Chapter 124 – LV.Eleven Priest Seo Yun – [One]

There is one boy who left a strong impression on Seo Yun, and not in a good way.

Park Taeyang… When negotiations with the Paladins weren’t going well, he suddenly suggested offering himself as a hostage.

At the time, Seo Yun wondered what desperate resolve had led him to make such a proposal, but she only understood why later.

Since then, hasn’t Park Taeyang been constantly muttering, “I was trying to do something back then too, you know? What I suggested was…” and striving to let everyone know that he was willing to sacrifice himself for the whole village? Furthermore, despite such efforts, he felt hurt that people didn’t acknowledge his willingness to sacrifice. It was utterly pathetic.

So, Park Taeyang’s sudden proposal of self-sacrifice stemmed from his belief that sacrifice is something people recognize and praise. For him, who had a poor reputation among the villagers, it was a way to elevate his own standing.

Thus, sacrifice doesn’t always originate from some great spirit. People can make noble sacrifices for perfectly trivial reasons.

Just look at Seo Yun herself. Her motivation for becoming a firefighter and her reason for wanting to ascend to godhood were no more elevated than Park Taeyang’s.

Wasn’t it Happy Village, a place so pleasant to live in that everyone found it peculiar? There, it was difficult to truly grasp how broken the world had become or how difficult people’s lives had grown.

So, until now, Seo Yun’s inclination to follow the Troll’s plan stemmed from vague reasons—a feeling that if she didn’t do it, no one would, and that sweating and sacrificing herself seemed admirable and fine. Her motivation was similar to that of a rich girl with ample pocket money wanting to do charity work.

But not anymore.

“‘Not meant to exist in the world’? What does that mean?”

Seo Yun asked, but the Troll only answered in a deflated voice.

“When the time comes, you’ll know.”

Silence flowed after that conversation. Well, it was difficult to have a chat while corpses were piled up.

The Troll stared blankly at the corpses Seo Yun had gathered and then spoke.

“I’m leaving now. Will you be alright alone?”

“I’ll be fine. See you in a month then.”

After the Troll disappeared, Seo Yun set fire to the gathered corpses.

She’d heard somewhere that burning human corpses smells like roasting pork, but whether it was because decomposition had progressed quite a bit or because she’d poured too much oil, the smoke only gave off a chemical smell. It was the smell of death she had caught a few times during her firefighter days.

The acrid smoke stung her eyes.

Through blurred vision, she watched the burning corpses. Among them, the people from the mountain valley village stood out particularly.

She didn’t know if their deaths were her fault, or if she should avenge them if they were. She had no particular obligation to them, nor were they close enough for her to dirty her hands avenging them.

But she was angry. Angry that the people she had tried, however briefly, to save had ended up like that, and that it was the result of her own decision.

In a short time, so many people had died.

Seo Yun thought of the Players and soldiers who had died in this region.

They had hunted each other from the moment they ascended Mount Taebaek. Why did they kill each other so much? To secure resources in a scarce environment and eliminate threats to each other. In other words, to survive.

What was the reason for all that dog-like behavior by the Dwarf Mage? To survive with the people of his village.

And then they all died.

The situation where people who did all sorts of things to survive ultimately died evoked in Seo Yun not so much sadness as a greater sense of emptiness, followed by anger.

An anger with no clear target. Anger directed at the changed world itself.

Seo Yun also recalled the Dark Mage Jeong Haneum, who had abandoned his own mother and left. It was a decision for their own survival. She now understood that, from their perspective, they had no choice.

In a world like this, no one could act nobly and survive. Unless you had a Health 11 body that could survive without eating anything because wiping your butt was too much trouble…

Only upon coming here did she realize how horribly the world had changed. The horror of it was unbearable.

And when a situation is unbearable, you shouldn’t just stand still; you must take some action. So, what then?

As the Troll said, follow the original plan…

She would become a god.

She would make that grand sacrifice and exert influence on this ruined world. She had already resolved to do so, but now she knew exactly why she had to.

Seo Yun, now Level 11, reviewed the gains from this Level Up. She had learned several lower-tier Spells she hadn’t been able to acquire before due to priority, and she had chosen and learned up to 6th-tier Priest Spells.

Among the newly learned Spells was also the Non-Magical Weapon Immunity Spell that the Frost Giant had demonstrated earlier. It was a powerful Spell that could ignore all ordinary Cold Weapons or bullets alike.

With that Spell cast upon herself, and having summoned and now leading a Flame Spirit, Seo Yun walked along the road.

As she did, she made no effort to hide her body or avoid people’s gazes. She was in a situation where she had to find a boy and girl whose whereabouts were unknown. If her location was exposed, it was actually for the better.

Even if soldiers attacked, it didn’t matter. If they wanted to attack, let them. She could drive them away easily with this magnificent Priest’s Spells.

Thinking this as she walked, Seo Yun discovered a group of people crouching around a campfire. Although they were all armed with rifles and their excessively wretched appearance suggested they were likely soldiers, she wasn’t particularly surprised or on guard.

She was looking at them with the thought, I’ll show them that I’ve now become the true Greatest Sword Under Heaven, impervious even to bullets.

The men presumed to be soldiers looked in her direction. Then their eyes widened.

“You…”

While she was relaxed and not attacking, for some reason, the soldiers who had spotted her also didn’t aim their gun barrels at her or charge. Instead, with strangely surprised faces, they called out her name.

“Seo Yun?”

Seo Yun nodded.

“That’s right.”

“You were alive…”

Seo Yun thought. Since they know about that incident, they’re definitely soldiers.

“Actually, would you say I’m a ghost who died from a gunshot?”Seo Yun had said it playfully, but it seemed they didn’t take it as a joke.

The soldiers fell silent, and Seo Yun asked,

“If you’re not going to shoot again, can I go?”

Seo Yun was about to pass by them when,

for some reason, the soldiers who had been frozen stiff spoke toward her.

“Hey…”

“Yes?”

“Do your friends know you’re alive?”

“Hmm? I haven’t seen them since then… I need to meet them again now. Do you happen to know where they are?”

“Not right now… but I’ll let you know as soon as we find them.”

Seo Yun stopped and blinked. They’d help her find her friends? She couldn’t understand why they were making such an offer.

Out of guilt for kindly shooting the military girl? No way. Just looking at them, they seemed like people who could barely manage to find food for themselves. Would they waste precious calories on something like that?

Seo Yun suddenly voiced the thought that popped into her head.

“Did they take revenge on you or something?”

Her guess was right. The soldiers nodded with stiff faces.

“Revenge… we got it, big time.”

“Still ongoing?”

“Yeah.”

“So you want to show them I’m alive to stop their revenge?”

“Roughly… yeah.”

After thinking for a moment, Seo Yun understood why those two had done it.

Well, it had been months since the Health 11-point person who could survive even while their whole body was burning had been taken away and hadn’t returned.

Those two must have thought their friend had died, not that the surgery was difficult. And among them was a girl obsessed with hating soldiers.

Given all that, it was easy to guess what the two had been up to until now. Bloody revenge.

And judging by how the soldiers weren’t firmly shooting back at their revenge but trying to stop it somehow, it was also easy to guess how many soldiers their revenge had killed.

‘It seems they’ve been killing to the point of “We were wrong, just spare our lives”…’

Seo Yun sighed, and the soldiers looked at her with uneasy eyes.

“What do you mean by helping me find them?”

“If you stay with us, we’ll contact people here and there and lure them this way…”

Seo Yun frowned and waved her hand.

“Forget it. What would make me trust you enough to go around with you?”

“Then…”

“Do you have a Two-and-a-Half-Ton Truck to drive around? If there’s gas left, hand over the keys along with it.”

The soldiers said they don’t drive Two-and-a-Half-Ton Trucks or other military vehicles around these days. Because if they catch the eyes of Players here, they instantly become Prey.

So there was an abandoned Two-and-a-Half-Ton Truck, and Seo Yun hijacked one of them and got into the driver’s seat.

A few soldiers hesitantly approached. Seo Yun glared at them.

“What are you looking at?”

“We wanted to say sorry for last time…”

“Enough, just go away.”

Seo Yun snapped at them like that and started the Two-and-a-Half-Ton Truck.

The Two-and-a-Half-Ton Truck sped along the roadside full of puddles. There was no particular destination; the act of driving around itself was the goal. If she kept driving around like this, she’d be spotted by the two who were mad with rage.

She had to stop what those two were doing as quickly as possible.

She wasn’t without resentment toward the soldiers over the incident either. While she understood the soldiers’ actions just now, she didn’t like them. It was annoying how they subtly tried to curry favor by acting pitiful, since she didn’t seem particularly eager for revenge.

Still, she couldn’t just let those two keep stabbing and beating those soldiers to death. If those two were going to dirty their hands, she, as the adult, should stop them—yet she had become the reason for them to dirty their hands? More than any justification like the righteousness of revenge, that was what made it hard to accept.

‘If you have time for that, you should focus on raising your Levels… Hurry up and reach Level 15 already.’

She was grumbling to herself while driving when—Thud!

From that building above, a thick log fell, blocking the path of the moving truck. It was something only a bear could do, so she knew who did it. A Warrior with Strength 9 or higher.

“Han Siwoo?”

The timing was truly exquisite, blocking the path so perfectly that even a detour was impossible. It showed how many times he must have done this before.

The moment Seo Yun urgently stopped the truck, something ran at a speed barely visible to the eye and stopped right in front of her.

Judging by the running speed, it was clearly not human, that creature…

“Hey, don’t shoot!”

At Seo Yun’s shout, the creature that was indeed not human lowered its Crossbow.

Gaeulbi looked at her.

“Seo Yun?”

Seo Yun, who had almost experienced what happened with Kim Jihyeok again, got out of the truck with a pounding heart. In doing so, she couldn’t avoid Gaeulbi tackling her with her whole body.

“Seo Yun!”

The moment she heard that roar, Seo Yun saw the Chimpanzee perched on top of her fallen body and forgot all the words she had prepared to say when she met the girl.

“Seo Yun is…!”

She could see Gaeulbi’s face, crying.

Seo Yun swore she had never seen such a sorrowful, complicated expression with tears streaming down in her entire life.