SL:R

Chapter 28

“Wait.” Sooho felt a strange sensation.

Looking back, all the recent incidents were connected. Gwanak Mountain Field, the Hyena Guild, and Seoul Station Field all shared one thing.

“… They all appeared a year ago.”

[Khiehek! Come to think of it! It seems like the aliens have been hiding on Earth since a year ago!]

“A year ago…” Sooho decided to start from here. “Shall we try to look backward? If we search for dungeons, fields, and guilds that appeared a year ago, we might find something.” If they found the demons, they could strengthen Vulcan’s Horn, and if they found any other traces of the outer beings, that would be great too.

[Oh! As expected, my little king is brilliant! It feels like I just taught you addition and subtraction the other day…]

Sooho ignored Beru’s chatter for a moment. Then, he remembered something.

“Yeah, there it was.”

The most famous area in Korea a year ago.

The scene of that dreadful massacre.
“Magok.” Sooho’s eyes flashed.

***

Hunter Association Surveillance Division.

“…No matter how much we investigate, it just keeps coming out.”

Team Leader Han Jaehyuk felt increasingly frustrated the more he investigated the hideout of the Hyena Guild, which had been completely destroyed.

Listing all the atrocities the Hyena Guild had committed would require a report of at least 100 pages. Among them, all matters related to crime were transferred to the police Hunter Division.

The Association focused on investigating things that fell outside the bounds of the law, such as ‘Stardust’.

…In reality, Stardust wasn’t technically a narcotic, so using it wasn’t necessarily illegal, but they couldn’t just leave unidentified drugs alone.

The Hunter Association had been continuously investigating how Stardust was made and who made it, and they had finally found a clue at the Hyena Guild’s hideout. It was a ledger that contained records of when and how much Stardust the Hyena Guild had purchased and to whom they had sold it.

This confirmed that the guild was one of the distributors of Stardust. If they followed the trail, they might be able to find out who was actually making the powder.

“But there were people who went into debt just to buy Stardust.”

“You could consider it a kind of investment. If you used Stardust to explore high-level dungeons, you could pay off that debt pretty quickly.”

“So they earned money and came back to the Hyena Guild to buy more Stardust?”

“In the end, it seems like the Hyena Guild was the only one constantly profiting. There really is no separate economy here.”

But the problem was that most of the Hunters listed in the ledger were ‘missing for the past year.’ Most were probably just fodder for the boss monster controlling the Hyena Guild from behind the scenes. But as they continued to investigate the ledger, they discovered something strange.

Among the missing persons, there were those marked with a red line.

Among them were not only Hunters but also many non-awakened debtors.

“What are these people? Is there something different about them?”

“Oh? Team Leader! Take a look here!” A subordinate showed some data to Team Leader Han Jaehyuk. “If you look here, the date when a large amount of Stardust was imported into Hyena is the same day that these missing persons were reported missing. Every single one of them.”