High-Speed Breakthrough (1)
At the foot of Chi-ak Mountain.
Kuuung!
Jeong Dawit's fist smashed into the boulder.
A heavy tremor rolled through the earth—and then:
Kwa-jik!
A dull crack split the surface of the rock.
"Huuu."
He looked down at his calloused knuckles and let out a rough breath.
I still can't believe it.
Looking back on the last six months, everything felt like a dream.
A UFC-ranked fighter.
He had once believed he stood at the absolute peak of combat skill in South Korea.
But the new martial arts he had learned belonged to an entirely different realm.
I thought modern MMA was the pinnacle of efficiency…
There was that classic story, wasn't there? The monk who spent decades training at Shaolin only to get beaten senseless by an MMA fighter on television.
So when Jeong Dawit first heard the word "martial arts," he hadn't been able to entirely shake a quiet contempt.
But then?
The moment he began to use qi, everything changed at the root.
You didn't just take a step—you had to drive yourself forward by kicking off qi itself. You didn't aim for the gut or the chin; you detonated qi to deliver the shock.
It was a domain modern combat sports simply could not explain.
And yet—
Bear-tank…
In front of Hwang Dae-un, the man teaching him, Jeong Dawit was still a child.
Just when he thought he was catching up, a single sparring match would leave him thoroughly, overwhelmingly crushed.
The rest of the members were no different.
Han Ji-yoon, Bok Dong-jin, Cha Dae-beom, Oh Jeong-min—every one of them.
Over the past half year, Team 2 had been forced to feel the gulf between themselves and Team 1 down to the marrow of their bones.
Especially Oh Jeong-min, the archer. He looked half-dead every single day.
He had been the leader of Ghost, a special unit so secret that only a handful of people inside the National Intelligence Service and the Defense Intelligence Command even knew it existed. After hundreds of real combat missions, he had long believed he had already stepped beyond the limits of ordinary humans.
That sense of self was shattered completely in front of Kang Si-a.
"You don't look at the wind. You feel it."
After that cryptic remark—
Shwaeaeek!
What kind of archery was this?
The arrow flew like a living creature, twisting through the air in an aerial dance before burying itself dead-center in the target.
And that's supposed to be a technique?
In Oh Jeong-min's world, something like that was called a miracle.
From that day on, his training became a war against himself.
He clung desperately to every scrap of Kang Si-a's instruction, determined not to miss a single word.
He cut his sleep. He drew the bowstring until his fingers were raw and bleeding.
He had grown stronger—no question.
He could now reliably hit a spinning coin fifty meters away.
But right beside him, Kang Si-a was blindfolded, piercing the wings of insects mid-flight by sound alone.
He thrashed and struggled to close the gap, yet she was already soaring through a sky far beyond his reach.
He wasn't catching up. The distance only grew more vast with every passing day.
It was despairing.
Was this the wall that separated ordinary people from geniuses?
From now on, my goal is to be the second-best archer in South Korea.
In the end, Oh Jeong-min revised his target.
Kang Si-a was no longer a rival. She was someone to revere, learn from, and follow.
At the same time, he felt a deep gratitude toward his leader, Yoo Jin-hyeok.
If their leader hadn't swallowed his pride that day and led them here… what would have become of them?
They wouldn't have improved at all. They would still be living under the delusion that they were the best inside their little well.
And that wasn't even the half of it.
Over the past half year, the members of Team 2 had confronted a deeper truth.
Even the Team 1 members they called masters were themselves receiving instruction from someone else.
The Pioneer…
Hyun Si-woon.
He had been guiding every single member of Team 1.
The origin of every martial art they practiced!
The way Team 2 looked at Hyun Si-woon could only change.
When respect and awe are repeated long enough, absolute obedience takes root at the end of that path.
In their hearts, Hyun Si-woon already occupied a place closer to a god than a man.
What we're learning is probably only a tiny fraction of what that man knows, right?
How can a being like that even exist?
We can never turn against him. Keep treating him carefully. Don't make a mistake and get on his bad side.
Especially in Hyun Si-woon's case—
Suaaaa.
He could now shape sword qi so vivid and clear that both Team 1 and Team 2 could only stare in open admiration whenever he did it.
"Hyeong-nim! How do you even do something like that?"
"How does your sword keep getting deeper every day while the rest of us are stuck in place…?"
"Is that what real talent looks like?"
Team 1 said it out loud.
Whoa.
Insane.
So a human can actually do that.
The gap between our masters and us is nothing… compared to the gap between our masters and the Pioneer.
Team 2 thought it silently.
And now—
Six months later, Hyun Si-woon was still in the Form Refining stage.
The road to the Moon Force realm remained long and brutal.
Half a year hadn't even been close to enough.
But at least one thing had become natural: shaping sword qi.
Time to start moving.
Hyun Si-woon stopped his training and gathered every member.
"You've all worked hard these past six months."
A great deal had happened in that half year.
The net profits of the ★Wandering Merchant★ had broken fifteen million TC, and once Jang Cha-yul began releasing information, the overall clear rate across the entire server had skyrocketed.
In particular, the death rate in the lower floors had plummeted, accelerating both the influx of new climbers and their growth.
Which meant?
Demand for potions and food had exploded right along with it.
Park Du-shik had seized that golden age and maximized profits without missing a beat.
He hadn't neglected material purchases either.
In his own words, they had stockpiled so much it was "impossible to count."
They had also steadily bought unique items from the monthly shop. A couple suitable for Team 2 members had been given as gifts; the rest had been released into the market.
Every member of Team 1 except Baek Do-hee was already wearing unique-grade gear or better, so there had been no issue.
"Starting now, we begin the climb in earnest."
"Ohh!"
"Finally!"
Cheers erupted as if they had been waiting for exactly those words.
How restless their bodies had grown over six months!
The community had never stopped talking about it either.
Just when were they going to clear the 8th floor?
How long were they going to keep lingering on the 7th?
We're going now, you bastards!
We were going crazy wanting to clear floors too!
Blood boiling, some of the members stamped their feet or started stretching on the spot.
Hyun Si-woon gave a small grin.
"The deadline is one month."
"…!"
"Within one month, we will break through to the 10th floor. Both Team 1 and Team 2."
"What?"
"…The 10th floor?"
"Huk."
Yoo Jin-hyeok and his teammates' eyes flooded with shock.
The 10th floor—during the days of the Tower of Despair, that had been a world-record pace for anyone who wasn't EndSeeker!
And they were supposed to do it in a single month?
"And Yoon Seo-a."
"Yes, sir!"
"It's time for you to climb the tower as well."
"Me too?"
Yoon Seo-a's eyes sparkled with anticipation.
She hadn't even set foot on the 1st floor yet, and her instincts were already starving for real combat experience.
"What about a team? Who am I going with?"
A memory from a few days earlier flashed through Hyun Si-woon's mind.
Several young people from Eden Camp had worked up the courage to come find him.
They wanted to become climbers too. They begged him to teach them martial arts.
But Ha-wol had been merciless.
Tsk. Those ones have no talent. Force-feed them all you like and they still won't break past the wall of third-rate. Better to let them till fields than shove clumsy power into their hands and send them off to die.
Her words had been cold—but not wrong.
Not everyone could become Yoon Seo-a or a member of Team 1 or Team 2.
"Team? What team. You're going alone."
"What?"
Yoon Seo-a's round eyes went wide with disbelief.
"By myself?"
She wasn't the only one.
Even the members watching from the side couldn't hide their shock.
No matter how strong Seo-a was, sending a child alone into that brutal tower…
But Hyun Si-woon felt no worry.
He had already verified it in a previous regression.
With nothing but Baek Yeon-ho's information support, she had solo-cleared all the way to the 7th floor.
Her talent was simply too overwhelming to cage inside the framework of a party.
Rather than teaching her how to breathe with teammates, he intended to first push her own power to its absolute limit.
I'm raising a joker card.
Fixed strategies. Predictable variables.
A strategic weapon that transcended every one of them—irreplaceable.
A single card that could be deployed at the exact moment, in the exact place, and overturn the entire battlefield.
That was the future Hyun Si-woon envisioned for Sword Emperor Yoon Seo-a.
"Don't worry. With your skill, the lower floors will be nothing more than a stroll. Yeon-ho hyung will fill you in on the clear routes when he has time."
"Okay."
Baek Yeon-ho nodded.
And so the two teams began moving along their respective paths.
Yoon Tae-shik of Owl waited on edge for contact from each team leader.
Before that, he had already declared the 10th-floor breakthrough on the community boards!
That short notice was more than enough to shake the entire server.
No one doubted it.
Over the past half year, the name "Yoon Tae-shik" had become the single most reliable guarantee of information on the entire server.
The belief that anything Owl released was pure fact had already been burned deep into every climber's mind.
Simply knowing that he had personal connections with both the Pioneer and Yoo Jin-hyeok was enough to make people envy him.
Expectation concentrated into a single point.
Countless posts and comments began flooding the boards.
Some people insisted that clearing the 10th floor in a month was absurd and told everyone not to overhype it. Others fired back that if the Pioneer really was EndSeeker, it was more than possible.
Two days later—
A new post appeared.
Climbers doubted their own eyes.
Even on the lower floors, clears that took more than a week were common. And they had cleared the 8th floor in two days?
Especially looking at the publicly available information on the 8th floor, there was simply no angle that allowed a two-day clear.
Another two days passed.
This time the news came that Yoo Jin-hyeok's team had finally cleared the 8th floor.
And at the same moment, an even bigger breaking report exploded across the boards.
The 9th-floor clear, right on the heels of the last one!
The community had no choice but to be swept by an even greater shock than before.