The Floor Beneath the Floor
Iron Blood Guild.
Third Raid Team Leader, Jeong Yunho.
He was a mana awakener of the pure Mage type — a rarity even among the awakened.
Ordinarily, even an awakener who wielded magic or gained some special power would see at least a modest boost to their physical capabilities at the moment of awakening. Pure Mage-types were the opposite. Like a wizard straight out of a game, the more their mana grew, the further their bodies fell behind — not merely behind other awakeners, but behind ordinary civilians.
Jeong Yunho had been born with a slight frame and withered muscles; he was frail by nature even before awakening, and after it, his already scrawny body passed from merely weak into outright sickly. His mana and magic ranked among the mightiest in the Iron Blood Guild itself — yet his actual body would run breathless at the slightest sprint, turn pale at the slightest strain, and had more than once found even his mana-amplifying staff heavy in his hand.
The day Team Leader Jeong Yunho accepted that no amount of striving would ever change his physical capabilities, a secret hobby took root in him — and ever since, he had volunteered, time after time, to personally escort the Iron Blood Guild's fresh applicants through the time-honored First Test.
The First Test: the dungeon gimmick that leveled all physical abilities.
It was the one moment when Jeong Yunho — possessor of the frailest constitution of all — could briefly know heightened stamina and strength. It was the moment he got to watch body-reinforcement awakeners several times burlier than himself fail to endure the drop and shame themselves in the ugliest ways imaginable. It was, in short, the small balm that soothed the inferiority of a man fated to cling flat to the very bottom of the physical ladder.
What Team Leader Jeong Yunho never knew was this — that beneath the bottom, there can wait a bottom deeper still...!
"Hrk— hooohhh, hooooohhh......"
"Save meeee..."
"Waaahhh!"
Is this reality? If hell exists anywhere in this world, it is here.
Unable to accept the miserable truth of it, Jeong Yunho sank into a swamp of fear.
He had known his staff — light compared to the edged weapons hunters carried — to feel heavy in his grip. But gravity itself? He had never once felt gravity as a weight, and now his body refused to obey him...!
He had overseen this test more than a few dozen times, and physical capabilities had always been enhanced. Never, not once, had anything like this happened.
Is something wrong with the dungeon...?
Yes — that had to be it. Nothing else could produce a phenomenon of this magnitude. Not that such a person could even exist in this world. Even with a sewer-rat-grade weakling mixed into the pool, there was no way the test could collapse into this much of a shambles...!
"Ugh— kh, khhhhh...!"
As a mid-level manager of the Iron Blood Guild, he had to bring this situation under control. He strained desperately, forcing strength into his body — and it began, little by little, to move.
And then Jeong Yunho understood. It wasn't that his physical abilities had truly sunk below a sewer rat's. His body had simply been plunged into a momentary panic by the absurd gulf of lost strength...!
Just as he had guessed, the ones rising to their feet, one by one, were the awakeners whose physical abilities had always been as wretched as his own — or else those gifted with exceptional talent and technique in governing their own flesh.
And.
Because they were fine hunters, quicker than anyone else to lift their heads—
they could see it.
Amid that scene of pandemonium, a being descending in solitary, august majesty above the worms crawling the floor.
My... we had an applicant like that?
A hood. A mask. A tiny frame — the face so thoroughly hidden that even girl or boy could not be told apart.
Naturally, no one could memorize the face of every one of some five hundred applicants. But a candidate that distinctive? There was no way he would have failed to remember.
And yet it could not be an outsider. The Iron Blood Guild was not so careless an outfit.
They had entered the dungeon by way of a large-scale gate-passage spell formation — and being large-scale, the number it could carry had been calibrated with minute care. Entry had been possible for precisely as many as the applicants and escorts combined. No more, no less.
And yet.
Buried too deep in the riddle, Jeong Yunho failed to grasp, right away, how all of this must look to the other applicants.
"No way...?"
"Isn't that the bastard?"
The applicants were not entirely without wits either.
The only one still standing. Which meant, with the highest probability, the culprit behind this whole situation — and even if not, here was bodily control of a level one could see with one's own two eyes and still refuse to believe.
Either way, whoever it was was unquestionably the most dangerous rival in today's Iron Blood Guild open recruitment. Every gaze in the hall came down at once.
"......"
A long silence.
And then—
Thud-thud-thud!
The instant those gazes landed, the figure had bolted, racing for the dungeon's depths as though in flight—
and that pulled the trigger on the tragedy.
"Wh-what is it? Is it starting...?"
"This whole situation is... the test?"
"Right — if it weren't a test, there's no way a body like that could exist in the world!"
"A dungeon... speedrun?"
"First place is already locked in...?"
Collective panic — every last one of them had a screw rattling loose in their judgment. And Jeong Yunho, the man whose role it was to tighten those very screws, was himself in a panic such as he had never known in his life — a panic from the bottom beneath the bottom.
"Aaaaargh!"
"I can't get cut here—!!! How did I even pass the paper screening!!!"
"Waaahhh!"
"Chase! Everybody chase!!!"
Their bodies had yet to properly adapt to their altered capabilities. They rose and toppled over. They tried to walk and went down again. And before that one back receding farther and farther away, the hunters at last had to make their choice — to gain one thing is to surrender another.
In that moment, a historic event occurred: humanity forsook the evolution of upright walking and regressed to the day of its birth.
A scene of madness — a human tide surging into the dungeon's interior on all fours. A colossal eruption of lunacy that would go down in the history of Iron Blood Guild recruitment... no, in the annals of every guild on the planet.
"Ah......"
Jeong Yunho fainted.
Bonjwa — the Blood Demon, Cheon Yujin.
Deaf to the sound of something dragging itself across the ground behind me, I became a lone streak of wind that did nothing but run.
But this was not, by any means, running away.
I had crossed countless battlefields and duels, and in all that history Bonjwa had never once turned tail...!
A strategic retreat.
Which was, in truth, nothing more than an excuse — fleeing pure and simple.
So no. This was neither flight nor strategic retreat. This was running, and running still, for the sake of striking the enemy's rear in the end. A perfectly legitimate... reverse charge...!
"The Earth... is round, after all."
I wiped the dust from my eyes with the narrow sleeve of my hoodie.
"......sniff."
No — honestly, think about it. Whether my martial arts touched the very heavens, whether they called me the peerless Blood Demon under heaven — none of that mattered here.
Behind me, the sound of something crawling along the ground, nearer with every moment. Eyes gone mad — people who had lost their reason to job hunting and corporate salaries. The dead of an infinite-competition society, mass-produced by the tragedies of the modern age...!
Even if I had been the Heavenly Demon rather than the Blood Demon, I'd have bolted all the same!
And just as my face drained blue at the terror that no matter how desperately I ran, the scraping behind me refused to fade—
KWOOOONG!
A thunderclap split the earth open; dust bloomed into the sky. My footing, thrown down by pure instinct, slid across the ground like a serpent.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
My heart pulsed like a detonation, and the art's power flooded every corner of my body, my blood vessels serving as its channels.
Equalization of physical abilities, was it? Now, at last, I understood. Only the tiniest of shackles had come loose — and that alone was enough. Today... my body felt light as a feather.
Pah!
Stamping lightly off the ground, I poured force into my right sleeve and brought it whistling down.
It was nothing but Entry-Realm force, faint beyond all measure — yet the tiny gust that burst from the descending sleeve swept the dust cloud from before my eyes with exquisite precision.
What had come down out of the sky was a hulk of iron larger than a man.
The ground, cleft in the shape of a fist. A walking, human-shaped mass of metal. A creation of magical engineering — and the moving coffin of every body-reinforcement awakener alive.
"A golem...?"
I alighted softly atop the iron arm of the metal titan, which shuddered as if still ringing from the shock of its own landing.
And one look told me it was no ordinary steel. I'd read on the internet that metal golems, with their trademark durability and crushing weight, were the natural predators of body-reinforcement awakeners. This one, moreover, was a truly considerable size.
Against a golem, the most effective blows came from elemental abilities, or from magic.
"Whoa..."
I understood at once. This dungeon might be under management now — but I could well imagine how the Iron Blood Guild must have suffered, the first time they conquered it.
The equalization of physical abilities. Fill the party with awakeners capable of toppling a golem, and everyone's strength sank through the floor. Build the party to prevent that drop instead, and landing a meaningful hit on the golem became all but impossible.
Kuuuuu— jiiiing!
An ominous red light flickered alive in the golem's long, cylindrical head. It hauled its massive iron arm far back, settling into its stance to bring it crashing down.
Even craning my neck all the way back, I could barely make out that head — the gulf in bulk and weight was absolute.
But Bonjwa, the Blood Demon Cheon Yujin—
today, this body is light.
KWAAAAAAH!
I took the falling iron arm — cleaving the very air — into both my eyes, and stilled my breath.
Breath upon breath. Flow upon flow.
Until now, this body had been so pitifully frail that I'd had no choice but to lean on the Fierce Tiger Fist — that most brutally hard of styles, the very opposite of yielding — shattering my own body and fists in the process, because without that much power I could not deliver even a sliver of an effective strike.
Eyes burning deep crimson, I smiled thinly.
In this very moment, in this body—
"So you have at least four ounces of strength in you."
I caught the incoming iron fist — seized the pulse of its flow — and shook it.
KUGWOONG—!!!
Like a child swept away midstream, the end of the iron arm dragged its master's whole body with it as it came pouring down toward the earth.
Flowing Fist.
"...Four Ounces Deflects A Thousand Pounds."
Four ounces of force, governing the weight of a thousand pounds.
The colossal golem, its center of gravity lost, crashed down — and from within the rising crater of dust, I turned around.
And met their eyes.
The would-be hunters who had been crawling along the ground.
"What the..."
"Is that... real......?"
Bonjwa, the Blood Demon Cheon Yujin.
Recalling the fond, familiar face of Ma-noe — who used to turn somersaults in midair and grovel flat every time Bonjwa deigned to show his majesty — I squared my back and shoulders, drew a deep, long breath, thrust out the chest that swelled without end, and flung both arms wide toward the heavens.
Blood Wind, Grand and Glorious.
Bonjwa was, after all... the genuine Blood Demon...!