Chapter 177 – Retreat

The reason the submarine blocked our path became clear soon enough.

The captain, who had crossed over from the submarine to our boat, explained the situation to us.

“There was an order from headquarters to stay off the coast of Gunsan and prevent you from landing at Gunsan Port.”

When asked how they knew it was us, the captain replied that they had stopped every ship after receiving the communication.

“We stopped a total of three ships, including this one. The two ahead of us were refugees fleeing from China.”

Since his answer wasn’t particularly important, I asked again.

“Why can’t we land? Did something happen in Daejeon?”

“Yes. Daejeon has already been occupied by the Demon King’s army.”

I had feared as much…

My persistent worries since encountering the Death Knights had turned out to be true.

“Due to sudden communication interference, we only learned of the situation recently. A soldier who escaped to the west coast contacted us via satellite communication, which is how we found out.”

The captain paused mid-sentence, pulled out his smartphone, and pressed the screen.

A voice came from the phone.

It was the recorded voice of a soldier.

Perhaps because they were on a nuclear submarine with ample electricity, they were still using smartphones.

Of course, they were using them as recorders rather than phones.

[Static. Eagle Six, Eagle Six, do you copy?]

[Eagle Six, this is Whale Two. Two here, loud and clear.]

[Good heavens… It’s finally working.]

The soldier’s voice came through the static, urgent yet somehow hollow.

[Is the communication jamming lifted?]

[No. The Daejeon area still has no communication, so I’m contacting you from Gunsan Port.]

The communication officer’s voice grew tense at the soldier’s words.

[Gunsan Port? What happened in Daejeon?]

[There’s not much time. I’ll explain as much as I can.]

As faint sounds of the communication officer calling for the captain came through, the soldier continued his report.

[A week ago, the Daejeon camp was attacked by the Demon King’s army. Liches, undead knights, and giant monsters. According to the expeditionary force command, they were the Demon King’s army, including former heroes who had become undead.]

The Daejeon camp was within a safe zone created by priests, but that safe zone could only hold off ordinary undead.

Former heroes, though?

It was no wonder the Daejeon safe zone had collapsed.

“But wasn’t there a hero party in Daejeon?”

Perhaps having overheard Yerim’s quiet murmur while listening to the recording, the soldier brought up the heroes.

[When the Demon King’s army attacked, the expeditionary force command and the hero party tried to escape through the gate.]

***

That day, the expeditionary forces in Daejeon fought with everything they had.

Knights stood their ground against giant undead monsters whose bodies were ablaze, even as their armor burned. Mages vomited blood while shielding against a barrage of magical attacks with their barriers.

The priests did their utmost to maintain the safe zone until the very end, but they couldn’t stop the elite undead legion that broke through, their bodies engulfed in flames.

A burning forest and university buildings.

As other soldiers and knights fell, the last remaining forces joined the battle.

Knights and mages guarding the headquarters, priests, and even apprentice knights.

When the apprentice knights raised their swords with grim determination, a knight at the forefront raised his hand to stop them.

As the apprentices looked at him in confusion, the lead knight spoke.

“We’ll buy you time. Take the surviving priests and head to the rendezvous point.”

“We’ll fight too.”

“It’s a pointless sacrifice. To protect people, the priests need to survive. Protect them.”

He pointed to the priests, their chests soaked in blood. The apprentice knights nodded with hardened expressions.

The priests bit their lips at the knight’s words.

They, too, wanted to stay, but they knew they were needed to create another safe zone.

Rather than dying here together, creating a safe zone to save even one more life was the will of their god.

They bowed their heads and headed south with the apprentice knights.

Once the apprentices and priests had left, the knight turned to another knight beside him.

“Take those soldiers and get out of here. They say communication works once you leave this area, so protect them.”

The knight tasked with the request glanced at the American soldiers and sighed.

“Well, you’re giving me a troublesome job.”

He gestured to the four remaining soldiers in Daejeon—the communication team.

“Let’s go.”

“Where are the heroes?”

Perhaps because a mage who had cast a translation spell was still alive, the knight understood the soldier’s question.

“They headed to the gate with the command staff. They’re all returning to Ea.”

The soldier’s jaw dropped at the knight’s words.

He hadn’t expected them to abandon all their troops just to ensure the heroes and command staff could escape.

And yet, this knight—and everyone else—seemed to think it was perfectly natural.

Was it because they’d been brainwashed by the nobles their whole lives?

The soldier couldn’t understand it, but that was their problem to deal with.

“If the heroes fall, Ea has no future. They had to protect the heroes.”

Perhaps sensing his own discomfort with the situation, the knight offered an excuse-like explanation.

Listening to the knight’s justification, the four American soldiers, accompanied by one knight and some expeditionary soldiers, headed west.

***

[When we barely escaped Daejeon, the knight told me the safe zone had been overrun. He also said the gate, which was supposed to be destroyed, had fallen into the Demon King’s hands intact.]

It seemed the knight escorting the Americans had mana-sensing abilities similar to mine.

Thanks to that, he could assess the situation from a distance and escort the Americans all the way to Gunsan Port.

[Thanks to that knight, we escaped, but a pursuit team caught up, and all my comrades died. Even now, I only have time to make this call because the knight is luring the pursuit team away…

Oh no, it looks like this is it. The undead—the Death Knight—is here. The knight luring them must have died. Over and out.]

With that, the recording ended.

Now I understood why they were trying to stop us from going to Gunsan Port.

There was a high chance that the Death Knights and undead of the pursuit team were still at Gunsan Port.

I was confident I could defeat them in a fight, but there was no reason to plunge into such danger.

More importantly, Daejeon had been taken.

They hadn’t even destroyed the gate and had handed it over to the Demon King.

The gate should have been destroyed to keep it out of the Demon King’s hands, but it seemed they couldn’t manage it in time due to the heroes’ and nobles’ escape.

It was the worst-case scenario among all my predictions.

‘No, maybe it’s fortunate for me.’

If they had destroyed the gate before the Demon King seized it, I would have had no way to return to Ea.

Of course, since our party—the target—was here, and there was likely a mage in Ea who could create another gate, they could just make a new one.

But I doubted the Empire would bother.

Since even the new heroes couldn’t defeat the Demon King, they’d probably use the gate’s destruction as an excuse to buy time.

‘Or perhaps they planned to abandon the Demon King and his army on Earth altogether?’

Since they had intended to destroy the gate, that possibility wasn’t out of the question.

In any case, since the gate hadn’t been destroyed, I didn’t need to worry about that.

The problem now was that the gate was in the Demon King’s hands, meaning Ea would soon have to fear an invasion by his forces.

The Demon King had come to Earth and grown his forces several times over.

“The reason the Demon King’s army attacked Daejeon is that China has fallen.

The Chinese government has collapsed, and the Demon King’s army now controls most of China. Even now, they’re advancing west and south without any resistance.”

If the captain’s words were true, the number of people turned into undead in China would be in the hundreds of millions—perhaps over a billion.

Turn some into skeletons and the rest into a zombie legion, and you’d have a Demon King’s army on a scale unimaginable in the past.

The power to create and sustain such an army likely came from the nuclear weapon used to attack Pyongyang.

Now that he’d seized the gate to Ea, all the Demon King needed was time to turn those undead into his army.

The sudden news darkened everyone’s expressions.

My party members, and even Irene, who had followed us.

Yerim asked me, “What do we do now?”

“Headquarters recommends heading to the Misawa U.S. military base in Japan for now.”

So that’s why they’d gone to such lengths to inform us—America still hadn’t given up on us.

With nowhere else to go, they were telling us to come to them.

Honestly, America was better than Jeju Island, but both were fallen nations anyway.

“Is Misawa the last base?”

“Yes. Like my ship, that base is America’s last stronghold in the Pacific.”

According to the captain, the nuclear submarine in front of us was the only American vessel left in East Asia.

The Pacific Fleet’s surface ships had been wiped out by a satellite meteor strike, and the surviving submarines—except for this one—were all retreating to America.

“We’re the last card. The weapon of last resort. Of course, it’s already been blocked once, but there’s nothing else.”

The submarine before us was nuclear-powered and armed with nuclear missiles.

The other submarines retreating to America also carried nuclear weapons, but since long-range nuclear strikes had been thwarted, they’d left this one behind to fire up close.

Seeing a submarine that had to wait in a distant foreign land—its hull dented by undead walking underwater, its homeland under attack—felt oddly similar to our own situation.

“It seems you don’t agree with headquarters, Captain.”

When I asked him about it, the captain gave a bitter smile.

“Either way, we need to return home before we die. That’s what we’re hoping for too.”

As expected, the captain seemed to share my sentiments.

“Since some people retreated south, let’s join up with them first.”

Once I made my decision, the captain left us a gift before returning to his ship.

Boom, boom, boom.

The submarine submerged, and we turned our boat around.

Instead of Gunsan Port, we headed for the Mangyeong River estuary near Jeonju.

We docked our boat at the Mangyeong River estuary south of Saemangeum and switched to the gift the captain had left us.

What we switched to were two inflatable lifeboats made of tubes.

No motors, just boats we’d have to row.

Compared to our luxurious boat, they didn’t even look like proper vessels, but for navigating a narrow river upstream, they were perfect.

We didn’t even need to row.

We had a mage, after all.

Moments later, the two lifeboats sped up the narrow river.

Our destination: Donggosan in Jeonju City.

A new safe zone said to have been created by priests.