"They’re running!"
Their monster commander was dead.
And when the attack that used that monster vanished at Sergeant Shin Youngjun’s hands,
the enemy forces—still numerous—began to withdraw bit by bit.
"Should we pursue?"
"I want to say... yes,"
Sergeant Lee Minjae said, glancing around,
"but our side took too many losses."
"Then...?"
"First we secure the wounded!"
At the call that the battle was over,
I let the tension drain out of my body and exhaled a tired breath.
[Skill: Cancelling ‘Assistant Chef’.]
As I canceled ✪ Nоvеlіgһt ✪ (Official version) the skill,
the kitchen tools flying through the air slipped back into the shadows.
"......."
"My god...."
I saw the troops who’d witnessed it let out odd murmurs of awe.
Truth is,
most of the skills and traits I’ve learned so far don’t really fit direct combat.
They’re mostly support techniques.
Especially to the naked eye, there’s basically nothing with a flashy, obvious effect.
But—
this [Assistant Chef], as reluctant as I am to say it myself...
Ahem. I-it might be kinda cool?
Weapons of all kinds drifting through the air.
In terms of spectacle, it could stand shoulder to shoulder with Sergeant Lee Minjae’s lightning.
"That was awesome...."
The soldiers’ admiring looks.
I was feeling just a little smug when—
"If only they weren’t all kitchen tools, it’d be even cooler."
"......."
—the follow-up comments
stabbed me right in the chest like a dagger.
"Is that like telekinesis? As expected of Sergeant Shin. Too bad the one flaw is that it’s all kitchenware."
"......."
"You’ve awakened a spectacular ability. Maybe it’s so powerful the penalty is you can only use kitchen tools."
"......."
[Assistant Chef] doesn’t share my traits; it only has proficiency with kitchen tools,
so I can’t exactly hand it different gear.
And if I only hand out knives, giving it a variety of tools is less versatile.
When blocking, a wok or frying pan with a wide surface is better than a knife.
Knives and a cutlet mallet are fine, sure, but
with woks, spatulas, and frying pans zipping through the air,
instead of a brilliant, overwhelming technique it feels...
how should I put it—
like a poltergeist in a commercial kitchen...?
Honestly,
it just looks more curious than anything.
That’s the story of my life. Damn it.
I’m a support-class. Who am I kidding trying to look cool?
My swelling pride turned humble in an instant.
And
I wasn’t the only one drawing those admiring stares.
"Y-you, Private Lee Byungmin. You were this strong?"
The ones who came back with me after learning martial arts—
every single one of them drew looks of shock from the troops.
"So you learned this ‘martial arts’ and got that strong?"
"Yes. I told you that several times."
A soldier who’d been average just showed overwhelming combat power.
For soldiers at a similar level, of course that’s interesting.
"Can we learn it too?"
"Yes. That’s why Sergeant Shin brought instructors."
"Instructors?"
"Folks who are insanely strong and have imposing presence. How Sergeant Shin sweet-talked them, I’ve got no idea."
What do you mean how.
I fed them some weaponized junk food and they liked it.
"Sergeant Shin, huh. Ahem."
Private Park, who’d been talking with Private Lee Byungmin, lowered his voice.
"If we learn those martial arts... we can throw knives like Sergeant Shin, right?"
"Huh? No way."
"......."
"Only Sergeant Shin can do that, obviously. I heard he could do that even before he learned martial arts."
"...R-right."
Thankfully,
the others were explaining martial arts for me.
One less hassle for me.
Now then. As for me—
Time to start post-battle cleanup.
****
Once the battle had settled down a bit,
I went to find Minjae.
"You’re here, Youngjun."
"Hope I didn’t take too long."
"Hardly. You came at just the right time. We do have a lot of wounded... but considering the results, our losses are light."
Minjae was issuing orders, organizing the field.
"The wounded are mostly taken care of and... ah, that reminds me."
"Hm?"
"We found a bunch of survivors gathered together in a warehouse nearby. That was... your doing, right?"
"Ah, in a way."
Strictly speaking, not mine.
Ariella, my vassal.
She hasn’t just been sowing chaos in the rear.
She gathered the humans within the zone she secured and hid them somewhere safe.
"Jung Sua took them."
"Jung Sua? I thought handling survivors was Lee Sanga’s job."
"Sanga’s been busy with production lately. And Jung Sua has a bit more trust among survivors. Especially the ones our unit rescued—they seem to have gotten a lot of help from her."
Now that he says it—
every time we freed people who’d been kept as slaves,
I think I did see Jung Sua nearby, talking to them.
All I assigned her was spirit-drone work. How diligent is she?
Doing a job I didn’t even assign that hard.
Maybe she’s just naturally gifted at caring for people.
Survivors used to be Section Chief Lee Sanga’s area of responsibility,
but if Jung Sua likes that work,
we could transfer the role entirely.
"Speaking of which, where’s Gwangil?"
"He went after the retreating enemy. Took a few uninjured soldiers, and the two I’d never seen before that you brought."
"Oh. Aggressive of him."
"He said he needs to grind proficiency... or something like that."
Grinding proficiency, huh.
Anyway, sounds like Gwangil’s very busy.
"That aside—"
Once the rough report was done,
Minjae, watching my face, asked:
"That shadow-like monster from earlier—what was it?"
The thing that attacked me at the end.
The [Spirit of Darkness].
He must mean that.
"I don’t know."
"What?"
What that thing is, exactly?
I don’t know either.
"More precisely, I know its name but not why it targeted me."
The Green Manes used Earth Spirits.
According to what came up in Ingredient Appraisal (Enhanced),
a Spirit of Darkness seems to be a very ominous being.
Ordinary folks don’t contract with it at all.
It’s a hard ingredient to obtain.
It was described as something quite rare to see.
So why did that thing go for me?
As I am now, I can’t say.
One thing I can say for certain:
[The Spirit of Darkness is a servant of a great demon, a being that brings death across multiple dimensions.]
"It looks like the thing is a servant of a demon."
"What?"
At that,
Minjae’s eyes flew wide.
"A demon? Something like that actually exists?"
A demon.
The sort of thing you’d expect to see in the Bible.
The system’s translations are pretty slapdash, so it might not be literally the same as the demon from scripture, but—
Even though Ariella isn’t literally a vampire,
her traits overlap with vampire lore in many ways.
So those demons,
even if they aren’t exactly the ones from the Bible,
are likely to be very similar.
Anyway.
I shrugged at Minjae’s shock.
"At this point, is there anything that would be strange to see?"
"W-well, true."
The name shook him up,
but I’d heard about demons once before.
From Ariella, who ended up my vassal.
She said something similar.
Vampires’ progenitor is a demon, or something like that?
Demons carry authority in their words.
And since the Nobles of the Night still have that blood, however faint, once they swear fealty they can’t take it back.
That was the first time I heard of demons.
The thing that destroyed Seohwan and Miho’s world—
might well be something like that too.
"The bodies that spirit was manipulating... one was the so-called Great Warrior, and one was a [High Shaman]."
Their tribe’s shamans handle spirits.
That High Shaman must have sacrificed himself to summon the Spirit of Darkness.
"Then the reason it targeted you was, maybe—"
"Hey. Nothing’s certain."
"That demon... targeted you?"
Minjae’s face turned grave.
"A demon... can we even fight something like that?"
"Well, it’s not an immediate problem. Besides—"
I lifted the blade that still held my dish’s buff.
[Anti-Demon Aura] shimmered on my knife.
"We’ve already got a track record of slaying a vampire."
The Spirit of Darkness, too,
seemed to take damage from this aura.
"So it’s not like we have no way to deal with it."
It’s not just my cooking.
We’ve accumulated a few kinds of strength,
and the biggest one is people.
The monks of Myohyangsa. They’re all either paladins or priests—cleric types.
Our unit’s first Priest,
Private Shin Jungsoo, is Buddhist.
Many priests who joined later are from other religions,
but monks, by their very vocation,
end up as cleric class in this game without mercy.
It really is a slapdash job-change system, but I’m not complaining.
Watching monks go “O god(s)...” still feels weird,
but it’s always clerics who smash demons.
I recruited them just because we had the numbers,
and now they’re as solid an ally as we could want.
It’s not like a demon is going to pop out right this second,
and it’s not as if we have zero countermeasures.
Of course,
I’m not actually planning to sit on my hands and wait.
We should make our own preparations.
As long as the enemy doesn’t show up immediately,
we have plenty of tools we can bring to bear.
"That reminds me—speaking of monks."
"Yeah?"
"What on earth happened there? No one’s given me a straight explanation."
"Ah."
It was too busy to explain everything by guild message,
and it’s complicated, so I’d intended to explain in person later.
I told Minjae everything that happened after I left the unit.
"I see... I wondered why you suddenly wanted to invest nearly a month. So that was why."
"Got lucky."
"When the merchant who left with you returned not with you but with monks, I did wonder what was going on."
Minjae nodded, genuinely pleased.
"That Gwangil can now control his Madness... thank goodness."
"Right? He was thrilled."
"What’s this, talking like it’s someone else’s business?"
"Hm?"
Well,
it is someone else’s busi—
"You were worried inside too. About Gwangil becoming a Berserker."
"...Ahem."
At that,
I could only cough awkwardly.
Man, this guy wastes so much energy worrying about others.
He was also the first to notice what my abilities were.
That I was worried about Gwangil’s Madness—
Minjae had picked up on that long ago.
"I know you care more about the troops than you let on."
He smiled lightly.
"That you use your cooking to care for their mental state. In a world that’s half-collapsed overnight, the fact that people are hanging onto their sanity at all is probably largely thanks to you."
"What’s with that all of a sudden. Embarrassing."
"But there are plenty of times I worry about your mental state."
"Huh?"
I looked at him, wondering what he meant.
Minjae’s eyes held a touch of concern.
"Your cooking takes care of everyone else’s nerves to some degree. But no one can take care of yours."
"I’ve got a steel-trap psyche. I’m fine on my own."
"Haha. Aren’t you special. Anyway, hearing that one of the things you worried about is resolved lets me breathe a bit easier. That aside—martial arts..."
Minjae asked, cautious:
"Odds are it won’t help mages much, right?"
"Probably?"
"...Tch."
He sighed, disappointed.
Martial arts are fundamentally techniques that move the body.
Awakened who aren’t frontline combat types—
"—might be able to learn them, but I think the efficiency will be terrible."
"What about you? You’re beyond non-frontliner—you’re non-combat class."
"Why ask what you already know? I don’t count."
"...Fair enough."
Marksmen might squeeze out a little use.
Bayonet work, or something like that.
But—
"—for mages, there’s practically nothing to leverage."
They could learn it,
but the time-to-payoff ratio wouldn’t be worth it.
"A shame."
"It’s fine. If the front is sturdier, the mages in the rear are safer. Firepower goes up anyway, right?"
"That’s... not wrong."
Uncharacteristically for Minjae,
he looked visibly disappointed.
****
After that,
while we tended our wounded, our unit pressed the attack without losing our momentum.
Maybe because we’d felled the [Green Manes’ Great Warrior] in the last battle,
the enemy’s resistance felt weaker than before.
Even so, their numbers were massive.
Led by the soldiers who’d learned martial arts,
various allied forces fought at the fore, and as a result—
[ROK.17 territory ‘Small City (2)’ has been seized.]
[As long as the territory is held, additional ‘Occupation Points’ will be gained.]
In the end,
we reclaimed Hwacheon County, one of the regions the Green Manes had occupied—Hwacheon and Cheorwon.
"Whew."
"There must be far more areas we haven’t swept yet. Lucky the system still recognized control."
"Less that we’re that strong and more that the original ruling force pulled back."
According to what Ingredient Appraisal (Enhanced) told me,
the Green Manes can swell their numbers quickly.
I did want to keep pushing while we had the upper hand,
but the moment I was thinking that—
Ding.
[Shaman: For now, it’s best to stop there.]
With the familiar chime,
a single message line filled my view.
"Stop there," huh.
We barely won.
This is when you press the advantage—so what was he talking about?
Tock.
"...Huh?"
A cold tap brushed my cheek.
I looked up at the sky.
What was up there—
no, what was coming down—
"Snow...."
In Gangwon, the first snow falls a little early.
Winter’s vanguard came a bit ahead of schedule.
"First snow."
Snow.
As a kid, just seeing the white flakes fall from the sky made my heart race.
But to soldiers in Gangwon, that snow is little more than pretty trash from the sky.
And now,
to humans in a ruined world, that snow is...
little different from a disaster.
I could also guess
why we should stop here.
To survive winter, we won’t have the leeway to keep focusing on combat.
I sighed,
and a white plume curled from my lips.
"Let’s hold out."
Winter had come.
Probably—
the harshest winter since the 21st century.
