Chapter 130
“Woooo..!”
We had painted and put stickers on our company’s box trucks. The cab up front, where people ride, was painted a completely matte black with no shine at all, and on the square container in back we had put stickers on every side that said EVE Project in white English letters on a black background.
And there were eight more of them, too.
“We will be selecting soldiers on a trial basis to carry out open-gate response operations within the Gyeonggi region.”
“That’s insane..!”
This is a pilot operation meant to reach the final goal I mentioned before. The most important thing, as always, is getting there ahead of the other hunters and summoning our golems with the Summon skill.
The trucks are for when we return after dealing with the gate, and if we take the golem soldiers to the gate site by truck, there’s no doubt the people already nearby will start hunting the monsters first.
If you look at the whole Gyeonggi region, gates are created at an average of ten a day, and up to fifteen at most. Of course, most of them are F- to C-rank, the kind that civilian awakened people nearby can gather up and beat flat with their fists.
But once you get to C+ and above, the difficulty starts rising sharply, so if the risk of death is too high, civilian awakened people won’t step up first and will wait for professional hunters to arrive. That means the delay until it’s resolved can be anywhere from at least two hours to as much as six hours.
When you ride with Bradamante, even if you only accelerate properly, you can hit 400 km/h. And since it doesn’t even travel on roads but can move in a straight line, you can cross Seoul end to end in about five minutes.
Even across the wider Gyeonggi region, it takes at most thirty minutes from end to end. If we’re finished and positioned in the center, we can reach anywhere in fifteen minutes.
Naturally, that’s much faster than most hunter guilds, which either go on foot or try to get there as fast as possible by car.
“To secure an informational advantage later on, we plan to operate a scouting swift squad with a magic-detection function.”
“Swift?”
“It’s a kind of bird.”
“Wow.”
Anyway, the most important thing is me. The plan is complete only if I use the Summon skill to quickly deploy the golem soldiers at the gate site.
After that, once the gate is over, trucks stationed all over the Gyeonggi region appear and recover our soldier golems. Since they have to run along roads, there’s no way they can keep up with my speed.
Still, they can move during the time it takes to handle the gate, and after that the job is to withdraw quickly.
Actually, this is sort of a loophole too: once the soldiers get on the truck, I can just send them back with the Summon skill.
“I’ll work hard, Princess!”
“Hehe, take it easy.”
Bradamante is also here today to help Suri with driving. Suri is yawning lazily beside me, and this is the top floor of the Nova building headquarters on Teheran-ro in Gangnam. It’s the rooftop area that ordinary people can’t enter.
“This really is an amazing plan.... I wonder if Nova will still have anywhere to stand....”
“If Nova goes under, come over to our side, big sis.”
“Can’t we just coexist....”
“Heehee.”
ㅡBEEP-BEEP-BEEP, BEEP-BEEP-BEEP
“Just in time, a gate has appeared.”
A call came in immediately from Ophelia’s program, which is set to receive notifications for every gate that appears across the Gyeonggi region.
“Where is it!?”
“In Topyeong-dong, Guri City.... It’s a D-rank gate.”
“Ah.”
A D-rank gate is a bit...
* * * * *
Plaza in front of Suwon Station.
ㅡBeep-beep, beep-beep,
ㅡDoo-roo-roo... doo-roo-roo...
Warning alarms began sounding simultaneously on the cell phones of people passing nearby. In an instant, a four-language translated warning announcement blared from loudspeakers mounted on nearby traffic lights and utility poles, sharp as if cut with a knife.
ㅡWEE-OO, WEE-OO, WEE-OO, WEE-OO
ㅡA gate has appeared. Citizens, for safety, please move inside the nearest building-
ㅡA Gate has appeared. For your safety, please move inside a nearby building equipped with anti-magic shielding.
ㅡA Gate has appeared. For your safety, please evacuate into a nearby building equipped with anti-magic shielding.
ㅡA Gate has appeared. For your safety, please enter a nearby building equipped with anti-magic shielding.
It happens occasionally, but in densely populated places like this, the announcement is broadcast with a strong sound so people can react a little faster.
For non-awakened people, it’s a sound that makes their hearts start pounding just from hearing it, and even though it disappears as if nothing happened once it passes, they tremble with fear while hearing it.
“Stop pushing—!!”
“Hurry up and get inside—!!”
Not long after the alarm, a huge hole shimmering with navy-blue light opened in the middle of the wide street in front of Suwon Station plaza.
ㅡWoooooom….
Then came the bizarre purple lifeforms with six legs and heads shaped like flower buds. They looked like horses with six legs, and after looking around with no eyes, they spread their huge flower-bud heads wide and began spewing a pale green gas.
“It’s a poison-type monster—!!”
“Kyaaahhhh!!!”
As the chaos continued, even civilian awakened people weren’t properly prepared with gas masks, so nobody stepped forward.
Then, just as an even larger flower-headed mid-boss monster with a gorilla body and four arms crawled out and charged toward the vehicles that still had people inside...
ㅡTHWOOOAAANG!!!
Something charged in and pierced straight through the mid-boss’s head in an instant. When the sharp impact drew everyone’s attention, a little girl’s clear, ringing voice echoed out.
“Respond to the princess’s call—!!”
ㅡFlaaash!
After the powerful voice echoed out, eight blue motes gathered in the air like fireflies.
ㅡThud..!
ㅡKkreeeek….
With heavy thuds, eight soldier golems were summoned in midair. Before the veteran hunters had even arrived, they appeared in an instant and began slicing the monsters apart.
A hunter unit made entirely of machines immune to biological toxins. What was seared into people’s minds like a movie scene was white-armored swordsmen suddenly appearing and bringing the monsters down with a perfectly coordinated, blade-sharp assault.
ㅡCrackle, crackle….
What emerged from the gate’s violent ripple after that was a completely deranged, mad mammoth with three enormous flowers stuck in its head. The thing spewed a tremendous amount of poisonous gas from its long trunk with a gurgle-gurgle sound, but.
ㅡSlash..!
A knight with a different appearance from the ordinary soldiers, who had only been watching from far behind, instantly bisected the mammoth monster.
“W-what is that..?”
“Machines..? They’re machines..?”
“Shit..! Either way, we’re alive!”
“They fight ridiculously well!!”
Ignoring the cheers and a barrage of shutter clicks, the machine soldiers mechanically began dissecting the monsters they had beaten and processing them.
They split each monster’s chest open, pulled out one magic stone each, and before long everyone boarded the truck that had arrived.
“Hey, hey, they’re getting on that truck?”
“Looks like there’s something written on it....”
ㅡClick, click....
A company logo covered the cargo bay of the box truck, which had been painted an unnaturally deep black.
[EVE Project]
“What kind of place is EVE Project?”
“No idea... Isn’t it just some ridiculously amazing place? Is stuff like that even possible?”
“Look it up, quick.”
“Kid, what kind of company is EVE Project?”
ㅡI don’t really know either. There’s no information.
“This guy doesn’t know anything.”
People quickly started uploading the videos they had filmed all over the internet. The search volume for the company name EVE Project, in both English and Korean, shot up steeply, and SNS and community sites were instantly flooded with related posts.
[ㅇㅇ : What on earth was today’s Suwon Station gate? (Photo attached)
(Photo)
A C+-rank gate opened and everyone was running for it, then some meteor-looking thing suddenly fell from the sky, and about a dozen front-line hunters came out and just sliced the monsters to pieces, lol;;
They fought with damn perfect form too, and after it was over they got in a black box truck and drove off
Unfortunately I had something to do so I couldn’t chase the truck, but a few unemployed guys looked like they were chasing it, and nobody knows how it ended
(Photo)
After a long while, civil servants from CHAD and the Hunter Association came out to clear away the bodies, then grabbed the nearby people and interrogated them like crazy, lol
What on earth is happening in Korea]
“Heh-heh.”
Internet opinion was split fifty-fifty. Since some company nobody had even heard of suddenly showed up and saved people, there were also takes like, “The Omnic incident is coming now,” and “the tech-obsessed crowd’s wishful thinking has gone into 500x overdrive.”
There were also reactions like, “I sent a picture of myself bowing deeply to the Chat AI and begged it not to kill me”—and so on.
There were reactions like, “No matter how you look at it, this is Oseong Group’s handiwork,” and “It seems pretty amazing, and they don’t look like they’re hurting people, so I don’t hate it. I want to shake hands with the machines,” and so on.
Overall, the response was favorable. The negative takes were fairly mild, while the positive takes were pretty intense.
[Kechori : I chased the EVE Project truck
(Photo)
I followed it by car until it stopped somewhere, but I never managed to film the scene of the white-armored swordsmen getting out
It went straight into a large-vehicle parking lot, and after that the engine just shut off and there was no news at all
Even the driver was gone
I went back home for now, but when I knocked there was no response at all
This is seriously the Omnic incident, you guys should prepare too]
“What the hell, you punk. We saved you..!”
Truck driving is done by one of the soldier golems, so of course there wouldn’t be anyone there. Even with the deep tint, if the blue flash from the Summon skill went off, it should have been visible. I guess the writer just missed it.
“Princess, it seems to be working.”
“Huh? What effect?”
“Please look at this.”
Ophelia showed me the tablet screen in her hand, and my SNS account’s follower count had shot up from around 1.2 million to 1.5 million.
“Gasp! How did they know that EVE Project and I were connected..?!”
“I made it so it would happen that way.”
“Ehh.”
Before the search volume exploded, Ophelia had used a multi-account operation to search EVE Project and arranged things so that when people searched EVE Project, my SNS ID would appear at the very top.
“Gasp.... But my account is just one where I post stuff like eating bread and snacks....”
“Now we need to establish a connection with EVE Project. In about a week, we’ll create a separate EVE Project company account and post an announcement about the company.”
“Oh, ooh..!”
“And if we steer traffic to that account through Your Highness’s SNS account, the number of your SNS followers will increase sharply.”
“Whaaat!!”
Oh my god. Ophelia really is a genius.
Open gates are usually far less profitable than entrance-type gates or dungeon structures, but if you greedily gobble up the ones that appear like that, the profits are pretty good.
But covering the entire region with just 25 people is a bit much. We need to raise revenue quickly and expand the troops fast.
“W-wait.... No. Not the cheerleader outfit again....”
Just thinking about dancing on stage again made my face suddenly burn hot. Honestly, it was fun, but it was really embarrassing. And back then, even if you added Ophelia, Suri, and puppy Minyum, we still didn’t even have 10 people.
We promised that I’d do the cheer-up dance again when we reached 100 people.... I never thought we’d get there this fast..!
“Aaaah..! Nooo....”
Oh my god. Ophelia is an idiot.