Growth Period (5)
Let's talk about Authority.
Once you advance into your final class, everyone receives one. Unlike ordinary learned skills, Authorities are absurdly broken — so the moment you get one, the first thing you do is max out its proficiency, no exceptions.
Authority falls under the skill category. That means the only way to raise proficiency is to use it, over and over. It also links with traits, so if you're sitting on something like Hidden Lineage or Cruel Adaptation, the proficiency climbs ridiculously fast.
Side note: no matter how I look at it, Hidden Lineage is overdue for a balance patch. It's too strong. There's a reason everyone tells you to grab it without fail…
Another year slipped by.
I explored the Forest of Monsters with a newly assigned squad. If there was any mercy left in the world, it was this: the overwhelming monster I had faced that day never appeared again.
In that time I finished refining the martial art I had been building for so long — and at the same time, I broke through the fourth wall.
The moment it shattered felt nothing like the walls before it. If anything, it was closer to the first. An entirely new world seemed to open. It wasn't only vague things like my understanding of martial arts that changed; even what my eyes could see was different.
My body most of all.
Skin, muscle, bone — everything felt as if the material itself had been rewritten. Harder. More precise. A frame I had already considered tough became something far denser still. If Jagan threw everything he had into a punch now, his fist would be the one to burst.
Only then did I understand why Special Class Warriors could so easily handle the corrupted beasts that 1st Class Warriors couldn't touch. It wasn't merely a gap in technique. Their bodies had grown strong enough that they might as well have belonged to a different species.
Strangely, as my body hardened, my bulk shrank. The thick, hulking frame I'd carried became leaner, cleaner — more refined. Maybe everything unnecessary had been pared away, leaving only the fully optimized form.
As a Special Class Warrior, I was assigned to the king's guard. For the first time since coming here, I stood before the one called King — the man who ruled these monster-like humans. He looked almost frail for someone with that title, but the weight of the name itself snuffed the thought out almost as soon as it formed.
I guess that's just what happens when you get old.
The old man I'd seen in the Abandoned Village hadn't been quite this far gone, but if you aged past even that… maybe this was where you ended up. I didn't dwell on the king. My interest lay elsewhere.
The only thing that truly caught me was a story he told — that his own people lived beyond the Forbidden Zone. I had always wondered what kind of world waited outside. Learning that the same humans lived there was, honestly, a little disappointing.
A nature that can endure these monsters…
That part was interesting. What kind of physical laws even governed a place like that? I didn't try to understand it. The idea that I could was arrogance in the first place.
I had become a Special Class Warrior, but I never once set foot in the Forbidden Zone. The path was sealed tight. No one was allowed inside. Even attempting to sneak in meant immediate execution if you were caught.
The senior warriors explained why the seal had to be that absolute. Something lived in the Forbidden Zone — something so powerful we couldn't even begin to imagine it — and the barrier existed so that no one would provoke it. The reason the king spoke of his people beyond the zone with such longing was simple: he could never break through to reach them.
The reason I had wanted to break the fourth wall in the first place — to kill the monsters of the Forbidden Zone — never came to pass. At best, I was called in as support whenever a beast that looked like it belonged in that place wandered into the Forest of Monsters.
Then, one day, the king declared that the Forbidden Zone would be pioneered.
No one had ever dared attempt it. History itself held no record of anything so radical. The backlash was immediate. Rumors that the king had lost his mind spread like wildfire. But he pushed through, and no matter how frail he looked, no one could defy his will.
An expedition force was thrown together in a rush. Ten Special Class Warriors formed each squad, each leading five lower-ranked warriors, and they set out to open the Forbidden Zone. Dozens of squads were committed.
To enter, you had to pass through the Red Barrier. According to the seniors, our ancestors had raised that wall to keep the monsters out — and it wrapped the entire Forbidden Zone. Inside, you could still tell day from night, but you couldn't read the sun's position. Lose your bearings even once, and you would never find your way back out.
The blood-soaked land was, in every sense, a land of death.
Hell began the moment we stepped through.
Less than an hour after entering the Forbidden Zone, an entire squad that had been scouting alongside us was wiped out without a trace. What hit us was a beast shaped like a jaguar — except it was five times our size. By the standards of this place, it might even have counted as small. Its speed more than made up for it. In the blink of an eye it closed the distance and, with a single strike, tore a warrior clean in half.
When fifty of those monster jaguars came at us at once, three squads weren't nearly enough. That only eight of them latched onto our squad felt like pure luck. We dropped one jaguar fast, punched a hole through their line, and put distance between us. Helping the others simply wasn't an option.
Judging that we couldn't save the second squad under the bulk of the pack, we traded a look with the third squad — the one holding off roughly ten jaguars — and scattered down separate paths. I barked at the idiots who wanted to charge back because they couldn't stand watching their comrades die, and dragged them with me.
There was nowhere to hide on that barren field of death. I didn't look back. Half the jaguars that had annihilated the second squad were already on our trail, so the way we had come was closed. Our steps carried us deeper and deeper into the Forbidden Zone.
We swore we would survive and make it home.
Day one. All fifteen members of our squad were still alive.
Day two. The jaguars that had been hunting us finally caught up. We had expected as much. We had already prepared. The squad split in two — a decoy group to draw their attention and buy time, and a hunting group to cut them down one by one.
I was with the decoys.
My grasp of how to apply force still lagged behind the other Special Class Warriors, but in pure movement, no one outmatched me. I had been born unusually weak. And yet, once I pushed my physical ability to its absolute limit, my strength, agility, and flexibility all surpassed everyone else's by a wide margin.
My role was simple: lead them on a chase. Alone, I dragged twenty jaguars this way and that. I was slower than they were, but my smaller frame made weaving through them easy. Whenever they piled in to pin me down, I used that exact moment to tangle their paths into each other. One by one, carefully, we thinned their numbers.
The fighting lasted all day. By the time the third day's light broke, the battle was over. All ten Special Class Warriors had survived. Two of the lower-ranked warriors, though, finally buckled under the jaguars' relentless assault and fell. Lower-ranked or not, they had all been 1st Class Warriors — men tempered over long years on battlefields where only the strong lived. Even that wasn't enough in the Forbidden Zone.
We have to tell them it's far worse than anyone expected. We need to go back and reorganize the squads.
We had underestimated the Forbidden Zone. Having never set foot here, maybe that was inevitable. Carefully, we crossed the blood-stained wasteland, searching for a way out.
Before we could even form a plan, that goal was smashed to pieces.
Without warning the ground heaved as if splitting open, and a colossal shape surged up from below. In an instant, five Special Class Warriors vanished into the monster's black shadow. The thing that had erupted from the earth and swallowed five Special Class Warriors whole looked like a maggot — except it was larger than ten of those jaguars put together.
The five of us remaining, myself included, hammered its rising yellow body and managed to open wounds, but it vanished back into the ground before we could finish it. A body that size burrowing underground without leaving so much as a tremor. If it came up again, the rest of the squad would be wiped out. That much was obvious. All we could do was scatter and pray that at least one of us made it outside the Forbidden Zone.
In that moment, I made my decision. I would be the bait.
When it first surfaced, we had carved plenty of wounds into its body. Those wouldn't heal instantly. If we could force the maggot to show itself again, we could end it for certain this time. I would be the lure that brought it back up.
"…I'm counting on you."
My comrades didn't say much. They simply nodded. I could feel their guilt more clearly than they could show it. These were the same men who had been ready to throw themselves at a pack of fifty jaguars without a thought for their own lives.
I drew a deep breath and ran with everything I had, deliberately slamming my feet into the ground to provoke the maggot. I pushed my senses as high as they would go, hoping to catch even the faintest sign of it bursting from the earth.
Then I felt something strange.
It wasn't something I had detected on my own. It seeped in all at once, like a gift handed down from somewhere else — an instinct I couldn't explain. My body twisted on pure reflex and changed direction.
Right where I had been standing, the giant maggot punched up through the ground.
"Bell did it!"
"Kill it!"
We poured everything we had into the rising body. Flesh tore. Dark red blood fell like rain. The maggot's massive frame reeled.
And then—
BOOM!
Something dropped from the sky with a roar like a thunderbolt. The maggot's enormous body was driven into the ground in a single instant and burst apart.
The moment I saw those vast black wings, I screamed until my throat tore. Instinct was screaming louder: run. No matter what.
"Scatterrr!"
My comrades didn't look back. They split down separate paths. Plan B — the one we had set in case we failed to kill the maggot. Get at least one person out of the Forbidden Zone.
I used my speed and ran like a madman. But a full day of fleeing the jaguars had driven us deep into the zone, and finding the way out was no simple thing. In the end, I was caught.
That same uncanny sensation brushed the back of my neck again. I didn't ignore it. I threw myself aside.
Shhk—
A sharp whistle of displaced air cut past me. It was a bird's foot — long, hooked talons. Only then could I put a name to the winged thing.
A beast with a bird's feet and wings. Its torso was human-shaped, but its face was an eagle's. Covered in black feathers, it looked like an eagle that had stopped halfway through evolving into a human.
I confirmed what it was and ran again. Immediately the chill of that sensation returned. I rolled, dodged, ran, and trusted the feeling to keep me clear of its attacks. The more it happened, the clearer the sensation became. I decided to call it a sixth sense.
Even the monster seemed to grow irritated. It stopped attacking and wheeled in the air. That pause didn't last. Less than five minutes after I had taken off, the eagle-beast reappeared — and it had brought its kin.
I dodged in a frenzy. Dodging everything was impossible. A razor talon raked across my back. Hot pain flared as the flesh tore open, but there was no time to scream. I had to throw my body wherever the sixth sense pointed.
I no longer knew which way I was running. I had left my original direction far behind. Dodge. Run. Counter. Dodge again. In the middle of that endless struggle, a deep underground cave suddenly opened beneath my feet.
Finding a cave like that in the middle of the barren Forbidden Zone could only be called luck. I didn't stop to think. I threw myself in.
Thud—
I fell a long way before I hit the ground. Pitch darkness flooded my vision.
"Hah… hahh… haa… ha."
I gasped for air that had climbed all the way to my throat and looked around, but I could see nothing. The cave was so black that even an inch ahead was lost. When I felt over my body, I was slick with liquid — sweat and the blood from my wounds.
As the rush faded and reason returned, pain crashed over me in waves. Vertigo spun through my head and the world tilted. I forced my back against the wall.
"Ugh…!"
The pain sharpened. The deepest wound was probably the one on my back.
I can't pass out.
I had come into the cave because there was no other choice, but I had no idea what might be living down here. I pulled dried meat from the pouch at my waist, chewed it, and kept scanning the dark.
Time passed. My eyes slowly adjusted. Still, nothing stood out. The sixth sense was quiet too. All I could make out were the contours of the cave — wide and high, but it didn't feel inhabited. It looked far too cramped for any large monster to live in, and the entrance was narrow. Even if the beasts had followed me, getting in would be difficult.
Of course, holding onto simple hopes like that in the Forbidden Zone was foolish.
I need to sleep.
Ever since breaking the fourth wall, my recovery had become absurd. The wounds were closing little by little — but to truly restore my stamina, I needed deep rest.
One day. Just hold on for one day.
I sat where I was and kept my eyes open through the night.
Day three. I was the only one left alive.