They say most battles have their outcome decided in the initial deployment.

What we often call a great victory is a win forged by overcoming a disadvantageous deployment—or one that only looks disadvantageous.

Same for the fight coming up.

We’re numerically outnumbered and, on paper, clearly inferior in quality.

Of course, I don’t believe we’re inferior in quality, but per the Defense Ministry’s internal regs, a Hunter like us is counted as the equivalent of one infantryman, whereas an over level-5 Awakened is treated like a tank.

Either way, we’re at a disadvantage.

We’ve got only two combatants.

Our guide, Jade, has no intention of joining the fight, and we’re not letting her in anyway.

From the start, she came on the condition she’d only guide us—and she’s already done more than I hoped.

Namely, this position we’re in now.

The moment I saw the place, I felt the same spark I had when, after retiring, I scouted bunker sites and found my domain.

A sublime spot.

The Tower we’re going to hit sits between buildings, and there’s about 250 meters of open ground in front of it.

It used to be packed with small buildings, but the Seoul administration bulldozed them to put in new housing, then the work stopped, leaving it as open ground.

Even so, the grading wasn’t finished everywhere, so there are a few ❀ Nоvеlігht ❀ (Don’t copy, read here) places you can’t use as cover.

Having an excellent teammate shines in advance work like this—down to details.

“If you were the enemy, you’d sprint to that side and use it as cover, right?”

“Agreed.”

Digging traps is harder and more tedious than you think.

If we’d had the usual skeptics, they’d have refused or sandbagged the work—“What if the enemy doesn’t step in and all our effort’s wasted?”—but friends like Gong Gyeong-min, who know their stuff, just take initiative.

We dug death traps at a few cover points that would be dangerous if the enemy seized them.

Maybe because he’s been active longer than me—or because he’s chummy with the Chinese army—Gong Gyeong-min knew a type of trap I didn’t.

He paced around a building under demolition, tapped its columns, then grinned.

“This’ll do.”

“What will?”

“A structure on the verge of collapse. It originally had eight columns; only five remain. And it’s still standing, right? Of those, this one’s taking the most load. What happens if we pound this with shells?”

“It drops like a sack.”

“Exactly.”

Use the building itself as a trap.

Besides that, he set Claymores facing upward beneath the floor of a sunken trench—literally buried them.

I understood the intent, but the tripwire was a problem.

A mine would pop on weight by itself, but a tripwire needs a physical snag-and-pull to actuate.

“I’m going to make a button.”

He ran the buried tripwire out of the ground, extended it to the front of the pit and a pile of concrete rubble, then wrapped it around a chunk of scrap metal.

“This is the button.”

“This is the button?”

“The tank’s got a machine gun, right? Rake this with it—”

“Impressive.”

This sort of battlefield trick is something only a person who’s seen more war knows.

I left China right around the time Hunters were fighting humans more than monsters, with humans as the primary enemy.

We worked the prep until we were breathless and sweat beaded on our brows.

This battlespace won’t be one hundred percent ours, but at least ninety percent of it is.

The enemy we’ll face doesn’t know this terrain well either—that’s a big help to us.

Jade was already up on a building farther back, looking down at us.

I’d told her to pull out, but she didn’t; apparently she’s confident in her own way.

As an aside, she uses an axe as a cold weapon.

Not a one-handed axe like me—it’s a firefighting axe.

Day was breaking.

The world lightened.

Even in a gray-white fog-world, sunlight washes everything in light.

Seated in the tank, I waited for Gong Gyeong-min’s call.

The gun was already laid square at the top of the 120-story Tower standing in the distance.

We’d had to back up a few times to clear the blind, but that was done.

Next to the spot where he’d set the plushie, I set my own item down.

If it were up to me I’d have put a piece of Skeleton merch there, but it doesn’t exist yet—so instead I set down the Necropolis transmission meter.

[ Echoes of the Dead – Very Loud ]

“Shall we begin?”

The one-day crash-course tank commander asked.

Staring through the sight hood at the target building, I answered,

“Let’s begin.”

The moment the words left my mouth—

BOOM!!!!!

With a brutal blast, the massive tank hull shoved backward under violent recoil.

Right after the sound hit, the shell struck the Tower’s crown.

WHAM!

A flower of fire bloomed atop the Tower.

It wouldn’t penetrate that hulking concrete, but it should at least jolt the whole structure.

Clack-!

With a loading clunk on a different scale from a cutesy rifle and a shell case kicked free, the tank demanded another round.

I hauled one from the rack and reloaded.

Clack-!

“Loaded!”

The instant the round was in, I reported to Gong Gyeong-min.

“Second salvo, fire.”

The second shell spat flame.

Another blossom flared on the Tower, and shattered debris fell like dandruff below.

I checked the Necropolis meter.

[ Echoes of the Dead – Very Loud ]

No change.

It’s the last of the meters Valentine made, so this should be the most accurate.

The units are odd, but Necropolis transmissions can’t really be quantified anyway, so fine.

The world beyond the Rift and the human world have different root conceptual structures to begin with.

How does a three-dimensional being comprehend a four-dimensional one?

Clack-!

Feeling strain loading my bones and tendons, I slammed round after round in, and each time—

WHAM!

Our “dumb” tank’s gun breathed fire.

It’s called the Dumb Tank, but this machine was once counted among the strongest in the world.

We simply toned down its shells by cutting propellant and beefed up the frontal armor—that’s its essence.

The rounds we’re firing now aren’t de-tuned—they’re raw war-issue shells.

The iron fangs that once ruled the battlefield can still gouge the hide of that massive Tower.

“We’ve punched a hole!”

The point fire took effect.

Still no change on the Necropolis readout, but at this rate we can at least get under Jeon Si-hoon’s skin in there.

As ever, there’s an order to things.

The job we anticipated but didn’t want to do is about to start.

“They’re coming.”

Kang Han-min’s guard has spotted us.

“Uncles!”

From her high perch, Jade pinged us over comms.

“Guests incoming!”

“We know.”

Listening to the same voice, Gong Gyeong-min grunted,

“You still up there?”

“Watching fights is the best thing in the world, right? I’ll tell you if anyone flanks.”

Not a bad offer.

We’re on spaced open ground, so we can watch for flanking points, but we’re not on the high ground.

We can’t see every enemy.

And yes, the tedious enemy we expected showed up.

Wiiiiiiiii——

Drones.

I’d thought since they’re teamed with monsters they wouldn’t use drones—but Jeon Si-hoon’s guard is human.

“Drones. Might be FPV. I’ll keep watch outside.”

“Good. I’ll call it before I fire—don’t be out of position.”

“Okay.”

I dropped out of the tank and checked my rifle.

Clack—

I looked up.

A gray-white fog sky.

But the sun punches through it and lights the world evenly.

We waited until sunrise so we could read the enemy’s movements—the drones’ movements count too.

Wiiiiiiiii——

Drones are an annoying foe.

They move faster than Defender’s beloved high-end sports cars, plus they work the Z-axis up and down.

If you’ve ever tried shooting a drone, you know rifles don’t hit as well as you’d hope.

Sure, muzzle velocity breaks the sound barrier, but only as it leaves the barrel—after that it drops hard.

Small, distant, fast—drones are fundamentally tough targets for rifles.

But we’re Hunters.

Crack!

A shot—then silver fragments glittered in the air and something smashed into the ground.

I saw the drone’s shadow sweep the ground as it fell before I saw the body itself.

Crunch!

“Whoa!”

Jade let out a gasp.

I wanted to tell her to hush, but no time.

Wiiiiiiiii——

Wiiiiiiiii——

Two more.

One of them sounded familiar.

American suicide drone.

A so-called blade-type.

I poured my senses into my five faculties and raked the sky with a hawk’s eye.

Hard to see.

They got cautious after watching one go down.

Suddenly the sound cut.

WHAM!

Even so the tank kept up its ruinous barrage, the thunder jolting me where I stood on the hull.

In the aftershocks of that violent shudder, I glanced straight up.

There.

A drone.

Right overhead, dead center.

They’d parked it, killed the engine, and were going for a straight vertical drop.

A clever idea, but—

Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!

They picked the wrong opponent.

Crunch!

Another drone fell.

Crack!

I dropped the one that came swooping in at head height, trying to rush our flank.

“Holy—this is the Professor? Are you human?”

Jade burst out in a jumble of Chinese and Korean.

“Keep it down.”

I finally scolded her.

“Sorry. Ah! They’re coming!”

Indeed.

Maybe they still have drones, maybe not—but having burned three already, Kang Han-min’s guard was now coming to finish us the old-fashioned way.

I slung the rifle at my side and slid back under the tank.

Next to the driver’s seat was the remote MG control console.

Lets you fire the machine gun safely from inside.

Surprisingly, rigs like this have existed since World War II.

Our remote unit, powered by electronics that don’t even compare with back then, feeds a high-res LCD.

No need to aim much.

See them coming.

Click—

And thumb a joystick.

Dududududududu——

The roaring tank laid down a different beat.

And of course—

WHAM!

It didn’t forget the main melody: the bellow of the gun.

“How is it?”

Gong Gyeong-min asked while hand-loading another shell.

I stared at the Necropolis meter.

[ Echoes of the Dead – Loud ]

“There’s a change.”

From Very Loud to Loud.

Not a big shift.

Given the mercurial nature of Necropolis transmissions, it might be an arbitrary fluctuation unrelated to the shelling.

Even so, we have to keep at it.

“Let’s pound a bit more.”

“Good.”

On the LCD, the field showed our enemies eating MG fire, cowering behind the buildings, doing nothing.

They must be at a loss.

Open ground—in broad daylight, not night—with a tank planted there. Telling riflemen to go fight that?

They might be tasting the despair Korean troops felt seeing Soviet tanks in the Korean War.

WHAM!

The tank breathed fire again.

The enemy still flailed, unsure what to do.

Thump!

Finally, an Awakened showed up.

“Contact front! It’s that bastard! The one who was spouting racist crap!”

“Keep it down.”

“Sorry.”

Even with an Awakened on scene, nothing really changes.

Dududududududu——

We hosed him with MG fire and—

Thump!

He answered with a reflective field.

But the Dumb Tank was designed to deflect even its own shells.

Ting! titititing!

No amount of MG is going to so much as scratch us.

Sitting safe in the tank, hands on the joystick, I mixed in a little playfulness and stitched bursts.

Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! Thunk!

Intermittent single-shots.

Each time, the Awakened threw up his reflective field, then realized it was pointless and ducked behind the building with his buddies.

All the while, Gong Gyeong-min kept loading without a break, widening the wound on the Tower.

“How is it?”

In the tank air thick with the reek of propellant, sweat, and that peculiar scent of tension, my classmate panted out a question.

“You take the MG.”

“Good. I was going to anyway.”

I’d forgotten my strength had waned.

“Just press that and it fires, right?”

“Right?”

“The data?”

I checked the meter.

[ Echoes of the Dead – Loud ]

I nodded.

“We’re getting results.”

Honestly, not much change.

But everyone’s fate rides on this.

I hefted a shell.

Maybe not as heavy as humanity, but in our little world, it carries the weight of those who remain.

With movements still clumsy, I seated the round, settled into the gunner’s seat, and sighted on the smoking Tower.

Dududududududu—

With MG chatter and shockwaves jostling the air, I raised a shout that erased all the trivial noise.

WHAM!

Another shell shook Jeon Si-hoon’s palace.

[ Echoes of the Dead – Chatter ]

There was a change.