Asking for a Beating
The hunters pressed on through the darkness.
Kim Jun-seok supported Song Tae-han, who had lost one ankle, as they moved forward. When tempers had flared earlier, they'd traded some genuinely vicious words, but now they walked in silence.
Ahead of them, Ju Ji-hye and Lee Ha-ye kept their nerves on a knife's edge, scanning their surroundings.
Kim Jun-seok hadn't fully recovered from his own injuries yet, which was why Song Tae-han was the one leaning on him. His arms needed to be free in case they had to fight at full strength.
"Feeling anything?"
"No. Nothing at all."
Lee Ha-ye shook her head.
"Not monsters, not anything. This is the quietest gate I've ever been in. And I mean ever."
As a detection and recovery specialist, her greatest strength had always been her exceptional detection ability. Her unique constitution was a power that supported it—within a fixed radius, she could sense and pinpoint anyone, no matter what obstacles stood in the way.
But right now, she felt nothing.
However alien a gate's interior might be compared to Earth, it always developed its own environment, its own ecosystem. Yet here, there wasn't a single living creature—not even the sound of running water or a draft of wind, things so common they hardly registered.
For a cave-type gate, it was a profoundly strange situation.
"They came pouring out at us at first, so where the hell did all those armored centipedes go?"
Song Tae-han muttered irritably from the back. On the surface, it sounded like pointless whining.
But the other hunters felt much the same.
With their stamina drained and injured among them, they had tried at the outset to avoid crossing paths with monsters as much as possible. And in fact they hadn't encountered any—they'd assumed they were simply lucky.
As the hours wore on, though, it only grew stranger.
They'd been walking for hours already and had seen nothing, met no monsters at all. Given the armored centipedes' famously massive numbers and the sheer size of the horde that had come flooding out at the beginning, it made no sense that they'd seen hide nor hair of one since.
This gate isn't nearly big enough for that... What the hell is this place?
Weariness was creeping steadily across Ju Ji-hye's face too.
She had never seen a cave-type gate stretch this far. Gates came in all shapes and sizes, sure, but this bordered on unprecedented.
"Something's wrong. We're not even going deeper—we're heading back toward the entrance. Could it really take this long?"
"We're not going the wrong way. But the terrain around us has been shifting oddly for a while now. We might be lost."
"Even if we're lost, this is a bit much, don't you think?"
"...Just hold on a little longer."
Keep walking, and an end would come eventually.
On that thought, Ju Ji-hye encouraged the hunters onward and pressed ahead.
But the situation didn't resolve itself as easily as hope would have it. Instead, something came that made her wonder if any of this could even be real.
"...A week has passed."
The hunters collapsed where they stood.
More than a week had gone by without meeting a single monster, without a single fight for their lives.
No—more precisely, they'd set out on the third day after being stranded, so it had been roughly four days or more.
In all that time of walking, they hadn't had a drop of water. The only thing they'd eaten was a single piece of strawberry. Even for hunters, exhaustion was inevitable.
"I can't... go any farther."
The two spent men lost consciousness. As the injured ones, their bodies were already in poor shape, and pushing themselves while starving had simply been more than they could endure.
Lee Ha-ye and Ju Ji-hye, by contrast, were still awake. But in their hearts, they desperately wanted to simply pass out then and there.
"Looks like... this is how we die."
"..."
"Not even fighting monsters—dying of thirst and hunger. What an ending none of us ever saw coming."
Lee Ha-ye leaned her head against the wall and let out a hollow laugh.
It wasn't that she'd never imagined dying in a gate. She'd always assumed that at the very least, her end would come facing down a powerful enemy or a swarm of monsters—a defiant, gallant last stand.
The reality was utterly, unbearably hollow.
To wander endlessly through this suffocating darkness and simply die, with no one ever knowing where it ended.
That was death, most of the time.
"...?!"
But at that very moment, Lee Ha-ye, who had been staring blankly with closed eyes, jerked her head up.
Deep in that oppressive darkness, something enormous was approaching them.
"Something's coming."
At her words, Ju Ji-hye reflexively raised her weapon. Knowing the unidentified monster lurking in this gate, the smart move was to get up and run—but she didn't have the strength to flee. She simply took a deep breath and lifted her sword with what little power she had left.
Thud. Thud.
Footsteps closing in from the darkness.
When the silhouette finally emerged through the deep black, Ju Ji-hye's eyes went wide as saucers.
Not a monster. Not an unidentified creature. A single person.
And it was the very person she'd been thinking of all this while—though she'd never dreamed she'd run into him in a place like this.
"Found you."
Oh Hyeon-seong, striding out of the darkness, smiled broadly.
Splutter! Splutter!
They drank down the spheres of water Alvern had conjured in midair, cupping them in their hands. They drank as if they couldn't bear to let a single drop escape.
What had tormented the hunters more than anything else was thirst, and the fresh water that greeted them in this place left them utterly unable to compose themselves.
When had a single stream of water ever been this precious? As they gulped down the impossibly cool, clean water, the feeling finally returned that they might actually survive.
Soon after, they held open the mouths of the unconscious men and poured water in for them as well, and their complexions improved noticeably.
"Um... thank you so much. But where did you come from? I don't think I've seen your face before..."
Lee Ha-ye asked Oh Hyeon-seong cautiously. Anyone entering a scene like this would have to be a skilled hunter of at least Grade 10, and she was embarrassed not to know the name of the benefactor who'd given them water.
Though for her, of course, not knowing was only natural.
"Don't worry about that. You said you were looking for the exit?"
"Ah... yes."
"That's a bad idea. Getting out of here back to the entrance would take even longer. And more than that—you can't leave. There's a barrier up that repels mana. Ordinary high-grade hunters can't come and go through it!"
"Th-then what do we..."
"We're going to destroy the gate's core."
Thwack!
Oh Hyeon-seong chopped Lee Ha-ye on the neck. She crumpled to the ground without so much as a yelp.
"Is—is she dead?"
"What do you think?"
"Why did you do that all of a sudden?"
"I'm leaving these people here. If they stayed awake in a place like this, they'd only suffer. Better to let them sleep."
He laid Lee Ha-ye down beside the men, dusted off his hands, and started walking.
"Honestly... their minds wouldn't have held up on the way to the core anyway. It's no ordinary trek."
"Th-then what about me?"
"You can endure it. You're my disciple, aren't you?"
Ju Ji-hye flinched at the remark, delivered so casually. A faint flush crept across her cheeks, and she nodded and followed behind him.
It wasn't a compliment meant to sweeten her ears. Even granting that this was a short one-week course, if she couldn't endure something like this after surviving his training, that would be indefensible.
That was how he saw it. Call it a matter of pride.
"You all came up with some fairly plausible guesses, I'll admit. Unfortunately, you got it wrong."
"What? So this isn't a gate with warped time?"
"It's not. The gate itself is nothing special. The thing hiding in here is simply off the charts."
"B-but a whole week has already passed! Nothing else could explain why the eruption hasn't happened yet..."
"It doesn't control time, and it doesn't manipulate space. Its specialty is bending human perception. In a word, it makes you imagine things. That's all."
Time hadn't actually flowed differently from outside. It had only been made to feel that way.
"Then never being able to reach the entrance was also..."
"Right. It made you misperceive space. In reality, you barely went any distance at all."
"A-after all that suffering..."
Ju Ji-hye was visibly shaken by the revelation.
"Um, then how do we get out?"
"You don't. Once the thing has settled into a place, there's no way out."
"What? Then isn't it unreachable? I thought there must be some method since you're taking us there..."
"No matter how far it bends perception, there are limits to how much it can stretch or shrink things. Just keep walking, and you'll get there eventually."
"Oh... I see..."
In other words: walk there like an idiot, and they'd arrive in the end.
"But it's beyond imagining things—I could feel myself dying of real dehydration back there. Are we going to starve to death on the way?"
"Your senses and your body really are feeling that way, yes. So ignore them. Your head knows it isn't real."
In the end, it came down to enduring through sheer willpower.
They walked on in silence through the dark passage. The deeper they went, the thicker the darkness grew, and still they pressed forward.
"Hah... hah..."
Unbearable silence, one empty space after another. Thick turbid energy saturated the air, and they walked on and on, peering into the ominous dark.
All they'd been given was clean water; they ate nothing and simply kept walking.
By the point when roughly a week had passed by their own reckoning, Ju Ji-hye had gone pale to the very cheeks.
"Um... I really think I'm going to die like this..."
"Don't worry. Even if it were real, any hunter could hold out in a fasted state for two weeks at minimum."
Back in the Special Task Force days, unit members routinely went days on end without food in operational zones, sometimes even suppressing their bodily functions altogether. Oh Hyeon-seong himself had gone over a month without eating on more than one occasion. He was thoroughly accustomed to this kind of thing.
Ju Ji-hye, however, could not be.
Does this actually end?
She knew it was a trick of perception, but the pain her body was registering refused to feel like an illusion. And more than anything, it was this environment that tormented her. Pressing on through darkness now so thick she couldn't see an inch ahead, she couldn't shake the thought that this endless silence and blackness would go on forever.
She'd tried to overcome her physical limits through mental fortitude, but the deeper she stared into that darkness, the closer she came to a limit of the mind instead.
"Ju Ji-hye. Stay with me."
"I'm sorry... I can't..."
"That thing looks into human hearts and grows stronger by feeding on negative emotion. Pain, anxiety, fear, despair—any of it will do. Don't dance to its tune."
"B-but how..."
"If you're a hunter, don't fear the unknown. And if it's really too much—then just keep your eyes on me and follow. I'm... not going to stop."
At his words, Ju Ji-hye stared fixedly at Oh Hyeon-seong's back.
And then she saw what she hadn't noticed until now. His ragged breathing. His trembling shoulders. And still, the legs that kept striding forward.
He was starving and exhausted, exactly as she was.
But he had not stopped.
"...Yes, sir."
Ju Ji-hye watched his retreating back and walked on in silence.
It was nothing more than looking at a back, and yet somehow it steadied her. It was as if he were speaking to her. However painful and grueling it got, all she had to do was put one foot in front of the other and never stop. Keep walking, keep walking, and the end would come at last.
Thump.
Half-detached from it all, she walked on without a thought, over and over, with no idea how much time had passed.
And then, at long last, the endless repetition of identical corridors came to an end.
A colossal door stood barring their way.
"...You're going to need a good beating."
KWAAAAAANG!
Oh Hyeon-seong blasted the enormous door clean off its frame.