Return of the Apocalypse Knight

Chapter 11: The Hero Dies (1)

I left the knight behind and ran north.

-Bang, kwaaang.

The screams of the undead can be heard from behind, followed by an explosion.

Were there any more mines left?

In truth, the road I was running on was not mine-safe, but I had no choice but to push my luck.

Luckily, I didn’t step on any mines as I made my way out of what was supposed to be a minefield.

With Knight Leopold and the mines doing their best behind me, I didn’t see any undead in pursuit.

I ran north for what seemed like forever, keeping Hoffman within earshot, even after the sounds of explosion and the cries of the undead died down.

After running for several miles, I set Hoffman down on the ground.

When I stopped, he slumped to the ground and gasped for air. He hadn’t been running, but he’d been hanging off my shoulder with his wounds, and he had every right to be exhausted.

Fortunately, all of Hoffman’s wounds appeared to be healed.

Only a few pale red marks remained.

Once again, the potion had worked wonders.

The potion was absolutely effective against trauma.

It was a miracle potion that could restore a body part at an incredible rate, if it wasn’t already missing entirely.

Other things were nothing compared to the things of my previous life, but the potion was something that no modern medicine could match.

However, even such a great potion was not without its problems.

Potion poisoning, like that of Hoffman and the countless soldiers before me, was the biggest problem, but there were other, lesser problems.

One of them was post-potion starvation.

While the potion restored lost flesh, it didn’t make something out of nothing.

What potions do is take materials from other parts of the body to repair broken flesh.

So there was a limit to what the potion could do, and if used too many times, the body would disintegrate.

Hoffman was now in that state of starvation.

Unlike his healed body, he was thin and haggard, his eyes bloodshot and his mouth drooling as he rummaged through his bag.

His large bag contained cured meats, piled high in cloth, prepared for just such an occasion.

Without even bothering to remove the cloth, he chewed and swallowed the meat, like a zombie craving flesh.

It was an unpleasant sight to behold, but it wasn’t the first time I’d seen it, so I watched him with aplomb.

He inhaled all the meat in the bag and patted his bulging belly.

“I survived again,” he said, “so it turns out I was right to stick with the knight as rumored.”

Despite all the meat he’d inhaled, he was still skinny as ever.

Knights and mages could use mana to force food into their bodies and turn it into calories, but Hoffman, who could only feel mana, needed to digest it like a normal person to recover.

For now, he had merely quenched his appetite by overeating, but his stamina hadn’t improved.

“Still, it would have been better for the knight if I had died……..”

‘Is it worth living now?’

“You told me earlier that if something goes wrong and there’s only one of us left, instead of looking for the hero, we should try to stay hidden as much as possible. I think a guy like me can survive until the gates reopen…….if we stay hidden. It would be much easier for you, sir.”

Apparently, the junkie soldier was also familiar with my other nickname, ‘Survivor’.

That nickname came from the fact that I lasted so long at the front, while fighting the Demon King, but it was also because I survived to the end, no matter what I did.

In fact, my survival was due to my special survival skills, my ability to recognize a crisis in advance.

Anyway, the nickname “Survivor” was given to me after many operations where I was the sole survivor, and I was patted on the back.

Besides, what Hoffman had just said wasn’t really bullshit.

The wizard had actually told me something similar before we left.

He said that in order for reinforcements to return to our dimension, they would need a target planted on this side of the world.

He was exaggerating, of course, but one of us would have to be alive to rebuild the gate.

However I had no intention of doing what Hoffman said.

“We may be alone, but I will find a hero.”

At the very least, I had to find out if he was dead or alive.

It would be a shame to spend all this time hiding only to find him alive and well when the gate opened again.

I’d have a lot of nobles trying to tear me apart as I left, not to mention a trusting Imperial Count.

I had to make sure he was alive before I could decide what to do.

“…….Then we should move.”

Hoffman sighed at my words.

The soldier looked like he really didn’t want to move, but at least his expression wasn’t as bad as it looked.

It was because he had confirmed that I wasn’t going to kill him.

The bullshit he’d spouted earlier was, after all, meant to keep me afloat.

I couldn’t get accurate directions anymore, since my elf navigator was dead, but I still knew where I was going, so I had no problem finding my way.

However, it was difficult to move as quickly as before.

Hoffman had to keep an eye on the trail.

Anyway, Hoffman’s stamina was low, so we followed the hero party at a walking pace.

While Hoffman checked the tracks of the heroes, I used my senses to check the surroundings for danger.

After traveling for a while, we finally found the trail the heroes had left behind.

Large fireballs had fallen, fires were still burning, and countless undead were burned and broken.

Judging by the signs of intense combat, the hero party had fought far more undead than we had.

“Still, these tracks are odd, because no matter how many undead there are, these tracks look like they struggled.”

Hoffman was right, the scattered tracks weren’t the result of the heroes smashing the undead, but rather the result of a fierce struggle.

There was no sign of a higher entity in the tracks so Hoffman was puzzled.

“Could there have been a lich among the undead? It also looks like the mage blocked a ranged attack with a shield.”

I had heard that the Demon King had crossed over to this world to escape the Hero, but neither we nor the mages knew when he had first crossed over.

Was it a month ago, when he fled from the heroes, or had he crossed over long before that?

If he had come over earlier, the Demon King could have sent a Lich to this dimension.

I knew, however, that it was not a Lich who had made the ranged attack.

It was a foe with a ranged attack so powerful that the mages in the hero party blocked it with their shields.

It wasn’t a magical attack, and it wasn’t an arrow.

I stared at the zombie corpse, its head rolling to one side and its skull popped off.

It was a corpse dressed in a military uniform, freshly dead.

The body, dressed in the uniform of a North Korean soldier, a People’s Army soldier from my previous life, clutched a rifle tightly in his hand.

It wasn’t the only rifle lying around.

There were North Korean rifles in the hands of the bodies scattered everywhere.

“Undead that shoots guns…….”

It was a far-fetched idea, but not impossible.

Many of the undead I’ve fought have wielded swords or spears, and some have used the skills they had when they were alive.

Then there are the Death Knights, who can use mana, and the Lich, who are mages.

So it was entirely possible to have undead that could shoot guns.

He just needed time…More time than a month.

“The demon king must have been here for a while.”

To get the undead to shoot, the demon had to know enough about this side of the world.

The wizards were right.

The gate was a trap.

It was here that the hero party had fought the gun-wielding undead but the trail of battle continued afterward.

Did the hero party see the demon king here?

Despite the undead’s continued attacks, the heroes continued northward.

The trail grew rougher and rougher, with black traces of what appeared to be their own blood but there was no sign of the fallen heroes anywhere.

Are they still fighting?

But there was no sound of fighting.

Furthermore, there were no undead in sight.

Did the heroes finish off all the undead? Or had they finished the job and left?

As I pondered these questions, I followed the trail for a while, until I found not a trail, but the hero.

No, a corpse.

The hero’s body lay in a large pit and it looked like there had been a massive explosion not too long ago.

There were shattered undead and zombies all around, and the trees beside the pit were gouged out.

And there, lying in a large pit, was a naked hero.

His limbs and head were missing from his gaping body, his stomach and chest were split open, and his entrails were spilling out.

It looked like someone had taken out their anger on the body.

I stood dumbfounded, staring at the corpse.

I thought the hero might lose, but I never expected to find him dead.

But as I thought more about it, I realized why the hero had been abandoned like this.

The hero was a paladin, chosen by the gods. As a paladin, his corpse could not be used to create undead.

After checking out the hero’s body, I looked around.

I heightened my senses and extended my mana sense, but I sensed no living creatures.

Nor did I see the corpses of any members of the hero party.

However, it seemed unlikely that his party would have left, abandoning the body of the humiliated hero.

After all, they had been defeated here by the demon king, or perhaps by his undead.

“Did the demon king take the others?”

Or did he take their bodies?

Judging by the absence of the hero armor and swords, they must have been taken as well.

“This is impossible! The hero is dead!”

I heard Hoffman mutter.

Unlike me, Hoffman believed that the hero was still alive.

After all, unlike me who remembers my past life, to the ordinary continental people, the hero would be living faith itself.

I had thought similarly when I heard the story of the hero until I remembered my past life.

Only, now that he was dead, I had to decide what to do.

No, first, I needed to get rid of the sense of crisis that tickled the nape of my neck.

I looked in the direction my senses were pointing, and saw a glint of light in the bushes in the distance.

Then, a gunshot.

-BANG!

I drew my sword at the same time.