A Bear in the Boss Room
Bonjwa. The Blood Demon, Cheon Yujin.
For some reason, I had become a loner.
“...Ah—”
According to everything I'd dug up online, the route to a dungeon's boss room varied from dungeon to dungeon. But once I'd brought down more than a certain number of golems, a gate had simply torn itself into existence—and to any eye, it looked for all the world like a passage leading straight to the boss room. Which was exactly why I'd hurled myself through the rift that had opened inside the dungeon, chasing the other applicants who'd gone through ahead of me.
Had they all dashed off to claim the boss in that sliver of time...? Because there wasn't so much as a whisker of another human anywhere around me. And why, of all things, was some unidentified, ominous birdcall ringing out around me? Kiiirrrk.
I looked up. The artificial ceiling, once crowded with strange sigils that evoked a sorcerous civilization, was gone. In its place stretched an azure sky, spotless and utterly without a single cloud. And all around me, dense, luxuriant trees rose skyward, each several times taller than a grown man.
Whooooosh!
Wind surged through, thrashing branches and leaves, and the bird's cry wheeled around me once more. The breeze was crisp and clean, carrying not one trace of enclosed space. In other words—no matter how I looked at it, this was the heart of an enormous forest.
“This is... the boss room?”
The dungeon I'd been storming until moments ago had been the very picture of what a 'dungeon' ought to be—the work of some otherworldly magical civilization. The fact that its only monsters were golems drove the point home; in modern terms, it was a research facility staffed wall to wall with security robots. So I'd predicted the boss would be a mage, or something a mage had built.
But this forest-like space showed not the faintest trace of civilization, no matter how I looked...!
Then it came.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
A sound overwhelmingly vaster than the heartbeat I heard each time I circulated the Forged Blood Art. Every time it rolled through, the earth shuddered and birds burst from the brush in panicked flocks. Worse, this damned, hopelessly frail body of mine bounced faintly off the ground with each tremor—boing—like a toddler rolling across a trampoline.
“Hngaaak...!”
I'd been standing there dumbstruck, and I nearly went down. I immediately spread the warmth of the Forged Blood Art through my body and steadied the balance the tremors had stolen from me. Colossal, yes—but this was, without question, the sound of footsteps.
With no trace of civilization in sight and no sign of the aspiring hunters who'd ridden the rift with me, I'd been one breath away from cursing the heavens, wondering if Bonjwa had been swept up in yet another absurd stroke of misfortune...! But this crushing weight—only a metal golem could make it! Besides, the golems that had appeared so far were far too small to pound such a ponderous footfall into the dirt.
A sliver of unease remained, but the conclusion was obvious. Only the venue had changed; the boss—a far larger metal golem—had spawned.
“Bonjwa takes first place...!”
So what if all Bonjwa had claimed was the boss's opening strike and its finishing blow—those heartless wretches had still abandoned the one who had fought at the very front of the line! And I had been prepared to welcome them into a second Blood Heaven Castle, no less...!
If my opponent wasn't a living creature moving at will, but an inanimate machine bound to a golem's fixed patterns—something shaped like a human while moving with artificial precision—then even if landing a decisive blow was difficult, I could toy with it to my heart's content using Shifting Flowers, Grafting Trees.
Which meant Bonjwa would flatten the boss single-handedly and leave those heartless wretches not so much as a crumb of the opportunity!
“Wabwarat...!”
KRAK! KRA-KRAK!
Ancient trees toppled as if an excavator were plowing blindly through, and beyond the splintered trunks a colossal silhouette emerged, one ponderous step at a time.
Rust-brown fur blanketed it from head to toe, mapped with scars that looked almost small against its bulk. Its claws were each far larger than my entire head, caked with sticky, rust-dark bloodstains. Drool spilled in long ropes from a mouth wide enough to swallow me whole—and then its bloodshot, bestial eyes met mine.
“Grrrrrrrr...”
“.........”
Why was there a bear in there...?
I stared blankly into those bloodshot eyes, my mind gone white. Yes. It was a bear. The problem was that it was rather large. No—rather, extremely... monumentally large.
“Ah. Aaah.”
Was this what it looked like when an entire building got up and walked? The metal golems had been big—thick-bodied the way golems were, and tall enough to make you crane your neck—but they fell a little short of what you'd call a giant. This bear outstripped them in height and left their volume in the dust. It merely wore the shape of a bear; stand it upright, and it looked built to scratch its back against an apartment tower instead of a tree...!
“...Hic, hic—”
This godforsaken body had started hiccuping in terror without my permission, but—
Bonjwa. The Blood Demon, Cheon Yujin. As long as even a fraction of the binding on this endlessly frail body stayed loosened, even a colossal monster was just a beast without technique—and Shifting Flowers, Grafting Trees could handle it...!
And so I softened my fists into open palms and settled into a stance to face the giant bear down. But somehow... the moment I moved with the same feel as before, merely spreading my fingers left me spent.
“...?”
My body was heavy.
Heavy as if I'd been thrown back to the moment before I entered the dungeon...! As if I'd fallen into a pit at the bottom of the abyss and hung on by nothing but the tip of my smallest finger, dragging my body along by sheer desperation. That old, familiar sensation had returned.
“......”
The sky... really is beautifully blue.
“This... was never... the boss roooooom...!”
I'd passed through the gate and found a forest. A giant bear instead of golems. Even the dungeon's gimmick—the equalizing of physical ability—had vanished. If this wasn't an accident but part of the hunter certification exam, then what in the world were hunters supposed to be—a gathering of blind men?!
Then the giant bear, which had been watching me in silence, raised a forepaw and bellowed.
“GUWOOOOOAR—!!!”
The brush shuddered and shed its leaves; the cry felt like it would tear my eardrums clean away.
Bonjwa. The Blood Demon, Cheon Yujin. Turned tail without a moment's hesitation.
With this pathetic body and the power of a Forged Blood Art still stuck at the Entry Realm, I had exactly two constraints to work with. Among the lightfoot techniques those limitations allowed, I chose the one that burned the least internal energy while delivering the greatest speed. Its name: Junzibo—the Gentleman's Step.
PABABABAT!
“Gu... Guwooo?”
The instant I drove the Gentleman's Step to its limit, the scenery smeared backward and the roar faded into the distance.
Save for a single flaw, the Gentleman's Step was a lightfoot art and stepping method infinitely close to the finest under heaven. It shone even on meager internal energy, and if you stripped away everything else and judged on efficiency alone, it was the best in the world.
Back in the days before I was the Blood Demon. Back when I was a barbarian of Hangzhou's back alleys, newly fallen into Murim. Until the day came for me to shoulder the curse of the Blood Demon Art, I had three masters.
The first of them—a legend whose notoriety shook every corner of Hangzhou in the Central Plains, who made every wealthy household bar their gates tight the moment night fell. The finest thief in all of Hangzhou's underworld. Amyoung Sintou, the Divine Thief of Shadows.
And the secret stepping art he devised for his disciple and his disciple alone was Junzibo. Not some nickname Bonjwa carelessly shortened—its formal name was Liangshang Junzibo, the Step of the Gentleman Upon the Beam. In plain terms: a rat on the roof beam.
Ignore the one trifling drawback—that you had to become a rat and run on all fours—and it was a first-rate lightfoot art, a movement technique fully worthy of being called the greatest stealth art under heaven...!
Perhaps because I was running flat out, sweat had blurred the world in front of me—but now was a time for running, first and foremost.
“...Sniff.”
In any case: run now, weep later...!
How long did I run? Either the giant bear had never meant to give chase, or it had given up entirely, because by the time the roaring behind me had fallen utterly silent, I was bent double with my hands on my knees, gulping down air.
“Haa... haa... haaah...”
Thank the heavens. Considering the length of that bear's stride, the Gentleman's Step as I could currently perform it probably wouldn't have shaken it off. But at least here, this far in, I didn't need to worry about any greater danger—
Snap.
The crack of a breaking branch.
I whirled toward the source of the sound, heart slamming, at the presence that had appeared out of nowhere. Since I'd begun training the Forged Blood Art, this frail body's qi-sense and perception had grown remarkably keen. And yet, exhausted as I was, I hadn't sensed a single thing until that branch snapped...!
Tension cinched tight around my spine. And then—
“......!!!”
From deep in the undergrowth, dozens upon dozens of crimson glints flared to life, rising like embers.
“The coordinate trace is in. The rift connects to the Bundang-gu gate—and on the other side lies the Alios Eastern Great Forest.”
“That's Aegis Guild territory. We won't get our hands on it easily, that's for sure.”
He was, after all, a leader in more than name, with people to answer for. So after a brief stint of hiding from reality, Kim Jinhu threw every ounce of the Iron Blood Guild's accumulated strength into untangling this inexplicable mess. In under half an hour, his people had traced the gate's nature and coordinates, and the report arrived before him with his aide in tow.
“Like we guessed, it's a regional-type gate... but what exactly are you supposed to do to make a dungeon link into one?”
“When has a gate ever once behaved according to common sense?”
“Delivered like cold fact, too.”
Kim Jinhu gave a hollow laugh and looked over the report. Regional-type gates. In the early days of the Gate Crisis, the most common sight had been emission-type gates, endlessly spewing monsters into the world. Next came the labyrinth-type gates that everyone simply called dungeons. And then there were the regional-type gates: vast slices of another world, complete with living ecosystems, far too large to be cleared like a dungeon and only ever suppressed. Just as hunters clipped labyrinth-type gates down to 'dungeons,' they called these 'fields.' A typical dungeon stuck to one concept, spawning monsters and guardians to match, while a field showcased every kind of monster its ecosystem could support, along with resources unique to the region.
“If anything, it's a blessing it turned out to be that one. The open-recruitment applicants are all hunters who pull more than their own weight as a baseline.”
“Doesn't mean I can breathe easy. I've been in that Great Forest myself. Never mind the rest—the Giant Bear alone is a colossal monster on the level of a field boss.”
The aide gave a small shake of his head and continued.
“Barring spectacular bad luck, you almost never cross paths with a Giant Bear, sir. And with a body that size, most people can spot it coming and steer well clear.”
“Fair enough... And the rest of what spawns in there was orcs and goblins, right?”
A sigh of relief escaped him before he could stop it. Urgent as the problem was, he couldn't help feeling a little better looking at that list. Complete rookies might have been another story, but these were hunters good enough to pass Iron Blood's first-round paper screening. A regional gate of this caliber wasn't the kind of place where lives were on the line from minute one—not unless someone went hunting for danger.
Then, quite suddenly, Kim Jinhu's eyes stopped on one corner of the report.
“...There's one more monster listed here that I never saw once in all my time going in there?”
“Ah, that one. That tracks.”
The aide shrugged.
“They're a species with high intelligence, poor physical specs, and cowardice bred into the bone. No wonder you never laid eyes on one, Guildmaster.”
Kim Jinhu found the monster's name in the report and let out a small laugh.
“Well, yeah. Rat-men... Ratmen were always that kind of monster, now that I think about it.”
In a full ten years of active hunter work, Kim Jinhu had never crossed paths with one. Not once. Which was exactly why the aide could laugh too.
“They're such cowards that if anything so much as outnumbers them by one—goblins included—they'll turn tail and run.”
Dozens of crimson glints burned ominously in the undergrowth. An ambush so complete I hadn't sensed so much as a whisper of it. And then—when the owners of those glints finally revealed themselves before me, I could only gape in horror.
Shaggy black fur. Round ears and buck teeth. Whiskers curled in an almost adorable arc. Eyes wavering red.
“...Squeak. Squeak-squeak.”
“Squeak-squeak-squeak!”
“Squeee...!”
Bonjwa. The Blood Demon, Cheon Yujin. Had just stumbled into a battle that must not, under any circumstances, be lost.