Return of the Apocalypse Knight

Chapter 16: South (2)

I had no intention of giving the gun to the woman who reached out, but the next thing I knew, I was handing it over.

“You’re supposed to put mana into those little arrowheads, right?”

She took the gun and handled it as if it were her own.

Right down to reassembling the magazine and zeroing it.

She remembered everything I knew to do with the gun.

I let her fire it at the next undead we encountered, just in case.

“It’s like when you shoot an arrow. You zero it, and when the target is in the center of the scope, you anchor yourself with mana and pull the trigger. Later on, depending on the distance, you take into account things like wind and humidity…….”

-Ta-da!

Before I could finish my sentence, the cute woman fired her gun.

The target was a half-rotting elk.

It was a sight to behold as she lined up her scope and fired at the charging undead, but what followed was even more spectacular.

-Puck!

The elk’s head exploded from hundreds of meters away as the charging undead lurched forward.

Unlike when I smashed its head off, the undead hit by her bullet stopped moving immediately.

The bullets were loaded with mana.

“You can inject mana into guns…no, even into weapons from this world.”

“It’s trickier than putting it into an arrow, but I think I can.”

Zahina smiled for the first time since she saw the fallen elk carcass.

She cradled the gun in her arms and said to me,

“Maybe this weapon can help me, too?”

I thought she was emotionless because she didn’t change her expression, but it turns out she was emotional too.

She felt that her weakened abilities were hurting the people she was traveling with.

Her healing abilities were great, and her other abilities helped her survive, but her combat abilities weren’t great.

She seemed to be thinking about it.

Once that was resolved, her face showed expression for the first time.

She was a pretty girl after all.

Anyway, her words were true.

“It would be a great help, Zahina……if you could use a weapon from this world…….”

It was always helpful to be able to use ranged weapons against the undead, especially since it was a powerful ranged weapon that could be sourced from this world.

By the way, is it a racial trait? Being good with ranged weapons?

Even though it was undead, that corpse elk was running toward us with more bounce than it had in life.

I took it down with a single headshot from my sniper rifle.

As expected, the eared race seemed to be a race similar to elves who were good at archery.

However, the eared woman shook her head at my question.

TLN: I’m just using elf since it’s easier to understand but the official name of the race it’s The Eared Ones.

“That’s not true, my race doesn’t have that trait, I’m just a nature magician, and I manipulated the atmosphere and the wind to make this arrowhead fly where I wanted it to go.”

So it wasn’t a race trait, it was just her?

But not an arrow changing the direction of a bullet it’s very impressive.

Apparently science goes out the window when mana is involved.

It didn’t matter if it was a race trait or an individual trait, as long as it was useful to us.

There was just one problem that remained to be solved.

“I don’t have many bullets left…….”

I zeroed in, fired a few shots myself, and found myself with no magazines left.

It looked like I was going to have to get a good gun, or at least more bullets for this gun, to make her useful.

However, I wasn’t too worried.

If this was South Korea, the ceasefire country I knew, guns shouldn’t be hard to come by.

So we headed south through the forest and once again we found a human trail.

Again, there were no bodies on the trail.

Instead, as we continued along the path, we found an inhabited house, a hut.

Dilapidated, crumbling houses dotted along the mountain passes in the valley.

They were authentic Dumesangol houses, but I stopped walking when I saw them.

They weren’t moving corpses or North Korean trenches, but the houses of my previous life, which I was seeing for the first time in this life.

Unfortunately, I didn’t expect to find rural hospitality here.

There were people hovering around the house, like guarding their territory.

Still, I couldn’t complain to them. None of them were alive.

“This is a dead town.”

Hoffman muttered softly as he looked down at the houses.

He was right, this village of a few houses lining the mountain road was a village of the dead.

The village had not been overrun by the Demon King’s army, but it seemed that all who remained were dead.

Just like in the world beyond, the weak, the elderly, and the babies died because they couldn’t overcome the death energy, and the dead killed others until the entire town became undead.

I’ve seen too many villages like this in my time fighting demons and we have cleansed them all.

“Weapons from this world make a lot of noise, so we’d better not use them here.”

We’ve seen them work against the undead, but guns are inherently too loud.

Using guns against the undead in the backcountry could have attracted more of them.

Besides, we didn’t need guns to cleanse a small undead village like this.

The elf nodded at my words, and I turned to Hoffman with instructions, drawing my sword.

“I’ll have you and Zahina follow behind.”

“Understood.”

It’s customary to have a platoon-sized group of men behind a knight, but I had no choice since I had no men.

A mountain soldier with mana and a child of the divine tree were not that much of a shortage compared to a platoon-sized force.

I’d just have to do the rest.

Sword in hand, I sprinted down the mountain path below.

One step, two steps, picking up speed, I quickly approached the first dilapidated house.

I could make out the half-open door and wall, blackened with blood, and the yellowed plants in the small garden on the other side of the road.

And, of course, the old people walking along the side of the road, shaking.

When they were far away, they were old people who moved slowly like people of their age, but have they become younger?

As I approached, they threw themselves at me with a half-crushed face and a decayed body.

I looked at the old couple and muttered to myself.

“May you rest in peace now.”

With those words of repose, I swung my sword at the two charging undead.

-Clang, clang.

The mana-filled sword sliced through the old man’s arm, decapitating him.

An ordinary undead whose throat was cut by a mana-loaded sword could not maintain its body.

The old man’s body collapsed.

-Kaaaah!

His wife popped out from behind his collapsing body.

The grandmother’s disheveled white hair dazzled her eyes.

It may have just been luck, but it was a great move but then again, I was a knight who was an expert when it came to the undead.

I rolled over onto my back, accepting the grandfather’s crumbling body.

The grandmother’s hands brushed over me as I lay on my back.

I swung my sword once more.

-clang.

The undead, decapitated along with both arms, fell over me and onto the floor.

The old woman undead never rose again.

I pushed aside the headless undead covering my body, picked myself up, and ran down the street.

As I passed by the next house, I could feel movement inside.

It looked like there were undead inside.

However, I pointed my finger at the house and ran past it.

Other villagers were running down the street.

Now that I was visible to the undead, in a town this small, it was inevitable that all the remaining undead in town would come running.

If I didn’t clean up the undead out there quickly, it could become quite a nuisance.

I made my way down the road, crushing each villager I came across.

As in my previous life, this mountain village seemed to have only the old people left.

I didn’t see a single young person among the onrushing undead.

A grandmother with her chest hollowed out and an old man with his arm severed, even an old man who was missing a leg and had trouble moving around.

They all ran at me as if they were young but these ordinary undead were easier than the bony soldiers I had fought to the death.

I took down one old man after another as they ran at me.

I ran down the street until I reached the last house, then stopped.

When I stopped, I turned around to see the path I had traveled and saw nine corpses lying on the ground.

It was as if a brutal demonic time had attacked the village.

The first time I saw it, I was so shocked that I vomited up everything I had eaten, but now I could only stare at the sight in disbelief.

I stood there and waited for a while. Thankfully, there were no more undead charging at me.

I then told Hoffman, who was waiting up the mountain path, to search the houses.

As I watched Hoffman climb over the low wall of the house in my direction, I began to slowly backtrack.

With my senses heightened to the max, I walked along the road, scanning the houses that lined the road at every turn.

I felt no signs of life in any of the houses other than the second one, but I had to be careful when fighting the undead.

There were more than a few people who had died as a result of their mistakes.

Fortunately, I didn’t feel any signs of the undead until I returned to the second house.

Some undead can hide their tracks with magic or specialized skills, but it was unlikely that an ordinary undead in this part of the countryside would have such skills.

When I arrived at the second house, Hoffman stepped out of the half-open door.

“You’re here already?”

Hoffman stared at me in surprise.

“Because this is the only house I’ve ever been in that I could feel any signs of life.”

Hoffman looked confused at my words, like he didn’t know whether to believe me or not.

A regular soldier like Hoffman would have checked every house, so it was only natural that he would look like that.

“I’m sorry, sir. The other knights had a hard time recognizing the undead hiding in the house, too………….”

So it wasn’t just the soldier.

“Trust me, after fighting the undead for so long, I’ve gotten pretty good at recognizing their signs.”

Hoffman barely nodded at my words.

“If the Skull Slayer says so, I suppose I should…….I guess I’ll believe it.”

Believing me because of my nickname, should I be grateful for the nickname?

“What was the undead inside?”

“It was a dog, and judging by the way it was tied up, it must have been a family pet.”

Hoffman told me about the undead inside and I nodded.

It was a common occurrence for domestic animals to turn undead.

“But this is a different world,” he said, “and there were a lot of things in the house I’d never seen before.”

I let his words sink in, and went through the door he’d come out of.

As I stepped through the door, I was greeted with a view of an ordinary country house.

A small, walled yard with an old house and barn attached to it.

On one side of the yard, I could see a cemented-in water tap and a doghouse with a smashed undead dog tied up.

I crossed the yard, feeling a strange mixture of emotions.

“But that dog doesn’t look like it’s been dead for long, nor do the undead the knight defeated. The skeleton soldiers I saw when I went looking for the knight were clearly undead that had been dead for a long time.”

Beside me, Hoffman was still talking, but I wasn’t paying attention to him.

This house, like this town, reminded me of my previous life.

Besides, there was something else I needed to find in this house.

Fortunately, I found it right away.

A pretty woman was standing on the floor, staring at the object.

“It’s a painting of a beautiful woman, but what is she drinking? There seems to be some writing underneath the painting.”

Zahina had it all wrong.

What she saw was not a painting, but a photograph, a picture of an actress holding a glass of soju.

The words underneath were not letters, but numbers.

What she was looking at was a calendar issued by the soju company, a calendar with blood on it.

I stared at the year on the calendar.