Blink. Blink.
Beyond the transparent protective barrier, red warning lights flashed at regular intervals.
Chae-ho rolled his stiff neck from side to side and walked toward the center of the training room.
The thick special urethane mat covering the floor softly embraced his feet.
It was the day after he successfully completed his short-term mercenary schedule in a Grade C dungeon and returned.
Back when he used to handle all sorts of dirty work in parties, he would have been bedridden for several days after a single dungeon raid, his body completely worn out.
But now it was different.
Although a dull fatigue remained in his muscles, his body actually felt lighter and his mind was calm.
He had heard through various channels that rumors were quietly spreading among the parties he had recently joined.
There was a skilled Grade D Hunter who could see through the flow of battle itself.
But Chae-ho was not the type of person to become arrogant because of such reputation or the attention of others.
Rumors were nothing more than words passed around by other people.
Avoiding a monster's vicious claws in actual combat and saving a companion's life was entirely a matter of his own hands.
It was his day off, so he could have spent the day resting lazily.
But his footsteps naturally led him to the Hunter-exclusive training facility.
Resting and loosening his body was good too, but first he needed to firmly engrave the dangerous sensations he had felt while gripping his sword in dungeons into his brain and muscles before they faded away.
Chae-ho approached the equipment control panel placed in the corner of the empty training room.
He moved his fingers quickly and set the difficulty of the target striking machine.
He easily skipped the basic settings that ordinary Grade D Hunters used for warming up.
He dragged the setting bar displayed on the screen straight up to a Grade C upper-level difficulty.
Once the settings were complete, dozens of barrels hidden in the walls and ceiling slowly emerged.
The sight of all of them aiming their muzzles toward Chae-ho was fairly threatening.
"Start."
As Chae-ho muttered quietly, he pressed the start button on the panel.
He immediately rushed into the center of the training room and lowered his stance.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Along with dull bursting sounds, countless black rubber bullets poured down from every direction like a shower.
Their speed and trajectories were completely irregular.
Some bounced violently off the floor and aimed for his chin.
Some dropped vertically from the ceiling toward the top of his head.
Others drew wide curves and entered his blind spots.
Even with his eyes wide open and his vision expanded, it was a brutal difficulty where most people would not last even 10 seconds before collapsing to the ground covered in bruises.
Chae-ho stood straight in place and narrowed his eyes.
Black dots filled his vision as they rushed toward him.
Among the countless bullets, he identified the three trajectories that would strike his vital points immediately.
'Time Deceleration.'
His own quiet switch turned on inside his mind.
At that moment, the mechanical noises hitting his ears and the raining bullets felt as if they had sunk into thick mud and slowed.
The trajectories of the rubber bullets that seemed frozen in the air were clearly drawn before his eyes like 3D models.
But Chae-ho did not maintain this state for as long as before.
The moment before the bullets touched his cheeks.
After confirming only the minimum necessary impact trajectories, he immediately canceled the skill.
Tap.
The world's speed bounced back to normal.
Chae-ho slightly tilted his head back and twisted his upper body sharply.
The rubber bullets grazed dangerously close to his ears, leaving behind sharp friction sounds.
At the same time, he bent his knees and rolled his body to let the bullet bouncing off the floor pass.
The remaining bullet flying at a difficult angle was struck away roughly with the handle of the short wooden sword in his hand.
Bang! Thud!
Dull impact sounds rang out one after another.
There was no unnecessary movement.
Activate the skill for a brief moment to read the attack direction.
Immediately deactivate it.
Then move the body.
The core of the training was eliminating the waste of forcibly extending the time between seeing and judging.
Chae-ho did not stop at merely relying on the skill as a reliable shield and following things with his eyes.
The process was to sharpen his pure reflexes and instantaneous judgment to the extreme, allowing him to immediately extend his sword and twist his body toward openings captured in the slowed world.
'One more.'
The skill activated and deactivated again.
A moment lasting 0.1 seconds or even less.
Like a flickering fluorescent light, deceleration and acceleration repeatedly alternated.
Relying blindly on the skill always carried risks.
There was no guarantee when the ability would become restricted or run out.
Even if he found the correct answer in the slowed world, if his body was not fast enough to execute that answer, even an ability like a miracle was meaningless.
Chae-ho silently scattered drops of sweat among the endless barrage of rubber bullets.
***
The irregular and merciless assault continued for more than 10 minutes.
Beep—
Along with a dry mechanical sound signaling the end, the barrels protruding from the walls returned to their original positions.
"Whoo."
Only then did Chae-ho place the wooden sword he had been holding onto the floor and release a rough breath.
His light training clothes were soaked with sweat and clung tightly to his body.
Sweat continuously ran from his forehead and fell to the floor from his chin.
Hundreds of rubber bullets rolled across the urethane mat.
The areas where three or four bullets had grazed his shoulders and thighs were red and stinging.
But there was not a single place where he had been struck directly hard enough to make his bones ache.
Just as he was about to catch his breath and pick up the towel he had placed nearby.
A translucent message window silently appeared in the corner of his vision.
[Time Deceleration proficiency has increased.]
[Total Daily Usage Limit: 13 seconds]
Chae-ho's hand reaching for the towel stopped in midair.
"13 seconds."
He swallowed his heavy breath and stared at the translucent letters.
When he had pushed himself to the limit practicing for several days after obtaining the skill, the usage time had increased from 10 seconds to only 11 seconds.
But this time, it had jumped by 2 seconds at once.
That meant it was not a fixed value that increased honestly by 1 second each time.
'Real combat experience. And the quality of training.'
One hypothesis clearly took shape in his mind.
The skill did not gain proficiency simply by keeping it activated for a long time and wasting the entire daily usage limit.
The ability to flicker the skill on and off only at the most efficient and deadly moments.
The control itself of feeling attacks against his skin and calculating the extreme timing.
That was what caused proficiency to rise explosively.
A faint smile spread across Chae-ho's sweat-covered lips.
If others saw it, they might think 11 seconds or 13 seconds were meaningless numbers.
After all, it was only the amount of time it took to blink once or inhale once.
But for someone who divided the world in 0.1-second intervals, 2 seconds was an entirely different level of resource.
'At least twenty times.'
In moments of crisis, he had gained twenty more opportunities to read enemy trajectories and enter blind spots.
The pressure of having to conserve the skill because of limited time had decreased by that much.
It was a clear and valuable reward capable of overturning the flow of battle two or even three more times.
He himself had not expected that an increase of only 2 seconds would feel this reassuring.
"Works even better than I thought."
Chae-ho picked up the water bottle on the floor and drank half of it in one go.
As the cool water passed down his throat, the heat built up in his muscles seemed to settle slightly.
He wiped his wet hair with a towel and left the training room with light footsteps.
***
After returning home, Chae-ho immediately went to the bathroom and finished a cold shower.
He put on a loose T-shirt over his refreshed body and sat down at his desk.
The fatigue from dungeon raids and the aftermath of brutal training arrived all at once, making his body sluggish.
But he still could not lie down yet.
He opened the lowest drawer of his desk.
Beneath various receipts and useless clutter, he took out an old notebook whose cover corners had worn away.
It was his personal record book that he showed to no one.
Not even his family.
Chae-ho picked up a black pen and carefully wrote down today's date.
[Total Daily Usage Limit: 11 seconds -> 13 seconds]
Below it, he densely recorded the slight errors in skill activation timing he felt during today's training, and the dull backlash applied to his eyes and muscles when repeatedly using the skill like a flashing light.
He also carefully organized the trajectory patterns of the Blade Wolves he had encountered in the recent Grade C dungeon, including the angles at which their knees bent when they pushed off terrain.
The only sound filling the quiet room was the scratching of the pen moving across paper.
Chae-ho turned several pages and lightly reviewed his previous records.
From the short notes he had written when he first had only 10 seconds and struggled to catch flies flying around the room, to the habits of countless monsters he had encountered as a short-term mercenary.
The data he had accumulated little by little appeared all at once.
Every time he reviewed his records, he engraved one fact deeply into himself.
'Just because you can see through a weakness doesn't mean the monster will obediently die on your sword.'
Chae-ho tapped the pen against his chin.
In the end, it was his own body that had to avoid the enemy's attacks and drive in the weapon.
No matter how much the skill slowed the world and revealed the enemy's openings clearly, if he lacked strength or his legs became tangled because his stamina ran out, he would not even be able to avoid an obvious club.
Dying because you cannot follow something with your eyes.
And dying because you can see it but your body cannot move.
On the battlefield, the result is the same.
'Without fundamentals, even the skill is just a strange stroke of luck.'
A Grade D Hunter's body had clear limits.
He had obtained an ability like a miracle.
But relying only on that powerful weapon and hoping for luck was no different from covering his own eyes while walking along a cliff.
He needed to relentlessly raise his pure combat ability and physical strength so that he could respond immediately to monster ambushes even without the skill.
This was the unwavering long-term growth principle Chae-ho had established while drawing lines in his notebook.
Rather than rushing toward higher-level dungeons like others and building fame, he would build a solid foundation from the bottom so that he would not collapse from even the smallest crack.
He closed the notebook and placed the pen on one side of the desk.
"There's no need to rush."
The quiet voice that came out was calmer than ever.
He was growing strong enough that the world seemed slow, but there was no need to rush his Hunter career as well.
Time was always on his side.
Chae-ho pushed the drawer closed.
Click.
The sound broke the silence of the room.
He rubbed his stiff neck once with his palm.
Then he stood up, thinking that tomorrow he would push his upper-body strength training to the limit.