Prologue
Two moons flickered beyond clouds spread thin as silk.
Dawn light rose, dyeing the opposing darkness crimson.
A man gazing upon that beautiful sunrise muttered.
“……It’s over.”
He straightened his ragged clothes, too torn to fully cover his wounds.
He loosened his grip on the long sword.
Stained with blood, it reflected the dawn light, gleaming red.
“Victory! We won!”
“Choe Chiseon-nim did it! Hooray!”
People burst into cheers, drunk on the sense of accomplishment that they had finally done it.
Though cheers mixed with praise for him, Choe Chiseon felt nothing.
With an expressionless face, he simply turned and descended the mountain formed of demon corpses.
“Ah…….”
His expression, unchanged throughout, finally shifted.
It was after seeing the cradle lying in the center of the battlefield, stained with monster corpses and blood.
Inside the cradle, a baby wrapped in swaddling slept soundly, an angelic face.
“I finished before you woke, as promised.”
Speaking in a tender voice, he slowly lifted the baby into his arms.
Gazing at the baby’s face with a sad smile, he quietly reined in his emotions.
Choe Chiseon, the strongest Hunter who had saved the world from the shadows of a war unrecorded in history.
“I’ll protect you.”
Holding his beloved daughter, all that remained after losing so much, tightly in his arms, he bid farewell to the Hunter he had been.
“Within an ordinary and peaceful daily life.”
The brilliant morning sun rose.
—The legend ended.
Episode 1
There was a Hunter.
He had been active in the shadows of Exodium, the war that changed the course of human history, felling countless demons with absolute power.
“D-Dragon!”
“Don’t retreat! We must hold this line!”
“B-But……!”
The center of the devastated battlefield.
Armored soldiers scrambled backward.
Though no one fled, the hands gripping weapons trembled in unison.
Their lives hung in the balance.
They had been prepared to lay down their lives at any moment to end this hellish war.
But before a mighty being, the survival instinct of living creatures slowly gnawed away at their resolute determination.
Fwoosh.
Black-red flames the same color as its body pooled within the dragon’s maw.
“D-Dodge!”
The brief warning was futile.
An explosion swallowed their screams.
Where it passed, leaving behind fleeting afterimages of human forms, not even corpses remained.
The army was divided on both sides by the breath that cleaved the earth.
“Ugh…… Uwaaah!”
Soldiers who belatedly realized their comrades’ deaths fell into panic. But the dragon gave them no time to compose themselves.
Flames gathered in its maw once more.
“Save me…… Save me!”
At that moment, a brilliant slash fell from sky to earth like sunlight silently piercing through the clouds.
Snow-white light traced a clean, straight line along its trajectory.
The dragon’s body split in two, as if space itself had been torn asunder.
Kwaaang!
The aimless breath erupted in midair.
Soldiers barely keeping their footing in the shockwave cried out as they saw a shadow through the smoke.
“I-It’s Hunter Choe Chiseon-nim!”
“Choe Chiseon-nim has come!”
Life returned to the faces of every soldier.
He walked out slowly.
In his hand was a beautiful hwando—a ring-pommelled sabre—that had cleaved the dragon in half.
Behind him, a woman followed carrying a large scythe. Her waist-length black hair and sharp eyes made a striking impression.
“……Yu Yeonhwa.”
When Choe Chiseon called her name, Yu Yeonhwa nodded and handed what she held to the soldiers.
It was a horn from the dragon he had just felled.
“Use it to forge weapons.”
While the soldiers busied themselves with the aftermath, Choe Chiseon approached a figure who appeared to be a general.
“How is the situation?”
“It’s dire. We never thought dragons would come this far. If things are this bad here, then…… the front lines have likely already been breached.”
Yu Yeonhwa approached and added.
“I can feel their aura even from this far. They’re hiding it to some degree, but it seems to be a massive army. If dragons swarm in droves, it’ll be dangerous, won’t it?”
Choe Chiseon, who had been lost in thought for a moment, changed his question.
“How is it beyond the river?”
“The others went there. It’s precarious too, but since there are no dragons, they’ll manage somehow.”
“So the problem is indeed this side.”
“Yeah. The demons must have aimed for this too. There’s a clever one among them. It read the aura on this side as well.”
Then the general hesitated, swallowed hard, and spoke.
“I haven’t confirmed it myself, but…… we have intelligence that the leader of the horde is a ‘Dragon Lord.’ I thought it impossible at first, but if the scale is this large, it can’t be dismissed as baseless rumor.”
“That’s troubling…….”
Yu Yeonhwa’s expression darkened.
A horde of dragons alone was overwhelming enough.
Facing a Dragon Lord on top of that was realistically impossible.
“This won’t do. For now, we should withdraw to the mountain range and—”
“Yu Yeonhwa.”
“……Hmm?”
Choe Chiseon cut her off.
“You go beyond the river and support the others. Once you join them, that side will be resolved.”
“……What do you mean? What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to hunt the Lord.”
His calm voice brooked no argument.
“……Can you do it?”
“I have to try.”
Yu Yeonhwa asked no more.
Instead, she tapped the red Sage’s Stone embedded in her chest and offered a piece of advice.
“If it comes down to it, don’t hesitate to use unequal exchange. You can gain more than enough benefit even without setting dangerous conditions.”
Choe Chiseon didn’t answer, only nodding his head.
Yu Yeonhwa wore a worried expression as she carefully added.
“Didn’t you say the baby is due soon? ……Don’t overdo it.”
“Thanks. I won’t. Then I’m counting on you.”
“Counting on me……?”
Chiding him for saying something so unlike him, Yu Yeonhwa broke into a bright smile.
“Just give me your orders, like always.”
At her words, Choe Chiseon smiled.
“Go and wipe out the demons beyond the river.”
“As you command.”
She vanished after placing her hand over her heart and lightly bending her knee. Where she had stood, only a circular ripple and a gentle breeze remained.
“……Well, then.”
Choe Chiseon muttered, gazing toward the faintly visible fortress walls.
“I’ll be back.”
***
“So you’re that human.”
A voice echoed inside his head.
The owner of that dignified voice was a massive golden dragon.
Its armor-like skin repelled all physical attacks, and the magic circle floating in a ring behind its head allowed infinite use of the auras of subjugated dragons.
The magical energy radiating from its brilliantly spread wings was enough to alter the gravity around it of its own accord.
A monster standing at the apex of dragonkind—the Dragon Lord.
An absolute being upon which no Hunter had managed to inflict even a scratch until now.
The Dragon Lord looked down at the small human standing before it and spoke.
“Dialogue is pointless now. The time for negotiation has passed. In this age of upheaval, all myths are written toward their predetermined conclusions. I will not say your petty resistance is meaningless, but it will only delay the inevitable. If you do not wish for prolonged suffering, accept your ruin with grace.”
Choe Chiseon answered briefly.
“I didn’t come to negotiate.”
“……Then have you come to betray your kind and defect? You are different from what I heard. Disappointing.”
The Dragon Lord’s eyes narrowed.
“Begone. And deliver this message to the humans. Tell them to prepare for war. Your civilization will melt away beneath our breath.”
“Yeah. Message received.”
“……What?”
“That’s exactly why I came. Let’s do this…… war.”
Choe Chiseon reached for the hilt of the sword strapped at his waist, angled behind him.
The ring of the hwando sliding free from its scabbard echoed clearly.
The Dragon Lord’s pupils dilated, unable to comprehend the situation.
“You came to fight? ……Alone?”
“Why? If you’re scared, should I defect instead?”
“……You insolent human!”
Kwooooo.
As the Dragon Lord bellowed in fury, the countless dragons behind it roared alongside.
“Do not expect a noble death! Your arrogance will vanish without a trace, along with your corpse!”
Four dragons took flight.
Breaths of differing attributes, matching the colors of their bodies, spewed forth.
Kwakwakwang.
Thin smoke rose swiftly within the massive semicircular shockwave. At its end stood Choe Chiseon.
As he raked his fingers across the blade as if caressing it, a pristine white aura wrapped sharply around it.
“Haah!”
A light, spinning movement in midair.
Srrk.
A shockwave spread in a ring along the hwando’s trajectory.
As if space itself had been severed, the clouds in the distant sky split in a perfect line.
Every dragon caught within that range was bisected and fell.
But immediately after, golden light erupted from below.
It was the Dragon Lord’s breath.
Accompanied by a bone-chilling sound tearing through the air, a beam of laser-like light engulfed Choe Chiseon.
A thunderous roar that shook heaven and earth filled the surroundings.
“……!”
The Dragon Lord, which had been looking skyward, sensed an aura and hastily lowered its head.
There stood Choe Chiseon, whom it had expected to be reduced to dust, holding his hwando level.
“How……!”
“Is now the time to be thinking about that?”
At his words, the Dragon Lord struck out with its foreleg in a flash.
Choe Chiseon spun his body the moment of impact.
A piercing impact rang out, and the Dragon Lord’s claw, severed by the raised hwando, fell away.
“Impossible……!”
The body that repelled all physical attacks had been cut.
The Lord recoiled at the impossible sight.
“Is this your first wound?”
Choe Chiseon took a step forward.
The aura of the Lord that had pervaded the surroundings scattered into nothingness with his movement.
“Then pain must be new to you as well.”
“Kuk……!”
Aura surged with Choe Chiseon at its center.
The Dragon Lord quickly took flight, putting distance between them, and roared.
“Do not regard that human as a mere solitary foe! Fight with the resolve to destroy the world itself!”
“That’s what I told you from the start.”
Dragons swarmed toward him in droves.
Choe Chiseon raised his hwando to his chest and declared,
“I came to wage war.”
***
Around half a day had passed.
Yu Yeonhwa gasped for breath as she looked around.
Having resolved the threat at the frontlines and rushed to aid him, she could not find Choe Chiseon.
A dark hill loomed to the left.
As she turned her steps to see beyond it, the sunset, which had been hidden by clouds, finally emerged and cast a faint light.
Only then did she realize.
That it was not a hill, but a dragon’s corpse.
At its highest point. Choe Chiseon, seated atop the head of the fallen golden dragon, spotted Yu Yeonhwa and rose.
Not a single drop of blood or speck of dust soiled his body.
As Yu Yeonhwa approached his side, Choe Chiseon asked,
“What would make a good baby gift?”
“……Is *that* what you’re worried about?”
She scoffed and replied,
“You can figure that out yourself.”
Twilight sank low.
There was a Hunter.
He had been active in the shadows of Exodium, the war that changed the course of human history, felling countless demons with absolute power.
After ending the war, that man drew the curtain on his own legend and disappeared with his newborn daughter.
The day he revealed himself to the world once more……
……was when his daughter turned seven.