For a man to be sensible is not such a good thing in a world as senseless as this one.
"Let's end it here."
"......"
In that moment.
Kim Tae-seong had no need for the worn-out question of what that was supposed to mean.
The man before him was Jo Seok-cheol, leader of [A Squad], the team he had matched breath with for the past five years.
A team formed by people who were no more than D-Grade, with the goal of one day building an A-Grade squad.
Kim Tae-seong had joined this team at twenty-three and poured his passion into it, and yet the sudden notice thrown at him on the very day they had promised to conquer the sixth floor of the tower did not, in truth, feel all that sudden.
'It's an obvious enough story.'
He turned his gaze.
A Squad had five members.
Including team leader Jo Seok-cheol and Kim Tae-seong, there were three others.
But beyond Jo Seok-cheol, along with the three familiar faces, some unfamiliar man he had never seen before caught his eye.
Jo Seok-cheol spoke.
"I'll get straight to the point. We've been through a lot together and I've grown attached to you, but to put it bluntly, our conclusion is that it's impossible to go any further carrying someone who doesn't have a single [Unique Skill]. Honestly, you knew it too. That our relationship was bound to end someday......."
"That's bullshit."
"What did you say?"
"What? You give me notice like this and you didn't expect to catch a mouthful of curses to the face?"
Jo Seok-cheol was thirty.
Kim Tae-seong was twenty-eight.
He didn't care.
With his eyebrows shot up, he looked Jo Seok-cheol straight in the eye.
"I can see plainly enough what's going on, but if you were going to throw me out, you should've at least given me time to prepare. Telling me like this on the day of the climb, that's because you need me until the new member joins, isn't it? Seok-cheol. I knew you were fucking selfish, but this is going too far."
"Kim Tae-seong!"
"Is that how you talk to your hyung?"
"What the hell do you want me to do, you fucking bastards?"
Being sensible does not mean living sensibly.
He had judged the situation sensibly, and precisely because of that he could not hide his anger at such a senseless attitude.
Kim Tae-seong looked over the people who had once been his comrades.
"You there, the new guy. I don't know how impressive a bastard you are, but keep one thing in mind. I joined this team and poured my passion into it night and day for five years, and I still got thrown out in a way that had no courtesy or respect in it at all. When you're in the jaws of death inside the tower, think hard about whether these bastards are the kind who'll guard your back."
"Why you little bastard."
He spun on his heel.
Irritation surged up.
Five years.
It was the moment when all that hardship ended in a mere five minutes.
"Let go of me! I'm going to kill that bastard."
"The climb is almost here, don't blow this up for nothing!"
"Hyung!"
"Ah, Oppa!"
Shouts rose behind him.
Let them.
Kim Tae-seong did not look back.
***
TAP.
"Haaah."
The cup struck the table.
As the buzz rose pleasantly through him, Kim Tae-seong stared blankly at the cup.
"......Those f***ing bastards."
Today.
Today was the day of the long-awaited sixth-floor climb.
For the past month he had poured in tireless effort for a successful raid, analyzing strategy guides, drawing up raid plans, and the fact that they had announced such a hollow parting handed him a sense of betrayal beyond words.
The problem was.
'I know it too. If you look at the future instead of the present, I'm the member who has to be let go someday.'
Those called hunters.
The moment they awaken, they obtain a 'Unique Skill'.
The Unique Skill forms the foundation of a hunter, and depending on which one they obtain, their growth takes an entirely different course.
Jo Seok-cheol, for one, had obtained a very common but decently performing Unique Skill called 'Iron Man', and thanks to it he took the role of the warrior who faced monsters head-on. A Unique Skill, of which everyone possessed one. Kim Tae-seong had obtained one as well, but the absurdity of that day still remained an unsolved mystery.
[????? Link]
[Unique Skill]
That was all.
A description more than half of which was question marks.
What kind of skill it was, what effect it had.
Staring at the shabby skill window that held nothing at all, Kim Tae-seong let out a complaint.
'......If they'd just been honest and given me time to prepare for the parting, it wouldn't feel this f***ing awful.'
Climbing the tower.
A team was normally essential.
The reason was the tower's difficulty.
The difficulty was beyond solving alone, so people generally formed teams, but that number was not allowed to exceed five. The tower's difficulty rose along with the 'number of people'. According to more than a decade of research, five was the final line at which a team could bring out its meaning to the fullest, and that was the accepted orthodoxy everyone agreed on.
Therefore.
The addition of a new team member meant the departure of an existing one.
To leap forward, A Squad had decided to discard Kim Tae-seong, who had no Unique Skill, and take in a new fifth member.
'And I have a mountain of debt to pay off.'
This sixth-floor conquest.
For it, he had pulled money together and invested in this and that.
With the whole thing falling apart before he could recover his investment, there was nothing he could do but throw back one drink after another.
He knew.
Despair lasted exactly one day.
That from tomorrow he would live in earnest again.
If he had not been relentless to begin with, he could never have reached D-Grade without a Unique Skill.
It was then.
From one side of the street food stall, the television the owner was watching carried a voice that caught his ear.
[News that Spain's expedition has failed to conquer the twentieth floor. With less than a month left on the deadline, the nations plan to hold a summit to discuss the matter. Meanwhile, in the United States.......]
"Oh no, this is bad."
Just as the owner's voice was laced with despair, apart from Kim Tae-seong's personal problems, the world itself was thoroughly f***ed.
The tower.
A trial from a god that had appeared one day out of nowhere.
The tower, made up of fifty floors in all, handed humanity a very clear deadline.
[Floor 1]
[Time Limit: One Month]
[On failure to conquer, this dimension is destroyed.]
The world was turned upside down.
Back then the concept of a hunter was not yet clear, and people put their heads together to solve the problem. In the end, they succeeded in conquering the tower within a week. Hunters appeared and wielded superhuman power, slaughtering every monster in the tower and passing the deadline.
From that day the world changed.
The existence of hunters rose swiftly to prominence.
All the economy and power of the world became focused on resolving the tower's deadlines.
And now.
[Floor 20]
[Time Limit: One Year]
[On failure to conquer, this dimension is destroyed.]
Humanity had hit its limit.
The tenth tower had already boasted tremendous difficulty, and this twentieth one, as if to confirm the 'Calamity of Ten', had swallowed every expedition whole with a hopeless difficulty. Eleven of the twelve months had already been spent. Of course, international law deliberately called for the tower to be cleared with one month remaining, but the problem was that this time there was truly no sign of it being cleared at all.
Leaving the team, whatever.
If the world was destroyed, it was over.
Perhaps it was the drink.
At this hopeless reality, a snort of laughter slipped out.
"I hope the whole lot just drops dead."
SCRAPE.
He rose, staggering.
Nonsense.
His family at home.
For their sake alone, the world must not be destroyed, and he must not give up on his own life.
SLAP, SLAP, he struck his face.
He went over to the owner and paid for the food, pushed aside the flap of the stall, stepped out, and walked down the pitch-dark alley.
Trudge, trudge, there was no strength in his steps.
The world spun round and round.
'Did I drink too much?'
Was it because the day had been hard?
Was it because he had drunk too much?
Just as he failed to hold himself up and stumbled badly.
[The conditions of the Unique Skill have been met.]
[The ????? Link skill has been unsealed.]
The world spun.
This was not an abstract expression.
It truly spun round and round, and then.
SPLASH.
Just like that, he fell into a whirlpool of dimensions.
***
He snapped awake.
The alcohol flew out of him at once, and Kim Tae-seong hurriedly raised his head.
'Where is this?'
The sudden unsealing of the skill.
And then his body had fallen somewhere.
While his head was still a tangled mess, what filled Kim Tae-seong's sight was a senseless scene.
A gray sky.
Ruins where the undergrowth had withered and shriveled.
Against a barren environment no one would believe was a world where people lived, unfamiliar figures caught his eye.
'Arm.'
FWOOSH.
Light flared.
Gripping tight the sword that appeared out of empty air, he braced for an attack from the unknown others.
But then.
TAP.
One man.
He stepped forward.
There was no particular motion.
He did not even draw the sword hung at his waist, and at the reach of his outstretched hand Kim Tae-seong felt a tremendous force and the hand holding his sword was flung away. The moment his widened eyes tried to follow the man's movement, the man hurriedly spoke.
"Do not be on your guard."
"......!"
"We are human beings like you, and we are the ones who called you here."
Kim Tae-seong was a sensible man.
Therefore.
He could not understand this senselessness.
In that instant, the skill came to mind.
The voice he had heard at the end was the only means of explaining this situation.
'Skill window.'
[E-031 Link]
[Unique Skill]
-Allows entry into the 'E-031' dimension.
-Cooldown: One month
-Link duration: 3 hours
-Bound Skill: Summon unsealed
-Bound Skill: Conscription unsealed
-Bound Skill: Salvation unsealed
[Summon] lv1
[Unique-Bound Skill]
-Summons a being of the 'E-031' dimension at random.
-Cooldown: 6 hours
-Duration: 1 hour
-Special Effect: If the duration is exceeded, the summon may be maintained by applying 1 hour of cooldown per 10 minutes.
[Conscription] lv1
[Unique-Bound Skill]
-Summons a specified being of the 'E-031' dimension. The target of the summon cannot refuse the summon, and obeys commands absolutely.
-Cooldown: One week
-Duration: 1 hour
-Special Effect: If the duration is exceeded, the summon may be maintained by applying 1 day of cooldown per 10 minutes.
[Salvation] lv1
[Unique-Bound Skill]
-Within the 'E-031' dimension, a designated area can be made into a 'Green Field'. A Green Field possesses the ecosystem of the era when life existed there.
'What is this.'
The skill's information had been revealed.
His head was a tangle.
It was not clear exactly what kind of situation this was, but the fact he could infer from the information he had secured was that he was now in a place called the 'E-031' dimension. Otherwise there was no explaining the strange environment and people spread out before his eyes.
The man's words.
If they had called him, and that was the skill's unsealing condition.
"......I need an explanation of this situation."
He asked carefully.
He had to grasp their intent.
Communication was no problem.
The [Interpretation Artifact], distributed worldwide, proved its worth even in this strange world.
Thanks to it, the man's voice reached him interpreted.
"The world we lived in could not withstand the trials of the tower and was destroyed. We are all the survivors that remain, and as we were dying with nothing to eat, a moment ago we declared our consent to the 'Link'."
The unsealing condition.
It was the consent of the other dimension.
"My name is Namgung Cheol, Clan Head of the Namgung Clan. I beg of you, Savior......."
Namgung Cheol.
The Namgung Clan.
What those names meant was clear.
"Would you share with us our daily bread?"
A world where martial arts and slaughter ran rampant.
A world called murim.
Out of nowhere, Kim Tae-seong had been linked to murim.