Hunter Exam (7): The Power to Annihilate All Hunters
The alchemist from the association wailed in front of his bisected golem. "No! My golem!"
It was a heartbreaking sight that could dampen the spirits of everyone around him, but Choi Jungwoo paid it no attention. His gaze was fixed on the small girl sitting there in a daze.
"Are you injured anywhere?"
The girl startled and nodded quickly. "Yes. I'm fine."
In the administrator's office set up beside the testing ground, Kim Cheon-a sat on the sofa. She slurped the hot chocolate from the paper cup and let out a small sigh.
Then, moving her mouth hesitantly, she asked in a careful voice. "Um, by the way..."
Choi Jungwoo looked up from the examinee documents.
"Just in case, I have to ask. For that golem earlier... do I have to pay for it...?"
It was the same determined question that examinee number 31, Park Minsu, had asked. But the weight behind it was completely different. Unlike Park Minsu, whose words had been nothing but bravado, the girl before him had actually sliced the golem clean in two.
Choi Jungwoo shook his head.
"You don't need to worry about that."
If examinees had to compensate for damaged equipment, no one would be able to use their full strength in the practical exam.
"If they had to pay whenever it broke, the examinees wouldn't be able to show their true abilities."
The golem had been built with an enormous budget specifically to measure those abilities. It would defeat the whole purpose if its high cost prevented them from going all out.
I never expected it to actually get destroyed, though.
The test golem created by the association's alchemists after pouring in a massive budget. They had reduced its unnecessary offensive power but pushed its defense to the absolute limit. It was a precaution against unexpected malfunctions or damage.
Naturally, the firepower of freshly awakened rookies couldn't even leave a scratch.
Of course, there were exceptions. The so-called irregular geniuses who could damage golems even in their beginner days.
But there weren't many such monsters in the world. And even if there were, it usually showed during the mana measurement stage.
Overwhelming mana. Or immense inner energy. Without that kind of tremendous power behind it, dealing any meaningful damage to the golem was impossible.
Even then, it would only amount to a shallow hit. At best, a tiny scratch on the expensive armor.
Slicing it completely in half like that was impossible for a beginner awakened, no matter how talented they were.
But.
Choi Jungwoo's eyes returned to the documents. His expression twisted with confusion.
Her inner energy is practically nonexistent.
Far from irregular, it was so weak one might mistake her for an ordinary person. So how in the world had she cut it apart?
Choi Jungwoo let out a short sigh and spoke.
"How did you destroy it?"
Kim Cheon-a tilted her head while still drinking her hot chocolate. Her expression was innocently puzzled, as if the answer should be obvious.
"...I cut it with my sword?"
Well, that was the only answer she could give.
He scanned the document again. The lowest possible level of inner energy. The martial arts she had learned were some rogue faction techniques whose name even she didn't know. That was all.
Then how on earth...
Bang!
At that moment, the office door flew open violently.
"Hey, Hunter Choi Jungwoo!"
A white-haired old man stormed in, shouting at the top of his lungs. It was the same alchemist who had been sobbing in front of the collapsed golem earlier.
A PhD-level alchemist. Though he had awakened late in life, he had risen to become the representative of the Alchemist Association.
"I don't know what happened, but you should have subdued it properly! What were you thinking, smashing it to pieces like that!"
Choi Jungwoo pinched the bridge of his nose. It seemed the old man had been too busy crying over the golem to hear any explanation of the situation.
Choi Jungwoo answered calmly.
"I didn't destroy it."
"What?"
The alchemist frowned, looking utterly bewildered. "Come on, it's obvious at a glance. Why are you denying it? Who else here could slice it apart that cleanly besides you?"
Choi Jungwoo let out a short sigh. He quietly raised his hand, pointing toward the girl on the sofa.
"Examinee number 32, Kim Cheon-a, is the one who destroyed the golem."
"Huh?"
The old man's eyes followed Choi Jungwoo's finger. There sat a small girl clutching a paper cup with both hands. A child with hot chocolate smeared around her mouth, staring at him with wide, innocent eyes.
The old man looked back and forth between the girl and Choi Jungwoo, then let out a dry chuckle.
"Heh. First time I've learned that Hunter Choi Jungwoo tells jokes."
He clearly didn't believe it. Choi Jungwoo didn't bother with a long explanation. He simply clicked the computer mouse on the desk.
"See for yourself."
The footage from the practical exam site began playing on the monitor.
On screen, the golem started attacking the moment Kim Cheon-a stood before it. She dodged every strike with flawless footwork. Just as Choi Jungwoo sensed the danger and prepared to intervene—
The golem suddenly moved at a speed on an entirely different level from before. It charged toward the girl with ferocious acceleration.
And in the very next instant.
Flash—!
At the moment of impact, the screen flooded with pure white light. The sparks from the sword slicing through metal had obscured the view.
Soon the result appeared. The golem, split neatly in two vertically. Its cut surfaces glowed molten red as it collapsed to either side.
A heavy silence settled over the office.
"......"
The doctor's jaw dropped so far it looked like it might come unhinged after watching the video.
"It seems I'm the one who should be taking responsibility," Choi Jungwoo said, his expression ice-cold as he stared down the old man. "Fortunately, examinee Kim Cheon-a handled it well. But if things had gone wrong, the examinee could have died."
Of course, Choi Jungwoo bore some responsibility himself. The moment the golem's movements turned strange, he should have subdued it immediately.
The movements were too good.
But the girl's footwork had been unexpectedly superb. Her movements made it seem impossible for her to get hit, so his timing for intervention ended up slightly delayed.
The last moment was the problem.
Without that, his intervention wouldn't have been late at all. The golem's speed had suddenly skyrocketed beyond its limits. A variable even an A-class Hunter like Choi Jungwoo hadn't anticipated.
"Please explain yourself. Why did the examinee golem suddenly move like that?"
At Choi Jungwoo's pointed question, cold sweat broke out on the old man's forehead.
"Wait, why is it acting up all of a sudden? I definitely finished the maintenance perfectly yesterday. I even greased the joints myself at my age!"
The large-scale practical exam was the very next day. As the representative, he had personally inspected every single golem with meticulous care.
The old man thought back again, but there had been nothing wrong. It was in perfect condition with no room for error.
"Then could this incident be the cause?" Choi Jungwoo operated the mouse and played the previous footage.
On screen, examinee number 31, Park Minsu, appeared. The video showed him swinging his magic sword and noisily pounding away at the golem.
The old man who watched it snorted in disbelief.
"That golem's outer shell is made from the hide of a deep-sea titan, famous for its hardness. The interior is filled with the mucus of an abyss slime that perfectly absorbs impacts."
The old man chuckled. "If it could break from childish attacks like that, this golem wouldn't be worth the price of a state-of-the-art fighter jet."
"Pffft!"
At that moment, a loud spluttering sound came from the side. The moment she heard it cost as much as a fighter jet, the girl on the sofa had spat out her hot chocolate.
Kim Cheon-a asked in a trembling voice. "If it's the price of one fighter jet..."
The girl's pupils shook with unease.
"I remember it costing around a hundred million to build."
The girl, who had looked momentarily flustered at the alchemist's words before making an expression that seemed to say Is that all a fighter jet costs?, listened as the old man continued.
"Just so you know, that's in dollars."
It was packed with cutting-edge technology and the highest-grade monster byproducts. That was why it carried such an absurd price tag.
"......"
At those words, the girl's face turned deathly pale.
"A hundred million... in dollars..."
With trembling hands, the girl tapped away at her smartphone.
"Th-that's over a hundred billion..."
After seeing the search results, she looked like she might faint at any moment.
"U-um. Just to confirm one more time..."
"There is no liability for compensation, so please rest easy."
Choi Jungwoo answered quickly. Only then did the girl look slightly relieved. Her body was still shaking, though.
"Ah, could it be because of that?" The alchemist, who had been stroking his chin in thought, suddenly spoke up. "When we first developed this golem, we received quite a lot of government funding."
But the National Assembly had raised objections about budget waste. They argued that it made no sense to use a golem costing over a hundred billion solely for examinees or training purposes.
"So we added military functions to suit the tastes of the higher-ups. Functions for killing rather than subduing. So it could fight in dangerous situations."
Choi Jungwoo's brow furrowed. "This is the first I'm hearing of it."
"That makes sense. I only just remembered it myself." The old man added with an awkward expression. It had been a function never meant to see use in the first place.
"It's a function we designed so it wouldn't activate."
The old man continued. "Originally this thing wasn't built as a dedicated combat unit."
There was one more reason the golem's price had been inflated. The function to autonomously assess an examinee's capabilities and accurately convert their combat power into data. The core component for that was the eye of a nationally certified S-class monster—the time-dwelling owl.
It could grasp an opponent's combat strength and potential at a level approaching future prediction, but the part was ridiculously expensive.
In short, this high-end golem had been created purely for measuring combat ability.
"It's ridiculous, but if the gold badges are throwing a fit, we have to comply." The old man sighed. "So I did set the logic to activate only in true emergencies."
"What counts as an emergency situation?"
"First, when it detects an enemy posing a lethal threat, the first-stage limiter releases. But that requires my manual approval. In other words, that's not the cause of this malfunction."
Then why had it activated? Choi Jungwoo wanted to press the question, but he turned his head toward the sofa for a moment. The lethal threat the golem had supposedly detected. Kim Cheon-a sat there. Still unable to recover from the shock of the hundred-billion figure, she hugged her knees and trembled. She looked anything but a lethal threat.
"As you can see at the end of the video, it wasn't normal combat movement. The speed suddenly became impossibly fast."
"Ah, that must be the final command I added. A function that activates without any permission as long as the conditions are met. That is likely the cause of this incident."
"Can you really include something that dangerous?"
"It was because the condition itself was something that would never happen. They told me to set it to release only during a national emergency, so I said fine."
So this was what the National Assembly had demanded: It's a golem that costs over a hundred billion. Therefore, make it usable in combat when danger arises. Its combat power is low? Then at least make it capable of going all out in the worst-case scenario.
"In that situation, all restrictions on the golem are lifted. It seems an error occurred in the system, causing a chain release that started from the first-stage limiter."
The old man looked at the monitor screen.
"The movement shown first in the video is the first-stage limiter release. A state where it uses all its killing capabilities without restriction."
It seemed to refer to when the golem first charged at Kim Cheon-a.
Choi Jungwoo continued. "Then what about the second?"
"The second is the final stage. It completely removes even the machine's performance limits. The more it overexerts itself, the more the core burns out and the golem's lifespan is ruined."
It was a self-destructive function in which a machine worth over a hundred billion would burn itself out in battle.
"The movement shown at the end of the video is that one."
Choi Jungwoo recalled the golem charging at Kim Cheon-a with tremendous speed in those final moments.
A function that should never have been activated in the first place. But under pressure from the political sphere, they had been forced to add it as a mere formality.
"They're laughable. If a situation like that ever actually occurred, a golem like this wouldn't be any help at all." The doctor snorted as he muttered.
Choi Jungwoo, who had been listening quietly, spoke up. "Then what exactly is this final command you added?"
If the conditions were met, all limiters would release without any permission. What kind of condition would the government approve?
"Well, it's a situation that would never happen, so my memory is a bit fuzzy. Let me think, what was it again..."
The alchemist scratched his head as if trying to recall, then suddenly let out an "Ah!"
"It dismantles all limiters sequentially starting from stage one. The condition is—"
The old man continued.
"When it encounters an opponent possessing the power to annihilate all hunters."