In the Name of God - Chapter 49.1
Lee Sunho, who had even rolled up my pant legs, continued the massage with great care.
As expected, a human painkiller was truly different.
My legs, which had been throbbing painfully at first, were already becoming comfortable. Thanks to that, I could more or less endure it even when Lee Sunho applied a bit of pressure to quickly knead out the knotted muscles.
Because of his efforts, my ragged breathing gradually settled down.
“Did you check your weight?”
At Lee Sunho’s question, I nodded while still lying down.
“The instructor told me to check every day, so I did.”
“Did it go up?”
“Someone has been persistently shoving food down my throat, so it went up by 1.5kg in that short time.”
Every time we ate, Lee Sunho would constantly pile meat onto my plate. There were times he swapped out my energy bars for chocolate bars, and he frequently provided snacks before I even had a chance to digest my previous meal. He even made me eat five meals a day on holidays; I honestly thought my stomach was going to burst.
Despite that, I was still nothing but skin and bones.
Sure enough, Lee Sunho, the head of the ‘Project Fatten Up Seong Do-yoon,’ seemed dissatisfied with my current appearance.
“It didn’t increase much. Let’s increase it to five meals a day starting today, even on weekdays.”
“…Spare me, man.”
I was speaking seriously, but Lee Sunho thought I was joking and just kept laughing.
By that time I had received a sufficient massage for both my legs and arms thanks to Lee Sunho.
“Seong Do-yoon, Lee Sunho. Come out.”
Someone with a stiff expression who had come to the training ground signaled for us to follow him with a jerk of his chin.
“From now on, you two are headed to the disaster area.”
***
Since he mentioned a field site, I thought we were going to clear a dungeon.
“This place is…”
It smelled of ruins. There was a scent of dry, dead earth, as if ashes would rise at the slightest brush of the wind.
It wasn’t my first time seeing a place like this.
It was a scenery I had no choice but to see frequently back when I was looking into the world inside the game from outside this world.
A city that had lost its name.
A place that did not exist on a map.
A ruin simply referred to among people as ‘Disaster Zone 3.’
A discarded land that failed to enter the Sanctuary.
‘Back then, it was land already occupied by monsters, so it couldn’t be made into a Sanctuary.’
In order to bestow God’s protection and declare a Sanctuary, the land had to be recognized as being owned by ‘humans.’ Only then would the system window regarding the use of protection appear.
The Sanctuaries created by God’s protection surrounded their areas like transparent domes, and the ‘dimensional poison’ leaking from the cracks in dimensions could not penetrate those walls and instead settled upon the disaster areas. This was still affecting the land even now, after the Holy War had ended.
Dungeons existing in disaster areas had a much faster monster generation rate compared to those in Sanctuaries. They frequently caused inconsistent anomalies, such as creating never-before-seen mutants or completely altering the internal structure of the dungeon. This remained true even now that the dimensional cracks were closed.
After the Holy War, the government considered the danger of the disaster areas and divided each zone among large-scale clans staffed with high-ranking Awakened. It was an unavoidable choice, as only powerful Awakened could respond to the volatile dungeons and monsters.
The clans that took charge of the disaster areas actually welcomed this situation.
Since these areas were prone to frequent changes and dangers, there were special spoils and byproducts that only appeared there. It is said that the four major clans of Korea grew rapidly by reaping massive profits from the byproducts of these disaster areas.
The Black Tail clan, which had barely managed to be allocated a disaster area, was also a case that rapidly increased its size thanks to this place, ‘Disaster Zone 13.’
“Each team must scout only according to their assigned routes and report any abnormalities without delay. That is all.”
After delivering the scouting routes to each team leader, the Reconnaissance Captain finished the briefing without any further explanation. Since they repeated scouts at short intervals, it seemed he didn’t feel the need for grand explanations even with new recruits present.
‘No, is it actually that he just finds these untimely recruits bothersome?’
It had felt ominous from the moment they threw us into the scouting team without so much as a basic manual.
“Team 8 over there, take good care of the rookies.”
“Yes, understood.”
Still, perhaps it weighed on his mind that he had included rookies who knew nothing, as he specifically mentioned us to the leader of Team 8, the team Lee Sunho and I belonged to.
There were eight teams in total heading out for reconnaissance.
The members of each team consisted of four people from the 3rd division.
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