The next day.
“Here. I’ll give you some gas money, so hurry up and get out of here.”
Ahn Yoonseung was sent back to Seoul without even getting the chance to share a meal with his relatives.
They were all busy with work.
And before long, the Choi sisters returned to their usual daily routine...
As a high-ranking A-class Hunter, Choi Jin headed straight for a Blue Gate raid as soon as her relative left.
By the time she cleared the dungeon, the afternoon had already given way to evening.
After dinner, she immediately started her night shift.
A high-level Red Gate had appeared nearby that day, and the Faith Guild, in cooperation with Chuncheon City, was also responsible for handling Red Gate incidents in the area.
“Unnie, this one’s huge!”
“Yeah, it really is. It must be A-rank.”
They hurried to the scene.
The gate had not opened yet.
During the brief wait, Choi Jin carefully checked her equipment once more.
Then, from a distance, a man came striding toward them.
“Oh, hello.”
A blond man with a popsicle in one hand.
“We meet again?”
Anyone could tell at a glance that it was the unwelcome guest from earlier that day!
“W-What? What are you doing here?”
Choi Jin was so startled by Giryeo’s silent approach that her eyes nearly popped out of their sockets.
She had naturally assumed he had returned to Seoul with Yoonseung.
“Wait, Hunter-nim. Why are you still in Chuncheon?”
Choi Jin blurted out the question without thinking.
The blond Hunter answered,
“This is my first time in Chuncheon, and I heard the dakgalbi here is supposed to be really good, so I wanted to try it.”
“Yes?”
“I’ve just been going around to a few famous restaurants by myself.”
Rustle.
As he spoke, Giryeo held up the package of dakgalbi in his hand.
Apparently, the reason he had not gone home yet was simply because he wanted to try the local specialty.
Frankly, he seemed insane.
“Oh! It smells good!”
Meanwhile, her younger sister caught the aroma coming from the plastic bag and immediately insisted that they should buy dakgalbi once work was over...
But Choi Jin was in no mood for idle conversation. ŖаŊ𝐨𝔟Εꞩ
How uncomfortable.
No matter how much he claimed he was simply sightseeing, what were the odds of running into him again by sheer coincidence in a city this large?
Could this S-rank Hunter have been following them the entire time?
“So annoying...”
She wanted nothing more than to abandon everything, work included, and leave immediately.
But under the circumstances, that simply wasn’t possible.
“Excuse me, Hunter Kim. I’m warning you in advance—don’t interfere with this gate. Unlike Seoul, even Red Gates here have assigned ownership.”
Choi Jin pointed a finger at him and warned him sternly.
“Yes.”
Kim Giryeo merely nodded and went on eating his ice cream.
Choi Jin was filled with conflicting emotions.
At least Kang Changho gave off some indication that he was dangerous.
That made him easier, in a sense, to deal with.
“Haa.”
But this man...
Just by looking at him, she had no idea what he might do next.
And that made him even more frightening.
“Unnie, the gate!”
At her sister’s call, Choi Jin turned her head.
The monster wave was beginning.
Crack, crack, crack.
A monster resembling a tangled mass of twisted wire emerged onto the ground.
A nonliving creature like that would probably be immune to the Hydra’s poison regardless of rank.
But that didn’t matter.
He wasn’t the one leading today’s operation.
Whoosh...
A broad sea of flames erupted across the open area.
The sudden blaze pressed in on the enemies from three directions, like three snakes flicking out their tongues.
An Awakened who had swallowed the Heart of the Dragon and could summon flames at will.
She resembled a creature from myth, one whose lungs themselves swelled with power before unleashing devastating fire.
“The most common attribute on Earth.”
Kwaaaaah.
That intense heat was Choi Jin’s awakened ability.
And it was also the element that allowed her to feel most clearly just how much stronger she had become.
Choi Jin had once been a borderline Hunter, barely clinging to the very bottom of B-class.
But everything changed after she obtained the [Dragon’s Heart] by chance.
Now, she had risen to a position of undeniable strength that no one could dispute.
“Monster breach on the right!”
“I’ll stop it!”
The Hunters dispatched from Chuncheon’s Faith Guild moved in seamless coordination.
At last, the advancing monsters were brought to a halt.
Just like always, everything was proceeding smoothly.
Everything was going well.
“Ugh.”
And yet...
Why had she felt so uneasy this entire time?
“I’m doomed.”
Hiik.
Choi Jin turned her head to check.
Beyond the wavering heat haze, she sensed someone’s gaze fixed silently on her.
“Damn it. As expected, he really is watching...”
S-rank Hunter Kim Giryeo.
He was observing the battle from a short distance away.
For reference, Giryeo had deliberately remained in Chuncheon because he genuinely wanted to study the effects of a dragon’s heart on a sorcerer.
His thoughtless curiosity, however, had become nothing short of a nightmare for one particular A-rank Hunter.
“There’s no way he isn’t close to Kang Changho! He acts exactly the same!”
For Choi Jin, attracting the interest of an S-rank Hunter was terrifying.
Her exceptional abilities had once drawn Kang Changho’s attention, and she had suffered endlessly because of it.
Naturally, she had developed an intense aversion to being observed.
Her body stiffened instinctively.
If she showed even slightly ‘decent’ skill here...
Would she be marked again, just like before?
Her movements gradually became more restrained.
Choi Jin had no choice but to continue the hunt using only simple, basic techniques.
For reasons she herself could barely explain, she desperately wanted to avoid revealing her full strength to Kim Giryeo.
“This is why I hate Red Gates! It isn’t even my territory, so I can’t just tell him to get lost. Haa, what a pain.”
Slash!
Choi Jin struck the approaching metal-like monster with the tip of her weapon.
Even while holding back, she continued steadily cutting down the enemies and reached the boss without much difficulty using nothing more than basic skills.
“Kieeek, kiieeek...”
The boss of this Red Gate was a grotesque giant with an enormous bell embedded in its torso.
The moment it appeared, the Hunters opened fire as though they had been waiting for exactly that moment.
And that was where the problem began.
The boss possessed defenses befitting its rigid, reinforced joints.
It endured the Hunters’ barrage of skills and immediately launched a counterattack.
“Deeng, deeng, deeng!”
Before long, the massive bell began to ring.
Choi Jin had fought this monster before.
She knew exactly what that action meant.
“It’s a mental attack!”
Fortunately, that was almost reassuring.
Unless the monster was a special case like a Siren, mental attacks rarely affected Hunters of the same rank.
Whoosh.
Choi Jin aimed her skill at the monster’s weak point—the thick piece of rebar connecting its massive bell to its head.
After sustained exposure to the flames, the vulnerable structure melted and finally snapped.
The boss collapsed like a creature whose spine had been severed.
Because she had fought this monster before, she managed to finish the battle while consuming only a minimal amount of magical power.
“Finally, I’m off work.”
Ssark.
The glowing red gate closed, confirming that every monster had been eliminated.
Choi Jin took a Hunter’s chisel and a pair of scissors from her equipment.
Now that the raid was over, it was time to collect the spoils.
“Jinhee-ya, could you move over there for a moment? This monster’s tough, so I’ll dismantle it myself...”
But then—
“Ack!”
As Choi Jin approached the boss’s corpse, she was struck by an attack she had never anticipated.
Her younger sister, who had been standing directly in front of her, suddenly lashed out and raked her claws across Choi Jin’s face.
“J-Jinhee-ya!”
Choi Jin clutched the torn bridge of her nose, staring at her sister in shock.
But the person who had attacked her looked just as horrified.
“---AHHHH!”
“Jinhee-ya!”
Whoosh!
A pair of membranous wings suddenly spread from Jinhee’s back.
The transformation-type Awakened screamed as she activated her ability, her altered body shooting rapidly into the air.
She looked as though she were fleeing in terror.
But what could possibly have frightened her that badly?
“Ah!”
Only then did Choi Jin understand.
This was the lingering effect of the boss monster’s bell attack.
Her sister had been completely afflicted by the monster’s [Confusion] status!
“That didn’t happen last time, did it? C-Could it be because I held back? Because I didn’t stop the bell attack quickly enough...?”
This was the danger of an A-rank gate.
The slightest complacency could change the scale of the damage in an instant.
Worse still, when she turned around to call for help, the situation on the other side was just as bad.
There was a healer present who possessed a status-effect removal skill, but...
“Waaaah! Don’t come near me!”
“Wow, this is driving me insane.”
“What kind of healer gets hit by the status effect instead of healing everyone else?!”
As it turned out, the B-rank healer had also lost the gamble against the low probability and fallen victim to [Confusion].
A moment later, the team’s healer began wildly swinging his staff at his own teammates.
Fortunately, he was an Awakened who possessed nothing but healing skills, so the others subdued him quickly.
But the real problem was her sister.
Jinhee was talented enough to fly at speeds comparable to a bullet when she pushed her abilities to the limit.
“No.”
When Choi Jin looked up, the shapeshifter had already flown so high that she was difficult to see.
Fleeing while under the influence of a mental attack...
What if she descended into the city and injured a civilian?
Or worse, what if she flew into the path of an airplane or helicopter and got hit?
“Jinhee-ya! Jinhee-ya! Come down right now. Hurry. Please!”
A few seconds later, Choi Jin shouted desperately into the sky, panic written across her face.
At this rate, the fear for her younger sister was going to drive her mad.
Yet whether the distant figure understood her distress or not, the shadow merely fluttered its wings aimlessly in the sky.
“Come down! Choi Jinhee!”
The Hunters on the ground had no idea what to do.
They paced anxiously in place.
But as the seconds passed, something began to feel strange.
Contrary to their fears, the shapeshifter wasn’t actually flying away.
She kept circling over their heads in the same pattern again and again.
“What is this? What’s wrong with her?”
“Isn’t she staying because her older sister is down here?”
The Hunters from the Faith Guild offered their guesses.
Maybe she refused to leave the area because her family was below.
Of course, that theory was wrong.
At the moment, the Hunter’s consciousness was so severely impaired that she wouldn’t even have recognized her own parents.
Which meant there was only one way to interpret her behavior.
Somewhere in this park...
There was something else stirring the desires of that vampire-like creature.
***
This is bad.
I’ve lost count of how many times something like this has happened just this year, but either way, it’s definitely bad.
‘I only wanted to observe the dragon’s heart a little more.’
Crunch.
I shoved the last piece of popsicle into my mouth.
Even now, an Earthling who had completely lost her reason was still circling through the sky.
‘She’s under a confusion effect.’
To explain, Choi Jinhee was a mutant Awakened who had developed vampiric urges as a side effect of her awakening.
If her judgment had deteriorated that badly, there was no reason to expect her to obey social conventions anymore.
‘That Earthling... She’s been circling directly over my head this whole time...’
Shiver.
Is this how a field mouse feels when a hawk spots it?
If I had known this would happen, I never would have given her my blood earlier.
Looking back, that had practically been a permanent event that only stimulated her appetite.
Now, lured by the promise of a delicious snack, that Hunter was circling the area like she was guarding her prey.
‘Save the wizard.’
Of course, while the defensive enhancement from [Sacred Tree Seeding] remained active, an A-rank attack should have been easy enough to withstand.
But the real problem was my state of mind.
Logically, I knew the barrier was strong.
And yet, once my life was actually being targeted, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking—
What if some absurd accident happened?
That was simply how people were.
‘Uhm.’
Should I ask Choi Jin for help, just in case?
But before the thought could turn into action, she apparently arrived at the exact same conclusion.
Instead, she came rushing toward me in a panic and shouted first.
“K-Kim Giryeo! Wait, could you help us for a moment? I’m worried she might cause an accident... You’re an S-rank Hunter, right? I’m sorry, but please catch Hunter Choi Jinhee!”
She’s at least a hundred meters up, and you want me to catch her?
‘Is that even possible?’
If I were a real S-rank...
Well, maybe I could leap across the surrounding buildings and somehow catch her.
At that level, they were all monsters beyond common sense anyway.
But even assuming it were possible—
Why on Earth would I go through that much trouble?
In that brief moment, I racked my brain for a way to turn the situation to my advantage.
And thus, the grand magician reached his final decision—
“K-Kim Giryeo?”
Tuk.
I undid the cuff of my left sleeve and rolled the sleeve up.
“There’s an easier way.”
Then I gave a brief explanation and extended my right hand toward Choi Jin.
“I’ll call your sister down myself. But once she gets close, you’re responsible for catching her. She’s your family, after all.”
“Yes?”
“And lend me those scissors for a moment.”
“Scissors?”
“Yes. The sharp dismantling scissors you’re holding.”