Black Badger

Kirill had just gotten lucky and survived a helicopter collision.

It wasn’t that he had been on the helicopter. It was simply that, right in front of his eyes, two helicopters had collided and crashed one after another, triggering a massive explosion.

With that collision, everyone nearby had been turned into charred lumps.

The stench of burning fuel, rubber, and human flesh stabbed into his nose. What remained of the wreckage spun emptily in place, its tail pointed up at the sky.

When the fireball faded, Kirill pushed himself up and looked over the site, drowned in heat.

Can’t even smoke. The fire might spread.

Several of the seniors who had seemed like they would never die had been roasted whole. Even an enhanced body’s regeneration had its limits.

Most had died from the collision, but a few had died because they were caught in that white attack that swept across the area.

[Get off the main road.]

Lee Seunghyun’s voice came through the comm.

Kirill obeyed the top senior without complaint. His legs, which had felt heavy, grew lighter as time passed.

One after another, the survivors like him jerked themselves upright and cleared the road. Not a single one argued with Lee Seunghyun’s decision.

Over the ground littered with flames that still hadn’t died down and blackened wreckage, silence crept in slowly. The enemy’s fire had stopped. Probably because most of the ones shooting had been hit by the white attack and lost their lives.

It was an attack like waves slamming the shore.

Every time Kirill sparred with Lee Seunghyun, he felt a wall. Realizing that this was what a gap in talent looked like, he had accepted—barely, with inferiority clinging to him—that there existed someone he would never surpass in his lifetime.

But against the being who had just swept the area with that attack, he didn’t even feel inferiority.

It definitely came into the Core, but where is it now...?

“Hm?”

A strange sound reached Kirill’s ears as he crouched amid the ruins, swapping magazines.

A hiss—pshht, pshht—cut through the crackling of the flames as it approached. It sounded like some kind of robot walking closer.

“They still use that?”

Kirill let out a scoff when he saw the HA-3 combat robot—something that had only ever been used back in the First War.

When the Creature crisis first erupted, it had been one of the few robot models the countries had poured out that was actually usable. The other models were useless in front of Creatures and couldn’t match the efficiency of soldiers with enhanced bodies. But that one model alone had earned the evaluation of being worth something.

Of course, it hadn’t been used all the way into the Second War. The production cost was too high.

It was cheaper to implant an enhanced body into a person than to build a single one of those.

“That’s not ours, right?”

He asked just in case.

A merciless answer came back.

[No. Destroy it.]

Easy for you to say.

But there wasn’t another option.

Lee Seunghyun, stuck at Yekaterina’s side, couldn’t exactly come running over here. And it didn’t look like there were any nearby who had recovered enough to help Kirill, either.

Kirill did his best.

Brrrrrrt—!

But three minutes later, he understood why it had been used steadily through the First War. The robot, stalking toward him on eight legs and pouring bullets into him, didn’t even look like it would get a single hole punched through it, no matter how many times he shot it.

Rolling over and over on a floor covered in ash and corpses, he kept firing. Most of the shots hit, but it did nothing.

Now there’s nowhere left to dodge.

So this is it.

Scrape.

The moment that thought crossed his mind, a white crescent moon rose right above his head.

Wind swept over Kirill’s hair in a single rush—then died.

It happened in an instant.

A figure with white hair streaming.

A man with golden eyes holding a sword.

Kirill blinked and stared at the man now standing in front of him.

Aside from the scar on his face, he didn’t look any different from before he’d gone missing.

Hands and feet all intact. The black lenses were gone. And the black special-ops uniform he wore looked quite similar to Black Badger gear, so for a moment Kirill thought he’d reverted back to being a Black Badger.

Though the pressure he gave off was nothing like back then.

Was his expression always that cold?

“Push through to the estate.”

Hildebert said it without even looking down at him.

“You can follow behind, can’t you.”

[Obey the order.]

Lee Seunghyun—still at Yekaterina’s side—spoke as if he, too, had heard Hildebert’s voice.

[Rally at the estate.]

“Ah—Commander!”

Behind Hildebert, who stepped over the combat robot now split in two and sparking, people latched on and followed.

Most of them had swords in their hands.

The scene was so bizarre that Kirill got up and let out a hollow laugh.

On one side there was a combat robot lying there, and on the other side there was a crowd of people holding long lumps of metal instead of AK rifles.

Soaked in blood, they narrowed the distance to Hildebert, laughing.

“It’s been a while since we sharpened our swords and came out—at least give us a chance to swing them!”

“But seriously, why the scar? You didn’t do that thinking it’d work as a disguise, did you? On a face this recognizable, you think adding two more lines makes you unrecognizable?”

“Not even contacting us is too much. Are you really angry because we didn’t wait? I only did what you told us—adapt and live happily.”

“Let’s admit it. None of us who didn’t get contacted actually thought the Commander was alive. You’re just rewarding those who believed.”

“That’s right!”

“No.”

Kirill brushed the dust off his clothes, then watched Hildebert—who had been wearing a cold expression—close his eyes in awkwardness, his face collapsing for a moment.

“I’ll apologize later, so focus. It’s been a long time since you held a sword, hasn’t it.”

The Titan group answered at once that they understood, then rushed out in a pack toward the incoming combat robots.

Hildebert let out a small sigh as he watched his subordinates pass him.

Kirill waited until there was a decent distance between them, then started waking up his juniors who were still alive.

Is this really the right choice?

It’s gotten somewhat under control—shouldn’t we just pull out now and let Hildebert and Colton tear into each other?

Then when one of them finally dies, we can strike the one who survives. Isn’t that all?

Yekaterina—his boss—was not someone who could be satisfied with second place.

She wanted everything under the {N•o•v•e•l•i•g•h•t} sky beneath her feet.

But....

“Let’s go.”

Kirill jammed in a blood injection roughly, hauled the other man up.

It’s not my place to decide anything.

And besides, he enjoyed hitting Colton.

“Let’s take the revenge we’ve been putting off.”

How many had they lost in that last territory struggle?

Kirill grinned, then opened fire as he sprinted toward the estate.

***

Good.

Shashinsky thought so as he looked over the inside of the Core that Hildebert’s sword strike had swept through.

The momentum had flipped.

“We need to press this momentum and push to the estate.”

Honestly, he couldn’t even imagine what might be waiting there.

There was no way that man would be waiting for Hildebert without preparing anything.

There would, of course, be a “core,” and Jaeyeon would definitely be there, and maybe they had something standing by that none of them could even imagine.

Ah. And Luke Lyle—whom they had kidnapped so obediently—would obviously be there too.

But they had nowhere left to go now.

Either they’d take heads here, or their heads would get taken. One or the other.

Truthfully, as for his own life—he’d lived enough. He didn’t really care.

But this human—

“Exactly!”

Erich Erhart was, in the middle of all this, a little excited.

“Of course we must go! A great act is about to end!”

“Every time you open your mouth, I want to smack it.”

Shashinsky said what he truly thought.

And as he grabbed Erich’s arm and whipped him behind himself, he drove the blade in his other hand into the enemy’s hand.

The moment Erich tried to move forward, the hand holding the gun—belonging to someone playing dead—was skewered clean through.

Blood sprayed, and the gun fell from the enemy’s hand.

But this kind of suppression was only effective for a moment.

Shashinsky reached to draw his own gun—only for Levi to be a beat faster.

Bang!

The enemy’s face burst like a dark red pomegranate.

“Oops. Sorry.”

“Levi.”

Shashinsky let out a sigh as he called his companion.

“Carry him.”

“Yes.”

Levi smiled broadly.

A thin man who looked like a blond, lanky boy slung Erich Erhart over his shoulder like a sack of flour. Erich made an Oh, sound, but he wasn’t surprised.

He only smiled, gray eyes crinkling.

“My apologies! I can’t even run properly in a place like this.”

There was no time to answer.

Far away, a swarm of combat drones could be seen flying in.

They were under the shadow of collapsed building debris—debris brought down by Hildebert’s sword strike that had swept through the Core.

But that wouldn’t be enough cover.

Nothing was as troublesome as air bombardment.

The fire-rain pouring down from the sky was as merciless as an unavoidable downpour.

But if they got inside Colton’s estate, at least bullets wouldn’t be falling from above.

So Shashinsky kicked off and surged forward.

An enemy who emerged from the corner of collapsed debris fired a pistol at him. The bullet tore through the upper part above his left ear and his hairline.

Shashinsky didn’t slow down.

He sprinted straight at his target, twisted his body sideways, drew the Kaiva greatsword, and smashed down on the enemy’s wrist.

As the hand holding the pistol dropped, he turned the blade and drove it through the enemy’s heart.

Bang! Bang!

He used the body of the enemy he had just killed as a shield against the hail of bullets.

The moment the body fell, he sprinted forward and took another man’s head.

Pshhk!

He kept doing things like that.

Half in a trance, cutting down the enemies in front of him, Shashinsky suddenly felt an unknown instinct flare.

He braked hard.

Reflexively he threw himself on a diagonal roll and stopped behind a burned-out drone, nothing left but its shell.

BOOOOM!

At that instant, something shot up into the sky.

And it split a large combat drone that had been flying overhead clean in two.

Hildebert.

“Scary~.”

Levi, stopping behind Shashinsky, laughed as he commented.

“Do we really need to be here? That one being alone should be enough.”

Shashinsky thought so too, but didn’t say it out loud.

Instead, he watched the fading white sword strike, then shifted his gaze to Colton’s estate, standing elegant in the distance.

“We push. No delays.”

And he started running again.

***

For a moment, Kairos thought—does any of this even matter?

Because it was so far away.

And because it wasn’t human.

So even if Kairos poured emotions toward that presence this intensely, there was a high chance it couldn’t feel it at all.

Whether it sensed the transferred emotions or not was one thing; whether the other side would respond was a separate matter.

Kairos stopped the emotional transference for a moment.

Then, letting out a long breath, he took in the lobby of the old official residence.

It was nearly lunchtime.

Not-strong sunlight seeped through the half-open curtains. The furniture in the lobby was dyed in a pale light. A worn sofa and a few round tables, chairs with paint peeled off and rust on their legs.

Still, quite a lot of people lived in the residence.

Because they didn’t think the attack on the Black Badgers was over.

It wasn’t a wrong guess.

After all, his peer Luke Lyle still hadn’t made it back.

With a troubled mind, Kairos looked at Hesh Lyle lying on the lobby sofa. After being riled up all through dawn, he was finally dozing.

It was Yehyeon who had draped a blanket over that Badger and brought him a pillow.

It was Ami who had calmed the Badger who had been demanding to hunt down the culprit and kill him immediately.

Now neither of them was here.

Yehyeon had left, saying he had to go out to another Core without even a moment to sleep.

Ami had taken Nana Dol up to put her to bed, and hadn’t come back down.

So Kairos was the one left here.

Because everyone had run to HQ to check the mysterious Core that had formed inside Center Core, even the other seniors weren’t visible.

The red-haired handler stood in the empty space with no sign of anyone else and let out a sigh.

One more attempt. If there’s still no response, I’ll grab Milk and go to HQ.

Right now, he had no kin to contact, and nothing in particular to do.

If this method didn’t work...

“Were you looking for me?”

A blue-haired youth stood in front of him.

“You’ve got some nerve.”

The Ice Dragon.

That enormous being he had met in Antarctica.

A high-ranking monster.

A near-demigod lifeform that people had worshipped, unimaginably long ago—before the Empire was even born—stood before him like a ghost.