Being a Hunter Is Too Easy for a Former Necromancer - Chapter 22
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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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The Reincarnated Necromancer Finds Hunter Work Too Easy — Episode 22
The orcs’ eyes blazed crimson, and they let out a deafening roar. Regardless, skeletal beasts still filled the field in abundance.
Rat-a-tat-tat-tat! Screeeee! Crash!
The barricades shattered in succession. In the gaps, orcs pulled weapons from the walls they’d constructed on either side of the barrier.
Park Il-sang, watching through the drone feed, blinked in disbelief.
“Wait. Where in the world did these orcs get guns? Where did they even find those?”
Rat-a-tat-a-tat-tat-bang!
They opened fire. But the skeletal beasts were made entirely of bone—the bullets landed with pathetic accuracy.
Next came a flood of orcs wielding thick blades from behind the barricade walls, though their charge amounted to nothing more than a suicidal sprint.
Crash! Boom-boom-crash! Rumble-rumble! Burst-burst-bang!
“Gaaaahhh!”
The skeletal beasts collided with the orcs and detonated on impact, obliterating their bodies into fragments. The blast alone was devastating enough.
As the shattered bone shards sprayed outward, they became something like shrapnel, tearing the orcs to literal tatters.
Pandemonium. A river of blood.
Moments later, the entire barricade lay in ruins, debris scattered across the ground in all directions.
And.
The team watching the drone feed responded like spectators glued to a broadcast.
-E-rank? Stop joking! You’re B-rank, aren’t you?
-Even I thought I had a pretty unique class, but Park Il-sang, you’re incredible! This is like a one-man army. I wish I could switch to Necromancer too.
The gunner Kim Ye-rin. The savage warrior and close-range dealer Kim Dong-su.
Both of them erupted in amazement.
Of course—with exchange rates that overwhelming, what else would you expect?
-Moving out.
At the squad leader’s signal, the combat truck surged forward. It accelerated instantly, reaching maximum speed.
Then charged straight toward the devastated orc stronghold.
Whoooosh! Crash!
An orc blocking the path was rammed hard by the truck’s body and sent flying.
Yayong followed close behind!
“Kha-ha-ha-ha-ha! This is exhilarating!”
Kim Dong-su howled with delight. The team then raced past the orc position guarding the passage and accelerated forward.
Then it happened.
“Kraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”
A tremendous roar that made every hair stand on end tore through the air.
‘An Orc Chieftain!’
-It’s the Orc Chieftain!
-Hit it! Run it over!
-Huh. So that’s the Orc Chieftain I’ve been hearing about? My whole body’s shaking…
The team’s bodies reacted instantly to the chieftain’s roar.
‘That Fear Roar has some bite to it—effective enough to shake even me, a Necromancer…’
An A-Rank heavyweight, the Orc Chieftain commanded respect.
It had likely emerged after hearing the sounds of combat, but by then the team had already put considerable distance between themselves and the orc position.
Whatever fury the creature vented, it posed no immediate threat.
Still, Park Il-sang felt a flicker of surprise.
After all, the Necromancer was fundamentally a spellcaster of death, with substantial resistance to psychic attacks built into the class.
When he eventually transformed into an Undead like a Lich, psychic attacks would cease to work entirely.
‘If I could capture the Orc Chieftain later and turn it into Undead, it would be useful as hell.’
Park Il-sang’s mouth watered as he watched the Orc Chieftain wailing in the distance behind them.
* * *
Daebu City.
A sizable city sprawling across Daebu Island, a fairly large landmass itself.
It was connected to the islands of Seonjae and Yeongheung, and had supposedly been a famous tourist destination in the old days.
Leveraging its nature as an island in the sea, it had transformed into a proper city, home to a substantial population.
‘If I remember right, the Korean population is around twenty million now…’
Twenty million spread across twelve major cities.
Of course, the largest is Seoul, which supposedly still holds six million people.
Honestly, in a world half-destroyed like this, the fact that Seoul still had six million inhabitants was surprising, though not beyond belief.
The Han River served as a defensive line against monsters from the north, meaning monster resources were abundant; plus, much of the old infrastructure and other conveniences remained intact.
According to what Park Il-sang had learned, the cities of Gwangmyeong, Seongnam, and Hanam—originally not part of Seoul—had been absorbed into it.
Having abandoned Seoul’s northern reaches, expanding southward was only natural.
Yet.
Everything else had been abandoned.
The Great Wall had been constructed to divide Gwangmyeong, Seongnam, and Hanam roughly in half.
In other words, the region the group had just passed through was actually the area around Gunpo, Siheung, Anyang, and Ansan.
These areas were lined with shattered buildings—apartments and office towers that somehow hadn’t yet collapsed.
Such was the entrance to Daebu City.
They had arrived at the Tando Harbor Embankment.
Originally, Daebu Island had two entrances: the Sihwa Embankment to the north and the Tando Harbor Embankment to the south, but apparently the upper route had been sealed off entirely.
That’s why it had taken eight hours. Especially those damned orcs—word is they frequently block the roads like this. It really drives home how apocalyptic things have become.
In any case, Daebu City was a fairly prosperous place, operating a sizable harbor through which it conducted trade with foreign nations.
In a world where monsters run rampant, the sea is far more treacherous than land, yet maritime trade still occurs—and there’s a reason for that.
Those blessed by a Constellation that claims the sea as its domain are protected from attacks by marine monsters.
Thanks to that, the world remains organically connected.
‘Without even that blessing, it wouldn’t be a dystopia—it would be a full apocalypse.’
In any case, the group halted at the entrance to the Tando Harbor Embankment.
A wall thick as a fortress rampart had been erected at the embankment.
‘Still. They’ve built this entrance pretty solidly.’
The world belonged to the age of System and Constellation.
Because of that, things created by those who had become Hunters through the System possessed special abilities.
They were imbued with Magical Power, carrying System-based functions.
This entrance to the Tando Harbor Embankment fortress was no exception.
He could feel powerful Magical Power radiating from it.
At this level, even an A-Rank monster would find it impossible to breach. Seoul’s Great Wall had been constructed the same way, so there was nothing particularly surprising about it.
“Halt! Where are you coming from!”
“You should have received advance notice. This is Kim Sang-in from Shadow Transport.”
“Please provide your identification number!”
“98713#2871.”
“Confirmed!”
With a deep rumble,
the gate swung open.
“Since I’ve never visited another city before, I was wondering—is this common?”
It was Kim Ye-rin who answered.
-Some monsters can disguise themselves as humans, you see. It’s a security measure of sorts. When traveling between cities, you always contact ahead and receive an authentication code. Of course, there are additional checks using Identification Skills and the like.
“I see. Thank you for explaining.”
-Think nothing of it.
And so the truck was able to arrive at the prospering city of Daebu City.
* * *
“The food prices here are cheap. Fresh stuff too.”
Daebu City had grown into a mid-sized city with a population exceeding five hundred thousand, he’d heard. In the old days, Daebu Island was a tourist destination with a population of less than fifty thousand.
Yet it had flourished like this.
Though the advantage of being a reasonably sized island made it easier to defend, Park Il-sang still found it rather exceptional.
Jeju Island had collapsed long ago and become a monster lair, or so he’d heard.
Daebu Island had somehow managed to survive.
Daebu Island as a whole was ringed by concrete walls around its entire coastline—not as tall as the Great Wall, but a respectable height nonetheless.
This was because of amphibious marine monsters.
Though dangerous specimens among them didn’t emerge that frequently, allowing them to crawl ashore unchecked would result in catastrophe.
Park Il-sang had lived in Seoul his entire life, so Daebu Island struck him as rather novel.
‘This is… quite different from my past life.’
In his past life, the world had perished.
It was because of the Demon King’s Army.
The Demon King’s Army weren’t like the demon lords from modern Earth’s subcultural animations, novels, and comics.
They were something incomprehensible, if anything.
The Demon Race beings that comprised the Demon King’s Army all possessed cognitive systems entirely different from those of Park Il-sang’s past-life intelligent creatures.
For one, they showed no fear of death whatsoever, and they had no concept of pain either. If anything, they were obsessive madmen.
The closest comparison to their behavior would be…
‘…like the creatures from those weird horror stories trending in recent web novels, I suppose.’
They had no reason, no logic, no proper thought at all. That said, unlike the apparitions in horror stories, they couldn’t simply vanish under certain conditions or anything like that.
They died if you hit them with enough firepower.
But their behavioral principles were indeed similar to the creatures in horror fiction.
There were those that collected eyeballs and carried them attached to their bodies, those that ate only brains, and some that harvested souls and wove them into their own.
As Park Il-sang’s thoughts drifted through memories of his past life, he pulled his mind back to the present.
His thoughts often drifted like this into tangential territory, he supposed, because he had lived far too long.
“Do you have tomatoes?”
“What isn’t being made in the Smart Farms these days? Seoul must have Smart Farms too, right?”
“Seoul receives about three times as much produce from theirs.”
“That makes sense. I’ve heard land is tight in Seoul.”
He stopped at a vegetable stand by the roadside to ask the price, and was surprised to find it cheaper than expected. Park Il-sang bought a single bag containing five tomatoes.
The bag was paper. He’d heard that back in the old days they used plastic bags, but nowadays plastic bags couldn’t be manufactured at all.
Well, of course.
Since Korea had no petroleum reserves, it made sense they couldn’t produce petroleum-based products. Paper, on the other hand, was possible because they made recycled paper using recycling technology pushed to its limits, or so he’d been told.
Park Il-sang drew a tomato from the bag and bit into it.
And he started in surprise.
“This…!”
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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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