The Constellation's Game, Laika

Along with the system messages, white light flooded my vision.

Then, a moment later.

Shaaaaaa―

The roar of a fierce wind lashing against my ears was what finally coaxed my eyes open.

"......."

The first thing that greeted me was a forest of gray buildings, collapsed in grotesque ruin. The roads were cracked and overgrown with weeds, and abandoned cars sat scattered about, rusted a deep red.

And yet, every bit of this scenery felt strikingly familiar.

Because.......

This is Gangnam-daero, isn't it?

It was the unmistakable face of Gangnam-daero, the very road I'd visited a time or two even since my return. Granted, it wasn't identical—things were warped and twisted here and there, and the whole place was little more than rubble—but still.

If I had to guess... this would be right in front of Gangnam Station, Exit 11?

But for a long while, I couldn't tear my eyes away from the dungeon's landscape.

The familiarity of the scenery itself was clearly because it resembled Gangnam-daero.......

Yet something beyond that—some inexplicable sense of déjà vu—kept prodding at all five of my senses.

It's not the scenery. This feels closer to a structural kind of déjà vu.

To put the sensation into more concrete terms, it was the feeling of having cleared a dungeon of this exact type at some point before.

"Hmm."

For now, I looked around a little more.

Whether it was fortune or misfortune, not a single person was in sight. One hundred participants scattered at random across a fairly wide stretch of Seoul meant the odds of running into someone right off the bat were naturally slim.

The cold isn't so bad yet either... just a moderate chill.

Out of habit, I opened my inventory first.

Ding!

And just as I'd predicted, a system window sprang up before my eyes. It was identical to the inventory I'd summoned outside the dungeon—except that retrieving and using my equipment was disabled.

This was... the hallmark of a classic 'farming-type dungeon.'

"Figured it'd be like this."

My brain was starting to tingle.

There was no way an artificial dungeon called 'Frozen Seoul' had ever existed on the beta server.

And yet, astonishingly, I was almost certain I had cleared this dungeon before.

A few quick checks should be enough to confirm it.

Was it because this wasn't a real dungeon, just a scrap of graphics? The moment I let doubt take hold, the odd details began snapping into sharper focus.

Thud- thud-

I walked out into the middle of the road and kicked the toppled remains of a streetlight lying at the roadside.

Clang!

Instead of a dull thud, a clear, hollow metallic ring echoed out.

"Thought so."

This time I approached the outer wall of a crumbling building along the road. More precisely, a spot where the concrete had broken away to expose the rebar beneath. Leaning into the gap, I rubbed it lightly with my fingers.

Swooosh.

What came off on my fingertips wasn't cement dust, but a slick, greasy black film. And most decisively of all—

"....Found it."

In the shadow of the collapsed building's wreckage, there sat a circular structure camouflaged as a manhole cover. Anyone else would have walked right past it thinking it was just a sewer. But my eyes saw it differently.

The serial number etched in exquisitely fine detail along the lid's rim drove the final nail into my certainty.

Iron Grave, Sector 3.

Bingo.

Certainty clicked into place. This map was, in essence, the Iron Grave dungeon of the Novark Archipelago with nothing but a Seoul skin slapped over it.

There's no way any of the mentee participants have experienced Iron Grave yet.... So the producers deliberately modeled this on a higher-level dungeon.

That said, the 'body temperature system' itself was a genuine original creation of the production team. The real Iron Grave dungeon had no such restrictions whatsoever.

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

The clear conditions differed too. Unlike Iron Grave, which required killing the boss, here you simply had to survive.

But the crucial part.......

Was that the dungeon's internal gimmicks and the layout of the field looked almost perfectly identical. And that, naturally, worked enormously in my favor.

Fun.

Honestly, artificial dungeons modeled on real ones were nothing unusual. Virtual reality dungeons cost astronomical sums to produce, so the data accumulated from real dungeons' clear runs was too valuable not to reuse.

Either way, that made things refreshingly simple. At least three separate dungeon gimmicks had already sprung to mind.

And most important of all—I could see exactly how this mission would unfold.

The real game starts at Phase 2. That's when the central districts open up.

If Iron Grave was the template, then Frozen Seoul would likewise be divided into phases in sixty-minute increments. Simply put: Phase 1 was farming, Phase 2 was competition.

Phase 3 onward was where true survival began.

So what I needed to do right now was blindingly obvious.

Thud-

Basic farming first.

Before the peaceful Phase 1 slipped away, I had to secure as many Heat Beads and survival supplies as I possibly could. The fact that it was getting colder as time passed was, in all likelihood, a gimmick tied to the phase transitions.

With that in mind, I quickly identified my first target—a vending machine half-buried nearby—and approached it.

CRUNCH! CRACK!

I tore off the machine's flank with my bare hands.......

Then started digging around behind its cooling compressor.

Wow, it's practically identical.

From the cascade of beverage cans that spilled out, I grabbed a few warm ones that still held their heat.......

Ding!

And after ripping off the compressor's lower panel, I found the part I'd been looking for and picked it up.

Its base performance wasn't anything special—but if one particular premise held true, it was a phenomenal value for the cost.

If the monsters here, like the ones in Iron Grave.... were fire-attribute.

The map concept changed, so they've probably stocked it with different monsters....

But what had caught my attention was the fact that the monsters dropped Heat Beads. Logically speaking, only fire-attribute monsters could ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠plausibly drop a Heat Bead.

Well, even if they're not, I can just use it a little and swap it out. No big deal.

Pipe tucked into my belt, I moved on toward my next destination. I ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠slipped into an alley between towering buildings, and there it was—a convenience store with its signboard half fallen off.

If my hunch was right, it would be a 'drug store' disguised as a convenience store.......

Grab one key item here, and my basic preparations would be complete.

This is the last stop for farming. Then I'll start hunting in earnest.

Perhaps it was because every checkpoint had fallen into place exactly as expected—I felt lighter than air as I climbed over the shattered glass door.

Crinkle-

But the very next moment.

"......!"

Reflexively, I froze and brought every nerve in my body to a razor's edge.

This smell.......

Something drifting out from deep inside the store—

a thick, cloying, metallic stench that burned my nostrils.

The waiting room of Sangam Studio was silent.

Seo Ji-hyuk toyed idly with his teacup, watching the screens with an intrigued expression. The PDs were busily flipping between feeds in search of 'interesting moments,' which made observing the mentees anything but boring.

Well, no one particularly impressive has shown themselves yet.

Truth be told, showing anything at all this early was already a tall order. Even the top-tier participants were still too tense, their vision narrowed by nerves. Some seemed overly rattled by the simple knowledge that someone was watching them, spamming flashy skills for no good reason.......

But the keyword of the Hunters School series was, at its heart, the rookies' 'growth.' Looking a little clumsy in the first mission was actually no bad thing.

Still, it'd be nice to see a hint of something special.

Despite himself, Seo Ji-hyuk clicked his tongue lightly. For a mage, he was a rather impatient man.

"Oh ho."

Just then, a low sound of interest escaped Ma Gwang-chul, seated across from him. It was the moment the main screen cut to a new feed.

"Participant Kang Sohee?"

"The youngest daughter of Aesculap, isn't she?"

The other mentors visibly perked up as well. Only a few seconds had passed since the screen switched—but the expectations that came bundled with a participant's background were impossible to ignore. The same went for Seo Ji-hyuk.

"Will this one show us something?"

"The stage is certainly set."

The situation itself was genuinely intriguing. This was still the dungeon's outskirts, where monsters were scarce—and yet Kang Sohee was facing off against quite a sizable number of them. Bad luck, perhaps.

The location on screen was the ruined Gangnam-daero. Kang Sohee stood with her back against the outer wall of a massive building, and before her, three Flame Goblins were charging in with savage ferocity.

Aesculap's youngest daughter, hm.

He'd heard the rumors—that the Aesculap royal family had produced a gifted awakened one.......

And her class appears to be magic-based too.

Little by little, Seo Ji-hyuk's interest began to climb.

FWOOOOSH―!

Thick violet mist came pouring from Kang Sohee's pale white hands.

"Mmm. Poison...?"

Someone murmured, but Seo Ji-hyuk caught himself shaking his head slightly. This was no mere poison magic.

It was a technique that converted highly refined mana into gaseous form to maximize lethality—something closer to a kind of 'matter-decomposition magic,' if anything.

SSSSSK―!

And the power of that unusual magic was... astonishingly, even stronger than what Seo Ji-hyuk had hoped for.

Three seconds. That was all it took for the goblins to melt into blackened, bloody sludge without so much as a scream.

"In terms of pure impact, that's the best we've seen so far."

"Wide-area magic with that kind of output......."

"She's level 41, I believe? That's considerable."

Seo Ji-hyuk's eyes sharpened. That single fleeting moment had fed him no small amount of information.

"That just now—a mana coefficient of at least 300%. That's the kind of output you only see from top rankers' skills."

His eyes were dead accurate. It hadn't simply been flashy. The time required to unleash that explosive burst of mana had been vanishingly short—which meant her mana circuits were terrifyingly efficient.

Not bad at all.

And so, from that one brief scene, Seo Ji-hyuk reached a firm conclusion: at the very least, this participant named Kang Sohee possessed far better potential than expected.

"A promising participant indeed. Though we'll need to watch her problem-solving ability a bit longer......."

At Choi Jae-min's murmur, Han So-eun beside him chimed in with a smile.

"Quite right. The higher-tier the dungeon, the less clearing it can be solved by raw power alone."

But in that exact instant—

Seo Ji-hyuk's eyes caught the fatal flaw hidden behind that spectacular display.

......Hold on.

The monsters had already vanished without a trace. She should have cut off the mana supply and dismissed the technique. That was Mage 101.

And yet.

VWOOOOM―

Purple miasma was still billowing from the fingertips of Kang Sohee on screen. No—if anything, the concentration was growing thicker than before. The nearby streetlights were melting, and pristine sidewalk blocks corroded and smoked. Like a broken faucet, of all things.

She can't close the technique.

However he looked at it, this was no intentional display. This was an unmistakable [Out of Control].

The mentors, detecting the anomaly a beat behind Seo Ji-hyuk, began to speak with worried expressions.

"She can't stop the mana discharge."

"Nervousness. She's failed to control her mana, it seems."

"Tsk. Pouring it out like that, her blood vessels won't hold."

"Exactly. It's like her brakes have failed."

Ma Gwang-chul clicked his tongue lightly, and a collective air of 'what a shame' hung over the room. This was the answer to why Kang Sohee, wielding out-of-spec destructive power, had failed to reach a comparatively higher level.

But... Seo Ji-hyuk found his interest in Kang Sohee sharpening into something even more certain.

Talent rated S, but her vessel can't contain that power.... That's the most precise way to put it.

The screen zoomed in on Kang Sohee's face. A forehead slick with cold sweat, brows knotted in agony. And yet even through it all, her appearance was magnetic. Pale skin and red lips, and cold eyes that refused to crumble even amid the pain. Not merely pretty—something rarer than that. An unmistakable, one-of-a-kind presence.

The calculator in Seo Ji-hyuk's head spun at full speed.

Her control over her own mana was so poor it could trigger Mana Reflux. A fatal flaw, unquestionably.

But conversely... what if that one flaw could be fixed?

Overwhelming firepower. Aesculap backing her. And star power to boot.

In Seo Ji-hyuk's estimation, Kang Sohee's marketability as a star hunter was flawless. Provided, of course, that she passed through the hands of Seo Ji-hyuk and Eclipse.

If her brakes are broken... you just fit her with the finest brakes money can buy.

Eclipse had the magecraft knowledge and the capital to do exactly that.

Even as he thought it, Seo Ji-hyuk's gaze stayed glued to what came after Kang Sohee. On screen, she could no longer endure the pain and was stumbling into a nearby building.

Seo Ji-hyuk, of course, could guess the reason without effort.

"Mana Reflux, most likely. She must be in considerable agony by now."

The Holy Maiden—possessing knowledge on par with Seo Ji-hyuk's own—added a remark of her own.

"Under normal circumstances she'd have taken medicine right away, but unfortunately the inventory is disabled here......."

Kang Sohee would almost certainly post a poor result in this entrance mission. In a dungeon that locked away her inventory, there would be no ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠medicine to take.

But the 'real' competition wouldn't begin until the main mission anyway.

Seo Ji-hyuk raised his teacup and moistened his lips. It was the first time since filming began that his expression had turned serious.

I'd actually prefer she score badly. It would make the negotiations so much smoother.......

While the mentors traded their assorted commentary, the screen tracking Kang Sohee moved on to another participant. The sight of her rifling through painkillers in a convenience store had simply stopped being interesting.

But at this very moment, there was one fact that neither the studio's mentors nor even the production team knew.

And it was this.......

That very soon, Kang Sohee was about to run into 'a rather peculiar participant.'