Chapter 10
For a moment, my vision went black, and I felt the world flip upside down.
In that split second, I met someone’s gaze.
A vast, distant presence. Just locking eyes with it felt like my mind would shatter from fear.
A gaze so overwhelming it felt like it could tear my body and soul apart. The fear I had buried deep inside me stirred awake.
Then my vision returned.
Red land.
A land dyed entirely in blood.
The sight dragged up a fragment of the past.
A battlefield soaked in blood.
The corpses of fallen comrades scattered across the ground.
The smell of blood.
The smell of death.
Screams filled with despair and agony.
And standing there alone…
Me.
“Director!”
For an instant, my mind went completely blank.
Gi-baek’s voice calling me sounded far away.
I absently wiped the blood off my cheek and looked at the large man holding me.
“Get ahold of yourself!”
I felt dizzy.
My head rang, hollow and dull.
That gaze I felt while passing through the gate… what was it?
When I recalled that unfathomable stare, my hand began to tremble slightly.
Bang!
My senses felt distant.
The sight of Gi-baek holding me while batting away huge tentacles felt unreal, like a dream.
I had no strength.
I was scared.
I was exhausted.
I wanted to stop.
A voice echoed endlessly in my head.
A voice urging me to end things, to give up.
That voice…
“Damn it.”
Snapped me back to reality instead.
Who the hell are you, messing around inside my head?!
“Director, are you feeling better now? What on earth just happened?!”
As my awareness returned, I finally realized how I looked.
Idiot, Gu Hae-ju.
What kind of mess is this?
Trembling in my subordinate’s arms.
“How many fingers am I holding up? Do you recognize who I am?”
“Kang Gi-baek.”
At my answer, the idiot smiled brightly even as he fought off the tentacles. I sighed.
“I’m fine now. Let go.”
The tentacles weren’t especially fast or deadly, yet there was a small cut on Gi-baek’s cheek.
Probably because he’d been punching them while holding me with one arm.
This was seriously humiliating.
“Idiot. Inside a gate, your own safety comes first.”
I reached out toward the sword lying on the ground.
“Are you mad because I touched you without permission?”
Gripping the sword, I answered with a sigh.
“No.”
Seriously, I’m racking up embarrassing memories today.
Standing there frozen, needing help from a subordinate, then snapping at him out of sheer embarrassment.
“I just said something stupid because I was ashamed. Sorry.”
After quickly apologizing to Gi-baek, who’d saved me only to get yelled at, I turned my head to hide my burning face.
“Team Leader Three.”
“Yes, Director.”
Sensing that I’d recovered, perhaps, the tentacles hesitated.
“Thank you.”
A lot of awkward moments today.
I’d take this humiliation out on those monsters.
Looking around, there was quite a variety.
Tentacle-writhing creatures and giants dripping rotten flesh.
Plenty to vent my frustration on.
I exhaled as if emptying my chest, held my breath for a moment, and stepped forward.
Slash!
At the same time, a streak of light butchered the monsters before me.
“Phew.”
Monsters that died without even realizing it.
Watching them fall, my tangled thoughts cleared a little.
“Figures. Pushing the body hard clears the mind.”
Watching me stomp the tentacles mercilessly, Gi-baek let out a dry laugh.
“You’re really not mad, right, Director?”
“Keep it down before I actually get mad.”
I replied curtly to his foolish question.
“They used a dirty trick.”
The corpses of the monsters, cut down by my sword, sank into the red ground as if being absorbed.
“To open a gate like this…”
Seo Jeong-pyeong, that deputy director, had desperately tried to stop us from entering the site.
I thought he was just buying time to destroy evidence.
“But this place feels like Oedo territory.”
Was he stalling to open a gate connected to this place?
“Th-that’s really true?”
I turned toward the trembling voice.
It was Han Wol-ryang, the guide who’d been assigned to us.
It seemed he’d fallen in with us when the gate opened.
“Ah, wait.”
A thought flashed through my mind, and I strode toward him as he stood shaking.
“W-what are you—!”
I grabbed his wrist as he flinched back in fear.
Then I immediately sent my energy flowing into his body.
“This is it.”
I’d been wondering how they pinpointed our location so precisely, restrained us, and opened the gate.
“Looks like you were used.”
“Ghk!”
As I concentrated my energy into one point, a red worm shot out of Han Wol-ryang’s mouth.
“That thing was sending signals to track us.”
The grotesque worm writhed desperately, as if trying to survive.
I flicked it lightly, and it crumbled like sand.
It had been a meticulously prepared plan.
“Were they targeting me from the start?”
A carefully designed trap.
Did they plan all this from the moment I showed up?
Or did they predict I’d come if something happened here?
“…Am I overthinking it?”
That felt like too big a leap.
Swallowing hundreds of lives just to lure me alone sounded insane, even for lunatics.
…Honestly, I didn’t want to believe it.
More likely, they planned to kill whoever came and silence them.
“Th-then… are we trapped here forever?”
Han Wol-ryang asked, his face pale with panic.
“If this is Oedo land, isn’t there no way out…?”
The fact that this was Oedo territory clearly terrified him.
And it made sense.
In all of history, I was the only one who’d entered a gate connected to Oedo and come back alive.
“It’s not that there’s no way.”
Though he didn’t show it, Gi-baek must have been scared too.
Oedo was the root of all evil, the destroyer of life itself.
Anyone who didn’t fear Oedo probably wasn’t alive anymore.
“Even if it’s Oedo territory, a gate is still a gate. Destroy the boss, the owner of the space, and the area will collapse. The gate will reopen.”
Judging by the energy here, this wasn’t the worst-case scenario.
The monsters roaming around were small and weak.
The area itself was so small you could see most of it from a high point.
It was a small gate.
That meant it was still manageable.
“There’s no way three people can pull that off!”
Han Wol-ryang shouted, panic overtaking him.
An ordinary person would struggle to stay sane in this situation.
Maybe I should praise Gi-baek for holding it together.
“If this were Oedo’s main territory, you’d be right. But this place is more like a fragment that broke off from Oedo.”
If it were the mainland, we wouldn’t even be able to breathe properly.
This was just a small fragment under Oedo’s influence.
“Of course, destroying a boss influenced by Oedo won’t be easy.”
Oedo’s source was its roots.
At best, this place was connected to a side route, but there would still be a guardian.
And its strength would be at least A-rank.
Probably near the upper tier.
“But that’s not enough to bind me.”
It wasn’t nearly enough to stop me.
“Let’s go.”
I took out a talisman that tracked magical waves and tossed it into the air.
“When we get back, I need to smash that bastard’s face in.”
The talisman fluttered like a leaf on the wind, drifting slowly in one direction.
Leaving the dazed Han Wol-ryang behind, I followed it.
Before long, we reached a certain spot, and something caught my eye.
“…A doll?”
A small, palm-sized teddy bear keychain lay on the ground.
A fluffy, white, soft-looking teddy bear.
Han Wol-ryang, clinging close behind Gi-baek, trembled.
“H-hik! A strange doll in a place like this… could it be a disguised monster?”
He whispered timidly.
“…You think?”
I sighed deeply at his surprisingly plausible nonsense and crouched down to pick it up.
The keychain was a little dirty with sand stuck to it, but I felt no evil presence.
Not only people fell into Oedo’s gates.
This bear might have been dragged in by bad luck.
Or…
“Probably belonged to one of the missing.”
Judging by its cute, chubby appearance, the owner was likely a child or maybe a young woman.
That thought made my mood sour.
“I’m taking it. It could be a clue.”
…That was just an excuse.
I simply didn’t want to leave something precious to someone behind in Oedo’s filthy land.
It pricked my conscience.
“Should we keep going straight?”
Compared to five years ago, when I’d wandered Oedo’s mainland for months, this really did feel like a fragment.
The monsters that attacked us along the way were far weaker too.
“At this level, I think even I could handle them.”
Unlike Han Wol-ryang, who was still stiff with fear as he followed, Gi-baek joked lightly.
“One hit and they’d all die, though.”
I let out a small laugh.
“Then why don’t you try? If you clear it solo, I’ll buy you a meal when we get back.”
“Can I get Korean beef?”
Gi-baek replied playfully, eyes sparkling.
And then, a short while later.
When we reached the entrance of a massive canyon where the source likely lay—
“I’ll take that beef some other time…”
Gi-baek’s confidence shrank to nothing.
“What the hell is something like that doing in a tiny fragment?”
Guarding the source of this land—
Was a giant nearly twenty meters tall, standing squarely at the canyon’s entrance.
