Ten Years Later
Part One
"A gnoll?"
Do-ha's brow furrowed the moment the hyena-type monster ambled into view.
"What the hell is a gnoll doing here…?"
This was Earth, not Belhart. So why was a monster that belonged in Belhart standing right in front of him?
"Kyaaaak!"
One of the drooling gnolls charged at full speed, swinging the weapon clutched in its fist. Gnolls always carried something — and this one, for reasons unknown, was brandishing a golf club.
Whoosh!
"Tch."
Do-ha clicked his tongue. No matter how drained he felt, he was not about to lose to a lowly gnoll.
"I was beating Murim martial artists the day I first landed in Belhart."
Crack!
He slipped past the club's straight-line swing and drove his knee up into the gnoll's jaw.
"Kyaak!"
The monster shrieked as its body reeled from the blow — then immediately righted its head and swung the club again.
"Kyaak?"
The gnoll froze mid-swing. No one stood in front of it. It had just lowered its head — so where had he gone?
"Whether it's Belhart or here, you lot never did have much peripheral vision."
"Kyaak?!"
At the voice from behind, the gnoll spun — and Do-ha's arm snaked around its throat.
Whip.
"Die."
Crrrack!
He twisted the neck clean around. A gnoll's weakness was always the neck — the rest of the body was tough and thick-hided, but the cervical bones were fragile. Even a modest shock left the head dangling like a broken doll.
The corpse crumpled. Do-ha brushed the fur from his clothes with the ease of long habit.
"Don't tell me…"
He narrowed his eyes at the body, then drew a rusted kitchen knife from his bag — a weapon he'd grabbed on the way out of the house, just in case.
Thuk.
He split open the chest around the heart and pulled free a lump of purple stone, nodding.
"So these things drop mana stones too."
Mana stones. Their shapes varied, but all of them glowed purple, and all of them had countless uses.
"Seeing a gnoll… I'm starting to put a few pieces together."
Monsters. And that "unusual power" mentioned in the martial-law notice. Settings straight out of comics and novels.
"Time to confirm whether I'm right."
And charge his phone while he was at it.
As expected.
When Do-ha reached Yadang Station and saw the massive barricades ringing the area, he nodded to himself. Beyond those walls lay an intact city — and on this side of them, Paju looked like another world entirely.
Once the monsters started appearing in Paju, they just abandoned the whole place.
Then they'd thrown up barricades to keep the creatures from spreading. In short, Paju was a ghost city now.
Someone's standing at the entrance.
Guards, naturally — it was a barricade checkpoint. But they weren't wearing military uniforms.
They're barely even watching the place.
One was asleep inside what looked like a guard post. The other leaned against a wall, yawning as he scrolled on his phone.
Well. Works for me.
Hidden in the brush, Do-ha flung a stone to the far side.
Crack!
"What was that?!"
The man on his phone shot toward the noise so fast that Do-ha's expression hardened with certainty.
That movement just now…
The distance between the guard's post and the stone's landing point was a good thirty meters. One blink, and the man was already there.
Now.
Do-ha pressed himself to the end of the barricade and moved. He hadn't done anything wrong — but getting spotted would mean a headache he didn't need.
He slipped past the wall with practiced ease and was out the other side.
A completely different world.
Leaving Paju for Goyang City was like crossing into another reality. Moments ago he'd been walking through a ruined wasteland; now the roads were whole, the buildings standing, everything ordinary.
Surreal.
A café sat right in front of the barricade. Do-ha let out a dry laugh. On one side of that thin wall, skeletons littered the ground and monsters prowled. A few steps away, people laughed over coffee.
"First things first — charge the phone."
A café. Perfect.
Hope the charger still works…
He'd brought one from home, but it was rusted. No guarantees.
A chime sounded as he stepped inside.
"Welcome to Starlightbucks."
Do-ha's pupils trembled. The employee greeting him was an elf. He'd assumed cosplay at first — but no. She was unmistakably an elf.
"Sir?"
"…Ah. Uh. One Americano, please."
He forced himself calm and placed the order. Seeing a race he'd only known from Belhart standing behind a real-world counter made him wonder, for a second, whether he was still on the other side.
"Of course. I'll ring you up."
"Here."
He pulled a ten-thousand-won bill from his pocket — the salary he'd left sitting on his desk.
"Oh… this is old currency."
"Excuse me?"
"I haven't seen one of these since the year I first arrived on Earth. Ten thousand won received."
Old currency? A ten-thousand-won note was old currency?
How much time had passed? He'd expected years — Paju's state made that obvious. But enough years for paper money to be called obsolete?
"I'll call you on the buzzer."
"Right."
He took the vibrating pager and found a corner seat. An outlet sat conveniently in the wall.
"At least the plug still fits."
Whether that counted as good luck, he wasn't sure.
Never thought I'd live to see an elf working part-time at a Starlightbucks…
He exhaled, plugged in the charger, and set the phone to charge.
The phones themselves don't look that different…
He studied the devices other customers held. He'd expected the designs to have changed, but they weren't far off from his own.
And there are a lot of other races here.
Elves and dwarves sat mixed among the laughing, chatting humans — so naturally that he almost hadn't noticed.
The screen flickered to life. A logo appeared. Do-ha smiled.
How long had it been since he'd seen this screen? Forty years. Forty years in Belhart without a single glimpse of a phone display — and here it was at last.
The logo kept blinking. The device was slow; age would do that.
"Well, even when I bought it, it was already a two-year-old used model—"
The smile froze on his face.
The buzzer vibrated in his hand.
…Two… 2034…?
The day the book had swallowed him was 2024. Ten years had passed.
The buzzer kept buzzing against his stunned fingers.
"Sir~?"
"Ah…"
The employee's call finally snapped him back. He stood.
"Enjoy your drink."
"Um…"
"Yes?"
"What year is next year again? I completely blanked…"
"Oh… I'm not totally sure either, but I remember the news saying thirty-five is the Year of the Blue Rabbit."
"Ah…"
The Year of the Blue Rabbit. Confirmed. It was 2034 — ten years later.
"Time really flies."
"I know, right? Next year it's already thirty-five."
The employee shook her head with a wistful look.
"Thanks. I'll enjoy it."
"Sure~"
Date confirmed, Do-ha carried his coffee back to his seat. He'd expected time to have moved on — but ten years? Not one or two. Ten.
What the hell happened while I was gone?
He sat, looked at his phone, and smiled despite everything.
There are texts from Grandpa from ten years ago.
Where are you. Please just be alive. I'm sorry. Message after message, all from a decade past.
Thank god. Just like I thought — Grandpa was in Seoul. He was safe.
He nodded, opened a browser, and started searching articles from ten years ago.
Before he'd fallen into Belhart, monsters had not existed in this world. They belonged in movies, comics, novels — never reality.
Gates… monsters… Awakening.
He read article after article, nodding slowly.
Exactly as he'd guessed. The world had changed.
Portals called Gates had appeared. Monsters had poured through them. And people with unusual powers — the Awakened — had begun to emerge.
Elves and dwarves, most likely.
He only had to lift his head to see the elf behind the counter.
Good. Smart move.
In Belhart, humans, elves, and dwarves had all been allies. Ancient history said they'd once been bitter enemies — but after thousands of years, the three races had chosen cooperation.
As he kept reading, the shape of this new world came into focus.
Do-ha worked through years of old news with the care of a student cramming for an exam. The world he'd grown up in had been rewritten from the ground up — he needed every scrap of information he could get.
Founded nine years ago.
Monsters had appeared, and a year later the Hunter Association had been born. Later than he'd have expected.
Unlike the comics and novels, when this actually hit the real world, everyone just flailed around.
They should have seized control and started solving problems immediately. Instead, reality had burned a full year. Countless Awakened and civilians had died in the chaos. Without a central command, nothing ran smoothly.
The year after that, guilds started popping up one by one.
A year after each nation's Hunter Association formed, guilds had followed. And now, years further on, the landscape held everything from small mid-tier outfits to corporate-scale mega-guilds.
That explained Paju. The monsters had poured out before any real framework existed. By the time the Hunter Association and the guilds had found their footing, it was already too late to reclaim the city.
Do-ha nearly laughed out loud. Ten years into a transformed world, and YouTubers were still on the list. He couldn't decide whether that was impressive or exhausting.
Hm? What's this.
Something caught his eye as he scrolled.
Cheon-oe-cheon?
Curious, he searched the term.
Cheon-oe-cheon (天外天) — Heaven Beyond Heaven
The seventeen SSS-Rank Hunters on Earth. The absolute strongest.
Hunters were ranked across eight standard tiers, from SSS down to E. Each Hunter license carried a color matching its grade.
And then there were the ones called Heaven Beyond Heaven — the Cheon-oe-cheon. Only seventeen SSS-Rank Hunters existed in the entire world, and each one was a national-level strategic asset capable of standing in for an entire country.
Korea doesn't have one?
The Republic of Korea had two SS-Ranks. Not a single SSS.
"The more I read, the more absurd this gets."
Do-ha set the phone down, shook his head, and took a sip of coffee. Watching all of this unfold in reality was equal parts fascinating and ridiculous.
Then again… he'd been pulled into another world himself. Was any of this really so strange?
More headlines scrolled past.
Hmm… a crime syndicate powerful enough to kill a national-level Hunter. That's a serious threat.
It meant they had Awakened of comparable strength packed into their ranks.
Axis Stone?
An unfamiliar term. He searched it at once.
An Axis Stone was the core that sustained a Gate — a nucleus of pure structure. Clearing every monster inside a Gate wasn't enough. Only by destroying the Axis Stone — the AS — could a Gate be permanently closed.
Belhart never had anything like this.
There had been no Gates there. Monsters simply existed wherever they existed.
Hm?
Something familiar snagged his eye mid-scroll. He enlarged the photo.
This is…
A Hunter smiled for the camera during volunteer work. Do-ha's face went rigid — not at the man, but at the mark on his arm.
The Demon God Cult's mark.
A fanatical order that worshipped and followed the Demon God. The Demon God Cult.
Their mark was here on Earth too.