Waaah, I'm Baby Jinhu
Kiii-gigik! With a sound like rusty hinges grinding against each other, the golem began flailing its way upright.
Every movement sent up clouds of fragment dust as metal flaked away from its body piece by piece, and yet it was still, barely, operational. Even a fist of the same weight and the same force as before would hardly be enough to bring it down in a single blow.
But Cheon Yujin paid no mind to the golem behind her. Because beyond that rear golem,
"F-Found it! Finally..."
"It's that golem from before!"
With the scrape of bodies dragging across the floor, a murmur of voices echoed through the passage.
Their physical abilities really had dropped considerably, but the hunters hadn't fallen into panic because their bodies were useless. They had panicked because the gap was simply too vast, because the sensation of weakening was too overwhelming. The faster they acclimated to their new condition, the more they could at least move as they always had.
Above all, there was the scene of collective madness itself: hunters crawling across the floor if that was what it took to chase the Cheon Yujin charging out front. That madcap race, absurdly enough, helped them adapt to the drop in their physical abilities all the faster.
And so,
"Attack, attack!"
"WAAAAAAH!!!"
"Big target, so wide-area spell, coming through! Heads down... ah, right, everyone's already flat on the floor crawling..."
Outmatched, they fought the way the outmatched did. Weakened, they fought the way the weakened did. Ever since the very first Gate, they had struggled in mere human bodies against monsters with overwhelming physical superiority. The hunters were already fully prepared for battle.
Physical-enhancement awakeners thrust their weapons and shields forward, forming a single wall that sealed off the golem's front. While they held back the shower of debris and the dull shockwaves, the awakeners whose abilities had degraded less could catch up all the faster. The firepower was more than sufficient. It overflowed.
Shaaaaaa! Streaks of mana and magical light lanced out and hammered into the golem in an instant.
KWOOM! KWAAAHAAANG!!!
Tang, terdang! The golem's head, its crimson glow extinguished at some point, rolled across the floor. Already half-destroyed, it offered no resistance to the follow-up chain of weapons and magic, and was reduced to a lump of fragments.
"...Huh?"
The process was fast, far too fast. Even Cheon Yujin, who had orchestrated it herself, had to blank out for a moment.
The plan had been to exploit the modern Korean obsession with acing exams: to leave the kill just short of finished, so that these hyenas would pounce on the leftovers for even a sliver of extra points. Bring it to the brink of the finishing blow, and even in a weakened state, a swarm piling on could easily bring it down. In the meantime, she would lure out another golem and repeat the process.
"How are they this fast...?"
These weren't even active hunters. These were the skills of mere applicants who had come to sit a certification exam...?
Even with their physical abilities suppressed, several of them were stronger than ConnectedDo, that bottom-tier streamer affiliated with Sungmuryeon. And ConnectedDo, low-ranking as he was, still belonged to a fairly major guild!
Because all she had ever seen of him was the sorry spectacle of him collapsing and wailing the moment he entered a dungeon, she had taken one look at the overall level and simply filed it away: It's a little strange, but I suppose this really is a certification exam.
Awakener registration got processed offhandedly at the public health center, and yet... just how brutal was the competition in the hunter industry, that talent like this was loafing around as mere applicants?!
She had now reached the point where she could no longer brush it all off as vague unease. But Cheon Yujin had been dropped into Murim at an age when she had never so much as entered a proper job market. After returning home, she had lived on as a freeloading parasite sponging off her younger sister Cheon Se-ah, and having spent most of her life as Occupation: Blood Demon, she was far, far too lacking in common sense to grasp the truth!
"Golem neutralized!"
"Neutralization confirmed! Moving to support the lead!"
"Supporting! Copy!"
This was supposedly nothing more than a crowd thrown together on the spot, yet everything was proceeding with suspicious smoothness. Worse, they were now even forming up to support her, the very person facing down the golem!
What Cheon Yujin didn't know was this: making it to the practical-test stage of the open recruitment for Iron Blood, one of the nation's premier large guilds, meant that every single one of them was either a rookie hunter whose exceptional talent had already been recognized, or a veteran who had been ground through the industry long enough and now wanted to transfer to a major guild to build a new career.
They knew how to keep duty and personal matters separate, and their judgment operated on a different level, honed by accumulated experience. Even if a single screw had come loose in that judgment, causing every last one of them to crawl all the way here.
In the minds of the hunters who had followed Cheon Yujin out to finish off the golem, one calculation had already been made. What Iron Blood's commander had emphasized: adaptability. In other words, squeezing out the best possible move with the body they had right now. Challenging the golem head-on in their current state would only look like reckless bravado.
A hunter is not an 'adventurer' out of a fantasy tale. A hunter must be a 'hunter,' one who takes down monsters efficiently. Simply by lending a hand with the golem's cleanup, they could show that they valued their duty as hunters above pride or personal glory...!
Of course, that only held if this were a normal exam and Iron Blood's interviewers could properly observe the situation. But since not one of them realized the test had already gone completely off the rails, a cooperative relationship formed quite naturally.
"Front line, hold! Relaying to the lead: lure request!"
"WAAAAAAH!!!"
"Hold confirmed! Lead, please lure the golem!"
She hadn't signed up for anything this elaborate. It was one thing when people just did their own thing, but the moment some systematic method got involved, it inexplicably became burdensome!
Bonjwa... Bonjwa does not take orders from those weaker than Bonjwa...!
Cheon Yujin tried to answer with fiercely blazing crimson eyes, but the moment all those gazes converged on her at once, her body, that of a frail young girl, began to tremble violently.
In the end, crushed under the pressure of countless eyes, Cheon Yujin shouted, voice wobbling on the verge of tears.
"L-Luring... confirmed!"
From then on, everything moved like lightning. Cheon Yujin lured a golem in, used the art of Shifting Flowers Grafting Trees to slam the golems into one another, and the hunters finished them off. Merely repeating that cycle was enough to start blasting the dungeon's golems apart in the blink of an eye.
As she carved through the dungeon at astonishing speed, a thought suddenly occurred to Cheon Yujin.
"Hmmmm..."
Weren't these golems... oddly high in killing intent? This was a dungeon under Iron Blood's control, so there had to be some safety mechanism in place. And yet.
The hunters fighting only in the rear didn't seem to sense it, but Cheon Yujin, who had to deflect the assaults head-on, could feel it with perfect clarity. Even though these were the fists of inanimate weapons, a vivid killing intent dwelled within them. No matter how she looked at it, taking a direct hit meant one future only: instant death, safety mechanism or not.
Of course, that didn't mean she felt any real sense of crisis. If anything, things were going too smoothly. Smooth enough to make her wonder whether dungeons were always this easy when you cooperated.
"Recon team here! Three golems confirmed in the right passage!"
"Relay to the lead! Flank left!"
"Speed-type awakener! I'll lure one of them!"
"Flanking on hold!"
Above all, doing this together gave her the feeling that something like bonds and camaraderie was sprouting all on its own.
For the first time since her return, Cheon Yujin stood at the very front, leading others, and her heart swelled.
The murim folk who ranged across the gangho prized camaraderie and loyalty above nearly all else. Were there not countless old tales of strangers sharing cups of wine the very day they met and swearing oaths of brotherhood on the spot? Having spent long years in a world saturated with just such sentiment, Cheon Yujin placed both hands on her hips, squared her shoulders, and gazed upon the comrades she had fought alongside, a bashful flush coloring her face.
"M-my comrades! If it is you, then Bonjwa supposes Bonjwa could make a special exception and admit you into the Blood Heaven Castle Bonjwa shall newly raise..."
At that very moment, the air warped, and a fissure shimmering with ominous violet light tore itself into being.
"...A Gate?"
"A boss room? Did a boss spawn?"
"The boss's... the boss's first hit and last hit are MINE! Everyone get out of the waaaay!!!"
"WAAAAAAH!"
FWOOSH!!! They say a boss's first hit and last hit are not yielded even to family. In an instant, the hunters vanished through the rift.
Whoooosh. Left entirely alone, Cheon Yujin felt a single cold gust of wind sweep across her flushed-red face.
"..........."
Trembling. This body was shaking, without a doubt, because the wind was cold. There was no other reason. None whatsoever.
The crimson-eyed girl. Drip, drip came the sound of water droplets falling to the floor.
"Y-YAAAAAAH! Bonjwa will... k-kill you all! Kill every last one of you!!!"
Sobbing, Cheon Yujin hurled herself into the rift.
Kim Jinhu, Guild Master of Iron Blood.
Dark circles that hadn't even existed back during the first Gate had already seized the skin beneath his eyes in a deep, murky shadow. By the time he realized he had left behind a rice paddle flecked with grains and his apron, he was already at guild headquarters.
"...I think I misheard you. Care to explain one more time why exactly I got called back into work?"
"W-well... it's... th-that is..."
"That is?"
"Th-that... the new-recruit test dungeon went berserk."
Kim Jinhu rubbed the corner of his eye. Or was it just his imagination that the rims felt hot?
"And?"
"We can no longer control the golems inside, observation is only possible intermittently, and... we've also lost contact with Team Leader Jeong Yunho, the officer commanding the raid."
Kim Jinhu pushed back once more, his expression perfectly composed.
"How did that happen?"
"According to the analysts, it appears to be an anomaly triggered by changes far exceeding what the dungeon's mechanics were designed to handle."
"In conclusion?"
Kim Jinhu studied the screen: a view of the interior, barely wrestled into observation. A single fissure, alien to any eye, swayed ominously, and around it plenty of traces of human presence remained.
"Because of the dungeon's rampage... the Gate coordinates that should have connected to the dungeon's master appear to have been rerouted somewhere else."
"Where to?"
"We haven't pinned down the exact coordinates yet, but judging by the Gate's properties, there's a high probability it's a 'regional-type Gate'..."
The aide froze.
The aide, who had been reporting calmly with courage drawn from Kim Jinhu's composed handling of the situation, only then realized it. Within that composed expression, his pupils had already gone slack.
"..."
Face utterly unchanged, Kim Jinhu raised his arm. With a soft pop, he removed the wireless earpiece from his ear and tapped his smartwatch, switching a setting.
The aide saw it. Kim Jinhu had been connected on a call with 'Cheon Se-ah' this entire time. And that even amid all this, text messages had kept pouring into his smartwatch.
The Guild Master of Iron Blood. One of the strongest Martial Arts Awakeners alive. A young hero of the Gate era. The Iron Blood Sword, Kim Jinhu, opened his mouth with ponderous gravity.
"Waah, I'm baby Jinhu. Twenty-seven years old and still going waah, so I don't know anything."
"G-Guildmasteeeeeer!!!"
And so it came to pass.