Hard Mode Floor 5!
"Haah… haah…"
My breath scraped all the way up into my throat.
Whoosh—
"Tch—"
Fwoosh— thwip—
Silent arrows that could only be dodged by pure instinct began raining down without mercy on the spot I had just left.
Kh… damn it!
The Heavenly Net.
In murim novels, it was that flimsy scheme the protagonist punched through every single time. I had plowed through enough of those stories that I had sworn I could breeze through one myself.
Rumble—
"Shit!"
The earth heaved in chaotic convulsions while hundreds of arrows poured down from every direction. I hurled Magi at the storm to blot out the attack, but—
The trajectories changed again…!
The mass of Magi I sent out only swatted down a fraction of them. An arrow that rewrote its own path at will was about to reach my face when I barely managed to unfurl my Form-Shifting Flash and slip free. But in that split-second of vulnerability, a Formless Arrow came screaming in.
"Kh…!"
A mana-forged arrow punched clean through my arm. Thanks to my protective aura, it was only a hairline crack in the bone—but the longer this dragged on, the worse the situation became.
Goddamn it, it never went like this in the murim novels…!
The Heavenly Net in those stories was usually an assassin ambush or a chain of successive assaults by masters—not sealing every exit with a wall of ranged weapons.
"Fucking Dark Elves!"
Then again, I wasn't fighting martial artists. These were elves. After a long standoff, I had confirmed they were master marksmen of the forest.
A chase through a mountain thick with trees… against elves.
Didn't that sound like something a person with a death wish would do? And among them, the Dark Elves—specialists in ambush—had me in their sights. On top of mana, they seemed to be borrowing the power of spirits. Riding freely shifting currents of wind, the arrows' trajectories were impossible to predict. The ground flipped without warning; sudden gusts kept disrupting my footwork. And their skill level was nothing ordinary either.
In murim terms, at least a thousand Peak Masters and one at the Transformation Realm.
If it were just ordinary arrows, I could have managed somehow. But the Formless Arrows the Transformation-level archer kept sending made everything exponentially worse.
At least there's only one of them firing Formless Arrows…
Since Formless Arrows required maintaining mana form while packing real power, I could pin down the one person who stayed at a fixed distance and kept targeting me. But the moment I tried to close in, every kind of interference erupted.
This is so damn annoying…!
Dust clouds, shaking and collapsing ground, rain suddenly dumping from the sky, wind like a storm whipping leaves across my vision—cheap, ugly tricks, over and over. I even unleashed Samadhi True Fire and set the trees ablaze, hoping for a forest fire—but the spirits snuffed it out in an instant. The moment I tried Treading the Void, natural disasters and arrow storms crashed down from empty air until I could barely stay upright.
Isn't there some way out of this?
Seonghwa had never lied to me. She had sworn I could break through, so there had to be a method. I scanned my surroundings, desperately hunting for a clue—but nothing presented itself. My movements grew frantic, and I was being driven into a corner when a realization cut clean through my mind.
Since when did I start counting on luck…?
"Haa— how stupid of me."
Apparently all that money and those points had made me soft in the head.
"In the end, the only thing I can trust is myself."
This wasn't some flimsy setup a lucky break could crack. It was a Heavenly Net built by a thorough assassination collective. The only answer was pure force—everything I had.
"Hoo… fine. Let's do this!"
A crushing pressure began to flood outward, dominating the air itself. Abandoning even my protective aura, I pushed Heavenly Demon Descent to its absolute limit. I layered that overwhelming, territory-dominating footwork with my movement arts and gambled everything on closing the distance.
My internal energy is draining away like water…!
But for that cost, the arrow storm that had been overturning the sky couldn't even approach me. Before long, the arrows were slamming into the ground like a torrential downpour. Then, from within that rain, one Formless Arrow came streaking in like a shaft of light.
"I was waiting for that!"
All those matches against the 10th Heavenly Demon hadn't been a waste of points.
Great Absorption Art.
No— North Dark Divine Art.
The instant the Formless Arrow touched my body, it tangled with the Magi surging out of me and amplified.
"Ugh!"
I clenched my teeth against the violent resistance, crushing the Magi that tried to reverse-flow and forcibly fusing it with my own. I absorbed the rebound energy into my body, forced it along my meridians, cycled it over and over—until at last it was completely mine.
That's it!
The blood smeared at the corner of my mouth told me my meridians had been shredded in that brief span—but this was at least a ninety-percent success. Proof that this reckless method hadn't been wrong after all…!
Thankfully, all that training wasn't for nothing.
Even with the Great Absorption Art, I had always wondered why Magi simply got sucked in without any real contest of power. After countless spars, I had realized the technique the 10th used wasn't ordinary Great Absorption Art. I had scoured Manmajeon for every martial arts manual I could find, and eventually uncovered an ancient text marked in Chinese characters as "North Dark."
So it was the North Dark Divine Art all along.
One of the strongest arts in existence—a clear superior version of the Great Absorption Art. After endless begging and pestering Seonghwa, I had finally gotten the text translated.
It was stuffed with incomprehensible talk about the energy of heaven and earth and the harmony of mind and body, so I never fully grasped it.
I had set physical training aside and spent days and nights shuttling between Manmajeon and home, grinding until I scraped together even a superficial entry-level grasp. This was the first time I had actually used it in real combat.
I only survived because the enemy was using arrows shaped from qi…!
Because the arrow was visible internal energy, even my clumsy skill managed to make the technique work.
"Now it's my turn."
The Magi amplified by the absorbed energy concentrated down through my meridians into my feet. I tore across the space at explosive speed. The Formless Arrows that came raining down again were swallowed into my body in an instant—I had already learned how once.
BOOM—
My accelerated footwork hit sonic-boom levels. The arrow rain scattered in the shockwave of my passage. I punched straight through the spirit-wrought disasters without a second glance. And then, for the first time since entering Hard Mode, I came face-to-face with the one who had been such a pain in my ass.
"Nice to finally meet you, you bastard…!"
Silver hair, ash-gray skin, pointed ears. A slender frame wrapped entirely in black. Pretty enough for an elf—but there was no life in those eyes.
"You're just another byproduct the Tower spit out, aren't you."
My first time hunting an entity with a human form. The opponent still had a hand on their bow, aiming at me without giving up.
KRA-BOOM.
One strike shattered the bow, then I snapped the arm holding it.
"This ends here."
Not a shred of hesitation. My palm strike slammed into their chest. The Magi that bored into their body burst their heart.
"Tsk…"
Even if they were little more than a mindless monster, the sensation of crushing a human-shaped being under my fingertips left a metallic taste in my mouth. But the most irritating obstacle was gone. The arrow pressure from every direction was still there—but the tide had turned.
"All right. Now it's reverse hide-and-seek."
Drawing out savage Magi in a continuous stream, I declared that our positions had flipped.
"Ha…! It's over."
The long, long chase was finally done.
"I'm exhausted… so exhausted…"
I had taken out the worst of them first, but that didn't mean I could relax. These were Dark Elves on their home ground. Wiping out more than a thousand of them while carving through a mountain range was anything but smooth. Their struggle was so fierce I only managed to cut down the last Dark Elf just before the sun set.
Afterward, I collapsed onto the ground and said:
"They call this survival?"
To live, I had had to kill over a thousand Dark Elves. I had butchered them without hesitation while they were hunting me—but they still wore human shapes. Once the fight ended, fatigue crashed in, and a nameless unease settled in a corner of my chest.
As if to ease that feeling, a message window appeared before my eyes.
You have cleared Hard Mode Floor 5.
You have recorded results far exceeding the target threshold.
Rewards have been increased and will now be issued.
◈ Superior Magic Stone × 5
◈ Branch of the World Tree
"Superior Magic Stones!"
To finally get a grade people had only speculated about from Intermediate Magic Stones! And the other reward—Branch of the World Tree—sounded like anything but ordinary treasure just from the name.
And then.
"Huh?"
Besides the reward window, another message window appeared before my eyes.