Chapter 64 – Promise (7)

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Translated by Seoulbound

Read it only at Novelbyu.com & Utoon.net

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We followed the remaining footprint traces.

Not far from the spot where we discovered the bloodstains, we found a pile of corpses.

The pure white military uniforms covered in snow looked familiar.

“It is Team 2.”

We had already expected that Team 2 had caused internal conflict, but facing the truly brutally dead corpses was another story.

“Crazy… Did soldiers from the same zone really shoot each other? No, Lord Haydam, wait a moment…!”

As I dashed forward and began to flip over the corpses to check their identities, Plato was startled and pushed me back.

“I will do it. No matter how it is you, Lord Haydam, this is not right.”

Well, sure.

There was no need to deliberately show a ten-year-old child searching through corpses.

Plato stood up only after inspecting the corpses one by one.

Even in this cold, beads of sweat were formed on Plato’s forehead.

With a breathing sound that could not be distinguished as relief or a sigh, he said.

“The leader of Team 2 and the new officers are not here…”

I had thought the leader of Team 2 did this targeting the new officers.

Why were these guys dead here without Lucas and Bones?

Were there also guys who protested against what the Team 2 leader did mixed in?

Taking advantage of Plato being distracted to check a few corpses, it seemed some guys were shot in the back.

Every single one of them had their eyes wide open as if they died with a grievance.

‘Ah… the Team 2 leader dreamed of silencing them all.’

The commander stared down at the corpses with a cold gaze and spoke to us.

“Let us search further. Because the guys who are not here might be collapsed elsewhere.”

We left the corpses as they were and went deeper.

‘Ahead is…’

Seeing that the surrounding terrain looked familiar, ahead was the crevasse zone where we gave up and turned back.

Just as I was cautioning Plato, a voice was heard from ahead.

“Save… save m…!”

The sound of someone desperately shouting for help was buried in the blizzard and heard faintly.

After restraining Plato, who was about to run over there, and carefully advancing while scanning the snow with the muzzle of my gun to avoid crevasses, the voice was heard a bit more clearly.

“I’m here! Save me!”

The place where the sound came from was a crevasse crack about one meter wide.

It was a crack I had not seen when we came earlier.

It was probably covered with snow and invisible, but someone passing over it seemed to have fallen below.

Looking down, the leader of Team 2 was hanging onto the crevasse.

“Your Excellency!!”

As we poked our heads out from the cliff and looked down, the team leader wept with joy.

“Oh…! Oh God, thank you, thank you…!”

Only the leader of Team 2 was hanging.

I scanned below to see if anyone else had fallen, but all that was there were firearms and combat rations, seemingly dropped by the Team 2 leader, scattered in disarray on a protruding cliff slightly further down.

No traces of anyone else falling could be found.

‘The new officers fled in another direction.’

I asked the team leader who was still hanging.

“What happened?”

“F-First, if you could pull me up…”

Restraining the naive Plato who was about to pull him up immediately, I asked toward below again.

“I asked what happened. What are all those corpses over there?”

A brief flash of dismay crossed the team leader’s complexion.

He did not seem to expect that we would have come past the pile of corpses.

However, like a seasoned officer, explanations quickly poured out from his mouth.

“It is the doing of those new officer bastards! Bones and Lucas, those two rebelled…!”

“You claim two new officers did that?”

“Y-Yes…!!”

I squatted at the top and asked sarcastically.

“Then why are you hanging there?”

“T-That is because I was fleeing…!”

“That is what I mean. Why are you still hanging? If I had decided to kill you, I would have just tapped someone like you hanging here, sent you falling, and left, though?”

“T-Those bastards passed by without seeing that I fell here!”

“Is that so?”

“Yes! So please, Lord Haydam…”

I ignored the guy’s desperate pleading and continued speaking.

“If there were people running around trying to kill me, I would hold my breath and hang quietly… but your voice calling for help was clearly audible even from afar.”

“T-That is…”

“Are you going to keep lying? Let’s just speak honestly. If you speak honestly, even if I turn you over to martial law, I won’t drop you from here.”

Since he did not seem to understand even when I spoke nicely, I spoke a bit more coercively.

“We already ran into the new officers earlier. Why do you think father and I came all the way here? I roughly know the situation, so stop rolling your brain and spill it quickly.”

Plato stared at me with a shocked face.

It was a face expressing astonishment at how a person could lie like this without even catching their breath.

Still, it seemed plausible to the Team 2 leader that the commander, who had ordered the return, would not have come all the way here unless there was some reason, as his eyes wavered.

“You’re not answering? We are just leaving.”

“Wait a minute!!”

The hanging team leader panted and hesitated for a moment before beginning to confess, as if he had reached his limit.

“It is… Lieutenant General Max’s order…! I did not want to do such a thing to the new officers either, but I was blackmailed…!”

‘Lieutenant General Max?’

If it was Lieutenant General Max, was he not Bones’s adoptive father?

That guy threatened the leader of Team 2 to kill the new officers?

I glanced at the commander.

However, the commander briefly shook his head from side to side as if it was news to him too.

I looked down again and said.

“You will have to properly testify to those words even after you come up.”

“O-Of course! So please…”

“Plato.”

“I will help.”

Thinking it would not be easy for Plato alone to pull him up on the slippery snow, the commander stepped forward to grab one of the guy’s arms and try to pull him up.

It was at that very moment.

-Rumble!

Instantly, the ground shook, causing Plato and the commander’s bodies to lose their balance, and.

The two let go of the Team 2 leader whom they were holding in their hands.

“Argh!”

Up to that point, there was no problem, but the issue was that the earthquake did not stop there.

-Thud! Thud! Thud! Thud!

This was not just an earthquake.

The sound of something massive moving while shaking the axis of the earth.

‘A large-class monster!’

As I held my gun and tried to stand up, the feeling of the ground sinking beneath me crept up my spine.

‘Fuck!’

Because of the vibrations caused by the large-class monster’s movement, the edges of the crevasse began to collapse.

As I instinctively tried to curl up to prepare for the impact of falling, something shoved me hard to the side.

-Thud!

Receiving a strong impact and being pushed to the side, I collapsed onto the snow pile outside the collapsing crevasse.

“Damn it.”

The commander, who pushed me to the safety zone, spat out a quiet curse and crumbled downward.

“Father!”

I involuntarily screamed and tried to grab the commander, but he twisted his body to avoid my hand.

It was probably because he knew that if I grabbed him, we would fall together instead.

“Crazy!!”

I hurriedly looked down the cliff.

Fortunately, it seemed the three people, including the Team 2 leader, had fallen not to the bottom of the abyssal cliff but onto a glacier protruding in the middle.

Seeing that the three who squirmed for a moment soon raised their bodies, they did not seem to have sustained major injuries either.

“Are you okay?”

When I asked, the commander, who stood balancing himself, made an OK sign with his fingers as if he was fine.

Looking at the glacier they were standing on, the area seemed narrow, but it surrounded the cliff lengthways, looking like a terrain formed like stairs as the glacier was carved away by the earthquake earlier. Relief washed over me since it did not seem to be a terrain that would easily collapse.

The problem, however, was that the crevasse, which was originally about 1m wide, had carved down on both sides, turning into an enormous hole.

When it was 1m wide, even if something went wrong while pulling up, one could spread their arms to hold onto the gap, but now a single mistake would send them falling down a thousand-foot cliff.

‘Can I pull them up by myself…?’

I had ropes.

Since I had already put ropes and firearms aplenty in my inventory.

Until now, because there were watching eyes, I had used only the supplied firearms, but actually, I also possessed firearms with better destructive power than the gun I was currently holding.

These were weapons I packed when going to hunt the furry crocodile last time, and after returning, I reported them lost due to the Unicorn zone player and kept them for myself.

Since I had verified that my body was sturdier than I thought, it would be fine to pull out and use another gun stored in the inventory.

Anyway, I had ropes and a sturdy body, but even so, pulling up adult men by myself was too much.

In the first place, even if I offered to pull them up, the commander and Plato would obviously refuse.

It would be nice if there was somewhere to tie the rope, but this place was a snowy plain.

The commander and Plato would know better than anyone that there was no such thing.

‘I must find the new officers.’

If I offered to pull them up with ropes by joining forces with those guys, the two of us wouldn’t refuse either.

In the meantime, Plato and the commander seemed to be subduing and binding the Team 2 leader.

They could make such a judgment even in that situation.

He was not the commander for nothing.

I spoke toward the bottom.

“I will find Lucas and Bones. If the three of us pull you up together, we’ll manage somehow.”

“Will you be okay alone?”

The commander also seemed to have noticed that the earthquake earlier was due to the movement of a large-class monster.

“If I move alone, there will be no worry of being detected.”

If a small child like me wearing a white military uniform ran around on a blizzard-stricken snowy field, it would be difficult to pinpoint my location with the naked eye.

Moreover, since the smell of blood would vibrate from the pile of corpses discovered earlier, there would be no worry of drawing aggro to my side.

Judging by the fact that the footsteps heard until earlier had grown distant, the monster must have smelled the blood from the corpse grave and headed there.

“Don’t try to climb up in vain and just stay quiet.”

As I spoke jokingly, the commander smirked and waved his hand as if telling me to go.

So, leaving the three beneath the glacier, I set out to find the new officers.

The first place I headed was toward the pile of corpses discovered earlier.

Because I calculated that if the large-class monster had indeed headed there, the next place those bastards would head would be toward the new officers.

Arriving at the place where the pile of corpses was, I realized I was fucked.

‘The corpses have disappeared…’

Seeing that the bloodstains remained but only the corpses were gone, it was certain that the monster that caused the earthquake had passed through here.

However, the footprints left by that guy were not ordinary.

“What is this…”

As if the large-class monsters we fought in the morning were child’s play, footprints of a size I had never seen in my life remained clearly.

Perhaps even the blizzard fluttering and covering the sky was not enough to cover footprints of that size, as clearly stamped footprints led toward the distance.

Seeing that they led in a single direction, it had advanced with a purpose.

‘There is a wounded person among Bones and Lucas too, then.’

It must have chased the smell of blood.

How long did I run in the direction of the footprints?

Far in the distance, I could discover a giant figure standing in the blizzard.

It was… too giant to be called a monster, and too small to be called a snowy mountain.

It looked as if a giant hill was moving at a glance.

Its speed was slow, but because it was too massive, it was moving further away with each stride.

I took out a motorcycle from my inventory.

I swiped one a while ago, but I didn’t know I would use it right away.

As I approached on the motorcycle, the guy who was visible only as a giant figure began to show clearly.

Identifying the guy’s identity, I was quite flustered.

‘Why is that guy here?’