A Skeleton in the Light
Knock, knock.
"Come in."
The door creaked open.
Association President Kim Hee-jae, buried in a fortress of paperwork, set down his pen and looked up at the staff member entering his office.
It was the first time he had put the pen down in the five hours since he had arrived at work.
"Haa… my head is killing me."
He rolled his neck from side to side, then pressed his fingers hard against his eyes.
Nearly two years in this chair, and he still could not get used to it.
"I'd almost rather be fighting monsters again."
Kim Hee-jae — once known as the Crimson Butcher, a man who had slaughtered monsters without mercy. Those days had burned bright and fierce. Now he fought paperwork instead.
"You should rest a little while you work, sir."
His secretary, the elf Roseina, held out a cold canned drink.
"Don't you have coffee instead of this?"
"Haven't you already had two liters of americano today? Any more and it will be bad for you."
"Coffee is the only reason I've lasted this long."
Pssht.
"Anyway, what is it?"
He cracked open the can and asked what she needed. Roseina almost never came by at this hour — gate-related work usually kept her elsewhere.
"Around 17:30, he reportedly entered a C-Rank Gate in Bucheon."
"Who?"
"That unidentified SSS-Rank hunter."
"Is that so?"
Unexpected news lit a spark in the Association President's eyes.
The man had thrown the entire country into an uproar while concealing every scrap of personal information, then vanished. Now he had reappeared somewhere no one expected.
So he went straight there after the Association measured his rank.
Given the time of the Gate visit and the distance from the Association, he must have left immediately.
"He arrived three hours ago, and the report is only coming in now?"
Something felt off. An SSS-Rank hunter appearing should have triggered an immediate report.
"The staff member dispatched to the Gate filed late, apparently. The SSS-Rank hunter has already left."
"Ah. So that's why the report only just came up."
"Should we discipline the dispatched staff member…?"
"No. Leave it."
He shook his head with a faint smile at his secretary's question.
The late report was almost certainly because that SSS-Rank hunter had stopped it.
That's why he hides his identity, too.
He had blocked the Association staff's report so a crowd would not swarm him and become a nuisance.
"What did that staff member do wrong? If an SSS-Rank hunter told you not to report on him, would you just go ahead and do it?"
"Well, no."
"So leave the staff alone. Or have you already disciplined them?"
"No. I knew you would say that, sir, so I never even mentioned discipline to them."
"…Then why did you ask if we should?"
"I was simply inquiring, sir."
"Not testing me?"
"Well… that depends on how one chooses to take it, doesn't it?"
"Ugh. And this is my disciple…"
The Association President looked at his secretary — no, his disciple, Roseina — and shook his head.
Before joining the Association she had been an innocent, adorable student. Now she had turned into a sly little fox.
"You weren't like this when you were younger…"
"Actually, I was. I just pretended otherwise."
She smoothly collected the empty can.
"Anything else unusual? Did he just hunt quietly and leave?"
"Staff searching the Gate interior found this."
She held out her phone, showing him a photograph.
"This is… the boss?"
"Yes. It appears the boss spawned. And it respawned as B-Rank."
"Association staff cleared that boss not long ago, didn't they? And it already came back this fast?"
He had never seen a case like this.
Barely two weeks since the Gate boss had been dealt with. Normally it took about a month for a boss to respawn. This time it had returned in two weeks.
"That SSS-Rank hunter must have taken it down."
"Yes. He left the corpse and only harvested the mana stone."
"Well, he's Cheon-oe-cheon. A boss would be nothing to him. Though entering a C-Rank Gate is still strange."
Had he simply gone to loosen up?
Korea had S-Rank Gates as well. Why leave those alone and walk into a C-Rank?
"What else?"
"We found several traces of combat. There was even a crater that looked as if a meteor had struck."
"That's only natural for a Cheon-oe-cheon. Nothing unusual?"
"A pit was discovered."
"A pit?"
"Yes. Fairly deep and quite large. Dozens of Hounds were trapped inside it."
"So he dug a trap and drove them in for a sweep hunt?"
"It didn't seem to be that. There was only one pit, and every Hound inside was still alive. Though it does appear he was conducting a sweep hunt of some kind."
"Could the boss have appeared early because of the sweep hunt?"
"That can't be it."
She shook her head at the Association President's question.
If sweep hunting made bosses spawn faster, more than half the hunters in the country would already be dead. Guilds, the Association, parties — all of them routinely conducted sweep hunts. If that alone caused early boss spawns, the casualties would have been catastrophic long ago.
"Hmm. So that wasn't it."
He stroked his chin.
Somehow he could not shake the suspicion that the sweep hunt had something to do with the boss's appearance. And that instinct of his was half right.
Do-ha's sweep hunt had not caused the boss to respawn — it had been drawn out by the pheromones. But no one knew that.
Do-ha was encountering Gates for the first time, and the Association President had no idea that something like a pheromone attractant even existed.
"For reference, the mana stone was sold at a nearby shop. And…"
"There's more?"
She swiped to the next photo on the phone resting on the desk.
"What is this…?"
Beside the Cheon-oe-cheon exiting the Gate clung a massive mass of light.
Not fireflies — simply an enormous blob of radiance.
"Is this edited?"
"No. According to Association staff, this is what happens when someone spreads Light magic over their entire body."
"So there's someone inside that mass of light? Don't tell me he hid a Hound in the light and brought it out?"
"To find out, we adjusted brightness, exposure, contrast, and so on, and determined what was inside the light."
She had not originally planned to go that far, but since whatever he had brought out might have been a monster, they had edited the photograph.
Even an SSS-Rank hunter could not be allowed to bring a monster into a civilian area. Citizen safety came first. If a monster went berserk, the consequences would be catastrophic.
She swiped again.
"This is it."
"…Am I seeing this right?"
The Association President stared at her with a blank expression after checking the edited photo.
A skeleton.
Sitting squarely inside the mass of light was a single skeleton. The image was not perfectly clear, but it was clear enough to identify.
"This is a skeleton, correct?"
"Yes, it is."
"And you said this was Light magic?"
"Yes."
"So he was a necromancer."
The Association President had misunderstood.
Do-ha could use magic, of course, but he knew nothing of the black arts. Looking at the photo alone, though, anyone would have made the same mistake.
"This was a Hound Gate, so he wouldn't have captured this skeleton there and brought it out."
"According to the staff member who took the photo, he also hit the light a few times… probably smacking the back of this skeleton's head."
"Then he definitely summoned it himself. But why bring it out?"
Necromancers who summoned undead existed around the world in decent numbers. Most of them, however, dismissed their summons inside the Gate before leaving. The occasional hunter who brought one out usually did so as a pack mule when they had too much loot to carry.
"I have a theory."
"What is it?"
"Since he's concealing his identity, couldn't this be a disguise tactic so no one knows who the SSS-Rank hunter is? Whether the hunter covering his mouth is the Cheon-oe-cheon… or whether someone inside that light is the Cheon-oe-cheon. Something like that."
"You…"
The Association President looked at her with a stern face.
"As expected of my disciple. Sharp. I think the same."
Both the Association President and his secretary nodded, thoroughly misunderstanding the situation.
A month passed.
A soft rush of energy filled the room.
Seated cross-legged on the floor, multicolored light rose from Do-ha's body in shimmering waves.
"Huh… how long has it even been, and he's already reached Five Qi Returning to Origin?"
Canteas, fiddling with his phone beside him, let out a hollow laugh.
Do-ha had said he lost all his power fighting the Demon God and returned to his original world. Barely a little over a month had passed since then.
And he's already at Five Qi Returning to Origin… just how far is that emperor bastard planning to climb this time…
Hours later, the multicolored aura finally sank back into Do-ha's body.
He opened his eyes.
"When did you get here?"
Do-ha looked at Canteas, who was still on his phone beside him.
The day Canteas had appeared in this world, Do-ha had bought him a phone and secured a studio apartment right next door. Living together would have been fine, but the current house was far too small. He had wanted to move immediately, but a month ago money had been tight.
A month later, he had more than enough to move — he was simply waiting for a suitable property to appear.
"I got here a while ago. You were inside, so the old man told me to go in."
Smack!
"Ow!"
Canteas clutched his forehead and rolled across the floor.
He had even stood guard for him — why hit him?!
"Watch how you address him. How dare you call my grandfather 'old man'?"
"…How old is your grandfather?"
"Seventy-five this year."
"I'm… two hundred and nineteen. Did you know that?"
Was there anything more unfair? Getting hit for calling someone "old man" when that someone was not just decades but a hundred and forty-four years younger than him.
"Still no. He's my family."
"Then am I not family?! You said before that you'd think of me as a brother!"
"Ah…"
Back in Belhart, Canteas had once helped stop a demonic invasion. He had sacrificed hundreds of millions of undead to hold back the demons flooding into the Western Continent. Do-ha had been away at the time, and the situation had been dire — Canteas alone had prevented a catastrophe. Deeply moved, Do-ha had told him he would regard him as a brother.
"…Th-then you should address him properly! If you're my brother, then he's your grandfather too!"
"Ah… is that how it works?"
What an idiot…
No — what a pure-hearted fool. Canteas scratched his head and nodded.
"Anyway, earlier that multicolored aura was surging out of you… where are you at now?"
"Exactly 5-Circle. As for martial arts… I've just stepped into the early stage of Peak."
"…You did that in a month?"
What kind of absurd monster was this?
Not one power, but both — climbing that far in a single month. From what Canteas had heard, Do-ha had never been quite this fast before.
"It's a path I've already walked."
From here on, though, things would get harder.
Until now, moderate training and moderate combat had produced rapid gains. From this point forward, it would take considerably more time.
5-Circle and Peak.
These were the walls where mages and martial artists first truly met resistance. Ordinary mages stalled at the wall of 5-Circle and never climbed higher — that was why mid-tier mages were so common in Belhart. Likewise, Peak was the wall for martial artists. Cross into the Eastern Continent's Moorim and you would find no shortage of martial artists whose growth had stopped at Peak. Neither barrier was easily crossed.
"Ten years since the world transformed. I wonder how the SSS-Rank hunters reached that level in only a decade."
Canteas narrowed his eyes at Do-ha's muttered words.
While living here, he had looked up a few videos of SSS-Rank hunters fighting monsters.
Compared to Baek Do-ha, they looked far too weak…
A single video was not enough for a proper assessment, but something about them had seemed remarkably frail. And those hunters were supposedly the same SSS-Rank as Baek Do-ha?
That makes no sense.
He had watched Baek Do-ha's entire rise to emperor. The man was an absolute being who had fought gods. The Demon God himself had nearly died fighting Baek Do-ha, had he not?
Being the same rank is strange.
No matter how he looked at it, SSS-Rank hunters were absurdly weak compared to Baek Do-ha at his peak. And yet they shared a rank.
But there was something Canteas did not know.
Something neither Canteas nor Do-ha knew.
It was a problem of the measuring device's limits.
The device had its own ceiling, and it had been unable to fully measure Do-ha's power. The maximum it could display was gold — so gold was what it showed. Canteas's sense that something was wrong was only natural.
"So why did you come?"
"Ah, because of this."
"Huh? Is this real?"
Do-ha's eyes lit up the moment he looked at the phone Canteas held out.