Chapter 62
#062
1.
The settling tank where Jinjo's slush fund was hidden.
Xian Sunming had appeared like a boss, plain and simple.
He was Brother Yiming's half-brother, and my predecessor.
We never did a proper handover, but he was one of the people who taught me how to live in this fucking city, by example.
Still, I wasn't exactly happy to see him.
He was a cowardly junkie I hated.
“You bastard, Sunming, how much junk have you shot up? Why do you look so bad?”
“K… keke… k-hah…!”
At my icebreaker joke, Sunming made a strange noise and rattled his jawbone.
He was probably laughing.
And every time, fluorescent liquid dribbled out like saliva.
“How the hell were you still alive?”
No, was he even alive?
No matter how I looked at him, he didn't look alive.
Half his face was bone. He was missing one eye, too.
I vividly remembered dunking that corpse, guts bursting out and all, into the sewer.
“Master, conversation is meaningless. That one is a dead man.”
“A dead man?”
According to Boksuni's brief explanation...
The flowing sewage in the old sewer wasn't ordinary shit water.
The sewer was, strictly speaking, a rift consumed by Heukjin.
It harbored a power that twisted and distorted reality.
On top of that, the Twilight & Overnous corporate duo had dumped industrial waste into it as well.
The sewer's wastewater had become a cocktail of chaos where nothing would be strange, and sometimes the dead who carried lingering obsessions would rise again inside it.
Wild undead Sunming was just one more consequence of pollution.
“So that means he's undead, right?”
“Yes, Master.”
“You don't say!”
But, well...
“Could happen.”
This was a world where zombie viruses existed and vampire clones wore bunny girl outfits.
It's like opening a jar and finding a live soy-marinated crab?
I didn't think it was that shocking.
“Boksuni, you stay back over there.”
I drew up my mana.
I'd come this far; there was no turning back.
A champion has to accept a rematch, no matter who the opponent is.
Besides...
Honestly, it didn't look like he'd let me run.
And talking clearly wasn't going to work.
“Krr... huh... huh...”
Sunming ground his teeth, clack-clack.
His head swayed back and forth like a junkie's, and his body listed too.
But his hate-filled one eye was definitely aimed at me.
How strong was he now?
Blood is thicker than water.
As Yiming's half-brother, Sunming was indeed the strongest Grade 7 I knew.
And by genre convention, enemies who return are supposed to come back stronger.
Just looking at the cleaners scattered dead around us, he clearly wasn't an easy opponent.
Then what about me?
I killed Sunming back when I had just learned Death Sentence.
Now I had an imprint that didn't exist back then, and the experience of killing dozens of fixers.
-KWAKAKAKAKA!!!!
Between Sunming and me.
Multicolored wastewater poured down in an arc.
Under the pale vertical lights, the ear-splitting roar of the water tore through the space.
-Splash
The moment the unidentified mass made ripples across the black lake.
We moved at the same time.
-SZZZZT!!!
Ignition from the rocket hammer.
Using that thrust, Sunming surged forward in an instant.
Fast.
The speed was on par with Geumri, the hitman from the previous loop, who'd nearly killed me without me even laying a hand on him.
Fast enough that a single blink would make you miss him completely.
Greenish vapor sprayed from between his teeth, his clenched jawbone, even his empty eye socket, tracing the path of his charge.
“Brother Yiming's younger brother is only me! Sunming!!!!”
I put some distance between us and formed hand seals.
I overlaid the mana I'd loaded in advance with all sorts of death imagery.
-Shwak shwak shwak
Slashes, gunshots, and fatal falls flew toward Sunming, densely covering my vision like bullet hell.
An imprint formed through all that experience.
The Death Sentence released through it had density, power, and speed that couldn't even compare to the first round.
Sunming's figure leaping in without the slightest hesitation looked reckless.
-Whoosh!
That is, until his rocket hammer ignited once more.
-Sssst! Tsk! Sssst!
Sunming's body, now a bit leaner after losing some innards, began moving acrobatically.
There it was.
Sunming's signature move!
“Huff…! Huuuff! Huff!”
Even if his mind was clouded, his body remembered the motions honed through endless repetition.
Like a jazz singer with dementia humming along to the accompaniment.
Undead Sunming's body danced, leaving afterimages behind.
In fact, maybe because he was soaked through with more drugs than the limit allowed, he was even faster than before.
And since he was undead, he didn't even look tired.
“Fuck!!! Stop dodging already!!!”
I never thought I'd feel that thrill again.
Sunming let the final slash slide past too.
Then, as if there was no more time to waste.
-BOOM!
He kicked off the ground hard enough to break the floor and leaped in a long straight line.
I'd expected that much.
I held out two fingers toward Sunming.
At the tips flickered mana shaped into an entirely different form.
A form Sunming had never seen while alive.
The kind of death best suited to subduing an opponent that darted about like a fly.
“Incinerate.”
The mana I'd scattered bit by bit on the floor earlier, like leaking fuel, turned into a wall of fire.
Sunming's feet were already off the ground.
Even if he moved by igniting the rocket hammer, avoiding flames over this much area was impossible.
-FWOOSH!!!
Sunming was engulfed in flames.
“KRAAAAAA!!!!”
Sunming let out a shriek as if he were being torn apart.
I know that pain well.
It wasn't an ordinary flame.
Magic flames that faithfully recreated the incineration I'd experienced.
Undead are supposed to be weak to fire, that's the rule!
Then—
“What.”
The curtain of flames was violently torn apart.
For a split second, what I saw before me was Sunming with even more bone exposed as his skin melted away.
His one eye burned with even deeper hatred.
And.
Like a baseball player taking a full swing.
A blurred afterimage of the hammer, swung with all his weight behind it.
Everything seemed to slow down.
-CRACK!
The elbow I had reflexively thrown across my side twisted outward at a bizarre angle.
“Kuhk…?!”
The end of the hammer dug deep into my side, and my body folded in the air like a shrimp.
As gravity vanished, my body was flung into the air.
My vision flipped like I’d been thrown into a drum washing machine.
The ceiling, the floor, the black sewage, and the ash-gray walls all mixed together in my vision.
I'm dizzy.
What is this? I suddenly feel like I'm going to throw up. It hurts.
How am I still alive? Am I still alive?
Maybe I got a concussion, because my head is a muddy mess.
What was I... doing again?
What did I get hit by? Why was I lying down?
“Master…!! Are you… al… right…!!!”
Boksuni's shrill voice came through.
Faint, as if I were hearing it underwater....
Ah, I don't know.
My eyelids are too heavy. I just feel like sleeping for a bit.
“Boksuni… five more minutes…”
Just as my threadlike consciousness was about to snap.
A clear notification rang in my ears.
-Ding!
[The subtrait of 「Burning Life」 has activated.]
[It prevents incapacitation once and allows combat to continue.]
Like cool liquid being injected into the blood vessels in my brain.
A cold, sharp sensation forced me awake.
The pain numbed, and my blurred focus sharpened.
“Huh?!”
I shot to my feet.
With a stabbing pain, my left arm dangled uselessly, ignoring my will.
I flinched and looked down....
“Fuck!!!”
My arm had turned into a three-stage folding contraption!
“You fucking bastard!!! How the hell can you swing that thing at a person!!!! It hurts!!!!!”
Rage.
More intense than the horrible pain, rage numbed it.
“Khat...! Kha-hah...!!!”
An excited Sunming came barreling over, ready to flatten Cedric into a pancake.
This fucking bastard.
He's having the time of his life.
Death Sentence hadn't taken effect properly.
I didn't know why, but I had a feeling.
It had to be because the firepower was insufficient.
Same as when I used it on the cleaners earlier.
My Death Sentence had grown tremendously in quantity, but not much in quality.
Like how, once you level up and head to high-level hunting grounds, there are monsters you can't clear with a single skill.
My ability was lacking.
Then...
What did I need to stop that Sunming?
That sensation from back then.
I didn't need to reproduce all of it. A part would do.
If I could recreate even a little of that feeling of looking down from a lofty height in my memories.
“…….”
Even with the horrible pain raging through my circuits.
Even with Sunming's charge drawing closer by the second.
I simply followed the faint clue and shaped mana in a trance.
It felt like playing a piano piece I'd performed ages and ages ago.
The kind of feeling where your hands are stiff, even muscle memory has evaporated, and you can only fumble through the score even while looking at the sheet music.
Is this it?
Was that how I did it?
I don't know.
As always, this world...
had never once given me a clear answer.
Only one thing.
There was one thing I knew clearly.
What is true death?
I had seen the true form of death.
Death is what happens when something that existed no longer exists.
The fleeting severing of bonds and causes that had been connected.
Its essence is...
Severance (斷絶).
Whether it's a living thing or not doesn't particularly matter.
I brought my fingertips together.
And swung.
———
There wasn't even a sound.
A black line shot out from my fingertips and bisected the world horizontally as it passed.
It was a bizarre sight.
The poisonous gas bubbling up split diagonally.
A sharp slash mark appeared on the filthy wall.
And the multicolored waterfalls pouring from the ceiling were all neatly cut off at once.
The moment that line of severance overlapped with Sunming's body.
-Thud.
A thin red line appeared across the bastard's swollen side.
Skin soaked and rotting from poison.
Thick muscle and bone. Even the steel shaft of the rocket hammer he was so proud of.
had been cleanly severed.
-Thump!
And then.
He never got back up again.
“Ugh….”
What burst from my mouth wasn't a victory cry.
“Uuugh….”
My vision went blurry in an instant, and before I knew it I was face-down on the ground.
It feels like my brain vessels are about to burst.
-Drip drip drip
Blood was pouring onto the floor like rain.
“Sh... fuck...”
What the hell? Did I do something I wasn't supposed to?!
I used an insanely cool new technique!
I overcame adversity!
When you look at protagonists in other isekai stories, they're all like, 'Hmm, is that so. Ah, I see,' and then they go blasting out their new techniques left and right!
“Why... fuck, why am I the only one...”
-Clomp clomp
As I was drowning in piercing injustice and pain.
I heard footsteps.
There, standing was Boksuni, face frozen stiff.
“…….”
At that scene, I felt a chilling sense of déjà vu.
Back when I still hadn't been hardened by society and kept making all kinds of screwups.
I got my ass kicked senseless by Sunming and ended up half-dead like this.
When Akit and Arang came back for me again, their hammer and machete beat me into Cedric paste.
Now there was no Sunming here, and no cleaners either.
And the master who used to sexually harass Sion at every turn was half-dead.
And yet, even though it shouldn't be, I kept getting a bad feeling.
“Bo... Boksuni...”
No way, right?
You know that would be a stupid thing to do, right?
I tried to look as okay as possible so Boksuni wouldn't get any crazy ideas, but my consciousness was fading.
I didn't have the strength to keep holding on to consciousness anymore.
Just as I was about to smash face-first into the floor.
-Squeeze
A warm, cozy heat caught me.
The last thing I felt was a frail body hugging me tightly as I thrashed in a fit.
My consciousness cut out.
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