Let's See What You've Got
The withdrawal order had come down to the Bureau's hunters.
When Oh Hyeon-seong heard the news, he set about calming the people inside the shelter. The agitated crowd finally regained their composure, and the Yoo siblings breathed a sigh of relief along with everyone else.
"Wait, so it was a false alarm all along?"
"It was my spirits that set off the sensors, so the mistake wasn't yours. If anything, you did your job properly."
"Ugh. I was already dead tired, and all that for nothing."
Ju Ji-hye flopped down flat on the spot. Having dragged her exhausted body all the way here after hellish high-intensity training, it was little wonder her strength gave out.
"Well, the fact that you're still standing on your own two feet means your stamina has improved at least."
"...Has it?"
"What do you mean, 'has it'?"
"It just hasn't. Ughhh..."
As pale as a ghost, Ju Ji-hye rolled over and let out a belated groan of misery.
Refusing a compliment — what a stubborn creature. He adjusted the training intensity on his own anyway; she knew that better than anyone.
Except the evacuation that should have ended quickly somehow dragged on and on. It was true that the paperwork couldn't always be wrapped up in a few simple steps, so he waited patiently at first — but when the time spent in the shelter stretched far longer than he'd expected, a question surfaced in his mind.
Why haven't they ordered a full withdrawal yet?
Vehicles were streaming out of the area as the Bureau pulled its people back. Most of the staff and hunters who had been posted in front of the shelter were gone as well. But the few who remained kept standing guard at their communication equipment, unmoving, as if rooted there.
Sensing something off, Oh Hyeon-seong walked over to them.
"I heard the situation was resolved. Is there a problem?"
"Ah, we've lost contact with one of the teams patrolling the perimeter, so we're verifying their status. The evacuation order will be lifted the moment they check in. For everyone's safety, please bear with us a little longer."
The staff member answered politely. Something had clearly gone wrong, but nothing about it suggested a serious incident involving a gate or monsters. And yet, turning to walk back, Oh Hyeon-seong felt an uneasy knot form in his chest.
...Something doesn't feel right.
His gut was telling him no. No gate had been discovered, and he already knew the identity of the detected wavelength — there was nothing to worry about, logically speaking.
But the instincts honed over a long hunter's life were whispering otherwise. It might be pure coincidence, but accidents had a nasty habit of erupting at exactly these kinds of moments.
Come to think of it... I haven't seen Gwon Gyeong-min and his wife anywhere, have I?
Gyeong-min and his wife were still nowhere to be found in the shelter. He'd heard they were looking after other villagers, but even accounting for that, too much time had passed.
Don't tell me...
Suddenly, Oh Hyeon-seong remembered the erosion that had erupted at the siblings' farm not long ago. Under normal circumstances, a monster's appearance and the Partial Erosion phenomenon had nothing to do with each other — the miasma simply built up underground over long years and vented outward, entirely disconnected from any present-day monster activity.
But there was exactly one other possibility. A tiny one, so improbable that dismissing it was the reasonable call — yet now, with several ominous details stacking up, he felt he could see the true shape of his unease.
"Ju Ji-hye. Grab your gear."
Praying that the thought in his head was nothing more than a wrong hunch, Oh Hyeon-seong sprang to his feet.
She moved on reflex at his words, slinging the case over her back as she hurried out of the shelter after him. "Wh-what's going on all of a sudden?"
"A friend of mine is missing. We're going to find him."
"There's no gate, though. Does it really matter? I doubt anyone's even out there."
The two of them cut across the deserted village. Most of the hunters had withdrawn and the residents had evacuated, leaving the streets silent as a graveyard.
"Maybe they went outside the village?"
"No. And my gut's been wrong ever since we left the shelter."
"Your gut? What are you, a fortune-teller no—"
KWAAANG!
At that moment, a massive explosion tore through the air in the distance. A flash of light burst from the direction of the mountain bordering the village.
"It's... it's real."
"...Damn it!"
After a brief moment of stunned disbelief, Oh Hyeon-seong and Ju Ji-hye broke into a run at the same instant.
"Move it! We have to get out of here, now!"
Three hunters were racing down through the mountains, clambering down the slope one after another — all of them caked in dried blood, tangled and battered beyond recognition. Among them, Seo Jae-ho carried the civilian Gwon Gyeong-min slung over his shoulder.
"Damn it all, we should have pulled out right then and there!" one of the hunters burst out.
When the tracking team had first discovered the eroded footprints, their plan had been to withdraw immediately and report the situation. Their communication equipment had been jammed by sudden interference, making contact impossible, and judging by the level of the erosion, tackling it alone was out of the question — a perfectly sound judgment.
But their plan had fallen apart almost at once. They'd witnessed a pack of monsters resembling black hounds abducting several civilians.
Assaulting the pack had freed the villagers, but pursuit had been instant. Monsters came pouring in from every direction, as if summoned from thin air. In the end, they lost all the rescued villagers except one, and when even a second search team that had come to reinforce them fell into the enemy's grasp, running became their only option.
"Save your breath for your legs! More coming from the left!" Seo Jae-ho shouted, thrusting out his arm. A massive explosion erupted where his hand pointed, the earth-shaking blast swallowing the monsters whole.
But black hounds came bursting through the smoke, their grotesque maws gaping wide.
"Damn it...!"
The creatures possessed powerful resistance to magic. The damage reduction made killing them anything but easy. They drew their weapons and fought back, but the pack came charging in with such ferocity that the hunters were soon driven into a corner.
"W-we can't hold out like this!"
"Idiot! Watch your—!"
WHUMM!
At that moment, a monster slipping through a gap in the hunters' defenses froze in midair. The force that had stopped it was overwhelming telekinesis. The creature trembled violently in place for a heartbeat, then died with a sickening crack as its body twisted out of shape.
Crrunch! Kwajik!
Ju Ji-hye had appeared through the underbrush. Each time she extended a hand and clenched her fist, another corpse dropped with a wet snap. The monsters' numbers dwindled rapidly.
"That's... that's Ju Ji-hye of Aegis, isn't it?"
The hunters flinched in shock. Not Bureau support — a heavyweight civilian hunter had appeared out of nowhere.
In the meantime, Oh Hyeon-seong came into view. "Hunter Oh, sir!"
"Is the person unharmed?"
"Ah — yes! No threat to his life."
Seo Jae-ho set Gwon Gyeong-min down. Oh Hyeon-seong rushed over and examined his condition. There was a deep gash in his thigh — nothing immediately life-threatening, but the sight of the blood-soaked bandages told him the man had lost a fair amount.
"Gwon Gyeong-min! You're going to be all right, you hear me?"
"Hy-Hyeon-seong..."
At the sight of him, Gwon Gyeong-min seized his arm with a trembling voice. "I can't just go back like this. Ha-na... Ha-na... they took her. Those things dragged her away."
"She's still alive. I can feel it. First, get to the station and get treated — a civilian hanging around will only get in the way."
"I'm begging you. Without Ha-na, I..."
"Don't worry. No matter what it takes, I'll bring her back."
Gwon Gyeong-min's head sagged. Strange — even with his mind in shambles, hearing those words let him close his eyes with something like relief.
Meanwhile, Ju Ji-hye ended the fight by crushing the last monster's spine. "Any other casualties?" Oh Hyeon-seong asked.
"Ah — yes, sir. Three villagers, plus the hunters from both support teams — all of them were taken. And their forces include a boss entity."
"It's a Lurker-Type, isn't it?"
"Yes, sir, it appears so. It seems the one hiding underground started moving the moment it saw us stirring things up."
Gates and monsters came in a staggering variety of types. If hunters rushed every gate as if it were a standard one, total annihilation was guaranteed — which was precisely why they had to tailor their countermeasures to each type. And among all of them, the most notorious classification without question was the Lurker-Type monster.
The defining trait of a Lurker-Type was that it avoided combat with hunters entirely. When a gate first formed, it hid among the other monsters, then slipped out behind their backs before the raid was finished. While the hunters believed the gate had been fully cleared, the creature crossed into a new region and built its nest. At first it was so faint it couldn't even be detected, but as it adapted to Earth's environment, its power grew explosively within its nest. It gave humanity no time to prepare, and the raw strength of its type had inflicted catastrophic losses time and again.
"Judging by the traces of erosion, it's at minimum an S-Rank boss monster. The level of its underlings alone makes that certain — there's no way this is merely A-Rank."
"Understood. Transport the wounded, and report to the Bureau when you get back."
"And you, Hunter Oh...?"
"We'll handle it."
At his words, Seo Jae-ho fell silent for a moment. Under ordinary circumstances, he would have argued the man out of it by any means necessary — it was tantamount to suicide. But now, he simply nodded. "...I'll pray for your good fortune."
Seo Jae-ho withdrew with his team in tow.
"H-hold on a second! You said it's an S-Rank boss entity! And we're really going in, just the two of us?"
Ju Ji-hye came up to him, eyes wide as saucers. The Lurker-Type had already established a nest that had completely taken over the cavern's interior. Adaptation had to be considered effectively finished at this point — which meant the inside of that burrow was, for all practical purposes, an S-Rank gate environment.
"S-Rank gates are cleared by teams of Grade 10 hunters or higher — that's the baseline. With our full strength an unknown quantity, the two of us alone is absolutely impossible."
"We don't have a choice. If we wait for support, everyone who was taken will be dead."
Monsters exterminated humans on instinct. They couldn't converse; they ran on pure impulse. The fact that they had taken humans alive instead of killing them meant there was intent behind it — and if a Lurker-Type's underlings had carried captives back to the nest, the reason was only too obvious.
They were being kept as the boss's food supply. To these creatures, human flesh was a delicacy that helped them adapt to the local environment that much faster.
"Besides, you never really know until you try."
"Are you sure about this? An S-Rank gate subjugation without even meeting the minimum personnel requirement... The agency would never let anyone do this."
"The world's gotten kinder, that's all. Back in my day, S-Rank or not, you just slammed your head into it and figured the rest out after."
"Wow. A 'back in my day' speech. Really? Here?"
"Then go ahead and be first generation yourself."
Oh Hyeon-seong let out a laugh and moved ahead. Ju Ji-hye, for all her grumbling, was following along meekly enough. This was a matter of her own life, and yet she didn't hesitate.
They followed the trail Seo Jae-ho had pointed them to, and before long discovered a burrow cunningly concealed between the rock formations.
"...The miasma is unbelievable. We haven't even entered a gate, and it's this thick already?"
"It gets worse the deeper we go. Stay sharp."
Oh Hyeon-seong entered the nest first. It truly felt like madness — but Ju Ji-hye followed him in all the same.
The burrow the creatures had bored so deep was on a scale that nature alone could never have produced. The miasma was so dense it caught in the throat.
Something like this was sitting right nearby... no wonder Partial Erosion erupted at Seung-su's farm.
Deep in the darkness, countless presences stirred around them as they pressed forward. Just how many had they stockpiled inside this nest? The movement of monsters came flooding in from the tunnels ahead and behind, a tide of them surging closer.
"They're swarming us. What do we do?" Ju Ji-hye asked urgently, her eyes darting every which way. Fighting all these enemies head-on would burn through an enormous amount of mana, and if that happened, she might not have anything left for the real fight against the boss. These were not foes she could simply sweep away with a few wide-area blasts.
"Stay put for now. Don't burn your strength yet."
Oh Hyeon-seong stepped out in front of her. Monsters had already emerged from the darkness, baring their teeth as they charged in from all sides.
Around him, a bone-white chill began to seep into the air.
"You haven't gotten rusty from the long sleep, have you?"
Behind him, appearing as if from nowhere, stood the Water Spirit — Alvern. The spirit gave a soft smile and nodded.
"Then let's begin."
Yip-yip-yip!
The monsters were upon them. The one in the lead flung its jaws wide open and leapt for the back of Oh Hyeon-seong's neck — but he didn't so much as twitch.
Then the storm of frost erupted.
Shhhhhhhhk!
merciless cold came pouring down, swallowing everything whole. The bone-white chill swept through the monsters, and the entire cavern was engulfed in freezing air. Not even a scream — just a silence that arrived in a single instant.
"Wh... what..."
Ju Ji-hye stumbled back a step. The floor, the ceiling, the walls — even the monsters. Everything around them was frozen solid, nothing left but shards and wreckage. The only things untouched were the two of them, standing inside a perfect circle of frozen ground.
"That's... a spirit...?"
She could only stare at Oh Hyeon-seong, hollow-eyed.