The Fifth Attribute
"I'm going to kill you here and now."
Batola's eyes glowed a menacing red.
A moment later, a sinister aura began pouring out of the creature.
It no longer regarded him as some degraded, weakened human — it truly saw him as a threat from the past, an old nemesis to be eliminated.
Tsssshhk!
Batola's rampaging form began to twist and distort.
It had started merging with the black dome of darkness that enclosed the area around them.
At the sight of it, Oh Hyeon-seong's brow furrowed.
Anyone else might not have noticed, but to someone who had taken the full backlash of a destroyed gate core, this was a reckless, self-destructive gambit.
"...Planning to take me down with you, are you?"
Vwooom!
In an instant, pitch-black darkness seized control of the entire space.
An unknown realm where nothing could be seen or felt.
Hiding himself within the darkness, Batola once again concealed his form, glaring at Oh Hyeon-seong from the shadows.
Craaang!
An attack came from behind, and Oh Hyeon-seong reacted on pure instinct.
But matching the timing perfectly was impossible, and the impact sent him skidding backward.
His arm throbbed with pain, and small cracks spidered across his sword.
The power of a creature fully merged into the darkness was such that even a hunter's equipment couldn't withstand it.
At this rate, it'll snap after a few more blocks.
Oh Hyeon-seong looked down at his sword impassively.
Soon, hallucinations began to appear around him.
A hopeless battlefield. The deaths of comrades. Spirits being devoured and erased.
Memories and visions his trauma could exploit unfolded before him one after another.
Sound and sight alike flooded vividly into his mind.
But Oh Hyeon-seong simply let out a short sigh.
"Sorry, but this kind of trick just feels childish now."
Caang!
He struck down Batola's attack as it flew at him through the illusions.
No amount of theatrical hallucinations could deceive his eyes anymore.
"No wonder you lost to Baek Ji-soo. You always retreat instead of fighting when it comes to me."
Batola's method of hunting humans.
Regardless of a hunter's strength or skill, it worked devastatingly well against certain people.
But conversely, against certain others, it was utterly useless — a fatal mismatch.
Oh Hyeon-seong was, naturally, the latter.
Moreover, while his body might fall short of its prime, his mind was harder than it had ever been.
"Alvern, let's see some of that old skill of yours."
Alvern smiled and gave a graceful nod.
Uncharacteristically, the spirit looked visibly excited.
Well, of course — a water spirit about to unleash its true techniques for the first time in ages.
Techniques that would be meaningless without a properly massive reserve of mana backing them up.
Woooong!
A tremendous wave of mana flowed out of Oh Hyeon-seong.
In the past, he had forged five condensed mana rings in his dantian, but even now, with only a single ring restored, his mana capacity effortlessly surpassed that of most high-tier hunters.
But in this very moment—
He drew upon the mana he had sealed away, and forged a second ring in his dantian.
It was more than his current body could safely endure.
His creaking frame groaned under the immense strain, but a few moments were all he needed.
"Graaaaah!"
Toward the roaring, rampaging Batola charging at him, he extended his hand.
"You — go cool that head of yours off."
Kugugugugu!
The ground shook as a colossal torrent of water surged skyward.
Massive waves rose on either side, filling their vision before swallowing everything — darkness and all.
After the gate's sudden eruption, the armored centipedes were annihilated before they could breach the defensive line that had been established in advance.
Despite the massive incident unfolding in the heart of the city, swift response meant no civilian casualties occurred.
Of course, that owed a great deal to the boss monster never going on a rampage.
No matter how quickly forces responded and intercepted, if an S-rank gate-level boss monster erupted, the damage to the city would grow exponentially.
Thud. Thud.
Hunters from the Management Bureau pushed inside to confirm whether any remnants of the monsters remained.
Among the sprawling corpses of the insect monsters—
Han Su-yeon found Ju Ji-hye collapsed on the ground, face pressed against the pavement.
"Ji-hye! Are you all right?"
"Wow... it's the sky."
Half-lidded, Ju Ji-hye mumbled in a daze.
Barely a single day had passed, yet to her, the time trapped inside the gate had felt far, far longer.
I really survived, she thought, a storm of emotions churning inside her.
Then, belatedly noticing Han Su-yeon standing beside her, she relaxed even further.
"Hehe... I... I did it."
Ju Ji-hye, still smiling, suddenly slumped over, out cold.
Han Su-yeon examined her condition closely and, thankfully, found no visible injuries — only exhaustion.
Though beyond physical fatigue, she had burned through every last drop of mana in her body, showing clear symptoms of mana depletion as well.
She really... took down all those thousands of armored centipedes by herself?
Armored centipedes were mana-devouring monsters; conventional mana projection at ordinary levels of skill simply didn't work on them.
Yet the colossal tide of centipede corpses that had spilled out of the gate lay brutally destroyed, every one of them bearing the traces of telekinesis.
Even the massive centipede presumed to be the boss monster was no exception.
If all of them had fallen to Ju Ji-hye's hand, then what that implied was self-evident.
"Looks like... we'll need to revise the 11th-grade hunter registry."
Han Su-yeon allowed herself a faint smile.
The treatment afforded to Grade 10 and Grade 11 hunters within the nation was a difference of heaven and earth.
"Get her out of here, quickly."
Ju Ji-hye was carried out by the Bureau's hunters.
She was now one of the nation's rarest and most precious assets; she could expect the most attentive care imaginable during her recovery.
But Han Su-yeon's work wasn't finished yet.
Moving alone, she came to stand before the black dome that had formed alongside the eruption.
Those two are definitely... inside there.
Han Su-yeon placed her hand on the surface of the dome.
It was a barrier designed to repel outside intrusion, but she was prepared to tear it open by force if she had to.
For her, that was no difficult feat.
But even before she could try, she could feel the barrier already weakening.
"Seems it's already over."
With a light manipulation of her mana, the black dome barring her way parted open.
Then, through the crack, a torrent of water came pouring out of nowhere.
Shaaaash!
"Eek."
Having stepped aside, she waited until most of the water had drained out, then peeked her head through the opening.
The entire area within the dome was soaked through, flooded ankle-deep with water.
And not just any water — it was remarkably pure and pristine, the kind rarely seen these days.
Not merely in appearance, but in its very essence.
Hm.
She waded inside the dome.
Passing through the flooded cityscape, she spotted Oh Hyeon-seong sitting perched on a low wall.
And before him lay the corpse of the colossal monster, half-submerged in the water.
Batola lay utterly motionless, the broken sword driven deep into its skull.
"You did it, Sunbae."
"I thought I was going to die of exhaustion."
Oh Hyeon-seong shook his head wearily, and Han Su-yeon chuckled, coming over to sit beside him.
She'd been bothered by her trousers getting soaked for a while now, so she kept her feet raised slightly off the ground.
"Batola, of all things... just how long was that thing inside the gate?"
"Maybe a month... two? No — I honestly don't know."
Oh Hyeon-seong gave up on estimating.
That wasn't what mattered right now.
"A Named Monster that should have died long ago has reappeared. Do you know anything about this?"
His voice was grave.
Members of the same 'species' as something slain in the past crossing over through a gate was an everyday occurrence.
But a single 'individual' — already confirmed dead — returning from the grave? That had never once happened.
Other hunters might be fooled, but there was no way Baek Ji-soo had failed to verify it properly.
By her own account, she'd hacked the thing into dozens of pieces back then.
Mistaking it was simply not possible under those circumstances.
"...Sunbae, do you remember me saying I was about to get busy?"
"You mean back when you first came to my house?"
"Right. Around that time, word came in on our end. That a group of Special Species had been discovered in China."
"Special Species — don't tell me..."
"The Queen's old servants were sighted. It wasn't fully reliable intelligence, but the reports kept coming, again and again, so we judged it a sign we couldn't afford to ignore."
At her words, Oh Hyeon-seong's expression darkened.
The Queen's legion — the ones he'd believed they had uprooted completely after the final battle five years ago.
The Queen's Special Species were of an entirely different stock from common monsters; even scattered remnants could escalate into a catastrophic problem.
If even a handful survived, they could swell their numbers at will and turn on humanity — a plague in the truest sense.
"But this is the first time one of the Queen's children has ever been found. As for the Queen herself, we confirmed her death with our own eyes and even recovered the body, so there's nothing to worry about there. But with Batola showing up in the flesh like this... things just got a lot more complicated."
It meant the situation could be even worse than they had anticipated.
The pursuit was already well underway — hunters from the Management Bureau had been dispatched all the way to China to investigate.
And that was nowhere near as easy as it sounded.
After the gate crisis, China had become a no-man's-land where humans could not survive, save for parts of the south.
Gates spawning without end, spewing forth monsters — a land overflowing with nests, the worst demon realm on Earth.
It was also the foremost line of the old monster front, where he had endured the most brutal fighting of his Special Task Force days.
"So they're being put through the wringer over there too, huh."
"Breaking through to the Root has been a real struggle. No confirmed intelligence from the field yet, but something should come out of it soon."
"If any information comes in from your side, tell me right away."
"Of course."
There was no way the Bureau could withhold anything from Oh Hyeon-seong, the man at the center of this entire affair.
They planned to recover Batola's corpse and subject it to analysis as well.
Of course, there was something he had to do first.
Let's have a taste of this, shall we?
Splash!
Oh Hyeon-seong sprang to his feet and stood before the creature's corpse.
It had settled sufficiently — the perfect state for absorption.
He wrenched the sword from its skull and flung it aside, then absorbed the enormous soul contained within the beast.
The moment the soul flowed into his body, it churned and roiled, transforming into a massive quantity of mana.
As expected — it's an enormous amount.
The soul, far vaster than the combined souls of ten armored centipede bosses, disgorged a torrent of mana.
Oh Hyeon-seong felt a considerable satisfaction as he directed the absorbed mana toward his dantian.
Thump!
Wh... what is this?
But he was caught off guard.
For some reason, the absorbed mana refused to merge with his existing reserves.
The mana he had accumulated in the past and the mana harvested from recent souls — Batola's among them — refused to mix together.
If anything... the recently absorbed mana is clumping together on its own?
Focusing his mind on the strange phenomenon unfolding in his dantian, he tried to calm the roiling mana and bring its flow back under his control.
But before he could lift a finger, this new, alien mana coalesced into a single mass — and forged yet another ring inside his body.
Woooong!
"S... Sunbae?"
"What is this?"
Oh Hyeon-seong stared down at his own body in a daze.
Not fire. Not water. Not earth. Not life.
A sixth ring — bearing an attribute entirely unlike anything he had ever possessed — had taken root within him.