Inside Min Hyung-sik’s barrier.
The rocks that had crashed down from above were piled atop the transparent shield like a mountain.
Spiderweb-like cracks spread densely across its surface, and beads of sweat dripped steadily from Min Hyung-sik’s chin.
Yet amid that despair, Siul stepped forward.
“Do-hyun, what are you doing? Hurry up and open the Mini Gate.”
Park Do-hyun fidgeted anxiously.
“T-The Mini Gate… right now?”
If they used the Mini Gate, they could instantly warp back to the midpoint where Hyo-won was waiting.
They could escape this hellish boss room.
However, using the Mini Gate also meant abandoning someone here alone.
“I’ll stay behind, so don’t worry about me. Everyone else should get out.”
The air inside the barrier froze.
“What did you say?”
“Are you joking right now?”
“You’ll die if you stay here alone!”
The party members shouted in horror.
One of them grabbed Siul by the arm in an attempt to stop him, while another stared wide-eyed as the Giant Golem raised its arm beyond the barrier.
RUMBLE—!
Mana pouring from its red core wrapped around a massive boulder.
The same enormous rock that had cracked the barrier earlier was being prepared once again.
“No, Siul! If that thing hits us one more time…!”
“Team Leader Min’s barrier has reached its limit. You all know that.”
No one could argue with Siul.
Min Hyung-sik’s body was indeed trembling like a leaf.
“Don’t worry. I won’t die. In fact, I can deal with those things faster if I’m left alone.”
Siul spoke with complete calm.
He was even smiling.
“Everyone, please leave. Sorry, but if you stay here, you’ll only get in my way.”
He even made such an arrogant declaration.
‘Who the hell is this guy…. How can he say something like that so casually in a situation like this…?’
The party members were confused.
A mercenary hunter whose name they had never even heard before was telling them to leave everything to him.
It was enough to make their heads spin.
“Do-hyun, take out the disc.”
“…Are you serious?”
Park Do-hyun asked again, as though trying to stop him.
But then Min Hyung-sik cut into the conversation.
“Do as he says.”
Everyone turned toward Min Hyung-sik in shock.
Min Hyung-sik was normally almost excessively protective of his team members.
If someone fell behind, he was the kind of true leader who would throw himself into danger to save them.
And yet he was agreeing to leave Siul behind.
Unable to believe it, the party members exchanged uncertain looks.
“Team Leader, if we leave him here alone….”
“Team Leader Min, we should stay and….”
“No.”
Min Hyung-sik’s single word cut through their protests like a blade.
He stared at Siul with bloodshot eyes.
There was already a firm resolve in his gaze, the look of a man who had reached his conclusion.
“He’ll be fine. We can trust him and leave.”
Min Hyung-sik reassured his team with words of confidence, but inwardly, he was calmly reviewing everything he knew about Siul.
‘He’s a Special Hunter belonging to the government.’
What Jang Jin-young had told him flashed through his mind.
Siul was supposedly a covert Special Hunter operating without an official badge despite possessing strength on the level of an S-rank hunter.
‘If he’s a Special Hunter, there’s no reason to doubt his abilities. And if he says we’ll only get in the way, that must mean he’s hiding an explosive amount of power.’
Min Hyung-sik made his decision.
“Park Do-hyun! Open the Mini Gate!”
Once the team leader gave the order, Park Do-hyun could no longer hesitate.
WHOOSH!
Park Do-hyun opened his inventory.
He pulled out Disc Two, which was paired with Disc One that they had installed at the dungeon’s midpoint.
With trembling hands, Park Do-hyun placed the second disc on the ground.
HUM—.
When he infused it with mana, the pattern engraved on the disc began to glow.
“Everyone, get on!”
At Park Do-hyun’s shout, the party members moved onto the disc with heavy steps, and Min Hyung-sik joined them last.
Siul alone remained one step behind.
“I’ll trust you.”
Min Hyung-sik met Siul’s eyes and nodded.
Siul answered with a smile.
『 Transporting from Gate Two to the location of Gate One. 』
As the warp began, the expressions of the party members were darker than ever.
Some had tears welling in their eyes, while others stared at Siul with guilt written all over their faces.
“You have to come back alive. Seriously…!”
Park Do-hyun pleaded through tears.
Siul did not answer.
He merely turned his back on them and walked forward.
FLASH—!
The disc erupted with blue light.
In an instant, the party members vanished into the glow, leaving Siul as the only human remaining in the boss room.
RUMBLE…!
Min Hyung-sik’s barrier collapsed.
The moment the shield disappeared, all the pressure from outside surged in at once.
The smell of stone dust.
The dense mana and crushing pressure.
And then.
WHOOSH—!
The massive boulder hurled by the Giant Golem.
SPLAT!!
The boulder struck Siul directly in the face.
His head exploded instantly.
“GROOOOAR!!”
“GROOOAR!!”
“GROOOOOAR!!”
The golems on the second-floor ledge danced like monkeys in delight.
They even pointed at the human corpse still standing upright despite its missing head and laughed mockingly.
SHLUK!
Then suddenly, a head popped out from the empty neck.
Siul’s head regenerated as though nothing had happened.
“I never get used to this. Regenerating feels absolutely disgusting every single time.”
Siul tapped his smooth cheek with one hand as he spoke.
The Giant Golem and its subordinates recoiled in utter shock.
His head had clearly exploded.
How was he alive?
No—
How had he regenerated?
Every last one of them was stunned.
“All right.”
Siul spoke a single word as he drew his longsword from his inventory.
There was no fear in his eyes.
Only anticipation.
“Now let’s have a fight between monsters.”
* * *
Hunter Association Headquarters.
Basement Level 3, Gate Management Department Conference Room.
A video was paused on the large screen at the center of the room.
The resolution was poor, and the footage shook badly.
“I’ll play it again.”
A Gate Management Department employee pressed the remote.
The video began playing, revealing what appeared to be the Hongdae intersection.
It was an ordinary city street in the middle of a quiet afternoon, nowhere near rush hour.
Then the air itself warped slightly.
“Right here.”
The employee slowed the footage.
0.3 seconds… 0.7 seconds… 1 second.
For that brief moment, a blue warp portal opened above the street, then disappeared as though nothing had happened.
“This is everything we have in the observation records. The energy waveform is also different from that of a normal gate.”
A graph appeared beside the footage.
Its bizarrely distorted waveform was noticeably different from the mana curve normally produced when a gate appeared.
“Are you suggesting this might have been a Black Gate?”
The head of the Gate Management Department, seated at the head of the table, asked.
“We can’t say for certain… but these values aren’t normal.”
The executives seated around the table grew grim.
A Black Gate.
A phenomenon with a probability of only 0.00001%.
There were even rumors that when one occurred, it did more than distort dimensions—it brought disaster with it.
“And one of those opened in the middle of the city for exactly one second?”
“How could something like that happen?”
The employee manipulated the footage again.
“I’m not sure whether we can call this fortunate, but we did find one clue.”
This time, he enlarged the CCTV footage.
It showed the scene immediately after the warp portal disappeared.
A person who had not been there moments earlier was now standing in its place.
“Please focus on this man.”
Every gaze in the conference room turned toward the screen.
A plain black tracksuit.
Messy hair.
A dazed expression.
He looked like an ordinary young man one might see anywhere on the street.
“Is he a hunter?”
“I don’t see any equipment.”
“He came out of a gate, so there’s no way he’s an ordinary civilian.”
The employee pressed the remote, zooming in on the man’s face.
“That guy… I feel like I’ve seen him somewhere.”
“Same here. He doesn’t look unfamiliar.”
“I could swear I saw him recently….”
Similar reactions spread throughout the conference room.
“Is he one of ours or something? Why does everyone act like they know him?”
A middle-aged executive rested his chin on one hand as he asked.
But no one could give a definite answer.
“Did you run an identity check?”
“The CCTV footage is too blurry. It’s difficult to identify him from this video alone.”
“Contact Special Hunter Headquarters. Those people have a way of making the impossible possible.”
“Yes, sir.”
The conference room filled with murmurs as everyone tried to guess the identity of the man in the footage.
The Association employees never imagined the truth.
The man on that screen had received a commendation from the Hunter Association only recently.
He had even walked away with seventy million won in compensation.
* * *
The boss room of Rock Canyon was suffocatingly quiet.
The only sounds were the faint creaks of the golems.
On the second-floor ledge, the golems that had been hurling rocks only moments earlier were now collapsed on the ground.
Their stone chests heaved, while faint mana leaked weakly from the gaps between their joints.
They were completely exhausted from the endless fighting.
There was no better way to describe it.
Things were no different on the first floor.
The Giant Golem knelt on one knee with its head lowered.
The core in its chest, once blazing red, now merely flickered dimly.
And in the center of the boss room lay Siul’s corpse, crushed like a crumpled tin can.
His arms and legs were bent at grotesque angles, and his chest had completely caved in.
But only for a moment.
CRACK!
With a sound like a metal spring snapping back into place, his crushed body rebounded.
Siul’s body sprang up from the floor.
His twisted limbs returned to their proper positions, while his collapsed chest expanded again.
Bones, muscles, and skin reconstructed themselves.
It took only a few seconds for his body to return completely to normal.
“Phew.”
Siul lightly exhaled and rolled his fully restored neck.
The Giant Golem frowned at the sight.
“GROOOOOOOAR!!”
Its roar was filled with both rage and fear.
‘What the hell is this monster?! Why does he keep getting back up no matter how many times I kill him?!’
That seemed to be exactly what it was screaming.
Siul gave a small laugh at its outrage.
“Tired already? Then….”
Siul kicked off the ground.
He charged fiercely toward the Giant Golem.
Normally, the golems on the second-floor ledge would have hurled rocks at that exact moment.
An automatic response meant to protect their boss.
But none of them moved.
Their arms would not rise.
They had no strength left.
They were simply too exhausted from fighting for so long.
The Giant Golem was no different.
It squeezed out the last of its remaining strength and threw a punch.
‘Way too slow.’
Siul shifted his body slightly and easily let the Giant Golem’s fist pass by him.
At the same time, his silver blade flashed.
He drove the B-rank longsword into the Giant Golem’s chest.
The Giant Golem’s massive body staggered violently.
A ten-meter-tall monstrosity was pushed backward and toppled by a single slender man barely 180 centimeters tall.
THUD!!
The entire stone chamber shook.
Siul pulled out his sword and climbed onto the Giant Golem’s chest.
The light from its core flickered weakly beneath his feet.
It was still alive, but no longer capable of fighting.
Siul looked down at the Giant Golem.
“You’ve got less stamina than I expected. Were all those rocks on your body fat instead of muscle?”
The Giant Golem was furious, but it could no longer move.
All it could do was let out faint, ragged breaths.
WHOOSH.
Siul looked up toward the second floor.
The fifty golems were crawling on all fours toward the ledge and throwing themselves over the edge.
It was their final desperate attempt to protect their boss.
“That’s hilarious. It looks like some kind of game show.”
Siul smiled as he patiently waited for the golems, now reduced to moving like turtles.
“Keep going. I’ll fight you until you die.”
It was pure mockery.
The obnoxious mockery of a man who knew he could not die.