A Giant’s Last Chance
“Ah, that’s better. My eyes can finally rest.”
Lee Tae-cheon blinked a few times in the shade.
Even after seeing Smirnov swell up like a skyscraper, he didn’t look the least bit afraid. As usual, he was lazy, relaxed, and utterly at ease.
Not even the mana pressing down on him with crushing force could change the expression on his face.
“Giantification, huh….”
Giantification.
It was the ability to make one’s whole body enormous.
That was all.
Such a simple, almost laughably straightforward power, and yet…
It had been enough to elevate Smirnov into one of the world’s four S-class hunters.
That massive body was the strongest weapon in the world—and at the same time, the most unbreakable shield.
Looking up at the giant armed with the world’s greatest weapon and shield, Tae-cheon muttered softly, “Seen in person, it’s not that big a deal.”
“Y-you’re spouting complete nonsense!”
Bogoris shouted from the other side.
Tae-cheon shifted his gaze from the still-growing Smirnov to him.
Bogoris was hugging himself with both arms, shaking violently. Tears streamed down his face in rivers.
“……”
Tae-cheon suddenly recalled a myth he’d read when he was little.
He couldn’t remember the title at all, but in that myth, a giant symbolized the awe people felt toward the vast, beautiful, and primordial things in the world.
To Tae-cheon, Bogoris looked exactly like that sort of feeling.
Awe.
Fear.
He was so crushed by the two that he couldn’t even hold himself together properly.
“You… you laid a hand on someone you should never have touched…!”
Someone you should never have touched?
Tae-cheon looked up at Smirnov.
And Smirnov, now done growing, looked down at Tae-cheon in return.
His eyes burned with fury, like a dragon staring at the human who had dared strike its reverse scale.
The giant spoke.
“This is your last chance.”
Perhaps because his voice was so loud, it rumbled like a fierce wind crashing over the world.
Bogoris immediately translated for him.
“Be my knight, Lee Tae-cheon…!”
“……”
Honestly, Tae-cheon was impressed.
Not by Smirnov, but by Bogoris.
The man was still doing his job as a translator.
Even while tears poured down his face. Even while snot ran freely from his nose.
He even added force to his voice, trying to convey the speaker’s emotions.
“…I already told you I’ve got a master.”
But that was all.
The admiration ended as admiration only.
It wasn’t enough to change Tae-cheon’s mind, so he answered carelessly, as if the whole thing wasn’t even worth hearing.
Smirnov ground his teeth.
Crack!
The sound of them grinding together rolled out like thunder.
Then Smirnov lifted one enormous foot.
“Прекрати!”
Bogoris shouted when he saw the raised foot.
Tae-cheon couldn’t understand the words, but he could feel the desperation in the voice. Seeing him throw both hands up toward Smirnov, Tae-cheon figured he was probably yelling for him to stop.
But Smirnov had no intention of listening.
He brought the lifted foot crashing straight down toward Tae-cheon.
“Нет!”
Bogoris screamed, but—
BOOM!
His cry was swallowed by a deafening blast and a burst of smoke.
It was such a simple motion, nothing more than lifting a foot and bringing it down again.
And yet the force behind it was like a bomb had gone off.
It had produced an explosion and a cloud of dust and smoke.
“Еблан….”
Thud…
Bogoris slumped to the ground, cursing under his breath.
How was he supposed to resolve this…?
No, could it even be resolved?
Useless, unproductive thoughts kept bubbling up in his head.
It would have been so much better if this had happened in Russia.
Then there would have been no problem at all.
They could have simply buried this whole moment and been done with it.
But this was Korea.
And all the other S-class hunters had come here for the same reason as Smirnov.
They pretended otherwise, but the S-class hunters were always busy checking and balancing one another; there was no way they would let a golden opportunity like this slip past them.
They would denounce Smirnov for committing murder in a foreign country and then launch a full-blown S-class hunter hunt.
And naturally, that included himself for failing to stop Smirnov.
“xм…?”
Bogoris, staring blankly at where Tae-cheon had been, tilted his head.
Through the thinning dust, he saw something he couldn’t understand.
Why was Smirnov’s foot hovering?
Under normal circumstances, it should have been buried deep enough that only his ankle showed.
It should have left a crater like a meteor strike…
“……”
Smirnov felt the same strange unease as Bogoris.
He couldn’t feel the usual sensation from his foot.
Normally, it should have felt soft, as if he were crushing a ripe red tomato.
But beneath his foot there wasn’t softness—there was hardness.
It felt as if he’d stepped on a stray Lego piece rolling across the floor.
And also,
“эта эне́ргия…?”
Smirnov sensed an alien mana beneath his foot.
It was mana with a nature he had never felt in his life.
It seemed to coil around him and drag him in.
The unpleasant feeling of sinking into a bottomless swamp attacked his body.
Trying to shake it off, Smirnov lifted his foot.
And when he did,
he saw Tae-cheon glaring up at him with fiercely shining eyes.
But Smirnov’s gaze wasn’t on his face. It was on his left hand.
A black sphere was roiling in Lee Tae-cheon’s left hand.
It was spewing out that same alien mana.
When Smirnov saw it, he burst into laughter.
When the giant laughed, the whole world seemed to ring.
“Lee Tae-cheon…!”
Smirnov called out Tae-cheon’s name.
Then, like a boy on the eve of Christmas, he kept shouting the same word over and over with bright, childish delight.
Watching that absurd spectacle, Tae-cheon asked Bogoris, “I thought he’d attack right away. Why the hell is that bastard acting like this?”
“I-I honestly have no idea.”
Bogoris answered politely.
Gratitude for the fact that Tae-cheon was still alive had slipped out before he could stop it.
He had been so shocked that someone he thought had been crushed to death was still standing there alive that his brain had stopped functioning properly.
Aside from Tae-cheon’s right arm, which had been broken and swollen grotesquely, he looked perfectly fine.
“You keep saying the same thing. What’s he saying?”
“He says… he says you’re excellent….”
“Excellent?”
“Y-yes. That’s what he’s sayi—”
“That son of a bitch is throwing a tantrum.”
“……”
Bogoris clamped his mouth shut.
He’d wanted to say the same thing himself.
No, he had already cursed once before.
“Haa….”
Tae-cheon exhaled rough breaths and grabbed his left wrist tightly with his right hand.
Crack.
A bone clicked in his broken right arm, but Tae-cheon didn’t care in the slightest.
“I wasn’t planning to use this….”
Grinding his teeth, he drew up every ounce of mana in his body.
The black sphere in his left hand grew larger and larger.
Smirnov watched quietly, apparently with no intention of interrupting.
He must have believed that no matter what Tae-cheon did after enlarging the black sphere, he wouldn’t be able to harm him.
It was absolute confidence.
Smirnov said cheerfully, “Рыцарь…! я с нетерпением жду этого…!”
As if to erase that voice,
Crash…!
Thunder boomed.
But it didn’t fall from the sky.
It came flying in a straight line from far away and stopped right in front of Smirnov’s temple.
“гром король….”
“Hey. Don’t move a single hair, Smirnov.”
Han Jin-hwan.
He spoke in a ferocious voice.
“If you move even a little… I’ll put a hole clean through your temple right now.”
Blue lightning burst from his entire body.
＊＊＊
“……”
Smirnov stared at Han Jin-hwan.
Sparks of lightning kept snapping around Jin-hwan, big and small.
He looked as though he were armored in blue thunder, or perhaps his body itself had turned into lightning.
“…Drop the giant form.”
His voice, unlike before, had gone a little more measured.
“If you don’t—”
“You mean you’ll punch through me? Me?”
“……”
Han Jin-hwan tilted his head.
It was because Smirnov had spoken Korean.
There was no way this guy knew Korean, was there?
Someone arrogant enough to call himself an emperor wouldn’t bother learning another country’s language.
“Thunder King.”
Smirnov’s lips curled upward.
His gaze at Han Jin-hwan was full of contempt.
“Do you really think you can?”
“…If it were just me alone, yeah, maybe I couldn’t.”
Smirnov didn’t know Korean.
And yet Korean flowed fluently from his mouth.
There was only one reason that was possible.
Aladin Miller.
She was nearby enough to be within sight.
“But.”
“……”
“Am I alone here?”
Han Jin-hwan spread his left arm wide, as if telling him to look around.
Following the line of his arm, Smirnov slowly turned his head.
There was Tae-cheon, who had somehow erased the black sphere by now, and beside him stood the white saintess using Heal.
There were many people he didn’t know by face or by name.
Of course, there were also those whose faces and names he knew very well.
Aladin Miller.
And Li Lianzhe.
Especially Li Lianzhe stood out to Smirnov.
He saw the greed that often appears on the face of a man who has spotted an opportunity.
Han Jin-hwan must have read the greed too, because he snorted.
“I don’t know about Miller… but that snake-like old man pretending to be a sage would definitely help me out. Right?”
“Thunder King….”
“Think carefully. If you screw up here and something happens to you… think about how the world’s currents will start moving.”
At Jin-hwan’s blunt words, Smirnov fell silent.
Russia with Smirnov.
Russia without Smirnov.
There was no need to think very hard to know how that would turn out.
Russia would literally lose its strongest force.
And history had already shown what happened to nations that lost their strength.
“So, unless you want this to get ugly, drop the transformation.”
“……”
“You can still smooth this over as a minor incident, Smirnov.”
Smirnov stared at Han Jin-hwan.
Jin-hwan met his gaze without flinching.
“……”
“……”
About a minute passed.
Then Han Jin-hwan smiled faintly and shrugged.
Seeing that, Smirnov let out a long breath.
He looked almost as if the strength had gone out of him.
Then he slowly closed his eyes.
And just like that, his mountain-sized body began to shrink little by little.
He was releasing giantification.
“…Good choice.”
With those words, Han Jin-hwan let out a long breath of his own.
Everyone watching nearby breathed out in relief as well when they saw Smirnov returning to normal.
If a fight had broken out here, there was no way they would have gotten out of it unscathed.
Only Li Lianzhe, who had stood with his hands clasped behind his back the whole time, gave an disappointed sigh. He even clicked his tongue, as if his regret refused to fade.
Right then—
“…What, it’s over already?”
A man’s voice reached everyone’s ears.
A man who had tied his hair at the back like a fish tail.
A man carrying a shield that looked like a turtle shell.
It was Do-woon.
He looked around with a grumbling mutter.
“Seriously, it’s over already? I was just thinking I’d watch a bit.”
At that, everyone turned to him with cold, drained eyes.
Even his close friend Lee Tae-cheon and his younger sister Do-hee did too.
“Do-hee, do you hear this?”
“Huh? Hear what?”
“I do. The sound of our friendship cracking into pieces.”
“……”
“Guess only I can hear it.”
“I-I’m sorry….”
“To think I’d call that a friend….”
Tae-cheon sighed.
Do-hee, who had to live with someone like that as her older brother, also felt ashamed.
So all she could do was let out a helpless sigh of her own.