Open the Door
"Hahk...!"
Ju Ji-hye collapsed where she sat.
The heavy darkness that had been pressing down on her had receded without her noticing, and the inexplicable afterimage had vanished entirely.
The others, who had frozen in place, began to move again as well.
"What's wrong with you?"
"..."
Lee Ha-ye came closer and asked, but she couldn't bring herself to answer.
Cold sweat poured down Ju Ji-hye's face in rivulets. It felt as though the whisper from those crimson eyes she'd locked onto was still echoing in her ears.
What on earth... was that thing?
An unknown existence she'd never encountered anywhere before. One thing, however, was certain: it operated on a completely different level from the ordinary monsters she had fought throughout her career.
She pushed herself up off the ground.
"We have to get out of here. Now."
"Moving carelessly is more dangerous. All we have are two injured who can't even walk on their own."
"It saw us! If we stay here, we're all going to die!"
"What are you talking about? I'm telling you to calm down!"
The two hunters bickered back and forth. The two injured, still unconscious, weren't combat assets — they were nothing but shackles dragging down every movement.
Dragging them through an S-rank gate was practically suicide. But Ju Ji-hye, the only one who had come face to face with the thing, thought otherwise. It felt as though that shadow-monster that had peered into the cracks of her very soul, or its legion of monsters, could come crashing into their hiding spot at any moment.
Yet for some reason, as time passed, no monsters appeared. Everything stayed eerily quiet.
Did it not pinpoint our location? Or is it capable of killing us and simply choosing not to? But then... why?
According to every established trait of monsters she knew, they would instinctively seek to exterminate the humans before their eyes. Yet that creature either could act and didn't, or couldn't act at all. Caught in a situation that defied all common knowledge, she felt herself unraveling with confusion.
After all, the moment it had spoken in human language, it had already strayed completely beyond anything she'd ever understood.
After waiting there for several hours to recover, the injured began to wake one by one.
"Wh-what happened? What's going on?"
"Don't strain yourself. Stay down. You had a proper hole punched through your stomach."
Lee Ha-ye pressed Kim Jun-seok back down onto the ground.
Meanwhile, Song Tae-han stared down hopelessly at his now-empty ankle.
"...Goddammit."
Along with the injury came the memory of Go Jin-young, already dead. His vanished ankle had become a permanent loss — but that he'd survived that situation at all was nothing short of a miracle.
Still, no miracle could offer him the slightest comfort.
Even with two hunters back on their feet, there was nothing anyone could do.
Only silence hung in the pitch-black cave.
Isolated inside the gate, they stayed where they were and waited for the rescue team. It followed the manual they'd all been trained on, and in truth it was the most rational choice available — when a sudden variable triggered a catastrophe, waiting for outside support rather than moving rashly always yielded the highest odds of survival.
But time kept slipping by.
When it stopped being measured in hours and started being measured in days, they found themselves fighting a war against hunger and loneliness.
"Damn it... damn it all..."
Song Tae-han gnawed anxiously at his lips. This was a situation he had never once experienced in his life.
Hunters these days may have faced the perilous enemies of gates and monsters, but every other condition of their work was extraordinarily favorable. Their base treatment was excellent, and a well-built system existed to support and assist every aspect of a field operation.
Before deployment, as much intelligence as possible was gathered so they could prepare for variables, and the moment anything went wrong, support or rescue teams were dispatched immediately. It was a fully systematized framework designed to guarantee the safety of high-value personnel — rules forged through countless trials and errors, steeped in the blood spilled by their seniors.
Precisely because of that, however, they had never once been thrown into an environment like this. A situation like now, where they were dying slowly, pushed past every mental and physical limit.
"God damn it! Why is there still no word?!"
"...I envy how much energy you still have to whine."
"Cut the crap! It's been at least three days since we came in! Where the hell is the rescue team and what are they doing?!"
Song Tae-han shouted at Kim Jun-seok. Until now, Kim Jun-seok had casually brushed off or snapped back at everything the man spat at him — but this time, even he couldn't muster a retort.
He simply didn't voice it aloud, but the thought of dying in this place had been circling his head without pause.
Deep despair had already taken root in every hunter's heart, sprouting and spreading like weeds.
"You're the oldest one here and you whine the most. Some people stay quiet because they don't know anything, unlike you."
"And whose fault was this in the first place? Why did Go Jin-young die?! That monster was right in front of us, and you didn't detect a thing — what were you even doing?!"
"My ability was spread at full range. It's just that I sensed absolutely nothing anyway."
Lee Ha-ye answered with a scowl. Far from detecting it in advance, she hadn't even been able to properly register the unknown enemy in the moment they came face to face.
"You saw it yourself, so you should know, right?"
"Shut up! I didn't bring you along to fail at the one job you had!"
"Close your mouth! You think I don't know who the dead weight is now that your ankle's gone? You should've just died with that thing instead!"
"You... you son of a bitch! You want to try me right now?!"
The hunters screamed at each other, voices raw. Exhausted, starved bodies gnaw away at the human mind. The anxiety rooted deep inside each of them gradually drove them toward more and more extreme behavior.
You could read the textbook line about never losing your composure in the field a hundred times, but without living it, it was nothing more than pretty words.
Hunters were the most privileged of the privileged, superhumans who enjoyed peak physical condition at all times — which made this extreme situation, where the ugliest depths of humanity bared themselves, all the harder to endure.
"St-stop it... please..."
Ju Ji-hye anxiously chewed at her nails. The severe hand tremors that had never resurfaced once since meeting Oh Hyeon-seong had returned.
The hunters looked ready to draw weapons on each other, their shouts growing shriller — and with every escalation, her anxiety twisted tighter.
Wavering black energies swirled around the hunters' bodies. Miasma burrows all the more easily into weakened flesh and fractured minds. They were under continuous exposure to the massive quantities of turbid energy the gate spewed out, and even high-tier hunters could not escape its effects.
Because of it, Ju Ji-hye's wounds — wounds that had healed — were tearing open all over again.
Rustle.
Then, Ju Ji-hye pulled a strawberry from inside her jacket.
With a trembling arm, she split a single strawberry into quarters and passed the pieces around.
"Everyone eat one."
"A strawberry?"
"Wait, you had food this whole time?"
It had been a large strawberry, but quartered, each piece was bite-sized. Song Tae-han nearly asked if she expected him to smear it on his forehead — but his stomach was gnawing itself hollow, so he took it meekly.
He expected nothing, of course. But the moment he chewed the strawberry in his mouth, his expression transformed completely.
Th-this... what is this...
An utterly overwhelming flavor surged through his body. Perhaps it was because he was starving and exhausted, but that small scrap of a strawberry filled his mouth with an absurd, impossible taste, waking every cell in his body.
And of course, that reaction wasn't his alone. The hunters who had been spitting venom at each other seconds ago went quiet.
A sliver of strawberry couldn't possibly fill a stomach. But in their worst state, their half-drowned minds woke — and only then did they realize, swept along by the mood, exactly what kinds of things they'd been saying to each other.
In the calmed atmosphere, questions began surfacing in their minds one by one.
"You said it's been over three days since we entered. Something is definitely wrong."
"Right — the problem was never about whether the rescue team gets in. Judging by how fast this gate developed, fast enough to trigger an emergency mobilization, an eruption should have happened long ago. And yet it's this quiet..."
"Don't tell me... time flows differently in here?"
The idea that time inside a gate might move differently from outside. Gates of that type were so rare lately that even they found them unfamiliar, but such cases did exist in historical gate records. And the defining trait of those gates was exactly that: because time flowed differently, their phases progressed at a breakneck pace.
The fact that communications with the outside had worked fine when they first entered was a slight wrinkle, but with no rescue team in sight and no eruption occurring, it was the most plausible hypothesis by far.
"If that's true, then sitting here holding out is completely pointless."
There was nothing left to eat, nothing left to drink. If they just sat there, they would be trapped in that slowed time, pickled in hunger and massive concentrations of miasma, until nothing remained but corpses.
"If we want to grab onto even the smallest thread of hope... we have to move first."
Ju Ji-hye rose to her feet.
Unlike mere moments ago, when everyone had sat slumped and slowly devoured by fear, there was no anxiety or dread to be felt from her now. Only the peaceful, happy memories that had surfaced as she ate the strawberry — and a clear goal, and a fierce will: for his sake alone, she absolutely had to make it back.
Outside the gate.
Far more hunters had gathered than when the crisis first erupted, but time continued to bleed away, indifferent to all of them.
"Deputy Director, we're detecting signs of a shift to phase four. The eruption will begin soon."
"...Deploy the hunters in preparation for the eruption first. Expand the evacuation perimeter so no civilians are harmed, pull all the reporters out, and keep facility damage as minimal as possible — we need to be able to suppress whatever comes out."
"Understood!"
The man gave a crisp bow and withdrew.
With an S-rank gate whose contents no one could predict, there was no telling what its eruption might bring. That was precisely why such an enormous force had been assembled, and why Han Su-yeon herself continued to hold her post.
Just then, the hunter standing beside her spoke, as if time were running out.
"Deputy Director, we need to commit personnel and attempt a rescue now, before it's too late."
"You're still on that?"
"There are five 10th-grade hunters in there. Even if one is confirmed dead, losing all of them would be a national loss."
Entry was impossible thanks to the barrier, which repelled mana. His proposal was to send in hunters of Rank 6 or below, whose low mana levels fell under the barrier's threshold, and attempt the rescue that way.
But against an S-rank gate, manpower of that caliber would need hundreds of lives spent just to produce a faint sliver of a chance. The proposal had been calculated on the logic that a single high-tier hunter above 10th grade was worth far more than all of those put together.
"It won't come to that. Drop it."
Han Su-yeon refused flatly. Kill that many people to save four? This was not a question to be weighed in national interest or value. At least, that was what she believed right now.
"What do you think you're—!"
Crash!
Just then, a commotion erupted behind her, and her gaze snapped toward it. Her eyes went wide.
"Wh-why is Sunbae here?"
Oh Hyeon-seong shoved past the hunters trying to block him and strode inside. At his utterly unexpected appearance, Han Su-yeon's face contorted.
"I heard the situation. Sounded like it was giving you one hell of a headache."
"Sunbae! Why did you come here? You shouldn't have!"
At her heartfelt words, Oh Hyeon-seong let out a wry chuckle. He understood exactly why she reacted that way. To her, the assault team's lives weren't the issue — she would have preferred he never appear even if an entire city had to burn for it.
But Oh Hyeon-seong simply patted her on the shoulder and walked past.
"Don't worry. This won't take long."
What was there to be so afraid of, huddling like that?
Approaching the barrier that encircled the gate, Oh Hyeon-seong extended his right arm forward. The first time might have been a different story, but as of now, he carried a considerable volume of mana within him — enough to have cradled Alvern. By all rights, with that much mana, the barrier's repulsion should have made approach outright impossible. The greater one's mana, the fiercer the repulsion became.
Tstsstssts—!
Yet his arm passed through without a whisper of resistance. Even a greenhorn Rank 2 or 3 hunter would trigger at least a faint repulsive reaction from their meager mana. But from him, there was no reaction at all.
The mana he had accumulated in his body was not the ordinary mana that every hunter carried. No hunter who read an opponent's presence through mana could ever detect it. It could not be devoured by mana-eating monsters, and it slipped through mana-repelling barriers without the slightest resistance. A mana that existed outside every known rule — one that belonged to him and him alone.
"I'm off."
"You come back safe. Sunbae."
Vwoom!
With a quick grin, Oh Hyeon-seong passed through the barrier — and entered the gate without a moment's pause.
Inside was a dank, pitch-black cave. Glancing around, he immediately sensed that something here had been twisted out of shape.
"...Somebody with a real nasty sense of humor is in here."
The landscape had changed completely from when the assault team had first entered. The corridors that had once stretched straight and open, easy enough to walk through, now wound in every direction, blocked and sealed. The entrance itself had been shut off entirely.
So you didn't want me coming in, huh. Well, that's a problem. I'm here to take back the ones you swallowed.
Thud.
Oh Hyeon-seong pressed his hand against the wall. Behind him, Alvern's form drifted into view, and a massive passage burst open through the terrain that had been sealed tight as a drum.