Chapter 171 – #37_Friendship?(4)
#169
1.
20 seconds.
That was the time it took for Sharon to defeat all the remaining homunculi.
The moment Sharon’s wand, adorned with emeralds of verdant green, shone.
A small storm erupted inside the department store.
Watching the vortex that had formed in the narrow indoor space tear apart the homunculi, which even a sword couldn’t easily cut, like dried squid, Siwoo couldn’t help but be amazed.
In the middle of the department store, which had become a mess as if a terrorist attack had occurred, Sharon signaled the end of the fight by lightly tapping the end of her wand on the floor.
“Whew…. That’s done. Let’s collect them quickly.”
“Okay, I’ll help.”
“I’ll do it quickly now. You rest a bit. You’ve worked hard.”
After finishing off the stragglers, Sharon used every last drop of her magic to telekinetically stir the numerous corpses all at once.
Unlike Siwoo, whose attempts at even slightly complex telekinesis resulted in a mess, Sharon, with her solid fundamentals, remained composed even while manipulating over a hundred objects.
The cores she extracted were also very clean, as if a surgeon had removed them.
Sharon, putting each core flying in the air into her pocket, said,
“Siwoo, have you ever learned martial arts?”
“No, I haven’t.”
A slightly ambiguous atmosphere flowed between the two.
It wasn’t clear if the crisis had completely passed, and they felt uneasy about whether today’s events might be a prelude to some future accident.
However, for Sharon, it was a chance to harvest a large number of cores after a proper hunt, and for Siwoo, it was an opportunity to confirm that the newly established law of shadows was very effective, so neither of them felt entirely uncomfortable.
“But how do you fight so well? It was like watching a movie.”
“I don’t know. I was surprised too because my body moved first.”
Sharon raised her voice as if excited, but Siwoo was the most bewildered.
He had caught so many homunculi, but there was no strain on his body at all.
He was only slightly out of breath, as if he had just finished a mid-distance run.
It was proof that he had moved very efficiently, unlike how he had used his body recklessly until now.
“Oh, right, you must have served in the military too? Did you learn it in the military?”
“No, it’s not that kind of place.”
Sharon continued with strange speculations in a slightly excited tone.
On her cheeks, dimples of undisguised joy were blooming.
Indeed, this amount would be enough to ease her debt worries for a while.
In total, 103 cores ended up in Sharon’s hands.
Sharon looked happily at the heavy pouch filled with homunculus cores.
With this amount, she could easily get 100 million, no, 150 million won.
“Siwoo.”
“What?”
“I’ve been thinking…”
Sharon approached Siwoo, who was resting on a shattered display stand nearby.
Sharon paused, watching him remove only his helmet from his armor and sweep back his sweat-soaked hair.
Honestly, Siwoo looked kind of cool today.
“If I exchange these, I’ll give you 80%. It’s because of you.”
“What are you talking about? Our original contract was that you would keep what we hunted and teach me magic instead.”
“Still, I don’t think this is right. It’s not just a few pennies.”
That was a condition Sharon had set, assuming that he would hardly participate in the hunt.
But today’s abundant spoils were purely the result of his power, weren’t they?
It didn’t seem right to bring up an old verbal agreement and say, ‘This is all Sharon’s!’
Siwoo smiled and then sat down on the floor with a thud.
And he gently stroked Sharon’s head.
He always liked seeing her face the difficulties honestly without resorting to shortcuts, no matter how hard her situation was.
“It’s okay, a promise is a promise. It’s weirder to change my mind now. Besides, I’m not in a desperate need of money right now.”
“Uh….”
“You take it all. I’m satisfied with using what I learned from you in today’s hunt.”
Sharon watched with a dazed look as Siwoo’s hand stroked her head.
It was just a head pat, but her heart was beating more wildly than when she had shown her chest, or when her chest had been touched.
Why were her heels bouncing like this?
Why was she about to break into a silly, untimely smile?
Sharon, thinking she might show a foolish, slack-jawed face, hurriedly covered her mouth and fidgeted.
Siwoo, realizing her flustered reaction, took his hand away, feeling a bit awkward.
Come to think of it, Odile also disliked having her head touched without permission.
“Let’s go back.”
Sharon turned around abruptly, with a composed, or rather, a demeanor that was trying hard to appear composed.
The danger seemed to have passed, and the cores had been collected, so there was no need to stay in this desolate place.
She would go home, order some late-night food, and watch a movie leisurely.
Sharon inwardly resolved to pay for tonight’s late-night snack.
“Thank you so much, Siwoo.”
“What are you thanking me for?”
“For always being considerate and helping me.”
“Don’t say that. We’re in a symbiotic relationship. It’s a win-win situation.”
Sharon, unable to look him in the eye properly, expressed her gratitude, and Siwoo followed her, trudging along.
Siwoo was also slightly embarrassed by the heartwarming atmosphere that had been created for the first time in a while.
He had been in a quandary about how to treat Sharon after having mindlessly enjoyed her ‘Wanna touch my chest? event’ in the morning.
Thanks to the series of incidents, it seemed like it would naturally be buried as if it had never happened.
They went down the escalator to the underground shopping area connecting the department store basement and Sinchon Station.
They were on guard in case monsters might pop out, but thankfully, there were no signs of that.
The inside of the darkened shopping area was eerie, though.
“Huh?”
Then Sharon stopped abruptly in her tracks.
And she looked at Siwoo with a bewildered gaze.
“Why?”
“Didn’t you hear something?”
“What sound?”
“I thought I felt a big rumble a little while ago.”
“No? I…”
He was about to say he hadn’t heard anything.
But at the same time, a heavy noise echoed loudly through the building.
-Thump!
Siwoo and Sharon looked around to find where the sound was coming from.
-Creek… Thump….
Earrings and rings on display rattled and rolled on the glass display cases.
The emergency exit signs flickered as if in their death throes.
The vibration rising from the tips of their feet on the ground made their bodies tremble.
“This is…”
The ceiling cracked like a parched rice paddy.
They could feel the concrete and steel bars that had been supporting the building groaning, splitting, and bending.
And they realized it with the continuous vibrations and noises.
“W-what’s going on?”
That’s right.
This noise wasn’t a matter of where it was coming from.
It was the terrible scream the entire building was letting out.
“Come here!”
Siwoo, sensing the danger, grabbed Sharon’s wrist.
“Whoa!”
Sharon was pulled in and gently embraced by Siwoo.
It was ominous.
It wasn’t that she didn’t think it was too much, but wasn’t this a sign of collapse to anyone?
Siwoo, holding her, immediately amplified his magic and activated coordinate movement.
“S-Siwoo…!”
“Just stay still!”
“This isn’t the time, we have to run away!”
“I’m trying to run away, so trust me and stay still!”
The two talked as if shouting over the increasingly loud roar.
Sharon, who didn’t know much about Siwoo’s coordinate movement, urged him anxiously.
Coordinate movement was a very tricky magic.
There were countless variables to input, and the amount of magic consumed increased tremendously in proportion to the distance and the number of passengers.
The best thing would be to move to their house in one go, but there didn’t seem to be time to calculate leisurely.
Therefore, the destination was set to be near the department store.
-Kwa-kwa-kwa-kwa-kwang!
A sound they had never heard in their lives.
No, rather than a sound, it was a sonic boom that had already reached the realm of shockwaves, and they could see the building collapsing from the far end of the hallway.
Like dominoes falling, the wave of destruction rushed towards Siwoo and Sharon.
Even if the law of shadows was an efficient magic, he didn’t have the confidence to withstand that amount of impact.
He couldn’t hear it well, but it seemed like Sharon was screaming amidst the noise that was making his ears ring.
And when a large chunk of concrete fell right in front of Siwoo’s feet.
Siwoo barely managed to succeed in coordinate movement.
2.
The 12-story department store collapses.
What Siwoo saw after successfully moving outside the department store was the sight of a large building, which he had to tilt his head back to see the top of, collapsing helplessly.
-Kugugugung
Mass and position are energy.
Since a mass of stone weighing over tens of thousands of tons was falling from tens of meters in the air, the department store was releasing energy close to a mass weapon in all directions just by collapsing.
With sound, with impact, with vibration.
Perhaps because it was five floors underground, it looked as if it was being sucked into the ground.
Glass shards scattering in all directions, and concrete chunks larger than people, poured down like hail.
Those heavy objects didn’t reach where Siwoo and Sharon were, but dust and debris spread like a sandstorm in the desert, covering Siwoo, who was holding Sharon.
He didn’t know how long it took to build that building.
But it didn’t even take 20 seconds for the department store, which was usually crowded with Chinese people, to turn into a pile of construction waste.
“Ugh… ugh… ugh… hieugh…. I almost, almost died…”
Sharon burrowed into Siwoo’s arms, as if terrified.
And that was understandable, it had been a truly close call.
The hallway collapsing like a sandcastle washed away by the tide, the sonic boom that had made her ears temporarily deaf, and the collapse that had come right up to her nose.
Sharon had thought she was going to be crushed to death.
And if it hadn’t been for Siwoo, that would have happened.
No matter how much of a witch she was, it was impossible to offset the impact of a collapsing building without magic.
“Are you okay?”
“Okay? I was so… so scared… I almost peed my pants. Really…”
“I thought things were going too smoothly today. My fate is a bit rough… but still, this is a pretty good defense, right?”
He threw out a light joke mixed with truth to lighten the mood, but Sharon was still trembling slightly.
Actually, Siwoo wasn’t completely okay either.
If he hadn’t timed it right, Siwoo would have been flattened inside the building as well.
But was it because of experience?
Perhaps because he had been through a lot recently, it didn’t feel like a huge stress.
Besides, what would happen if he showed weakness when Sharon was trembling like this?
“Look, are you hurt anywhere?”
“I’m not hurt anywhere… j-just a moment… my body is stiff… I can’t move…”
Sharon was frozen stiff, clutching Siwoo’s collar tightly.
He was wondering how to comfort her, and then he gently patted her back. Sharon then let out a rough breath as if she had been holding it in.
Looking at her face, tears were welling up in the corners of her eyes.
“I think it was a bad idea to go underground. This must be the work of the homunculi too, right?”
If not, it was too coincidental.
The building collapsing as soon as they entered the underground shopping area.
“I don’t know if they have that much intelligence. Ah, I don’t know either… my legs are giving out… let’s rest, let’s go back and rest no matter what.”
Sharon groaned and barely let go of Siwoo’s clothes, then squatted down on the spot.
But unfortunately, the two didn’t have time to rest peacefully.
“……..”
“……..”
Humans naturally fall silent when they see an amazing sight, when they see a scene that is beyond common sense.
That was the case with Sharon and Siwoo now.
Far away.
Probably where the entrance of the department store ‘used to be’.
As the dust settled and the debris cleared in the summer breeze, they could see it.
The sight of a huge beast, the size of a decent building, staring straight at Sharon and Siwoo.
And it immediately began to run, kicking off the ground.
Sharon’s face turned white.
“S-Siwoo, we have to run away. That’s… that’s not good.”
The ground shook every time it rolled on the ground.
Despite being a quadruped, its huge body, which seemed to be at least 30 meters tall, was very similar to the homunculi they had been diligently beating up today, perhaps its mother.
But if it was just about size, Siwoo, who had gained some confidence in his skills, and Sharon, who had watched his performance, wouldn’t be terrified.
What made them feel the crisis more than anything were the countless red eyes that were densely packed all over its body, so many that it was meaningless to count them.
Siwoo was so shocked that he even let out a hollow laugh.
“I knew my luck was too good… how many are there?”
Siwoo’s fate, which was being dragged into a mess that was so absurd, was faithfully leading him down a thorny path today as well.
Coordinate movement was not something that could be used so frequently.
Moreover, the calculation required quite a long time.
It would take at least 30 seconds to escape with Sharon, but looking at the mother dog running towards them, it was obvious that they would be trampled underfoot in less than 10 seconds.
Siwoo lifted Sharon into a princess carry.
Sharon wasn’t very heavy to begin with, and with the power of the armor added, he didn’t feel her weight at all.
“W-what are you doing!”
“You don’t have any magic right now! This is faster!”
And he immediately turned around and began to run towards the boundary of the otherworld barrier far away.
