Chapter 21: 21

Chapter 21 – Song Eun-young (1)

My sword had cut cleanly through the body of the fire ant soldier. The cut-off limbs of the ant twitched while they were on the ground.

“What? How did you do that?”

“Is your strength really that high?”

“Let’s just say that I have a knack for this.”

I responded after hearing the comments of the Hunters behind me.

And it really was true. To amputate the body of a fire ant soldier, you needed a strength stat of at least B+.

It would be nice if you could be strong enough to walk around without a care for your surroundings, but in the case where that wasn’t true, you had to learn to show off your know-how.

‘Every living thing has a weakness.’

Even the shell that surrounded the fire ant soldier was just another part of its body.

All I’d done was efficiently cut through its weakest part.

“Hey, come help me with this one too!”

Min Seong-taek raised his voice as he was blocking some fire ants with his shield. As I ran towards him, he stepped back a little and struck at the body of one of the ants with his shield. After lightly jumping off the wall with one foot, I slashed at a fire ant in mid-air, bringing it down together with me as I cut through the weak point in the middle of its chest. Then, I joined Min Seong-taek in facing off with another fire ant soldier.

“This is the last one.”

An ant with a severed leg was trying to crawl away on the ground. I thrust my sword into the fire ant soldier’s chest. When I pulled the sword back out, I could hear the sound of wind hissing through the hole.

It seemed like we’d taken care of all the fire ants in this area. After making sure that there were no more monsters, we sheathed our weapons.

As I was massaging my throbbing wrists, Kim Yoo-han’s eyes met mine. He finished tidying up his things and slung a bag over his shoulder.

“It’ll be night soon, so let’s go! Double time!”

“Alright! Be right there!”

After checking the way forward, Min Seong-taek and the rest of the party were calling out to me. Kim Yoo-han shouldered the bags as well as the rest of the luggage and made his way through the heaps of deceased soldier ants.

I also walked along right behind Kim Yoo-han.

The blood that was pooled on the floor splashed in Kim Yoo-han’s direction. It was because I’d taken a wrong step.

Looking down at the blood splattered on his clothes, Kim Yoo-han let out a sigh inside of his mask. Anyways, I had to ask because I was just that curious.

“Aren’t you hot in there?”

Kim Yoo-han met my eyes again. He looked at me as if to ask if he was the one I was asking just now.

‘Well, everyone else is up there and we’re the only ones back here, so do you think I’m asking the air or something?’ 

It was so ridiculous that I couldn’t speak for a second. Just as I was about to chastise him, Kim Yoo-han responded first.

“What concern is it of yours?”

The response was certainly something. What concern of mine? Well, if I thought about it, it really wasn’t my business. But still, what a prickly reaction.

“It’s none of my concern, but can’t I just ask anyways?”

“No, you can’t ‘just ask’.”

He was talking politely earlier, but now he’d dropped the act. But well, I’d started talking impolitely first, so it didn’t really matter.

“What are you so wound up for? You don’t have any friends, do you? Huh? Damn, I saw on a wiki once that out of two Hunters, one would be a psychopath while the other would be a guy with something wrong with him. Guess they weren’t kidding about that.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say you look like a proper Hunter either.”

“I’m a Hunter, alright? Where’s my ID… Damn, right. I put it in my bag.”

I didn’t want to search through my bag just to take out my ID. Kim Yoo-han turned his head to stare at me while I scratched at my head.

‘Strange bastard.’

Come to think of it, Kim Yoo-han wasn’t the only eccentric Hunter I’d met over the past few months. From that bastard that showed up armed to the teeth like some sort of medieval knight, to the one who’d appeared cosplaying some manhwa character, and the one who’d brought along some unrecognizable drone.

‘It’s not like we’re shooting some sort of superhero movie here.’

Out of the so-called Awakened, there wasn’t a single sane one among them! At this point, the Choi Soo-hyun that diligently clocked in and out of work every day for a regular paycheck seemed almost normal.

“Whew, whatever. Let’s just drop it.”

Min Seong-taek beckoned towards me with one hand. It looked like he’d found something. I didn’t see any monsters that were following us or anything, so I ran forward without worrying about it.

The dungeon expedition was going smoothly.

If we continued on like this, it looked like we’d be leaving the dungeon way sooner than I’d expected.

I walked through the cave, munching on a nutritional calorie bar that I’d taken out of my backpack. Kang Hyun-seung, who was walking next to me, looked at my calorie bar with disgust.

“Does it actually taste good? Really?”

“Well, I think it’s fine. I’m not really eating it for the taste.”

“That’s fair, but don’t you get bored of it quickly?”

“Really?”

I fiddled with the calorie bar wrapper in my hand, having finished the whole bar. As the number of long-term dungeon expeditions increased, naturally the emergency food industry had also grown alongside it. And the representative of that growth was the nutritional calorie bar. It was called a calorie bar, but it was more so a white-colored red-bean jelly bar.

The biggest downside was that it didn’t have much flavor because it was made up of so many different ingredients. Unless I was going into a high-ranked dungeon where I needed to travel light, I usually didn’t pack these that often.

“It’s because I don’t really like to carry around a lot of luggage. And if you keep eating it, you get used to the taste.”

“You have some unique tastes too, huh?”

“That guy’s eating them too, though?”

I pointed at Kim Yoo-han, who was off in a corner by himself. Kim Yoo-han was eating the same kind of calorie bar as I was. Feeling Kang Hyun-seung’s gaze on him, Kim Yoo-han turned around. 

After we finished eating, we then went to sleep.

We took shifts keeping watch, but nothing really happened.

The expedition of the ant burrow continued. The Giant Ant Den wasn’t that wide of a dungeon.

The paths weren’t complicated, and the patterns were also generally similar. On the start of the second day, Kang Hyun-seung came back from a recon search.

“Did you find it?”

“Yes. It’s the queen ant.”

“You guys already know, right? We have to get an egg. The only thing is, who’s gonna go get it…”

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The five of us looked at each other in silence. The ‘queen ant’s egg’ was a valuable reward.

Fortunately, we didn’t mindlessly start fighting with each other over who would get the egg. There was nothing more foolish than fighting amongst Hunters over an optional reward.

“I think Kang Hyun-seung should go get the egg.” 

Min Seong-taek took Kang Hyun-seung’s side. Even though the pattern of the anthill wasn’t that complicated, Kang Hyun-seung had done a good job as a scout to get us to this point. It was a reasonable choice.

“Honestly, I don’t really care who gets it.”

I took a step back. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to get my hands on that egg, but I didn’t want to get it at the cost of disrupting the camaraderie of the team.

‘I’ll go for the killing blow instead.’

They said whoever got the last hit was just based on luck, but that was bullshit.

I’d killed monsters countless times, so this angle was much easier for me. It was looking like the general consensus was that Kang Hyun-seung would get the egg.

“Well then… Let’s put our bags down and prepare to attack right away.”

The attack on the queen ant had begun. Min Seong-taek rushed in first and drew aggro towards him.

Kim Yoo-han and Ahn Joo-hye ran to deal with the fire ants that rushed towards Min Seong-taek. While these three were drawing the attention of the ants, I went to deal with the queen ant. 

The queen ant, who was much larger than any of the soldier ants and had bright-red skin, was certainly eye-catching. I just barely dodged her attack, and felt heat rise right beside my cheek.

I swung my sword and drew a line. The queen ant’s leg flew off and fell to the ground.

Losing her balance, the queen ant staggered. At the signal, Kang Hyun-seung started to move.

He quickly darted forward and grabbed the large egg that was being nestled by the queen ant. The egg was about the size of a watermelon.

“Run!”

At Min Seong-taek’s words, I did a backflip and put some distance between me and the queen ant. Noticing that Kang Hyun-seung was holding her egg, the queen ant stamped her feet repeatedly.

The outer walls of the cave shook and rocks and debris started to fall from the ceiling. The queen ant’s eyes became more and more red with rage from getting her egg stolen from her.

Influenced by the queen ant, the other fire ant soldiers started to become enraged. The queen ant spewed out a burst of fire. We jumped behind Min Seong-taek the moment the queen attacked, as if we’d planned for this to happen.

Min Seong-taek raised his shield. The shield glowed with bright light, protecting the people behind it. At the same time that it protected us, the light that came from the shield temporarily obscured the view of the ants in the cave. It was serving as some kind of flash bomb.

Before the light faded, Ahn Joo-hye and I started to move. Ahn Joo-hye stuck a dagger coated with poison into the queen ant’s shell. It didn’t do enough damage to pierce through the skin, but that was enough.

[The god Soter has blessed you with his divine energy.]

[Level 2 Protection has been activated.]

The shell around where the dagger had been embedded started to turn black and crack. As Ahn Joo-hye retreated, I swung my sword to the side. One of the soldier ants threw its body in front of the sword to protect the queen.

Where the sword had passed through, the afterimage of a crescent moon remained. The divided halves of the soldier ant’s body fell to the ground. The queen ant’s feet brushed past its cheek as she walked past it.

I swung my sword in an arc from high to low. A leg went flying off.

‘It ends like this!’

I thrust my sword in the direction of the queen ant’s chest. The stabbed queen ant struggled desperately in her death throes, but it was no use.

‘It’s ov—’

The second that the queen ant met her end, I sensed that something was off.

My intuition was usually pretty good. I instinctively drew back, pulling my sword out from where it had plunged into the queen ant’s chest. The second that I did, the queen ant’s body began to twist grotesquely. 

“What is that? Wh-What’s going on?”

Ahn Joo-hye said nervously while still clutching her dagger. Instead of blood, an unidentifiable black sap began dripping slowly out of the gaping wound.

Min Seong-taek, who had taken care of the rest of the fire ant soldiers, tilted his head.

“What is it? Why’s it doing that?”

“I don’t know either, so please don’t ask me!”

Everyone’s eyes turned to Kang Hyun-seung, who’d had the most experience in dealing with giant anthill dungeons.

Kang Hyun-seung shook his head while holding the egg to his chest.

“This is the first time I’m seeing anything like this too.”

Black mucus spewed from between the open wounds of the queen ant and came flying towards me and Ahn Joo-hye. It was as if we’d cut open a giant jelly. The jelly bits I’d cut away burst and splattered all over the floor.

It looked like Ahn Joo-hye had managed to avoid it. I furrowed my brow while looking at the black slime coating the floor. I relaxed the hand that was holding my sword and took a deep breath. A thin layer of magic power spread out around me.

‘Something’s definitely off.’

The black mucus that flowed from the wounds had now completely covered the body of the queen ant. Already, I couldn’t say that what was happening with this monster was normal.

The black slime started to clump together. It almost looked like a ball. To put it bluntly, it looked more like a living cocoon.

After seeing that, I was sure.

I knew what that thing was.

Spiritual residue.

Spiritual residues were beings that had violated a great taboo.

Although small in size, that was just one part of the spiritual residue. More precisely, it was the eroded body of deep-seated grudges. An impure incident led to another impure incident.

That was what the eroded body was.

‘Why is something like this here?’

Before I could even understand the current situation, another thought popped into my mind. 

Could I face something like this in the body I had now?

I turned around and looked behind me.

If I was alone, I might’ve found a way to survive, but the problem was those guys behind me.

‘How unlucky.’

After experiencing that incident before with the goblin village, I didn’t feel good about the thought of another complete massacre.

As I was trying to think of a way for us to survive somehow, my eyes landed on the queen ant’s egg that Kang Hyun-seung was still holding to his chest.

“Throw that away! Right now!”

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