Chapter 18: The Snap of Released Magic
The moment the reins holding back the manifestation of magic snapped free—
an overwhelming sense of liberation washed over her.
Flash!
“Aaaagh!”
“M-my eyes…!”
The monitors in the command room lit up all at once.
The situation room staff clutched their eyes and screamed as an overwhelming flood of light poured from the screens.
It was impossible, but… the light felt like it carried physical force.
Even through the electronic medium of the monitors, the wave of mana beyond them crashed into the command room.
“Nngh…!”
Min Ji-hee gritted her teeth and barely held on.
As a non-mage, she couldn’t parse the magic itself.
But her superior predictive ability led her to the conclusion anyway.
Even if I were a mage, it’d be the same. No human could parse that.
Her legs trembled.
Tap tap tap!
Min Ji-hee’s hands flew across the controls.
“Field… we need eyes on the field!”
From Incheon to Pyongyang.
Every CCTV along that 200-kilometer path was summoned simultaneously.
And Min Ji-hee swallowed hard.
…Holy…
It looked like someone had taken a ruler to the map and drawn a straight line.
A single streak of pure white began in Incheon and stretched straight to Pyongyang.
Everything along that line—gone.
Buildings, forests, mountains, rivers.
All matter touched by that slash—erased, as if it had never existed.
All that remained were ice crystals scattering like diamond dust.
A landscape too clean and too cruel, as if a god’s finger had scrubbed filth from the earth.
“Pyongyang! What about Pyongyang?!”
Min Ji-hee screamed.
The top priority was the target—whether Skazaha had been erased.
And—Han Seol-ah’s survival.
Static.
[No Signal]
[Connection Impossible]
Dozens of monitors went black all at once.
“Gone…? All of them?”
Min Ji-hee’s pupils shook violently.
Bunkers in the deepest core, underground facilities, even drones kilometers in the sky.
Hundreds of ‘eyes’ planted with the battle’s aftermath in mind—
One spell, and all visual data from Pyongyang as a whole was deleted.
Min Ji-hee snatched up the phone with trembling hands.
Speed dial 1.
Jin Cheon-jin.
He’ll have made it.
Please…
[00:02]
Two seconds before the two minutes the Apostle had allotted expired.
Jin Cheon-jin, hidden behind a pillar in the ruined building, moved.
He pressed the ring on his finger—the pitch-black gem.
[00:01]
Flash!
Jin Cheon-jin vanished and reappeared beside the collapsing Han Seol-ah.
In that instant, Skazaha sensed the anomaly—its aura shifted.
A split second.
The predator’s killing intent clawed through the space.
Goosebumps erupted across Jin Cheon-jin’s body, cold sweat exploding from his pores.
At the same time—a pure white glow began to gather at Skazaha’s maw.
[00:00]
The moment the promised two minutes ticked over.
From some distant point all the way to Skazaha’s massive form—an impossibly thin white line slashed across.
And then.
The line expanded, devouring vision in blinding white.
Jin Cheon-jin knew instinctively.
Ah, I’m dead.
His life flashed before his eyes.
Jin Cheon-jin reflexively pressed the gem.
Right after Han Seol-ah departed for her sniping position, Jin Cheon-jin received the Apostle’s summons.
And—heard the shocking news.
“If things proceed as planned, Han Seol-ah dies.”
“…Pardon?”
Jin Cheon-jin’s reply was short, laced with denial and bewilderment.
The Apostle’s eyes were ice-cold, like someone looking back on a future already set.
“Han Seol-ah will endure the two minutes.”
“…She will, without fail.”
“But.”
The Apostle cut in.
“The instant those two minutes end, I’ll unleash the spell. Skazaha included—Pyongyang and its surroundings will be obliterated entirely.”
“Then…!”
“Yes.”
The Apostle nodded.
“Han Seol-ah can’t escape my spell’s range. She dies right there.”
Jin Cheon-jin’s mind went blank.
“To survive, she must abandon the battlefield the moment she endures those two minutes.”
Was that even possible?
Surviving two minutes alone was a miracle—what came next?
“There’s a way.”
Jin Cheon-jin’s head snapped up at the Apostle’s words.
“…I’d appreciate your wisdom.”
“First, confirm. Does the Korea Hunter Association possess a Blink—an artifact for short-range spatial transfer?”
“…No.”
“Any way to acquire one immediately?”
“Spatial artifacts are treated as strategic assets. Personal trades are impossible from the start, and supply is extremely limited… As far as I know, only the US and Japan possess them on Earth right now.”
“I expected as much.”
The Apostle muttered without surprise.
“…”
A brief silence.
And then—the Apostle tossed something over.
Thud.
Jin Cheon-jin caught it reflexively.
A ring embedded with a black gem.
“This artifact has one short-range and one mid-range spatial transfer built in.”
The Apostle said flatly.
“Name? …Yeah. Just call it the Black Ring.”
“!”
Ancient runes etched meticulously atop the jet-black gem glowed faintly.
In that moment—Jin Cheon-jin’s eyes widened.
No way…
He recognized it instantly.
The last S-rank hunter of fallen India, Bayu’s—‘Vishnu’s Six Steps’…!
Three short-range, two mid-range, one long-range.
India’s national treasure, embedded with six spatial transfer spells total.
But most charges were expended in India’s struggle, and it vanished with Bayu’s death—a legendary artifact.
How did he…
Questions piled up, but the Apostle’s explanation cut them off.
“Exactly at the two-minute mark.”
The Apostle’s voice sank low.
“There’ll be a split-second gap between my spell activating and reaching Pyongyang.”
Jin Cheon-jin shoved his thoughts aside and gritted his teeth.
“Use that window.”
The Apostle’s gaze pierced him.
“Save Han Seol-ah and escape.”
“…”
“Fail, and you both die.”
The Apostle’s tone remained even to the end.
Jin Cheon-jin bowed without hesitation.
“I’ll make it happen.”
Flash!
“Cough, cough!”
Jin Cheon-jin coughed up blood-mixed phlegm and opened his eyes.
A sensation like his entire back had been flayed assaulted him.
Heat turning to cold, cold burning flesh—a bizarre agony.
The remnants of his cloak and shield, grazed by absolute zero’s slash, had evaporated silently.
“Hah…”
Am I alive?
He urgently checked his arms.
The unconscious Han Seol-ah lay cradled against him.
Her face dusted with white frost, lips turned blue.
But her heart—faintly beating.
“Ha… haha…”
Saved.
Or more precisely—he’d just followed the ‘Apostle’s design.’
As relief loosened his body, Jin Cheon-jin noticed his back felt unnaturally light.
His trembling hand reached over his shoulder.
“…Huh?”
Gone.
In that brief moment turning with Han Seol-ah in his arms.
The cloak’s hem he couldn’t dodge, and the A-rank artifact shield on his back—cleanly vaporized.
The cut edge was glass-smooth.
An ultra-low-temp severance so precise no pain registered.
Without the Apostle’s artifact—0.1 seconds slower, and his entire back would be gone.
Jin Cheon-jin looked straight ahead with trembling eyes.
Nothing.
No Skazaha, no ruins.
Not even the cluster of buildings he’d stood in moments ago.
As if a god had spilled white paint, the world had turned entirely blank.
Even sound had frozen.
No crashing buildings, no screams from the earth.
Only the wind whispering over the empty glacier.
“……”
Jin Cheon-jin traced the destruction with shaking eyes.
Incheon to Pyongyang.
A straight-line trajectory ruled across the land.
Mountains grazed by the line were tunneled hollow; rivers frozen mid-flow.
And—the endpoint of that line.
Pyongyang’s core, where Skazaha had stood, was even more grotesque.
“Ah…”
From the impact point, a massive circle had bloomed across the earth.
Like a nuke’s scar, but no mushroom cloud—instead, an eternal glacier dome swelling outward.
Inside that circle.
A white expanse kilometers in radius, where even ‘ruins’ ceased to exist.
No collapsed buildings, no twisted steel.
Everything caught in absolute zero’s chill had decomposed to atomic dust, now glittering diamond particles adrift in the air.
The map had changed.
The basin cradling Pyongyang’s wreckage was now the world’s smoothest, whitest ice desert.
Jin Cheon-jin trembled wordlessly.
Bzzz—
His phone vibrated in his left breast pocket.
…Tough little thing.
Caller: Min Ji-hee.
“Mission success.”
Waaaaah!! Cheers erupted from the line.
Jin Cheon-jin chuckled.
We’d escaped annihilation.
[Phew… How’s the situation?]
“You weren’t watching the monitors?”
[The cameras all got wiped out.]
“Ah… yeah, figures.”
Jin Cheon-jin summed up Pyongyang’s landscape in one line.
“We’ll have to erase ‘Pyongyang’ from the maps from now on.”
[…We figured. All gone, huh?]
“Yeah. Skazaha and Pyongyang both.”
[President… but…]
[Is it really over?]
“Why say it like that? Making me nervous.”
[It’s weird.]
The line went quiet.
[No system message.]
“…”
Come to think of it…
After boss subjugation and Break conclusion, the System notifies every Korean hunter.
But now?
Nothing.
Like the hush before a storm.
That instant.
“…Hm?”
Whoooosh—!
As if a storm rushed into the vacuum from the blast.
A gale of frost sucked toward central Pyongyang.
Like an invisible ‘hole’ had opened there.
Jin Cheon-jin sensed clear malice in that frigid wind.
The killing intent from that split second before Skazaha—the monster’s aura embedded in it.
Frost mana? No, slightly different!
The unique energy beasts exuded.
Magi.
Undeniably!
How? Skazaha was clearly erased!
[President?]
Skazaha’s obliterated fragments drew in the white desert’s ice dust, reconstructing form.
What emerged—an enormous heart of ice.
Thump!
At the heart of the white desert.
A blue heart pulsed in midair like a newborn fetus.
And then.
Crunch.
Crack crack!
Ice pillars erupted around the heart.
Crackle crackle!
Scattered ice dust defied gravity, converging.
Building skeleton, layering flesh, sheathing scales.
Transparent, unyielding ice clumped, sculpting a bloated form.
“…!”
A statue like finely wrought gemstone craft completed.
A hollow, transparent body of ice, lit only by the pulsing blue heart—a monster statue of ice.
“No way…”
[Hello?]
Rumble!
Frost magi surged, and the ice statue’s eyes flashed open.
Roooooooar!!!
The completed statue spread wings and bellowed.
Shockwave scattered clinging ice shards like buckshot.
“Gah…!”
As Jin Cheon-jin recoiled in shock, Skazaha’s head snapped south.
Toward the sniper who’d killed it.
Toward Incheon.
Flash!
Space tore, a black portal yawned, and the massive ice dragon was sucked inside.
…!
“It’s alive! It’s teleporting to Incheon!”
[No way! The Apostle’s the only one there…!]
“Apostle’s status?”
[Critical…! He’s vomited blood multiple times fueling the mana for that spell!]
Jin Cheon-jin urgently called for a chopper.
Manastone-engine heli from Pyongyang to Incheon—under five minutes!
The sensation of saving Han Seol-ah lingered.
Charging toward confirmed death.
But he’d survived.
This time too…
If battle erupted on the field…
I’ll be the first to die.
Jin Cheon-jin steeled his resolve.
“Ptoo.”
I spat the blood pooling in my mouth onto the floor.
Blowing my nose brought out bloody clumps.
My insides were a wreck.
“Gonna have to dial back the lifeline.”
Even 50,000 MP couldn’t hold—better cap safe at 40,000.
I picked up Eternal Winter and infused 10,000 precious mana.
“This should let me pull off a few Genesis traits.”
I rose from the sniper chair.
Forced strength into wobbling legs and leaped down.
Min Ji-hee’s ‘third request.’
Secure a clear lot near the sniper chair for guaranteed lockdown.
I landed in a wide open space.
Thorough as always.
Once an elementary school field.
Now no field, no building, no assembly platform.
Just perfectly leveled dirt—a flawless arena.
“About time it showed.”
I stretched while waiting.
Soon, space above tore open.
A black portal.
From it crawled an ice dragon dripping killing intent.
Seeing that pissed-off mug.
I couldn’t help but smirk.
“Welcome.”
I gripped the staff tighter.
“To my home ground.”
Inside Synchronization’s effective range.
What’s that mean?
“You’re fucked.”
I’m invincible.