True Reversal Art
Yun Seok-cheol. Pilot of Mae-3 Squadron, currently airborne.
Inside a cockpit screaming along at twelve hundred kilometers an hour, he stared up at the man in the bone mask standing on top of his aircraft.
"…Is this even possible?"
The words came out thin as dry breath through his oxygen mask.
At this altitude? At this speed? Bare-handed?
The airflow over the canopy hit like bullets. And yet the man simply stood there. No swaying. No scramble for balance. Nothing.
Yun Seok-cheol flicked a glance at the instrument panel.
Speed: 1,197 km/h.
Cabin pressure: normal.
Everything was real. Everything except the sight in front of him, which defied every law he knew.
Then—
Tap. Tap.
A knocking sound traveled through the airframe. Someone was rapping on the canopy.
"?!"
The man bent down and peered in. Five thousand meters up, as casually as if he were ringing a doorbell. The eyes behind the mask were unreadable, but Yun Seok-cheol could feel the gaze locked straight on him.
Then the man drew a small scrap of paper from his coat. Paper that should have been ripped away by the slightest breeze unfolded quietly between his fingers.
Can you take me as far as that white giant over there?
"What?"
Yun Seok-cheol blinked, vision briefly gone blank. The only way he could read it was as a request to fight together. But it was a request he had no business granting.
On one corner of the HUD, a warning light blinked: FUEL 14%.
All ordnance expended. The aircraft had already switched to autopilot on a return heading. Re-entering the combat zone in this condition meant one thing: no way home.
Yun Seok-cheol ground his teeth.
He was a lieutenant in the Republic of Korea Air Force, pilot of one of the last combat-ready fighters left in the country. Since the monsters appeared, air power had been cut in half. Maintenance parts were blocked at the border. Even fuel depended on Alliance supply lines. They could barely manufacture three new airframes a year. His KF-21 was, for all practical purposes, one of the last jewels in Seoul's air defense.
And this man wanted him to fly it straight into the face of a monster that had just shrugged off a full bombing run.
"…That's a suicide order."
He drew a short breath. Then opened the comm channel anyway.
"Control, Mae-3. Unauthorized entity currently aboard the airframe — the one they call Bone Mask. Message content: requesting approach to the white giant. Requesting confirmation."
"Denied. We still don't know what that thing is. We will not risk a critical asset. Mae-3, return to base immediately. That is an order."
Her voice came through the speaker, absolute and cold.
"But if I return…"
Yun Seok-cheol tightened his grip on the stick. On the center of the HUD, the monster's track was still crawling toward the city center.
"…the downtown will be a sea of fire. It's only a matter of time."
A beat of silence. The entire control room held its breath. Everyone knew. A few more steps from that giant, and Jongno would vanish off the map.
But that didn't mean you took a precious frontline fighter and flew it into a monster's face on the say-so of something that might be friend or foe. That was suicide. No one gave that order. No one followed it.
And yet.
Charisma Contamination Mode
Description: That feeling you got watching hero shows going "whoa, that's cool"? Now you're the one spreading it. Nearby people's judgment drops 30%. Trust rises 300%. Humans in range feel, for no reason they can name, that this guy's got a point.
Yun Seok-cheol's breathing shifted, just slightly. Strangely, his head went quiet. Even as he thought this is insane, his fingers refused to leave the stick.
"……Command."
"Respond, Mae-3."
"I'd still like to put my faith in that Bone Mask."
"What did you just say, Mae-3? That is a direct violation of—"
He didn't answer. The monster's track on the HUD swelled larger by the second. The airframe shuddered. Warning lights cascaded across the panel.
Warning. Approach altitude limit exceeded.
Tracking system error. Departing safe altitude.
"…If I pull back now, there's nothing left."
He shoved the throttle full open. The fighter screamed and dove.
In that instant, the man in the bone mask bowed his head and looked quietly down into the cockpit.
"…Thank you."
Just the shape of the words on his lips. And then—
Fwoosh!
He launched himself skyward as if spring-loaded. A single streak of light tore through the clouds. The fighter's residual heat flashed and burst, and his silhouette dropped straight toward the white colossus.
"…He actually jumped."
Yun Seok-cheol's breath exploded out of him. The control channel dissolved into chaos.
"Mae-3, respond! Unable to maintain altitude! That entity is—"
"Sensor contact! Directly above the colossus — something is falling!"
Over Seoul, the sky split open. With a metallic crack of impact, a single human being leapt into the domain of gods.
The opponent was a super-giant monster, fifty meters tall. Its mere presence made the air tremble. Every time it exhaled, chunks of concrete shuddered; the ground rolled like the surface of a sea.
Last time, with the Divergence Bird, it had been different. That one had been standing in the middle of an already-evacuated apartment complex, so I'd driven the blast straight into its core without hesitation. I still couldn't forget the wreckage that day — white feathers mixed with blood.
But this time… no. This was the edge of downtown. One wrong angle on the way down, and the debris and shockwave alone could erase thousands of people.
So I thought it through.
If I want to be a hero who protects people — not just a superhuman who kills monsters — what do I have to do?
That question finished itself inside my body as I carved through the sky in free fall.
"Hero Landing Mode, ON."
Hero Landing Mode
Description: If you're going to fall, at least look cool doing it. Your HP doesn't drop — but landing impact damage is tripled. Meaning: you won't die falling out of the sky… but the ground is going to hurt.
The sky split. Air screamed. A single red trajectory drove straight down like a drawn line.
I have to end this monster in one hit.
That apocalyptic size. If it toppled even one degree off true, everyone beneath it would be crushed. So I discarded thought. Doubt. Fear. What remained was a single thing — calculated destruction, nothing else.
"Mass: amplify."
With a sound like air shattering, my body ignited like a meteor. Flame surged from the heavens. The faster I fell, the more friction-heat bloomed like blood across my skin, light flashing over flesh. I didn't care. That wasn't heat. That was momentum.
And the next step. If even a fraction of this force went wide, the city would be ash. I had to lock it down.
"Hold still."
Freeze Tag Mode
Description: For monsters with bullshit patterns. Program pause: 5 seconds. Once per target. The devs kindly put a limit on it so things don't get boring.
In that instant, the white colossus's enormous body locked with a hard click. The roaring mouth, the swaying shadow, even the air itself seemed to freeze. The machine-like vibration cut out. The entire city held its breath.
Now the angle was perfect. Speed, height, distance — all of it.
"Good."
My gaze drove straight down the vertical. Three seconds to the crown of its skull. Why I hadn't taken a single step even standing on a fighter jet. Why I'd rationed every breath. Every reason locked into place as one.
"From here on — real shamanic arts."
Max-Level Newbie Mode
Description: Don't quit grinding some godawful skill tree. Just start the game at max level and use it. Every skill you've learned instantly rises to Special Grade.
Same as last time. In an instant, the world zoomed in. My vision opened, and the formulas suspended in the air began to show themselves — as if all of reality were revealing itself as one vast shamanic array.
There, I opened a grimoire from some shamanic house. Its pages were the sky. Its ink was starlight. A shamanic art that manipulated the formulas composing the world itself. The root of all force: attraction and repulsion. The binding that holds existence together, and the separation that drives it apart. When those two axes crossed at a single point, it was no longer "power." It was a rewrite of principle.
The name of that art: True Reversal Art.
Attraction and repulsion. Life and annihilation. When every opposition reverses and cancels the other, one thing remains.
Severance — the cutting of the world.
There was no beginner form. No intermediate. From the start it was a completed, forbidden absolute formula. In theory anyone could cast it. Surviving that single strike, however, was not a human act.
I fell. The instant the monster's crown filled my vision, every symbol locked in place.
"True Reversal Art —"
⟨ Severance ⟩
Light detonated. Space screamed. The monster's skin neither tore nor burned. Its existence simply came apart. Color and temperature, sound, shadow — every layer of information peeled away one by one and was swallowed into white blankness. The enormous body dissolved in midair. What had once been a monster faded without a trace, the way a dream fades on waking. Even the air forgot the place it had occupied.
"……."
The ground was quiet. No sound. No vibration. No wind. At some point I was standing on the earth. All that remained at my feet was one shattered leg — and even that crumbled to powder the moment the breeze touched it.
Then the shockwave, late to the party, crashed over the world. The city's lights flickered for several seconds and flashed pure white. Inside that glare, I stood alone.
Right now the situation room was packed with the roar of a room about to explode. Every display board lit up with MISSION CLEAR, and the comms officers pounded each other's shoulders and cheered.
"We did it! It's down!"
"That horned mask guy… he was real! Not a fabrication!"
"Downtown damage: zero percent! All civilians confirmed alive!"
It was a festival. A monster that had tanked a full fighter squadron's ordnance — the Disaster-Class White Colossus — had evaporated under a single person's strike. Forty years since the monsters first appeared. Not once had a Disaster-Class been cleared with zero casualties. People clung to each other and wept. The words "we're alive" had never felt this real. Someone pulled off their goggles and wiped their eyes. Someone else laughed with coffee spilled all over their radio.
But one person. In the middle of that celebration, one person was not smiling.
Brigadier General Han Seo-jin. She kept her eyes fixed on the monitor, teeth set lightly into her lower lip. Her fingertips trembled. In the quiet, static crackled through her headset.
"…Commander? Shall we issue the order to lift the evacuation alert?"
Instead of answering, she pointed at the monitor. Cold sweat ran down the line of her jaw.
"—I'm talking about SHAS."
Her subordinates turned toward her as one.
"Ma'am? A Disaster-Class monster appeared there, yes. But the signal's gone now—"
"That's the problem."
Her voice came out low and hard. The noise in the room drained away by degrees. The tension of a single commander was enough to chill the air.
"Why is there still a Disaster-Class signal on SHAS?"
"...!"
Center of the monitor. At the coordinates where the White Colossus should have vanished, a single red dot was still blinking.