Chapter 229

The monster was a Chimera made from human beings. What was once a human body had been forcibly and grotesquely enlarged. The skin had violently torn apart and peeled away, leaving muscle fibers swollen unnaturally to their absolute limit, fully and obscenely exposed to the open air.

Across the back of that horribly bloated body, countless insect legs had been crudely grafted on. Jagged, chitinous spikes had been brutally jammed into its arms and legs. Multiple hearts had been carelessly slapped onto its chest in a twisted, uneven cluster. Blood vessels had been roughly stitched together, and tendons and ligaments had been brutally used to hold everything in place so it wouldn’t immediately spill out.

There wasn’t even the faintest trace of care, precision, or craftsmanship in the way this abomination had been assembled.

“You sick, twisted bastards...”

The instant Do-Jin saw it, he felt as though time itself had suddenly and unnaturally slowed to a crawl. At the same time, a thick wave of nausea rose violently in his throat, nearly forcing its way out. It wasn’t just because it was disgusting, but because the bottomless, suffocating malice of the ones who created it came through so vividly and unmistakably that it made his skin prickle and his stomach twist.

Blood and pus were steadily leaking from the Chimera’s graft points. That alone clearly proved they had made absolutely no attempt to regulate immune responses while violently stitching together different species. They had clearly mass-produced these monsters recklessly and without restraint, not caring whether they died during the process. It had been churned out like actual trash.

“Krrrrrrrrr...”

The Chimera slowly, painfully turned its head while dragging out a long, distorted roar. To Do-Jin, it looked less like a monster and more like something desperately writhing in unbearable, endless pain.

“Uuuaaaarghhh!”

Whether its vocal cords had been brutally cut or completely crushed, it couldn’t even form proper sounds. Still, the tears that weakly pooled at the corners of its eyes were painfully real. They had no regard for its completion or long-term survival, yet they had cruelly left its mind intact enough for it to clearly recognize that it had become a monster.

Do-Jin conjured Gale, not aimed at the enemy, but at his allies. The sudden rush of air snapped those who had frozen in shock back to their senses almost instantly.

“All units, hold position and prepare for contingencies. We’re taking this one,” he conveyed.

The soldiers who heard the command understood that Do-Jin meant he and his companions would handle it.

“KRRRAAAAAAH!”

The roar that carried its imprinted hostility as a Chimera also carried the broken, desperate scream of what little self still remained trapped inside it.

As Do-Jin stepped forward, his party moved automatically and smoothly, getting in formation without hesitation or confusion.

“Let’s end this quickly.”

That was the only real mercy they could still give to the victim standing in front of them.

***

There wasn’t just one Humanoid Chimera. There were a total of fifteen Chimeras deployed at this supply base. Some of them had gone berserk, and that was what had reduced the entire supply base to ruins. One had smashed through the building wall, and two others had continued slaughtering everything inside.

Their combat power was considerable. It was as if a quest phase had suddenly shifted and their levels and abilities had jumped dramatically. However, Do-Jin’s party was even stronger than that. On top of that, from the Chimera’s perspective, Do-Jin’s party was the absolute worst possible matchup.

The relic shield that reflected a significant portion of incoming impact, combined with Theresa’s masterful parrying, formed a wall that was nearly impossible to break through. Most decisively, because Do-Jin accurately understood the crude weaknesses of these poorly made Chimeras, he was, in the most literal sense, their perfect executioner.

After finishing off all of them, Do-Jin moved quickly to secure the area. He mobilized the resistance members wearing magitech armor and began extracting the remaining survivors, most of whom were hanging on by a thread.

Even after Soso used Forced Sacrifice to share her HP, two still died. At this point, only six survived.

“Spread out and grab any supplies you can find,” Do-Jin commanded. “Just in case, also take two of the Chimera corpses. You have three minutes. We pull out in three minutes. Move.”

“What about the survivors?” asked one of the resistance members.

“They aren’t people who would know anything useful anyway. We leave them.”

Do-Jin issued his orders rapidly, without hesitation. The ones who received it answered with a sharp “Yes, sir!” and began sprinting at full speed as if they were being chased by a demon.

Over the course of fighting beside him, the resistance members had come to trust and fear Do-Jin in equal measure. As they hurried around, Do-Jin looked over the fallen Chimera corpses and sank into thought.

These alone can’t become a real threat.

If their numbers increased, they would certainly become a burden. Any more and they could even become dangerous. Practically speaking, though, it was impossible. From the enemy’s perspective, the front lines they had to defend were far too long and far too wide to concentrate their forces effectively.

When the entire border was essentially the front line, how could they possibly predict where the terrorists would strike and preemptively deploy large numbers of Chimeras? It was for that reason that Humanoid Chimeras were being scattered in small numbers across different areas of the front.

They must know that too...

Was this just buying time to prepare something else? No. If that were the case, they could have simply kept pretending to take hits and dragged things out quietly. There was no need to deliberately provoke him by showing off hastily assembled Chimeras like this.

As Do-Jin continued thinking, he saw the resistance members carrying away a Chimera corpse. He looked at the body, where three remaining hearts hung loosely from blood vessels, swaying grotesquely. The moment he saw the dried stains where blood, pus, and tears had mixed together, a chill ran straight down his spine.

These sick bastards...

That was when he finally understood the true meaning of the bottomless malice he had sensed from the Chimera.

They aren’t trying to beat me.

In fact, they knew that even if they created Chimeras like this and scattered them across the front, they still couldn’t stop someone like him, who could move freely and strike wherever he wanted. The fact that they had gone out of their way to create and deploy these things meant something else entirely.

They have no intention of backing down quietly.

If they can’t have it, then they will simply destroy it. If they are going to lose it anyway, then they will burn it all down.

The Cult of Ruin bastards are using this country as a disposable tool to strike back at me.

Whether these Chimeras could become a real military threat was secondary. They were doing it simply because they wanted to. They killed because they wanted to kill, and they destroyed because they wanted to destroy. Perhaps it was as simple as that.

So they are planning to get their revenge by destroying what I am trying to protect.

Do-Jin blamed himself. He had been thinking too rationally while fighting these cultists. Because he was making rational decisions, he had unconsciously assumed the enemy would do the same. He had mistakenly assumed they would at least try to preserve what they were trying to take.

“Withdrawal preparations are complete,” someone reported, cutting off his train of thought.

Before he realized it, three minutes had already passed. Thinking about what might have been happening deep inside during those three minutes made his heart grow cold in more ways than one.

I need to find another way.

Do-Jin was about to give the order to retreat when an idea suddenly came to light.

He added another command. “Take the survivors with us.”

“Sorry? I thought you said we were leaving them...”

“We are taking them. Load them up.”

“Ah... yes, sir.”

He didn’t know whether they would be of any help. But leaving them here would only mean death. Everything he had seen here was too inhuman to expect even the smallest shred of mercy for survivors who were barely clinging to life.

***

The people who came out to greet Do-Jin and the fighters when they returned were left in shock after seeing the corpse of a Chimera made from a human.

“W-what is this? That’s a person?”

“How far has this country fallen... How insane have they really become?”

The resistance members and their families alike were overwhelmed by both grief and rage. They were people who had already been disappointed in their homeland to the point of turning against it.

However, what they were now witnessing went far beyond even what they had experienced themselves. It was a version of their country’s collapse that exceeded the limits of what they could have imagined. The same suffocating, vicious malice that Do-Jin had felt when he first saw the Chimera was now being felt just as clearly by everyone else.

Yeah. No matter how much of a dictatorship this is, seeing something like that is bound to make people react like this.

Just moments earlier, Do-Jin had been seriously considering borrowing outside power. The only problem was not knowing how far the overall difficulty of the quest would spike if a large number of players were to suddenly join. However, if he gave more time to people who had already started treating the Rumanus Republic as a disposable pawn the moment interference began, the end result would be disaster anyway.

In that case, would it not be better to take a gamble? If he timed it right and struck all at once, he might be able to finish everything before difficulty scaling kicked in and the situation changed completely.

While those thoughts were running through his head, the people’s reaction to the Chimera showed Do-Jin another possibility.

There is no way Chimeras were only deployed by coincidence in the places we had gone. They’re being scattered across the entire front.

On the surface, it might look like the front lines were now being guarded by powerful biological weapons, but that wasn’t the real point. Fights and wars were still ultimately carried out by human beings.

What’s spreading everywhere isn’t just combat power. What’s really spreading is fear and instability. It’s shock strong enough not only to crush soldiers’ morale, but to make them turn their guns around.

Do-Jin decided to trust this new possibility he had discovered.

***

Do-Jin went back out with only his companions. Regardless of how likely or unlikely his plan was to succeed, what they were about to do was far too dangerous. It also didn’t require a large number of people.

“Do you really think it’s going to work the way you think it will, Do-Jin?” Theresa asked.

He gave an answer that lacked true confidence. “If we’re lucky.”

After hearing that, Soso spoke up. “It sounds like we’d need to be really, really lucky.”

“No. I think it’s more about timing. In the end, it’s gonna go that way anyway. It’s a bomb that’s bound to go off someday. All we’re doing is making it explode a little sooner.”

Do-Jin’s party quietly infiltrated the Rumanus Republic. The republican army had been on high alert recently but even so, it was impossible to seal off every single rat hole that had been drilled through over the years.

Many of the crude, improvised passages that had been opened long ago and left neglected were no longer even recorded in official documents. It was the kind of bureaucratic negligence unique to a dictatorship. They covered things up instead of properly dealing with them.

After they successfully infiltrated, Do-Jin apologized to Tanto. “I’m sorry for asking you to do something this risky.”

From this point on, Tanto would have to handle an enormous amount of work on his own. He adjusted his mask so it fit more tightly against his face and replied, “Don’t worry about me. Just wait.”

With that, he separated from the party while still in stealth. When he moved outside, a bleak landscape greeted him. Cold lights cast uneven shadows, and soldiers moved through the area. Tanto moved carefully, avoiding anything that might risk exposing his stealth. He needed to go deeper, much deeper.

After moving for a long time, he finally reached his destination.

So this is the base where that general is.

Stationed here was General Riccardo, a man selected from the list of “officers open to persuasion” that Do-Jin had obtained from the revolutionary forces. More precisely, he was a former major general and now a lieutenant colonel.

You can do this,Tanto thought to himself, taking a deep breath.

His role was to deliver Do-Jin’s message to Lieutenant Colonel Riccardo. He needed to pass on the message and, if possible, create a circumstance in which the lieutenant and Do-Jin could talk rather than fight.

In theory, if he handled every situation perfectly, it was possible to remain undetected. However, his stealth didn’t equate to invincibility. Even the slightest lapse in focus or a single mistake could expose him.

Let’s go...

The player Do-Jin could remember as taking stealth more seriously than anyone else melted completely into the darkness.