Chapter 66 - The Sleepwalker IV

6

I can finish Tenlegs with a single stroke.

I mastered the miracle originally permitted only to the Sword Star in this world: an aura of starlight, otherwise known as sword force.

Nevertheless, I generally refrained from killing Tenlegs in one turn. However tedious and inconvenient it was, I always established the Korean Peninsula Awakened Federation and dragged it onto the battlefield against Tenlegs.

"It has been some time, Mr. Undertaker. Have you been keeping well?"

"Oh, Mr. Undertaker! How are you?"

Because, to put it in slightly ridiculous terms, the awakened needed a wake-up call.

On the battlefield, I demonstrated just how formidable Tenlegs was, and just how misplaced their arrogance was in considering themselves transcendents. No need to lecture them individually; practical experience made the point perfectly clear.

It is the destiny of Homo sapiens to taste something before finally realizing whether it is shit or soybean paste.

Only after a bloody, life-or-death struggle with Tenlegs did the peninsula's awakened reach the realization: 'Ah, unless we form an alliance in advance, we'll all get along splendidly as we drop fucking dead when an A-class anomaly appears.'

I added another trick to the mix.

"It's been a while. Have you all been well?"

"Of course. We've been great!"

"And are you getting the hang of aura?"

"Ahaha. Well, not quite yet..."

Specifically, I advertised: "Exclusive free private tutoring in advanced aura manipulation, available only to awakened who join the Federation."

Civilization might have collapsed, but the Korean people's zeal for education was etched into their DNA. The words "advanced," "learning," and "special private tutoring" paralyzed their brains.

Countless awakened had already witnessed the usefulness of aura firsthand in the fight against Tenlegs. Its tentacles were tougher than the toughest squid legs in the world, and practically nothing could bite into them except a blade suffused with the lovely sheen of aura.

"Mr. Undertaker!"

"Mr. Undertaker, lately I've hit a wall in my training..."

In other words, the Korean Peninsula Awakened Federation was rather like a martial arts sect that revered me as its grand patriarch.

Old Man Scho originally filled that role, but then the fellow retired...

Of course, every last awakened was a lunatic. You could find people who treated their superiors like dogs absolutely everywhere.

That was why, even as I taught them aura training methods, I deliberately asked for nothing in return.

Running your guild? Why would I interfere with that? It's your guild, so handle everything yourself. Tuition? Oh, forget about that. Just suck every last bit of benefit out of my training methods. Yes. Take this, take that, take my liver and gallbladder while you're at it. It's fine. I don't need anything.

In an apocalypse, behavior like this was a perfect way to get treated as a sucker.

But what if that sucker casually crossed the anomaly-infested void, traveled from city to city, picked apart the head of Tenlegs—a creature they could do nothing against—as easily as deboning chicken, enjoyed the lavish favor of the constellations, and even flaunted friendships with the guild leader of Three Thousand Worlds and the commander of the National Road Management Corps?

Even awakened who admitted reason into their skulls only on a selective basis had no choice but to reconsider their definition of "sucker."

"Teacher, when will we ever be able to repay our debt?"

"Well, I could demand payment from you whenever I like, but I'm deliberately choosing not to, and I'll keep doing so. So just take some more aura lessons tailored to your needs. These methods will help you survive mortal danger and consolidate your authority as a guild leader, but you'll still give me nothing and pretend you owe me nothing. And you, I, our dear Seorin, and Noh Doha will all know you've done exactly that."

"Teacher! No, Boss! Please!"

The so-called phenomenon of the subordinate with all the power.

To exaggerate a little, if I came up with a suitable pretext and murmured, "Hmm, it seems the guild leader over in Incheon has been muddying the peninsula's waters lately...", the guild leaders gathered here would have to shout, "The grand patriarch wants us to fuck up the Incheon guild!" and take their entire forces out to wreak havoc.

And the campaign against Meteor Strike wasn't merely a suitable pretext. The fate of the entire peninsula was at stake. Naturally, the guild leaders who had benefited from my generosity had no choice but to come running at full speed.

"You're always popular, aren't you?"

After I returned from a particularly intensive round of handshaking, Dang Seorin greeted me with a thoroughly weary expression.

"You could just settle down in one city, but instead you're always roaming all over the country. Honestly, I can't tell whether you're diligent or irresponsible..."

"What do you mean? I have settled down. All of Gangnam in Seoul is my turf. Don't tell me you're looking down on Gangnam property prices."

"There's nothing left there now except your guild building."

"That's called buying the dip. Once civilization starts rebuilding, the life of Undertaker will go down in history as an unparalleled real-estate legend."

Dang Seorin chuckled.

"So you have no intention of settling down for good? Or dating anyone? I hear there are quite a few people who like you."

"Dating is a bit..."

In any case, sunset had to fall before Meteor Strike could arrive.

We waited for night, chatting quietly with a broom in each of our hands. Why was everyone carrying a broom? Well. You'll find out shortly.

The air was taut with tension.

To deliberately pare away the calluses of that atmosphere, jokes and idle chatter drifted softly through the military camp.

Ignoring the extraordinary by maintaining the ordinary was wisdom humanity had acquired long, long ago.

"Why? Are you impotent?"

"I'm simply not interested in romance. To be honest, my mental age is around a thousand. Surely I can't go dating children and getting tangled up in their love lives?"

"Pfft. What are you even saying?"

It wasn't just Dang Seorin and me. All the awakened were trading silly jokes.

Naturally. Meteor Strike descended into the skies above South Gyeongsang Province in the seventh year of a regression.

Not one of the elite troops gathered here on the Gimhae Plain had failed to cross the boundary between life and death dozens of times.

They all knew painfully well how important it was to regulate their mental tension right up until battle.

"Honestly, Boss, it's hard to imagine you dating anyone."

"Y-yes. Some people look perfectly agreeable on the outside, yet somehow have the face of someone who'll remain single for life. Guild Leader, you're exactly th-that sort."

Had this been after the fiftieth run, SG Guy Seo Gyu and the Goryeojang troll Sim Aryeon would have joined in the banter.

"Heh. Above all, we should worry about whoever dates you... Seventy percent of your romantic conversations would be about Romance of the Three Kingdoms, twenty percent about the Chu-Han Contention, and the remaining ten percent about Water Margin. Who could endure that...? Even a thousand-year love would grow cold..."

Had it been after the fifty-fifth run, Noh Doha, commander of the National Road Management Corps, would have sipped ginger tea, releasing warm breath and equally scalding barbs.

"Ahaha. Sometimes I wish you'd stop talking about Romance of the Three Kingdoms too! Honestly, I don't really see what's so entertaining about it. Oh, but the scene where that Dong Zhuo character burns Luoyang was fun!"

Had it been after the 109th run, Cheon Yohwa, Student Council President of Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School, would have landed another blow with a beaming smile.

"..."

[...]

And Lee Hayul and the Saintess would have been quiet, as always.

Throughout my life after that, all the way to the 1,183rd run, allies occasionally joined our ranks, and occasionally our numbers dwindled.

But today was the forty-second run.

Our blood alliance was not yet complete. And so I think I'll portray the battle from the run that was, for that very reason, the harshest and most fiercely fought.

"———, ——."

"—. ———. ..."

"... ..., ..."

The voices of countless people faded away.

Only our breath—Dang Seorin's and mine—rose toward the sky as white smoke.

Those two streams of breath took on a reddish hue.

My companion through time murmured.

"Well. I'm not interested in romance either."

The sunset sank from the sky.

A pleasant tension seeped through my entire body.

[—It's coming.]

The Saintess's soft murmur.

In that instant, the world's vermilion blazed a deeper red.

It resembled a flame, an enormous ring of fire.

The very center of the sky burned scarlet, while its edges quietly turned blue, black, and then pitch-black.

The flame moved as though alive. The scarlet sunset at its center constantly exhaled into the dark-blue night around it, then inhaled in the opposite direction.

The sky—the world—was breathing sunset and starlight.

"Dang Seorin."

"Yes. I know."

She had already begun her magical chant.

How much time passed after the song first flowed from her lips?

Suddenly, the darkness at the edges swallowed the entire vault of the sky in an instant. Heaven and earth went dark as though there had never been a sunset.

A night sky.

This was not a physical, astronomical change. As though a mother were gently covering her child's eyes with her palm, something obscured the entire world in a single instant.

"... It's here."

"Fuck. It was real."

Murmurs spread through the ranks.

Some awakened stirred uneasily at a phenomenon utterly beyond common sense. The tension they had worked so hard to suppress with meticulous strategy meetings, written battle plans, and deftly traded jokes surged to the surface in an instant.

Others clenched their fists as the anomaly whose existence had been foretold six years ago finally appeared.

In an age when transmission towers and streetlights had closed their eyes, only the eyes of the elite troops gave off a faint glow. They looked up at the night sky from their meticulously planned formations.

[The ‘Saintess of National Salvation’ makes an announcement.]

[The special-class anomaly ‘Meteor Strike’ is appearing in the skies above the Korean Peninsula.]

The darkness of the night sky burst open, spewing endlessly concentrated starlight. It was as though some giant were playfully prodding the balloon of the sky with a scale.

But the result was anything but playful.

"It's starlight!"

"The strategy really was right...?"

"My God. That isn't anything like a shooting star. An anomaly that controls the entire sky?"

Normally, Meteor Strike would remain overhead for a full six hours from this point onward.

But observations across multiple runs had established that it wasn't merely doing a runway walk—no, a Milky Way walk—across the night sky for six hours to give everyone a free show of its beautiful starlight.

In fact, it was slowly casting a spell on the humans below over those six hours.

Call it hypnosis or call it brainwashing; either was fine. The point was that the greater the proportion of humans gazing up at the starlight in that night sky, the stronger Meteor Strike became.

[The ‘Saintess of National Salvation’ advises noncombatants to avoid looking up at the night sky whenever possible.]

Thus, the most important factors in this boss battle were cooperation and a swift resolution.

Rather than sitting quietly and waiting for Meteor Strike to gather sufficient strength and fall, we would strike when it was weakest.

In other words, my strategy was to settle the fight in its opening stage.

"Ah—."

To put that plan into action, Dang Seorin opened fire first.

First Melody: Repeat. Second Melody: Expansion.

The song we always relied on in large-scale battles rang out across the plain.

That alone would have been enough for allies within earshot to receive support from Dang Seorin's magic. But for this particular battle, we had prepared absolutely everything.

"... KZZT... ah..."

Every member of the combat units had a radio attached to their chest or waist. The equipment had been prepared solely for today's battle. We had even built a base station nearby.

A tactic made possible by my precise knowledge, as a regressor, of where the battlefield would be.

It also demonstrated how we had concentrated every last crumb and scrap of civilization on this one engagement.

It would have been convenient if each radio could amplify her magic simply by transmitting her song, but we weren't granted a cheat quite that obliging. Another strand of song had to be added.

"Ah—ah, ah—."

Third Melody: Medium.

A spell that made predesignated materials resonate with Dang Seorin's song, rather like mirrors.

Naturally, every radio distributed to the awakened had been designated a medium. That designation required another spell as well, so whenever she had a spare moment, Dang Seorin had enchanted the radios in advance.

That work alone had taken a total of three years.

And cheap radios weren't the only pieces of equipment she had designated as mediums.

Finally, the most important Spell-Song Chanting we had prepared, and which Dang Seorin now put into practice, rang out.

"Aah— aaah——."

Fourth Melody: Flight.

The fourth song swept around the sky once, then, through [Repeat], surged endlessly back to its beginning, da capo.

Hands tightened.

Of the nine hundred awakened assembled on the Gimhae Plain, the seven hundred selected for combat tightened their grips as agreed beforehand.

Every last one of their fists held a broom.

"It's a little late to bring this up now... but were brooms really our best option?"

"Yes. Of course."

Having completed the Fourth Melody, Dang Seorin had enough breathing room to answer. Her expression suggested she found it strange that I would even ask.

"What else would a witch use to fly into the sky?"

She pushed off the earth with practiced footwork. Had she repeated it thousands, tens of thousands of times, until it was ingrained in her body? The Great Witch's posture was poised and elegant.

A black cloak three times larger than her small frame fluttered behind her like a flag.

I chuckled, then spoke into my radio.

"All units, launch."

That was the signal.

Seven hundred awakened of the Federation pushed off the plain together and soared into the night sky.

Boss battle.

Threat level: Continent.

Meteor Strike.

Combat begins.

Phase One: Takeoff.