Chapter 31

Chapter 31

“P-please spare me.”

The last survivor begged Deioden.

Her name was Aislin.

She was a Magic Type Awakened, and her specialty was wind-type magic.

In Neo Seoul, she was a noble.

Since she was a Grade A Awakened, it was only natural that her pride had risen high.

She had become so used to being placed on a pedestal by everyone that she considered herself a noble as well.

The reason she had joined this attack force was purely of her own will.

To Neo Seoul’s leadership, Deioden was a kind of taboo word.

As though none of them were allowed to say his name, they all kept their mouths firmly shut. That was why she had grown hostile.

‘Are you really that incredible? You’re nothing but a relic of the old era.’

She had wanted to prove it.

That the Awakened of this era were far better.

More precisely, she had wanted to prove how outstanding she herself was.

That was why she had joined the attack force against Deioden. And now, she bitterly regretted her decision.

Her face was hideously stained with tears and snot, and she had pissed herself between the legs.

Deioden was terrifying. And horrible.

It felt as though Deioden was showing the very end of how strong a human could become.

Without using even one proper Skill, he had slaughtered every Awakened who had attacked him.

He had beaten them to death with his fists and cut them down with that gigantic longsword.

At the sight of humans being cut apart like scarecrows and blood spraying like fountains, Aislin completely lost her senses.

Because of the nature of Magic Type Awakened, there were almost no times when she fought monsters or humans up close herself.

It was enough for her to occasionally fire off a spell from a safe place.

Because of that, this was her first time seeing such a horrific scene right before her eyes.

Covered in blood and flesh, Deioden could not possibly be seen as the same kind of human.

Everyone was dead, and she was the only one still alive.

Aislin hurriedly knelt and begged.

“I-I was wrong. Please spare me.”

She did not even dare think of resisting.

Deioden looked down at her with a pathetic expression.

“You want me to spare you?”

“Yes! If you spare me, I’ll do anything.”

“Anything?”

“Yes! Anything.”

“Then kill yourself.”

“What?”

“I have no need for you, so I am telling you to die by your own hand.”

“I can’t do that. Please spare me.”

“Seeing that he sent a woman like you, I understand very well what the mayor thinks of me. I received the message.”

“What?”

At that instant, Deioden swung Crayon.

A thin line of blood was drawn across Aislin’s neck as she wore a puzzled expression. Then, with a soft THUD, her head separated from her body and rolled to the ground.

“Hmph!”

Deioden snorted and approached Zeon.

Zeon’s face was badly twisted.

While following Deioden, he had seen many deaths.

Among them had been elves, who looked exactly like humans. But they were not human.

Because of that, a psychological barrier had protected Zeon’s heart. But not now.

Although they were enemies, countless humans had become horrific corpses and lay scattered around him.

There was no way he could feel no shock.

Deioden opened his mouth.

“Raise your head.”

“Yes!”

Zeon raised his head.

“Look.”

“Yes!”

Zeon looked at the corpses spread around him.

“That is the worth of humans living in this era.”

“......”

“They swagger around acting superior because they are Awakened, but in the end, they are nothing more than someone else’s tools. Once their purpose is fulfilled, they are discarded like this.”

“Are you saying they were discarded after serving their purpose?”

“Jin Geum-ho has always been skilled at scheming.”

“Who is Jin Geum-ho?”

“The mayor of Neo Seoul.”

At the unexpected answer, Zeon’s eyes widened.

“Jin Geum-ho came from the bureaucracy and is skilled at political games. He has clearly sent me a message while disposing of troublesome pieces at the same time.”

“You mean these people were troublesome pieces for Neo Seoul?”

“Awakened are double-edged swords. Obedient ones make good blades, but disobedient ones become threats. So he occasionally creates events like this and adjusts their numbers appropriately.”

“Then what is the message?”

“It must mean I should never think of returning to Neo Seoul again. Not that I had any intention of going back anyway. Khehehe!”

Deioden laughed as if something about it was terribly amusing.

It had been decades since he left Neo Seoul.

During that time, he had not visited Neo Seoul even once.

To those who had lived in old Korea and its neighboring countries, it was like the final wall.

The last bastion protecting humanity from monsters, and the strongest fortress.

But to Deioden, it held no meaning at all.

Rather than grow old and die neatly in a safe fortress, he would burn everything away in that rough desert and vanish without leaving a single trace.

That was the journey he had chosen.

“As long as you say you will follow me, battlefields like this will keep unfolding before you. If your heart weakens and you disgrace yourself by crying and sniveling, I will cut you down myself.”

“Who said my heart was getting weak? It just feels unpleasant because it’s my first time.”

“You must stop feeling even that unpleasantness. That is the only way you will survive in this hellish world.”

“I understand.”

Zeon answered with a hardened expression.

It was advice like a threat from a man who had lived in the desert for over a hundred years.

It was somewhat unpleasant to hear, but every word would become flesh and blood for him.

After engraving Deioden’s words into his heart, Zeon asked carefully,

“Leaving that aside, may I collect some things?”

“What are you talking about?”

Instead of answering, Zeon looked at the corpses of the Awakened.

They were Awakened mobilized to capture Deioden.

Most of them had been high-ranking Awakened.

That meant there was a high chance the items they carried were precious as well.

Deioden smiled faintly.

“You are like a hyena.”

“Everything is precious in the desert, isn’t it? I should take what I can when I can.”

“Do as you please.”

“Thank you.”

Zeon soon began searching the Awakened’s corpses for usable items.

He was not ashamed of this act at all.

He had done worse things than this in the slums.

For him, searching corpses for survival was only natural.

After searching the corpses for a long while, Zeon’s face twisted slightly.

‘Dogshit old man!’

Leaving aside the fact that not a single corpse was intact, he could not find any intact protective equipment.

That was because Deioden had smashed them along with the protective equipment.

What he managed to salvage were only a few weapons, food and drinking water loaded into the buggies, and a large backpack.

It seemed they had hunted quite a few monsters on their way here.

The backpack was filled with Mana Stones extracted from monsters.

After putting them all into his subspace, Zeon asked,

“What should we do with these vehicles? They still seem usable.”

“They will break down before long anyway. We leave them behind.”

The desert sand gnawed away at machines.

They might hold out for now, but without someone to maintain them, they would soon wear down, corrode, and break.

Leaving them behind was the wiser choice.

“Then let’s go.”

The two began walking again.

A sand-laden wind blew over the place they had left.

The desert sand soon buried the Awakened’s corpses and the vehicles without leaving a single trace.

---

WHOOOM!

Sand scattered in the fierce wind.

The sand-laden wind had grown stronger for some time now.

A fierce sand-laden wind, strong enough that an ordinary person would find it difficult even to open their eyes, blew without pause.

Zeon and Deioden could endure it only because neither of them was ordinary. If it had been anyone else, they would have lost their way long ago, wandered, and collapsed.

Zeon thought it was strange.

No matter how impossible the desert’s climate was to predict, it was never natural for a sand-laden wind to blow for days and days without stopping like this.

Zeon asked Deioden,

“Am I mistaken? It feels like the sand-laden wind is getting stronger the farther we go.”

“You are not mistaken. The sand-laden wind will grow even stronger from now on.”

“Stronger than this?”

“Yes.”

At Deioden’s answer, Zeon felt overwhelmed.

Even to him, who had awakened as a Sandmancer, the sand-laden wind was burdensomely fierce.

Deioden said,

“The place we are passing through now used to be the sea.”

“The sea? You mean that place bigger than land and filled with salt water?”

“Yes. More precisely, it would be correct to call it the Pacific Ocean.”

“The Pacific Ocean?”

Zeon’s eyes widened at the word he was hearing for the first time in his life.

It was a name he had never heard before, but somehow, he felt vastness from the word itself.

“Can you believe it? The deepest point was over ten thousand meters, and a sea so vast it could contain all the land in the world evaporated entirely and was filled with sand?”

Deioden bent at the waist and scooped up sand with his hand.

The sand quickly flowed down between his fingers.

Deioden’s eyes as he looked at the sand he could not grasp were filled with rage.

He still remembered clearly.

The blue sea stretching endlessly.

The seagulls that had flown above it, and the powerful leaps of dolphins that appeared from time to time.

The brilliance of an era to which he could never return.

A hundred years had passed, but those memories had not faded. They had only grown clearer.

Perhaps that was why his rage and madness also grew greater as time went on.

Zeon silently looked at Deioden as he burned with rage.

It had already been two months since they killed every Awakened who had ambushed them.

For two months, they had continued walking east.

During that time, Deioden had not said a single word about his own history. Even so, Zeon somehow felt he could understand Deioden.

Because Zeon had been born after the world had already changed this way, he simply accepted the situation and lived with it.

But for someone like Deioden, whose memories of the past remained vivid, the current world must feel like hell.

That was why Zeon could understand his eccentricity and madness.

Of course, that did not mean he felt sympathy for him.

Deioden was still a dogshit old man, and Zeon was being trained day by day by his eccentricity.

That was when it happened.

Zeon’s senses caught a stealthy presence approaching them.

RUMBLE!

The vibration was coming from beneath his feet.

Zeon silently looked forward.

Fifty meters, thirty meters, and then ten meters......

The creature hid tightly beneath the sand and approached right under Zeon’s feet.

At that instant, Zeon murmured,

“Sand Blender.”

The sand beneath his feet began rotating at terrifying speed.

It spun like a blender around the place where Zeon stood.

GRRRRIND!

Though it was only sand rotating, a sound like turning gears rang out.

KIEEE!

At that instant, a monstrous cry burst from within the sand.

That was because the being that had approached stealthily had been trapped in the sand and ground apart.

Its hard shell was worn away, and the sand that dug inside finely ground its flesh.

At the pain it had never felt before, the creature struggled and tried to escape. But the whirlpool of sand Zeon had created trapped and crushed it like an iron wall.

The sand beneath Zeon’s feet began turning red.

The blood flowing from the creature’s body was staining the desert in the area red.

Deioden watched the sight in silence.

The monster now being crushed beneath Zeon’s feet was the Sandworm, called the terror of the desert.

It was a monster everyone feared because it hid beneath the sand and approached stealthily. Such a monster was being ground away by sand without being able to do much of anything.

‘That ability truly is fraudulent.’

Together with Deioden, Zeon’s talent was blooming perfectly.

His grade was still low, so the power was not complete, but when it came to the application and adaptation of Skills, he was second to none.

Compared to Deioden at the same age, Zeon was far stronger.

It was truly an unbelievable achievement.

BOOM!

A huge explosion erupted inside the sand.

At last, the Sandworm’s enormous body burst apart, meeting a horrific end.

Deioden’s eyes shone.

‘At this level, we can slowly begin.’