Chapter 21: Episode 21 – The Second Relic, Part I
Chapter 8. The Second Relic, Part I
Translator: Khan
Editor: RED
1.
A car that had been blocking the road fell into the ditch by the road with a crash of metal. Its nose crumpled loudly. If the owner had seen it, he would have been mortified.
“I can’t believe that there are so many cars in the small country. Oh, God!” The person doing this was angry rather than reflective.
What was more surprising was that the cars he had not knocked down the side of the road were not one or two.
Hundreds of cars were being sent into the ditches, some cars slamming into one another quite loudly.
Bang Hyun-wook turned his head, looked at what he had done and wiped the sweat off his forehead.
Jang Sung-hoon, who had just sent a car into the ditch, said to him, “You’re very strong.”
“It thanks to jewels of Strength and Energy. If I made my professional debut right now, I would hit a hundred home runs.”
“Yes, I really hope you make your professional debut. If the car owners here later see you in the black boxes and claim damages, you’ll either file for bankruptcy or go to the Major League and hit the jackpot.”
“Please, I hope that a world like that will come back.”
“I agree.” Jang Sung-hoon once again looked at the crowd of cars on the road with his words. ‘I’ve done all sorts of bad things to get one of these … and now they are like garbage.’, he mused to himself
Among them, there was one expensive enough to whistle at the moment Jang Sung-hoon saw it.
“Uh? Boss? Boss!” Jang Sung-hoon shouted at Kim Tae-hoon, who was marking a car to push off onto the side of the road ahead of them.
“Boss, that’s a Cayenne! A Porsche Cayenne!”
He saw Kim Tae-hoon trying to mark an X-shape with a red oil pen on the back glass of Cayenne, an SUV made by Porsche.
“It’s worth at least a hundred thousand dollars!”
For reference, the price of a new Porsche Cayenne was a hundred thousand dollars without any option. Adding options, it could be worth up to twice that.
At least it was a too much valuable car to put in the ditch, and at the same time, Porsche was a car-maker that could make the man’s heartburn.
Of course, that was Jang Sung-hoon.
Kim Tae-hoon did not even look up at the cry, and immediately pushed the back of the car lightly. Confirming it was in neutral, he immediately looked at the back of the car.
He painted it in his mind. A picture of a huge intangible wall pushing the car away. A picture of a car moving slowly toward the ditch.
The image in his mind became a reality. The car moved on its own and started to go down the ditch.
The expensive car went down into the ditch and slammed into the back of another car already there.
Bang!
Watching the car like he was losing a lover, Jang Sung-hoon spat out a sigh. “If I could just drive that thing once…”
“Tae-hoon brother is the one who beat an Orc with a Mercedes when he caught it, so it’s nothing.”
“There’s a difference between Mercedes and Porsche!”
“Different? Aren’t their prices similar?”
“It’s not the price, but the romance! The romance!”
Kim Tae-hoon shot a look at the two of them.
‘Huck!’
‘Oh, my God …’
Jang Sung-hoon and Bang Hyun-wook became dumb. The meaning was clear – Shut Up and Get Back To Work.
After seeing they had shut up, the gaze moved past them.
He saw the road they had come up was like a graveyard of cars, the dump truck that was slowly moving up the road, and the cars that followed it were like ducklings chasing the mother duck.
He could also see the soldiers filling the scene.
“Hey, watch out, watch out!”
“I’m sorry.”
“Move the dead body carefully, and even if you can’t do a funeral, you have to use at least a little courtesy.”
“I understand.”
“It’s a happy thing to deal with the dead, it’s proof that you lived.”
Some of the soldiers were working on moving the dead bodies to the side of the road and covering their faces with jumpers.
“Monster stone collection is finished.”
“Ten quotas is finished. Can I have a cigarette?”
“Yes, I’ve filled ten. Let’s smoke together.”
The other soldiers were working on finding the monster bodies and then grabbing the monster stones by cracking their chests open.
There was a puff of smoke between the jobs.
Kim Tae-hoon sighed briefly as he watched the scene.
“I’m glad there’s less noise than I thought…”
——
January 2nd.
At the end of the day, which was like an eternity, Kim Tae-hoon and his newly-minted men if the Mac Clan, left the 1121 unit at the moment the sun rose and began marching toward the Bucheon Stadium.
The march was not so long.
The distance was about five kilometers, and even if you walked, it was only an hour to reach it.
However, the Mac Clan, who had left the unit at 7 AM, arrived at the Bucheon Stadium Station near Bucheon Stadium at 2 PM, just past the middle of the day.
They had to arrange the roads so that the vehicles carrying the weapons could move, including the dump trucks carrying the weapons.
There were few monster raids. It was a task that took a lot of time.
Getting rid of the cars which had lost their owners filling the streets by shoving them to the side also a took a lot of time, and it was not an easy job to deal with cars that were tangled up by traffic accidents if they didn’t have Kim Tae-hoon and Bang Hyun-wook.
But it was a task that had to be done.
‘Anyway, we have secured a road that links the Stadium Station with the military base.’
Now the dump truck wasn’t just a truck, but an arsenal with a lot of weapons, and a powerful weapon that allowed them to gain the height advantage in the battle with monsters.
Securing a road for such a dump truck to move was now the most important thing for the Mac Clan.
Moreover, the road was supposed to be used as a way out at an emergency moment, so organizing the road stupidly was just like dealing with their lives stupidly.
‘Living in an apartment or a building is dangerous. If we decide where to live, we’d better go to a military base or Bucheon Stadium…’
It was also important to dispose of the bodies of the dead. The place where a body sleeps becomes a tomb, but the place where it is scattered becomes hell.
The difference was huge.
Organized bodies would be a sign of order still remaining in a world that seemed to be nearing the end.
‘Uh? There, there!’
“What is it? What happened? Ah!”
“The smoke is thick over there. It looks like there’s a fire?”
“Isn’t that a general fire, with that much smoke? It’s an apartment complex over there, isn’t it?”
Everyone’s eyes turned to the smoke of the distant apartment complex. Kim Tae-hoon’s eyes also turned.
‘Now this is the beginning.’
That performance that everyone is looking at is why we need a trace of order.
The cause of the smoke was obvious.
Smoke would not be generated without fire in the chimney, so there is no smoke without fire, isn’t there?
It was a fire.
The cause of the fire was obvious.
“What happened to the fire?”
Currently, the temperature was minus ten degrees Celsius, but the wind was blowing, rather than the temperature is rising.
In this cold winter, no electricity or gas was being supplied.
In the end, we will have to use the old-fashioned methods that mankind used to endure in the cold.
“I’m sure they set a fire to melt themselves, and if there were no fire in this weather, they’d freeze to death.”
Of course, they would have set a fire.
Naturally, if they had had common sense, they would have come out of the building and brought out something like a drum, or a large-scale cooking oil, and put some firewood into the fire.
But some of them, without common sense, would have been burning in their house using portable gas burners and portable butane heaters, and this was not a world that rewarded a lack of common sense.
The problem is that there were no firefighters to dispatch even if they called 911.
“Maybe we just have to wait until the fire goes out unless it rains. But it won’t rain in this weather. If it rains, it would be even more astonishing.”
“What happens when the apartment complex is on fire and spreads around?”
“Well …”
The world that people had built was as easy to burn as matchboxes.
“I don’t know what will happen, but I’m sure there’s no way to do anything.”
“It’s creepy.”
In fact, this applied not to just monster attacks, but also disasters such as earthquakes.
Experts say that when a disaster like a major earthquake occurs, there would often be more deaths from secondary disasters such as fires in the infrastructure that had collapsed, than the deaths caused by the disaster.
‘The real trouble is now beginning.’
It would be monsters, not people, who would be most excited in such confusion.
‘Hmm…’ At that moment, Kim Tae-hoon’s head went back.
To his eyes, this was a desolate road filled with vehicles.
But his other senses said that the desolation was false. The Sense of the Hobgoblin told Kim Tae-hoon that there was a strong being near him.
“Prepare for battle!” Kim Tae-hoon shouted.
Ohwwww!
After Kim Tae-hoon’s cry, an eerie howling that made their legs tremble echoed around them!