“How!”
“Build your image not as the ‘Hunter of the Vatican,’ but as the ‘Rebel of the Vatican.’ A fallen priest with a filthy temper and a foul mouth, but more merciless than anyone when it comes to hunting monsters. Viewers these days go crazy for that kind of ‘spicy edge.’”
Lee Seong-ha’s eyes wavered back and forth. His lips twitched as he fell into thought, as if the suggestion sounded fairly plausible.
“……Would that work? Wouldn’t the Vatican excommunicate me?”
“If they excommunicate you, you can just sign a formal Hunter contract. Wouldn’t that be better?”
“You crazy bastard, seriously…….”
Just as Lee Seong-ha was about to spit out a curse—
-BANG!
The office door opened roughly, and three figures staggered inside. Go Gyeol and Lee Seong-ha’s gazes turned toward the door at the same time.
“…….”
“…….”
There stood the party members, looking as if they had just crawled out of a Dungeon—no, as if they had rolled around in a garbage dump.
Kang Ji-hyun’s once-proud face was stained with black soot, and Kang Hoon was crawling across the floor with eyes as if his soul had left his body. Kwon Do-geun, who entered last, was so covered in dust that, in mockery of his title as a Water Caster, he had become an Earth Caster.
“……Save me…….”
The one sentence Kang Hoon squeezed out as he sprawled spread-eagle on the floor broke the silence. Lee Seong-ha slowly released Go Gyeol’s collar and muttered,
“Hey, Go Gyeol. Why do they look like that? Didn’t you say you were training them while I went to the Vatican? Looking at them, it’s like they came back from a battlefield.”
Go Gyeol looked at the ruined party members and smiled with satisfaction.
“It was a battlefield. A battlefield that has only just taken its first steps.”
At Go Gyeol’s cold smile, Kang Hoon, lying on the floor, flinched and trembled.
Before the lingering effects of hellish Arcadia could even fade, Go Gyeol gave them hell.
A 20km mountain run that began the moment they opened their eyes, the Hunter Administration’s murderous outsourced education program that devoured the entire afternoon, and the endless D-Grade Dungeon rotations in three-person teams that continued day and night.
The 3 days Lee Seong-ha had been away. It was easy to say, but that time had been a continuous stretch of pain, like being caught and ground between the gears of a machine. Every day, they realized just how comfortable Dungeon clears had been when Lee Seong-ha was with them.
“……I can’t go. I really can’t go anymore.”
Kang Hoon mumbled with his face buried against the office floor. The moment a name was registered at a Dungeon entrance, a No-Show meant the company’s credit rating would fall and a massive fine would follow. Dungeons operated under a national reservation system were opportunities for Hunters, but for those led by Go Gyeol, they were no different from forced conscription.
“Save me…. I’m still only eighteen…. I’m at an age where I should be growing…….”
Kang Hoon was crawling forward to grab Go Gyeol’s trouser leg when Lee Seong-ha, who had approached at some point, placed a large hand on his head with a reverent expression.
“Lord. Hear the cry of this lost little lamb wandering astray.”
“Ah, seriously, don’t do that!”
Kang Hoon jumped like a cat whose tail had been stepped on and shook off his hand. But Lee Seong-ha paid no attention and lowered his voice solemnly.
“Though this child’s flesh is ragged, I pray that his soul may become as hard as a Dungeon’s Mana Stone. Sister, no, brother. After hardship, joy shall come…….”
“Father, you go see that joy yourself! Ah, get your hand off me! It’s creepy!”
Kang Hoon shouted and tried to run away, but his body, exhausted from 3 days of training, could not escape Lee Seong-ha’s grasp.
Beside that chaos, Kang Ji-hyun and Kwon Do-geun staggered in. As if they did not even have the strength to speak, the two collapsed onto the sofa like puppets with their strings cut.
“…….”
“…….”
Kang Ji-hyun, her usual haughtiness nowhere to be found, stared at the ceiling with her hair a mess, and Kwon Do-geun gazed into empty air as if he had left his body with his eyes still open. In their unfocused eyes lay terrible fatigue and silent curses aimed at Go Gyeol.
Go Gyeol watched that miserable sight and shook his head.
“Their stamina is still this bad? Should I raise the training intensity even more?”
Even while thinking something atrocious inwardly, Go Gyeol opened his desk drawer. Then he took out two bottles of high-concentration recovery medicine he had bought from the Hunter Shop.
Pop, pop.
Go Gyeol approached the sofa and placed the recovery medicine into their hands.
“Drink. The briefing is about to begin.”
“……Hey, you Satan.”
Kang Ji-hyun, receiving the recovery medicine, muttered in a cracked voice. Go Gyeol lightly ignored her complaint and checked the time. The results of training were clear. Behind their mess of an appearance, dense mana far beyond what they had before was flowing faintly from their bodies.
“Me too, give me some too!”
Kang Hoon, crawling across the floor, desperately stretched out his hand. Go Gyeol annoyedly shoved the remaining bottle of recovery medicine roughly into Kang Hoon’s mouth. Gulp, gulp. After drinking the life water, Kang Hoon finally looked human and leaned back against the sofa.
“I feel alive…. But Go Gyeol-hyung, we’re really resting next, right? Please say we are.”
Instead of answering, Go Gyeol turned on a tablet PC and brought up a map. The moment the red skull mark clearly stamped in the center of the screen and the text [S-Grade] appeared, the office temperature dropped to freezing point.
“The next Dungeon is S-Grade. To be precise, it’s a ‘story-type Dungeon.’”
“S… Grade? And story-type too?”
Kang Hoon, whose eyes had been sparkling after drinking the recovery medicine, sprang to his feet. His curiosity defeated his fatigue at the story of a “Dungeon only for the chosen,” something that had only floated around on YouTube or communities.
“Wow, I heard those are insane! It’s that kind of Dungeon where once you enter, you possess a specific person and have to clear the scenario before you can leave, right? I heard the rewards are amazing too!”
Kwon Do-geun, a former actor, also reacted to the word “story” and swallowed dryly.
“So we have to act according to the scenario… no, clear it? If it’s that, I’m confident.”
But unlike the excited atmosphere among the party members, only Kang Ji-hyun severely furrowed her brow and shuddered. She, who usually never lost her haughtiness in any situation, had an expression as if she had seen a rotten fish.
“Have you been to one before?”
At Go Gyeol’s question, Kang Ji-hyun nodded slowly, very heavily.
“……It was the worst week of my Hunter life.”
“Oh, if our Sister Ji-hyun hated it that much, what kind of story was it? Did you film a tragic romance or something?”
Lee Seong-ha chuckled and fiddled with his steel pipe. Kang Ji-hyun clenched her fists as if recalling that memory and ground her teeth.
“Orcs.”
“Huh?”
“I was the vanguard commander of an orc legion. The scenario objective was to ‘invade the human kingdom and destroy the world.’”
Kang Hoon tilted his head.
“Come on, noona. If it was destroying the world, wouldn’t that have been a good stress reliever? You must’ve been super strong too. So why was it the worst?”
Kang Ji-hyun glared at Kang Hoon as if she would devour him and shouted,
“Orcs don’t wash, you idiot!”
The office went quiet as if cold water had been poured over it.
“I had to sleep in a cramped barracks with that stinking horde for a week! Sweat smell, blood smell, rotten meat smell everywhere! If I tried to wash, they swung axes at me, saying, ‘Don’t do something so weak and un-orc-like!’ Do you think that was good? Ever since then, I feel sick just seeing the color green!”
At Kang Ji-hyun’s desperate confession, Lee Seong-ha began rolling around clutching his stomach, and Kwon Do-geun quietly covered his nose. Kang Hoon’s face turned blue, as if imagining it was horrifying enough.
Amid that chaos, Go Gyeol added indifferently.
“Fortunately, this Dungeon isn’t orcs. Its background is the ‘Imperial Knights.’”
“Phew, that’s a relief. If it’s knights, they’ll at least wash.”
The moment Kang Ji-hyun let out a sigh of relief, a wicked smile appeared at the corner of Go Gyeol’s mouth.
“The problem is that it takes place in the middle of a ‘trench war’ that hasn’t ended for 3 years.”
Kang Ji-hyun’s face instantly turned earth-colored. Trenches. Mud. Rats. And soldiers who could not wash.
“……I’m not going! I’m absolutely not going, you Satanic bastard!!”
Kang Ji-hyun’s scream filled the office, but Go Gyeol was already waving the S-Grade Dungeon reservation certificate with her name clearly written on it.
“Go Gyeol, you son of a bitch…!”
As if she could no longer endure it, Kang Ji-hyun summoned a staff in midair, gorgeously entwined with rose vines. Sharp mana began surging like a storm from her feet, about to swallow Go Gyeol.
That was when the office, which had been bright with sunlight pouring in, suddenly went dark in an instant.
Woooooong—!
The ground beneath their feet began trembling faintly, as if screaming. Kang Ji-hyun’s mana, which had been filled with rage, scattered after losing its target. While the party members looked at one another in confusion, only Go Gyeol ran like lightning and threw open the window.
“……!”
Go Gyeol’s eyes filled with shock.
The scenery outside the window looked like a page of hell brought into reality. The sky, having lost its blue light, was dyed a grotesque violet, and massive bolts of lightning between the clouds were striking in eerie trajectories, as if they might touch the ground at any moment but never quite did.
“Why is the sky like that? Is it abnormal weather?”
Lee Seong-ha, who had approached beside him, swallowed hard as he asked about the strange phenomenon outside the window. Go Gyeol clenched his trembling fist tightly. His heart was pounding as if it would burst. There was no way he would not know this phenomenon.
“It’s the Tower.”
“What? What do you…….”
At the word from Go Gyeol’s mouth, the party members inside the office all gathered by the window at once. The enormous ruin that Go Gyeol had always spoken of like a habit, the ruin that would become humanity’s destruction.
The Tower had finally revealed itself.