Chapter 162: Karma Be Damned
After finishing off Edward.
Walfred left the room and swept through every corner of the shelter, hunting down the scattered remnants of the hardline faction.
The search itself was simple.
By peering into past memories through the countless Fragments of the Afterimage littered all over the shelter, he could see plain as day exactly who belonged to the hardline faction.
And.
Thwack! Whack! Crunch!
Every last straggler Walfred found had his head blown off, without a single exception.
A massacre carried out by a monster beyond all common sense.
Perhaps having felt that overwhelming gap in power firsthand, the remaining stragglers lost their will to fight. One by one, they dropped their weapons and hurriedly fell to their knees.
"I, I surrender! I surrender!"
"Please, just spare my life!"
Hunters prostrated themselves on the floor, heads pressed to the ground.
But what answered their desperate pleas was the axe, swinging down with mechanical precision.
Crunch! Thwack!
Conversation meant nothing.
Whether the hunters spat curses or dropped to their knees begging forgiveness, Walfred simply kept swinging his ice axe in silence.
Did they finally realize that no amount of begging would save them?
The hunters screamed in desperate fury.
"You, you fucking...!"
"I said I surrender!"
"Why the hell are you doing th... Khak!"
The head of the hunter demanding a reason was sliced off at an angle. Another hunter, witnessing the scene from point-blank range, recoiled in horror and stumbled backward.
"Eeeeeek!"
"S-spare... AAARGH!"
But the outcome never changed.
Walfred showed no mercy, and in the blink of an eye, dozens upon dozens of corpses piled up.
Blood soaked the floor.
Walfred set out in search of his next prey.
’I can’t let a single one live.’
The reason he refused their surrender.
Part of it was that Jenna had nearly died because of the hardline faction’s scheming, but there was a simpler, more fundamental reason.
’If I let them live, they’ll come back to bite me later. That much is certain.’
The past memories he had seen through the Mark of the Afterimage.
Through them, Walfred had learned just how cruel and utterly depraved the hardline faction’s hunters truly were.
The scum of humanity, men who wouldn’t hesitate to torture or kill children right in front of their parents if it got them what they wanted.
Would monsters like these truly repent and turn over a new leaf just because they were shown mercy?
’Not a chance.’
Walfred smiled coldly.
Even their kneeling and groveling right now was nothing more than an act to weasel out of the situation.
’For Jenna’s safety if nothing else, wiping them all out here is the right call.’
Steeling his resolve once more.
Walfred continued the slaughter.
Until the count soared well past a hundred. And in the process, he came to realize a few things.
[Level up.]
First.
Killing hunters granted him experience, just like slaying monsters did.
’No idea why, though.’
He had gained a substantial amount of experience earlier while dealing with Edward and the other A-rank hunters too. Enough that he had already leveled up several times over.
And there was one more thing.
Something else came along with the experience.
[531 coins acquired.]
[185 coins acquired.]
[1,093 coins acqui...]
The coins the dead hunters had been carrying.
A considerable sum of coins flowed straight into Walfred’s pocket. This, too, was exactly like exterminating monsters.
But there was one difference. Just one.
A notification that appeared only when he committed murder, unlike when he exterminated monsters. Walfred glanced at the red message in the corner of his vision.
[Karma is accumulating.]
[Current value: ■■■]
Karma. He didn’t know exactly what it was, but he had a rough grasp of what the word karma implied and generally meant.
’The consequences that come back around for your present actions.’
Something along those lines, he figured.
And if this karma kept piling up, he doubted anything good would come of it.
’Call it a gut feeling.’
It was his intuition talking.
But that didn’t mean he could afford to let the hardline hunters live, when they would only get in his way.
Before long, Walfred made up his mind.
At least until Jenna’s safety was secured, he wouldn’t care whether karma accumulated or not.
Crunch!
"Khak! Gurgle...!"
With the beheading of a hunter whose clothes were half stripped off as the finale, Walfred succeeded in eliminating every last hardline hunter inside the shelter.
The long slaughter was finally over.
’I’m exhausted.’
A deep fatigue suddenly washed over him.
Not the weariness of drained mana or a body pushed to its limits, but a psychological exhaustion born from the fact that he had taken more than a hundred lives.
Just then.
"E-excuse me..."
A thin, delicate voice sounded from behind him.
A voice trembling faintly.
He turned his gaze, and there sat the woman who had nearly been assaulted by the hunter who had just lost his head.
"Sob! Thank you, thank you so much for saving me."
The moment her eyes met Walfred’s, she burst into tears and bowed her head low.
Walfred said nothing in reply.
He had cut off that hunter’s head purely to nip future trouble in the bud. It hadn’t been to save the woman.
’Still...’
As he listened to her repeated words of thanks, he somehow felt the psychological fatigue wrapped around his body wash away, just a little.
At last, with everything taken care of, Walfred called Elsa over from nearby. His business was done, and he intended to return to Coral Cave.
That was when it happened.
"Wait!"
A familiar voice called from a distance.
Moments later, the figure who came running up, out of breath, was the S-rank hunter he had briefly encountered earlier: Elma.
Panting hard from the run, she stood before Walfred and asked her question.
"Are you planning to head back to Coral Cave, by any chance?"
"That’s the plan."
Walfred nodded.
With Edward and the hardline faction hunters wiped out, he had no further business here.
At his answer, Elma hesitated for a moment before working up the nerve to speak.
"What are we, what should we do now?"
The shelter’s current situation was catastrophic.
More than half of its core hunters were dead, and not a single one of the fire-attribute hunters who had maintained the shelter’s internal temperature had survived.
’Not that I’m saying he was wrong, but...’
After all, it was thanks to him that the hardline faction had been dealt with and the shelter reclaimed.
Still, he had clearly said he came from the Coral Cave Shelter, so surely he had done all this with some kind of aftermath plan in mind, hadn’t he?
’God, I hope so.’
With that desperate prayer.
Elma looked at Walfred.
But the answer that came back was ice-cold.
"Why are you asking me?"
"...What?"
"Figure it out yourself."
You’re the shelter chief here now, after all.
With that indifferent remark as his parting words.
Walfred turned away. Then he swung himself up onto the back of Elsa, who had come up beside him at some point.
"I’ll be going, then."
Leaving Elma frozen like a statue behind him.
Walfred soared high into the sky with Elsa, cutting straight through the raging blizzard.
Elma could only stare blankly at his receding figure as it grew smaller and smaller.