A Nutritious Snack for Our Kid
Monsters were beings from another world that crossed over through gates.
Since it was impossible to pass over to the opposite side from Earth, what was known about the world beyond remained extremely limited.
But one fact had been established long ago: monsters did not come from a single, common world.
The beasts brimming with murderous intent toward humanity poured in from countless dimensions, each from its own.
That said, monsters were not the only otherworldly beings in existence.
The 'summons' that hunters with summoning abilities contracted with were also beings that had crossed over from other worlds.
Summons came in every shape and variety imaginable, but there was one clear line that separated them from monsters: they did not arrive through gates, but manifested into this world through a hunter's mana as the medium. And they were friendly toward humans, lending their strength through contracts.
Of course, that relationship was a transaction born of their own need to feed on mana. Still, at the very least, unlike monsters, they had no desire to wipe humanity off the map.
By any measure, they were friendly enough.
Spirits fell within that same category of summons.
Only Oh Hyeon-seong, blessed with his unique constitution, could commune and form contracts with them — but they met every condition required to belong in that category all the same.
There was, however, one thing that set spirits starkly apart from ordinary summons.
They were beings that devoured souls.
Where ordinary summons took a hunter's mana as payment for their power, spirits manifested into this world in exchange for the power of the soul.
This was also why Oh Hyeon-seong accumulated mana not in the conventional form other hunters used, but as circulating rings.
His mana had its roots in the power of the soul, after all.
His unique constitution — Spirit Affinity, the only one of its kind in the entire world — fundamentally changed the source of his mana.
He devoured the souls of monsters to accumulate mana, then allocated a portion of that accumulated power to establish contracts with spirits.
Tsutstsutsut!
"Whew."
A wisp of pure white breath drifted from Oh Hyeon-seong's lips. Having absorbed the souls of every last Armored Centipede lying collapsed around him, his complexion had visibly improved. Not a trace of exhaustion remained anywhere on him.
"Nothing since I took down Grimhel last time — so thanks to you, I just swallowed about ten bottles of tonic in one go. Didn't see that coming."
The souls of ordinary monsters were, on their own, too weak for absorption to mean much.
But thanks to the creature having mass-produced boss-class monsters in droves, he'd been able to absorb an enormous quantity of souls.
His body had gone a full five years without consuming a single soul.
Aside from the Lurker-Type he'd absorbed after leaving the hospital, he had been in a state of complete fasting — so his body received the freshly ingested flood of souls all the more voraciously.
Deep within his dantian, the rings of mana surged and churned violently, reacting to the rich wave of power they were tasting for the first time in an age.
"What a grotesque look on you — all high and mighty. Whether or not your mana recovers, nothing chang—"
"How about you get out of there first."
Kwajijik!
Massive spikes of freezing cold erupted upward, tearing through the darkness.
The frigid spikes charged in with no physical room to evade, and they skewered the creature's form right through.
But they never actually reached it.
They had passed clean through that smoke-like body without dealing a shred of damage.
Then, the instant Oh Hyeon-seong clenched his fist—
Every spike that had erupted detonated at once, unleashing a raging blizzard of ice.
Paseuseuseu.
"Kghk!"
Batola was dragged out into the open.
The first look at his true form in so long — unchanged from before.
A humanoid monster of black shadow, crowned with four glowing red eyes.
That rippling mass of dark shadow gained a physical body the moment it left the darkness behind.
Which meant physical blows could now land.
Jjeok!
Oh Hyeon-seong closed the distance in a heartbeat and drove his fist square into the creature's face. The monster went flying and slammed hard into the ice-coated wall.
"First, that's for putting me through all that grief."
The ceiling and walls were already thick with the ice he'd laid down — a measure taken in advance so the creature couldn't cast its shroud of darkness and flee.
It was a simple but effective trick, one only possible because Oh Hyeon-seong knew exactly how the creature spread its darkness.
"GRAAAAH!"
An enraged Batola roared. The shadow cloaking its body writhed, and black blades sprouted forth from it. The creature glared at Oh Hyeon-seong with murderous eyes.
It absolutely despised taking physical hits.
Especially from the lesser species it called humans.
"I will kill you!"
Batola charged in an instant, blades sweeping. Whether hunter or monster, those blades would cleanly carve through flesh and bone at the slightest graze — a genuine threat.
Sword drawn, Oh Hyeon-seong parried and deflected each attack. At the same time, he unleashed spirit arts alongside Alvern, striking at the creature.
But as expected, it didn't fall easy.
It moved far faster, freely widening and closing the distance at will, weaving this way and that through the rain of spirit attacks all while pressing Oh Hyeon-seong hard.
Kwaaak!
"Ghk...!"
A long gash opened along his side. Fortunately it wasn't deep, but the situation was far from good.
"You fool! Did you really think you could beat me in that wretched state of yours!"
Batola had been relentlessly targeting his left leg this whole time.
Living as a farmer, Oh Hyeon-seong's leg had recovered enough to endure even a battle this fierce. But a recovery was not a cure, and it lagging behind the rest of his body was simply unavoidable.
And since exploiting human weaknesses was Batola's specialty, it had identified that flaw at a glance and hammered at it with infuriating persistence.
"To think the one who was once my greatest rival could fall so low... it's an eyesore, frankly!"
Teong!
Pushed onto the defensive, Oh Hyeon-seong was driven steadily backward — until at last his chin came to rest against the very wall of ice he himself had raised.
"Hah. Well, I managed to stall you pretty well, all things considered."
"That's your last will and testament? That pathetic little thing?"
"No, it's a victory speech."
"What nonsense are you—"
"Why don't you turn around?"
At the far end of the passage sat the core of the gate.
It pulsed with an enormous working of energy — the power source sustaining the entire gate.
And standing atop it was a low-tier fire spirit, so small in presence that no one had noticed it was there.
"Kyakkyak!"
And it looked utterly delighted with itself, to boot.
"Y-you little...!"
"There was no reason to leave the core you planted as your bait sitting there untouched, was there?"
Batola had assumed the man's entire fighting force was a single spirit.
Which was, in truth, an accurate assumption. By their standards, the power of a low-tier spirit was utterly meaningless.
But that was only by their standards. It was more than enough to destroy a gate core left completely undefended.
"Detonate it."
"No—!"
Kwaaaaang!
In that instant, the fire spirit — brimming to bursting with mana — erupted in a violent explosion of flame that swallowed the core whole.
The core was destroyed in one blow, and the collapse of the gate began.
Of course, destroying the core didn't mean the monsters inside would suddenly be annihilated. Full collapse would take time.
Hunters were no different from monsters in that regard — fail to escape the gate within that window, and they too would be wiped out.
The only difference was that in a gate that hadn't yet reached its eruption stage, monsters could not get out, while hunters could.
"GRAAAAAAAK!"
Batola let out a shriek of agony. The shadow coiled around its body thrashed wildly.
The creature had tampered with the gate's core in order to seize control of the gate's interior wholesale. The problem was the backlash: with the core abruptly destroyed, its dominion had been severed in an instant, and the recoil and fallout crashed into it in full.
"That pain like your whole body being shredded to pieces — that's what you get."
Oh Hyeon-seong advanced on the fallen Batola one measured step at a time.
No matter how strong the enemy, once they'd fallen into a trap like this and bared their weakness, ending them was simple. There was nothing to gain by dragging it out, so he raised his sword at once, intending to cut the creature down in a single stroke.
But at that very moment—
Kwaaaaaaang!
Along with a colossal shockwave that burst forth—
The gate underwent a full-scale eruption.
Hudududuk!
"Ugh... UAAAH!"
"Those are corpses?"
Before the hunters of the Bureau waiting on standby, an overwhelming number of Armored Centipede corpses came pouring out of nowhere.
The bodies inside had apparently been spat out by the eruption — but who on earth had wiped out this many monsters? It was nothing short of astonishing.
"Deputy Director...!"
"Yes, I see it."
Han Su-yeon nodded.
Before the operation had even entered its fourth phase, the gate had suddenly gone berserk, triggering a massive eruption. This wasn't the typical outpouring from the gate's mouth — monsters had suddenly spewed out from every direction at once.
As a result, the blast of the eruption had caught a far wider area than anyone had anticipated, and the number of living centipedes mixed in with the corpses was substantial too.
Still, because every civilian had been evacuated and the controlled zone designated in advance, the damage was contained.
'But... the monsters aren't the problem.'
At the heart of the zone, where the gate's entrance had stood, a black fog had suddenly materialized, encasing the center in the shape of a dome. One look was enough to tell something was deeply wrong, and the hunters found their eyes pulled helplessly toward it.
They could feel an immense quantity of energy raging out of control in there.
But of everyone beholding that sight, the one most stunned was Han Su-yeon herself.
'That's definitely... a being that died in the past. Why is it suddenly—'
"Deputy Director! It looks like the gate's boss got pulled out along with everything else! We'll push in right away and—!"
"Don't you dare approach!"
Han Su-yeon snapped urgently into the radio.
"Focus on the centipedes in front of you, right now! We intercept everything that poured out — nothing else. And above all... that thing is not an enemy any of you should be standing in front of."
"So it could pull off something like this, too?"
Oh Hyeon-seong rose unsteadily from where he'd been thrown, groaning.
An ability to purge everything inside a collapsing gate out into the open. This was beyond anything he could have predicted.
"Ghhhgnk!"
Batola groaned in pain as it crawled along the ground. But even in that state, there wasn't the slightest sign it was about to die.
Truly, not a creature that went down easily.
The sudden ejection had left Oh Hyeon-seong's own head ringing too, but he picked his sword back up and strode toward the creature step by step.
Batola was a child of the Queen.
It was a being of such high order that it could reduce even the boss monsters of most S-Rank gates to playthings, and it carried a soul of correspondingly immense magnitude.
In a word — it would be extraordinarily delicious.
"You fool. Planning to wade into the mire again? You already lost all your spirits and broke yourself apart doing it."
At Batola's words as it pushed itself up from the ground, Oh Hyeon-seong stopped dead in his tracks.
"Read my mind just now, did you?"
"Kheheh. Step into an endless war, and all that awaits is the same ruin. Humans wear down and crumble in the end, swallowed up by battles no one will ever acknowledge."
Batola rasped as it staggered upright — desperate to carve even a crack into him.
Had it been the man of the past, the words might have shaken him a little.
But the man standing here now didn't waver in the slightest.
"Whether anyone acknowledges it or not isn't my problem."
"You would repeat a war that means nothing?"
"No. It means plenty."
It would be a lie to say the long war hadn't worn him down at all.
The patriotism for country a heroic hunter was supposed to carry, the great cause of fighting for the people — those had long since lost their fuel and faded pale. He probably had no right to be called a legend or a hero anymore.
But none of that mattered.
He had come all this way and drawn his sword for one thoroughly personal reason.
"I fight for one reason only — because I have a home to go back to. Anyone who disturbs my everyday life, I will kill. So..."
Oh Hyeon-seong raised his sword toward the creature.
"You die again, too."