Chapter 29
“I’m tired.”
Suhyuk let out a low breath.
It had only been a short time, but the chaotic battle against several A-class Awakers at once had drained his body and mind far more than he’d expected. Each attack he dodged in that explosive tension, each move he made to seize a blind spot, left a heavy exhaustion behind in both brain and flesh.
His first time entering a gate. The first hideously deformed monster he’d ever faced. And the hair-raising moment when his supposedly perfect stealth had been broken by a detection skill, exposing his true face to people for the first time.
Everything had been a first, and because of that, everything had left a sting of regret behind.
I’d have liked to break all the way through to the boss room while I was at it, but... I guess today’s enough.
With his current fatigue and remaining strength, fighting the boss of an A-class gate full of variables would have been nothing short of reckless.
Suhyuk coldly reined in his thoughts and let the lingering desire go. He resummoned the bloodstained scythe of the Grim Reaper and pulled it back into nothingness.
“Back to back, all of you! Don’t leave a single opening!”
The seven Awakers, hardened into a knot by their fear of the unseen Suhyuk, shouted themselves hoarse as they stayed on guard.
Suhyuk simply passed through their murderous stares and walked out of the gate as if nothing at all could stop him.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
Inside the gate, only perfect silence remained.
The seven Awakers had no way of knowing that Suhyuk had already left, and so they stayed trapped in a suffocating tension, bracing themselves for an attack they couldn’t see and couldn’t predict.
“Ugh...”
Then Kwon Seong-hee, who had been lying collapsed on the floor, groaned as Lee Si-hyun rushed to support her.
“Seong-hee! Are you awake?”
“Uh... my neck definitely felt cold. Am I not dead?”
Still failing to grasp the situation, Kwon Seong-hee rubbed the back of her neck and muttered something absurd. In that instant, the thread of tension stretched so taut among the party members that it snapped with an audible break.
Cha Seon-ho drew in a deep breath and slowly lowered his sword.
“Since there’ve been no follow-up attacks so far... it looks like he’s gone. For now... Hoo. Let’s get out of here. Everyone withdraw.”
To him, Kwon Seong-hee had clearly been the biggest nuisance. And yet, instead of killing her, the enemy had fixated only on three of them with strange, dogged persistence.
Something’s off...
“Seong-hee. Can you use Detecting?”
Even though he strongly believed the enemy had already departed, he asked her to use her skill one more time, just to be sure.
“Yes. I can.”
Seong-hee cast Detecting, and there was nothing around them.
Even so, Seon-ho kept his nerves sharp and escorted each party member one by one, carefully making his way toward the gate exit.
The helplessness and dread of knowing that invisible death could strike their throats at any moment seemed to tear their minds and bodies to shreds.
Maybe that was why they flinched at the sound of a pebble rolling on the ground, and kept twisting around to look over their shoulders dozens of times.
At last, after pushing through the rippling veil, the seven Awakers stepped out of the gate and into the night air of the city.
The temporary tent area inside the cordon had been set up as a staging ground. When the advance team, once ten strong, suddenly burst out of the gate reduced to seven, the waiting Association employee came running over in a panic.
“W-What? Awaker Cha Seon-ho? Why are you out already? You’ve barely been inside at all—did you find the boss room entrance right away? We still haven’t fully prepared the large-scale follow-up force...”
“That’s not it.”
Cha Seon-ho cut him off firmly and swept his bloodshot eyes around the area.
“Get someone from above on the line right now. This is an emergency report. And is a healer on standby?”
“Huh? Oh, yes. The healer is waiting inside that temporary tent over there. I’ll guide you there first. I’ll call upstairs immediately.”
Led by the employee, the party members hurried into the tent as if fleeing for their lives.
The healer who had been waiting inside tilted her head, looking puzzled as she saw the A-class Awakers coming in.
Normally, an advance team that had hastily retreated from a high-level gate should have been dragged in missing limbs or covered in blood. But the seven before her didn’t seem to have any serious external injuries.
There were only the scrapes from Kwon Seong-hee collapsing and hitting the floor, and the swelling at the back of her neck after she’d been knocked out and woken up again.
But their eyes were hollow, as if they had seen a ghost, and their spirits were utterly exhausted.
“She was suddenly knocked unconscious, so her neck and head probably took a hit.”
Cha Seon-ho first brought Kwon Seong-hee to the healer.
“And I’d like a mental stabilizing and healing skill for the whole party. We need something to ease this extreme strain and exhaustion.”
“Ah... yes, understood.”
The healer swallowed her confusion and hurriedly extended her hands, letting forth a warm healing light.
A little while later, an Association employee came sprinting in, breathless, and set a laptop with a secure communications link on the folding table.
The screen lit up, and a video call window appeared.
On the monitor, the faces of a senior Association official and five executives representing the Five Great Guilds appeared in split screen, all of them wearing grave expressions.
Cha Seon-ho straightened his posture and began.
“Greetings. I’m Cha Seon-ho, an A-class Awaker from the Cheonmyeong Guild. I was acting as the temporary leader of the advance team, but during the operation, a significant irregularity occurred, and I withdrew the reconnaissance mission and returned.”
The six executives on the laptop screen all looked taken aback.
The Association official furrowed his brow and asked,
At the official’s words, Cha Seon-ho’s expression hardened before returning to its usual blankness. He then gave an unvarnished summary of the horror that had unfolded inside the gate.
An unknown invisible enemy. And the fact that, because of that enemy, three A-class combatants had lost their lives.
As the report continued, the faces of the six executives gradually turned ashen, one after another.
After a brief, heavy silence, one of the guild executives swallowed dryly and spoke with caution.
Without even the slightest hesitation, Cha Seon-ho shook his head firmly.
“No. If that bastard had been Ghost, the seven of us would never have made it here alive.”
The executives on screen held their breath.
“Kwon Seong-hee’s Detecting wave exposed his stealth for an instant, and the seven of us clearly saw his form. Ghost is known to be extremely wary of his identity being revealed, and he never leaves witnesses alive. On top of that, even though he could have wiped us all out if he’d wanted to, he only knocked out Kwon Seong-hee, who had been using Detecting, then casually made one more victim and slipped away. It seemed like he was targeting only Park Cheol-min, Kim Yong-han, and Choi Yeong-o.”
At Cha Seon-ho’s cold analysis, the executives on the laptop screen silently nodded in agreement.
“And... the most decisive irregularity that convinces me he wasn’t Ghost is this: the bodies of the three people who died from his attack turned into pitch-black dust and completely evaporated.”
“Yes. None of the Awaker skills already known to us can produce such an abnormal phenomenon. I think there’s a high chance this was an Abyss member with a ‘new job’ that isn’t even registered in the Association database.”
The Association official’s face tightened with alarm.
“Yes... They all definitely turned into black dust and scattered into the air.”
At that answer, the official’s expression darkened further.
As if something had just come to mind, he rifled through some documents and spoke heavily.
“What? Something similar happened before?”
He paused briefly, then continued.
Dust.
Dust. Cha Seon-ho silently repeated the name in his head, a title that fit with eerie perfection—a horrifying power that reduced corpses to powder and erased them from the world.
The executives of the Five Great Guilds all nodded in unison, as if they had rehearsed it.
The moment Suhyuk’s existence came into the world, he did so under the name Dust.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
When Suhyuk got home, he roughly peeled off his outer layer and flung himself onto the bed as if diving into it.
Fatigue crashed down on him, and yet his mind was clearer and more awake than ever.
The fleeting moments he had experienced inside the gate kept flashing through his head without end.
“Detecting...”
A bitter murmur slipped between Suhyuk’s lips.
He had never imagined that the Robe of the Judge, which had seemed invincible, could be rendered helpless in an instant by a single area-detection skill.
A fatal weakness brought on by carelessness, and his identity laid bare.
He was, frankly, more shocked than he cared to admit.
But that wasn’t all.
“They’re tough. The A-class ones.”
He had painfully learned that the Grim Reaper’s scythe, which he had thought could slice through anything like tofu, was dulled against A-class warrior-types.
The sensation of thick armor, along with bone reinforced by mana and stubborn muscle tissue, clamping down on the blade and refusing to let it pass had been unpleasant in a way that was hard to describe.
“Compared to the way I cleanly took off Cheol-gamen’s head, when I’d expected him to be B-class...”
A rough, bitter taste seemed to spread in his mouth.
“And when I think about the insane prices of the skills and items I’ll need to buy from the Hell Shop from now on... targeting A-class Awakers is definitely more efficient.”
At five thousand Hell Points per target, no less.