Hoarding In Hell [EN]: Chapter 80

80. If That’s the Case (3)

Hyeon-woo examined the Ratman King’s condition, but upon closer inspection, it was slightly different from Yanok. It was smaller, more feeble, and seemed less intelligent. However, to Hyeon-woo, they all looked the same.

‘Honestly, how am I supposed to tell hamsters apart?’

The Ratman King wiggled its nose again and squeaked at Hyeon-woo. It sounded cute, but it didn’t seem like a friendly greeting.

As if responding to the hamster Ratman’s voice, squeaking sounds began to echo from all directions.

Squeak, squeak-squeak, squeak-squeak-squeak.

The voices that had seemed cute quickly filled the plaza, becoming overwhelmingly loud. Hyeon-woo could see the darkness filling with red eyes.

An overwhelming number of rats that could crush him to death if they charged.

Soon, the hamster Ratman King in the center of the plaza began to move.

It arrogantly turned to Hyeon-woo with the gaze of a king delivering a death sentence.

[Ratman King (LV 40)]

[The ‘Hell’s Strongest’ title increases stats relative to level.]

“King, my ass. Just an unlucky rat.”

At that moment, the Ratman King froze. The moment an unknown energy seized its heart, the Ratman King couldn’t move an inch.

Even its heartbeat was slowing down. It could see the human approaching slowly. No, the creature it had thought was just a lost, pitiful human was never human to begin with.

It was a demon come to behead it.

Thud.

And with a brief noise,

The Ratman King’s torso was sliced in half by the lightly swung blade of Tam.

Hyeon-woo felt a sense of emptiness at the sight of the Ratman King being cut so easily, as if slicing through tofu.

He barely felt anything touching Tam’s blade. It felt like just slicing through a rat-shaped block of tofu. But the Ratman King’s corpse, cut in half and lying on the ground, was real.

“Kings get the guillotine or hanging. Got it?”

“Kkeeeeek!”

The answer came not from the severed Ratman King, but from all around the plaza.

The moment they saw the Ratman King’s head fall, the Ratmen went berserk and began to charge. Hyeon-woo was honestly a little disgusted by the sheer number of them.

“Looks like you’re upset that I killed your king, but that’s because you haven’t tasted democracy yet.”

Hyeon-woo muttered cheerfully.

“And democracy thrives on blood.”

It would be good to just charge in and kill them all. But Hyeon-woo suddenly wanted to try out the new item he had acquired.

The moment Hyeon-woo clapped Oshet’s six-handed palms together, the Ratmen startled and froze.

And when Hyeon-woo stretched his hands out to the side again, silver chains flowed out as if by magic.

“Thrall.”

Hyeon-woo resurrected the Ratman King, whom he had just killed, as a thrall [a being bound to serve a master]. The Ratman King, who had just been split in half, began to slowly regenerate.

Soon, the Ratman King, now whole again, had silver chains, the restraints of a covenant, wrapped around its neck.

Hyeon-woo glanced at the Ratman King’s condition. The Ratman King’s eyes were burning with a bleak purple light.

Despite being a higher level than Hyeon-woo, it felt utterly willing to obey any command.

“Good.”

Hyeon-woo smiled cheerfully and gave the order.

“Now, kill each other.”

The Ratman King took out a whistle hanging around its neck and gave an order in a strange tone.

The Ratmen who received the order looked at each other in confusion. But only for a moment. One Ratman stabbed the Ratman next to it in the side.

The first scream erupted, and fear and shock swept through the area. What followed was a desperate struggle for survival.

Watching the hellish scene unfold with all its might, Hyeon-woo suddenly thought of Yanok.

Come to think of it, in Difficulty: Hell, the Overlord was acting as a leader. He didn’t know if that guy was democratically elected, but it seemed like one was as good as another.

Hyeon-woo couldn’t help but laugh as he looked at his past self being tormented by the Ratmen in Difficulty: Hell and the hellish scene before him.

There, unknown monsters from beyond the universe created a hellish landscape, but here, he was no different from such a being.

Compared to the monsters of Difficulty: Hell, how fragile this world was?

Hyeon-woo chuckled as he watched the eerie slaughter.

“Cute, insignificant, and lovable creatures, this world is really worth protecting, isn’t it?”

***

With a bang, the dungeon transformation stopped. Several hunters fell as the violently rising room suddenly halted, but they quickly regained their balance. Then, one side of the wall opened, revealing a long corridor. The hunters waited tensely for something to emerge. But after waiting for a long time, nothing came out.

“……Should we go in?”

“It seems like we have no other choice.”

It was an area that no one who had visited the Guillotine Dungeon had ever been to.

Typically, the Guillotine Dungeon was only known up to the second objective, the werewolf.

This scale of dungeon transformation, and the existence of a hidden passage, were all new information.

As they entered the corridor and moved forward, Jeok Nabi raised her hand with a tense expression. She didn’t say anything, but everyone understood what it meant almost simultaneously.

“……I smell blood.”

A strong stench of blood was flowing out, so intense that even someone with a stuffy nose couldn’t ignore it. And the screams, groans, and cries faintly filling the corridor were also growing louder.

The hunters were already breathing heavily.

Advancing into the deep darkness towards unknown monsters was enough to awaken old fears in even the most experienced hunters.

Kaaa!

“It’s coming!”

At the same time as Yoo Seong-yeon’s shout, a Ratman ran madly out of the darkness and collided with them.

The Ratman blocked with its shield, but the impact was so strong that it almost pushed him back. With a thud, the Ratman that had collided with the shield collapsed to the ground.

“Is it dead……?”

The Ratman had died from the impact of hitting the shield, it had been hit so hard. As everyone looked at each other with bewildered expressions, they quickly realized that it was not something to laugh about.

“What the hell was this guy running from?”

However, they were not given time to think deeply about it. Screams erupted one after another from beyond the corridor, and the sound of footsteps began to be heard.

It was an overwhelming number.

Yoo Seong-yeon quickly put the defense team in front, and Yohan cast a blessing. Jeok Nabi prepared to attack, raising her aura.

“The corridor is narrow! If we follow the strategy, we can block them……”

Jeok Nabi’s words trailed off.

The condition of the monsters running towards them was strange. It wasn’t the blind hostility or madness that they had seen so far.

The monsters, foaming at the mouth, were throwing away their weapons and even grabbing and knocking down each other as they ran madly.

The faces of the defense team at the front turned pale at the speed.

“We, we have to run away!”

“Where to?!”

Jeok Nabi snapped at the hunter’s terrified scream. The hunter’s words were not wrong. This number was not manageable.

But if they ran back, there was only a blocked room. Fighting in that room would only make things worse.

Jeok Nabi turned off her aura and quickly stuck to the defense team.

Bang! The monsters collided with the force of a tsunami hitting a breakwater. The defense team was pushed straight back by the impact alone.

It was thanks to Yohan’s blessing that they weren’t thrown out and trampled. And the red aura emanating from Jeok Nabi’s body surrounded the shield and decomposed the flesh of the monsters clinging to it.

“Kill them!”

The hunters of the attack team rushed towards the monsters, but they didn’t even need to be active.

Thanks to the monsters running madly from behind and pushing the monsters in front of them, the ones caught between the shield and the monsters were being crushed to death. The defense team even turned away from the gruesome sight.

“We can’t hold out for long!”

If the defense team collapsed, everyone would die. It was a desperate situation. If the monsters were fighting calmly with reason, there would at least be a possibility, but in a situation where they had to worry about being crushed to death, there was no way.

Jeok Nabi realized that they couldn’t solve it with their own strength and reluctantly turned to Yohan.

Yohan calmly took something out of his pocket.

It was a golden ball. Yohan lightly made the sign of the cross and threw it into the middle of the monster horde.

At the same time, he flapped his hands and cast some kind of skill. A translucent curtain of light purple rose up between the monsters and the hunters, separating them.

At that moment, a fierce explosion engulfed the corridor in a huge flame. But no heat or debris could cross the light purple curtain.

“Good heavens, the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch! I knew it existed!”

“D&W actually made something like that?”

“No, you idiot. That’s not something made by the lab, it’s a rare item called a Flame Orb. The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch is nonsense [a reference to the movie ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’]. I heard it sometimes comes out of a 4-star dungeon in Syria, but I never thought I’d actually see it.”

Explosions or fragments created by humans cannot inflict significant damage on monsters. Only items with mana processing are possible.

All the hunters could see the monsters burning and knew that it was definitely a flame made of mana.

It was then.

With a thud, a werewolf collided with the barrier. The impact and fire were blocked, but the werewolf’s screams were clearly heard thanks to the strange barrier that didn’t block sound.

Everyone felt strange watching the werewolf, who didn’t care that its flesh and fur were burning, charge at them.

“What the……”

Thud, thud! The werewolf’s screams were only brief. The corridor, which they thought had been cleared by the explosion of the Flame Orb, was being filled with new monsters.

The monsters charged at the barrier as they had done before. The same things happened as before. This time, the monsters being crushed to death were even more visible because they weren’t covered by shields.

“H, how long will this barrier last?”

Yohan always had a serious expression, but he thought for a moment with an even more serious expression, then raised five fingers.

But everyone didn’t immediately understand what it meant.

“5 hours?”

“Judging by his expression, it’s 5 seconds.”

Yoo Seong-yeon said to Jeok Nabi with a dark expression.

“This is Priest Yohan’s ultimate skill, Veil of Benevolence. It creates an almost absolute defensive wall. But I heard that he can’t use it for more than 5 minutes. He must have used a lot of mana to assist us, so he won’t be able to do it any longer. We have to find a way out in the meantime.”

“But this was a one-way road. There’s no way to get out……”

“Can’t we induce the dungeon to transform again? If we can somehow return it to its original form……”

They only had vague measures. Yohan seemed to have decided that he had to actively resolve the urgency of the situation and came closer to say something. But no one could speak German.

“Okay, okay, we good. Okay? No problem.”

Yoo Seong-yeon tried to communicate with broken English, but it seemed to make things even more frustrating.

“Ah, damn white guys. Can’t they even learn English? How can they only speak their own language?”

Yohan also started using some other language as if he was frustrated. But it was the same as not understanding.

“What is he saying?”

“It sounds like Latin.”

It would be strange to understand. It was ancient Latin that was only used in churches.

In the end, there was no communication. As time passed, Yohan visibly became more tired.

Yohan had already used a lot of mana. Using his ultimate skill for 5 minutes was clearly quite a strain. It meant that the situation was so urgent that there was no other way.

The future was bleak.

The monsters were trampling on each other and climbing up, their heads reaching the ceiling.

There was a limit to the amount they could block. Once the Veil of Benevolence was over, there was no way to hold out. Yohan might know how to survive, but no one could guarantee which of the remaining hunters would survive.

A sense of resignation spread among the hunters. They were looking at the screaming monsters in front of them with a sense of helplessness.

“Team leader.”

A hunter said with a hollow laugh.

“I never thought that we, who have even cleared 4-star dungeons, would be wiped out in a 3-star.”

“No one could have predicted this. It would have been nice if Team Leader Lee Ji-tae was here……”

If Lee Ji-tae had been there, he would have somehow boosted the morale and prepared for battle, leading them to victory. He had the power and charisma to do so.

But there were only inexperienced people in this place. As Yohan visibly showed signs of fatigue, Jeok Nabi and Yoo Seong-yeon exchanged glances.

“Priest Yohan, please remove the veil now.”

They didn’t know what she was saying, but they seemed to understand the meaning.

Yohan’s eyes became even darker. Jeok Nabi had chosen a way to save even one person, to save at least Yohan.

To do that, they had to save even a little of Yohan’s strength.

“We have to go out and tell them what happened here.”

Jeok Nabi said, tapping the body cam on Yohan’s chest. Yohan nodded.

The hunters looked at the monsters beyond the veil with firm expressions. After taking a short breath, Yohan began to withdraw the Veil of Benevolence.

A monster broke through the weakened veil and poked its head out. A werewolf emerged, trampling on the already crushed corpses of its kin.

Yohan’s gunshot rang out. The werewolf collapsed, but it was just the beginning. Soon, monsters began to pour out madly.

Belated fear settled on the faces of the hunters who had calmly resigned themselves to death.

Thanks to their firm resolve, they were able to face the fear of death. If they had previously had a strong feeling that they wouldn’t die, this time they belatedly felt fear after realizing that even Yohan had given up.

“Ah, aaaaah!”

In the end, one of the defense team threw down his shield and started running away.

Yoo Seong-yeon cursed and tried to catch him, but gave up and filled the gap in the defense. There was no choice. But he could feel the formation wavering, starting with him.

“Stand and die! Don’t fall shamefully!”

That’s what he said, but Yoo Seong-yeon also wanted to run away right now. There was only one way to shake off this fear.

Yoo Seong-yeon screamed and charged forward. If he was going to die anyway, it was better to die at the front.

But at that moment, Yoo Seong-yeon discovered someone going ahead of him.

It was Yohan.

Why? Was there a way? He thought, but Yohan punched the werewolf in the face.

The hunters were dumbfounded, but they thought that Yohan was fighting desperately as they watched the werewolf rolling around.

“Even the priest is fighting, what are you doing! Fight!”

The hunters shouted and charged. But Yoo Seong-yeon’s thoughts were completely different.

Yohan didn’t charge bravely.

He was running to die.

Yohan was deliberately throwing himself into death.

But Yoo Seong-yeon couldn’t continue thinking because of the Ratman that collided with him.

Bang, thud.

Groans and shouts echoed from all directions. He could hear half-sobbing sounds. Someone must be dying.

Yoo Seong-yeon thought that his death was not heroic, but it was brave enough. He screamed loudly and crushed the Ratman in front of him with his shield.

“Aaaaaah!”

Yoo Seong-yeon saw a werewolf warrior with white mane running towards him. It was the guy who would bring him death. Yoo Seong-yeon gladly raised his shield.

But at that moment, the werewolf warrior disappeared from in front of him with a cracking sound.

“Dogs are relatives of hamsters. Got it?”

Along with nonsense that made no sense.

Yoo Seong-yeon made eye contact with the man in front of him.

It was Kang Hyeon-woo.