Chapter 117
The survivor was captured before he could even make it out of the tunnel.
So of the Hunters went outside imdiately to contact Dispel, while those who remained began to tidy up the area step by step, identifying the petrified dead and putting the surroundings in order.
Choi Suhyuk guarded the area around the Basilisk’s corpse.
The other Hunters kept circling it with the air of people looking for any chance to pocket sothing.
It was an unknown monster, after all. Even a single scale would likely fetch a considerable price.
A few of them had already deliberately stepped into the pooled blood to stain their shoes.
They ant to wring out the leather later and take the Basilisk’s blood with them.
Cha Yeri was turning a blind eye because there had been so many casualties, but there was no guarantee the blood would be marketable, given its toxicity.
Unless it was sold to assassins in the underworld.
“So you are saying you are going to go in there yourself?”
“Yes. Places where dragons live are usually full of treasure.”
“You do realize that even if there is treasure, in a case like this it becos Bureau property, right?”
“Yes. That is why I want to go in. Once the Bureau arrives, we will not even be allowed to look.”
Cha Yeri and I were bickering in front of the large hole from which the Basilisk had erged.
Strictly speaking, since I had been hired by Hyeonseong, I should have been helping with the cleanup. But wherever I went, Hunters gathered around and spouted embarrassing praise, so I ended up sticking close to Cha Yeri.
It was always awkward for the hired hand to loiter around the client, after all.
In any case, she wanted to wait until specialists arrived, but the mont Dispel showed up, the chance to inspect the hole would obviously vanish.
Places like ruins beyond a Rift were always tightly controlled by the Bureau.
“If you insist on going, then I am coming too.”
“What?”
“If you go in alone, people might misunderstand.”
Reluctantly, I nodded.
If there really was sothing valuable down there, it could cause unnecessary trouble later.
People would start saying I had stolen treasure and slipped out alone, or sothing along those lines.
And there was always the possibility that sothing even worse than a Basilisk was sleeping below.
The likelihood was low, but still.
“But how are you planning to get down?”
“I will climb down on a rope.”
“...?”
“Oh. This.”
I undid my suspenders.
More precisely, they were the Suspenders of the Brilliant Manager, whose length could be adjusted at the user’s discretion.
I secured one of the three clips to a solid rock ledge, then fastened the other two to my clothes and Cha Yeri’s.
Then I dropped the empty mana potion bottle into the hole. A mont later, the sound of it striking the ground echoed up to us.
“It is about twenty ters.”
After taking a torch, I approached the slope of the opening.
“Wait, you are jumping right in?”
“Yes. At this depth, I do not need to climb down the wall.”
“First, we should tell everyone we are going to investigate.”
“It is fine.”
I tilted my head toward Choi Suhyuk.
He was watching us with a bored expression.
At last, Cha Yeri nodded, clearly displeased.
“If it gets dangerous, we co back up imdiately.”
“If you are scared, you can climb back up alone.”
I answered casually and jumped down first.
Tactically, entering together would have been correct, but I needed to prove what the suspenders could do.
I adjusted their length slowly and landed on the ground.
The hole was about as deep as I had estimated.
Fortunately, nothing nearby looked imdiately dangerous.
“But how did the Basilisk survive without prey?”
Cha Yeri climbed down soon after.
She raised MA6 at once and scanned the surroundings as she spoke.
“This place looks too ordinary for a monster like that to have lived here. Unlike above, there are no murals.”
As I fixed the suspenders’ clip to a rock nub on the floor, I replied.
“Can it really be ordinary if soone carved out a space like this under a mountain?”
“...I ant compared to above.”
“I was joking. You are right, though. The murals on the upper level were shocking. But does this place not feel strange too?”
Cha Yeri had already lowered her gun and was studying the area closely.
After about a minute, she narrowed her eyes.
“Soone has been here.”
As expected, a sharp deduction.
She continued.
“There are no traces at all for a monster that massive. If it was a serpent, there should at least be shed scales. And the floor bothers too. Unlike above, it is uneven. If sothing that large had been dragging its body around, there would have to be at least so smooth sections.”
“That makes sense.”
“Am I right? Do you think so too? That the serpent was a summoned monster. That soone summoned it here.”
The idea that the Basilisk had been summoned was not a bad one, but I chose to shake my head.
“If it was a summon, it would not leave behind a mana stone or a physical body.”
“Then what in the world…”
In the first place, the only monsters awakened beings could summon at this point were Golems.
The reason was simple: as the original author, I had made it convenient to categorize them by attribute.
So the Basilisk had been real.
Yet there were no signs that it had ever dwelled anywhere nearby.
In the end, only one possibility remained.
“A Rift must have opened. Right when the workers connected the tunnel to this place.”
“...!”
Normally, predicting a Rift was difficult.
At best, one could say they tended to occur where the concentration of environntal mana was high.
And even in the original story, it was impossible at this point to open and close Rifts at will.
But it was not wise to rule out every possibility.
This world was already no longer the one I knew.
With my Demonic Eye active, I started walking.
My destination was a small burrow, barely a ter high, that had been bothering for a while.
Cha Yeri followed at once and asked.
“Where are you going?”
The burrow was tucked into a corner, so she must not have noticed it yet.
Holding the torch higher, I answered.
“To et soone who may have been involved with the Rift.”
“What? You found soone?”
“Yes. I can see him. Soone with a mana color I have never seen before.”
“That person is human… right?”
“I do not know.”
“Is it really wise to et them without a plan?”
“Why?”
“Whatever their intent, we are intruders who damaged the murals.”
She was right.
We had fired hundreds of rounds into the muraled walls, and the tunnel itself had collapsed part of the structure.
“We cannot just sit still because we feel guilty. Not if we want to do business.”
“That is true, but…”
“Besides, if it cos to it, we can treat it with financial dicine.”
“Who will?”
“You will. You are the client. The murals were damaged because of Hyeonseong’s business.”
“...”
Cha Yeri stared at with her lips slightly parted, as though she was speechless.
It sounded absurd, but in truth, I was trying to shake off the tension coiling around my entire body.
Because unless it was a Demonic Being, I might be about to et another higher race in this world for the first ti.
In the original setting, the higher races had been exterminated by the Demonic Beings.
But the murals above were recording events beyond a Rift.
Knowledge of those events was not sothing a human of this world could possess unless they were a Demonic Being.
Which ant only one thing.
One of the higher races had to be residing in this world.
This was undoubtedly the Avid Reader’s doing.
From the aning of those murals to the Basilisk’s very existence, it was a narrative designed to target .
At last, we arrived before the small burrow.
“Do you hear it?”
“Yes.”
As soon as we reached it, we heard a steady sound of friction that had not been audible before.
CLANG!
CLANG—!
CLANG—!
We crawled along the ground and entered the burrow.
After about five minutes of movent, we spotted a red light leaking from the end of the passage, and only when we reached it could we finally straighten our backs.
“...”
“This is…”
Heat pricked at our skin.
A furnace that brightened the surroundings as though driving away the darkness.
And the friction of tal that made one forget the passage of ti…
It was a small forge.
In front of the anvil, a blacksmith stood with his back to us, striking tal without pause.
More precisely, it was a dwarf blacksmith, with a short body, a blunt nose, and shaggy fur.
***
Seoul's Outskirts District 26, dawn.
Lee Eunho, dressed in the Phantom Thief’s clothes, wandered the outskirts once again today.
District 26 was the center of transportation, which made it likely his movents would be discovered, but it was also a place where countless people flowed through.
Above all, it was ideal for observing the free rcenaries he had marked as targets.
I have to find them today.
It was becoming harder and harder to endure Gen’s oppression.
That was why, as soon as possible, he had to find the person who had participated in the Gangneung incident.
For the legitimacy of his actions, and to draw closer to the goal called revenge.
Lee Eunho moved by stepping across rooftops.
So fast it was difficult to track with the naked eye, using magnetism produced by electricity.
Soon, he reached a street dense with nightlife.
He climbed onto the roof of one building, hid within the shadows, and looked down at people who had collapsed into drunken stupors.
“...”
How long did he watch that filthy street?
Then Lee Eunho suddenly spotted a familiar face.
No way.
The man he noticed was a middle-aged man who appeared to be a free rcenary.
The man was dead drunk after drinking until dawn, and he had just left a shop with a colleague.
Should I take both of them…?
He hesitated, but soon shook his head.
With rumors about the Phantom Thief already spreading, creating needless victims would be foolish.
He decided he had no choice but to tail them and wait for an opening.
The man and his colleague wandered through alleys, spewing curses in every direction.
Eventually they moved away from the neon signs that made District 26 as bright as day, and before long, they separated.
In a secluded alley, the man began to retch.
“Ugh! Ugh!”
This location was unmistakably Outroad.
Lee Eunho entered the alley faster than the vomit could leave the man’s mouth and hit the ground, and he paralyzed him without hesitation.
“Guh—! Wh-what is this? Ph-Phantom Thief? Am I hallucinating?”
Though his body was restrained, the man’s eyes and mouth still worked.
Lee Eunho brought the Ring of Illusions close to him, and as before, his vision was swallowed in an instant.
But the darkness lasted only a mont. Soon, Lee Eunho saw a scene similar to what he had witnessed in Gen’s Ghoul.
Gangneung…
The sight of Gangneung thirteen years ago, swallowed by a sea of flas.
As expected, thirteen years ago, the middle-aged man was slaughtering Gangneung’s citizens without rcy.
Old people, children, it did not matter.
Inside buildings lting in the fire, he had even looted valuables, and he had seized a woman who had been running for her life and violated her.
How could soone still be human?
A filthy sensation tornted Lee Eunho.
Because he was sharing the man’s vision.
Lee Eunho struggled desperately against the ring’s ability, and at last, he managed to break free of the mory.
“Keheheh! Hey, Phantom Thief, you have got the wrong guy. I do not have a single coin on . If you call yourself a Phantom Thief, go rob the rich in the inner districts instead of soone like .”
The man chattered on despite being paralyzed.
Lee Eunho asked quietly.
“Gangneung, thirteen years ago. Do you rember? What were you doing then?”
The man answered with eyes glinting with drunken excitent.
“Gangneung? Ah! Those traitors? Putting those bastards down with these hands, that was the achievent of my life. Heh! I can still rember it. It felt incredible! And when I pinned down that shrill bitch while she struggled…”
His babbling continued without end.
Lee Eunho bit his lower lip irritably.
Rage he could not hide.
But at so point, he could no longer hear the man’s babbling.
More precisely, the mana flowing from the Ring of Illusions had been whispering sothing to Lee Eunho for a while now.
Vengeance upon those who shattered daily life, judgnt upon those who denied the past, a bloody trial for those who cultivated lies…
As though subrged underwater, as though intoxicated, the world swayed and churned.
Vengeance, judgnt, a bloody trial!
The man, who had been talking endlessly, sensed that the Phantom Thief before him had taken on a strange air.
The instincts that had kept him alive through countless crises as a free rcenary warned him of danger.
“H-hey?”
Sure enough, branching arcs of electricity began to burst from the Phantom Thief’s body.
“W-wait!”
The electricity swelled at an incredible speed.
In a blink, it lit the alley and struck the man.
“Damn it!”
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