The Tough Guy Hides the Villainess - Chapter 85



085 – And Then There Were None #1

085 – And Then There Were None #1

Humans are creatures that use tools.

I knew how to handle various tools, but I preferred small blades because they were easy to hide and could be used in many situations.

Like now.

I suddenly threw a dagger, piercing the neck of the special zombie, and easily incapacitated it.

It was a moment when the practice and effort of throwing daggers whenever I had nothing to do in the junkyard of the ruined world paid off.

Someone might ask, ‘Isn’t it better to shoot a gun?’

I think so too!

But guns were expensive and hard to come by.

Fortunately, the dagger throw, enhanced by the power of “Leap” level 3, showed destructive power comparable to a heavy sniper rifle.

The accuracy was excellent, so it could be called a special move.

Hundreds of hours spent throwing daggers were worth it!

…But?

“Summer Beam!”

Ziiiiiing-. Kwaaa-!

It couldn’t compare to the beam of light that Yoo Yeoreum shot from her eyes, charged by drinking strawberry milk just now.

The special zombies were sliced like tofu in an instant.

There was no need to separate their heads from their bodies; their torsos were cut in half.

“What…!?”

With just a blink of an eye, not even a click, my painstaking effort was turned into paper scraps.

Is this talent?

Is that the realm of a genius that cannot be overcome by effort!

Ziiiiiing-.

The light from Yoo Yeoreum’s eyes swept away 14 special zombies in an instant.

Even I would have been in despair at the sight, so how would Namsanho have felt?

“This, this damn it, how can this be! You monster of a woman!”

I agreed.

It was truly amazing how I had managed to kidnap someone like Yoo Yeoreum.

Ssssss-.

Yoo Yeoreum frowned, smoke billowing from her eyes that emitted excessive light.

“Namsanho, I don’t want to hear the word ‘monster’ from you, okay?”

Thud-.

Yoo Yeoreum whispered softly, nudging my side.

“For now, I can’t shoot heat rays. But I’ve roughly dealt with those special zombies or whatever they are, so you and Seo Gaeul have to catch that guy. Are you confident?”

Confident?

Of course, I wasn’t just good at throwing daggers.

How about this.

“Hup!”

Tadadak-!

I quickly ran and retrieved the knife that was stuck in the pillar.

Then, I swung it with all my might towards Namsanho’s head, who seemed still dazed.

With desperate force.

Whoosh-. The light of the knife cutting through the wind.

Namsanho shuddered.

“The same trick twice─.”

He recognized the trajectory and seemed confident he could block the incoming projectile.

From noble mtl dot com

But, his calculation was wrong.

Because I leaped greatly at the same time I threw the knife.

“────Wha, what.”

To his eyes, my body would have seemed like some acrobat, as if dancing under the moonlight of this colosseum, showing my back.

Head down. Literally, a leap that reversed heaven and earth.

My body flying through the distance with the same speed as the nightmare-like thrown dagger.

“aaah─!”

By the time he realized my intention, it was already too late.

The ultra-fast dagger with enough energy to separate his neck from his head.

In an instinctive attempt to stop it, Namsanho’s body shook violently as a reaction to the defense.

“─Keurk?”

At the moment his body shook from the impact, my hand grabbed his head.

“…………Ah.”

「Name: Namsanho

Possession: Click to view details ☜

《Conquest Lv.4》 – Holds the potential to cover half the world.

《Zombie Lv.3》 – Revived, mocking death like a nightmare’s dead. Not easy to kill.

《Infection Lv.2》 – Has the infectiousness of the Black Death.

Status: 《Fear》 – Terrified facing death for the second time!」

Creak, the sound of a neck bone turning.

“─Guksa Namjin.”

Kya, it was perfect to use as a finishing move for New Hanamjin with intact legs.

But, since the opponent didn’t die, is it right to call it a finishing move?

“Kill! Kill!”

Even though his head had fallen off, Namsanho didn’t die and kept shouting angrily.

Maybe because he was the host of special zombies, he was quite something.

Actually, I didn’t intend to kill him.

There were many things I wanted to ask this guy.

After checking his status window with 「Emotion」 just now, I became even more curious.

# # #

There were about ten hostages trapped in the Colosseum.

They all seemed to be first awakeners, kidnapped by Namsanho to be turned into special zombies.

They had been infected with the virus for some time, so they were unconscious.

Even when they came to their senses, they only said things like “Who am I…? Where is this…?”

“The symptom of the zombie virus is that it makes you lose your most recent memories first. It’s been two days since they were infected, but it’s not too late yet. Seo Gaeul, Yoo Yeoreum, pour some cola into their mouths.”

Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle-.

While Yoo Yeoreum and Seo Gaeul were pouring cola into their mouths, I asked Namsanho’s head.

“Namsanho, tell me everything that happened to you that day. As far as I know, you were a first awakener, but did you accidentally get the concept of 「Zombie」 when you died that day and cause an accident?”

“…….”

Suddenly, Namsanho closed his mouth.

I poured cola into his mouth.

“Graaah!”

Pouring cola on an already rotten zombie causes it pain.

It was knowledge I had from the future, and it seemed to work on the host, Namsanho, as well.

“I’ll talk! I’ll talk! I came back to life! That day, that guy saved me! He brought me back to life when I was dead!”

He brought the dead Namsanho back to life?

Seogaul, who had been in a daze, also came to his senses.

“Who? Who on earth…!?”

“Kuhuhu, Gu Sejun. It was him. He brought me back from the dead. Actually, he was half-convinced about my resurrection. The problem was that I couldn’t control myself.”

Gu Sejun, the leader of the illegal awakener group Villainous?

‘Gu Sejun, who was dispatched to cover up the Namsanho incident at the request of Seodochul, tried to bring Namsanho back to life… Is there a concept that can revive the dead?’

It would have been nice if the resurrection had succeeded, but the scenes of Namsanho, who became a “zombie,” biting and rampaging around people played in my mind.

“The higher-ups, fearing the spread of the zombie virus, ordered Yeomhun of Villainous to burn down N-Mart. Am I wrong?”

“Hehehe. I did nothing wrong. I was just too hungry after becoming a ‘zombie.’ You know? Awakeners consume a lot of calories. Especially right after awakening.”

I understood the cause of the fire.

So what happened next?

“What happened to you after N-Mart? Tell me about your actions until you became a ‘zombie’ demon. Why did you settle in this great labyrinth? Did Namtaegun provide you with a hiding place?”

I wanted to uncover the connection between Namtaegun and Namsanho.

So I was meticulously filming and recording.

Namsanho started laughing.

“My father? Haha, no. You’re wrong. A ‘zombie’ demon? What is that? You guys are mistaken. A ‘zombie,’ that… that’s just one of the many abilities I conquered….”

I had a bad feeling.

It was the discomfort I had felt since I saw Namsanho’s status window.

“You guys made a big mistake. Now I don’t know what will happen to me. That woman gave me that, that… jewel. The white… jewel. Since I swallowed it, I…”

Namsanho’s severed head bulged and twisted bizarrely. Soon, sticky blood flowed from the cut on his neck, and the blood intertwined grotesquely with the surrounding dead zombies.

In this strange situation, Seogaul asked me.

“…Hey, was this part of your plan?”

“Honestly, I think we need to make some adjustments.”

My plan was to take down Namsanho and use him to my advantage.

However, unfortunately, my expectations about him fell slightly short.

“I thought he was just a pathetic guy, but why is he in phase 2?”

Namsanho was not a demon of “zombies.”

There was another concept that he couldn’t handle.

“Ahhh…”

Namsanho’s body, entangled with several corpses, grew several meters larger.

The form of the monster, made from the grotesquely intertwined bodies of people, was quite familiar.

The day the world ended without any warning.

The giant monster that sucked people in with its huge maw.

Among them, the form of the super-giant corpse golem, called the “giant,” was exactly like the one in front of me.

Although it was several times smaller than back then, it was clear that he was one of the “Three Calamities” that destroyed the world and emerged from the ground.

‘Namsanho was not a demon of “zombies,” but a demon of “conquest.”‘

It was my misjudgment.

However, I couldn’t think of it as necessarily bad.

Rather, I was lucky.

“The demon of ‘conquest’ was one of the Three Calamities.”

Like a mystery that had been unsolved for a long time, a clarity like carbonated water swept through my body.

I had always been curious about the true nature of the giant monsters that emerged from the sky, the earth, and the sea, and now I finally knew.

Their true nature was “concepts”!

A certain “concept” becomes a demon, and if it gains uncontrollable power, it becomes a giant monster!

The “giant,” made of flesh, absorbed countless people and grew even larger.

I decided to name him the “Giant of Conquest.”

“Ahhh─.”

He had countless mouths.

He opened his mouth and screamed.

“Ahhh─.”

“Ahhh─.”

The scream alone seemed to chip away at a person’s mental strength.

What should I do in this situation?

Defeat the “Giant of Conquest”?

Compared to its size at the time of destruction, it was now as small as a baby.

If we are to stop it, now is the perfect opportunity.

“What… what is that monster…?”

“Jina! What’s going on! You didn’t tell us about this…!”

However, both Seo Ga-eul and Yoo Yeoreum couldn’t accept the current situation and looked exhausted, like marathon finishers.

It was indeed the perfect opportunity to defeat the great monster, but unfortunately, our condition was not good.

At that very moment.

『A threat to the safety of the Great Labyrinth has been detected.』

『Do you authorize the activation of the defense system under the authority of the king?』

『YES/NO』

The words appeared before my eyes.

Wooong-.

The ring of ‘Seed’ I was wearing was vibrating violently for some reason, and it was clear that the words appeared because of the ring.

Authorize the activation of the defense system?

Yes or No.

In front of these unfamiliar words, there was only one choice I had to make.

“If you’re a man, you should charge forward even when running away.”

The answer is YES!

The moment I made up my mind, Yoo Yeoreum shouted.

“Jina, look at that! Do you know what that is?”

When I turned my head at Yoo Yeoreum’s cry, there was something round floating in the air of the colosseum.

It looked like a black hole or a wormhole, with a white ring around a pitch-black hole.

Since when has that been in the air?

Just as I felt puzzled, flash- the black hole emitted light.

And in that place, something elongated appeared, revealing a strange presence.

It was an entirely pitch-black figure.

So black that it looked like a shadow floating in the air.

The only peculiar thing was that its eyes emitted a brilliant starlight, the color of the universe.

It was a starlight that felt familiar.

Such a beautiful light is hard to forget once you’ve seen it.

‘Isn’t that Nam Woo-joo?’

While I was racking my brain, Yingying, who had been quietly clinging to my face like a mask, cried out irritably.

━Grrrr…!

I never thought Yingying would act so hostile.

Seo Ga-eul, who had been dispirited the whole time while facing Nam San-ho, also screamed as if she was fed up.

“What is that again! Another demon has appeared!”

A demon.

Is that how Seo Ga-eul’s intuition sees ‘that’?

Indeed, to my eyes, ‘that’ was a demon too.

Perhaps it was Nam Woo-joo who had fallen into ruin─.

Blazing-.

Soon, the demon’s burning starlight eyes turned towards the giant made of corpses.

【Eliminating… the threat… of the Great Labyrinth.】

Clap-.

As he clapped his hands, the giant of conquest, which had swelled up massively, began to distort as if being crushed by a compressor, converging towards a single point.

“Ahhh…”

“Ahh…”

Countless mouths screamed, but it was impossible to stop what was happening.

The giant, crushed and compressed by an immensely strong gravity, was eventually reduced to the size of a fingernail.

It looked like a pure white stone, like white jade.

【…….】

Nam Woo-joo, looking down at it, seemed to lose interest, and disappeared in a flash, leaving only a black hole behind.

In this situation, I uttered a magical word that calmed my mind no matter what happened.

“Mission accomplished!”

Yu Yeoreum nudged my side.

“…Is it really according to the plan?”