The Stage Is Set
In modern society, the power of capital and the power of the collective are truly fearsome things.
Wasn't the hunter industry the perfect example of that?
Back in the days when individuals scraped together slapdash parties, no one could have dreamed of the things that became possible once guilds corporate-fied and acquired real capital. The scale of what they could attempt had simply exploded.
What was happening with Kang Minho right now was exactly that.
Granted, the AI operator's accuracy was steadily degrading. But even with degraded Crisis Perception data, if you had the overwhelming force of artifacts, equipment, and raw ability backing you up—if a full complement of backup hunters and a support team were propping you up from behind—then no matter what crisis loomed ahead, you gained the power to smash straight through it.
That was the portrait of the modern hunter: more advanced, more mature. Which was exactly why I had to provoke him.
Because I needed to fight on my stage, not the one he wanted.
Whatever you say, this is not a man you can dismiss.
He wore the weight of [Ark] on his back, armor-plated in gear so expensive the price tags practically screamed, backed by an absurd army of support personnel. And Kang Minho's own strength wasn't exactly something to sneeze at, either.
This was the sweet spot—everything about him was known, no novel crisis had yet emerged, and he could still analyze danger and power through it using past patterns alone. This wasn't like the miners' floors, where there was no danger and no unknown and you could simply grind away with superior equipment and manpower.
Even now, after all this time, if humanity tried to push carelessly into this place, it would bare its vicious true face—its sharpened molars. An unconquered unknown.
But this was also where hunters had first cut their teeth, and where the richest spoils lay. So I had no choice but to drag Kang Minho down into the depths of the dungeon.
Fiddling with my pixel sunglasses atop my mask, I smirked.
Well, the Metal Pig thing wasn't so much a calculated provocation as... something that welled up from the heart.
A magnificent piggy bank that copied down an astronomical basic salary at regular intervals. They say God is above, but the landlord is above God—yet measured in pure income, this pig was a greater being than most landlords ever dreamed of being.
So when collection time drew near, dancing a little shoulder shimmy and bowing in reverence? That wasn't just a corporate slave's duty. It might have been instinct. The fact that it tipped him over the edge and sent him chasing after me with his lid blown wide open—well, that was merely a secondary outcome.
Ku-gu-gu-gung...
We were drawing closer to the depths of the Crystal Cave—the Resonating Room.
A vibration drifted from far away.
Right on cue. The guests who fancied themselves moths dancing through flame had arrived, busy digging their own graves in style.
Then let's see what Vice President Jin's prized pickup is actually worth.
"Hey! You rat-faced bastard! Where the hell are you hiding!"
Even with the cameras rolling, his eyes had gone half-mad. Kang Minho burst into view with a roar that rattled the crystal walls, and behind him, the support hunters from [Ark] came stumbling after him, wheezing and drenched in sweat, dragging in ragged breaths.
Naturally. They'd sprinted all the way from the entrance without a single break.
But the sight that unfolded before them silenced even the cursing—for a moment, at least.
"...This is..."
What stretched out before them was the Resonating Room—the chamber that marked the true threshold of the Crystal Cave's depths.
An amphitheater of overwhelming scale, the largest in the entire cave. Every surface, from every direction—walls, ceiling, floor—was sheathed in colossal crystals polished smooth as mirrors.
Though not a single ray of external light reached this place, the crystals glowed with their own inner light, each one reflecting and amplifying its neighbors' radiance until the whole chamber blazed with a brilliance too dazzling for the eye to bear.
It was beautiful, and...
At the same time, a place where light refraction and reflection warped your field of vision, and the flow of mana became nearly impossible to read.
Which meant it was also a place steeped in a strangeness that stirred instinctive dread in any hunter worth the name.
The lead hunter of the support detail—effectively their coordinator—realized just how deep they'd come, and reported with a trembling voice.
"Team Leader. As you know, there's no data on this place. The mana wavelengths are... far too unstable, as well."
"You're telling me it doesn't make sense that we back off and refuse to go in there, because we got pushed here by some guy with no decent equipment and no support staff. Do you hear yourself?"
Of course, reasoning with him was a lost cause. Vice President Jin Se-hoon's requirements were supposed to be straightforward—the trick was to execute them flawlessly, at exactly the right moment, and without a hitch.
And beyond that, anyone with eyes could see that as of right now, the advantage was theirs.
Kang Minho hoisted his battleaxe.
Flames erupted from his body, catching the crystals' reflection and swelling into dozens, then hundreds of tongues of fire.
At the same time, on the tablet screens the support team carried, the AI's analysis results began convulsing wildly.
[WARNING : DATA ACQUISITION FAILED]
[ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES : COMPUTATIONAL ERROR]
But no warning was ever going to reach Kang Minho in the state he was in. His head held exactly one thought: to present a picture of absolute dominance next to that lunatic who wore pixel-dot sunglasses and bowed to a piggy bank.
And he had more than that on his mind, too.
Acutely aware of the camera trained on him, he forced his composure back into place, deliberately arranged himself into a posture of leisurely disdain, and looked up at me where I sat perched on the crystal pillar.
"What are you doing skulking around up there? I was starting to think you'd bolted out of sheer terror."
Kang Minho sneered, goading me. But a provocation like that? Coming from a man who could actually take the field himself, there was nothing in this world more infuriating than watching Park Jin-chul do nothing but raise his voice and dig himself into a hole back at HQ—because here, hands-on, anything was possible.
I adjusted my pixel sunglasses and chuckled.
"Fled, you say? Have you ever met a man who flees a dungeon by going deeper into it?"
"..."
Even Kang Minho recognized he'd blundered; his expression hardened for an instant. But it didn't last. He must have figured this was still salvageable, because he pressed on, still wrapped in his thin disguise of composure.
"But when I've done all the work pinning everything down, and some slime sneaks in to steal the killing blows and vanish—of course I'd get suspicious. If you wanted the spotlight so badly, all you had to do was step out and earn it honestly."
Killing blows, he says. Honestly, the accusation wasn't wrong. The targeting had already been fixed on him, every gaze in the room pinned to Kang Minho—snatching the initiative to my side and stoking his fury like that was simply the best play available. And considering what [Ark] had done to me? I felt precisely zero guilt about it.
"I had no intention of stealing anything. It simply annoyed me. The crystals had drunk in so much of your flame that the glare was reflecting everywhere—I couldn't see properly."
When I answered with a shameless shrug, Kang Minho's face cycled through red and blue—briefly. Then he swallowed it down, and, apparently giving the problem a rational rethink, came up with an alternative to offer me.
"Listen to the excuses on this guy. If you wanted attention that badly, just say so. Ladies and gentlemen? I'm not a petty man. You all know that, hahaha. Hey—'Corporate Slave Life,' was it?"
"...?"
"The costume, the whole concept—if you're that starved for attention, how about we settle it with a little contest right here?"
What Kang Minho proposed was, transparently, a wager designed to reduce me to a sideshow in a performance he intended to star in.
"Whoever clears this room's monsters first. Or whoever subjugates them more spectacularly, more overwhelmingly. The whole nation's watching, so we won't even need judges, will we?"
The whole nation, my foot. Well, it did look like a genuinely large number of people were watching, for what it was worth.
More than anything, the whole thing was a little bit funny, because Kang Minho's intentions were written all over it.
Given the reports and the earlier footage... he's thinking about the times I used a cutter to strike pinpoint weak points and take monsters down.
Those past raids had a weakness: a short attack range and poor durability, which had forced delicate, surgical strikes. Clean and efficient, but hardly flashy—and by his math, that meant I'd fall short in raw destructive scale.
...Of course, none of that applied anymore.
He's confident.
Stupidly so, at that.
How many support personnel did he have right now? How strong and flashy were his abilities? How impressive his bravado? None of that was what mattered here—not even close.
I stared at him steadily through the pixel sunglasses.
"A contest, then..."
There was no reason to refuse. He was the ignorant fool who didn't realize he was the one being lured onto a battlefield that had been prepared, down to the last detail, for him.
Besides, once the true masters of this room woke, it was a fight he'd be forced to fight anyway.
"Very well. Try not to regret it."
"Ha! Regret is going to be your problem!"
And with those words, at the very instant Kang Minho swung his battleaxe high in grand flourish—
Wooooong—!
The floor of the Crystal Cave trembled. The walls, too, shivered with a fine vibration.
It was no earthquake. It was the skin-crawling resonance of an overwhelming swarm—a monster wave—stirring and moving as one.
Ssasasak—!
From the crevices in the walls' crystals, from the ceiling, and through the fissures in the floor, they came pouring out.
"Wh-what are those things?!"
"Scorpions? No—golems?!"
Crystal Scorpions, each the size of a compact car. Glass Bats, bat-shaped things with wings of razor crystal. And Crystal Golems, hulking brutes nearly the size of small buildings, hauling their enormous frames into view.
A sheer, crushing tide of them—as if the entire ecosystem of the deep floors had woken at once.
No, wait. The mapped zones simply have no monsters. This is what's normal.
What humans called the "deep floors" was, to those things, nothing more than ordinary wilderness.
Any ordinary hunter would have shrieked at the sight and started forming ranks immediately. But then, he was the lunatic Vice President Jin had personally recruited.
Kang Minho's expression was different.
He looked like a man who'd just been handed a golden opportunity. A cheap, simplistic picture—flushing out things hiding in the dark and hunting them down one by one—versus a picture of him single-handedly sweeping away a monster wave of overwhelming size.
The latter was precisely the debut stage the "Star Hunter" he imagined himself to be had been waiting for.
"Hahaha! Perfect timing. I was just itching for a warm-up."
Kang Minho swept his battleaxe in a great arc, and the flames swelled and rolled.
"Everyone fall back! I'll reduce them all to a fistful of ash!"
"Team Leader! You need to be careful! Given the terrain here, your element has a bad matchup—and with numbers this extreme, we should pull back for now and set up a defensive forma—"
"Just keep the camera rolling! Don't you dare miss a single second of the sweep!"
Kang Minho, predictably, did not listen.
The momentum had already tipped once, snatched away by 'Corporate Slave Life's' aggro. The moment he retreated here, that balance would tilt past the point of no return.
And at the same time—this battlefield had its disadvantages, yes, but also its advantages. 'Corporate Slave Life's' attacks were efficient, perhaps, but they were small and inconspicuous strikes.
He drew his mana up to its absolute limit.
The flames devoured the air around them, swelling larger and larger.
"Watch closely, 'Corporate Slave Life'! This is the power of me, Kang Minho—the man they called a one-man army!"
Then he hurled himself, utterly alone, into the surging monster legion.
His physical abilities had been boosted to absurd levels by the support team and his artifacts, so the fight unfolded with astonishing vigor and force.
Kwajik—!
A compact-car-sized Crystal Scorpion split apart as if melting under a single axe blow, cleaving apart with a satisfying crack, and a golem's leg ran like wax.
Dozens of monsters in the front rank became ash in the blink of an eye.
A dazzling fireworks display. The crystals caught the flare of his flames in a bright reverse-glow while his axe gleefully blasted monsters apart.
It was a picture that would have made broadcast audiences erupt in cheers. Maybe the single most spectacular dungeon-exploration combat footage among all the hunter videos on Nutube.
But.
Idiot.
While he played hero, I ducked my body into a blind spot and clicked my tongue.
In real time, like crimson paint dripping onto a blank white canvas, the world's colors were changing.
Where was this? Not an ordinary cave. Every surface was crystal—this room was a hall of mirrors.
Kang Minho had breathed fire to burn the monsters, but that fire burned only the monsters and refused to die out so easily.
The crystals drank in the heat of the flames. And their light.
And then.
Flash—!
His arrogance—the belief that he could control both his power and the environment—came home to roost, and in an instant, it crossed the critical point.
An unanalyzed space, a space without sufficient information. Trying to compute all of it and wall off every variable was never possible to begin with.
"Huh...?"
Kang Minho, mid-pose in triumphant triumph after sweeping away the scorpion swarm, went wide-eyed.
The crystals, past their critical threshold, vomited back every ounce of the energy and light they had swallowed.
To the ceiling. To the floor. And rebounding to the opposite wall again.
Shuuuung—!
"Aaagh!"
"Damage! The fire's scattering!"
The [Ark] hunters waiting in the rear shrieked as sparks rained down on them. His arrogance—the certainty that everything would be fine as long as he moderated his power as he went—had come back as a boomerang.
That's what you get for skimping on a professional operator.
Not that Kang Minho would have listened to one, even if he'd hired them.
Heat and light ricocheted at terrifying speed. Jets of flame began slicing the entire room apart like a laser show.
They bored through the monsters as well as his own allies, and to the untrained eye it might have even looked like some temporary sweep...
"Ha... haha. Everyone! This isn't an accident! Fighting a monster wave is just... this is how it goes, you know—!"
Kang Minho scrambled furiously to contain it, but it was useless.
Because even the world I saw had already begun drowning in red solid lines.
Only the space behind my pillar—one hand-span of it—still sank in gray.
Kang Minho fought to smother the fire, coolly swinging his battleaxe—but the flames were no longer his fire, and they would not go out.
"The barrier—it's melting!"
"The heat has nowhere to go!"
"Cooling! Deploy the cooling-type equipment, now!"
The best they could manage was bailing the ocean out with a cup.
The sealed Resonating Room was running, slowly but surely, toward its finale.
The temperature... hot, yes, but still survivable.
Then, as the room's temperature spiked, the crystals on every wall gave a faint shiver—
Kiiiiiiiik—!
—and the shiver curdled into a horrific shriek of noise.
The Resonance was slowly revealing this battlefield's true face.
"Put it out! PUT IT OUT! Kang Minho!! I said put out the fire!!"
The support team's leader screamed like a man vomiting blood. But Kang Minho was already deep in panic, flailing amid flames that bounced off every surface and lunged at him from all directions, drowning in the roar of resonance.
"It's my own power! It's MY power, why won't it turn off?! Damn it, what is this thing?!"
And I, from the very eye of that chaos, adjusted my sunglasses and savored the view of them devouring themselves.
They said they'd be making history. The variety show of ways to botch it was certainly rich. But then, a black mark is history too—so he wasn't entirely wrong.
Except this wasn't the end of it.
It's beginning.
The true master of this room—the master summoned by all this pandemonium—was now making its entrance.
Ku-gu-gu-gugu—!
Stained through with heat, torn open by the joyful destruction of Kang Minho's axe work, a gap had formed in the room.
And through the resonance, a sound pierced clean through—the sound of that gap splitting wide open.