Yanked From the Earth Like a Carrot
Naver's trending searches. One of the clearest barometers of what was currently setting Korea on fire.
And sitting proudly at number one was the hottest coin of the moment: Masterchef.
What the Fourth Industrial Revolution had to do with coins, exactly — and why every article under the sun wouldn't shut up about the Fourth Industrial Revolution this, the Fourth Industrial Revolution that — Jisu couldn't have said. But the articles kept coming, and their view counts were astronomical.
Which was as clear a sign as any that a truly massive number of people had started paying attention to cryptocurrency.
Korea's largest coin community, Coinler, was in just as much of an uproar. The boards were being torn apart by two camps — people insisting they'd known about Masterchef's potential all along, and people who couldn't for the life of them figure out why the hell this coin was going up — and the traffic was wringing the servers dry.
Why was this coin rising all of a sudden?
Nobody knew. Not a single person understood why it was going up. It had simply... gone up. This market had a habit of pumping and dumping a handful of coins for no reason whatsoever. But why? Because of what?
Setting aside every last one of those questions, the one thing that was certain right now—
I can go all-in on this. No fear.
—was that Hyun Jisu was a buyer of this coin.
......?
Seo Ayeon watched Jisu, whose movements had suddenly turned razor-sharp.
Did he just activate his Unique Skill?
Hunters S-rank and above were typically defined by their skills. Every hunter had a Unique Skill. Some of them were useless for anything at all. Others were more practical — and more powerful — than any skill in existence. The law of the luck of the draw applied just as ruthlessly to the hunter industry as anywhere else, and so of course Ayeon couldn't help thinking he'd activated a skill.
She glanced back to check on Chaerin.
"..."
Yoo Chaerin still hadn't said a word, but Ayeon could tell. She was a little thrown. No — more precisely, she was puzzled. Watching Jisu move with that sudden, explosive speed, Chaerin's expression had twisted into something faintly off-kilter, the look of someone wondering why a thing that absolutely ought to be happening... wasn't.
Not that Jisu noticed, or cared. His eyes were already locked on that mass of clay.
Another giant fist is about to come punching up out of the ground, isn't it?
Ayeon turned back to him.
"As I told you earlier, we cannot kill it here! It will show itself soon enough — for now, please keep your focus on evasion!"
"..."
Jisu didn't properly hear her. More accurately, he couldn't. Jeong Seyeon's voice kept slamming through his thoughts, over and over.
"It broke 110 won! At this rate it'll hit 120 in no time. Ah! It just passed 120 the second I said it! Jisu! This is insane! This is completely ridicu——"
Bzzzt-t-t-t-t-t.
"Huh? Seyeon?"
Nothing. For reasons he couldn't guess, the connection had dropped.
Are you kidding me? Now? Of all times? I need to be able to sell the second it starts falling, and this is what I get?
Not that there was anything he could do about a dead line. Which meant there was only one option left.
Finish this raid. Fast.
He moved.
"Hyun Jisu, look out!"
Once again, Jisu's dodge beat Ayeon's warning to the punch. From the earth, colossal fists like heaps of mud kept booming upward, one after another.
I'm getting pretty sick of just dodging.
He scowled — and then something flickered through his mind.
Should I try it?
The live feed had cut out, but just as Salk had said, Masterchef was well and truly mooning. The price just kept climbing, as if to prove there had been a reason he'd been told not to get shaken by a mere double-up. Jisu hadn't known Seyeon all that long, but she wasn't the type to lie about something like this. There was nothing in it for her if she did.
So?
Wasn't it worth testing at least once?
Jisu started walking, carefully, toward the colossal fist that had erupted from the ground. Ayeon saw him and her voice jumped to urgent.
"Hyun Jisu! That's dangerous!"
This wasn't Ayeon's first time facing that monster. Ever since [The Incident], the thing had shown up every single time she came here. A giant-type that never appeared in ordinary raids. Its fists boasted a durability like adamantine itself. In everything she'd tried, no ordinary attack had ever punched through that defense.
Not that it was unkillable. Go after the gem in its chest — its weak point — and you could take it down, given a little time. And if hunters of Ayeon and Jisu's caliber went after that weak point? They could hunt it cleanly, without any real threat to their lives. That was why she'd kept telling him to wait. Attacking it now would accomplish nothing.
Jisu didn't listen. He walked right up to the giant fist and laid a hand on it.
It was hard. It looked like mud, but the moment his palm touched it he could feel it — harder than steel.
"It's dangerous! Get away from it!"
If another fist punched up right beside him, this could get ugly. Ayeon had no idea what kind of skill he had, or how his power worked, or where its limits were — but dangerous was dangerous regardless. Ayeon herself was an S+ rank hunter. If even she couldn't put this thing down easily, then it stood to reason that Jisu, SS-rank or not, couldn't either. And if, by any common-sense measure, he could take it down easily — wouldn't that mean he was ranked higher than SS?
Yes. Common sense.
"Hahp!"
Jisu set his other hand on the fist as well. From a distance, it looked as though he were wrapping both arms around a colossal forearm.
"Hyun Jisu...?"
Ayeon made no effort to hide her tension at a move she couldn't begin to understand. What was he trying to do? Activate a skill?
Don't tell me he's about to use that technique he mentioned.
She flashed back to the recent duel between Woohyeok and Jisu. Jisu had tagged Woohyeok with a light attack, then declared — in that chuunibyou tone of his — that he was about to use a technique that would bring a man to his death. If that was what he was winding up for now, the bizarre posture almost made sense.
That was what Ayeon thought. Needless to say, no such technique existed.
The reason Jisu had gathered that giant forearm into his arms had nothing to do with a power that wasn't real. It had to do with a power you could see with your own eyes. Not a skill. Ability in the most literal sense of the word.
Strength.
Power.
"UAAAAAAAAAGH!!!"
Jisu started roaring. The sight of him was so strange it almost defied description. If you had to put it into words, he looked like a farmer trying to wrench a crop rooted deep, deep in the earth.
......?
"?"
Ayeon's expression locked in place. Something she had never imagined was about to happen.
Chaerin, for her part, was not simply standing there unmoved. She had held a motionless watch over the entire situation up to this moment — and now her left eyebrow gave a twitch.
Not that Jisu noticed, or cared. He poured every ounce of force he had into both hands, and that unidentified colossal forearm—
"HAAAAAAAAAAHP!"
KRA-KOOOOOOOOOM!
—he pulled.
And he lifted it.
SHHHHHHHHHHHHHNK!
"!!!"
Ayeon could only stare in horror. In a hunter's life that, if anything, had run long, she had never seen anything like this. Panic — an emotion almost never readable on a woman who never lost her composure — surfaced on her face. If any of her acquaintances had been told of it, they certainly wouldn't have believed it.
Chaerin was no different. It was a difference so minute you wouldn't catch it at a glance, but she had not kept her composure. Her left eyebrow, as she stood motionless and watched, trembled ever so slightly.
Even Yoo Chaerin, of all people, couldn't help but be stunned. Of course she couldn't. Anyone would have been stunned. Anyone, looking at that.
Because Hyun Jisu, with nothing but his own two hands—
"UAAAAAAAAAH!!"
—had ripped a giant-type monster the size of a house, a creature far larger than himself, straight out of the earth. Like pulling up a carrot.
It did not take long for Ayeon's confusion to curdle into outright shock. She might have kept a cool face as a matter of habit, but she was still human. An S+ rank hunter, yes — but in the end, she couldn't think past the limits of a human being.
"W-w-what in the...!"
Jisu was holding it. With both hands, at full strength: a giant monster that looked several times the size of a man. The image was so surreal it could have been a painting hanging in a museum of modern art.
What kind of skill even is that?
Ayeon approached it from the skill angle, because of course she did. What was it? An ability that spiked his physical strength in an instant? A power-amplification skill that came with some kind of penalty — that was the answer hunters who knew Jisu reached for most often, when they tried to estimate what he could do. The way he'd detonated a wyvern. The way he'd coughed blood after an attack. And now this: a level of raw strength no individual should ever have been able to produce.
No. No, that is absolutely not a skill.
Chaerin could now confirm what she had only inferred by instinct. It was not a skill. The reason was simple.
She hadn't felt a thing.
Just as Chaerin thought: this was no skill. It was something more fundamental than that. The source of power that formed the bedrock of every hunter — the numbers everyone was given.
Stats.
The destructive force of raw stats.
G-rank.
At last, Jisu was closing in on something that lived on the other side of S, SS, SSS, and every plus stacked after.
What did G-rank even mean? How powerful did you have to be to reach it? There was not a single answer to be found. Because this was the first time. A rank of G had never been reported anywhere in the hunter industry, anywhere in the world. A power that even the handful of world-class hunters credited with changing history had never achieved. Overwhelming strength.
That was it. Without even realizing it himself, Hyun Jisu had laid a hand on a realm no one had ever reached.