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HELIO SCANS
[Translator - Hestia]
[Proofreader - Kaya]
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Chapter 44
Manaus.
The largest city in northern Brazil, a port city along the banks of the Rio Negro, a tributary of the Amazon River.
Even in the age of the Rifts, the Brazilian government had fought desperately to defend Manaus.
Yet even now, ten years later, its safety rating was still far from reassuring.
In spite of that, the official population of Manaus had reached a staggering twenty million.
Unofficially, it was said at least another two million lived there.
That was proof that no other city in northern Brazil could rival Manaus in safety.
It was precisely to protect Manaus that the Brazilian Hero Association and the government had decided, after much deliberation, to take the drastic step of shutting down the Rifts.
Because of this, the Rifts around Manaus were being sealed off by top-ranked heroes and guilds—the so-called “aces.”
BA035 Rift, east of Manaus.
This was a Rift where the Brazilian Hero Association had already been systematically controlling the monster population, so shutting it down shouldn’t have posed much difficulty.
There was no boss monster, and unlike other Rifts around the Amazon, there was only a single semi-boss monster present.
Even so, the Association deployed their most trusted force to make absolutely certain of its closure.
That force was S-Rank Hero Arvado and his Riuninu Guild.
They even assigned an extra 30 A-Rank heroes alongside them—no one had so much as considered the possibility of their failure.
“Kuh—!”
“Scatter!”
“My combat suit’s melting! Get it off now!”
“AAAAAGH!”
It was complete chaos.
The Riuninu Guild was being torn apart by the attack of a monster known as the Giant Hornet.
Apart from being a flying monster with a venomous stinger, it normally posed no great threat.
Even a C-Rank hero with a decent combat suit and shield could usually hold it off without much trouble.
Yet the Riuninu Guild, made up mostly of A-Rank heroes, was collapsing helplessly under the Giant Hornet’s assault.
The venomous stings were simply too powerful.
Just a single hit could melt through most shields and combat suits, rendering any defense meaningless.
“Don’t even try to block them! Evade at all costs! Focus on bringing them down from a distance!”
As the casualties mounted, Arvado roared out commands while launching his own counterattack.
Arvado’s weapon was a pike.
Over seven meters long, but engineered with a button that could adjust its length, making it versatile and easy to carry.
Puff-Puff-Puff-Puff-Puff!
Against the airborne Giant Hornets, Arvado used the full seven-meter reach of his pike.
Each swing shattered nearly a dozen hornets like fireworks exploding in the air.
But even so, the swarm of hundreds showed no signs of retreat.
If anything, they seemed even more enraged, their buzzing intensifying as they swarmed toward Arvado and the Riuninu Guild.
’This isn’t normal! There’s no way these things should be this strong!’
Watching his guildmates fall into danger right from the edge of the Rift, Arvado clenched his teeth.
His body felt heavy, his stamina was draining fast, the monsters were several times stronger, and he had people to protect.
This wasn’t normal.
No one could have predicted this enormous variable.
’The shutdown operation has failed! I have to make it out of here alive and report that the Rift has changed!’
Arvado quickly revised his plan.
But in order to escape, they would still have to cut through countless monsters.
How many would survive?
A look of despair washed over Arvado’s face.
The BA035 Rift—located 110 kilometers east of Manaus, and 480 kilometers west of Santarém.
＊ ＊ ＊
“Think of it like highly concentrated mana flooding into your body, so dense it’s almost impossible to control.”
“Highly concentrated mana?”
Hyun Jooyeon stared straight at Dojun, as if wondering what nonsense he was spouting.
“Mana…”
Dojun clicked his tongue, ready to elaborate.
The heroes of Earth still had an embarrassingly poor grasp of mana. They’d awakened through that mysterious power and been called heroes, but even after ten years, hardly any could truly control or harness it properly.
Only S-Rank heroes had learned to manage even a fraction of mana’s power.
Of course, from Dojun’s perspective, even that was at the level of a child fumbling around.
’If they knew how to handle mana correctly, their artifact technology wouldn’t be in such a sorry state either.’
How to explain this in a way they’d actually understand?
Dojun thought for a moment, then landed on the best metaphor.
“What happens if your body suddenly floods with so much adrenaline you can’t handle it?”
“Adrenaline? You’d drop dead from heart failure or high blood pressure, obviously.”
Jooyeon’s reply, focused only on side effects, made Dojun frown.
“That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about the way that rush of excitement makes you pull out strength you didn’t even know you had—like a superhuman burst of power, you know?”
Of course, in reality, flooding yourself with adrenaline wouldn’t turn you superhuman.
Maybe that was why Jooyeon still looked completely lost, her nose wrinkled in confusion.
“Think of it like giving a professional athlete every doping drug under the sun. That might make more sense.”
After circling around, Dojun had finally found a comparison simple enough for her.
Thankfully, Jooyeon seemed to grasp it this time.
“So the monsters in this Rift are basically in that state?”
Dojun just nodded, leaving it there.
Explaining more would only get complicated, and there was no way Jooyeon could grasp all the details anyway.
Jooyeon, who had been studying him carefully, finally asked—
“How do YOU even know this stuff, Dojun?”
“It's stranger that you don’t know.”
If they had even a halfway decent understanding of mana, they’d instantly sense what was happening in the Rift.
The thick mana weighing down their bodies wasn’t all bad, in Dojun’s eyes.
Its energy was murky and harsh, but there was nowhere else on Earth with such a rich supply of mana to absorb.
Watching the guild members of Silken Lily complain that it felt heavy, sticky, and unpleasant was, frankly, pathetic to him.
’You can’t expect them to master mana breathing techniques overnight.’
According to the theories of Ryuntena, dark mana was especially suited to monsters.
Monsters could naturally absorb far more mana than humans, and at far greater speed, so in an area flooded with dark mana, it was only natural for them to gain overwhelming advantages.
Humans, meanwhile, barely had any skill with mana at all.
By contrast, monsters were born with mana in their bodies and instinctively used it to survive—doubling their power in an instant wasn’t surprising at all.
Even dark mana was still mana, after all. If someone could handle and purify it with the right techniques, there’d be no better place to grow stronger anywhere on Earth.
The problem was there simply wasn’t a human on Earth capable of doing that.
Jooyeon watched him and spoke up again.
“When I look at you, Dojun, you feel like a totally different person. Be honest… you’re on your second life or something, right?”
Even as she said it, she laughed and shook her head, as if she couldn’t believe her own joke.
’Second life, huh…’
Dojun allowed the faintest hint of a smile to appear on his lips.
·
·
·
After finishing their meal and taking a break, Dojun’s group resumed hunting in the Rift.
The members of the Silken Lily Guild had already become next to useless in battle, and even Hyun Jooyeon’s stamina was running out fast, leaving her combat capabilities severely weakened.
In the end, it fell to Dojun alone to stand at the front and hunt down monsters.
Even the small fry had grown more than twice as powerful; just how strong had the mid-boss monsters become?
Yet those mid-boss monsters, despite having grown so much stronger, were struck down instantly by Dojun before they even had a chance to flaunt their newfound power.
’Twelve down so far.’
He counted.
The specialized storage box now held the twelfth Blue Croco’s heart.
“Most monsters wouldn’t even be worthy to show their face here.”
Someone remarked.
“Even the Black Orcs have gotten ridiculously strong, but the Blue Croco still goes down in one blow…”
A Silken Lily guild member trailed off, staring at Dojun in awe.
After Dojun extracted the heart of the Blue Croco, the rest of the guild members collected whatever other byproducts they could salvage from its corpse.
Since they were practically dead weight in the actual fighting, the least they could do was handle those chores properly.
“But… what exactly does this stuff do?”
One guild member, slicing the Blue Croco’s meat into manageable pieces, asked with a serious expression.
That was because Dojun, every time he hunted a Blue Croco, had sampled its meat with the face of a true gourmet, as if curious about its flavor.
And today was no different.
Dojun was grilling a portion of the meat himself and eating it.
“Should we try it too? You never know—it might really have some kind of effect.”
“Y-Yeah, maybe?”
“Sure, let’s give it a shot!”
Eventually, the Silken Lily guild members began roasting the Blue Croco’s meat themselves.
Their expressions as they took their first bites were all over the place.
It didn’t have any of that typical monster-gamey smell, and the texture wasn’t particularly weird, either—but the idea of eating monster meat still made them uncomfortable.
The only saving grace was that, at least, it tasted good.
Watching them awkwardly chew down the Blue Croco meat, Dojun couldn’t help but chuckle to himself.
They were treating it like some special delicacy, even though in truth it had no special properties beyond being edible meat, and that amused him.
Then, as if something occurred to him, he walked over to the group, who were still chewing on their monster steaks.
“Not bad, right?”
When Dojun asked, the guild members nodded with the faces of people who’d just been forced to chew dirt.
As they did, mana invisible to the naked eye began to spread out from Dojun’s body like a spider’s web.
That mana targeted the guild members eating the Blue Croco meat.
As they grimaced through their forced meal, Dojun’s mana seeped into their bodies.
“…Huh? What was that?”
One guild member, particularly sensitive, tilted his head.
“What’s wrong?”
“Did I just get a chill?”
“A chill? In this heat?”
“…Maybe I imagined it?”
He decided he was just imagining things and shrugged it off.
“Enjoy it.”
Dojun said lightly.
“Who knows? Something good might come of it.”
With that, he calmly walked away.
From here on out, these people would be able to accept mana into their bodies more quickly than anyone else.
In the world that had been destroyed, most mages and knights went through a similar process BEFORE learning mana cultivation methods, so they could more easily and rapidly absorb mana in the first place.
Someone as skilled as Dojun would use mana to open up pathways in their bodies and expand them, and this process was remarkably effective.
’In a place with such a high mana density, it’ll be even more effective.’
He thought.
’Come to think of it…’
Dojun approached Hyun Jooyeon, who had been the first to eat the Blue Croco’s meat.
The other Silken Lily members who’d eaten later were already feeling some change, so it would have been strange if Hyun Jooyeon, who had eaten first, didn’t feel anything.
He applied the same method to her as well.
“What was that?”
As expected of an S-Rank hero, she scanned the surroundings with sharp senses, but no one had a clue what Dojun had done.
Before long, there would be a clear difference between those who had eaten the Blue Croco meat and those who hadn’t.
And eventually, everyone would end up trying it.
When that happened, all Dojun needed to do was adjust their bodies one more time.
It wasn’t anything complicated or particularly grandiose.
No matter how much mana you absorbed, if you couldn’t properly make it your own, it was pointless.
And with dark mana in particular, even if you couldn’t refine it through proper mana techniques, it would simply flow back out of the body harmlessly, so there was no danger to worry about.
’I do know a pretty large number of mana cultivation methods.’
He mused.
But Dojun decided he had no obligation—and no particular reason—to teach them just yet.
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HELIO SCANS
[Translator - Hestia]
[Proofreader - Kaya]
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