Chapter 87. The Devourer, No. 10 (4)
“I had no choice! My daughters and I all have weak lungs! We can’t survive anywhere except the mountains where the air is clean!”
The old woman screamed at No. 11.
“That is none of my concern.”
No. 11 simply shook his head and delivered the verdict coldly.
“In any case, Abraxas has determined that neither you nor the clones you produced are useful anymore.”
“More importantly, we will soon be launching a large-scale project in Korea.”
The old woman paled.
“What are you going to do to us?”
No. 11 smiled pleasantly.
“Unnecessary test subjects should be disposed of.”
“Wouldn’t you agree?”
“N-No!”
The old woman screamed when she understood what he meant.
Victoria immediately stepped forward in anger.
“And who said I’d let you do that?”
She rushed forward and kicked hard toward No. 11’s head.
But No. 11 neither dodged nor defended himself.
He merely smiled with interest.
“Hmm. Pointless.”
Victoria’s leg passed straight through his head.
She felt nothing against her foot.
It was like kicking through fog.
“Huh?”
Victoria looked startled when her attack failed so completely.
No. 11 advised her calmly,
“Did you not see what happened earlier?”
“Physical attacks do not work on me.”
“Then I’ll keep hitting you until something does!”
Victoria gritted her teeth and swung a fist with all her strength.
Once again, her punch passed uselessly through No. 11’s body.
No. 11 burst into laughter.
“Hahahaha! Punch as much as you like.”
“I possess the most abnormal body among the Twelve Archons.”
“Such one-dimensional attacks will never work.”
“What the hell are you made of?”
Victoria, who was fairly confident in hand-to-hand combat, could only stare in disbelief.
She had met all kinds of strange Archons by now.
But this was the first one this bizarre.
No. 11 then looked directly at Victoria as though suddenly recognizing her.
“Come to think of it, you must be Doctor Frankenstein.”
“You know me?”
“Of course.”
No. 11 smiled.
“Alpha asked me to give you her thanks.”
“She is very grateful that you have been taking such good care of the Archon she entrusted to you.”
Victoria frowned.
“You mean Yukgap?”
“Yukgap came to me because he wanted to!”
“You people didn’t entrust him to me!”
No. 11 only smiled at her protest.
“Do you truly believe that?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I would never dare presume to understand Alpha’s profound intentions.”
“But one thing is certain.”
He looked at Victoria knowingly.
“No. 6 went to you exactly as Alpha intended, Doctor Frankenstein.”
He spoke as though he understood everything that had happened.
Victoria could feel anger slowly rising inside her.
She had no idea what he was trying to accomplish with those words, but it was obviously meant to provoke her.
Don’t fall for it.
She could not defeat him physically anyway.
Then what was the smartest thing she could do here?
The moment the answer came to her, Victoria ran toward the old woman.
“Hup!”
She lifted the old woman straight off the ground and slung her over one shoulder.
Caught completely off guard, the elder flailed her arms and legs.
“Put me down!”
“Stay still! Escaping is more important right now!”
Victoria shouted and immediately ran out of the house.
If she could not defeat No. 11, then she would simply flee.
“My, my. I’m not particularly good at chasing people with this bad leg.”
No. 11 watched Victoria and the old woman disappear into the distance.
Then he grinned.
“Well... I suppose it doesn’t matter.”
“Alpha intended for me to desert?”
Yukgap stared at No. 10 in disbelief.
“What kind of nonsense is that?!”
Remembering his family after eating kimchi.
Running away because he did not want to die.
Meeting Victoria completely by chance.
All of that had been nothing but coincidence piled upon coincidence.
And now No. 10 was claiming Alpha had intended all of it?
“Have you truly never doubted whether any of this was your own free will?”
No. 10 mocked him as though he could see straight through Yukgap’s confusion.
“How foolish.”
“We are weapons.”
“Things like free will never existed for us in the first place.”
“Shut up!”
Yukgap shouted sharply.
“I’m human!”
“I’m a person with freedom and a will of my own!”
“Yes. I’m sure you want to believe that.”
No. 10 remained indifferent.
“If you’re so curious, ask Alpha yourself.”
“I have work to do.”
He slowly straightened his back.
Then something black and sticky, almost like tar, began flowing from his chest.
It rapidly spread across his entire body.
“You know what this is.”
“My assigned overtechnology weapon.”
“Carbon-fiber reinforced armor.”
Covered in the armor, No. 10 looked like a crocodile statue carved from black obsidian.
He stared at Yukgap.
“If you are the fastest Archon, then I am the toughest.”
“Stop me if you can.”
With those words, No. 10 turned toward the village.
His ravenous jaws opened and closed several times, searching for flesh to tear apart.
If Yukgap let him go, a one-sided massacre would begin.
“You think I can’t stop you?!”
Yukgap gritted his teeth and accelerated.
His body disappeared into a yellow afterimage.
The blades of his monomolecular cutters rained down relentlessly against No. 10’s armored body.
Clang! Clang!
Not even a scratch appeared.
“Damn it! You really are absurdly tough!”
When his attacks failed, Yukgap backed away and clicked his tongue.
No. 10 gave a faint, mocking smile.
“No. 6.”
“You possess exceptional acceleration and reflexes.”
“That is why your body was made excessively light, and why your raw strength is weak.”
His armored claws flexed.
“You do not possess enough power to do anything against me while I wear this reinforced armor.”
“So what?”
“Stand there and watch me complete my mission.”
No. 10 opened his enormous mouth.
Layer upon layer of hunger filled his growling voice.
“I am the Predator.”
“I exist to devour everything Abraxas orders me to erase.”
This is bad.
That single thought flashed through Yukgap’s mind.
No. 10 was not wrong.
Once equipped with his reinforced armor, he lost mobility in exchange for overwhelming defense.
He was essentially a walking tank.
Yukgap lacked both the raw strength and the proper technique to break through that armor.
They were an absolutely terrible matchup.
“Mr. Yukgap!”
Mijin’s voice suddenly came from beside him.
She stood there with a club in her hands and a determined expression.
Yukgap stared at her in horror.
“Why are you back?! I told you to run!”
“Why do you think?!”
A group of women carrying farming tools came rushing from the direction of the village.
They immediately surrounded No. 10.
Mijin stood at the front and shouted proudly,
“We came to protect our village!”
Victoria kept running without looking back.
Only after reaching the middle of a nearby mountain slope did she finally stop.
She lowered the old woman from her shoulder.
“All right. He shouldn’t be able to follow us this far.”
But the old woman’s expression remained grim.
“It’s pointless.”
“I’m the one who failed to keep the terms of the contract.”
“Once they’ve made up their minds, it’s already over.”
Her voice was painfully lonely.
At this point, Victoria could no longer suppress her curiosity.
“What exactly did you agree to with Abraxas?”
“...”
“Are you really still not going to tell me?”
Victoria continued pressing.
Eventually, the old woman opened her mouth with difficulty.
“Fifty years ago, people still lived around here.”
“There was a coal mine, so most of us managed to make a living.”
Victoria already knew that much.
According to online records, there had once been a settlement in this area, but it disappeared after the mine closed.
Apparently, that was the village the old woman was talking about.
“But when the mine shut down, people began leaving one after another.”
“I couldn’t.”
“Why?”
The old woman pointed toward her chest.
“I had a disease in my lungs.”
“My body couldn’t endure anywhere except the mountains where the air was clean.”
“I tried moving to the city several times, but each time my condition became so bad that I felt like I was dying.”
Her expression darkened.
“Even my husband eventually got tired of living with me and left.”
Layer upon layer of sorrow filled her voice as she spoke about her past.
“And so I was left here alone.”
“I thought the loneliness would drive me mad.”
“That was when I met the man from earlier.”
Victoria frowned.
“Wait.”
“That was fifty years ago.”
“But that man didn’t look nearly old enough for that.”
The man calling himself No. 11 looked to be in his early forties at most.
The elder did not seem to understand it either.
“I don’t know.”
“All I know is that he offered me a deal.”
“He said he would give me the ability to create a family by myself.”
“In exchange, I had to send the children I gave birth to out into the world somehow.”
“And after fifty years, he would return to see how they had lived.”
Victoria immediately understood.
“So you accepted.”
“Yes.”
The old woman looked sadly down toward the mountain where she had lived all these years.
“If the alternative was spending the rest of my life alone in these mountains, I would rather have had a family like that.”
Deep down, she had always known it went against the natural order.
But loneliness had been heavy enough to make her accept even that.
“After they performed some strange operation on me, my belly began to swell even though I had never been with a man.”
“Then I gave birth to a daughter.”
“My daughters grew up.”
“And when they reached a certain age, they became pregnant without fathers too.”
“They gave birth to daughters of their own.”
The old woman looked toward the hidden village below.
“And that is how this village came to exist.”
