The Saint Wants to Rest - vanish into fiction

The place where the silver badges were first released was, naturally, South Korea. It was not out of a sense of patriotism. It was for the purely practical reason that one can only rest easy once their own front yard has been cleaned.

The completed badges were distributed free of charge to the front-line Awakened deployed at the North Korean defense line.

The initial reactions were filled with skepticism and ridicule.

“You want us to wear these badges? They were made by that newly formed cult, weren’t they? Has the effect even been verified?”

“I am only wearing it because the higher-ups told me to. The craftsmanship is quite clean, though. I wonder if they would be worth some money if I sold them.”

Most Awakened dismissed the small badges on their chests as merely annoying ornaments or a display of administrative performance by the high-ranking officials. Though their nerves were frayed due to the horrific video from Russia, few believed that a tiny scrap of metal would distinguish a monster.

However, it did not take long for that shallow distrust to be shattered into pieces.

A nearby B-rank Gate burst open. Ordinarily, such an event would have been known in advance through foresight, but problems had occurred at several Gates simultaneously, making it impossible to raid them all. Consequently, the monsters from within rushed out toward the city.

“Ah, we are out of luck.”

At the front lines, Awakened belonging to the Management Bureau and those from guilds were stationed together. Once a person became an Awakened, they were mandatory participants in front-line deployments to subjugate monsters at least twice a year to promote domestic stability.

Among them was Kang Min-jun, an Awakened belonging to a small local guild. While looking around, he discovered a survivor collapsed beneath the debris of a collapsed commercial building. It was a teenage boy, covered in dust and bleeding, shivering violently.

“Are you alright, kid? You are safe now. Just wait a moment, and I will get you out.”

It was the moment Kang Min-jun let down his guard and lowered his weapon, approaching the boy with a smile to reassure him.

Suddenly, the silver badge attached to his chest emitted a heat so intense it felt as if his skin would burn.

“Ah, hot!”

In the same moment Kang Min-jun recoiled in surprise, clutching his chest and stepping back, an intensely pure white light exploded from the badge, illuminating the boy. The light was like a sword tearing through the darkness.

“Aaaaahhhhhhh!”

The boy, struck directly by the light, let out a grotesque scream and rolled across the ground. The skin of the boy, which had looked pitiful and ordinary, began to melt away into blackness, and the hideous true form of a member of the Demon King’s Army burst out through the cracks in the shredded hide. The mimicry had been forcibly stripped away.

“C-crazy! Is that a demon? Prepare for battle! Open fire!”

At the urgent cry of Kang Min-jun, his waiting comrades poured out magic and firepower all at once. Because they had launched a preemptive strike and the demon had suffered significant damage from the light, not a single casualty occurred.

If they had been deceived by the monster’s acting because of a lack of badges, and if they had rescued it and sent it to a civilian shelter, the resulting atrocity was something he did not even want to imagine.

And this brief yet intense combat process was being recorded in its entirety by the body cam attached to the chest of Kang Min-jun.

“Ian! Look at this. It is absolute chaos!”

Yoon Tae-gyeom kicked open the door to the rest area, his face flushed with excitement and his usual composure nowhere to be found, while waving a tablet PC. The video he urgently played vividly captured the terrifying and miraculous scene Kang Min-jun had experienced at the Gyeonggi-do site yesterday.

“It was a video filmed to be backed up on the Management Bureau’s internal server, but it seems the person who filmed it and their colleagues got excited and leaked it here and there. This is currently the top post on the Awakened community. The message board is exploding with people demanding the badges right now.”

Ian leaned back leisurely on the sofa, sipping his tea while looking at the screen.

“Then we can move on to the next step.”

Since the reputation among domestic Awakened had been overturned, they only needed to prepare for export and full-scale distribution. It was just as Ian was mentally tapping on a calculator.

Yoon Tae-gyeom wiped his sweat and shook his head.

“No, actually, it is not just talk among the Awakened right now. The video has spread to general social media and major portal sites. The public reaction right now is nothing short of pure madness.”