Chapter 28

Chapter 28

Erasure. That damned Erasure.

A name I’d thrown out once because of Oh Jongyeop, and it’s still hanging around.

I’ll have to bill him for this later.

Anyway, whatever answer I gave, that Berserker bastard was already convinced.

“Could be me, could be not.”

“You’re telling me to believe whatever suits me.”

“Haven’t you always?”

“……”

Berserker shut his mouth, stared at me, then asked a question.

“Between Erasure and Head Breaker, which is stronger?”

Is that a question or a pile of crap?

He doesn’t look like he has any intention of giving up.

“Try thinking about it after your skull’s been smashed.”

“I still remember it. The moment you wiped out Bigteng.”

Berserker’s eyes flashed.

“There was nothing but killing intent, purely to annihilate the enemy. That purity aimed at death—that’s where I caught a glimpse of the moment of the star.”

Maybe the moment of the star is just a hallucination only lunatics can see.

I can’t see it, so I guess I’m not crazy.

“Send me a photo if you see it later.”

Surely they’ve got smartphones in the afterlife.

Berserker was originally known as the Seeker of the Sword—a man who walked a peculiar path even back when he was a Hunter.

Opinions still differ on why he became a villain.

One theory says it was to complete his sword. Another says he went mad from overtraining, and that his madness turned not a full hundred and eighty degrees but only about ninety. Some say his training to unlock his gift twisted in the wrong direction.

That last one is false. In my past life, I killed Berserker myself, so I know exactly what gift he had.

Whether I cared or not, Berserker went on about the “moment of the star” as he defined it.

“The moment of the star is the moment I become omnipotent. Everything I’ve seen makes me complete. Those fragments gather, and the ultimate I pursue is finished. My will reaches it, and it becomes absolute perfection.”

Hearing that, I realized.

It was just the ravings of a lunatic after all.

And I’d actually pricked up my ears trying to interpret it, even for a moment. I felt ashamed. You’re not supposed to engage with lunatics.

“Let me ask you one thing. Why did you join the League?”

“They said Erasure came from the League.”

“Who said?”

“Puppeteer.”

“And you believed that?”

“I figured if it wasn’t true, they’d just come out.”

Does he think the League is an automatic door people stroll in and out of?

“The more we talk, the more tired I get. Let’s end this now.”

The moment I raised my sword, the eyes steeped in madness returned to normal. Though a lunatic returning to normal is still a lunatic in the end.

“Come, Erasure.”

* * *

Berserker asked me whether Erasure or Head Breaker was stronger, but I don’t have any particular thoughts on the matter.

Head Breaker with bare hands, Erasure with a sword—they’re both Choi Junho. It’s just a matter of preference, whether I feel like smashing an enemy’s head in bare-handed that day or cutting them down with a blade. There’s no difference in fundamental strength.

“Does going crazy make your skull tougher?”

His body was forged like steel, and his Force was as stubborn and tenacious as his personality. Even though it let the Arc Mine penetrate, it weakened the force and absorbed the shock, making it hard to deal serious damage.

If I kept stacking up damage, I could eventually neutralize him, but at that rate I might end up fighting him for three straight days.

Three days straight with a lunatic. Horrifying.

Berserker allowed a few of my attacks to land, but he only shuddered and endured without taking any real damage. If anything, the Arc Mine seemed to sharpen him—his eyes were growing more intense.

Did Arc Mine have that kind of effect?

It did make me wonder what would happen if he fought that old bastard Franz. The geezer would’ve fired an Arc Mine at me the second I asked if Beethoven was Austrian.

“Kgh!”

Berserker was the one getting cornered in the battle of wits. He had no choice but to swing his sword to push me back, and I—who’d spent plenty of time tangled with him in my past life—dodged his strikes with ease and landed Arc Mine after Arc Mine.

I closed in on Berserker again, reached out, and curled my fingers. It was a Force blade too faint to cut even a blade of grass, but that sliver of a Force blade was enough to trigger the Slash gift.

“……!”

Berserker, who’d been braced for Arc Mine, flinched back in alarm for the first time, snapping his head backward. The Force blade grazed past by a hair and sliced through his hair, sending strands scattering.

When he raised his head again, a red line had appeared on his forehead, and blood was trickling down.

“Heh heh! Pain makes me feel alive. But a dual gift, of all things. That attack just now—that could have led me to the moment of the star……!”

“You lunatic.”

But then Berserker turned serious for the first time.

“Before we finish this, let me set one thing straight. I am not insane.”

“You’re insane.”

“Then you’re saying you’re not in your right mind either?”

“I’m perfectly sane.”

“So am I. Erasure, you are not mad, and neither am I. We simply see the world from different directions. It’s the world that fails to understand us.”

“……”

“You must have felt that moment too.”

How is it that the exact sentiment I felt while working as a public service Hunter is coming out of this bastard’s mouth?

“What we needed was someone who could empathize with us. We were never understood, and they never tried to understand—so they simply called me Berserker.”

“Sounds stupid, but I think you’re right.”

Honestly, Erasure and Head Breaker are both names I’m not particularly fond of.

Don’t they sound like villain names? Why give someone who hunts villains a villain-sounding alias? There have to be cooler options.

“I have nowhere to return to, and you do. That is the only difference between us.”

“So the thing you want to hear is that I’m normal?”

“I simply wanted to share my thoughts.”

The fact that everything he says is right makes me want to rehabilitate him and keep him around.

But I need to take his gift, so I gave up on that.

“Done with your last words? Let’s finish this.”

* * *

In the moments of their several clashes, Berserker felt that he could not reach Erasure.

It was a strength that made the word despair feel fitting. Like a marionette dancing before him, he was jerked this way and that, helplessly giving up openings.

The gift called Arc Mine was the most vicious attack he had ever encountered, and Slash was the sharpest.

Most astonishing of all was the experience Erasure displayed in combat.

His control of pacing was perfect, as if he had fought battles his entire life.

From beginning to end, Berserker moved exactly as the man wanted.

‘A wall. So I must overcome this to see what lies higher.’

But the wall before him was impossible to overcome.

Just what level had the man reached? And what kind of scenery did he see from there? His own inability to even gauge that felt pathetic.

For all his pursuit of the Dance of Nothingness, how lacking he was.

He struggled desperately, but he couldn’t take away even a sliver of the man’s composure.

“Kgh!”

Attacks poured in at a speed incomparable to anything before.

Swallowing his groans, he unleashed thirty slashes breathlessly in every direction, but the man shed them all like a fish gliding through water. Then he seized the sword and tore it away.

Berserker tried to swing the halved blade to push him back, but the hand that had already reached right in front of him passed his throat and gripped his collarbone.

Crunch!

“Kraaagh!”

Amid the pain of his collarbone crumbling like a sandcastle, he roared and tried a body slam, but the man slipped aside like a ghost and broke his right shoulder, his forearm, and his wrist in sequence.

In the span of a single blink, one arm was demolished.

He tried to push out the Arc Mine rampaging inside his arm, but the power, carrying a stronger poison, thrashed on its own and shattered everything to pieces.

“Khheh heh!”

Berserker, switching his sword to his left hand, let out a dry laugh through the merciless pain. The world was tinting yellow, but the power Erasure showed him was a new world.

He wanted to experience that strength just a little more. An overwhelming power capable of annihilating everything in the world. A Hunter of the strongest and most fearsome kind, truly worthy of the alias Erasure.

What kind of world did that man see? Could he reach it too? He wanted to see it. If he could pluck out the man’s eyes, he would, just to contain that world.

Berserker did not lose his fighting spirit. Even if he died, his desperate yearning to reach the distance Erasure had attained only grew stronger.

But even his left wrist was twisted until he lost his grip on the sword, and his elbow snapped backward. A casual kick, loaded with Arc Mine, struck his leg and killed his mobility.

He became a scarecrow, exposed defenseless to the man’s attacks. Then Erasure’s hand plunged into his chest.

“Kuaaagh!”

With the pain of his heart bursting, the entire world turned red. In that fleeting moment of will, Berserker gathered his last remaining strength and activated his gift.

Full Recovery.

His own gift, unknown to anyone in this world—his trump card.

His shattered heart was restored, and every wound on his body healed perfectly.

His condition was optimal.

Erasure wouldn’t have expected him to die and come back to life.

This was the opening to kill him. It was cowardly, but this too was fate.

He would kill Erasure and seize the moment of the star.

But what awaited him, fully recovered, was Erasure’s expressionless face.

The man hadn’t let his guard down in the slightest.

As if he had anticipated everything.

“Full Recovery.”

“How……”

In that moment, his heart nearly dropped from sheer shock. Even that was cut short when the hand drove into his chest once more.

“I wanted to say this, Berserker.”

“……”

“Your gift was sick.”

Crunch!

* * *

“Stubborn bastard.”

I shoved aside Berserker’s collapsing corpse and ingested blood from the spot closest to his heart.

Blood Devour began to interpret the Full Recovery contained in Berserker’s blood.

A gift is like a fingerprint engraved in blood. Blood Devour copies it and transfers it into my blood.

As I felt the new gift being engraved, I deleted my existing Pain Relief gift. Pain Relief is useful in combat for dulling pain and sustaining fighting strength, but it’s nothing compared to Full Recovery.

Zzing!

A sharp headache struck me. A familiar pain. It reminded me that this pain was the process of gaining power.

The reason the Blood Lord became the strongest was that, among countless gifts, he kept only the best.

I still don’t know why I went mad. One of the most likely reasons, I thought, was that I had taken too many gifts.

Perhaps the gifts in my blood, too many and too numerous, clashed and ran wild, affecting my mind.

Even the mad Blood Lord, at some point, discarded unnecessary gifts and kept only what he needed. I saw that as his survival instinct at work.

While I was lost in thought, the Full Recovery copy finished. Now, even if my heart is crushed or my head is cut off, as long as a sliver of will remains, I can revive.

Full Recovery is a spare life. There was a reason worth killing a troublesome bastard like Berserker.

That aside.

“Hey. Why are you still alive?”

“……”

“Open your eyes. Otherwise I’ll kill you again.”

At my warning, Berserker, who had been lying there playing dead, opened his eyes.