Gacha Pull
Lee Tae-hyun's failure was a foregone conclusion.
A C-rank gate — solo, cleared in five hours?
'Absolutely ridiculous!'
Success wasn't even up for debate. The consensus was that surviving in there at all would count as a stroke of luck.
Tae-hyun himself knew it, and so did Cheonseong Group. Nobody was fool enough to miss that.
'What's their real game here?'
The public began digging for the hidden truth behind Tae-hyun's actions.
"It's obviously a sympathy play," one talk show panelist said. "Cheonseong's cutting off the rotten tail. If he dies inside the gate, they can write it off as an accident."
A masked YouTuber spread the rumor far and wide.
Someone on an anonymous forum pinned up a falsehood that might as well have been the truth.
No one held out hope. No one could hold out hope.
Because this was Lee Tae-hyun they were talking about.
Scum of humanity. F-rank trash. A degenerate. The coward who got his comrades killed and ran.
The world despised Lee Tae-hyun, and everyone believed in his failure without a shred of doubt.
And then, today—
TICK!
A new record was carved into the world.
4 hours, 51 minutes, 29 seconds.
The time it took Lee Tae-hyun to clear a C-rank gate — alone.
"…What in the actual hell."
Seong Ju-ah clicked her tongue as the record glowed on her monitor.
She'd investigated and compiled the file on the Daegu C-rank gate — now nicknamed the Lee Tae-hyun Gate — replaying it over and over in her head, and the number was still absurd.
"Is this for real? Is this actually happening?"
By all public accounts it had been a C-rank gate, but its difficulty had spiked midway through. That alone was news enough to turn the whole country upside down.
'The gate's difficulty clearly transformed mid-raid.'
The gate Tae-hyun entered had jumped in rank while he was inside. In other words, he had cleared something beyond C-rank in under five hours and walked out on his own two feet without a scratch worth mentioning.
The more she turned it over, the more surreal it became.
"This is driving me insane…"
Her fingers froze on the keyboard, and she glanced out the window. The people wandering the street in twos and threes all had their eyes glued to their phones.
He'd cleared the gate just yesterday. The story was beyond fresh — it was white-hot.
Everywhere you looked, everywhere you went, it was nothing but Lee Tae-hyun. Most reactions ranged from skepticism to outright confusion.
Over at the Hunter Bureau, the red alert sirens were wailing yet again. Ever since the Bureau got tangled up with Lee Tae-hyun, there hadn't been a single calm day.
The poor officer in charge of awakening-grade measurements nearly got slapped with a formal reprimand — and would have, if he hadn't dug up Tae-hyun's measurement records right that second.
An awakened person's status window can only be viewed by the individual. Which is why, for the sake of official records — and to prevent rank forgery — every awakened person has their grade reassigned at the Bureau using the Measuring Device.
Lee Tae-hyun's grade was F. No matter how you looked at it, F.
'They say the device's accuracy is 99.99%, right?'
The only reason it wasn't listed as 100% was optics — for all practical purposes, it was 100%. Not once in history had a hunter's true limits ever contradicted the grade the device produced.
"…In Korea, anyway."
Seong Ju-ah rifled through the documents stacked beside her.
Documented Cases of Measuring Device Error
After an all-nighter's worth of incidental digging, the results were in. Across the entire world, there were exactly three recorded cases where a measuring device's grade had failed to match the hunter's actual limits.
Fujiwara Manabu of Japan — the Sword Demon.
Viktor of Russia — the so-called strongest of the primates.
And Veronica — the Saintess.
"……"
Three might sound like a lot, but weighed against the number of awakened people born worldwide, it was nothing. And those irregulars all shared one thing in common: each had been assigned a below-average grade, yet now stood at the very summit.
Considering the influence those three wielded over the world, anyone would swallow nervously at the thought.
'If Lee Tae-hyun turned out to be the same kind of case…'
It was only natural for her thoughts to drift that far. And yet Seong Ju-ah had no choice but to shake off that hope immediately.
The Lee Tae-hyun she'd seen through her own eyes had been the very portrait of a pathetic man.
'If he'd had that kind of power, he never would have fled a B-rank gate in the first place.'
Hadn't there been an incident that flatly disproved the entire theory? The photo of Lee Tae-hyun sprinting out of a gate, tears and snot streaming down his face, was still being used as a meme on the internet.
"No chance he's an irregular."
She smacked her lips and filed the materials away. Then paused.
"…Still, I can't help but wonder."
What had happened inside the gate yesterday? How had Tae-hyun cleared it — and if he'd used some workaround, what was it? And more than anything… what exactly was this gate difficulty surge phenomenon? How had he responded to it, and how had he made it out alive?
'I want to know.'
Seong Ju-ah felt a thirst she hadn't felt in a long while.
'It's driving me crazy!'
A thirst called curiosity — provocative, relentlessly scraping at her nerves.
"Senior! I brought drinks!"
Right on cue, Kim Su-hyeok walked into the office with a cup in each hand. The contents were, as always, pitch-black, extra-strength iced triple-shot Americanos.
"Thanks."
Seong Ju-ah took a cup and downed the coffee in one gulp. Drink enough coffee and you stop tasting the bitterness altogether — it felt like her taste buds were being detonated one by one, and a strange melancholy washed over her. That was when—
"Well, well. Somebody's looking sharp today, Su-hyeok. Got a blind date or something?"
Seong Ju-ah asked with a knowing, teasing look. Kim Su-hyeok was a different man from yesterday — instead of the rumpled shirt of a weeks-long overtime grind, he wore a crisply pressed three-piece suit, and his grimy face was freshly scrubbed and gleaming.
Though the dead-tired expression remained exactly the same.
"Where would I find time for a blind date…? I had somewhere to be, so I rushed through a sauna scrub on the way back."
"And where exactly was that?"
Kim Su-hyeok let out a deep sigh before answering — and in that same instant, Seong Ju-ah's eyes glinted.
"…Oh-ho?"
The corners of her coffee-sipping mouth crept upward. It was a smile that somehow resembled a snake's.
The moment I got home, I washed up haphazardly and collapsed onto the bed.
The long-awaited C-rank gate raid. There'd been a few small wrinkles, but it had ended in an unqualified success. I was more tired than expected and a little more banged up, but all's well that ends well.
'And yet.'
Grempel's final words still lingered in my head.
'Outsider… do not trust the Monarchs.'
"……"
Monarchs. The moment I heard that word, someone came to mind unbidden.
The Iron Blood Monarch. The monster that had devastated the Earth of my previous timeline and driven humanity to extinction. Barring some bizarre twist, I would inevitably cross paths with him in this iteration too.
'Monarchs,' plural.
Don't tell me there were more of those things out there. And if there were…
"…Enough."
Thinking about it wouldn't change anything. What I needed to figure out right now was what to do next.
I sank my worn-out body into the plush mattress. "Ughhh…" Potions could patch me up, sure, but leaning on them too hard was a bad habit. Knowing exactly how much rest my body needed for a full recovery was important in its own right. I rolled around until sleep took me. "Khhhaaah…"
When I opened my eyes, the sun was high in the sky. I checked the time — two in the afternoon. I'd slept nearly eighteen hours straight.
I was still marveling at how long I'd been out when it clicked.
"Come to think of it, I used a Domain Technique."
Domain Techniques — skills taught to disciples of the Suzaku Spirit Sect. The stats they primarily demanded were Magic Power and Wisdom.
"In my case, that'd be Technique, I guess."
My Magic Power and Wisdom stats had both been unified into Technique.
'So I burned through my mental stamina using a Domain Technique beyond my current level, huh.'
My Eve was an intermediate-tier Domain Technique. By rights, my stats shouldn't have been able to so much as imitate it — but I'd taught myself my own twisted version of Domain Arts, working it out through trial and error. To put it bluntly, I'd learned it through a loophole.
I kept the technique's core ability intact while stripping away every secondary function to minimize the backlash. Take the Eve I'd used mid-battle against Grempel: I bolted on the handicap of sealing every sense except what lay within the domain, and in exchange carried over the ability that Eve itself possessed. The end result was basically a stripped-down, degraded copy of the original.
"And even that, my base stats could only sustain for about three seconds."
It had devoured a monstrous chunk of my mental stamina on top of that.
This gate had made the Body stat the top priority, so I'd trained it intensively — but that didn't mean the others didn't matter. If I wanted to convert all the techniques I carried into proper skills, I'd need to keep steadily developing the rest too.
"Oh, right. That thing should be surfacing soon."
If I could just get my hands on that properly, I wouldn't have to worry about Technique for a good while.
…Setting that aside.
"Almost forgot the most important part."
Suppressing the grin leaking across my face, I opened my interdimensional bracelet.
▷ A ring saturated with savage power. Grants its wearer an unending river of blood and glory. Beware: do not let the madness take hold.
▷ Special Effects
① Berserk Stacking: Gains a 'Berserk' stack the moment combat begins. Attack power rises by 5% per stack. At 30 stacks, the wearer falls into <Frenzy>.
A black band set with a crimson gem. This was the very artifact that had sent Solion's guild master into a murderous rampage.
Berserk Stacking was a special effect whose raw power came hand in hand with a brutal price. As the stacks piled up, reason thinned, savagery took over, and the line between friend and foe blurred away. The higher one's Resistance stat, the more stacks one could endure.
"So how many can I handle right now?"
My Mind stat — Resistance and Luck unified — sat at 10, as ever. Every point I raised would change this ring's efficiency. In theory, I could ride it all the way to 29 stacks, right up to the brink of <Frenzy>. A weapon that granted roughly a 145% attack boost!
Ha! Now that's a steal. A absolute steal.
"Still, I'd better keep it stowed for now."
Mind would need to hit around 30 before I could use it safely. I slipped the ring back into the interdimensional space and pulled out the next rewards.
▷ Grants mastery of one inscribed C-rank skill. Consumed on use.
▷ Inscribed Skill: Five Senses Amplification (C)
▷ A key fragment of unknown material and unknown grade. Gathering all of them should yield a key that unlocks… something.
▷ Special Effect
① Resonance: The fragment draws other fragments toward itself. The acquisition difficulty of the remaining fragments is slightly reduced.
A C-rank skill book, a low-grade random box, and one bluish key fragment.
"A key?"
No telling what it opened until I collected them all — but with the Resonance effect, I'd probably have the full set in no time.
Next, the skill book.
"Five Senses Amplification, huh…"
Just as the name said, it maximized all five senses to sharpen perception — but honestly, compared to other C-rank skills, it was a letdown.
Well, a skill book was a skill book. A skill was a skill. Anything beat having nothing at all.
You have used a C-Rank Skill Book.
You have acquired the inscribed skill.
You have obtained the skill Five Senses Amplification (C).
Next up, the Low-Grade Random Box.
The moment I pressed Use, a familiar cube materialized on my palm.
'Maybe I'll get another Skill Rank Upgrade Ticket this time.'
I was waiting for the box to open without much expectation when—
[An ent■ty that felt ■nterest in the outc■me has ■nterfered w■th the 'Random Box' probabilit■es.]
[Causal■ty Syst■m engage■!]
[A high■r being ■estows caus■l favor.]
Zzzzzzzrrrt—!
[The reward has been successfully adjusted.]
Suspicious messages flickered onto the screen, crackling with static.
"…Huh? What the…"
Before I could even parse the noise-choked text — as if the whole thing had caught a bug —
Viiiiiiiing!
Light began pouring out of the box. A torrent of it. Dazzling gold lanced straight into my optic nerves.
"AAGH! MY EYES!"
Wasn't this presentation a little different from the first time I'd opened one?!
Squinting through the glare, I watched the box swing open.
The highest-tier reward?