The Undefeated Streak Ends
Before gates were called gates and awakeners were called hunters, the “raid” had already begun. It gradually took shape, becoming more systematic as humanity itself advanced.
Once people realized the unknown magical power was a door connecting to another dimension, they discovered that each gate possessed its own level.
After levels were calculated, the next priority was reducing waste. Back then, gates were little more than brute-force wars where awakeners were thrown in indiscriminately. But once levels became visible, humanity began deploying the right number of people. It was the optimization of hunting.
Data kept piling up. Certain gates spawned only fire monsters. Others had bosses with specific patterns. The more data accumulated, the more precise the optimization became, and awakeners naturally fell into distinct positions based on their abilities.
When the focus shifted from mere survival to safety, and from protecting humanity to pursuing personal glory, awakeners stopped being superhumans and became hunters instead.
Therefore, the history of awakeners was the history of raids.
The Meaning of Raids, by a Professor of Awakener Studies at Korea University.
Guardian Yeo Eun-seo sat with her eyes closed, lost in thought.
Many hunters subconsciously look down on raids.
This attitude appeared even more clearly among professional hunters who competed in the so-called league. They saw it as no different from the public hunts they ran for a living and sneered at it.
But was that really true?
Absolutely not.
The true professionals in this industry, Yeo Eun-seo included, all insisted on the same thing. These raids were the very foundation of the league and the real test of a guild’s true power.
You must understand the gate’s environment and terrain, then design the optimal route accordingly. You can measure responsiveness by how well the team handles random terrain variables.
Beyond that came equipment selection based on monster types, weaknesses, and affinities. Countermeasures for every pattern, the ideal raid party composition, optimization, and more.
A little faster. A little safer.
Couldn’t it be more efficient?
Couldn’t they score even more points?
In front of any single gate, a guild had to keep asking itself these questions without end.
If the raid team builds the strategy and trains for it, the front office does everything possible to lighten the hunters’ burden and supplies supporters who can help execute that strategy.
That was why.
That was why Guardian Yeo Eun-seo called raids the true measure of a guild’s strength.
It wasn’t only about the hunters.
It wasn’t only about the raid team.
Raid battles were decided by the combined capabilities of the entire guild, front office included.
Which was exactly why Guardian Yeo Eun-seo had marked this tenth round as the decisive battle.
It was a notoriously difficult gate even among raid gates, yet Yeo Eun-seo and Taeyang Guild held three secret trump cards that could turn that very difficulty against the map.
Park Gwang-seob.
The Sword Master known as the butcher of all bipedal humanoid monsters.
Mohamed Salah.
Horus, a priest before he was a powerful sand sorcerer.
And finally, the master herself.
Taeyang Guild’s final piece and the most perfect partner Guardian had ever gained. This was a gate where Black Star could unleash two hundred percent of her strength.
An environment where the guild’s three strongest powers receive perfect synergy. It would be hard to find better conditions than these.
If they couldn’t take first place—more precisely, if they couldn’t defeat Mir Guild—even with such a golden opportunity, the fault would lie entirely with the commander.
Living forever beneath the Mountain King? Yeo Eun-seo’s pride refused to accept it.
She would show them.
She would show them exactly why she had been chosen to succeed him as national team commander.
From that moment on, Yeo Eun-seo threw herself into preparation with desperate intensity.
Using Taeyang Guild’s enormous data archives, she calculated every possible randomly assigned map and terrain, analyzed monster placement and formation patterns.
Schedules down to the minute. Movements down to the second.
After forging tactics so close to perfection they could cut glass, she drilled them into the raid team.
Not as a metaphor—literally.
They recreated similar terrain inside the stadium’s artificial gate and ran the simulation without end. They repeated it so many times that their bodies reacted automatically, bypassing the brain entirely.
Truthfully, up to this point it was no different from what the former Guardian of Royal Sword Guild had always done—creating flawless execution within her reach.
But the current Guardian possessed a new weapon she had never held before.
It was Taeyang Guild and the Taeyang Group itself.
Chairman Son Seong-ho willingly placed his hand on hers when she made her gamble.
Equipment and consumables tailored precisely to the strategy arrived. Some pieces existed solely to pierce a single mid-boss’s weakness. Others were custom-made for faster movement rather than combat.
The best possible squad created just for her.
The massive support she could never have dreamed of during her Royal Sword days allowed the Guardian to bloom in brilliant color.
Not a single second was wasted.
Not a single step was wasted.
Not a single monster was wasted.
Heaven’s timing, earth’s advantage, and the harmony of its people.
Every condition aligned perfectly.
She could declare without hesitation that even if they ran it again, it could not possibly be more perfect than this.
And so she stood here today.
The moment she emerged from her long contemplation, a sound like thunder reached Yeo Eun-seo’s ears.
It was cheering.
“First place!!”
“We won!!”
“We actually did it!!”
Front office staff and hunters alike were hugging each other, fatigue completely forgotten.
In the middle of it all, Gong Ju-in rushed over with glistening eyes and threw herself into Yeo Eun-seo’s arms. The hands gripping her shoulders trembled violently.
“You worked so hard, sis.”
“You too.”
“Sis, this is my first time ever getting first place.”
“Feels good, doesn’t it?”
“Too… hic… it feels way, way too good.”
“I like it too. Let’s do this a lot from now on.”
If skill and support were roughly equal, she believed desperation was ultimately what decided victory or defeat.
Today, she—and their Taeyang Guild—had been the more desperate ones.
Guardian Yeo Eun-seo smiled through her tears.
In the Mir Guild basement, the guild’s top executives—including Lee Shin—watched the screens with grave expressions. The display split into fifty separate frames showed pieces of parchment and scrolls.
Common magic consumables capable of releasing stored spells.
These were what the experts had unanimously chosen as the decisive cause of defeat this round.
“Begin.”
At Lee Shin’s command, Chae Dong-ha sent a signal through the microphone. Soon, lines of magical characters rose from the parchments along with flowing magic power.
Round 10—LV7. Puppet Empire of the Crystal Palace.
This was the gate Mir Guild had challenged. True to its name, it was a gate that spawned bizarre doll monsters.
The tricky part was that while these dolls possessed powerful physical attack strength, they also carried random mental-type debuffs.
In particular, the boss “Dancing Queen Sisi” was infamous for mental attacks so potent that a direct hit would render the victim completely unable to fight.
Naturally, clearing this gate required Anti-Mental Scrolls that granted temporary immunity to mental effects. Mir Guild had, of course, brought more than enough.
However.
The problem had occurred with those very scrolls.
They were supposed to last one second, two seconds, three seconds… yet these scrolls were burning out before they could even reach three.
It wasn’t just one or two. The same phenomenon was appearing across nearly every one of the fifty split screens.
“2.78 seconds. 2.79 seconds. 2.81 seconds… Director Jeong Sun-dong?”
“…They’re defective.”
“Vice Director?”
“They’re defective. I’m sorry.”
Exactly.
At the very last pattern of the boss fight, right before clearing, the raid team had torn the scrolls as a matter of course—only for three of them to turn out defective in the most ridiculous way possible.
The immunity effect had been cut off midway, leaving them fully exposed to the mental magic.
To make matters worse, the ones hit included a core member of the tank line and two magician dealers responsible for wide-area damage. The absolute worst part was that the mental spell had been charm.
“Hmm…”
The charm effect reversed friend-or-foe recognition. The three lost their minds and began attacking their own allies. The battlefield instantly turned into what could only be described as a complete disaster.
If Colossus Park Su-bin and Kang Malsuk had not put on a godlike tanking performance, if the Mountain King and Genius Baek Yeon-woo had not thrown themselves forward with holes punched through their bodies, and if Yu Ri-ra and Hwa-rang had not created a miraculous lucky shot through perfect coordination at the final second—
Lee Shin dared to declare that without even one of those three factors, they would not have held on to second place.
Therefore, he first bowed deeply to the Mountain King who had cleaned up the mess.
“Thank you for your hard work, Raid Leader. And I’m sorry, sir.”
As guild representative he offered gratitude to the raid leader; as partner he offered apology for the broken record.
Faced with that sincerity, the Mountain King smiled instead and comforted him.
“Don’t take it too hard. Defective consumables are common. If anything, we’ve been too perfect until now.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Guild or not, it was ultimately work done by humans. Mistakes were inevitable, and many viewed even those mistakes as part of the competition.
But for Lee Shin, who pursued perfection, such words sounded far too comfortable.
“I don’t mind when it leaves my hands, but this mistake happened inside my hands.”
“Haha, it’s not like we lost any victory points.”
“Even so, disappointing is disappointing. We’ve never lost first place in any raid we’ve entered. That title isn’t easy to keep.”
“A title is just a title. In the end, the championship cup is what really matters in this industry.”
The Mountain King stubbornly told him not to worry and glanced around at the others.
The front office staff stood with heads bowed like criminals. Perhaps out of guilt, none of them could meet his eyes. He left them with one final sentence before walking out.
“I hope there are no more mistakes like this next time.”
The moment the raid leader disappeared through the door, Lee Shin’s face hardened like ice.
“Let’s change rooms first.”
“……”
“……”
With a face like stone, Lee Shin led the way. The directors, including the leader and vice-leader, followed with their heads lowered.
A short while later, they gathered inside the conference room.
“Lock the door.”
At Lee Shin’s cold order, Yun Cho-a locked it. Lee Shin swept his perfectly styled hair back sharply and scanned the room with a piercing gaze.
“Who wants to speak first?”
In the freezing atmosphere, Director Jeong Sun-dong was the first to step forward.
“The scroll company contacted us to apologize. They said a defect was discovered in the newly imported machine. Apparently a system error caused—”
In short, they had replaced the scroll-printing machine with a new one, but the magic sensor malfunctioned and caused uneven magic power injection.
Lee Shin listened to the entire explanation in silence. His reply was simple.
“So? Is that all?”
“…Pardon?”
“Director Jeong Sun-dong, do you think I’m standing here posing dramatically just to hear about their screw-up?”
Whether they changed machines or changed lovers was none of his concern.
What Lee Shin wanted was an answer for how such an elementary mistake had occurred inside his guild.
“Eight out of fifty were defective. Numerically? Sixteen percent. Not 1.6 percent—sixteen percent. I honestly don’t know how I’m supposed to accept this.”
If it had been 1.6 percent, Lee Shin wouldn’t be this angry.
That would still fall within the realm of an honest mistake.
But sixteen percent was different. That was a number basic inspection should have caught.
Statistically it meant one in every ten was defective. If you couldn’t catch that, the problem wasn’t ability—it was eyesight.
“Is there anyone among the team leaders here who cannot see? No, right? You can all read and observe normally, can’t you?”
“……”
“Damn it, this is irritating… Are you going to answer me or not?”
“Yes sir!”
“Good. Then the answer is obvious.”
They had handed hunters consumables that hadn’t even received basic inspection. That complacency had thrown the raid team into crisis at the most critical moment.
At that point, Lee Shin finally exploded.
“Are you guys messing with me?”