Cutting the Red Thread
KWA-KWA-KWA-BOOM—!
With a thunderous roar, the scouting mana drone—a marvel of cutting-edge technology—detonated, its fragments scattering and rolling across the ground.
Three seconds. That was all the time the drone launched by [Mir]'s support team had managed to survive.
"No way... he definitely went through along that exact route."
"So this really is beyond us, huh."
Their strategy had been simple. Since the 'Suit Guy' who'd gone in ahead had passed through so effortlessly, they'd decided to test whether simply following his path would work.
Given how utterly calm he'd seemed—without so much as a dramatic dodge—it wasn't an unreasonable guess. There must be an invisible safe corridor in there!
But the results had been catastrophic.
"There are no safe zones, sir! The blades are bouncing in randomized, omnidirectional patterns, just as predicted!" the support team shouted urgently from behind their sprawl of analysis equipment. "Even in the instant right after he passed, it took less than 0.1 seconds for the blade winds to sweep through that exact spot. He didn't go there because it was safe—it wasn't safe at all!"
"...What did you say?"
It was absurd. Did they seriously expect anyone to believe that? It defied logic entirely.
If he had dodged with eye-popping, frenetic movements or deflected the attacks outright, that at least would have been believable.
But strolling through a zone where life and death flipped every fraction of a second, calm as could be?
That would mean he was seeing the future, if anything...
No. Even seeing the future wouldn't explain it. Even if you could see the future, the blades themselves remain invisible. The natural result would be nothing but visions of yourself being shredded in every conceivable way.
Which meant that this man was threading the 'gaps'—the openings that existed only for a split instant—and hitting the 'timing' with perfect precision...
Is that even possible?
The shock lasted only a moment before reality came crashing back.
"Team Leader! Now is not the time to be stunned. If we end up outperformed by some unknown solo hunter with zero exploration results to show for it, the Management Bureau's commission—"
—and the penalty fees that would come with it, no doubt.
Right. Whether it worked or not, this was a situation where they had to act.
Any corporate party, from any guild, had been expected to fill the full two days of the operation, achieving at least a sliver of exploration progress...
Only one option remained.
"Tch... No choice, then. Hanna. Break out the artifact."
"Excuse me? Are you serious? If this fails, there'll be no one left to take responsibility—"
Kim Hanna lowered her head in flustered disbelief, but there was no alternative.
"So what, we open our eyes wide, hand over every last piece of loot waiting on the other side, and pay the Management Bureau a penalty fee for contributing absolutely nothing to the exploration?"
There was no rebutting the team leader's decision.
"...Understood. Deploying the artifact."
"Omnidirectional barrier, deploy! We push through while we block!"
And so the hunters of [Mir], their pride trampled into the dirt, were forced into the humiliating choice of crawling forward wrapped in the power of a defensive-type special artifact like turtles in their shells.
...Though considering the Management Bureau had already tried something similar and failed once, their odds of success were anyone's guess.
"Make way. Don't just stand there blocking the path, you slowpokes."
Meanwhile, the Suit Guy wasn't the only spectacle drawing eyes—[Mir] wasn't the only guild watching.
The one who pushed forward while sneering at [Mir]'s sluggish spectacle was the ace of [Dokkaebi]'s scouting squad, Kang Minsu.
One of the five most agile hunters in all of South Korea.
He had been studying the Suit Guy's movements with intense focus.
What's the big deal? He's just dodging whatever comes at him as he sees it.
That much reaction speed, Kang Minsu had as well. Half out of curiosity and half out of competitive pride, he concentrated mana into his legs and threw himself into the wind.
WHOOOOSH—!
Invisible blades came hurtling in.
Doesn't matter if I can't see them. I'll read them through the airflow!
It shouldn't be so different from fighting in dungeons normally.
Kang Minsu sharpened his senses to a razor's edge. The killing intent pricking at his skin, the minute shifts in the air currents—he could feel them in exquisite detail.
PAT! PAPAPAT!
Twisting, crouching, leaping—he weaved through the invisible blades.
Where evasion failed, he displayed deft technique, flicking them aside with the twin daggers he'd brought along.
But...
This is...
No matter how acrobatic the performance, the human body has a finite range of motion.
The moment came when the blades converging all at once left him nowhere to dodge.
"Ugh!"
He wrenched his body aside just in time to avoid a direct hit, but blood spattered from his thigh.
"Damn it!"
The instant his balance wavered in the panic, while his nerves were stolen by the pain, his shoulder went cold—and his uniform tore away with it.
A fraction of a second. That tiny fraction of a second lost to the pain snowballed catastrophically.
The moment he failed to dodge once, all he could see ahead of him was the infinite web of blades binding him in place.
"Kang Minsu!"
Before he knew it, [Dokkaebi]'s lead hunter had dragged him out of the storm.
"Were you trying to get yourself killed?"
"No... it's just..."
Even as he fumbled for excuses, his heart was hammering like mad at the sensation—the knowledge that he'd come within a hair of dying. No, that for all practical purposes, he had died once already.
He could dodge. But dodging perfectly was never going to be possible.
Watching it all unfold, a chill ran down Kim Hanna's spine.
Stationed in the rear as [Mir]'s support, she turned to the veteran hunter of [Dokkaebi] standing beside her and asked in a trembling voice:
"...Senior. Does anyone come to mind? A hunter with movements like that."
The [Dokkaebi] lead—a veteran hunter—kept frowning as he stared into the darkness where the Suit Guy had vanished.
"No one."
"I'm sorry?"
"No one. Not that I know of, anyway. The domestic rankers. Hell, I've gone through every retired legend too, and I've never seen evasion ability like that. No—maybe it's not even evasion. He could be blocking it with something... Regardless, that's not the domain of reflexes or instinct."
He swallowed dryly and added:
"It's as if... a path made just for him has been carved into the dungeon itself."
In that instant, a single word flashed through everyone's minds.
All manner of hypotheses about his abilities and identity raced past, but at their core they shared the same truth.
A being that defied definition by any existing data or common sense.
An Irregular.
The masked Suit Guy was shaking the very paradigm of dungeon conquest they all knew to its foundations.
Somewhere along the way, the distance between us must have stretched a good deal.
The stares and the noise of the crowd had been swallowed whole by the roar of the blade winds, fading into nothing.
Unlike the entrance zone, the deeper we pushed into the interior, the more ferocious the winds became.
SHAAAAA—
A storm of blades raged on all sides.
However exceptional my ability might be, there were limits in a stretch where the gaps themselves physically narrowed.
I stopped for a moment and gazed at the colossal blade storm barring my way.
There was no shortage of open space, but every route my body could plausibly thread through was drenched in red.
Left, right, everywhere—the danger was seared into my eyes.
There was nowhere to advance while evading.
Not that there were no options at all.
It wouldn't be bad to hold position here, dodging until the gaps widened, then slip through...
That thought crossed my mind.
The sensation I'd learned while taking down the final Horn Rabbit on the 1st floor.
The charging path of the Horn Rabbit—and the way it had split apart so naturally when I followed its 'grain'.
Have I been defining this ability far too passively?
Just eyes that saw danger well, a field of vision and flow of information far broader than anyone else's—that was all I'd ever taken it for.
But the world doesn't hand you a friendly game manual saying, this ability works like this. It doesn't even tell you what the ability actually is.
In the end, maybe it's the user alone who decides its limits.
What lies ahead is clearly a dead end...
But if I could see it plainly—and grasp even its underlying flow—then why not simply cut through it?
I drew out the crafting knife, small enough to pass for a utility cutter.
As the winds grew fiercer, the light radiating from the red lines deepened in turn.
And yet, smoothly—as if it were only natural that thread should be cut by a blade—
I rode along that flow and split the grain.
Suuuh.
With a slowly extending arm, the knife reached out.
There was no powerful swinging force, no explosion of mana.
I simply eased the keen edge of the crafting knife into the 'grain' of the visible red lines, soft as thread.
Tuk.
An exceedingly faint resistance registered at my fingertips. And then—
SHAAAAAK—!
An unbelievable scene unfolded before me.
One of those massive red lines whose length I couldn't even fathom—one of the threads that had enwrapped the entire canyon—dropped away, and the instant it fell, every thread connected to it came loose with it.
...So it works.
A electric thrill shot from my fingertips and spread through my whole body.
Until now, this ability had been nothing more than contemplating the threats the world threw at me. But just now, I had directly intervened in that causality.
The path that had been leading to death now stretched open before me, showing me its far side, clear as day.
Sensing danger and dodging isn't the whole of it. If I can apply it in other ways...
It occurred to me that perhaps I might see scenery entirely different from anything I'd witnessed until now.
It felt the way it had back when I awakened as a child—as if the resolution of my vision had changed.
Until now I had thought only of the 'red lines' as danger, and since that color was the only one in a gray world, my gaze had no choice but to follow it there. But the moment I consciously looked at other things, a new sense awakened.
The world—revealed itself.
WHOOOOSH...
I could see the wind flowing through the narrow canyon.
As the surging mana currents squeezed through the canyon's tight crevices, they were momentarily 'compressed' into thin membranes possessing physical cutting force. That was the birthplace of the red lines.
And perhaps influenced by the airflow in the air above, those membranes became transparent blades, ricocheting in every direction—then reflecting off the canyon's peculiar transparent walls, expanding and stretching onward.
The true nature of the blades born in this canyon. The intricate mana dynamics and physical laws composing this landscape lay bare before my eyes, transparent as a holographic blueprint.
That rock juts out at a fifteen-degree angle there, accelerating the wind.
If the mana concentration thins at that point, the blades won't carry toward the area ahead.
This was clearly uncharted territory, and yet it felt like playing with a strategy guide spread open in my lap.
Ever since my ability awakened, I'd always thought other hunters were half-blind. But a thought flickered through me—maybe I had been a frog at the bottom of a well all along, too.
I picked up a pebble rolling on the ground.
Then, simply by tossing it into the point where the visible mana 'flow' twisted—nothing more than obstructing that current—
FWOOSH—!
That trivial difference in deflection became a butterfly effect, and the blade winds blocking my path died down, if only for a moment.
This was, quite literally, playing with the dungeon itself.
When I looked at the world again, the mana flows that would crumble if I only tossed something into them—the weak points generating the red lines—glowed a soft pink.
...
Since my ability awakened, I'd believed I could see this world in two ways: ordinarily, as anyone would, or through my power—in gray and red. That's certainly what I'd thought.
But maybe... this world, viewed through this ability, held a panorama of every color after all?