What Color Is Your World?
Han Taewoo, chief operator of [Dokkaebi], could hardly believe his own eyes.
The scene playing out on the monitors was demolishing, root and branch, every convention of the craft he had spent his entire career mastering.
"Red leaves roughly fifteen meters ahead. Don't step on them—slip past. Agitate them and they'll follow you."
"The wind's shifting. Hold your breath for a moment, or Mr. Park, disperse it with your own. Toxic energy is going to ride in on it."
A dry, unhesitating voice.
"But why would the leaves—"
The moment Han Taewoo voiced his doubt, Choi Seokhoon's trailing toe brushed one of them—and something astonishing happened. What had looked like an ordinary drift of fallen leaves beat its wings, rose as a swarm, and began to give chase.
"Oh, no."
Han Taewoo's eyes went wide.
That's impossible—
His operating had effectively ground to a halt. But the man never stopped giving orders.
"It doesn't matter. In exchange, Mr. Park will need to work a little harder."
No sooner had the instruction left his lips than the hunters in the field moved with even finer precision than before.
They slipped past toxic energy invisible in the wind and picked their way through what was, for all practical purposes, a minefield as casually as if they were out for a stroll.
It was terrain where, on paper, cranking sensor sensitivity to maximum painted nearly everything red—or else caught nothing at all. A zone neither the mana scanners nor the support drones could properly read on the fly.
But the man was watching something else.
Something beyond the data—perhaps the dungeon's very source.
"...I'm afraid we can't keep this up much longer. The swarm has grown too large. Unless we intend to carry those things with us to the Elemental Stone, we'll have to thin them out."
[Should we stop here for a moment and sweep them up before moving on?]
"No. A large movement from this position would only draw in more bugs. Keep running exactly as you are. Instead—there's a purple fruit open on the tree ahead to the right. Strike it as you pass."
[Huh? Isn't that the thing leaking poison everywhere?]
"...It's not safe. But everything has its uses."
Though skepticism written all over him, Park Sangwoo obeyed—flicking the fruit with a grazing touch as he vaulted past.
And then—
KUUUURUUM—!
CRUNCH.
The ground flipped over.
Something like an enormous maw burst out of the earth, swallowing tree and fruit alike, sweeping the space above clean in a single instant—gone before anyone could blink.
A speed no eye should have been able to follow.
And in that same instant, the insect swarm that had disguised itself as fallen leaves simply ceased to exist.
[Whoa... holy crap. You predicted that too, didn't you?]
Awe rang in Park Sangwoo's voice.
By that point, Han Taewoo's mouth had gone bone dry.
This isn't operating.
Operating meant gathering information through survey equipment, synthesizing the data, and building strategy from what you knew about the dungeon and your own team.
Yet everything spread out before them was uncharted—no data collected yet. And the man on the screen already seemed to understand all of it, down to how each piece would interact with the others.
It was as if he were uttering prophecies.
The [Dokkaebi] party was unstoppable. Where Park Sangwoo raised the wind to clear a path, Kim Hyeona slashed away branches with razor-edged blade energy, and Kang Minsu intercepted the insects worming through every gap.
And through it all, the hulking Choi Seokhoon ran with Lee Jina hoisted in one hand like a cat.
Actors walking a stage already rehearsed, they crossed the hellscape called the "Rotten Autumn" at last and reached the very edge of the deep floors.
A speed unthinkable for a normal dungeon expedition.
At that pace they arrived where summer's fire-laced falling embers, winter's all-freezing ice rain, and autumn's festering miasma collided—a place where three seasons tore at each other.
At the dead center of that typhoon, in the deep floors, stood a grotesquely warped colossal tree. The Elemental Stone hung within it.
[Found it—the Elemental Stone!]
Park Sangwoo whooped and stirred up the wind to close the distance, but the man stopped him urgently.
"Stop. Wind won't work here. The poison and heat are tangled together—one wrong move and it all detonates."
[Then what do we do? We've come all this way—you can't be telling me to turn back—]
"We punch through. Something very small, and very precise."
The man pointed at a single spot on the screen—a knothole in the ancient tree, or something like it.
He could see it, apparently. In the midst of maddeningly churning turbulence, one hairline fissure where blue light leaked through.
And on the tactical map—which was only barely keeping up with the expedition, updating in rough approximations because it couldn't match the team's actual pace—he drew a red solid line from the [Dokkaebi] party's position to that single pinpoint.
"Ms. Lee. Ready yourself."
Lee Jina, still draped over Choi Seokhoon's shoulder, lifted her head.
"Target shared via tactical map: eleven o'clock ahead, the knothole in the tree. That one point, and nothing else."
[...That's quite a distance. And if I miss?]
"You? Miss? Lee Jina of [Dokkaebi]?"
When the man provoked her with a faint smile, Lee Jina only laughed.
Mana began to condense at her fingertips.
Tension crackled, tight enough to feel through the screen. Cold and heat and the poison of decay swirled together into a wall that seemed to offer no way through at all—
—and in the split second where they overlapped, folding themselves into a single seam—
"Now!"
KWA-AAAANG!
The mana cannon fired from her hand tore a straight line through space.
A single strike that needled through the curtain of poison and heat—and it struck the knothole of the ancient tree dead center.
SKREEEEEECH—!
A shriek split the air, shrill enough to rend eardrums. And as it rang out, the countless energies that had wrapped the place came apart and scattered.
"Mr. Minsu! Go!"
Before the man had even finished speaking, Kang Minsu—who had been poised and waiting—dove into the gap like a loosed arrow.
And then, a moment later—
HUUUUM—
The dungeon pulsed, beating like a great, convulsing heart. The ancient tree shrieked, and its rotting bark began to peel away in sheets.
"Wh-what...?"
The operators watching the situation room monitors couldn't shut their mouths.
The poison and the heat, the cold—every anomaly in the dungeon was being sucked toward where the Elemental Stone hung. And in its wake, there were no more grotesque creatures. No gray dust at all.
Pink cherry blossom petals.
The hellscape of the "Rotten Autumn" subsided, and the warm sunlight of spring washed over the entire dungeon.
On the screen, the [Dokkaebi] party members standing stunned beneath a tree in full bloom, the Elemental Stone clutched in hand, made a picture so surreal it hardly belonged to this world.
"Ahhh..."
Exclamations burst from every corner of the situation room. The release of tension. Wonder, elation—and sheer disbelief.
With slightly trembling hands, Han Taewoo slowly turned to look at the man.
A man in an unremarkable suit, notable for nothing but the mask he wore. And yet something ineffable radiated from him all the same.
"...What does the world look like, through those eyes of yours?"
Han Taewoo asked it in earnest. He wanted to know how the world inside his monitors—the world he had spent his life staring into—appeared to this man.
Perhaps because this was the very ideal he had always striven toward.
But [Corporate Slave Life] was silent for a moment before answering with a bitter smile.
"Gray. A world of nothing but muted color. Within it, I see red, and blue. Pink... colors that come back to life one by one, repainting the world again. I simply watch."
Silence settled over the room.
It was words Han Taewoo couldn't make sense of—and yet somehow, vaguely, felt he almost could. The way a beast and a man see different worlds, perhaps he and other humans simply saw different worlds. That was how it sounded.
Having followed the thought that far, Han Taewoo seemed to turn the words over once more, then asked again.
"Someone like you... could have become the finest operator in the world. No—you already are something beyond that. So why... why insist on going out into the field, into all that danger?"
It wasn't an unfair question—an operator can command a battlefield from the safety of the rear.
But.
A bitter, rueful emotion seemed to surface behind the mask.
"An operator... once, I did think about that. But—"
[Corporate Slave Life]'s eyes were fixed on Han Taewoo.
"An operator's voice doesn't carry to the field half as well as you'd think."
Then he rose from his chair and adjusted his jacket.
For a moment Han Taewoo wondered—is it because of the field hunters who do whatever they please?—but that thought lasted only an instant.
"I want to stand on my own two feet. I want to see my own fate with my own eyes, and decide it with my own hands."
Watching [Corporate Slave Life] as he said it, Han Taewoo had the strange feeling that he could almost glimpse the expression behind the mask.
"...I see."
In the dungeon, now purified into spring.
The hunter parties from the other companies, who had arrived only after every hazard had already vanished, stood around like dogs chasing a chicken that had flown up onto the roof—all they could do was stare.
And even then, the [Arc] party was no healthy dog.
Bludgeoned by the tendrils of carnivorous plants, poisoned half to death by the miasma—they were beaten soldiers in tatters, having salvaged barely the equipment they could carry out.
[Osung] and [Mir] had at least been latecomers and sharp enough to follow roughly the same route [Dokkaebi] had taken, so their losses were lighter. But [Arc] had been devastated. Even the clothes on their backs hung in rags.
"Well, well~ look who it is! If it isn't Mr. Muhyeok of the [Arc] Special Response Team!"
Park Sangwoo tossed the Elemental Stone from hand to hand and needled him with a grin.
"You're quite the sight. I've never seen that famously elite [Arc] special response team get worked over like this. They say you choke if you eat too fast—hard to believe you'd stuff yourself silly with all those years of experience under your belt."
"Park Sangwoo..."
Bloodshot lines crept into Kang Muhyeok's eyes. Killing intent spiked through the air around him in an instant.
It's a trap. They set this up to screw us over. It has to be.
Nothing else could explain such a stark difference in a single expedition. Even granting that each party and company had its own strengths, the gap in exploration levels between the teams dispatched here should never have been this extreme.
And yet—
It doesn't add up.
The moment he forced himself to think calmly, he could only grimace. Whatever else you said about them, [Dokkaebi] wasn't the kind of outfit to pull a stunt like that. And given the timeline—the gate appearing through a phase shift and the expedition being scheduled on the fly—they couldn't possibly have had complete information on this dungeon beforehand either. If they had, they'd have skipped the shared schedule entirely, slipped in early, grabbed everything worth taking, and walked out. No friction like this required.
Kang Muhyeok ground his teeth and let the killing intent go.
"...How did you know? That route."
"Oh, that?"
Park Sangwoo shrugged, smiling in that grating way of someone who'd clearly been burned by [Arc] plenty of times before.
"We brought in a genuinely capable operator this time. Did exactly what he told us, and—well—easy street? Guess he's just playing on a different level from the folks back at your shop."
"...An operator?"
Kang Muhyeok's brow furrowed. He'd heard the rumors—that Han Taewoo, [Dokkaebi]'s chief operator, was exceptionally good. But bringing in a special operator? Had they gotten cooperation from some famous American corporation?
But even that didn't hold up.
No... it's alien. They had just as little time as anyone, and he ran ahead of the support drones. This wasn't data analysis. It can't have been.
......
But then what was it?
A chilling sensation—as if an invisible eye were looking down on the battlefield from above—made Kang Muhyeok scan his surroundings. Naturally, there was nothing there.
"Well then, see you around. We're busy."
Park Sangwoo left the dumbstruck [Arc] party standing where they were and strolled away without a backward glance.
Meanwhile, at the Hunter Management Bureau Situation Room of the Republic of Korea.
"Director! We have a problem!"
"What now? What is it this time."
"A party has entered the Twisted Garden of the Four Seasons."
The Director-General's expression flickered at the breathless report.
"...And? That was the scheduled expedition, wasn't it."
But the agent shouted again, as if that wasn't the point at all.
"No, sir! They didn't enter at the front—they skipped it all in one go and charged straight into the deep floors!"
"What? They went there? Before even the first survey is finished?"
It was madness. This wasn't some site with even a baseline of safety data or preliminary scouting behind it—this dungeon had only just been discovered. To hurl people into a place where anything might appear was suicide.
"Yes, sir! The corporations got competitive and—"
"What lunatic... did they decide they want to die?! Do they have any idea what that place is?! Scramble a rescue team, now! The moment we get mass casualties, it's over!"
Director-General Lee Geuntaek was white as a sheet as he bellowed the orders. The Hunter Management Bureau had, after all, been the first to explore Korea's Tower and accumulated its databases—and it knew this dungeon better than anyone.
More than the monsters themselves, it's the environmental variables there that are lethal. Places like that are the true danger—
Charging into such a place with no long-term, careful surveying, no accumulated intelligence, without a thought for the lives at stake—it was insane.
"What on earth were they thinking—"
At that moment, the field monitoring agent reported in a hollow voice.
"Uh... Director. One moment, please."
"What?! Are they wiped out? Already?"
"No, sir... it's not that. It's just..."
With trembling hands, the agent threw the feed up onto the giant main screen.
There was no hellscape of snowfields. No summer where everything froze transparent. Beneath cherry blossom trees in riotous full bloom, the [Dokkaebi] party members were sitting around resting, servicing their gear, laughing and chatting.
"......?"
Lee Geuntaek's jaw hung open.
"Did they... go on a picnic?"