Chapter 129

In the center of the formation, the esteemed S-Rank Hunter Glys Roban and the two A-Rank Hunters flanking him readied their weapons, bracing for combat.

How can people with the exact same A-Rank classification be so entirely different? Harvey Lane thought bitterly.

“Silveron. Please mind your language,” Roban gently reprimanded.

“But Master! That useless piece of garbage is just wasting oxygen and eating into our rations! We never should have brought him along.”

“He will undoubtedly prove his worth once he manages to tame a suitable monster,” Roban replied soothingly.

With his brilliant blonde hair and striking features, Glys Roban effortlessly mediated the escalating tension among his subordinates. It was solely thanks to Roban’s protective grace that Harvey was even allowed to hold his head up amidst the barrage of vicious insults.

“With all due respect, Master, that bastard has been giving me the creeps from the moment he joined,” Silveron spat. “Always scowling with that gloomy face… acting so incredibly subservient despite being an A-Rank Hunter. Tsk.”

The man who had been screaming aggressively for the past ten minutes was Glys Roban’s right-hand man, the A-Rank Hunter Silveron. Desperate to avoid aggravating the notoriously short-tempered Hunter any further, Harvey hurriedly pushed open the door leading to the next chamber.

“I-I’ve opened it! The next room has the exact same structural layout,” Harvey reported nervously.

“Again?! This is driving me absolutely insane. How long does this loop repeat?!” Silveron roared.

This dungeon was a bizarre anomaly. Every single room they entered either spawned hostile, tentacle-like seaweed that attacked them, or presented a trivial, mundane puzzle to solve. They were forced to clear these identical, cube-shaped chambers one by one just to progress.

They had been wandering blindly, breaching an endless succession of these cubic rooms, yet they hadn’t even caught a glimpse of the boss’s shadow. It felt as if the entire dungeon was constructed from an infinite matrix of interconnected cubes.

“Since we cannot track the sun’s trajectory, it is impossible to accurately gauge the passage of time,” Roban noted, gazing upward.

Instead of a blue sky, an undulating, water-like barrier sealed the ceiling above them.

Honestly, none of them had any idea how many days they had been trapped inside. In a space entirely devoid of day and night, they were relying solely on their own biological clocks to function. Furthermore, wandering endlessly through identical cubic chambers felt suffocating, like rats trapped in an inescapable labyrinth.

I’d vastly prefer a massive, open space swarming with monsters, Harvey thought miserably. We can’t just keep fighting a war of attrition like this forever…

Just then.

KABOOOOM!

A colossal shockwave violently rattled the entire dungeon, the impact so severe the very floor and walls quaked. Startled, the strike team instantly raised their weapons, scanning their surroundings with hyper-vigilance. Had some massive anomaly occurred? Had the boss finally made its move? Hearts pounding, they frantically swept the perimeter.

“O-Over there! There’s a bizarre object embedded in the wall!” someone shouted.

Lodged violently into the structure of a chamber they had already cleared was an object none of them had ever seen inside a dungeon before. The massive, streamlined construct appeared to be forged entirely from sleek, high-grade alloy. It looked exactly like…

“An… airplane?”

A private jet, a sight completely mundane in the outside world but utterly alien here, was violently wedged between the shattered walls of the dungeon.

***

A massive, breathtaking expanse of undulating blue light dominated their vision. Bioluminescent flora drifted through the water like living organisms, creating a spectacle so incredibly beautiful it was hard to believe they were in a deep-sea trench.

Vibrant turquoise coral reefs and swaying fronds of seaweed painted a mesmerizing, fantastical landscape.

“Aigoo… my aching bones…”

Violently shoving aside the mangled wreckage of the jet, Bale Taylor crawled out.

“Who the hell enters a dungeon this barbarically?! Seriously, what is wrong with you?!” Bale shrieked.

“Shin-hoo-hyung, are you injured anywhere?” Haeju asked immediately.

“At least pretend you can hear me! I swear to God, I almost just died!”

“But you survived,” Haeju replied flatly.

“…”

Completely ignoring the hysterically complaining Bale, Haeju meticulously inspected Shin-hoo for injuries. Naturally, Shin-hoo stepped off the wreckage without a single scratch on his body, his eyes already sweeping the dungeon environment.

“This space feels entirely detached from reality,” Shin-hoo murmured.

The dungeon was bizarre. Tentacle-like stalks of seaweed were densely woven together to form the structural walls, and schools of tiny, bioluminescent fish swam freely through the gaps. It felt like stepping into an intricately crafted illusion. Of all the dungeons Shin-hoo had ever entered, this one exuded the strongest sense of artificiality.

“We need to locate the vanguard team first. But… this is useless,” Shin-hoo sighed.

Pulling out a tracking artifact, he weighed his options before shoving it back into his inventory. While the artifact could effectively pinpoint human life signs in a massive, open space, it was practically useless in an environment partitioned into countless, identical chambers.

The four men were currently standing in the exact center of a room enclosed by seaweed walls. Through the gaps in the vegetation, they could clearly see into the adjacent chamber. Its layout was perfectly identical to the one they currently occupied.

“You three should evacuate first. Do you have your Return Stones ready?” Shin-hoo asked the pilots and Bale.

While they technically held high Hunter classifications, they were not optimized for frontline combat. If they remained, they would merely become liabilities to Hunters like Shin-hoo and Haeju, who possessed massive, area-of-effect destructive capabilities.

“We’ll wait outside,” Bale agreed immediately.

“Do not worry about us.”

“Right. Good luck… and please save him,” Bale added solemnly.

Bowing his head respectfully one last time, Bale shattered his Return Stone alongside the captain and co-pilot. Once Shin-hoo confirmed the three men had safely teleported out, he summoned Luin Vuada into his hand.

“Shall we?”

Gripping Jinmu tightly, Haeju fell into step right behind him. They were currently at the very entrance of the dungeon; their only option was to proceed on foot and manually track how deep the American strike team had progressed.

“They shouldn’t be too far,” Haeju noted.

The higher a Hunter’s rank, the more oppressive their innate presence became.

I just need to head toward the direction radiating the strongest, most distinct aura. That will undoubtedly be Glys Roban, Shin-hoo reasoned.

However, making that assumption proved unnecessary. Before they had even taken more than a few steps, Shin-hoo spotted a group of figures rapidly approaching from a distance.

“…”

The approaching Hunters looked incredibly grim. And the man leading the pack, Glys Roban, wore the darkest expression of all.

For someone who had supposedly been trapped wandering a dungeon for an entire month, he appeared remarkably well-groomed, though deeply, visibly irritated. Maintaining a perfectly unbothered facade, Shin-hoo casually waved at them.

“It is a relief to see you are still alive.”

“What is the meaning of this? What was that barbaric entry method? And more importantly… why are you two here?”

Roban’s voice was laced with heavy suspicion. Shin-hoo was simply relieved the man hadn’t already been abducted by the syndicate. Carefully observing the wary American Hunter, Shin-hoo noted that Roban looked largely identical to how he had appeared four years ago, save for one glaring difference.

His arm. The hand gripping Roban’s weapon was a mechanical prosthetic. Catching Shin-hoo’s gaze, Roban hastily hid the prosthetic behind his back.

“Your stare is quite rude,” Roban snapped.

Given the tense atmosphere, it wasn’t the right time to pry into his personal history. Shin-hoo shifted his attention to the rest of the strike team. Exactly as Bale’s dossier had detailed, he identified the three A-Rank Hunters flanking Roban.

One man looking deeply depressed and withdrawn. One man looking violently aggressive and heavily muscled. And one remarkably small, quiet man wearing glasses.

That meant the sleeper agent planted by The Cradle of Genesis was currently standing right in front of him.

Making zero effort to conceal his immense displeasure, Roban aggressively massaged his temples.

“I demand an explanation. Why have you intruded upon a dungeon we are actively clearing? You had better have a damn good reason.”

“We are here to rescue an S-Rank Hunter who has been completely MIA inside a mere A-Rank dungeon for an entire month,” Shin-hoo stated flatly.

“A… month?”

“Yes.”

“Has it truly been that long? Hmm…”

Roban’s pupils trembled slightly. He appeared to be frantically recalculating their timeline in his head.

Just as I suspected, Shin-hoo thought.

From the moment he arrived, Shin-hoo had felt a profound sense of dissonance within this dungeon, a distinct lack of reality. The source of that bizarre sensation was the distortion of their chronological perception.

It was a common phenomenon for time to flow differently inside a dungeon compared to the outside world. A few days inside could easily equate to an entire month outside. However, while the actual passage of time might differ, the biological clocks and internal perception of the Hunters experiencing it should remain consistent. But in this specific dungeon, that innate sensory perception had been violently warped.

Shin-hoo and Haeju had located Roban mere minutes after crashing into the dungeon. They had effortlessly found a team that had supposedly been wandering the maze for an entire month.

While Shin-hoo felt as though he had only been inside for roughly thirty minutes, there was absolutely no way to verify how much actual time had elapsed.

“How long has it been since the plane crashed?” Shin-hoo asked Roban directly.

“Why are you asking such a… We mobilized the exact second we confirmed new entrants had breached the dungeon. It hasn’t even been a few minutes,” Roban replied, bewildered.

“…”

Exactly as Shin-hoo suspected, there was a massive discrepancy in chronological perception between the team originally trapped inside and the team that had just entered. Does a person’s sense of time become increasingly numb the longer they remain inside? Shin-hoo pondered, observing Roban and his team.

According to his original plan, Shin-hoo had intended to inform Roban of the sleeper agent’s existence, force him to abandon the raid, and immediately evacuate the team using their Return Stones. Extracting the VIP safely was currently far more critical than clearing the dungeon.

However, a massive variable suddenly caught Shin-hoo’s eye. Huddled fearfully behind Roban’s strike team was an entirely unfamiliar group of people. It was a massive crowd, numbering roughly twenty individuals.

“Are those civilians?” Shin-hoo asked sharply.

The group consisted almost entirely of older men wearing heavily weathered, saltwater-stained work clothes.

“We discovered them during our subjugation,” Roban explained, glancing back at the frightened group. “They claimed they were operating a commercial fishing vessel when they were suddenly sucked in.”

“…”

“It seems highly probable that this dungeon possesses multiple entrance gates,” Roban theorized. “They claimed they were dragged in through a spatial anomaly located entirely outside of United States territorial waters.”

It was a perfectly plausible scenario. There had been several documented cases of a single mega-dungeon manifesting multiple entrance gates across different geographical coordinates. However, the timing was far too suspiciously perfect. The exact moment Glys Roban was occupied clearing a newly discovered dungeon, a massive influx of civilians just happened to get sucked in through a secondary gate?

Is this truly just a coincidence?

Rapidly organizing his chaotic thoughts, Shin-hoo assessed the current tactical reality. The situation was disastrously bad. Under these circumstances, simply using their Return Stones to extract Roban was impossible. The American Association had only provided enough Return Stones to cover the official strike team; they didn’t have anywhere near enough artifacts to evacuate twenty civilians. And Shin-hoo absolutely refused to abandon them to die.