Spear vs Fist (1)
“…It's not a summon?”
The autopsy of the monster that had appeared near City Hall Station had just concluded, and the investigator in charge was receiving the results.
“Correct. Individuals summoned by awakened hunters almost always leave traces of mana or skills within their bodies…” The medical examiner pulled the data up onto the monitor as he continued. “As you can see, there are no such traces at all.”
“Then you're saying it was a monster extracted to the outside world using an item?”
“That's… also ambiguous.”
This time, the very first footage of the monster caught on CCTV began to play.
An unidentified creature with several sharp tentacles sprouting from its back, its entire body coated in black fur.
“No gate anywhere has ever recorded the appearance of a monster like this.”
“Couldn't it simply be a newly discovered species?”
“If it had been extracted with an item, it would have been reported to the Hunter Bureau.”
New species of monster had been turning up at a rate of one or two a month lately, but this case was on an entirely different track from those—no new monsters had been reported from any of the gates registered with the Hunter Bureau recently.
“The most disturbing part… is this.” The examiner flipped to the next file, sweat beading on his forehead. “The monster's blood is completely identical to human blood.”
“I'm sorry?”
“A monster with human blood… I'm finding it rather difficult to hold on to optimistic interpretations.”
The investigator furrowed his brow and gazed through the glass wall at the dissected corpse. It was a body that defied belief as anything human. Even accounting for the damage inflicted during its termination, the shredded scraps of tentacle and the enormous flat feet looked closer to an orc or a gorilla.
“Don't tell me that thing is…” A chilling thought flashed through his mind. “We need to launch a full-scale research initiative. Whatever this is, it's completely unlike anything we've seen so far—”
“No.”
The investigator cut the examiner off mid-sentence.
“This incident will be closed as a small-scale act of terrorism involving a summoned creature.”
“Wh-what on earth are you saying?! This is a critical matter!”
“…I'm well aware.”
Tsk.
The investigator fished a cigarette from his pocket and lit it.
“The timing… is bad, that's all.”
The Guild War was underway right now—and not just any Guild War, but a record-breaking spectacle, staged with unprecedented extravagance, one on which the very future of the Korean hunter industry was said to hinge.
“Do you know how far Korea's hunter ranking fell compared to last year? A full three places.”
“……”
“The higher-ups are rolling up their sleeves and thrashing around trying to claw it back. You think news like this would make them happy?”
“All that, just for a reason like that…!”
“It's not about the reason. This is what you'd call the greater good.”
Blue smoke curled from the investigator's lips. What he was smoking was no ordinary cigarette—it was a cigarillo-type artifact enhanced with a strength augmentation effect.
Crack.
The muscles beneath his dress shirt swelled bit by bit, radiating a subtle air of menace.
“I'm not saying we stay silent about it forever. Just that we let this Guild War finish without a single whisper of noise.”
“Ugh…”
“You're a sharp man, so I trust you understand exactly what I'm telling you.”
The examiner swallowed dryly and lowered his gaze.
“If word of what happened here leaks out to the outside, we will consider you the source.”
“…Understood.”
With that answer, the investigator rose from his seat and left the autopsy room.
“Oh! So you're all finished with your meeting?”
“Yeah. Nothing special.”
“Still, I can't believe they assigned a case this small to you, Senior Investigator.”
The investigator let out a wry chuckle at his junior's flattery. “It's a sensitive time, you know. Can't be helped.”
“But you of all people—Jin Seok-cheol, the living legend of Hunter Bureau Investigation Team 1—assigned to something like this!”
The Hunter Bureau's Awakened Crime Investigation Team. A unit composed entirely of awakened individuals, responsible for the vast majority of awakened-crime cases.
“Never mind that. I want to ask you one thing.”
“Anything, sir!”
Haa—.
Jin Seok-cheol ground the spent cigarillo into the floor and slowly lifted his eyelids.
“…The hunter who killed this thing. Who was it again?”
“The day has finally arrived!”
The emcee's cheerful voice rang throughout the arena.
“The Guild War main tournament! And among them all, the matchup so many of you have been waiting for is about to begin!”
“Silla's Shinseong, Shinseong's Silla. They call it the Shin-Shin War, don't they?”
“That's right! Just look at the reaction from the crowd out there—you can practically feel the heat!”
“Today's match drew the highest audience count of any round of 64! It begins shortly!”
Listening to the commentator and emcee trade their rehearsed banter, I stretched both legs out straight and loosened my body up.
“Uuuuuuughh…”
Shin Min-woo, seated across from me, was trembling like a phone stuck on vibrate mode.
Keep that up and he's going to shake his hair off.
“Hey.”
“Y-yes…?”
“Nervous?”
“…How are you not nervous, hyung?”
“What's there to be nervous about?”
Nerves were for people whose preparation wasn't complete. Or for people who lacked faith in themselves.
I was neither.
“That guy Kim Jin. No idea why, but he doesn't seem to think much of you.”
Baek Seo-ha had her long hair tied up. It made sense—for human opponents, more so than against monsters, you had to seize those split-second openings whenever they appeared.
“Raw emotions like that have a way of exploding mid-fight, so be careful.”
“Heh. Suits me just fine.”
I was genuinely interested in his Ink Fist, after all. My own Ink Spear was, if anything, still only a foundation—crude, basic. Not quite refined enough to be folded into the Nameless Spear Art.
'Even the Gwonwang's teachings have their limits here.'
From here on, I would have to learn to command this ponderous force with my own hands. And for that, nothing beat the finest textbook available: going toe-to-toe with someone who wielded the same power.
Lucky for me, a mountain of misunderstandings had already piled up between us—so he'd come swinging his Ink Fist with everything he had.
'I'm going to suck him dry down to the marrow and make it mine.'
Maybe facing Kim Jin this early was, in truth, a stroke of luck.
▷ Win the Guild War.
▷ Reward ① Upon victory: 300 EXP
▷ Reward ②(Undisclosed)
▷ Reward ③(Undisclosed)
'Oh.'
The quest window had popped up for the first time in a while.
Well, of course a major event like this would come with a quest attached.
'Three hundred EXP, no less.'
The largest quest yet, and the reward matched the scale. Considering the EXP tank grew tenfold with every level, handing out this much seemed about right.
'But the bonus rewards are still undisclosed.'
This was a first. Bonus rewards granted for fulfilling special conditions had always come with the conditions laid out upfront, letting me choose whether to chase them or not.
'Undisclosed, meaning they'll tell me later?'
Nothing to be done about it right now. I forced myself to accept it and closed the quest window.
“Please finish your preparations. The match will begin shortly.”
The waiting room door swung open and a Guild War official stepped inside.
“Let's go.”
I rose from my seat, resting my spear against my shoulder.
“Go win it.”
The main tournament's match format was randomized on the day of each bout.
“This match is…! A Crystal Defense!”
Crystal Defense. A massive crystal structure manifested for each faction; the winner was the team that defended its own crystal while shattering the enemy's first.
“Silla Guild has been assigned the red crystal. Shinseong Guild, the blue crystal! The battlefield terrain: forest!”
Simple as it looked, the format demanded considerable strategy. How each side split its forces between offense and defense decided perhaps eight parts in ten of the outcome.
“Mmm~ nice.”
Jeon So-young stretched languidly in the heart of the forest. Behind her, an enormous crimson crystal hovered in the air—the crystal they were meant to protect this round.
“A favorable draw right out of the gate.”
Crystal Defense was the ideal stage for Jeon So-young to shine. Her skill set was built around assassination—she could slip in undetected and burst the enemy crystal before anyone knew she was there. Even if she was spotted, her nimble feet could buy time while the rest of the team went for the enemy crystal.
“Captain. You're obviously coming with me on the attack squad, right?”
“I'll take defense. If I lay magical traps, I can hold off two of them at least—”
Jeon So-young was doling out the attack roster as though it were self-evident when—
“No.”
“Hm?”
“This time, I'm taking defense.”
Kim Jin folded his arms and declared it flatly: in this Crystal Defense, he would choose to guard rather than attack.
“What are you talking about, Captain? Defense, out of nowhere?”
“He'll come himself. I'm sure of it.”
Both of them knew exactly who Kim Jin meant.
“Lee Tae-hyun, on the attack squad?” Jeon So-young's eyes glinted. “Captain, I get that he's stronger than he looks, but aren't you overplaying the mind games?”
They had both noticed Kim Jin's fixation on Lee Tae-hyun lately—and it had only deepened since his visit to the Hunter Bureau.
“Honestly, I don't get it. F-rank, after all.” She acknowledged that his skill far outstripped his grade—but potential was still just potential. And Jeon So-young, an absolute upper-echelon A-rank, held her convictions about grades all the more firmly for it. “If you ask me, it's Baek Seo-ha we should be wary of. She's S-rank.”
“The man standing beside her was unsettling too. B-rank, granted, but still.”
Even with both of them pressing, Kim Jin did not bend.
“I'm on defense.”
It was disorienting, watching a captain who had always ruled by cold, rational judgment suddenly behave like this—but…
“…Fine. A captain who pushes this hard must have his reasons.”
Jeon So-young accepted it quickly and readied her gear. She was on the attack squad either way.
With the signal to begin, I shot up a tree trunk and tore through the canopy at full speed.
The first order of business was locating the enemy's crystal.
Mana Sight (A)
The senses, heightened by mana, read the mana of the entire region.
“South-southeast!”
Mana Sight—Jeon So-young's awakening-born skill. A detection ability that let her see and feel the flow of mana.
'Read the crystal's mana with this, and its location is a trivial matter.'
Once she had the location, there were a hundred ways to break it. She grinned with confidence as she vaulted between the trees.
And then—
“…!”
Something felt off.
“W-wait a second.”
It was wrong. Only moments ago, there had been a single trace of the crystal's mana.
'It's… multiplying?'
As the distance closed, the crystal's mana signature began to spread. Dozens of mana traces, past thirty, past fifty—coordinates stamping themselves in real time, scrambling her sense of position into chaos.
“Wh… which one is it…?”
Even now, the number of points radiating mana kept climbing. The harder she sharpened her senses, the more hopelessly tangled the picture became.
By the time the signals she felt had swollen into the hundreds—
“Nngh!”
Jeon So-young gritted her teeth and shut Mana Sight off.
Her mood was already soured, and the match had barely begun.
“Can hiding the crystal's location really work with something like this?”
“Save the chatter. Make more and plant them.”
At my command, Shin Min-woo concentrated mana into his fingertips.
Ice Drill (B)
The mana chilled and compressed into a sharpened drill, which plunged into the ground.
“There's one thing people get wrong about Crystal Defense—they assume it's an all-out brawl by default.”
Think about it for even a moment and you'd see it. The crystal's location was never information that had to be made public. Usually, finding it was only a matter of the opening scouting phase; the rest devolved into a chaotic scramble of destruction and defense.
“But there's no law saying it has to.”
Which was why, the instant the Crystal Defense began, I'd been having Shin Min-woo hammer Ice Drills into the ground all over the map.
A crystal was, at its core, a low-grade mana stone. It radiated a faint pulse of mana, which made it a deliciously easy target for detection skills—frankly, that was the whole reason they were built from mana stones in the first place, so people could find them quickly.
'Which, in other words, means—'
if something emitting similar mana were scattered thickly throughout the vicinity, detection skills could no longer single out the crystal.
Ice Drill was a spell-type skill that ejected mana-frozen ice in the shape of a drill. Its structure and principle were remarkably close to those of a mana-stone crystal—and the amount of mana it gave off was, as it happened, a perfect match.
“Alright, Min-woo. Your turn to sweat. Scatter it far and wide, fast and plenty.”
“You got it!”
With that side entrusted to Shin Min-woo, I had business of my own elsewhere.
“I'll be right back.”
In this Crystal Defense, I was Shinseong Guild's one and only attack team.