[Breaking News] Saintess Isha places a bounty of 100 billion won on the culprit.
[Breaking News] Government declares emergency martial law. “All of Seoul sealed off.”
[Breaking News] Composite sketch of the culprit obtained. An unidentified suspected F-rank?
Beneath Seoul, where darkness lay thick, in a sealed underground waterway.
In that place, reeking of dampness and mold, I burst into laughter.
“100 billion, huh.”
As a price on the head of someone who would stop the apocalypse, it was a fairly decent appraisal.
Before my regression, even when I had cut down the Demon King as humanity’s last survivor, I had never received treatment like this.
To think the world would go into such an uproar just because I caught one measly lizard.
It made me realize all over again that when it came to playing hero, nothing beat the public’s attention.
“Cough!”
The laughter was brief.
A fishy clot of blood surged up into my mouth.
The aftereffects of using a high-grade teleportation scroll unsuited to my body.
It was the backlash from forcing this shabby F-rank body to draw on mana.
Breathing roughly, I leaned the back of my head against the wall behind me.
Wastewater dripping from the ceiling struck my forehead.
If anything, that coldness cooled my feverishly burning brain.
‘Three days from now.’
That was how long it would take Isha von Estelle to regain her reason and activate precise tracking magic.
Knowing her personality, she was probably turning Seoul upside down right about now.
They say it’s darkest under the lamp.
While she vented her fury aboveground, I hid beneath it.
The world trying to find me was spinning far more ferociously than I had expected—and, in some ways, far more absurdly.
I looked down at the smartphone screen glowing through its cracked display.
Among everything there, one particularly eye-catching username was making the news headlines.
***
“No, wait a minute! What kind of people just break down a door like this? Where’s your warrant? Isn’t this breaking and entering?”
Username: BearishCandleAddict.
Real name: Kim Minsu. He jumped up and down in outrage.
The steel front door had been ripped away like a sheet of paper.
Emergency investigation agents from the Hunter Association, all dressed in black suits, filled his cramped studio apartment.
The investigation team leader held a tablet PC screen up coldly in Kim Minsu’s face.
“Mr. Kim Minsu. At 14:32 and 14:35, you posted two comments on the hunter community Hunter Inside.”
“What?”
‘Who told you to go short?’ and ‘You never know. I heard Isha fed Dessore and went to another Gate.’”
“N-no, that was just a meme. I mean, it was a joke…”
“For a joke, the timing was remarkably exquisite.”
When the team leader swiped the screen, the logs from a brokerage application appeared in stark detail.
“You put your entire fortune into overseas futures options shorting hunter-related stocks, especially shares of the Estelle Guild owned by Isha von Estelle. And with 50x leverage, no less.”
“……”
Kim Minsu’s mouth opened and closed like a carp’s.
“And that isn’t all. Exactly three minutes after you pressed the sell order, Desolatus died. This is strong circumstantial evidence that you knew insider information in advance. Or that you were involved in plotting the terror attack.”
“No, that was just my gut! The chart had just formed a perfect double top and was about to fall. I’m telling you, it was a technical downtrend zone!”
“A technical downtrend?”
The team leader let out a hollow laugh and grabbed Kim Minsu by the collar.
“Do you have any idea what’s happening outside right now? Because of that finger you used to press the short button, the Saintess is this close to wiping Seoul off the map.”
The investigation team leader pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Hoo. Mr. Kim Minsu. You are under emergency arrest on suspicion of violating the Anti-Terrorism Act and the National Security Act.”
“Wait! Let go! Let go of me!! I seriously only went short! I thought it’d crash, I didn’t think it’d actually die!!”
“Shut your mouth. Let’s see if you can say that in the interrogation room at the Seocho-dong branch. Take the suspect away!”
“Aaaaargh! My money! I have to close my position!!”
Kim Minsu’s screams echoed miserably down the hallway as he was dragged away.
He probably had no way of knowing.
That Isha von Estelle’s rage was burning through the entire country, leaving her no time to care about trolls or stock gamblers.
Isha von Estelle’s mansion, the scene of the incident.
The stench of blood filled the air.
Even that reek could not cover the frostlike killing intent emanating from the Saintess.
The forensic agents from the Hunter Association who had been dispatched to the scene could not even breathe loudly.
Isha von Estelle stood blankly, staring down at the floor.
The massive corpse of a dragon, its head and heart gone.
A being who had been her soul-bound pet, her friend, and her family.
“……”
No tears flowed from her eyes.
Her grief was too immense, sublimated into rage, drying even her tear ducts.
The air around her crackled, scattering sparks.
Uncontrolled transcendental-grade mana pressed down on the space.
“Saintess.”
The forensic team leader addressed her cautiously.
The mana pressure was so intense that merely approaching made his skin sting.
“The preservation of the scene… is complete. May we recover the body? If we delay any longer, there is concern of a secondary explosion caused by mana backflow.”
Isha did not answer.
Instead, she slowly began to walk.
Beside the dragon’s corpse.
Toward something rolling on the floor.
What she bent her knees and picked up was—
A sword hilt snapped cleanly in half.
The weapon the culprit had used when blocking her.
The proof of an indelible humiliation, thrown into her face before he fled.
“This.”
Isha’s voice was low and cracked, as though scraped up from the bottom of hell.
“Analyze it.”
“Pardon? Ah, that is an F-rank mass-produced dagger used by the culprit. It’s a cheap 50,000-won item sold even at convenience stores, so I doubt it will serve as much of a clue—”
“That cheap thing.”
—Crack.
Isha gripped the sword hilt tightly.
The steel handle crumpled like clay, screaming inside her grasp.
“Deflected the trajectory of my holy sword.”
“Pardon?”
The forensic team leader doubted his ears.
A mere convenience-store dagger had blocked the sword swung in rage by the empire’s only Sword Master?
Physically, it was impossible.
Even an A-rank artifact shield should have been torn apart like paper.
“It may have been a coincidence. Or perhaps my heart wavered. But…”
Isha’s red eyes drilled obsessively into the cross-section of the broken blade.
In her mind, the culprit’s final movement replayed like slow motion.
Just before she swung her sword.
The culprit had already twisted his body.
As if he had seen the future.
“He reacted exactly 0.1 seconds earlier. Before I had even moved my muscles.”
It had looked as though he had completely seen through her action patterns, her sword path, even her habits.
Or else he was a monster with some ability that defied causality.
Isha roughly shoved the crushed sword hilt against the forensic team leader’s chest.
“Analyze it down to the nanoscale. Fingerprints, saliva, mana residue, even a single bead of sweat on the grip.”
“Y-yes, understood! We’ll process it as top priority!”
“If even one fragment of DNA turns up.”
Isha raised her head and stared into empty air.
Behind her back, a golden aura rippled like enormous wings.
No longer the benevolent light of a Saintess, but the flames of vengeance determined to burn everything down.
“I’ll chase him to the ends of the earth. No, even to the depths of hell, and tear him apart.”
***
—Thump.
The spoils I took out from subspace.
The dragon’s heart pulsed grotesquely on my palm, as if it were alive.
[Grade: Transcendental]
[Desolatus’s source of mana. It contains an immense amount of mana, but is being corrupted by the energy of the abyss.]
[Effect: ??? (Can be confirmed upon consumption)]
Corrupted.
As expected, the system knew.
People only knew Dessore as an adorable pet.
They never would have dreamed that the creature was a lump of toxins contaminating the mana in the air.
Even Isha hadn’t known.
That every time she embraced it, her divine power had become its food and vanished.
‘If I just eat this as is, I’ll die instantly.’
The body of an F-rank hunter is like a thin paper cup.
And if molten metal from a furnace called a dragon heart were poured into it?
The moment I swallowed it, I would obviously burst with a pop and become meat paste.
Even so.
There was a way.
I took the ingredients I had prepared in advance out of my bag.
Mandrake root, the Ice Queen’s tears, low-grade magic stone powder.
It was a one-of-a-kind recipe I had devised before my regression, when I stood at the pinnacle of magical engineering.
—Scritch, scritch.
I began drawing a bizarre magic circle on the floor with the magic stone powder.
‘Purification and neutralization.’
A process to filter the explosive energy of the dragon heart so my body could accept it.
When I placed the dragon heart atop the magic circle, its crimson energy was refined and began turning into a gentle golden light.
The sickening smell of blood vanished, and a fragrance of mana like sweet fruit rose up.
“Now comes the real part.”
I slit my wrist with a spare dagger.
—Drip, drip.
As fresh blood fell onto the magic circle, the dragon heart shone as if coveting my blood.
I grasped the heart with both hands.
A lukewarm, writhing sensation.
This was the power.
The only key to saving the world and surpassing that woman.
I threw the heart into my mouth.
—Crunch. Squelch.
Half solid, half liquid.
Every time I chewed, bursting juices filled my mouth.
A fishy yet blazing heat traveled down my esophagus.
“Gaaaaaah!!!”
Pain so intense I couldn’t even scream properly began.
It felt as though red-hot iron skewers were being shoved into every single one of my blood vessels.
My stomach melted, and my heart pumped madly, rampaging as if it would burst my veins.
The process of every bone in my body shattering and rejoining, my muscles tearing and regenerating, repeated every second.
If I lost consciousness, it was over.
I bit my lip until it bled and barely clung to the thread of my mind.
‘This level of pain is nothing.’
The sound of my comrades being chewed up by demonic beasts before my eyes.
Isha’s cold gaze as she despised me in the final moments.
The silence of a ruined world.
Compared to that despair, physical pain that felt like my bones being carved away was, if anything, a stimulant that made me feel alive.
“Hup, ugh!”
I forcibly opened my mana circuits.
The blocked meridians burst open, and the shackles called F-rank shattered.
—Kwaaaaaang!
The wastewater in the underground waterway exploded upward around my body.
The golden aura pouring from my entire body drove away the pitch-black darkness.
Cracks spread across the concrete ceiling, and the whole waterway trembled as if struck by an earthquake.
How much time had passed?
The intense pain subsided, and in its place, infinite power filled me.
I slowly opened my eyes, and my vision had changed.
The movements of dust floating in the air.
The mana concentration in the flowing water.
Everything in the world appeared as clear as data.
[Name: I Han]
[Grade: F -> B+ (Nonexistent grade)]
[Tap for details]