Chapter 322

Jung Haseong and Seo Esther.

And now, a clash between them and the Beast whose identity had been exposed.

Who would have thought the Hunters locked in a standoff with the two fake Beasts would somehow manage to make it all the way up to this transformed floor?

What was absurd was that Enzo felt exactly the same way.

"What were those idiots doing?"

Enzo was momentarily taken aback when he saw the Koreans appear behind him.

Their shoulders were soaked in blood.

Their equipment was torn in multiple places.

The unmistakable traces of severe injuries on their bodies made the situation obvious enough.

"They must've patched themselves up in a hurry with potions. There's no way they're actually in good condition."

He could tell his comrade hadn't simply let them escape for no reason.

But—

"Huh."

Now that Enzo understood the situation, everything somehow began to feel strangely unreal.

"Seriously..."

And yet, it was their employer who had accurately predicted the emergence of a break-type mutant monster—something that had never once appeared in this world before—and had even pinpointed the exact location where the Gate would open.

"Even with full support from backers that capable... they're still losing here?"

Heh heh!

"Against Hunters from a country that's hard enough to find on a globe?"

Enzo burst into laughter, even as blood gurgled in his throat.

The situation was so absurd that all he could manage was a hollow, bitter laugh.

***

Then how had the Korean Hunters managed to defy Enzo's expectations and make it this far?

"Ugh...!"

Five minutes earlier—

back when the ceiling of the Gate still resembled the depths of night.

"H-Hunter Seo."

"..."

"Hunter Seo Esther! Can you hear me?"

Only moments earlier, Esther, who had been supporting him from the rear, had suffered a serious internal injury after one of the Beasts found an opening and drove its claws into her.

Unless one's body had been surgically enhanced with alien technology, any ordinary living creature was bound to feel pain.

The Guildmaster of the Magic Tower had fallen into neurocardiogenic syncope from the sheer severity of it.

And now Jung Haseong had to hold off two Beasts by himself, leaving him with almost no opportunity to administer proper treatment.

FWOOOOSH.

Jung Haseong spread flames around the fallen Esther, preventing the bone-masked group from approaching.

But then—

KIEK, KIEK, KIEK.

From beyond the flames came faint laughter, almost like an auditory hallucination.

"No matter how I think about it, there's no way I'm imagining that..."

Stamina couldn't be infinite.

Magic power couldn't be infinite either.

So why did those things never seem to tire?

"They're actually getting faster."

BOOM!

Meanwhile, Jung Haseong's flames were visibly weakening.

Just before losing consciousness, Esther had focused everything she had left into casting a powerful curse, one that would be difficult to dispel.

Naturally, its effects were still influencing the battle.

And yet, just as Haseong had suspected, the Beasts before him showed strangely little reaction to the curse.

They dodged Jung Haseong's flames like startled rabbits and even used their monstrous strength to fend off occasional strikes from the [Sunset Sword].

"Could it be an item's effect?"

The Beasts continued fighting with frightening intensity, as though constantly drawing power from some bottomless reservoir.

They unleashed skill after skill without any sign of exhaustion.

"I should've done this earlier."

Good job!

Could this really be nothing more than talent?

I never expected that guy to be this strong.

Jung Haseong was an exceptional superhuman.

Thanks to the combination of natural talent and relentless effort, he even managed to push the Beasts back for a time.

One of the masked marauders had an arm completely burned away, rendering it useless.

Unfortunately, Jung Haseong had chosen the wrong strategy from the very beginning.

It looks like waiting for them to tire out isn't going to work.

They were only wearing skins.

Inside, they were still ordinary combatants being propped up by the power of some item.

While their opponents hesitated, carefully weighing their chances, the Beasts had already begun regenerating little by little.

CRUNCH.

The Beast whose arm had been incinerated by Jung Haseong's skill quietly began growing it back.

Then, the instant the black-haired man turned his attention toward his fallen companion—

the creature sprang forward like a released spring.

"-!!"

At that moment, the Korean gave up maintaining distance.

"Haseong-ah..."

"Don't be afraid."

"I've told you over and over. The very attribute that made humanity what it is today has become part of your own body. Do you understand how incredible that is? How magnificent that talent of yours is...?"

But this time was different.

Perhaps it was because he had already fought a body-enhancement type once by the seaside.

Or perhaps it was thanks to the trials he had recently overcome in the Tower of the Thousand People.

Whatever the reason, Jung Haseong calmly activated his skill even as the enemy closed in, relying on the experience he had accumulated.

BAM!

The resulting attack burned with power comparable to a dragon's ultimate strike.

The moment the young man erupted in flames—deliberately including his own body within the blast radius—the Beast that had just reached for Haseong's head no longer had any chance to dodge.

It was roasted alive.

"Kwaaaahhh!"

Calm.

Calm.

Calm.

Jung Haseong fought desperately not to feel sympathy at the sound of his enemy's screams.

And because he succeeded, his hand did not tremble when he raised his sword.

It was at that very moment—

when the decisive blow that would overturn the flow of battle was struck.

"Aah!"

"Heup...?"

A huge silver moonblade suddenly burst through the broad-chested Beast blocking the way.

Its curved, single-edged blade resembled a vicious crescent moon.

And it pierced clean through both the Beast and Jung Haseong's waist in a single strike.

What the d**n... ****!

The Beast being used as a living shield immediately spat a stream of curses at its [N O V E L I G H T] own comrade.

But the one responsible merely shrugged and muttered something casually, as though it were of no importance.

You've still got one left anyway. I already used mine dragging those bastards back here myself.

Jung Haseong collapsed before he could even properly understand the English he had overheard.

The blade had scraped dangerously close to his internal organs.

A freezing chill spread through his entire body in an instant.

And now he finally understood—

why so many legends depicted the Grim Reaper carrying a scythe.

"H-heuk."

The sensation of cold steel slicing through one's insides was undoubtedly close to a premonition of death.

SWISH!

While Jung Haseong's body stiffened from shock, the bone-masked enemy violently ripped the crescent blade back out—

without the slightest concern for whether it would tear through his own comrade along the way.

Naturally, the result was catastrophic blood loss.

The nameless pseudo-Beast immediately moved in to finish him off.

Its intent was obvious.

Kill the Korean Hunter once and for all while he was bleeding heavily and barely conscious.

And in fact—

this was exactly what it meant for a fight to be decided in a single blow.

[Ting!]

With a sound strangely reminiscent of a parking collision alert—

[Physical damage has exceeded 80%.]

[According to settings, a counterattack will now be executed automatically.]

Although Jung Haseong's expression had gone rigid, an extraordinarily high-frequency vibration still began emanating from the red blade.

"Huh?"

"Wait, that..."

And with those few words, inaudible to any ordinary human on Earth—

the battle ended.

CRRRAAAAACK!

"Ugh!"

"Heugh!"

Recognizing Jung Haseong as its true master, the [Sunset Sword] instantly subdued the enemies.

If its ego function and chatter settings had been enabled, the sword might even have bragged about the feat.

Layer upon layer of its master's magic, embedded deep within the legendary item, was rapidly transmitted through Alphaurth's advanced sorcery.

[Auto Notification: Master! The mana stored in the cylinder is critically low. If this condition continues, core functions may fail to activate properly.

If you'd like to rapidly replenish mana—

→ (Strongly recommended: Try invoking a Word of Command right now!]

...Compared with the time in Mimic City, however, the sword's stored capacity was much lower.

So the result was relatively underwhelming.

"Keugh... cough."

Jung Haseong, utterly bewildered, hurriedly pulled out a potion and drank it.

"Cough, cough...! No, what just happened...?"

He had no idea.

A moment ago, he had closed his eyes believing everything was over.

He had been completely certain he was about to die.

"Why did the sword suddenly...?"

The enemies clinging to him had abruptly been struck by a burst of light from the sword—

and then, inexplicably, transformed into bizarre lumps of stone.

"What on earth is this?"

A reddish glow lingered over them.

The Beasts that had been rampaging wildly only moments earlier were now trapped in the middle of some incomprehensible transformation.

They looked almost like frozen pomegranate jam, or perhaps chunks of translucent ruby.

Their bodies had hardened in awkward, unstable poses.

"Could it be... petrification?"

There were indeed monsters in dungeons capable of turning living beings into stone...

But Jung Haseong had never heard of petrification producing anything this color.

More importantly—

"That light definitely came from my sword, didn't it?"

TUK.

Even as Jung Haseong belatedly took out a recovery potion to treat Seo Esther, he refrained from touching the petrified enemies.

If the mechanism truly worked like ordinary petrification, then a sufficiently powerful external impact might break the effect immediately.

"Heugh!"

"Hunter Esther? Are you awake?"

Seo Esther soon regained consciousness.

"Huh! What is this?"

The instant the curse-type Awakened opened her eyes, that was the first question that came to mind.

But Jung Haseong had no answer either.

[* * * It will inform you of the status. No repairs are currently needed.]

How could these primitive beings possibly understand that a magical sword created in a binary star system beyond the known universe had, for the first time in ages, awakened enough strength to protect its chosen master?

"..."

Still, there was one thing even Haseong understood.

"This too... must be thanks to that Hunter."

The sudden activation of his legendary item's hidden function—

it had to be related to that particular Hunter who had caused such an uproar in Mimic City.

Could it be that the sword had been so overwhelmed by the monstrous power of that blond Hunter...

that it had finally "opened its eyes"?

"Even when that cultist nearly blew my chest apart, nothing like this petrification happened. That's the only clue I have."

For a fleeting moment, the image of a Hunter's back he had once seen surfaced in his mind.

But this was no time for sentimentality.

"Whoa."

Jung Haseong took a deep breath and immediately stood.

"This isn't the time for this. Hunter Esther, we need to move."

"Move?"

"Hunter Kim still hasn't come back. The fight over there may have gotten much worse than we expected...!"

At first, they had simply hoped the fourth S-rank would eventually join them on his own.

But looking back, that was no different from sitting beneath a tree and waiting for a ripe persimmon to fall into their mouths.

"Keeng!"

So they began cutting down the monsters in their path and moved out of the room toward the corridor.

"Oh my."

"Right. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't sense any magic...!"

Along the way, they realized that the structure of the ant-nest-like rooms had changed slightly with the passage of time.

"It's the same as Heaven's Revolving Maze."

"Was that... ah, do you mean the dungeon that existed before the anomaly caused the [Six-Legged Corridor] to appear?"

"The internal structure changes according to a fixed cycle. According to the research so far, each area usually shifts one position in the same direction—something like the cylinder of a revolver."

Thanks to the judgment of a seasoned veteran—a walking encyclopedia of Hunter knowledge—their confusion quickly settled.

"Hunter Kim Giryeo, who was fighting in the corridor, should definitely still be on this upper floor."

"Ah! There aren't any stairs going down!"

"This phenomenon shouldn't have changed our relative positions by much. As long as we're not too late!"

They discovered a staircase leading to another level just beyond the plains where they had originally been fighting.

That meant there was only one thing left to do.

Defeat the one-eyed hounds packed tightly into that narrow space—

and hurry to reinforce their teammate.

"Kreurung!"

KEUNG!

The S-rank Hunters launched a ferocious assault, splitting open a path through the monsters like the miracle of the Red Sea.

As Seo Esther ran alongside Haseong, however, she suddenly voiced a concern.

"Ugh... I-it's just, you know."

"Yes?"

"Maybe Kim Giryeo... isn't in very good condition right now."

WHOOOSH!

Just moments ago, Haseong had barely been able to bring himself to take a sip of his mana recovery potion.

Now he had the bottle shoved into his mouth as he stared at her in complete bewilderment.

Not in very good condition—

"Ah, I'm not even sure whether I should say this, but..."

Seo Esther had known about this for quite some time.

But because she had sensed it was a weakness the other person was deliberately trying to conceal, she had tactfully kept quiet until now.

However...

"If this were any other time, he'd have taken down at least one S-rank Hunter by now!"

First, let it be made absolutely clear.

Everything she was about to think from this point onward was a complete misunderstanding.

"Someone who would mercilessly execute even a criminal as pitiful-looking as Su Yetwi... and yet a person like that still hasn't come back to us. That's strange."

A massive misunderstanding.

"...I'm worried."

But from Seo Esther's point of view, the situation looked suspiciously as though it might be connected to that particular problem of Kim Giryeo's.