Effort vs. Two Geniuses
A day passed.
Seo Gwang-pal still hadn’t shown up at the factory.
Is he really going to let this slide in silence?
Seo Gwang-pal had beaten Ma Seon-ung without mercy, and there had been a thick, sticky rage simmering behind every blow.
No. He’s definitely coming.
War, after all, was the foundation of life and death, the road to survival and ruin. That was a line from the Initial Estimates chapter of The Art of War.
Exactly.
To live or die.
This was a war between me and Seo Gwang-pal.
No, the bastard wouldn’t come alone. He’d drag the whole guild with him.
This was a war between me and Dio Guild.
Am I afraid?
I couldn’t honestly say I wasn’t.
Dio Guild was far too huge and powerful for any one person to stand against alone.
But still.
I have to face them.
Because standing against evil was the fate a hero was meant to bear.
“Hah. Huu.”
From dawn, I went out to the empty lot and drove my fists forward again and again. A thousand mana-infused punches. The mission had already been completed, but I kept training all the same.
Sweat poured off me as if it were raining, and every muscle in my body screamed in protest.
Right now, I was both strong and weak. When I used my hero abilities, I could boast overwhelming power, but without them, I was nothing more than a low-tier hunter.
To beat someone like Seo Gwang-pal, I had to raise my capacity. I had to get stronger.
Did I even have talent as an Awakened?
I wasn’t sure.
Talent, huh.
There was one quality I could at least be proud of.
Rain or snow, no matter how sad or crushed I felt, I kept going quietly and stubbornly.
I had lived that way in my past life, and I would live that way in this one too.
If I kept at it long enough, maybe one day I could stand alone without relying on hero powers at all.
“Hah. Huu.”
After work, I switched to running drills. Chin tucked in, arms pumping in a steady rhythm.
A full marathon.
It was harder than throwing a thousand mana punches.
Running without stopping for hours on end was brutally painful.
My neck ached. My calves felt like they were about to tear apart. The soles of my feet, pounding against the ground, were nothing but a field of blisters.
The longer I kept going, the more strange thoughts seized me.
Forty-two kilometers? Can I even finish?
Why am I doing this?
...I feel like I’m going to die.
No one could help me.
And I had no one I could ask for help.
Running was a lonely fight from start to finish.
...Should I quit?
The thought flashed through my head, and my body collapsed as if it had been cut down. I dropped to one knee on the embankment of the Han River.
Gah!
I landed flat on my ass and gasped for breath, staring at the red text floating in the air.
10 km 32 m
I was still nowhere near the goal.
I had to keep running if I wanted to get Regeneration.
The problem was...
0 km
Damn it.
If I stopped running, it all went back to zero.
Mission failure.
I couldn’t even run slowly. If I didn’t finish within two hours, it would all be for nothing.
I checked the timer.
1 hour 23 minutes 47 seconds.
I had only managed ten kilometers in more than an hour.
I was supposed to complete the full course in under two hours.
I’m moving at turtle speed.
As the thread of hope drifted farther and farther away, all my strength drained out of me, and I flopped backward onto the ground.
A week passed.
Before work, mana punches.
After work, marathon training.
I kept up the same routine.
The security guard at the entrance to the Ilsan Hunter Complex waved at me when he saw me.
“You’re at it again today! Youth is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?”
The guard, whom I ran into every day, seemed to think I was just a guy who liked to exercise hard.
“Here, take one!”
He tossed something to me.
It was an apple.
“Fighting!”
I nodded and thanked him as I started running again, taking a bite of the apple as I went. The crisp, sweet flesh spread through my mouth.
Let’s go. I’m going to do this.
But despite that fierce determination, I still collapsed at the riverside before I could hit the two-hour mark.
15 km 72 m
So a week isn’t enough after all.
The distance had increased, but I was still nowhere near the target.
“Damn it!”
I lay on the Han River park grass and stared blankly up at the sky.
Raindrops scattered like a spray bottle, wetting my face.
I closed my eyes.
I can’t rush this.
But I couldn’t afford to take it easy either.
I had to gain a new ability before the enemies arrived.
Only...
Easy to say.
Historically, marathon runners had always faced the wall of two hours. No one had ever broken through a full course in under two hours, as if the human limit had simply been fixed there.
I wasn’t a professional athlete. No matter how brutally I trained, topping a world record in just a few weeks was close to impossible.
Isn’t there some other way?
In the darkness, my recent daily life flashed through my mind.
Mana training in the morning.
Running at night.
If I combine the two...
My eyes snapped open.
Dark clouds drifted lazily overhead with the drizzle.
I was an Awakened.
Just as I could pour mana into my punches, maybe I could use it while running too.
The longer I ran, the more my throat burned as if my blood were flowing backward. A sweet, metallic taste rose in my mouth. I was forcing myself through it with sheer grit, but my body couldn’t keep pace with my will.
What if I used mana in my breathing, taking it in and pushing it out together with my breath?
What if I put a thin layer of mana into both feet and drove myself forward by kicking off the ground?
I got to my feet.
Focusing my mind, I jogged in place lightly, then began stepping forward one foot at a time while paying attention to the mana.
Sure enough, it felt far easier than before.
I’d been so fixated on obtaining abilities that I’d made the mistake of focusing only on blind running.
The air slid down my throat smoothly, like swallowing sweet syrup.
My legs moved as if they were just skimming over the ground.
My body feels light.
Just combining running with mana produced this incredible effect.
Had I figured it out on my own?
No. This is...
The System had guided me.
Talent:Purchase
You can buy the abilities of the heroes you admire.
Purchase was not simply a talent for buying a hero’s power.
It increased my physical strength, taught me how to use mana efficiently, and built not just stamina but mental endurance as well. Through missions, it taught me all of those things naturally, without ever feeling like it was forcing them on me.
The sentence I had seen when I awakened had been simple:
Talent:Purchase
You can buy the abilities of the heroes you admire.
The more heroes I purchased, the more missions I completed, the closer I came to the image of the hero I had always admired.
The System had been programmed so that, if I followed the road it opened for me, I would undoubtedly become stronger.
Incredible.
The one who wanted to become a true hero more than anyone else was me.
Ignoring hunger and sleep, I kept running through the night.
Half a month passed.
25 km 11 m
2 hours 7 minutes 23 seconds.
I had succeeded in running a half marathon.
I couldn’t believe it even after seeing it with my own eyes.
A human being really could keep running this long without stopping.
People often say that life is like a marathon. It was a cliché, but at this moment it felt painfully true.
My impoverished childhood. My grandmother’s death. My younger brother’s death. My past, stained by relentless labor.
It had been miserable, but if I kept breaking past my limits and moving forward, someday I might reach whatever waited beyond them.
For example...
Right now.
My heavy body was still hard to move, but for some reason it felt light. My mind was hazy, like I was drunk, and yet at the same time it was strangely clear and fresh.
An experience I had never had before.
Runner’s high.
Once the fatigue vanished, my entire body soaked in a languid sense of happiness. The stress that had built up over time blew away all at once.
How far had I run?
40 km 56 m
41 km 79 m
42 km 12 m
...
Even the runner’s high that felt like it would last forever finally came to an end.
From here on, I had no choice but to sprint like a man in a fever dream.
A long, steep stone staircase blocked my path.
The place was commonly known as the 108 Steps Museum.
Seven years ago, an apocalypse-class monster had appeared in the Han River and destroyed the outer facilities, and the museum had been built there afterward.
On a normal course, I would have gone around and avoided the stairs, but I didn’t stop.
I stepped onto the stairs and kept pushing my pace higher.
Up and up and up again.
When I finally reached the summit, a huge statue was waiting for me.
It was a monument honoring the SS-class hunter who had slain the apocalypse-class monster and died a glorious death in the battle.
I had heard that records of his achievements were stored inside the museum.
42 km 195 m
1 hour 59 minutes 58 seconds.
By using mana in my running, I had barely, barely made it.
I finally did it!
Regeneration has been acquired.
With a cry that held all my hard-won satisfaction, I turned my back on the statue and shouted. I threw both hands high into the air.
“Aaaahhh!!!”
Looking out over the Han River, I swung a mana-charged fist.
Light flashed through the darkness.
One-two.
Straight!
Confidence flooded me, and adrenaline burst through my veins.
In my last life, I had spent day after day as good as dead.
But now, at last, I could feel that I was alive.
Incheon International Airport.
A man and a woman appeared side by side.
One had short hair, a slender figure, and a face that looked almost feline; the other was a huge bald man.
Lee Yu-seol and Seo Gwang-pal of Dio Guild.
“Yawn. I’m tired already, and it’s only morning. Right, Team Leader Lee?”
Seo Gwang-pal yawned with his mouth hanging open in a disgustingly lazy way.
Lee Yu-seol didn’t even bother answering.
If it hadn’t been on the orders of Dio Guild’s representative, Go Ju-hun, she would never have come here alone with Seo Gwang-pal.
“Haaah. Damn it. Who the hell are these twins, anyway, to make such a fuss?”
Seo Gwang-pal clicked his tongue and muttered under his breath.
They still hadn’t been able to strike the Ilsan Hunter Factory. That too was because of the representative’s orders: they were to bring the Twins in case something unexpected happened.
Because of that, the operation had been delayed for two full weeks, waiting for the Twins to enter the country.
“Do you know them, Team Leader? Those twins or whatever they’re called?”
As the wait dragged on, Lee Yu-seol answered him only because she needed something to kill the time.
“Free hunters. They’re skilled. They just do things however they want.”
They weren’t full-time members of Dio Guild. They were the kind of people who took contracts on a case-by-case basis and moved wherever the job led them.
“Looks like the Representative trusts them quite a bit...”
Seo Gwang-pal drew the words out with a sneer.
“Are they stronger than you, Team Leader?”
Lee Yu-seol, an A-class hunter.
And the Twins.
If you put those two sides on a scale, who would come out on top?
Seo Gwang-pal wasn’t actually interested.
He just wanted to get under the skin of the proud, high-and-mighty Lee Yu-seol, who always looked down on him.
That didn’t mean he had no curiosity about the Twins at all, though.
From what he had heard, they had a natural gift for combat.
Unofficially, one had committed his first murder at the age of five, the other at seven.
They had learned how to use a blade without anyone teaching them, and they were especially gifted at killing.
When it came to taking human life, they were unmatched.
Not one, but two geniuses had been born on this earth with the talent of devils.
Lee Yu-seol snorted.
“What kind of question is that? Obviously I’d win.”
It wasn’t bluster; she genuinely believed it.
But...
“If they don’t come at me together, I’ll win. No question.”
It was a conditional victory, but those words carried a lot of meaning.
Seo Gwang-pal curled his lip.
So it’s only one-on-one, huh.
Just then, two figures appeared at the entrance.
They were two men with identical faces and the same height.
Both wore Hawaiian shirts with different colors and patterns.
Nihao!
Konnichiwa!
The Twins, meeting Lee Yu-seol’s eyes, raised their hands and greeted her in two different languages.
“Why are you so late?”
Lee Yu-seol met them with a cold expression.
At any rate, they were fellow A-class hunters, so she treated them with proper respect.
“Oh dear, Team Leader Lee. Our apologies.”
“We missed our flight, you see.”
The Twins answered in turn, like a comedy duo.
Seo Gwang-pal stood behind them, staring blankly.
Their build was ordinary.
There was nothing especially remarkable about them.
But then...
Hm?
There were stains on their busy Hawaiian shirts.
At first, he had thought it was just a dark red pattern.
...Th-that’s blood, isn’t it?!
When he got a little closer, a fishy smell stabbed into his nose.
Seo Gwang-pal panicked and stumbled back a step.
The Twins went right on talking as if nothing were wrong.
“We had some business that came in from Tokyo, so we handled that on the way here.”
“We cut off a yakuza boss’s head!”
The Twins grinned and let their eyes gleam.
“Anyway, Representative Seo contacted us personally. Just who is this guy, anyway?”
“Yeah. For him to call us in this urgently, he must be something special. Let’s get this over with quickly. The target is...”
They spoke at the same time, as if they had rehearsed it.
“Where is he?”
“Where is he?”