The Last Battle

"Don't let the front break!"

A man in a gleaming golden suit was the one who shouted it. The suit looked like something torn out of a superhero picture or a science-fiction film—near-future, and handsome about it. The design all but begged for a name like Golden Lion. He wore no helmet, and his hair really did stream behind him, thick as a lion's mane.

For an instant the space around him warped. Heat-haze shivered up, and then he shot forward faster than the eye could follow. Not even a highly trained special operator could have moved like that. A single glance was enough. That was not a civilian's movement.

No. He was no ordinary man. He was one of the beings people called an Awakener, or a Hunter—a special breed of humanity that wielded powers you would expect from a film, a comic, or a novel. In a word, a superhuman.

"Well, would you look at that. There he goes, overdoing it again."

I let out a short laugh as I cut across the battlefield beside him. I was no ordinary man either. I was an Awakener.

"Hm?"

Krrrrk!!

A colossal abomination, dreadful and insectile, erupted from the dirt beneath my very feet and barred the way. I startled—but an Awakener's senses had long since left human limits behind. Reflexes quick as light triggered the skill, and I already knew the thing's nature and its weak points.

Shrrrik, chrrrk! Chains of translucent energy burst from behind my back and lashed the monster's body in an instant. This one was especially weak along the tail. Bind it there, and it couldn't move an inch.

"Keeek!"

Beyond the thrashing creature, flames climbed in the distance, tangled with uncanny screams and blasts no one could name. Pandemonium. A battlefield prowled by Awakeners who commanded powers beyond nature.

We were inside a dungeon.

A place cut off from the reality outside. Wholly unrelated to it. Something like a crack between dimensions. Guns, bombs, missiles—none of the weapons of the real world did a thing in here. The only thing that worked was an Awakener's power.

So, to put it in a single line: Awakeners, humans possessed of superhuman ability, entered dungeons packed with monsters and bizarre phenomena and wiped them out with superhuman powers called skills...

Light burst over the head of the monster I had pinned, and with it rose the afterimage of an enormous longsword. No—not an afterimage. This was an Awakener's power made real. A skill. Each blade stood as tall as a grown man, and there were dozens of them.

Crackle—crackle! BOOM!! Then they fell. Like rain. Like lightning. Giant swords poured down.

The monster, which had looked at a glance something like a mantis, was torn apart until its shape could barely be told. In a single instant. It never even had time to scream.

The force of the skill kicked up a violent wind. Dirt whipped through my hair, and I scowled.

"Ha-jun. Don't let your guard down."

A worried voice pressed in at my side, the way you speak to a child. It belonged to the Awakener who had just used that terrifying skill. He stood well over six feet, fierce eyes angled down at me, a man whose body looked powerful even before he moved.

"And when, exactly, did I let my guard down? I could have handled that one by myself just now, Team Leader Han Gyeol."

I threw him a salute as if I had joined the army. His blank face creased, just barely.

"......Look at you. Joking around again."

"Yessir, yessir. I'll stick nice and close to our big, reliable team leader. So I don't get hurt~. Hah, is this what they call the power of connections? I only trust our Team Leader Han Gyeol~."

"Team Member Eun Ha-jun."

The voice that came back was quite serious, but the air didn't freeze. Because...

"Whyyy, Team Leader? Want me to put a buff on you? My attack skills may be garbage, but I do lay buffs and debuffs on sooo nicely."

"Seriously. I told you to stop talking like that. What kind of man in his thirties talks that way?"

We were about as close as two people could be. The S-rank Awakener Hunter, Team Leader Han Gyeol, was my friend. We had been together for something like thirty years—childhood friends, friends since we were old enough to ride, best friends. Any of those would do.

"Oh, please. You're in your thirties too, so quit pretending you don't get it! We're the same! You think a person's way of talking changes just because they get a little older? You punk! These days—hello, the internet exists—there is no grown-up voice and no kid voice! I'm using this voice when I'm fifty, and I'm using it at my seventieth birthday party. People don't change that easy."

I put on a show of taking offense, and he let out a short laugh. For all his scowling, he liked it when I acted like a child. Han Gyeol was clumsy with his feelings. When I made a scene and overdid it, he was much more at ease, because then he could be certain of what the other person felt.

"I get it. But I'm not joking. They say sixty-five percent of the Awakeners sent into the dungeon have already gone dark."

At that, my face went hard, and I looked at the letters floating in front of my eyes.

A translucent pane, the sort of thing you would see in a VR game, hung there with its message. This was the System window, visible to any Awakener. It showed the physical abilities that set us apart from ordinary people after awakening, and the explanations of our skills. Now and then, as now, it also displayed notice of an event.

For Awakeners, the world had in some sense turned into a game. You gained a special power, hunted monsters, and raised your level. A game—except this one was played with your actual life.

"Give me a break. A D-rank, way down the ladder, clowning around up front. He's a liability."

"Shh. Quiet. Don't you know he's the team leader's best friend?"

"Even so. Seriously, how long is he planning to keep hauling a sandbag around?"

"We can put the data and the tactics together ourselves. Hell, swap that D-rank for one more A-rank and we wouldn't even need that crap. We could just crush them with force."

"Hey! Quiet. He'll hear you."

The teammates who had caught up right behind us were muttering among themselves. Unfortunately, I had already heard every word. Or had they said it so that I would?

"Bringing a D-rank like that along, even at a moment like this."

"Yeom Tae-gyu. Be quiet."

Han Gyeol, who had stepped a little away to look the monster over, spoke with an edge in his voice.

"Ah. What did I even say?"

Yeom Tae-gyu flashed a shameless grin, and the moment Han Gyeol turned his back he fixed me with a look of open hostility. The average rank on our R-9 team was A-rank, so of course I rubbed them the wrong way. Honestly, it was true that my rank didn't fit. I had nothing to say to that.

Yeom Tae-gyu had moved with us as a teammate for five years, and even among A-ranks he was an excellent Hunter with considerable attack power. He and I had never been meant to get along. Not from the start.

An uneasy transmission crackled through, and the whole of R-9 broke into hurried motion after Team Leader Gyeol. The team was made up of some twenty Awakener Hunters. Abilities and skills varied wildly from one Awakener to the next: attack specialists, defense specialists, healing specialists, support specialists. If you reached for an MMORPG—a massively multiplayer online role-playing game—as a comparison, weren't the jobs split into warrior, mage, archer, and priest? Awakeners were just as varied. You built a team to those traits and raised its combat power that way.

I was what you might call a hybrid. Put kindly, I could attack, defend, and support other people—a little of everything. Put unkindly, I was neither fish nor fowl. A slightly ambiguous ability. Not protagonist material. The protagonist's friend, at best? No. The friend of the friend of the protagonist's friend? Or an acquaintance of the friend of the friend of the protagonist's friend?

And my Awakener rank was D.

When we were young, the two of us had been the only people around each other we could trust. By the time he had made a real place for himself as a Hunter, Han Gyeol insisted on keeping me as his pair—whether he was looking after my ambiguous abilities or something else. My skills were faint, but they were the kind that helped for certain. The hard-won rhythm of matching each other all the way to this age wasn't something you could ignore, either.

At any rate, my friend Han Gyeol—a hard-hitting tank and damage dealer both—and I worked well together, and we were fairly well known among Awakeners. Of course, slander like what I had just heard always came packaged with the reputation.

"Give me a break. If it's the west, isn't that Team Leader Jin's sector? That side is always..."

Sprinting toward the west, I couldn't get the rest out.

"Hey...... what is that?"

A gigantic chandelier was blazing before my eyes. Hundreds of candles and crystals glittered, and above them unidentifiable clockwork and machinery vented steam. The problem was that this was not the Palace of Versailles. It was the inside of a dungeon. There wasn't even a ceiling for the thing to hang from. We were standing in an empty plain, and the chandelier alone rose as high as a three-story building.

Perhaps it had a speaker built in. Strange music, the kind you would hear in an old gothic film, drifted out of it. A chill of dread ran the length of my body. It sat a step outside the shape people usually pictured when they thought of a monster.

"I've never seen one of these."

Monsters that weren't alive in the ordinary sense were not unheard of, but this one was different. It wasn't merely that the air around it felt wrong. A mountain of corpses was piled in front of it—bodies hideously ruined, the reek of blood stabbing up into the nose. My motto was that it was better to be struck first, and that if you couldn't avoid a thing you might as well enjoy it. This was a sight where I could no longer keep up the act of staying at ease.

A familiar face showed in the heap of bodies. Team Leader Jin? Damn it.

Something had gone wrong. Dungeons had ranks, and the monsters that appeared were supposed to match the difficulty of that rank. Quibbling over the point after a quest called the Last Battle had appeared seemed meaningless, and yet...

What is that thing? A new monster? Not once in the last five years has a new monster been found. Is something really happening? The end, the final battle—is that real? A penalty that absurd has never once...

A low hum. A shrill beep, a grinding screech. A sickening melody that seemed to split the ear wound the dread tighter, and then the thing that had been still began to move.

"Eun Ha-jun!"

"Ah—yeah!"

At Gyeol's shout I snapped back at once and cast. In the same moment the team moved in crisp unison, exactly as he directed.

Pzzzt! Pale smoke rose from my body, thinned into a cord, and clung to Gyeol. The shape of it made me think of a telephone made from paper cups—the kind where you poke a hole in the bottom and connect them with string. Only I could see it, of course.

Odd metaphor or not, this was one of the more useful skills among my Awakener abilities. It raised the connected target's stats by five percent, and their skill values by five percent as well. Give me a break—honestly, it wasn't a bad skill. Our Gyeol was S-rank, so even five percent was enormous. Of course, to the rest of the team a skill like this was not reason enough for me to stay glued to Han Gyeol's side. They would rather patch the gap with items and bring in one more Hunter with real attack power.

Chains of energy surged from the ground to seize the monster, and a huge translucent spear drove down out of the sky. I had used two skills, and the damage that landed was zero. Both were debuffs. Oppressive Chains stopped the thing from moving, and the brutal spear of Stake Drive cut MP—mana—instead of HP, its health.

But dealing no damage at all was fine.

Go.

What I was waiting for was something else.

My friend—and I was proud of him—flickered, and shot high. Like a lightning bolt driven down in one short stroke.