Chapter 83

Chapter 83
## Chapter 83: Necromancer Tabul’s Grievance

Necromancer Tabul was currently in a state of absolute fury.

“Out of all the places they could strike, why here?”

He believed he had a solid grasp on the humans of this era. He hadn’t been lazy about collecting intelligence on his surroundings, either. Most of the world’s nations were currently in shambles, reduced to half-destroyed ruins. The solitary exception—the only country still maintaining the proper functions of a sovereign state—was the one known as South Korea.

“But look at the distance!”

He was well aware of that country’s coordinates. Harbin, the city where he had established his hidden laboratory, wasn’t exactly next door to Korea, even if it wasn’t halfway across the globe. More importantly, a massive Erosion Zone sat squarely between Korea and Harbin, acting as a formidable barrier.

“Are those lunatics really willing to leave their own borders exposed just to come this far?”

They were completely out of their minds. He had picked this specific location because he was convinced the Korean military would never attempt such a reckless maneuver. They had never shown that kind of aggression before, and he assumed they never would. It had been their consistent strategy for a long time.

“Did they get a new monarch? No, that nation doesn’t even have a King.”

It was a preposterous world. Imagine allowing a rabble of uneducated commoners to pick their own rulers. It was a defective system where the victors were merely the most skilled con artists, promising the masses extra treats to win favor. They weren’t true sovereigns; they were just silver-tongued swindlers wearing crowns.

Regardless, that wasn’t the immediate problem.

The crisis was that this pathetic country, with its circus-like politics, had suddenly gained an inexplicable surge of courage and pivoted its entire military force in an instant. They had bypassed the Erosion Zone hanging over their own heads and were charging straight toward Harbin.

“Curse it all, why is their combat power so high?!”

Projected in the numerous magical images floating in his chamber, the legions of undead he had raised were being systematically annihilated. Slaughter, pest control, a grand scrubbing, incineration—any of those terms accurately described the carnage.

“I didn’t have high expectations for the grunts anyway!”

However, being trampled this effortlessly was insulting. To be fair, he was successfully stalling the hundreds of regular troops pushing inward. They were just a mountain of corpses, easily replaced. Trash to be used and discarded.

“But what is the deal with those two?!”

What truly infuriated him were the two individuals operating independently from the main army. One female, one male. The woman was sweeping in from the northern sector, while the man was carving a path from the south.

It wasn’t just that they were winning; it was that they weren’t even being challenged. It was a total non-contest. The male was particularly infuriating.

“…”

His undead warriors would freeze solid before they could even swing a weapon, shattering into pieces on their own. At least the woman had the courtesy to actually use her sword occasionally, but that male brat lacked even the most basic etiquette when facing an opponent.

“Why are they bee-lining for this spot? Damn it.”

Even more terrifying was the fact that both were moving in a perfectly straight trajectory toward the island housing his facility.

*‘I know you’re hiding there. You’re a dead man.’*

It felt as though a layer of frost was creeping up his spine, which was already as dry as old parchment. His exposed jawbones, devoid of any skin, rattled together softly. If they breached the lab, he was in deep trouble.

He took a frantic second look at his research specimens, numbered one through twelve. Each one had been built with meticulous precision. They were his crowning achievements, his masterpieces.

“This is madness.”

But as he watched those two monsters sprinting toward his island, a seed of doubt took root. He felt like a commoner who had been invited to a royal gala, pulling his finest rags out of the wardrobe and realizing they were still just rags. He had given these creations his all, but his instincts were screaming that his best wouldn’t be enough.

“What on earth is happening?!”

A thunderous explosion rocked the entire laboratory, and cracks began to crawl across the ceiling like a spider’s web. And then, through the collapsing roof—the very people he had been agonizing over—the man and the woman dropped directly into his inner sanctum.

—

Landing in the stale air of the subterranean lab, I swatted the debris off my coat and locked eyes with the skeleton standing before me.

“Top of the morning.”

“You people—there was still plenty of ground to cover!”

I looked at the skull ranting at me with a sense of genuine pity.

“Decoy signals to mess with your tracking spells. Are you seriously telling me you’ve never heard of that?”

It was a basic ruse to trick a sorcerer’s detection magic. Honestly, it barely even qualified as high-level arcana.

“There is no way a piece of filth like you could pull off such a feat!”

He was a real whiner. The proof was standing right in front of him, yet he couldn’t wrap his head around it. That’s a bad habit to have. Even when the truth is staring you in the face, you try to blink it away. Pathetic. As he began frantically spinning mana circles and gesturing with his bony hands, the surrounding glass vats shattered, dumping their occupants onto the floor.

“Do you have any concept of aesthetic design?”

What crawled out were undead, and every single one was an eyesore. A truly gifted necromancer takes pride in the look of their work. Even a stitched-together corpse can look imposing or elegant if the creator has actual talent. I’d fought a necromancer once whose Death Knights looked like they belonged on a high-fashion runway.

But these things, lining up to shield their creator? Complete failures. It was a clear sign he lacked the finesse to even consider the visual aspect.

“Does looking good actually make them more powerful?”

Han Sang-ah’s question prompted a nod from me.

“Generally speaking, yeah.”

Most of the undead are driven by sheer bitterness—a fundamental envy of those who are still breathing. Envy implies a desire for what others possess. Undead creatures loathe all living things, yet paradoxically, they yearn for the same physical perfection as the things they hate.

“Whether it’s an animal or a human, the principle holds.”

The more flawless the physical vessel, the more potent the undead becomes. A truly master-crafted specimen could carry on a sophisticated conversation, and besides a slight pallor or a faint scent of decay, you’d never realize they were dead.

“A bit of perfume and some decent makeup, and normal people wouldn’t have a clue.”

“Shut your mouth! I am a genius!”

Still clinging to his delusions. I glared at the skeleton playing at being a necromancer.

“Pal, you have zero talent. You know it deep down—so why keep talking nonsense that nobody believes?”

The guy had a massive reservoir of mana. It was enough to animate every corpse in the city. But his precision? It was a joke.

“Slay them!”

Having finally lost his temper, he ignored my critique and barked an order to his thralls.

Twelve undead creatures lunged at us with guttural roars, splitting their focus between me and Han Sang-ah. One possessed a maw large enough to gulp down a small building; another had a single, grotesquely overdeveloped arm, similar to things I’d fought in the past. It was a traveling circus of deformed monstrosities.

“Good grief, it’s like a discount sampler platter.”

Quite the variety, I suppose. Regardless, they felt like they were roughly at the level of a Grade 2 Erosion Core.

A hulking brute with massive iron mallets for hands took a heavy swing at me. My spear met the hammer head-on, the force of the impact gouging deep fissures into the stone floor beneath our feet.

“Heh, this one actually has some meat on its bones.”

As its mallet remained locked against my spear, its muscles rippled with effort, trying to overpower me. I executed a precise flick of my wrist, and the creature’s own momentum sent it soaring backward, crashing into the stone wall. Meanwhile, the others were closing in.

A flexible, fleshy tentacle whipped toward me, lined with jagged metal shards. But before it could connect, a silver blur intervened—the tentacles were lopped off, twitching on the ground like severed squid limbs.

“If we fried those up, they might actually be tasty.”

“Eating corpses isn’t sanitary, you idiot. You’d get sick and die.”

Han Sang-ah parried a half-dozen incoming blades, expertly hamstringing the undead attackers. His “masterpieces,” which he had displayed with such arrogance, were being dismantled piece by piece. The necromancer’s expression shifted toward pure hopelessness.

“I’m starting to feel like we’re the villains raiding some poor guy’s private collection.”

*Thwack.* Paradox Flame surged backward from the tip of my spear, which was currently buried in an undead’s forehead. That was the final one.

“You absolute wretch…!”

Walking through the swirling black embers and over the piles of remains, I approached their master.

“Got any final remarks, buddy…?”

In a flash of speed, I closed the gap and crushed his skull.

“No? Okay.”

I hoisted the headless skeleton into the air, ground it into dust, and then used Paradox Flame to burn every last trace of it away.

“Sorry, I don’t plan on giving you a chance to do anything.”

If you give them a moment to speak, variables arise. Variables mean risking a clean victory. Nobody enjoys losing a sure thing. Listen to his dying confession? What do I look like, a hospital chaplain? I came here to terminate him. So, I finished the job.

“Objective neutralized.”

After confirming he was truly gone, I tapped my comms to let the Seagull Team know the mission was a success. The remaining undead in Harbin were now just mindless beasts, nothing to worry about.

“Let’s move out.”

“Understood.”

Han Sang-ah gave a nod and stood up. It was at that exact moment that a freezing sensation raced up my spine—I stopped dead, my expression turning grim.

“What the hell is that?”

In total disbelief, I sprinted out of the laboratory and looked toward the western horizon.

—This is the Lighthouse: Detecting unidentified undead entities approaching from the west of Harbin.

I shouted into my earpiece:

“Jeong No-hun, get everyone out of that eastern sector right now, or you’re all dead!”

If he wasted time asking ‘Why?’—it would be his end.

—Received. Moving now.

Fortunately for him, today wasn’t his funeral. The very second he cleared the area, a beam of light from the west struck the peak of the Harbin Lungta tower where he had been stationed. There was no blast, no debris. The top of the tower simply dissolved and rotted away under the intensity of the light.

That was high-level magic. I processed the thought and then spoke into the radio.

“All hunters, initiate a full retreat along the primary extraction routes immediately.”

However, pulling everyone back meant there would be no defense. I looked at Han Sang-ah.

“Looks like you’re stuck with me for the messy part.”

“I’m ready.”

She took a second to think and then nodded. It wasn’t just her—Jeong No-hun, who had just narrowly escaped the tower’s collapse, would need to assist as well.

—Visual data from the lighthouse has been processed. We are looking at exactly 50 targets.

This was insane. I looked completely baffled.

“Only 50 of them are putting out that much mana?”

That was terrifyingly impressive. I gave the Seagull Team a blunt assessment.

—The issue is that none of the other hunters are picking them up at all. It’s going to be hard to convince them to run.

They were suppressing their magical signatures. And not with some amateur trick—this was master-level cloaking. 50 of them? That meant at least one individual among them possessed the mana control of a high-ranking state mage from my previous life. Or it was a coordinated squad of elite casters.

“This is extremely dangerous. Do you remember the fallout when my warnings were ignored during the Sohwi event?”

—Understood. We will implement the forced evacuation protocol.

Using that past disaster as leverage, the Seagull Team stopped questioning me and moved with urgency.