Kim Siwoo (1)
Kim Siwoo (1)
Having stayed inside the Tower for so long, I had absolutely no idea how the outside world was turning.
Subduing that bastard who was swinging my equipment like a madman right in front of my eyes was, honestly, a piece of cake.
But the risk of my identity being exposed was far too great.
I possessed the unique ability called [Primeval Maker].
Since I wouldn't take any damage, I didn't even need to dodge.
Yet, perhaps because the combat experience from climbing the Tower was etched into my very bones, my body reacted first, leisurely sidestepping his ferocious attacks with utter ease.
Even in the split second when a razor-sharp blade passed within a paper-thin margin of my eye, my mind churned with complexity.
'What should I do?'
Just continuing to dodge like this was bound to draw attention.
Should I just slip away and quietly flee?
But the fact that they attacked me—of all things—with equipment I had crafted myself scratched at my insides raw.
I lightly parried the incoming flat of the blade and swept my gaze around.
The road was deeply gouged, and from the collapsed building's exterior walls, a hazy dust ceaselessly poured down.
The once peaceful cityscape of Seoul had transformed into a truly wretched ruin.
From the fact that they were using my precious equipment to carry out such a brainless act of terror, to every single situation unfolding right before my eyes—more than a thing or two disgusted me.
But I let out a deep sigh, suppressed the boiling rage, and thought coldly.
Yeah, acting all emotional here wouldn't do me a single bit of good.
If I stepped in and smashed them to pieces, only my identity would be broadcast to the entire world, yielding nothing but sheer losses.
'You better consider yourself really damn lucky.'
I inwardly snapped at the bastard in icy disdain, took a step back, and tried to find a gap to escape.
That was the moment.
—Thwack!
With a dull, heavy impact sound, a man in a suit came hurtling through the air from afar and crash-landed near my feet.
A torn suit drenched in blood.
Rolling on the ground and groaning, he was an Association employee.
The Association employee gasped breaths that seemed ready to snap as he barely managed to reach his hand out toward me, his voice filled with death.
"Cough... Are you a... Hunter...? The Red Scale Guild is nearby. Could you... go request reinforcements on my behalf...? Tell them we are currently confronting five members of the Cipher organization......"
At the Association employee's desperately wrenched-out words, coughed up with blood, I doubted my own ears.
"Cipher?"
It was that name I had seen in the internet news not long ago.
A notorious international crime syndicate infamous for engaging in all sorts of terrorism and kidnappings on a global stage.
No sooner had I harbored the doubt than a giant of a man came striding through the hazy dust cloud from afar.
In his hand, he held a massive blunt weapon the size of a human torso.
And behind that giant of a man, two women holding a bow and a staff, one man wielding a sharp dagger, and finally, the man who had been swinging a sword right before my eyes—a total of five figures revealed themselves.
The moment I confirmed their appearance, I was so dumbfounded I nearly let out a hollow laugh.
The weapons they were clenching and the subtly gleaming defensive gear wrapped around their bodies.
Every single piece of equipment they had on and held was something I had sweated to create in my workshop.
Thud. Thud. With rough, heavy footsteps, the giant of a man who had strode right up to me raised the blunt weapon in his hands all the way above his head.
Even before his menacing bloodlust, I asked, perfectly calm and composed.
"You guys are Cipher? That global criminal syndicate?"
At my collected question, the giant distorted his facial muscles and sneered.
"And if so, what the hell can you do about it?"
Along with his mocking reply, the large blunt weapon that had been blotting out the sky came crashing down ferociously toward my head.
—KWAAAAANG!
With an ear-splitting roar, the blunt weapon pummeled the ground, causing a tremendous shockwave to erupt.
Soil and dust billowed fiercely in all directions, obscuring the view.
The giant of a man, still in his follow-through posture of striking down with the blunt weapon, turned his head toward the sword-wielding bastard who had been attacking me just moments earlier and said sarcastically.
"You said you'd kill 'em all by yourself, and you can't even handle one guy like this properly?"
At the giant's mockery, the man with the sword flared up as if stung, veins bulging, and shot back.
"Aaah~~? You want me to kill you first? And that bastard's weird. My attacks don't work on him at all."
At those words, the giant's face crumpled into a deep scowl.
"What kind of nonsensical bullshit..."
The giant was about to finish his sentence with a snort of derision.
The thick dust slowly lifted, and from beyond it, an unbelievable sight was revealed.
I was gripping the head of the massive blunt weapon tightly with a single hand.
My grip strength, bursting from my Strength stat that had long since shattered the three-digit mark, was so immense that the giant's face had flushed beet red from the strain, yet he still couldn't wrench the blunt weapon free.
Still holding the blunt weapon, I turned my gaze to check my feet.
Due to the shockwave caused when the blunt weapon had slammed into the ground moments ago, the bleeding Association employee had completely lost consciousness.
'If you could call that a relief... maybe it is, in a way.'
After all, it meant the witness who would have observed me displaying my strength had disappeared.
My thoughts concluded, I gently released my hand from the blunt weapon.
And then, I swept a dry, expressionless gaze over the five members of the organization called Cipher.
As soon as I let go, the giant of a man who had been staggering off balance, along with the other members who had been so full of mockery, flinched as if sensing something seriously amiss and each swiftly took up a combat stance.
Immediately after, from afar, magic and arrows from the two women with staff and bow flew in ferociously, and at close range—from sword, dagger, and even the blunt weapon I had just released—a flurry of deadly attacks assailed me simultaneously from multiple angles.
"Die!!!"
The same demon-possessed roar tore from the mouths of all five Cipher members.
But I neither dodged nor blocked.
I simply stood still in that spot and did nothing.
—Clang! Clank! Thwack!
The sounds of sharp weaponry and destructive magic striking my body resounded noisily.
Yet their attacks failed to leave a single scratch on my skin, and even the thin collar of what I was wearing remained untorn as they all dissipated futilely.
When their all-out attack—everything they had poured in—proved completely ineffective, the color drained from the members' faces.
Thick beads of cold sweat fell from their foreheads as they muttered in panicked voices.
"Wh... why isn't this working...?"
Baffled by a reality they utterly could not comprehend, the Cipher members were trembling violently, their weapon-holding hands shaking.
I slowly raised my head toward them.
At that instant, their eyes collided head-on with my own.
It was the thick, vicious killing intent that had seeped into my very marrow—bred from climbing the Tower from the 1st Floor to the 22nd Floor, snuffing the breath out of countless monsters, and walking the razor's edge of life and death against monstrous bosses.
The moment they met that heavy gaze—stained by countless experiences across life-or-death battlefields—all five members froze solid in place, like herbivores thrown before a gargantuan predator.
In the heart of the ruins where even their breathing had stopped, I lightly clenched and unclenched my fists and slowly approached their frozen forms.
"I've got quite a lot of things I'm really curious about. You guys are gonna have to give me some answers."
In the heart of Seoul, where collapsed building wreckage and acrid dust swirled together.
Hong Chae-yeon and Cha Seo-yun were gasping for rough breaths that rose to their chins, constantly wiping away the sweat dripping down.
Where their gazes were trained, the Cipher branch manager stood tall.
He was fully armed to the teeth with the highest quality Mithril defensive gear made by SW, and in his hand, he gripped a gigantic axe as big as a human torso.
Hong Chae-yeon exhaled and spoke.
"He's stronger than I thought..."
At her words, Cha Seo-yun answered in a dry voice that nonetheless plainly betrayed her exhaustion.
"That's what I say. I originally had no interest in the equipment side, but that armor is so ridiculously sturdy my sword will break first."
Hearing the two's conversation, the Cipher branch manager threw his shoulders back and burst into a hearty laugh.
"Kuhahahaha! So the so-called Rankers are weaklings after all! Or could it be that I, who possesses a Unique job, have simply grown strong?!"
At the unexpected word that popped out of the branch manager's mouth, Hong Chae-yeon's eyes widened in surprise and she asked.
"Unique grade...? The same as Kim Yu-seong...?"
As if her reaction were amusing, the branch manager let out a derisive snort and jeered.
"What's there to be shocked about? Did you really believe there were only three people in the whole world with a Unique grade?"
He thumped his thick Mithril breastplate—clang, clang—and carried on leisurely.
"This person SW seems like they'd at least be a Unique grade job holder too, don't you think?"
Hong Chae-yeon couldn't readily refute those words.
It was because, while she had privately guessed that Si-woo was in possession of a grade far above the rest in a league of his own, she hadn't gone so far as to impolitely pry further than that.
But such idle thoughts weren't important right now.
Taking down the enemy before their eyes was the priority.
A crimson blaze ignited fiercely in Hong Chae-yeon's hands.
"You ready, Seo-yun-ah?"
Cha Seo-yun also nodded silently, gently grasping the hilt of the sword sheathed at her waist.
Without a moment's delay, Hong Chae-yeon launched a colossal fireball at the Cipher branch manager.
The house-sized mass of flame tore across the empty air with ferocious momentum.
But the branch manager, trusting in the superior magic resistance of his Mithril armor, didn't even make an attempt to dodge.
As if flaunting that petty magic wouldn't work on him, he rested his axe on his shoulder and gave a derisive snort.
The moment the fireball squarely slammed into the branch manager's body, Hong Chae-yeon twisted the corners of her lips upward and said mockingly.
"That fire is a little different from what you've seen so far."
The flame she had just released was the very fire that had tormented her relentlessly for ten years.
The fireball was unable to strike through to the inside of the armor in a single blow.
However, the sticky flames adhered to the Mithril armor like a stubborn leech, continuing to burn without going out.
In an instant, the once-solid metal surface heated red-hot and began to spew a horrifying heat.
Flustered by the intense heat seeping into the interior of his armor, the branch manager tried batting at the flames with his large hands.
But the flames, as if ridiculing his pathetic struggles, only blazed larger and more ferociously.
"Kuaaak! ...You bitch, I'll tear you to pieces!!!"
The branch manager's veins bulged with pain and fury as he roared.
In the very instant he raised his axe toward Hong Chae-yeon, she threw out a cold piece of advice.
"What, you haven't forgotten something, have you?"
No sooner had her voice dropped than Cha Seo-yun, who had already slipped in behind the branch manager's back, murmured lowly.
"Six Consecutive Flashes."
Along with the chilly voice, six sharp slashes carved through the air in the blink of an eye.
Cha Seo-yun's sword avoided the solid armor plates and precisely dug into only the empty gaps at every joint—between the helmet and breastplate, behind the knee, the inner elbow, and so forth.
Crimson streams of blood spurted out like a fountain through the chinks of the heavy armor.
"Guugh...!"
Having sustained a critical wound, the branch manager let out a pain-laden groan.
But the branch manager's eyes, now that he had shed blood, soon began to gleam with a red shade of madness.
As if the instinct of the Berserker had awoken, with injury and the flowing of blood, his speed, attack speed, and attack power began to explode exponentially.
Having lost all reason to rage, the branch manager twisted his body at an unbelievable speed and swung his giant axe ferociously toward Cha Seo-yun.
Cha Seo-yun flinched in surprise at the branch manager's speed, which had become incomparably faster than just moments before.
However, since her senses were reading his trajectory, it wasn't a level she was utterly unable to respond to.
She swiftly corrected her stance, lifting her sword to block the heavy axe blade.
In that instant.
Because of the fierce battle that had been ongoing and the last attack she had just forced out beyond her limit, the durability of Cha Seo-yun's sword had reached its breaking point; it could not withstand and shattered into pieces.
Amidst the scattering fragments of the broken sword, the branch manager wore a gruesome smile and spat out cruelly.
"Die."
Having lost even the weapon to defend with, Cha Seo-yun watched the dreadful axe blade draw right up to her eyes and thought.
No other way to block it came to mind.
'Am I dying like this...?'
In that desperate, life-or-death moment, as she inhaled a breath as if resigning herself to fate...
A familiar man's broad back suddenly loomed up, blocking Cha Seo-yun's view.
With his bare hands, the man was lightly catching and stopping the branch manager's massive axe—which had become even stronger and brimmed with monstrous destructive power after bleeding—just like that.
He looked at the two people behind him and let out a light sigh in a relieved tone.
"Phew... I wasn't late."