Prelude to the Reversal
“Lee Yeonghak, your service is extended by three years!! You fucking bastard!!”
“You murdering piece of shit!! You dog-fucking bastard who took this old man’s fist up the ass!! I’m really going to kill you!! Kill you!! You son of a bitch!!!!”
Base Leader Cho Geunseong swung his arm, and the military police standing by drove their batons into Yeonghak’s gut, subduing him. Inside a gate, where mana existed, he was the world’s first Level 1100 powerhouse. Outside the gate, with no mana at all, Lee Yeonghak was nothing more than an ordinary man. They took him down without effort.
“Get him out of here! Stick that bastard inside the gate! No more leave for him! If it weren’t for that problem child’s skills, I’d have—!!”
Even after the MPs dragged Yeonghak away, Cho Geunseong kept rubbing his stinging cheek for a long while before glancing at me.
“Kim Seongho.”
“Yes, Base Leader.”
“You’re nothing like Yeonghak. I like that about you. You listen.”
Cho Geunseong lit a cigarette.
“You know things have been noisy inside and out because of Lee Sangmin’s death, right? Don’t go spreading weird rumors and tanking morale. You’ve got one year left on your hunter service, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t want your service extended like Lee Yeonghak’s, do you? Right? Finish your three years of mandatory service and get out. Isn’t that right?”
I clenched my fist where he couldn’t see. This fucking bastard. I wanted nothing more than to throw a punch the way Yeonghak had. But if I did, my service would be extended. I didn’t want to get torn apart and eaten by monsters. After a brief internal struggle, I had no choice but to bow my head in cowardice.
“Yes, Base Leader.”
“Lee Sangmin’s death. Don’t go flapping your mouth to any more reporters. The Ministry of National Defense already put out the official line that the kid died of a pre-existing condition. If you step up and start saying weird shit again… huh? Both of us end up in trouble.”
Sangmin had been a good kid. While clearing a monster horde gathered near a crack that was about to open toward Seoul, he got poisoned and was rushed back to base. But the base didn’t have the medical supplies that should have been stocked as a matter of course.
Why weren’t they there?
I didn’t know either.
Base management was Cho Geunseong’s job, along with a few female awakeners. But one thing was certain.
Lee Sangmin had been left to rot at the base for three days.
Because of that, a kid who would have lived if the medicine had simply been there melted halfway to death. Right up until the end he kept sobbing that he wanted to see his family, and then he died.
And I had watched every second of it.
Yeonghak had seen it too, lost control, and thrown a haymaker at Cho Geunseong. For that, his service had just been extended by three years and he’d been thrown back out.
And I could end up the same way at any moment. It was cowardly, selfish, and disgusting, but—
the thought that I only had to keep my head down for one more year and then discharge had already taken root in my mind.
I nodded with an expression that could have been a smile or a grimace.
“Yes, Base Leader.”
“Good. Let’s do this right. You heard the report that a new crack stone appeared in Zone 39? Boss raid. The coordinates the crack stone is linked to are right in the middle of downtown Seoul. We have to deal with it, so put in some work. A Tamer! I’m really glad you came! Haha! Why don’t you just re-enlist permanently?”
When I didn’t answer, Cho Geunseong watched my face for a moment, then waved me out.
“Rest a day in the restricted zone before you go back in. I can grant that much on my own authority. Good work, Seongho.”
I gave a slight bow and left the room without a word.
It was a day that made me want to vomit from sheer self-loathing.
If I didn’t drink, I was going to lose my mind, so I bolted for a bar in the restricted zone.
Daejeon.
Once upon a time it had been nicknamed a dead-end city with nothing fun except bakeries. Then, ten years ago, a main gate that no amount of force could close opened right in the middle of Daejeon, and the dead-end city stopped being a dead-end city.
A brutal city packed with military units in case the gate ever went berserk.
That was Daejeon now.
And because hunters might desert, even on leave they were only allowed to spend it inside the designated restricted zones within Daejeon—under heavy military surveillance.
“Three bottles of soju is thirty thousand won.”
I was used to the restricted-zone merchants’ fucking prices by now. Three bottles of soju and one order of fish-cake soup and sixty thousand won vanished in a flash. This motherfucking pricing was a joint masterpiece cooked up by the restricted-zone merchants and that bastard Base Leader Cho Geunseong, so there was zero chance it would ever change.
I drank.
I drank and drank some more.
When I’d been conscripted at twenty I’d told Mom and Dad not to worry too much. Then I got here and found a thousand things to worry about. In two years of service I’d seen far too many sights no one should ever see.
People dying.
People breaking.
And incidents where the people who should have been held responsible simply didn’t exist—only victims.
Yeonghak was a hero.
The first hunter, a legendary one who had been forced to live inside the gates for ten years since they first appeared. Even now, across every hunter on the planet, no one else had reached his level.
Thanks to the know-how and monster-hunting methods he’d passed down, hunters who used to die at a rate of one a day in the early days now died maybe once a year. Yet that hero had protested the absurd death of his own party member, taken a gut punch for it, had his service extended, and been thrown right back into the hell inside the gate.
One death a year meant that if another absurd death happened next year, the public would just go, “Oh, that happened,” and move on. Hunter deaths were forgotten cheaply.
Something was seriously wrong.
But the system was so twisted I didn’t even know how to change it or where to start. Alone, there was nothing I could do.
“Fucking hell.”
Three bottles of soju disappeared in an instant. Inside a gate I could have circulated mana and purged the buzz right away, but this was outside. There was none of that. I stared blankly at the fish-cake soup.
Maybe I should just die.
Even if I discharged like this, could I really call it a happy discharge?
Fucking Republic of Korea.
Piece-of-shit Republic of Korea.
I hope it collapses.
I was chewing a piece of fish cake and thinking exactly that when a breaking news report from the TV in the shop reached my ears.
A blaring siren cut the broadcast short before I could finish watching. I had to leave my seat.
There was only one reason a siren ever sounded in the restricted zone.
A crack was forming that would connect to South Korean territory.
I abandoned the half-eaten fish-cake soup and rushed back to the base inside the gate.
“Yeonghak.”
When I returned, Yeonghak and three parties were already fully geared and ready to deploy. He glanced at me and pointed with one finger.
“The crack stone in Zone 39. It’s about to activate. The mana wavelength is no joke.”
“They said it wouldn’t open for at least three more days, didn’t they?”
“For whatever reason, it’s been moved up. We haven’t even finished prepping. This feels bad.”
A crack forming early meant either the monster horde had swollen far beyond projections, or a boss-class monster with an enormous mana reservoir had appeared.
The latter was far more dangerous.
“Who’s deploying?”
“Parties 41, 42, and 43. Plus me and you. That should cover it, right?”
It was the base’s maximum available firepower. The remaining parties had to hold the base. Praying it wasn’t a boss over Level 900, I summoned the three wyverns I had tamed.
“Same as always!”
At my word, Party 41 climbed into the big basket carried by my wyvern Yongil. Party 42 took Yongdui. Party 43 took Yongsam. Then I mounted the biggest one—Yongil’s head.
“Move.”
The three wyverns lifted off. We flew toward a boss raid that could easily kill us all.
Normally Yeonghak would have cracked jokes to lighten the mood somehow, but today he was silent. The other party members were the same.
The Ministry of National Defense could claim Sangmin died of a pre-existing condition all it wanted; the people who had been there knew better.
Die and it was a dog’s death.
A fucking dog’s death no one would mourn or honor.
Any pride in stopping cracks and protecting the Republic of Korea had been obliterated by Sangmin’s death. Watching ourselves habitually carry out the work we’d been trained for without even knowing why we were doing this shit, I wondered if this was what a slave mentality looked like.
But those thoughts evaporated the closer we got to the crack.
“The mana density rolling off this thing is fucking…”
Something ominous pressed against the skin.
There was no swarming monster horde in sight.
Instead, a single monster of staggering size stood alone.
A body sixty meters long.
A blood-red body as if painted in gore.
Wings of enormous span.
Target is an Ancient-class Dragon!
The status windows kept spamming us with bright-red warning panels.
“Level 1200 range.”
A level I had never even heard of in two years as a hunter.
“It was… it was definitely a Level 800 worm-class when we scouted it…”
Even Yeonghak, with his ten years of experience, was stammering.
And while we stood there, the ancient dragon slowly turned its head and looked at us.
As it moved, the shed skins piled beneath its feet crumbled to dust.
The worm-class creature had apparently stopped mid-crack-opening and evolved into an ancient dragon.
No one had seen this coming.
“W-we have to go back!”
“I don’t want to die!!”
Party members already shaken by the Sangmin incident erupted in panicked shouts.
Even if they fought and died, they would die like Sangmin—without treatment or recognition. And the Ministry would just bullshit another “pre-existing condition” story. That terror was speaking.
The real problem was that Yeonghak, the one who should have been holding them together and leading, couldn’t get a single word out. Looking at his face, I saw pure disgust. The expression of a man thinking, Fuck this country. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if the crack just opened and everyone died.
So I shouted.
“We take it!! Drop it to ten percent HP!! I’ll try taming it!!”
Objections came immediately.
“And if we die trying to take it?! Who compensates us for that, Seongho?!”
Anyone who had watched the Sangmin incident could ask that question.
And, thank every god, I had an answer ready.
“I’ll make you filthy rich! I just saw the news that room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductors can be made from magic stones!!”
Their expressions changed.
“All the shit we’ve suffered!! All the comrades who died for nothing!!! I’ll make you enough money to pay every bit of it back! We take it! Then I tame that bastard and make it my summon! Just do that and I’ll let you live in the hunter golden age you only ever read about in novels!!!!!”
My roar flipped the party’s faces and atmosphere.
Yeonghak looked up at me.
“That true?”
“Fucking dead serious. I don’t lie about shit that can get people killed.”
Our eyes locked for a moment. Then Yeonghak raised his personal weapon—a longsword with a blade alone measuring 1.3 meters, forged in imitation of Admiral Yi Sun-sin’s sword. He swung that heavy thing as freely as a limb.
“Let’s trust Seongho for once, you bastards. All the fucking grinding we’ve done—time to collect, right?”
At Yeonghak’s words the party atmosphere finally snapped back to normal.
I brought the wyverns down to the ground.
Against an ancient dragon, the wyverns would never enter a certain range. That was the nature of the dragonkin.
From here on, the humans would have to walk up and beat the boss down on foot.
“Let’s go, you bastards!!!! Let’s survive another day!!!!!!”
Yeonghak’s battle cry rose, and the hunters answered with a roar.
I summoned every monster I owned except the dragonkin wyverns.
Dozens of Level 700 monsters I had tamed over time.
And three hunter parties of monstrous Level 900 skill.
Boss Raid commencing!
There was no better composition for facing an unprecedented Level 1200 monster.