The Invisible Cracks
It begins with small, invisible cracks.
Take, for instance, the metal creatures the size of lapdogs—powerful, yes, but slow, so they'd been dismissed and brushed past. That was one crack.
The absence of the risk manager and commander—the operator—whose job it was to keep the party safe. That was another.
Handing unfamiliar duties off to someone else, leaving the retreat route never properly secured. That was another still.
*Park Jin-chul. He's just torched this entire expedition.*
Sitting on the rooftop railing, looking down at the carnage below, that was the extent of my thoughts. No—not just the expedition. Their very lives could be on the line.
Watching Field Exploration Team collapse so utterly brought home, yet again, just how much a commander and operator mattered. See? I told Han Tae-seok it wouldn't work without me. I told him AI alone wouldn't cut it. Why does no one ever listen?
I had no intention of groveling back to the company at this point, but it was genuinely funny all the same. Part of me felt hollow, wondering if the ten years I'd poured into an organization that crumbled this easily had been worth anything at all. At the same time, the wreckage was indirect proof that *I* had been the one barely holding that organization together from the shadows—and that was satisfying. Exhilarating, even.
And yet, remembering that it had been my team once, my feelings tangled into something complicated.
...I suppose that's just how the human heart works.
After all, I was the one who'd taken Han Tae-seok's abuse in spades and picked fights with Park Jin-chul just to slam the brakes on this dumpster-fire party so it could keep rolling at all.
No. A car with broken brakes crashing was always the inevitable outcome. And a necessary one, too. If a brakeless wreck doesn't crash now, it only piles up a bigger wreck waiting down the road.
*Still, if Min-woo were here—paranoid about his own hide the way he is—they wouldn't have pushed so far as to get their retreat route sealed off and be trapped.*
But karma was karma. What could anyone do about that?
*KRUMBLE-BOOM—!*
Ahead, a metal building began to twist with an grotesque shriek.
Why the Irregular had appeared was impossible to say with any certainty. People lumped every anomalous space that materialized in the Tower through phase shift under the name "dungeon," but each one was, in truth, its own separate and peculiar world.
Maybe it was [Ohsung], boring down with heavy machinery and vibrating in place as it mined toward the mantle. Maybe it was a reaction to the deep, potent aura exuded by one of [Mir]'s veteran hunters.
Or maybe it was the fault of the maniac streamers of [Midas], poking and prodding at everything without an ounce of fear, even now broadcasting live from their drones.
...But one thing was certain.
The ultimate responsibility lay with Park Jin-chul—so blinded by results that he'd pushed deep into a danger zone lacking sufficient survey data, without so much as securing a line of retreat.
And there, in that desperate moment, two things crossed paths: the dungeon's true horror unfolding in earnest, and—for the hunters positioned in relative safety—a golden opportunity to obtain *information*, priceless and free, without paying a single casualty.
"Whoa! You seeing this, folks? The building—the building is getting up! Insane, absolutely insane. That overwhelming size! That's the beauty of dungeons, right? Things like that just appearing like it's the most natural thing in the world!"
Opening the pandemonium was [Midas]'s camera drone, zipping about like it had just landed the scoop of the century at the Irregular's appearance.
*Whiiiiir—*
Having filmed an Irregular situation before, it carefully kept any of [Ark]'s party members entirely out of frame, avoiding footage of people getting hurt or anything gratuitously brutal.
[Mir] and [Ohsung], by contrast, reacted coldly.
"Everyone grab your gear. We're done for today. Recover equipment only, then fall back and hold position!"
"Secure a safe distance!"
The moment the warning signs showed, they turned their backs without a flicker of regret.
Entirely reasonable. They weren't about to charge in to rescue someone who might be caught up in it—they weren't Hunter Administration Bureau rescue teams, and one look was enough to tell you that thing was a *catastrophe*. Common sense said you flee a catastrophe, you don't fight it.
'That is the natural order of things, I'll grant.'
For corporate hunters, the only logic that mattered was the kind you got from punching a calculator—profit versus loss, cold hard numbers. The whole reason companies banded together for joint expeditions in the first place was to reduce risk, and they were supposed to charge into *that*, with zero odds of winning?
An amateur that reckless would've died to a Horn Rabbit on the 1st Floor long ago.
Besides, there was no camaraderie in this industry—no one gambling their own life to save some stranger in peril. And from what I could see, that thing was pure karma anyway.
As good as dead already, the whole party.
But then, unexpectedly, the scene turned.
*KWAAANG—!*
An overwhelming shockwave whipped up a storm of dust that swept the surroundings.
And what appeared was the sight of a fist—formed from the building, now a colossal metal giant—colliding head-on with a human fist, small as an ant by comparison.
*...Not bad.*
Park Jin-chul.
Say what you would—a rotten personality, a trash politician of a man—but he hadn't gotten the Team Leader's seat of Ark Industry's Field Exploration Team 1 by winning it at a card game.
And there was the artifact borrowed from Han Tae-seok—the *Gigantic Arm*—spewing mana as it absorbed the Irregular's pressure.
But then—
*CRAAACK!*
Just as I thought.
The shockwave burst out, and the metal floor Park Jin-chul stood on buckled and dented beneath him.
Rebar and girders from a metal building twisted and fused like the muscles and bones of a living thing, yet keeping an eerie, precise metallic sheen—the colossal golem. Park Jin-chul was barely *withstanding* that overwhelming mass, with an artifact and raw brute strength alone.
"Gh... uuuurgh!"
The veins on his forehead bulged as if they'd burst.
But what couldn't be, couldn't be.
Humanity does not defeat catastrophe—not barehanded, not with skills, not ever. Least of all when it's a catastrophe of this world.
If a mere artifact or two could beat an Irregular in a one-on-one, more than half the Tower would already be humanity's territory, and mana stones would be selling for pocket change.
All he could do was hold his ground.
And even that—
*crick—*
A splitting sound raised every hair on my skin.
Hairline fractures spidered across the surface of the Gigantic Arm, Han Tae-seok's most treasured artifact.
And the limits arriving weren't the artifact's alone.
The metal-frozen pedestrians who'd stood like mannequins. The flock of metal pigeons. The mass of cars.
They surged forward while Park Jin-chul barely held back the giant's fist.
"B-block it! Don't let them through! The moment the Team Leader goes down, we're all dead!"
Section Chief Jung Tae-soo hastily raised the ground into barriers, and Assistant Manager Kim Mi-young pushed back the pigeon flock with telekinesis—
But a defense line turned tissue paper in an instant. And in the moment I could see the party's annihilation plain as day—
The metal giant, its fist having been stopped, cocked its head as if puzzled—then twisted its whole body, putting its full weight behind the next blow.
*WHAM—!*
"Kgha—!"
Not just hardness, but the crushing difference in sheer mass grinding him down.
Now the party was truly about to be flattened into pancake.
*Tap.*
I set down my coffee and kicked off the rooftop railing.
*Let's see how far the new gear actually goes. Time for a little test.*
Truth be told, I'd been feeling it ever since I first put these on at The Archive. Like when I used to run operations for other people—the moment these shoes were on, the world looked a little different.
The world showed up grayer. The Red Solid Line, dotted and sparse. The inevitable slowness born of massive weight. And the loot guaranteed at the end of it.
What looked to anyone else like an abyssal hell of screaming chaos appeared to me in near-monochrome—a battlefield of no risk, high return.
*And besides, watching Park Jin-chul's teammates—who only ever did as they were told until the day they died—end up as funeral portraits on a memorial wall would be a bit much, even for me.*
*Whiiiiing.*
I kicked off the railing and rolled my feet midair as I fell.
Na Hee-ra's [Hermes' Wing Boots]. From those shoes, stamped with Midas's seal, a blue corona of mana erupted and held me suspended in the empty air.
And so, with the sound of cleaving wind ringing in my ears, the Red Solid Line leading to death never had a chance to touch me.
'The performance is out of this world.'
Gravity piled acceleration onto my plunging speed—but like a single snowflake scattering on the wind, I surged forward, braced against empty air, slipped past the red lines, and where each evasion ended, there was always somewhere to land.
Riding the flow, using the jutting structures of the building's exterior wall as stepping stones, I slid down the side in what felt like no time at all.
*Tap.*
The instant I landed, I started running—no hesitation—straight into the heart of the battlefield.
The scenery flashing past was absurd.
[Midas], still thrusting its camera around like a wide-eyed tourist narrating a nature documentary.
The hunters of [Ohsung] and [Mir], too busy logging data on another company's disaster—recording information and patterns for regions no survey team had ever reached.
And through the gap between them, just as I entered the zone where red trajectories ran rampant—
"You there! Stop! It's dangerous!"
A voice I'd heard somewhere before. Kim Han-na.
I didn't look back, and I didn't stop.
From somewhere beside me, a voice—likely one of [Midas]'s hunters—flashed past my ear.
"Whoa! There's a hunter charging in over there! You're not going in there, are you? Come on... you know I'm not that caliber. Things like that are a catastrophe, a catastrophe. That guy'll turn right around any second now, just watch—"
As I ran, the native lifeforms of this place—the big and small metal creatures that had latched onto [Ark Industry]'s Field Exploration Team 1—threw themselves at me.
*shff—*
No matter how many of them there were, it meant nothing.
'This was a different universe from handling the Horn Rabbits.'
Back then, even reading the source of every attack well in advance and keeping it from ever landing, my body's specs were so mediocre that my evasion options were limited—and limited movement meant limited options.
But the moment these shoes went on, everything I perceived linked together, my senses woke up, and my reaction speed was forcibly dragged upward.
The flow began.
I stepped lightly.
As if dancing a casual waltz, head dipped low, I slipped between their attacks and bored in.
And at the same moment—
*shhhk—*
I cut. The red lines. Their paths of travel, their paths of danger—sliced clean away.
Reaching the center of the scene didn't take long.
'Compared to last time, the head-bashing is almost comical.'
They were on the very edge of annihilation. Section Chief Jung Tae-soo, bleeding, was still forcing walls up out of the ground alongside Assistant Manager Kim Mi-young, while Lee Seok-hyun had all but melted into his surroundings with his signature stealth.
And before them—
"Ugh... uuurgh... ghaaa..."
The Gigantic Arm borrowed from Managing Director Han Tae-seok was half-shattered, a lump of scrap metal, and Park Jin-chul was crawling on the ground, hollow-eyed.
It hadn't been a dangerous expedition to begin with, so the safeguards for a retreat were inadequate too—his mind had apparently collapsed completely.
I stepped on Park Jin-chul, sprawled on the ground, and leapt lightly off him.
"Hk—?!"
His dumbfounded expression flashed past beneath my feet, and our eyes met for an instant.
I let out a snort at the absurdity of it—but only for a moment.
From my familiar bag, I drew out today's other protagonist.
*click-click.*
The utility knife, engraved with the *Concept* of [Foreshadow].
At the sudden rescue, Kim Mi-young seemed to brighten, perhaps mistaking me for a Hunter Administration Bureau agent—but that lasted only a moment before she grew confused by my appearance instead.
"Uh... uhh."
I didn't turn to look at them. There was no need.
Instead—
*FWOOOOM—*
I slammed my foot into the ground toward the giant metal fist plunging down at terrifying speed.
And just before it connected—
*skeee—*
At the limit of my acceleration, redirecting with the artifact's repulsive force, I braced against the air and sidestepped the attack as if mocking it.
Its wide attack range, its overwhelming mass, the destructive power of its hardness—it looked as if the whole world had been painted wide and red with death...
But with good reads and overwhelming mobility, all I had to do was be one step ahead, gone from where the blow would land.
'Can't hold a candle to the Blade Wind Graveyard, where the entire world burned red.'
This was like dodging a row of obstacles with teeth missing—gaps everywhere. Movement easy enough to yawn at.
No risk: confirmed.
The real question was the source of the creature's power—and whether the return was truly *high*.
To gauge where its core might be, I glanced around, eyes narrowing—
And there, in the world of gray and red—
For the first time, a flash of blue light.