The Beast Who Threw His Comrade to the Wolves
A beastly nature, one that would shove an ally straight into mortal danger without the slightest hesitation if it meant saving his own skin.
The monstrous stain of sin hovering above the man’s head now confirmed exactly what kind of situation this was.
“I’m not dying! Get out of the way!”
Seeing that Choi Young-oh had confirmed Lee Si-hyun had been flung clear and was now sprinting frantically to the other side to save her, he spun on his heel and, without looking back once, began bolting for the Gate exit like a madman.
Where do you think you’re running?
Su-hyuk’s eyes sank to an icy calm.
Reaper’s Steps.
In an instant, his body tore through the cave’s thick darkness and leaped across space.
The ten-meter gap vanished without delay, and Su-hyuk appeared behind the fleeing Choi Young-oh, raising the scythe high before savagely bringing it down toward the man’s neck.
Clang—!!
“Kraaaah!”
With a shriek of metal splitting the air, a scream of agony burst from Choi Young-oh’s mouth.
It had originally been a strike aimed at the throat, but because the bastard had been running at full speed, the trajectory had shifted ever so slightly and lodged instead into the thick shoulder armor.
Damn it. So this is what A-class means? Why the hell is this so hard?
Su-hyuk’s brow furrowed.
The armor buckled, and the blade of the scythe sank halfway in, but it couldn’t drive any farther.
It wasn’t just that the armor was hard.
The man’s skin and bones, strengthened by mana, and even the tough bands of muscle beneath, were all clamping down on the Reaper’s Scythe and refusing to let go.
Even with Su-hyuk’s strength explosively amplified in his Reaper form, the weapon remained stuck, and his body was nearly dragged along by the sheer, brutal momentum of the man’s charge.
Of course, the pain of having his shoulder bone splintered must have been immense as well.
But Choi Young-oh clenched his teeth so hard they seemed ready to crack and reached a rough hand up over his shoulder.
Grip!
“I’ve got something! This bastard’s an invisibility-type Awaker! Stay tight behind me! I’ll hold him in place—kill him now!”
His thick fingers clamped around the blade embedded in his shoulder.
Confirming the chilling touch of an unseen edge, Choi Young-oh bellowed curses at the top of his lungs.
The party members who had been fleeing toward the exit all stopped at that desperate shout and turned back at once.
Sensing something fixed in the air behind Choi Young-oh, they bared their killing intent and rushed in.
“Keep a grip on it! Don’t let him go!”
One melee Awaker, blue aura coiling around his sword, leaped in a terrifying arc and was just about to slam his blade toward the empty space behind Choi Young-oh when—
For the first time, Su-hyuk faced a true life-or-death crisis.
And yet his reason was colder than ever.
Recalling the scythe. Reaper’s Steps.
As long as a hand, or even part of the body, remained in contact with the weapon, recall was possible.
Su-hyuk recalled the Reaper’s Scythe as though it had vanished into thin air, and at the same moment activated Reaper’s Steps, retreating into the perfect darkness ten meters behind.
Everything happened in the span of a single breath.
Right where Su-hyuk had just been standing, the party member’s heavy greatsword crashed down like lightning.
Whoooosh—!
But the only thing the razor-sharp sword aura tore apart was the damp air of the cave.
“Huh?”
“W-what? Where’d he go?”
The Awaker who had launched the decisive strike staggered from the recoil of cutting through nothing and stared in confusion.
More stunned than anyone was Choi Young-oh, who had felt the weapon in his grasp vanish like smoke.
His eyes bulged as if they might burst from his skull.
“Where the hell did he go, you stupid—! I told you to hold on tight!”
“I don’t know! I was definitely gripping the blade stuck in my shoulder just a second ago, but then it just disappeared!”
Running his hand over the eerie sensation left in his palm, Choi Young-oh muttered blankly, “It was definitely... something bent at a right angle... a scythe? It felt like a scythe.”
At that nonsense, the party members’ looks turned icy.
An invisibility-type assassin used a scythe as a weapon?
Their contemptuous gazes dug into Choi Young-oh, as if he’d probably seen a hallucination while trying to toss a teammate around like a meat shield and run off alone.
Then came another voice.
“Mr. Choi Young-oh! What the hell do you think you were just doing?”
Cha Seon-ho, who had hauled Lee Si-hyun up from where she’d been rolling on the ground, stormed over and exploded with anger.
Choi Young-oh, flinching under the thick killing intent that set Cha Seon-ho apart from the other A-class Awakers, opened his mouth to defend himself.
“Is that really the important part right now?!”
At that, Cha Seon-ho felt the urge to draw his weapon at once and cut down that piece of trash, but he took a deep breath and forcibly subdued the rage boiling up inside him.
“...First, I’ll report your disgusting behavior to the Association and the guild in full once we get out. Be prepared.”
Choi Young-oh snorted at the warning.
“Can’t you see the injury on my shoulder? Don’t you understand the situation?”
“I do! That’s exactly why I’m holding myself back!”
Cha Seon-ho immediately tore his gaze away from that repulsive face and snapped at the support-type Awaker in the rear, his voice sharp.
The unseen predator was surely still watching them from somewhere in this darkness.
“Use Detecting now! Everyone keep formation!”
“Detecting!”
At the support Awaker’s shout, a clear, transparent wave of mana spread outward through the entire passage like ripples cast across a lake by a thrown stone.
The eight Awakers tightened their grips on their weapons and guarded every direction with razor-sharp vigilance.
Su-hyuk had been careless.
So far, Judge’s Robe had completely blocked every line of sight from the living and even the eyes of machines, while also erasing the signs of even the most sensitive Awakers.
But the Detecting skill, which swept the space itself, passed over the area, and for the briefest instant the distortion in space aligned.
“There he is!!”
The support Awaker pointed shakily toward one side of the passage, her face ghostly pale.
Where her finger pointed, in the darkness where there should have been nothing at all, a pale, indistinct figure began to emerge, wearing a robe with black fabric crossed by dark red geometric lines.
“Hyaat!!”
Cha Seon-ho sprang forward without the slightest hesitation.
Veteran reflexes, overwhelming and instantaneous.
Blue mana wrapped around his longsword in a flash, and it surged like a storm straight toward Su-hyuk’s front.
...?!
Startled, Su-hyuk hurriedly cried out to his power inwardly.
Reaper’s Steps.
In an instant, his body lurched backward ten meters as though yanked by force.
Right over the very spot where he had just been standing, not only Cha Seon-ho’s heavy longsword but also the rear damage dealers’ sharp mana arrows crashed down like thunderbolts.
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!!
With a deafening explosion, a thick cloud of dust wildly filled the spider-web passage.
They found me?
Su-hyuk’s shock as he retreated into the dust was no small thing.
The Judge’s Robe, which had seemed invincible, had been pierced by nothing more than a single Detecting skill.
But there was no time to remain stunned.
His opponent was made up of eight A-class Awakers.
Choi Young-oh, whose shoulder had been torn open, was among them, but for these people, who had crossed countless lines between life and death, that kind of wound was probably no different from the usual injuries they suffered in Gates.
Without the slightest hesitation, they immediately pinpointed Su-hyuk’s position and unleashed merciless chained attacks.
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!
Mana explosions burst from all directions.
The dust cloud was no obstacle at all to those who had Detecting active.
Su-hyuk had no choice but to keep activating Reaper’s Steps in succession, narrowly dodging the murderous trajectories.
Each time his vision flashed, destructive skills skimmed past his toes.
“What the hell kind of movement skill is that? It looks like it has no cooldown or delay at all!”
One Awaker, irritated by the attacks that had cut through empty air, shouted with veins bulging in his neck.
Cha Seon-ho, veteran that he was, was just as incredulous.
Movement skills were rare.
And precisely because they were rare, they were powerful weapons—tools that could instantly seize an enemy’s blind side or guarantee survival.
Of course, their limitations were equally severe.
They devoured mana, or had long cooldowns, or suffered critical delays before and after activation.
But watching Su-hyuk flicker about like a ghost with a movement skill, it seemed as though none of those penalties existed at all.
“Don’t let yourselves be rattled! Invisibility types have low mana pools! He won’t be able to run forever.”
Cha Seon-ho’s calm, confident shout steadied them.
At those words, the wavering Awakers nodded and redoubled their pursuit.
“Keep Detecting active! Don’t let Detecting drop for even a second!”
At Cha Seon-ho’s repeated warning, Su-hyuk dodged the tidal wave of attacks bearing down on him and glanced at the support Awaker trailing furthest behind.
She stood at the very rear of the party, continuously releasing waves of mana.
Apparently Detecting consumed a great deal of mana, because her face had gone white and she was grimacing hard.
She has no sin...
There was no pitch-black text above her head, no heavy stain of sin like the ones over Park Cheol-min or Choi Young-oh.
Su-hyuk’s gaze wavered.
Since awakening as a Reaper, he had never once taken the life of an innocent human with no sin.
But the one who had stripped away his perfect concealment and exposed his fatal weakness was that very blameless support Awaker.
Amid the rain of attacks, Su-hyuk sank into a deep dilemma.
Should he kill her or not?
“Die!!”
Cutting into Su-hyuk’s split-second hesitation was Choi Young-oh, roaring in fury as he rushed in from the blind side.
His eyes bloodshot, he swung his guandao wildly.
Under normal circumstances, the fact that prey had practically come to him should have been cause for delight, but with his invisibility stripped away, fighting head-on was nothing but a loss.
Going head-on against an A-class warrior-type still isn’t happening.
But that did not mean Su-hyuk had no way to subdue him.
Staring at the guandao’s trajectory as it fell like lightning, he coldly recited the skill inwardly.
Shackles of Sin.
Swish—!
The shape of a pitch-black chain, as if stretching up from the floor of hell itself, split the air and tightly bound Choi Young-oh’s entire body.
In an instant, the man’s violently charging body began to slow in a grotesque manner, as if someone had slapped a slow-motion video onto reality.