Even after the [Grisvelk] pack’s assault,
the attacks from monsters in the forest kept coming.
‘Insane... even when we assaulted cities, I’ve never seen this many monsters.’
The number swarming in defied imagination.
A count that all but packed this not-even-that-wide forest to bursting.
‘Don’t tell me—this is the state of all Gyeonggi Province?’
If that’s truly the case—
even if that wall opens and the Legion moves in,
wiping out monsters at this density would be near impossible.
“My children.”
One fortunate point, if anything...
punching through them to escape
seemed barely doable.
“Hurry. Offer me their blood.”
In the snow-buried forest under fallen night—
when a woman stretched out an arm and gave that command,
FWAAASH!
in a forest already dark,
an even blacker, pitch-dark shadow spread,
and within it—
“Yes... my Master!”
red eyes gleamed,
answering their master’s order.
And—
that was enough.
—KWOORRRGH!?
—kerrrk...!
The many monsters that had converged to prey on a feeble target—
without even realizing it,
became the ones hunted instead.
In a forest where nothing could be seen,
only the screams of monsters kept echoing.
shhk—
crack!
From the bodies of monsters cut down, torrents of blood geysered and drenched everything crimson,
and once pooled, that blood began to move on its own—
“Hmph. Beasts will be beasts—nothing but low-grade blood.”
—and flowed
into the woman who had issued the very first command.
‘A place I could never have escaped by my own strength.’
But—
the fighting to be done here
is not the work of someone like me, a mere production class.
‘Leave it to the combat classes.’
A boss-monster-tier powerhouse with combat-specialized traits, a vampire—
Ariella,
and the vassals she commands with overwhelming strength.
[Shadow Veil]
A personal space granted only to the Nobles of the Night,
now set within my shadow—another Otherworld.
Honestly, part of me had thought to stuff all my troops into the veil
and drop them here.
You know how it was in those old strategy games—
you cram a transport with troops to the max,
then unload them in the enemy base right before the transport blows up.
But—
‘The miasma from that [Underground Mine] invaded even this shadow.’
The heat from that wall could well do the same.
No matter the flame-resistance gear,
stuffing ordinary soldiers inside to move was a risk far too great.
And—
having now experienced it, that worry was not baseless.
“Keep fighting and report strength as you go.”
“Yes. For now—Master ordered 30 vassals to be mobilized for crossing the wall. Of them, 27 burned away and are gone.”
“Tsk.”
That heat—though much weakened compared with what I took head-on—
still affected even the space inside that shadow.
‘Ariella is a boss monster with absurd power.’
You just don’t see it because she’s a subordinate, not an enemy.
Her stats, reborn as a viscount, exceed imagination.
On top of that, the vampires wore the same fatigues as me
and I had stuffed them with my flame-resistance cuisine.
Yet—
when I first crossed the wall—
‘Even Ariella... was barely clinging to a shape.’
After crossing the wall,
when I first looked into the shadow,
Ariella
was in a state so ghastly I’d be hard-pressed to describe it with my own mouth.
‘Ordinary troopers would never have endured.’
The inner shadow space took less heat than I did head-on,
and she endured only because vampires have that distinctive regeneration.
Even so, had she not been linked by a vassalage pact,
I’d have thought she died the instant I set eyes on her.
‘It was, as expected, a reckless gamble.’
Ariella is a fairly powerful asset.
I gambled—worrying I might lose her—because I believed in her stats,
but failure would’ve cost me dearly.
......Still.
“It worked, so good enough!”
What, it could have failed?
Why dwell on that when it succeeded!
‘If the result is good, it’s all good—full stop.’
I looked over the troops spilling out of the shadow.
[Elite Vampire Knight]
[Lee Beomjae]
[Son Naeun]
[Son Nahun]
Ariella,
and among the vassals she’d brought, the three who survived.
The five [Grisvelk] I’d taken down—
their blood flowed straight into my shadow
and became these ones’ provisions.
‘Only the elite vampires survived; the ordinary ones all burned.’
They were the ones keeping me alive right now.
‘Elite Vampire Knights.’
[Elite Vampire Knights]—
like all other vampires—
had once been criminals of severe degree.
Killing an Awakened
nets you a hefty sum of Experience and also the points that Awakened possessed.
That predatory growth method, in truth, guarantees quite rapid growth.
Accordingly,
among humans who survived this world, the number and proportion of vicious raiders was high.
Step outside our unit’s sphere and they overflowed.
Even so,
the reason we rarely saw such scum near our unit was—
‘We cleaned them out routinely.’
Ariella,
and Lee Hyunjin, who went out to police the area whenever there were no special tasks—
they killed raiders on sight.
‘Lee Beomjae seized a road, killed the easy marks, and took tolls when targets didn’t look easy.’
I remembered him fairly well since I personally nabbed that one.
And—
the other two were the same—
‘......No.’
I looked for the two who stepped in front of me,
cutting down monsters that leaped at us.
“Hehe...! This is fun! Right, Naeun?”
“Yeah... big bro...!”
Faces that looked, at most, high-school aged.
They were young, but both were so good-looking it felt unreal—
a brother and sister, oddly resembling each other.
‘Those two were truly on another level...’
Amid a grind of brutal fighting,
they wore bright smiles with their faces painted red in monster blood.
‘Even if you tried to make them blossom through cuisine, their natures were so vile they’d be almost impossible to handle.’
A brother and sister who should have been in high school at most.
The world broke,
the social rules that would stop them vanished,
and they decided to indulge the desires they could never vent in normal society,
to their hearts’ content in a ruined world.
‘Hedonistic killers.’
Raiders like Lee Beomjae at least committed crimes to survive.
These two, purely—
gain or loss be damned—killed others for fun.
‘Crayon-book crazy criminals, through and through...’
Criminals whose depravity was that severe
Ariella turned into vampires on her own authority without asking me.
It made me sick to my stomach—
but dealing with such severe criminals as quickly as possible
was the path that helped me—no—
helped humanity survive more.
If anything—
after becoming vampires, maybe because they already enjoyed killing,
those two showed great talent for combat.
Hence, they could be made [Elite Vampires].
‘It is a shame that, for now, only human-born vampires can be made elite.’
The more a target resembled her own race, the easier it was for her to make them vassals.
At first only humans were possible,
and after her promotion she could vassalize monsters with limbs.
The most recent ability—creating [Elite Vampire Knights]—was the same:
for now it seemed possible only for human-born vampires.
Even so—
no matter how weakened they were inside the [Shadow Veil],
the elite vampires were the real deal who’d withstood the heat blasting from that wall.
[Blood-Shadow Blades]
shhhraaaa!
“Offer your blood to our Master...!”
Each one carried strength on the level of our unit’s squad leaders—
no, perhaps even stronger.
As they killed, they healed their wounds with the blood,
and the monstrous pressure they exuded
made even the monsters overflowing in the forest grow wary of approaching.
‘No matter what, if we keep fighting all the monsters here, we’ll be the ones who lose in the end.’
Even so—
driving off the monsters chasing us and sprinting through the forest was doable.
And—
only after repeating such battles for quite a while—
“There!”
tap.
—I broke out of the forest
and set foot on open ground.
‘Don’t tell me they chase me this far...!?’
The number of monsters in that forest was abnormal.
If they kept pursuing me, it’d be a serious problem.
With that thought, I glanced back—
—grrk......
“......”
From the shadows of the dark forest,
only the monsters’ eyes glinted as they stared at me.
I worried those eyes might leave the forest and rush me,
but they seemed to have no intention of chasing me beyond this edge.
sliiide......
Soon,
they slipped away deep into the woods and vanished.
“Phew!”
A quick sweep with the [Wildness] trait—
there were still an immense number of monsters in that forest.
When I disappeared, they even seemed to have turned to hunting one another, the air growing ugly—
‘At least the rear is fine.’
Maybe because I’d gotten quite far from the forest near the wall,
the side opposite the forest felt much lighter in monster presence.
Granted, that’s only compared to that forest.
‘So monsters were clustered near that forest alone?’
I didn’t know why that spot drew so many,
and puzzling over the unknowable was useless.
I forced myself to my feet.
“......It’s freezing.”
Away from the heat-belching wall,
the cold around me had risen to a level incomparable to moments before.
I looked around.
Snow was piled not just in that forest,
but a blanket of white covered everything my eyes could reach.
A view so white it should have been blinding.
The reason it wasn’t blinding
was clear when I raised my head.
“Perfect conditions for vampires to move.”
A giant gray sheet of cloud covered the whole sky.
It wasn’t so dark that no light came through at all,
but for someone ~49% vampire like me, there was no pain at all.
The cold around me,
the vast amount of snow—
“Total chaos.”
I could roughly guess
how things stood in Gyeonggi Province.
****
After I’d fully cleared the forest,
I shoveled away snow piled up nearly to my chest.
‘Cold enough to die, seriously.’
Away from the heat-radiating wall,
I could tell the temperature around was far from normal.
Gritting through it, I scraped aside the snow hardened like ice—
[Ingredient Discrimination (Enhanced)]
[Road Asphalt]
and black asphalt peeked out.
“So this was a road.”
Snow lay everywhere with nobody to clear it.
It was hard to tell whether this was a road or the middle of a field.
‘Still, at least I know it’s a road.’
If I followed it,
I’d hit a city eventually.
The problem...
‘Will there even be people in that city?’
Feeling the cold stabbing my whole body,
I raised my head and looked around.
Not only the insane number of monsters that had been in that forest—
but this insane cold.
An extreme environment that seemed utterly unlivable.
I thought of [Dasmur], the dungeon in Chuncheon we cleared not long ago.
If what our unit faced was annihilation by monsters and zombies,
what Chuncheon’s citizens faced was annihilation by flood.
And here—
“An ice age.”
Among scenarios tied to humanity’s extinction,
one rated comparatively likely.
It looked like annihilation by cold.
“What will you do, Master?”
If this were in Gangwon, fine—
but the sudden ice age in Gyeonggi left me dumbfounded,
and Ariella approached to ask.
“......Aren’t you cold?”
Since becoming my vassal she’d always worn fatigues,
but now, as when I first met her,
she wore something like a dress adorned in black and red.
‘Because her fatigues burned.’
Without gear items equipped,
she’d defaulted to the garments included in her original look—
and wearing that in this cold felt oddly out of place.
“Ah—no. We nobles are fundamentally poor at feeling cold.”
“Yeah? Convenient race.”
“......Says the one who, compared to ordinary humans, has also grown quite resistant to cold.”
......Apparently I’d gained cold-resistance without realizing it.
And still it was this cold.
‘How are other humans supposed to endure this...’
While I was lost in thought,
Ariella spoke.
“Master. You came here to check your family’s safety and...”
“If there are humans in Gyeonggi, to save them.”
She glanced around,
frowning.
“This seems a rather poor environment for achieving that goal.”
“It does... but I still have to check.”
“Well. From what I see, it’s already...”
She—
was about to say something to me, but—
“......No. It’s nothing.”
she soon swallowed it
and held her tongue.
“......”
But I could easily guess
what she’d been about to say.
‘Chances are high they’re already all dead... so isn’t this a fool’s errand? That.’
I tried not to think it,
but looking at this landscape,
the supposition forced itself into my head.
‘Maybe Gyeonggi Province... is already gone.’
That enormous number of monsters,
this enormous cold—
to believe humans survived here
was to fight despair.
‘Maybe there aren’t... any living people at all.’
If so—
then my family, who would have been here, too—
clench.
“Not until I check!”
Grinding my teeth,
I repeated what I’d already said.
“We don’t know.”
“......Understood.”
Barely,
I rejected the worst assumption.
“Then we’ll have to move to find living humans... first we must handle this cold. My vassals and I are fine, but for you, still closer to human, this cold will be lethal.”
“True.”
“Once we solve that, we move to the nearest city and search for human traces...”
Sensing I wouldn’t bend,
Ariella seemed ready to prepare to head straight for the nearest city—
“No.”
“Pardon?”
After a moment’s thought,
I decided and told Ariella,
“For now, you stay here.”
“What do you mean?”
She widened her eyes in surprise.
“Stay here—what do you mean by that?”
“You haven’t fully recovered, have you?”
“That is...”
When we crossed the wall—
if this had been a video, she would’ve needed mosaic censorship.
No matter how much blood she’d taken, she wouldn’t be whole.
“Even if you’ve treated some of the burn injuries, that process cost you a lot of blood. And right now you don’t have many vassals.”
“......True, but, Master—”
Her personal strength is great,
but the “Noble of the Night” is a race whose core is, above all, the vassals they can command.
Her own power shifts with the number and quality of vassals.
With only three vassals,
she wasn’t bringing out even a quarter of her true power.
So—
“The monsters in that forest.”
Pointing back
at the forest I’d escaped, I said,
“Among them, there should be kinds you can turn into vassals.”
“You mean for me to make them my vassals.”
“Yeah. Whether this sky is temporary or not, looking at it it won’t be too sunny. Here, you can fully exercise your power.”
If humanity really has perished,
until that wall opens or the [Legion] opens it and comes through,
I have to survive here alone.
‘To do that, I need a power base.’
Originally I’d planned to join with humans and hide inside their base,
but right now I don’t even know if that’s possible—
no, the likelihood has turned high that it isn’t.
“You’ll be that base.”
“......As you wish.”
At my words,
she hesitated briefly, then nodded.
“But you are far too frail right now, Master.”
“Hey. I’m not that flimsy even now.”
“Even so—better take vassals with you, just in case.”
“Hm.”
She had three vassals in total.
Fair.
My combat capabilities were drastically reduced right now.
“In that case, I’ll take those two.”
I pointed—
“The Master of our Master—”
“Us?”
—at the two vampire siblings, those hedonistic killers.
“If you’re taking vassals anyway, why not take all of them...”
“Do you know what else might be in that forest? I’m taking two just in case. You also need to consider just in case. You take the remaining one.”
“......Yes.”
After that—
we set a few methods to reconnect later and to exchange information—
“You two—serve our Master well!”
“Y-yes!”
“If I get a report of inadequate protection, I will not overlook it!”
“Leave our Master’s Master to us, Master!”
—and Ariella took a single vassal
and headed into the monster-choked forest.
The light here wasn’t strong to begin with,
and under snow-laden trees it was near pitch black,
so she could swell her forces in no time.
And I...
“Let’s go.”
“Yes!”
“Yeah!”
—with the vampire brother and sister,
began moving, plowing through the high-piled snow.
****
Brutal cold.
Awakened rarely die to cold alone—
but it still hurts.
So—
[Raw Grisvelk]
I took out the meat I’d sliced during the fight,
and over it—
[Head Chef’s Special Sauce]
I drizzled special sauce.
[You consume Raw Grisvelk with Warm Feelings!]
Then—
I felt my body grow a little warmer.
“It probably isn’t actually warmer, though.”
The “special sauce” tweaks emotions—
by itself it doesn’t grant a buff.
My body was still thrown into an extreme chill.
Awakened won’t die to ordinary cold; if there’s no pain, it’s fine.
If I think I’m not cold, maybe my body will feel a bit warmer.
‘For now I don’t have ingredients with cold resistance. I’ll endure like this.’
Beating back the cold by any means,
we kept walking the road—
“......We got here, at least.”
—and I reached a snow-covered city:
Gapyeong County.
But—
no matter how I scanned around—
“......No people.”
I felt no human presence.
Only—
—krrrk......
—thud, thud—
non-human—
only monster presences.
‘Many.’
So many it strained belief.
Compared to any city we’d subdued in the past, it was overwhelming.
Famous as a resort area, sure,
but Gapyeong wasn’t particularly special otherwise.
And in such an ordinary city—
this many monsters?
clench...
‘Is it truly over?’
It’s not that I hadn’t considered it.
That [Pope] said fewer than one in ten of humanity still walked the earth,
and most of that tenth were already zombies.
A survival rate to the point of despair.
If so,
there could be one or two regions
where humanity had gone completely extinct...
I had thought so.
But—
I still hoped not.
‘Mom... Dad.’
And—
the many people I’d encountered in my life—
their faces flashed through my mind.
As with the survivors in Gangwon—
they hid near cities where resources pooled, as a rule.
But around here I sensed only monsters thickly—
any qi that could be human
wasn’t... at all—
rustle.
“!?”
Just when I thought there were none—
another presence, felt from afar.
It didn’t have the vicious, rough feel of a monster.
A strangely cautious footfall.
If I wasn’t imagining it—
that was definitely...!
‘People!’
Unable to contain my excitement,
I ran toward them.
A moment later,
I could confirm I hadn’t imagined it.
—...What do we do now?
—Damn it, if you hadn’t been spotted, we wouldn’t have been chased to a dump like this...
—Says you, big bro...!
People speaking in clear Korean.
The moment they rounded the corner—
—Hold up! Presence!
—I finally
met the first survivors of Gyeonggi Province.
“......”
“......”
They stared at me without a word.
Seeing that,
‘There are living people!’
I was overwhelmed,
and opened my mouth.
“Hello. I’m—”
“Wait, wait.”
But—
the survivors I’d finally met cut me off mid-sentence.
‘Ah, come to think of it.’
In a world this grim,
I didn’t know how people here differed from survivors in Gangwon,
but if a stranger suddenly blocked the path in Gangwon,
they’d worry first whether I was an enemy.
“Ah. Don’t worry. I—”
That I held no hostility,
and in fact wanted to help them—
I was about to say—
“Let’s start with handing over what you’ve got.”
“......?”
At their next words,
I could only blink dumbly a moment.
Uh.
What?
‘Did I say out loud that I wanted to help you?’
Since I said I wanted to help,
“start by handing over your stuff”...
Was it that kind of brazen demand?
“Heh. Didn’t think we’d have a senior already holed up in this back alley.”
“Face looks good—guess you’ve been eating well. Let us eat with you.”
“If you got chased all the way into this monsterland, guess you’re in the same boat as us.”
“Headcount’s smaller on your side... so if you don’t want to die, start by handing over everything.”
Of course—
it was my mistake.
“What’s with you. Cat got your tongue?”
It wasn’t hard to understand.
The first “survivors” I met after pushing into Gyeonggi...
‘...Should I have brought Ariella.’
Ridiculous as it was,
they looked like raiders.
