Chapter 195. 5,637 Regrets (1)
It is often said that humans are animals that regret.
Contrary to common belief, it is said that other animals are not incapable of having the emotion of regret.
Studies on mammals and birds with high intelligence say that animals can also feel the emotion of regret.
However, no study has ever reported a case of a non-human animal giving up on life and taking its own life because of regret, a byproduct of an event that has already passed and cannot be changed.
“Keoheok…!”
I coughed up a lump of blood.
The dark red color stained a part of the map.
The stained area was the part where the new Imperial Capital, Wolfskrig, was drawn, in the middle of the God of War's battlefield map.
Like a revolving lantern, a few regrets swirled in my mind.
***
It is said that in a place called DEVGRU, one of the elite special forces of the United States, there is a bad habit called 'canoeing.'
This practice, which originated from a confirmation kill delivered to the head of a fallen enemy, refers to the act of firing a burst of bullets to split the skull itself vertically.
The V-shaped split in the head looks like the mark left by dragging a canoe, hence the na canoeing.
It is not so strange that the act of splitting a person's head open has been the subject of much controversy due to its cruelty.
However, from the perspective of having rolled on the battlefield for several years, the act is not incomprehensible.
The battlefield is not a training ground.
'Excessive asures' are always better than 'insufficient asures.'
The discussion of the dignity of a corpse has a weight as light as a feather in the face of the life and death of my comrades and myself.
“Keok…!”
My first regret is not taking 'excessive asures.'
Why didn't I make a confirmation kill.
Udeuk!
The tip of the spear pierced through my breastbone and protruded.
I reflexively rolled forward to avoid being impaled on it.
I imdiately wrapped myself in a defensive spell and looked back.
I saw the enemy erging from the ground.
“You're not dying. For a necromancer, you're tough.”
My opponent said.
A familiar face.
Gorgeous gold-plated armor.
Flesh and muscle peeling off in places.
Rotten eyeballs and thick makeup.
The true emperor of the Lur Legion.
“Y-Your Majesty!”
“It's a surprise attack!”
“Protect His Majesty! His Majesty…!”
It was instantaneous.
As countless Lur legionnaires similarly burst out from the ground around the emperor who had erged, they began to attack the Vampire Duke and his subordinate troops.
Vampire necromancers are slaughtered in an instant.
Undead, including Necro Ogres, are literally dismantled by ancient spells.
“Uuuk……!”
The mont I try to move, blood gushes up from my mouth.
A curse.
A terrible curse has been engraved like a brand inside my heart and lungs through the spear that just stabbed .
In my blood-red vision, I could see the Legion Emperor casually dusting off the dirt and muttering.
“I've seized the upper hand, but I'm not feeling great. To crawl out of the ground after four thousand years. And to have to do a surprise attack from the ground again.”
I don't understand.
He was definitely dead.
I saw it with my own two eyes.
The Lur Legion was crushed by the Eastern Empire expeditionary force.
The Legion Emperor before also burned to ashes without a trace in the flas raised by the Curse Spirit Grandmaster, Hwayoung.
“That look. You're curious, aren't you? How I'm alive?”
The emperor of a dead civilization smiled with his half-rotten lips.
“Well, the loser becos the winner's slave.”
“You, of the God of War….”
“That's how it is. Just like the Eastern Emperor.”
So that's how it was.
Was it all a setup from the beginning, designed to make think he was dead, to make misjudge that the Lur Legion was annihilated?
The death of one clone is no big deal.
But losing the military power of the Vampire Archduchy is a different story.
The Princess of Blood and the Vampire Duke were seriously injured.
In effect, the army of the Vampire Archduchy was as good as disintegrated.
Even before I could squeeze out a way to sohow make up for it.
“That's enough chatter. I'm also under orders.”
The world spun.
The Legion Emperor's sword had cut off my head.
Tribus' clone died like that.
***
The profession of a hunter is inextricably linked to the word 'trap.'
Generally, traps are set for animals, but in Warlord Conquest, there was a profession called 'human hunter.'
It was a general term for those who pursued criminals with bounties, runaway slaves, heretics designated by the Church, and fugitives for various other reasons.
When you selected a hero with that profession, the loading screen would display sothing called the 'Hunter's Adage.'
I don't rember which number it was, but there was a phrase like this.
‘Both hunters and human hunters are professions that deal with traps. The thing to be careful of as a human hunter is that our prey also sets traps.’
My second regret is overlooking the fact that the enemy could also set the traps I set.
I blew up an entire city to catch an Outer God.
Why did I think the enemy wouldn't do the sa?
Kururururu…!
The eastern wall.
The command post of the third wall.
The mont I felt that sothing was wrong was when fragnts and debris fell onto the shoulder of the emperor's clone, who was in charge of the defense line.
“...The vibration seems close. Is there already a section that has been pushed back to the second wall?”
Of course, the tactic of blowing up the entire wall to create an obstacle was not only used on the first wall.
For about a year, all the capabilities of the Empire were concentrated.
It ans we also have no way back.
Each section of the urban area and the main sections of the walls were all planted with explosives, turning them into giant booby traps with the intention of blowing them up if they were occupied by the enemy.
If they are hit once or twice, they won't fall for it, but it can bog them down and buy ti.
If necessary, we can retake it without any problem.
Anyway, the vibration just now was quite clear.
About as far as the second wall or the second urban area behind it.
I thought that the defense line had been pushed back sowhere I hadn't been paying attention to while losing the vampire's military power.
I was mistaken.
Kururururu… Kugugung…!
“Wait.”
“Your Majesty, this is….”
“It's under our feet.”
A fleeting mont.
Dozens of questions and answers flash through my mind.
Who is the enemy that can break through from the underground? The Ratn.
Didn't we guard the sewers? No. We built an underground defense line.
Can the remaining remnants of the Ratn break through the underground defense line? Impossible, since the three main priest councils have been annihilated.
And so on.
However, the questions and answers did not last long.
Kugugugugu……!!
“Your Majesty… ah……!”
The ground sank.
The walls, the urban areas, the city, everything collapsed.
Like a building with a flimsy foundation collapsing in an instant, it didn't even take a few dozen seconds for the entire city to collapse along with its foundation.
A few minutes later.
Wolfskrig disappeared from the map.
It was sucked into a bottomless pit along with countless imperial troops, rcenaries, allied forces, mages and priests, nobles and citizens.
The emperor's clone was crushed in the deepest part of that bottomless pit, under an imasurable weight of stone and earth.
The last thought of the crumbling body was about the enemy's tactic of collapsing the entire foundation of the area where the city was built, far below the underground defense line.
Kurururururu…!
Furthermore, the mont my thoughts reached the fact that its driving force was the 'Orb of Fire,' which was considered a kind of 'final weapon' when playing as the Eastern Empire.
All the debris around and myself lted into bubbling magma.
The emperor's clone died like that.
***
The reason the main body, Count Ash, survived the collapse of Wolfskrig was purely luck.
A narrow escape with a clear view, several spatial movents, a body tattered by a hail of projectiles and spells, a miraculous resurrection using the 'Bracelet of Life' left by the emperor, and Randal appearing at the mont of being surrounded by the enemy.
Is it a fateful flow to review, no, to regret all three mistakes?
The last regret was nothing special.
“Hah, this is sothing. They were all monsters.”
We too easily judge others by their appearance.
Even people who benefit from civilization often hide sinister intentions and use cunning tricks.
There's no law that says an enemy on the battlefield, far from the law, doesn't hide one or two such intentions.
However, it was not easy to think that a seemingly normal human soldier was hiding a monster inside his physical body.
That's right.
The army of the Eastern Empire was not half, but all monsters.
“Count, get up. It's difficult to fight them while protecting you.”
The strength of that monster can be guessed just by looking at the troubled expression of Randal, who is scratching his head with the handle of his axe.
They were far from the relatively 'normal' other monsters.
Is it because they are monsters born from eating people from the inside out and using them as living sacrifices for months?
Strength, reflexes, stamina, and all sorts of resistances, including spells and curses, are on a different level.
They don't die easily either.
When you think they're dead, they regenerate and revive, and if you cut them in half or chop them up, each part revives and their numbers increase.
It seems that holy power and fire are their only weaknesses, but….
Kwaaaaaaa-!!
[[Warrior's Insight] is deployed.]
[You have acquired a skill.]
[Wan Hua Gui Yi Jing (Level 10)]
The problem is that there are even monsters among them that can handle fire.
It's the Curse Spirit Grandmaster, Hwayoung, a level 11 hero, who has turned into a monster.
From fire spells, which are a weakness to other monsters, to ordinary fire, that thing has taken it all and made it its own.
It, with its writhing thousands of dark red tentacles, moved.
The flas shot from each tentacle lt the ground and rocks, and even suffocate the breath.
Randal split hundreds of tentacles as if chopping firewood with his axe, but the monster, sensing defeat, jumped back.
In the anti, other monsters that rushed in bought ti and blocked his movents.
The exhausted body instinctively fights a desperate battle, but its limits are quickly reached.
Teeth, claws, and thorns pierce the protective shield and tear through flesh and muscle.
Fatal injuries accumulate all over the body.
‘Count! Get a grip! Count!’
To the extent that even Randal's shout, as he spits blood, gradually fades.
The death of the main body is approaching.
***
Personally, I tend to choose healthy feedback over resignation, and resignation over regret.
It is a long-standing habit from my school days.
Even if you fail once or twice, if you properly sort out the cause and effect, you can make up for the previous mistakes in the next opportunity.
However, things in the world are not always so easy to solve.
So failures co too suddenly and fatally.
As if determined not to leave any option other than regret, even erasing the possibility of a next chance.
“Keoheok! Keok! Uweeek!”
Dark red lumps of blood pour endlessly from my throat.
Red spots color my whole body, and in so parts, my skin tears and blood flows out.
As my physical body approaches death, the shock is transmitted to , my soul.
Who was it that said.
That few do not regret in the face of death.
‘…If I could go back.’
It keeps coming to mind.
If I could go back, could I make a different choice.
Well.
Honestly, I'm not confident.
Even the word 'carelessness' is a luxury.
I was defeated by pure skill.
If it were a ga, I would have admitted defeat and cleanly moved on to the next playthrough.
But….
“Keoheok! Grrreuk……”
…But.
How can I give up.
It had been a question for a long ti.
Why I had tried so hard in this world.
In my life on Earth, I was far from being a ntally healthy person, even by a stretch.
Even though my only sister was in a coma in the hospital, I was a ga addict who shut myself in my room, telling myself that paying the hospital bills was enough.
Does it make sense for my will to live to suddenly surge just because I got a ntal strength trait?
I said that clearing the ga was my goal, but could I really have thrown my life away countless tis for others who were not even my family, just for that one thing?
Now I understand.
I wanted to protect them.
I just didn't want to repeat the old nightmare of helplessly accepting soone's death.
That nightmare is the muffled sobs that are like background music in every corner of the columbarium.
It is also the sll of dicine in the hospital room where I visited my unconscious sister.
It is also the cold touch of the floor of the empty family ho.
“Grrrreuh. Keoheo….”
The reason I was so into Warlord Conquest was none other than this.
Because although they were people in a fake world, pieces of data, I could protect them.
Because I could at least feel the vicarious satisfaction of having protected my country, my heroes, my people.
And by doing so, I could turn my gaze away, even for a little, from the nightmare of reality that could no longer be undone.
But the people of this world are not a collection of pixels on a monitor screen, nor are they a combination of polygons and function classes, but living, breathing beings.
So, I vowed to protect them at least.
In front of Terren's grave. In the cenotaphs of the fallen soldiers of Wolfskrig. In front of the families of the civil war victims. In front of the psychopathic emperor who gave up his own life.
‘…And in front of myself.’
Yes.
In front of myself, who had collapsed in the columbarium, the hospital room, and on the floor, in the mories of the past engraved in my subconscious, I vowed.
That I would not lose them helplessly again this ti.
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