Once the grind in the mess hall was about to wrap up.
“Your discharge is only a few days away. You’ve worked hard.”
“Tell me about it.”
My immediate junior in the cookhouse.
Junhyuk came up to me and struck up a conversation.
“What are you planning to do after you’re discharged?”
“Not sure.”
It was the kind of question any soldier nearing discharge thinks about at least once.
What do I do when I get back to society.
“First I have to go find my family.”
Of course I had thought about it.
“We’ve learned there are people alive in other regions, but I still have no idea where my mom and dad are. I’ll take care of that first, and after that I’ll go step by step into why the world ended up like this.”
“Hm. I see.”
“Do you have something you want to say?”
My junior.
Junhyuk had started learning Japanese cuisine before he got drafted.
“I don’t know if I should say this.”
Maybe because he started adult life early.
He handled kitchen work well and had a pleasant personality.
He also had a knack for making coolly realistic points.
“There’s no way your family is still alive.”
“...What did you say?”
At my junior’s ridiculous remark,
I turned my head.
“I died like this too.”
Junhyuk’s corpse
was looking at me.
“...”
One eye dangled half out of its socket.
The flesh all over his body had been torn open by the teeth of some beast.
From his neck.
Something that should never come off had come off and was dangling.
How could I forget.
The last thing I saw.
Junhyuk as he was then.
“...Right.”
I glanced back over my shoulder.
The youngest in the cookhouse.
Yongjun was splattering entrails as he prepared dinner.
Watching that,
I muttered to myself inside.
“It’s this dream again.”
Ever since the day of ruin,
it was the dream I had seen until I was sick of it.
A truly garbage dream.
“The youngest and I died so pointlessly. Do you really believe a sergeant’s family with nothing special about them would still be alive.”
If anything,
the two juniors walking around talking to me in those disgusting states were the mild part.
The truly rotten thing about this dream
was that even when I realized it was a dream,
I could not wake up easily.
All I could do was...
I don’t know.
“If you have something to say, say as much as you want.”
Until the dream broke,
I just listened to what he had to say.
“Do you remember? Back then, if you had done the errand you ordered me to do, the one who died would have been you, not me.”
“Well, sure. That’s true.”
“A chef? You got yourself a good job. But if you think about it... that job. Don’t you think it should have gone to me, the one who had actually studied cooking.”
“That’s not exactly wrong either.”
He spoke words steeped in malice.
But his tone and face were calm as could be.
“You survived because you were lucky.”
When he was alive he had never once yelled at me or gotten angry.
So for me it was hard to even picture him getting angry at me.
“How long do you think that luck will last.”
“I don’t know.”
“It probably won’t last long. The Beastkin world and Dasmur both fell. Your family. You. All of you will someday follow a similar path.”
“Is that how it will go.”
“No. It could be worse. Those two at least managed to flee here somehow. Dimensional travel... there were great beings on that side, so it was possible.”
“Right. I won’t be able to run away like that.”
“In the end, everyone will die. You. Your family. The other unit members. Everyone.”
Yeah.
It was a dream anyway.
That guy was nothing but a shadow I had made up.
“Hey.”
There was nothing in particular I could do,
so I had been listening in silence.
“Even so. Don’t you think you’re talking a little rough to your senior?”
For an immediate junior,
what kind of way of talking was that.
“...Sir?”
Junhyuk’s corpse faltered, flustered.
Right.
Embarrassing as it is to admit,
because I saw the ugly way he died,
I am still.
Terrified of death.
“I still feel sorry for you and the youngest.”
But
that is separate from this.
“So. I do not want anyone else to end up like you two.”
I might make mistakes,
but I have no intention of making the same mistake twice.
Once more,
I studied the corpses of my junior and the youngest carefully.
The first time in my life I had ever seen it.
More hideous than I had imagined.
Even now it was enough to make me gag.
“Because I have struggled all this time not to see this again.”
Human death.
“...Huff.”
When I woke,
cold sweat ran all over my body and the bed was soaked through.
“...”
I rose from the damp bed.
I splashed water on my face and thought.
“I never want to see a human turned into that again.”
Right.
If that is what it takes,
“I will work very hard.”
Whatever the means.
However brutal the method.
I will use every move I can use.
In any filthy form,
I will survive no matter what.
****
The monsters released from the military bases.
After the cleanup for those monsters was mostly finished.
“Sending people to the bases and rebuilding the communications network is good, but we are going to be short on personnel.”
“For now let’s dispatch Legionnaires to each base and settle survivors in the surrounding area. A lot of survivors have gathered since we put out the radio. The bases have enough facilities to house large numbers.”
After I returned to Vimana,
I was in a meeting with the officers.
“Well. For immediate handling this should be enough.”
“In the end we came out way ahead. Just the byproducts from those monsters have the production crews over the moon.”
It had been the kind of battle where it would not have been strange if the humans in the entire area, including us, had been wiped out.
Thankfully it had been handled well thanks to Taejun.
“It was definitely a big deal.”
It was unquestionably huge.
And we had actually gotten enormous results.
But.
Not everyone was just marveling at it.
“Sergeant Shin.”
“Yeah.”
“We still have not heard an explanation for how this raid happened.”
Corporal Seo Suhyeok.
He folded his arms and looked at me.
“It is good that it ended well, but should you not brief us properly on this part.”
“Hey, hey. Show some respect to the sergeant.”
“Respect is respect and work is work. Gwangil, be quiet.”
He spoke with a face full of dissatisfaction.
Watching him,
“Same as ever.”
“Sir?”
I murmured that.
Corporal Seo Suhyeok looked puzzled, not getting what I meant.
“What do you mean, same as ever? If my tone sounded that way I apologize, but I do not plan to stage insubordination like last time.”
“No, not in that sense.”
“?”
“I just meant you are impressive.”
After I returned from the 423rd Battalion,
the way the unit members looked at me was.
Awe.
Like they were looking at something immensely great.
“...”
This guy
had not changed how he looked at me.
No, it was not only him.
Gwangil, Suhyeok, Minjae,
the officers of the unit were impressed by my ability, but only that.
They pointed things out when they needed to.
They did not seem to be in awe.
Maybe because they had struggled with me since the very early days of the unit.
Rather than looking up at me,
they just treated me as a person with a bit more ability.
To be honest,
for an attitude toward a corps commander, some might call it impertinent.
Sometimes they even told a senior to run errands or spouted nonsense.
But.
From where I sit, that kind of attitude is actually more to my liking.
If the gazes of people who think of me like a god feel like pressure,
then the gaze that sees me as a human being.
That, if anything, puts me at ease.
“Stay just like that.”
“...?”
Anyway, that is personal.
Right now,
it was time to talk about unit business.
“Ahem. To answer the question, there is not much I can tell you.”
“What does that mean, that it is classified even from us?”
“No. I would prefer that.”
From the start,
there is not much I actually know.
“I only heard there would be a raid after I met Taejun.”
Besides that.
I do not know.
“Oh. Now that I think about it, I did see a few of the people who caused this raid.”
“...!?”
At that,
Team Leader Lee Sanga cried out in shock.
“Did you say people.”
“...Ah.”
Come to think of it,
I had personally seen the people who came to the 423rd Battalion.
I had seen them trying to free the monsters that should have been stationed at the battalion.
So naturally I knew the culprits were people.
Considering it was monsters from military bases being freed,
most would assume the culprit was something more powerful than humans.
It would feel more natural to think at least some other powerful monster did it.
“Did you learn anything from those people.”
“Right. If it was you, Youngjun, you would have gotten something.”
“Well. I meant to.”
If we had captured them alive
and managed to feed them a round of Chef’s Special Sauce,
things would have gotten a little easier.
Unfortunately,
“They died before we could take them.”
They sacrificed their own lives
to summon a monster to attack us.
When that monster failed to kill us,
the humans screamed into empty air and crumbled to dust.
Humans ❖ Nоvеl𝚒ght ❖ (Exclusive on Nоvеl𝚒ght) being toyed with by another being
and dying miserably.
Honestly,
it was extremely unpleasant to watch.
“Well, anyway.”
We managed to win somehow, so that is fortunate.
The monster they summoned,
and the other monsters released from the bases in other places.
If not for Taejun, it would have been an attack we could not have stopped.
“I had a lot of questions, but there was no way to find answers, so it was frustrating.”
The ones who hit our unit with an attack of this scale.
Having no information on them is a fatal fact.
They are not normal.
The moment they were subdued by me and the unit,
they sacrificed their own lives and summoned a being that could threaten us.
Sacrificing your life is not easy.
Among the drives humans are born with,
the strongest is the drive to survive.
They did something that denied that survival drive.
Either they had been brainwashed so that drive was gone,
or they had some grand goal worth giving even their lives.
I had no idea which.
“What I do know is that their job was Demon Contractor.”
“Demons.”
“And one more thing.”
If there is any hope,
it is what Taejun said before I left the mountains.
“Someone with information would come find us on their own.”
Right then.
“L, leaders.”
The meeting room.
A soldier came to report.
“What is it.”
“Well, a visitor has come.”
“A visitor.”
“We are in a meeting. Tell them to wait a bit.”
“I tried, but the visitor said it was extremely urgent.”
...?
Among the visitors who came to our unit,
none were not urgent.
If it could be handled at the enlisted level, they would have handled it.
The reason he had come all the way here to report had to be something else.
I was a little puzzled,
but the answer was simpler than I thought.
“It is because it is him.”
As the soldier finished,
a man appeared behind him.
“Been a while.”
“...Ah.”
He wore light armor made from monster hide.
A long spear was slung across his back.
He radiated the feel of a seasoned hunter,
and the power emanating from his body proved he was a formidable fighter.
A face we knew well.
There was a simple reason the soldier had not turned the visitor away.
The visitor
was an extremely important figure to our Legion.
He was the leader of the group we met inside Dasmur,
and the man who had since grown that group to guild size.
“Taejun did say someone would bring information.”
One of our unit’s strongest allied forces.
Leader of the Avengers.
“I have an urgent matter to discuss with you.”
It was Changsu.
