[Hoit hoit!
ƪ(˘⌣˘)ʃ It’s the first night of the long-awaited Night of the Dead. ┌(˘⌣˘)ʃ
It’s the perfect night for the dead to come out, isn’t it? (ɷ ꒪ཀ꒪)ɷ
Since we’ve shown you the Night of the Dead preview, everyone have a happy Halloween! ヾ(・ᆺ・✿)ﾉﾞ
Now, for the next 100 days, the dead will visit you every night.
The dead are uninvited guests!
You’ll have to do your best to send back these uninvited guests.
Don’t think of them lightly.
The dead are really scary when they’re angry. (╯•﹏•╰)
But don’t be too afraid! The dead can only come out at night.
For the Night of the Dead, you need to distribute your stamina well… Oops! I told you too much! (˶‾᷄ ⁻̫ ‾᷅˵) But oh well, it’s fine. You’re all going to die this time anyway…. Aah! That was a mistake too! Tehehe!
Come on, Earthlings. Everyone work hard to survive! （ʃƪ＾3＾）
If you can survive, that is!]
As always, the system message scratched at people unpleasantly. But right now, there was no time to curse at it.
Right before night fell, right before the mission started, they had held meeting after meeting, but no clear solution had emerged.
The biggest agenda item of the meeting was the safety issue of Jaehee, the guild master.
At this point in time, they couldn’t know whether Sahae Guild and the group that attacked the Kings last night were the same. Assuming a completely different third party, not Sahae Guild, had attacked the Kings, then two groups were currently targeting Jaehee simultaneously.
Jeongwoo anxiously bit his lip and looked around. Already pitch-black darkness covered Jeongwoo’s surroundings, and all he could see was black darkness. But darkness itself was just a bit stuffy for Jeongwoo; not being able to see ahead didn’t really matter. Once you reach a certain level, visual information becomes meaningless. Because along with the five senses, a transcendent instinct awakens.
What made Jeongwoo more anxious than that was the fact that Jaehee wasn’t by his side.
While Jeongwoo understood rationally, he was furious and frustrated that Jaehee wasn’t next to him. Jaehee was currently deploying three King’s Veils simultaneously. Actually, originally they had planned to deploy more veils, but through the meeting, with Jeongwoo’s strong insistence, they had reduced the veils to three.
The King’s Veil had a structure where the more they overlapped, the weaker the veil became and the more burden it placed on the caster.
While casting the skill, the caster had to maintain concentration, and when casting multiple times, the consumption of mental strength became considerably large.
However, even though they had reduced the number of veils, the area itself that needed to be covered was quite large, so Jeongwoo had to be that much farther away from Jaehee. They had to maintain a distance equal to the combined size of the two veils to be deployed in the provinces and the main base veil where Jaehee was.
As a result, Jeongwoo had to be alone in a distant place where he couldn’t even see the main base’s veil. Even coming here required traveling by car.
Jeongwoo glanced back and estimated where Jaehee was.
Even if Jeongwoo ran at his fastest speed, Jaehee was in a distant place that would easily take over an hour. He stared in the direction where he thought Jaehee was, but nothing was visible. He couldn’t even see the whitish light the veil emitted, and he felt buried in pitch-black darkness.
The anxiety he had tried not to show in front of Jaehee kept popping up.
All missions were vicious, but among them, the Night of the Dead could be called the worst. Of all the missions Jeongwoo remembered, the Night of the Dead was the one where the most blood was shed.
The King’s Veil did block the dead, but it couldn’t block them completely. Especially the more they overlapped, the lower the defense became, so even inside the veil, people were easily eroded by the dead.
Those who were beguiled by the dead soon turned into internal enemies. They willingly offered their own comrades as food for the dead.
Was that all? The enemy wasn’t limited to just the night visitors. Attacking the King by taking advantage of the darkness and chaos was something that had happened in the past too. When the King lost their life, those who lost the King’s protection instantly became food for the dead.
During the hundred nights that passed, humanity ended up with exactly less than half of what it had before. Not only that, but distrust and hatred for each other grew so much that it became difficult to unite as one anymore.
Jeongwoo quietly traced the past in the darkness and sighed.
“Hoo, it’s okay. It’ll be okay.”
To be like this even before starting—wasn’t he like a small child with separation anxiety?
Jeongwoo muttered alone and pressed down his anxiety firmly again.
If it were up to his heart, he wanted to throw everything away and be by Jaehee’s side. But since he couldn’t do that, he had to do what he could do here.
That’s why he had allocated most of the combat team as security personnel for Jaehee, hadn’t he? Unless Lee Shinhoo himself came, there shouldn’t be any major problems.
Jeongwoo drew his sword where red flames fiercely billowed. As he swung the sword in a circle, the red flames drew a round band along with the sword.
“Kraaaaaaa—”
A dead one rushing forward with fierce momentum, mouth agape, fell beneath the flames without being able to resist much. In the place left after swinging the sword, there was only a lump of pitch-black mud along with a foul smell.
Jeongwoo’s movements were graceful like classical dance yet simultaneously powerful. Each muscle movement moved under calculated restraint. Moving his legs lightly as if dancing, he cut off the hands and legs of the dead reaching out from all directions.
If they were going to take away one of the five senses, he’d rather they take his sense of smell.
Did those things not know that they gave off such a foul smell?
Even while having such trivial thoughts, Jeongwoo didn’t stop moving his body.
He bent his upper body completely backward and then jumped up into the air. Just because light had disappeared didn’t mean gravity had disappeared too, but Jeongwoo’s movements were light as if they didn’t know gravity.
Jeongwoo minimized all his movements. The reason the Night of the Dead was difficult was precisely stamina. Because there weren’t many people who could move without rest until sunrise. As he emptied his head and moved frantically like this, even the concept of time became ambiguous. He couldn’t tell how much time had passed.
Then a message flashed. Jeongwoo quickly opened the message window.
[Fuck, it’s an attack.]
It was a message from Jaehee.
“Ugh, damn it!”
Too surprised, he hesitated for a moment, and his ankle was cut by a dead one. Jeongwoo cursed and cut the dead one in half. Cutting a dead one in half was nothing, but on the ankle that had been caught by the dead, a pitch-black handprint must have remained. Though it wasn’t visible in the darkness, the part caught by the dead ached.
[What? What happened? Are you okay? Who attacked?]
Jeongwoo sent a message to Jaehee again, but there was no answer from Jaehee. So anxious he forgot about controlling his strength and swung his sword. When he had swung his sword rapidly like that until Jaehee’s message came, cutting down the dead nearby—
[I’m okay. I resolved it for now. You don’t need to worry. There was an attack, but there’s no real damage. Jisu-ssi caught them, so we decided to lock them up for now.]
“Haah…. Thank goodness. Kim Jisu is more useful than I thought. When I go back, I should get her an item or something.”
Jeongwoo exhaled a long breath and muttered.
Kim Jisu. She seemed quiet and timid in personality, but as it turned out, she was more aggressive than expected. He wanted to praise himself anew for leaving Kim Jisu next to Jaehee.
[Be careful. There’s no guarantee there will only be one attack. Be careful considering even Lee Shinhoo. If possible, don’t leave the guild master’s office. Keep even Kaengkaeng by your side.]
[Alright, you nag. You come back safely without getting hurt.]
Jeongwoo chuckled at the message in the usual tone. Since he’d even been told not to get hurt, he really shouldn’t get hurt from now on.
Jeongwoo, who had been tilting his head left and right, took out a potion and poured it on his ankle.
It was only just the beginning of a long night.
