Chapter 100

Kwon Haeju stared blankly at his fingertips, slowly turning ice-cold. These pathetic, useless hands had failed to catch Nam Shin-hoo at the very end, helplessly letting his absolute most precious treasure slip through his grasp into the abyss.

Just then, the neon sign of a storefront across the street abruptly shorted out. Surrounded by a chaotic, vibrant sea of dazzling neon, that single, isolated pocket of sudden darkness felt exactly like his own existence. A broken, burnt-out sign left entirely alone in the blinding light.

Kwon Haeju’s soul remained permanently trapped in that dungeon. Every time he closed his eyes, the agonizing, suffocating moment he had lost Shin-hoo to the void violently resurrected itself.

For four agonizing years, it was the only thing he thought about. What should he have done differently? What was the fatal mistake? Was it his arrogant decision to challenge the EX-Rank dungeon in the first place? Was it his physical failure to hold onto Shin-hoo at the climax? Haeju violently chewed over every single micro-decision, dissecting the past until his mind bled.

The conclusion was always terrifyingly simple.

Everything was his fault.

With every retrospective autopsy, a new mountain of crushing regret piled upon his shoulders. Every agonizing memory proved his own inadequacy; every critical choice highlighted his own catastrophic negligence.

Haeju sensed the uninvited guest approaching from behind. The footsteps were quiet, measured, and agonizingly familiar.

“Why are you here?” Haeju rasped.

“I heard you’re still diving into dungeons alone these days,” Choi Kanghyeon replied.

“You don’t need to concern yourself with my operations.”

“How long do you intend to operate like a rogue variable?”

“…I am perfectly capable of pulling my own weight without an escort.”

A heavy, exhausted sigh spilled from Kanghyeon’s lips. He stared intently at the man before him—a man who had been fundamentally, unrecognizably deformed by the passage of a few short years.

Looking at Haeju’s hollowed silhouette, Kanghyeon was violently dragged back to the apocalyptic events of four years ago.

Kwon Haeju had marched into that anomaly alongside Kanghyeon’s most precious friend, yet he had returned to Korea completely alone.

No, perhaps it was inaccurate to say he had ‘returned.’ The entity that clawed its way out of that EX-Rank abyss was not the Kwon Haeju the world knew.

Upon materializing, Haeju had waged a unilateral, apocalyptic war against the entire hunter population of the United States. Forsaking sleep and sustenance for a full week, he had devolved into a mindless, catastrophic force of nature, systematically obliterating everything in his path.

Three American S-Rank hunters had been slaughtered in the rampage. Their shining golden boy, Glys Roban, had been permanently maimed, losing an arm and an eye. The sheer kinetic devastation of Haeju’s grief had been so apocalyptic it literally redefined the geographical border between the US and Canada.

Ultimately, the overwhelmingly arrogant United States had been forced to hoist the white flag.

They begged on their knees, promising to pay any conceivable geopolitical or financial restitution if he would just stop. But Haeju didn’t care. International power dynamics and bureaucratic appeasements were utterly meaningless to him. He was a machine fueled entirely by apocalyptic vengeance—vengeance against the world that had cornered Nam Shin-hoo, and vengeance against his own pathetic, inadequate self.

Concluding that reasoning with or neutralizing Kwon Haeju was mathematically impossible, Washington had frantically transmitted an SOS to Korea.

Upon receiving the fragmented reports regarding Haeju’s rampage and Shin-hoo’s disappearance, Kanghyeon had abandoned everything and immediately deployed to the United States. After an agonizing flight, what he confronted on the American frontlines was a monster stripped entirely of its humanity.

Radiating overwhelming, cataclysmic power and an unfathomable, bottomless rage, Haeju was violently purging everything inside him. He no longer resembled a human being.

Yet, after a week of unbroken slaughter, Haeju registered Kanghyeon’s presence. For the first time since the rampage began, the monster faltered. Staggering forward on trembling, blood-soaked legs, Haeju collapsed to his knees before Kanghyeon, his silver eyes completely dead and hollow.

“Kill me.”

That was the entirety of his plea. Following that single demand, Haeju offered his neck to the Saint Guild Master without uttering another syllable. The gesture of absolute, pathetic surrender mirrored a completely broken prisoner of war begging for the executioner’s blade.

“You said you would protect him,” Kanghyeon had snarled.

“…”

“Do you honestly believe you can atone for Nam Shin-hoo with your pathetic life? A piece of trash like you?”

Kanghyeon’s voice had bled with murderous, guttural agony. The sheer, tearless devastation ripping his heart to shreds was unbearable. Yet, simultaneously, he understood Haeju’s apocalyptic grief better than any living soul. In that agonizing moment, they were comrades bound by the exact same catastrophic loss.

Kanghyeon desperately wanted to go feral just like Haeju. He wanted to violently shatter the world and slaughter until his own heart gave out. But he had to exercise restraint. He could not abandon the Saint Guild. It was Shin-hoo’s inaugural achievement—the only sanctuary Shin-hoo had personally named and nurtured with his own two hands.

Shouldering the crushing burden of protecting the Saint Guild alone was Kanghyeon’s penance for carelessly letting go of his friend’s hand.

And…

“If Nam Shin-hoo sacrificed himself to save you, then you will live,” Kanghyeon commanded softly.

“…”

“That will be your penance.”

Haeju had to survive to pay the agonizing toll for his catastrophic failure.

Kanghyeon’s intervention officially terminated the week-long American massacre. Yet, the cessation of violence did not equate to closure. The wounds inflicted by the incident were too apocalyptic to heal.

Boarding the flight back to Seoul after his eyes were magically restored, Haeju resembled a hollowed-out husk, his soul entirely stripped away. While Kanghyeon ruthlessly extorted astronomical, nation-crippling reparations from Washington and permanently cemented Korea’s absolute geopolitical dominance, Haeju merely stood by like a lifeless, unblinking mannequin.

Throughout the grueling trans-Pacific flight, he rejected all water and sustenance, staring blankly ahead without even glancing out the window.

He remained in that catatonic state until they touched down on Korean soil, and Kanghyeon delivered the final blow.

“The Association is preparing Nam Shin-hoo’s funeral. It will be conducted as a state funeral. Since there is no… body, they will merely erect a cenotaph.”

“…”

For the first time since emerging from the dungeon, a terrifying, desperate light fractured the deadness in Haeju’s eyes. Even after the miraculous healing, his irises had permanently discolored into a piercing, unnatural blue, which now gleamed with manic intensity.

“He is not dead.”

“…”

“He promised me he would return. Therefore, he is absolutely not dead. He merely left for a short while.”

Haeju frantically rubbed the ring constricting his finger. The artifact, embedded with a pitch-black gemstone that was supposed to broadcast his partner’s status, remained as cold and lifeless as a corpse, transmitting absolutely zero feedback.

Even logically knowing Nam Shin-hoo was a chronic liar, Haeju fundamentally refused to surrender him. He knew with absolute certainty that the very second he accepted Shin-hoo’s death, his entire universe would violently and permanently cease to exist.

“Conduct the funeral however you please. But I will not attend.”

True to his word, Haeju was absent from Nam Shin-hoo’s solemn, heavily televised state funeral. Instead, Kwon Shinju, clad in traditional mourning garb with a severely swollen, tear-stained face, attended as the sole representative of the Epic Guild.

While the entire nation drowned in days of profound, collective mourning, news of another S-Rank casualty quietly broke.

—In the early hours of the morning, Hunter Cheon Gu-hoon, the former Guild Master of Evil Nine currently incarcerated in the Association’s subterranean maximum-security facility, was found dead. The Association has restricted all public details regarding the incident…

No one needed to ask who was responsible.

Kwon Haeju was methodically, violently tying up the loose ends of the past in his own unique way.

“It was a truly horrific scene,” the Association President had reported, his voice trembling as he tried to maintain a facade of professional detachment. Tiny ripples violently disturbed the black tea in his porcelain cup.

“Every single joint in his body had been systematically shattered and bent backward. It appears he died without being able to mount even a token resistance. He likely suffered for an agonizingly long time before expiring.”

“Is that so,” Kanghyeon replied flatly.

“We intend to publicly rule Cheon Gu-hoon’s death a suicide induced by severe depression regarding his incarceration. Exposing the true culprit would trigger apocalyptic political fallout.”

Kanghyeon simply nodded. His own hatred for Cheon Gu-hoon easily rivaled Haeju’s. His only lingering regret was that he hadn’t been the one to butcher the traitor with his own two hands; mourning such a pathetic death was entirely beneath him.

However, there was a secondary, far more troubling variable.

“My brother’s mental state is highly unstable. Ah, I obviously know why. But… I’m genuinely terrified he’s going to cause an irreversible catastrophe.”

It was Kwon Haeju.

Kanghyeon never imagined a timeline where he would be forced to actively worry about the Epic Guild Master’s well-being.

Following the tragedy, the crushing administrative burden of managing the Epic Guild had violently defaulted to Kwon Shinju. Overwhelmed and desperate, the younger brother frequently approached Kanghyeon for advice. Kanghyeon desperately wanted to reject him, but even that proved impossible. He knew intimately how closely Shin-hoo had monitored and cared for Shinju.

The sporadic updates Kanghyeon received from Shinju painted a horrifying picture of Haeju’s deterioration.

While Haeju superficially continued to spearhead vanguard dungeon raids, his methodology had radically mutated. He fought with a suicidal, apocalyptic recklessness, completely devoid of any lingering attachment to his own life. He routinely abandoned his strike teams, charging violently ahead to slaughter the boss alone. Plunging into S-Rank anomalies entirely solo became his new baseline.

During their rare, accidental encounters, Kanghyeon noted the deep, necrotizing shadows permanently etched into Haeju’s chillingly stoic face.

“…Are you actually sleeping?” Kanghyeon had asked.

“I sleep,” Haeju replied.

It was a blatant, mathematically impossible lie. Staring back with the haggard, hollowed face of a man who hadn’t managed thirty consecutive minutes of rest in days, Haeju noted Kanghyeon’s heavy skepticism. With profound reluctance, the younger man extracted a specific artifact.

[S-Rank: Mirror of Nemesis 

A mirror that tests the user, manifesting an illusion tailored to their soul. The righteous shall dream a fleeting, blissful hallucination; the wicked shall be condemned to an eternal, agonizing nightmare.]

Haeju was artificially sustaining his microscopic sleep cycle by heavily relying on the hollow, synthetic hallucinations generated by the artifact. However, regardless of an item’s pedigree, an artifact was ultimately just an external crutch. If a hunter became chemically dependent on a mere object to maintain their sanity, the hunter’s psychological collapse was an absolute inevitability.

Yet, upon hearing Kanghyeon’s grim clinical warning…

“You don’t need to concern yourself,” Haeju stated flatly. “I will absolutely not break. Not until he returns.”

“…I genuinely hope that is true,” Kanghyeon murmured.

Haeju’s desperate delusion was exactly what Kanghyeon secretly prayed for in the darkest hours of the night. If exchanging his own life could resurrect Nam Shin-hoo, Kanghyeon would gladly die a thousand agonizing deaths. But such miracles did not exist.

Time could not be rewound, and the universe was fundamentally not kind enough to return something so precious once it had slipped through their fingers.

‘Kwon Haeju will irrevocably shatter long before Nam Shin-hoo ever returns.’

That was Kanghyeon’s clinical, objective assessment. Yet, defying every law of psychological endurance, Haeju stubbornly refused to break. Despite being routinely stretchered out of dungeons, suffering catastrophic injuries, and physically withering into a desiccated husk, he survived.

For four agonizingly long years.

“…”

Kanghyeon violently snapped back to the present, the freezing night wind biting sharply at his cheeks.

“…I received a transmission from the United States this morning,” Kanghyeon stated, finally addressing the primary reason for his visit.

“The specific asset we demanded will clear customs at the airport tomorrow. They surrendered it far more easily than I anticipated.”

“As they should,” Haeju replied coldly.

The geopolitical power dynamic between Korea and the United States had been permanently and violently inverted. Part of the capitulation stemmed from Washington’s absolute terror of Haeju’s apocalyptic power, but the primary catalyst was the miraculous, dam-breaking surge of high-ranking hunter awakenings that had subsequently flooded Korea.