The True Predator
"So we finally made it."
The moment they stepped through the broken doorway, the crushing hunger and exhaustion that had been smothering their bodies vanished into thin air. They had escaped the creature's domain, the one that twisted perception itself.
"Wh-what? I feel fine again?"
"Good work getting here."
"Hah... I thought I was going to die," Joo Ji-hye said, exhaling a long, shuddering breath.
She could feel her battered body returning to its proper state. Strictly speaking, it wasn't recovery at all — she was finally perceiving her condition as it truly was, rather than as the illusion had made it seem. Even so, she had every right to be proud. Whatever a hunter's grade, only a handful of people alive could have endured what she just had.
"But don't get comfortable. The real fight starts now."
With those words, Oh Hyeon-seong pressed ahead, taking the lead.
Past the corridor, a new space opened up before them. The cavernous area defied belief that it lay underground — a vast ruin stretched out across it, filled wall to wall with collapsed buildings. You'd sooner expect a floating island drifting through the sky inside a gate than this.
Still, when the atmosphere shifted this abruptly, it usually meant some new variable was closing in. Caution was warranted.
"Something's definitely in here," Joo Ji-hye said, her voice taut with tension.
Hunters could roughly pinpoint a gate's core by instinct alone. It was something apart from detection abilities or the talent for reading traces of mana. Just as monsters surged instinctively out of gates to attack humans, hunters, in that same instinctive realm, could sense a gate's core. The strange pulsing waves it emitted beat strongly against them even here.
"The core's somewhere in the middle of the ruins."
"Don't trust that too much. Especially not information that's handed to you this neatly."
They pushed across the ruins, eyes peeled for monsters lurking among the collapsed structures — but nothing appeared. The ruins seemed utterly empty.
At the heart of it all, they came face to face with a ruined temple, and at its base, a staircase descending deep into the earth.
"Looks like it's down there... and of course, nothing's going to let us through easily."
Oh Hyeon-seong cast a slow glance around. Moments ago there had been nothing — now countless presences were blooming to life all across the ruins. And true to form, they were converging on the exact center, on them. Before he knew it, a swarm of armored centipedes filled their vision on every side, and an enormous crimson specimen brought an entire building crashing down as it emerged.
"You've... you've got to be kidding..."
Joo Ji-hye stumbled back a step. But she quickly steadied herself, nodding as if she'd figured something out, and looked at Oh Hyeon-seong.
"I get it now...! This is all an illusion that monster created, right? It's all a matter of whether I choose to see through it!"
The numbers were far too great for a single gate. And on top of that, a boss monster of the armored centipede species had appeared — a type that had never even had a boss before. It had to be the ability of the creature that had been warping their perception this whole time.
"No. Those are all real."
"...Huh?"
"Yeah. And I think I need to head down first, so hold the line for me."
Her jaw dropped.
"No — no way! You're telling me to plug this entire place up alone?"
"If I'm right, these aren't all of them. Unless we destroy the gate's core, they'll keep coming. Endless waves of them."
Even at this very moment, she could feel countless presences still crawling toward them. And now she was supposed to believe even more would pour in? It defied belief.
"But I don't even have my equipment. How am I supposed to handle all of—"
Armored centipedes were vermin that devoured mana. Direct projections of it simply didn't work on them, which meant her telekinesis could be resisted easily enough. Of course, she had never relied on her telekinesis alone against enemies of this kind; she'd always paired it with a combat style built around wielding dozens of swords. Blades laced with telekinetic force let her take on enemies with high mana resistance or sheer size.
But when the ambush had come in the darkness, she'd lost her entire equipment case. All she had left was the single sword in her hand.
"You won't need equipment like that."
"...Excuse me?"
"You've grown on the way here. You just haven't realized it yet."
Every awakened person was close to superhuman in body. But mentally? They were merely resistant to external stress — fundamentally no different from ordinary people. They panicked easily. They crumbled. They gave up.
Not the woman standing here now.
The grueling road she had walked alongside Oh Hyeon-seong was, in itself, a feat impossible for anyone but a mental superhuman. She had refused to surrender, fought the lightless dark with no promise of dawn, and she had won.
"The fact that you — someone still carrying the trauma of a year ago — made it this far means your mind has grown far more resilient than before. You don't need strawberries or anything else to lean on. You're already back on your feet."
Back... on my feet?
Joo Ji-hye stared down at her own two hands as if she couldn't believe it. Only weeks ago, her mind had collapsed under her like a house of cards — and now, he was saying, it stood tall on its own. If it had been her own thought, or anyone else's words, she wouldn't have believed it for a second.
But a hardened conviction had taken root inside her now.
THOOM!
She clenched both fists. Ability-type hunters were always at the mercy of their mental state — and not just in the textbook sense of needing composure for fine mana control. A hunter's mind could shape their power in far more direct ways.
"Go on ahead."
With that, she hurled the sword in her hand downward. It slammed firmly into the ground. Oh Hyeon-seong gave a faint smile at the sight, and descended into the underground of the ruined temple.
SHRIEEEK!
A tide of monsters came surging in from every direction. Even the hardiest hunter would have faltered — frozen, panicked — before a scale this absurd. But there was no wavering in her eyes.
She simply extended her arm forward.
CRUNCH!
Her telekinesis smashed the head of the first armored centipede to reach her. It was a force that should never have worked on them — but her mana now was something creatures like these could never devour.
CRACK!
The crushing pressure flattened two centipedes at once. Then ten burst. Then thirty twisted apart, a hundred crumpled. In the end, every armored centipede in the sector was ground to paste — along with dozens of buildings — by a single flick of her hand.
SHRIEEEK!
Yet from within the mound of crushed corpses, a giant armored centipede tore its way through the wreckage. A boss monster that should never have existed at all. Its mana resistance was on another level entirely from the common drones; the massive telekinetic barrage hadn't left a single scratch on it.
But she said nothing. She simply brought both hands together and focused everything on a single point.
"Don't get in my way... just die!"
KRRRSHHH!
The giant's long, massive body was crushed hideously from head to tail, spewing blood like a fountain. She had hit this wall again and again, failed against it again and again, certain it was a barrier no amount of effort could ever breach — the wall of the 11th Grade hunter. And in this moment, she shattered through it.
Monsters have names.
Through long years of war, humanity collected data on them and devised countermeasures — so of course designations had to exist. But examined closely, those names belonged to the species, not to any single individual. And that was only natural. There was no need to assign personal names, like tigers in a zoo, to creatures that existed purely to be exterminated.
Not all of them, though.
Sometimes a name was given not to a species, but to one solitary monster. A name that had to be burned into humanity's memory — a being that had inflicted staggering losses upon them.
The Named Monster.
Not things intercepted at the gate stage, but entities that roamed the world and warred against humanity for months, sometimes years, on end. Most Named Monsters were printed in hunter textbooks, forcing every student to memorize their case studies one by one; a few were so dangerous that their very existence was classified beyond those pages.
What Oh Hyeon-seong was recalling now was exactly that kind of Named.
KUUUUNG!
Deep darkness. Standing alone, Oh Hyeon-seong was flanked by the corpses of giant armored centipedes, laid out in a grim row. A full ten of them. Ten boss monsters emerging from a single gate was an absurdity — nothing about it made sense.
But he knew the whole story. Some entity from outside the gate had been crossbreeding the armored centipedes abnormally to multiply their numbers, and in the process, had manufactured these artificial boss specimens as well.
Only one being could have pulled off something like that — then, and now.
The very creature still crouched in the dark, refusing to show itself.
"Batola."
At his words, a pair of crimson eyes flickered in the darkness. The thing responded as if delighted.
"How pleasant to meet you, human. Few remain who still remember my name."
"You should be dead — Baek Ji-soo killed you. How are you alive?"
"KHAHAHA!"
The creature burst into laughter.
"Humans — just as pathetic a species as ever, I see."
"Did you crawl out here just to say that?"
"Your arrival was beyond my calculations. But to think you'd been weakened this badly. I needn't have bothered being careful at all."
The black shape slithered this way and that, sizing him up.
"A single spirit at your side, and a body broken beyond repair — you truly are finished, aren't you? Such is the fate of humans, I suppose. Devoured bit by bit by our remnants, withering away, while we devour you and grow ever stronger. This is the difference between predator and prey."
"Back then or now — you never could shut that mouth of yours."
The Named Monster, Batola. It had always dodged any straight confrontation, toying with hunters and striking only when they were worn down and weak. Thanks to that, Oh Hyeon-seong had crossed paths with it several times, but had never once fought it directly.
This time, though, the creature had no intention of simply letting him walk away.
"Don't bother playing brave in that state, human. You know perfectly well this is where your grave lies."
Batola had read his condition to the letter. He had burned through every drop of mana fending off the swarming giant centipedes, and now stood gasping, his body spent.
The creature, meanwhile, had once been one of the Queen's own children. It existed on an entirely different plane from ordinary monsters — utterly beyond what Oh Hyeon-seong was now. That was precisely why it would never release him.
KRRRSHHH!
But in that instant —
Blinding white frost scattered in every direction, sealing off the surrounding space. Batola reeled at the massive spirit art unfolding out of nowhere.
"Your mana was drained to nothing... How—?"
"Complaining about that after knocking your own meal flat on the ground? Meaningless."
TSSSSSSH!
Oh Hyeon-seong's core had, at some point, filled to the brim with vast quantities of mana. No — it wasn't filling on its own. It was being drawn in from outside. Only then did Batola notice: the souls of the fallen giant centipedes were flowing into him.
"You...! What have you done?!"
This was the true reason Oh Hyeon-seong survived one desperate battlefield after another, growing stronger with each crucible he walked through — the reason he ultimately accumulated a volume of mana without precedent in hunter history.
His unique constitution had never been a mere knack for handling spirits.
To be sure, even Batola — who had stalked the battlefields of the past — knew nothing of this ability. No one who ever witnessed his true power lived long enough to tell of it.
And if that someone was a monster? So much the worse for them.
"I've thought this for a while now... you'd taste pretty good yourself."