Chapter 17 : Jo Pyeong

Chapter 17: Jo Pyeong

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Jo Pyeong was the lead gang leader of the Black Snake Society. He had been entrusting his body to the darkness, bathed in the dim light of the crescent moon.

“Guaaaah!”

“Keuk....”

Endless screams echoed from afar. Every single one of them was the sound of his subordinates dying. Even those had now grown markedly less frequent, to the point where they were barely audible. That alone was proof that very few subordinates remained.

Dongpal, Nadol, and even Kang Hae—those who had entered together with him—would surely be mixed in somewhere over there as well. Perhaps, among the gang leaders, he alone was still alive.

Now the Unnamed Righteous Hero would come for him. He was approaching this way after slaughtering all the rest. Nothing, no method, no means, no countermeasure, had been able to protect them. Even though they had anticipated it in advance and prepared for it.

Soon, it would be his turn.

He did not want to die yet....

All he had done was extort people a little, engage in human trafficking a few times, sell women and alcohol here and there... and kill a few things that were hardly even human. That was all. And to lose his precious life over just that.

It was unfair. Where was there retribution so unfair as this? There were so many people in the world far worse than him—people who had killed dozens or hundreds and were still living comfortably, eating well and sleeping well! And yet he had to be killed for committing only this much evil.

The world was unfair.

The easy targets were the weak. Those people must have been left alone by the Unnamed Righteous Hero because they were strong.

Jo Pyeong endlessly strung together sophistries in his head, hurling curses at the Unnamed Righteous Hero. Yet he failed to realize that none of it made any sense—just like most villains.

‘Should I run away?’

The thought crossed his mind for a moment, but Jo Pyeong soon shook his head.

Run away?

If he ran, that would be no different from losing his life as well.

How much time had it taken to build this foundation to this extent! He could not do that.

He reaffirmed his resolve to take the remaining Black Snake members and defend Paradise Village’s final stronghold to the very end. Was this not a place with only a single path leading in and out?

Because of the terrain’s characteristics, it could not be assaulted head-on, nor could someone sneak in unnoticed. The rear path led to Paradise Estate, the manor of Bang Po-yeom, the society leader of the Black Snake Society. In other words, the only way to come here was the single alley ahead. If they could properly guard just that spot, they might be able to stop the Unnamed Righteous Hero—or even go further and capture or kill him.

“Uaaaaaaaagh!”

At that moment, a scream as loud and horrific as all the screams that had sounded until now combined reached even the place where Jo Pyeong was hiding.

With that, the death screams finally ceased.

Now ‘he’ would come. The one who had freely trampled the Black Division under the name of righteousness—the Unnamed Killing Demon would come this way.

Yeah! Come! You son of a bitch!

“I’ll kill you!”

Fighting in the dark favored the Black Division.

The Unnamed Righteous Hero might have chosen the dark night to easily hunt the Black Division members, but the Black Division had been born in darkness and lived their entire lives in the dark. No matter how great a martial arts master he was, there was confidence.

And that wasn’t all.

Those remaining here were on a completely different level from the riffraff who had just died. They might have been low-level fighters, but every one of them had learned martial arts to some extent in proper sects.

The White Tiger Division and the Blue Wolf Gate had collapsed due to an unexpected assault. The Black Snake Society would show that it was different— huh!? Already?

At the very moment Jo Pyeong was steadying his resolve—

A single black shadow, shaped like a human, flew in through the passage.

In an instant!

Ssswashshshshak!

Dozens of arrows shot forth with the sound of something tearing through the air, like a school of salmon cutting through rapids.

The bowstrings that had been prepared snapped loose all at once.

Puh-bubububuk!

The shadow turned into a pincushion and fell straight to the ground.

Seeing that, Jo Pyeong realized it was not the Unnamed Righteous Hero. There was no way it would be that easy.

Whoosh.

Then, once more, another black shadow flew in through the alley toward them.

Again, dozens of arrows flew out, shredding the shadow into ragged scraps. Of course, this too was not the real one, but a corpse.

‘Is he hoping we’ll run out of arrows?’

Pfft. A snort of disbelief escaped him.

‘This is awkward— we’ve prepared more arrows than we could ever use even if we shot all night. What will you do now? Unnamed Righteous Hero.’

At the very moment he formed a triumphant smile!

“Keuk, kraaagh!”

One of the Black Division members hiding in an abandoned house screamed. He was dead.

‘How!?’

They had been watching the only passage that led here. He might have been able to come over the rooftops, but moving that way would have been even more dangerous. Wouldn’t he be immediately exposed in the moonlight?

There had definitely been Black Division members stationed on the rooftops as well, keeping constant watch. If he had moved that way, there was no way they wouldn’t have seen him.

‘Just where did he come in from!?’

While Jo Pyeong was panicking, the last remaining Black Division members continued to fall.

“Kraah!”

“Ugh!”

“Keuk!”

....

....

..

.

The screams of death drew steadily closer to him. Now there was no time to even think about how.

Jo Pyeong immediately emerged from his hiding place and entrusted his body to the moonlight. Even then, the final cries of the Black Division continued to echo throughout the grounds.

But even those soon faded away.

“Damn it.... Am I the only one left alive....”

Originally, that was the signal. When he came out from where he was hiding, all the Black Division members were supposed to emerge into the central open ground at once and form a formation to engage the Unnamed Righteous Hero head-on.

“Is there… no one?”

Pitch-dark silence.

No one stepped forward.

No—

Tap. Tap.

There was one.

A masked man with a lean build.

He was the one who revealed himself under the moonlight, strolling forward with an unhurried gait.

“A-are you the Unnamed Righteous Hero?”

“....”

He merely approached Jo Pyeong in silence. There was no answer from the Unnamed Righteous Hero.

“W-what… what do you even want?”

“....”

Once again, no reply came back.

Jo Pyeong tried to say something more, but no further words would come out. It was because he had met the Unnamed Righteous Hero’s eyes head-on.

Since throwing himself into the Black Snake Society, he had seen the eyes of countless people, but this was the first time he had seen eyes so utterly ‘empty.’ It was not something like being emotionless.

Void.

There was simply nothing there. Not a single thing that could be considered human was reflected in the Unnamed Righteous Hero’s eyes.

“Fuck....”

Sssaaak, puksak.

Jo Pyeong’s body was split cleanly in half, starting from the head. The blood, entrails, and brain matter that spilled from his corpse fouled Paradise Village.

And at the same time—

Flash!

Pure-white Purifying Flame bloomed from the Unnamed Righteous Hero’s body, cleansing Paradise Village.

Bathed in that brilliant light, the Unnamed Righteous Hero’s appearance was revealed, if only for a brief moment, in broad daylight.

The Unnamed Righteous Hero.

Sosam, the Horse Stable Hireling of the Danri Family.

More precisely—

Dong Bong-su, who had now reached Level 7.

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After setting the Black Division as his target,

Dong Bong-su had been truly busy.

There were simply too many things that needed to be prepared.

Though he had leveled up by killing Jangho, he was still far weaker compared to the Black Division members. Naturally, just as he had done back on Earth, the preparation process demanded a great deal of time and effort.

He had to closely grasp the movements of the Black Division and each individual member, then determine the order of hunting priority among them. Even after that, he had to meticulously plan various surrounding circumstances and even the hunting script itself. Only when not even a single strand of failure probability remained—only then would Dong Bong-su actually move to hunt.

He diligently roamed the streets of Bongyang, gathering information. Some of that information included things about the Black Snake Society obtained from the thugs he had killed last time, but those were already widely known and thus of little help.

He spent roughly a week focusing on collecting information about the Black Division.

But.

With the status of Sosam the mute and a body all alone, there were clear limits to information gathering. The few things he did learn were either so miscellaneous as to be completely useless, or so broad that they held no real meaning in his case.

At best, the only usable information he had managed to obtain was roughly which streets the Black Division members mainly operated on and about where their dens were located.

Even knowing things like that held little real meaning. It might have been different if he had the ability to storm those places alone, but at Level 2, it was impossible.

That said, he could not afford to obsess endlessly over information gathering alone. At this rate, half a year—perhaps even several years—would pass by with nothing but investigation.

In the end, he changed his approach.

Stirring the grass to startle the snake.

Beating the grass and startling the snake.

It was commonly used to mean rashly acting without preparation and failing as a result. However, the original meaning of this idiom was something entirely different.

One of the foundations of ancient Chinese military strategy, a tactic recorded in the Thirty-Six Stratagems.

To catch a snake hiding in its burrow, one strikes the grass to force the snake out and then captures it. In other words, it was not a proverb with a negative connotation, but a tactic in itself.

Dong Bong-su stopped investigating the ‘snake’ that was hard to see. Instead, he struck at the ‘thicket’ where snakes were likely to gather.

One day.

After thoroughly disguising his appearance, he sought out an underground gambling den that was being secretly operated and swept the place clean. Once or twice might have gone unnoticed, but when such incidents repeated, the snakes eventually bared their fangs.

A single Black Division member attacked him as he was leaving the gambling den—without knowing that Dong Bong-su was a ‘snake catcher.’ Thus, the first snake to be sacrificed was a low-ranking Black Division thug from the White Tiger Division. In truth, Dong Bong-su had not even known that the gambling den was operated by the White Tiger Division. All he had known was that there was a gambling den there. That was all.

Because of that incident, Dong Bong-su was placed on the White Tiger Division’s Black Register under the name “Gambling Demon” and became the target of pursuit, thereby achieving his intended objective.

And so it began.

The blood-soaked counter-hunt massacre.