Chapter 2

Gah!

A death rattle tore from his throat. Vomiting a clump of pitch-black blood, Nam Shin-hoo bit down hard on his lip. Through fading, bloodshot eyes—the capillaries having burst from the sheer pressure—he glared at the monster with bottomless resentment.

It was the sworn enemy that had ruined absolutely everything. The calamity that had toppled civilization and ushered in an era of absolute despair.

Gritting his teeth, Nam Shin-hoo leveled the tip of his spear at the Nuckelavee, but it was nothing more than a final, futile struggle. Tears of blood streamed down his blurring vision. He wanted to tear that massive body to bloody shreds this very instant, yet not a single drop of strength remained in his shattered frame.

His body, its heart obliterated, collapsed with hollow finality. His knees hit the ruined earth, and before he could even register the physical agony, his vision tunneled into pitch darkness.

A hollow chuckle escaped his lips at this pathetic end. Nam Shin-hoo exhaled his final breath, heavy with frustration and resentment—a resentment directed not at the Nuckelavee, but entirely at himself.

You stupid fool. You trampled over the sacrifices of everyone else to get here, and in the end, you couldn’t even pull it off.

A sudden, ethereal light bled into his flickering, dying vision.

[Quest: To Save a Perishing World]

What a shame. There is no remaining combat power capable of responding to the battle. Do you wish for another chance? If so, find the ‘true’ savior this time.

Reward upon Success: ???
Penalty upon Failure: Annihilation of humanity.]

Staring into the encroaching void, Nam Shin-hoo’s grip slackened, letting the spear slip from his fingers. Like the final curtain dropping on a finished play, a veil of blood-red draped over his eyes.

Regaining consciousness felt like a single drop of water rippling across the surface of a perfectly still lake.

Blood began to circulate from his fingertips, and his mind booted up with the static crackle of a broken radio. His chest burned with a tearing agony. Reflexively clutching the spot where his heart had been pierced, Nam Shin-hoo jolted upright.

Hah… hah… He gasped for air.

He desperately dragged oxygen into his lungs, his trembling hands frantically patting down his surroundings. His fingers failed to find the pain-relieving cigar he always kept by his side—an item that hadn’t left his person since the moment the Nuckelavee first descended.

As his blurry vision slowly focused, the world resolved into a bright window flooded with warm sunlight and the crisp white sheets covering his legs.

“Am I… alive?”

He was absolutely certain he had died. He had fallen pathetically, entirely unable to react to the monster’s Phase Two transformation. Since Nam Shin-hoo, the last vestige of humanity, had perished, the world should have met its definitive end. So how in the hell was he opening his eyes in such a safe, tranquil place?

Tossing the blankets aside, he climbed to his feet. A nagging sense of wrongness washed over him as he moved, prompting his gaze to drop to his hands. Staring back at him were smooth fingers with neatly trimmed nails.

It was a deeply unfamiliar sight. Even factoring in the slowed aging process of an Awakened Hunter, the hands of a man in his forties were never this pristine. Snapping out of his daze as he stared at the unwrinkled, flawless skin, Nam Shin-hoo quickly scanned his surroundings.

The space was achingly familiar. It was a room he had looked at for a very long time, yet hadn’t seen in years.

“This is…”

It was the quarters he had lived in during his twenties. This was his personal room from the era when he was aggressively expanding his Guild—a physical space inside a building that the Nuckelavee had long since reduced to rubble.

What is going on?

Stumbling forward, he approached a full-length mirror. Staring back at him from the glass was a young man so youthful he could practically be called a boy.

The young man, looking to be in his late twenties, glared at the mirror with wide, disbelieving eyes. It was Nam Shin-hoo—it was his own reflection.

“Just what the hell happened?”

He had been certain of his death, yet he had woken up fully restored to his youth. Tearing his gaze from the glass, he turned to look out the window. The city that had been reduced to a pulverized wasteland was currently glowing with vibrant, dazzling life.

The faint, rhythmic hum of passing traffic drifted up from the streets below, accompanied by the peaceful splashing of the fountain in the park across the way—it was as if the apocalypse had never happened.

As he stood there, utterly captivated by the impossible view outside the window, a sharp knock rapped against his door.

“Shin-hoo. Are you awake?”

“Choi Kanghyeon?” Nam Shin-hoo’s head snapped toward the door, his body moving before his brain could process the command.

He wrenched the door open with desperate haste, revealing Choi Kanghyeon standing in the hallway. Boasting a massive, solid frame befitting a defense-specialized Hunter, he looked exactly as Nam Shin-hoo remembered him from their twenties.

With a personality that perfectly mirrored his unyielding abilities, Kanghyeon was a rigid, inflexible bastard who couldn’t take a joke to save his life. Yet, he was also a childhood friend Nam Shin-hoo had relied on since they were kids. And…

—I will cover you until the very end. I am the Saint Guild’s strongest shield—its final aegis.

He was the comrade who had blocked the Nuckelavee’s relentless onslaught until the very last second. The image of Kanghyeon, drawing his final breath while standing upright with a shattered shield still gripped in his hands, remained brutally vivid in Nam Shin-hoo’s mind’s eye.

—Just hold on a little longer. As soon as this attack stops, I’ll charge right in.

—That’s enough. Kanghyeon. Drop the shield now. Dodge before the Nuckelavee comes down.

—Kanghyeon? Choi, Kanghyeon?

His friend had died with his eyes wide open, still holding the line. In the end, the very last order Nam Shin-hoo had barked at him was simply to endure. To stand like a meat shield in front of him and endure until it killed him.

“You don’t look so good,” Choi Kanghyeon noted, stepping forward to support Nam Shin-hoo as he wavered.

Kanghyeon propped up his friend, troubled by an expression he had never seen on Shin-hoo’s face before. The man who was always so fiercely prideful, who absolutely refused to show even a sliver of weakness, looked so precarious he might collapse at any given second.

Clinging to Choi Kanghyeon’s arm, Nam Shin-hoo dragged in a ragged breath and slowly raised his head. He bit his lip hard as he stared at Kanghyeon, whose face was just as impossibly young as his own.

“Are you feeling sick somewhere?”

“No, it’s nothing.” Shaking his head in denial, Nam Shin-hoo hastily swiped at the stray tears threatening to spill from the corners of his eyes. He had absolutely no right to cry right now.

Lingering in the corner of his vision was the very same Quest window he had seen in his final moments. It pulsed with a crisp, vivid light, mocking any notion that this situation was merely a dream.

[Quest: To Save a Perishing World]

What a shame. There is no remaining combat power capable of responding to the battle. Do you wish for another chance? If so, find the ‘true’ savior this time.

Reward upon Success: ???
Penalty upon Failure: Annihilation of humanity.

“Kanghyeon.”

“Yeah.” The reply came immediately, carried by that same steadfast, dependable voice he knew so well.

Confronted with the warm, vibrant reaction of a living, breathing human—no longer cold, no longer pale—Nam Shin-hoo squeezed Choi Kanghyeon’s arm with a vice-like grip. Kanghyeon’s expression hardened in concern at his friend’s highly uncharacteristic behavior.

“Are you absolutely sure nothing is wrong?”

“I just had a nasty nightmare, that’s all. Yeah. A truly horrific nightmare.”

The corners of Nam Shin-hoo’s eyes trembled as he met Choi Kanghyeon’s bewildered gaze. He forced himself to smooth out his expression, though it hovered bizarrely somewhere between a smile and a sob.

He had no idea what this new reality meant or why it had even happened, but one thing remained absolutely certain: this impossible situation was a bona fide miracle granted to Nam Shin-hoo, and his absolute final chance.

[Name: Nam Shin-hoo

Class: Converter
Age: 28 (■■#■)
Skills: Energy Drain (SS), Elemental Converter (S), Arcana (S), Trait Distortion (A), Assimilation (A), Potion Brewing (B), Herb Gathering (D)… [Expand]

Innate Traits: Young Commander of the Battlefield, Seeker of Hidden Hope, Twisted Corrector, Guiding Guardian, False Savior, ■■’s ■■.

Certain information is blocked due to causality.]

Having relocated to his private office, Nam Shin-hoo sank into his desk chair and stared intently at his hovering Status Window.

The interface he had looked at for a lifetime had fundamentally changed. Leaning back heavily against the chair, he scrutinized the window; though undeniably his own, it was now riddled with blocked and corrupted data.

The redacted block next to his age was likely a side effect of his regression. The traits, however, presented a glaring issue he couldn’t easily brush aside. Originally, the absolute limit of Nam Shin-hoo’s innate traits had been Guiding Guardian.

Possessing such a lofty trait had bred immense arrogance within him. Blinded by the title of ‘Guardian,’ he had genuinely believed himself to be the protagonist destined to protect the world. In reality, Nam Shin-hoo hadn’t managed to protect a single damn thing.

And the trait slapped onto him in the aftermath of that failure was False Savior. That, along with a completely unreadable, mysterious title.

“Truly… pathetic.” A dry, hollow laugh burst from his lips. Every time his eyes swept over his altered traits and that ominous Quest window, an indescribable cocktail of emotions pressed down mercilessly on his shoulders.

A False Savior and a True Savior—it was a venomous phrasing. The quest brutally highlighted the inescapable fact that Nam Shin-hoo could never, ever be the savior, feeling less like a directive and more like a blistering reprimand commanding him to stop playing pretend and go find the real deal.

Closing his eyes, the apocalyptic ruin of Seoul painted itself vividly across his mind. The final moments of those who had died so senselessly—all because they committed the sin of trusting Nam Shin-hoo—surged to the forefront of his memory. The gruesome battleground, where finding a corpse with all its limbs intact was a rarity, felt as tangible as reality itself.

Creeeeeak. The armrest of his chair, forged from high-grade dungeon byproducts, groaned and bent under his white-knuckled grip, warping into the exact shape of his fingers.

“Shin-hoo.”

Choi Kanghyeon’s voice broke through his dark reverie. “You’ve been acting bizarre all day. You’ve been like this since this morning.”

“Guess I just have a lot on my mind,” Nam Shin-hoo deflected.

Choi Kanghyeon’s silence lingered.

“I’m serious. Well, my shoulder is aching a bit too, so there’s that,” Nam Shin-hoo added, smoothly steering the conversation in another direction. In truth, mentioning his bothersome shoulder wasn’t entirely a lie.

He hadn’t noticed it when he first woke up in a frantic daze, but as time ticked on, his shoulder began to throb with a strange, persistent ache. Judging by the faint traces of recent medical treatment, he must have injured it quite recently.

He racked his brain to recall if any major incidents from this specific time period could have caused it, but nothing significant sprang to mind. Since serious bodily harm was practically a daily occurrence back when he was aggressively building the Guild and hunting on the front lines, it was likely just one of countless minor injuries.

“If your shoulder keeps hurting, should we use another potion on it?”

“Save it. We don’t have any dungeon raids scheduled for a while anyway. Just leave it be and it’ll heal on its own.”

The visible exterior wound had already closed. That meant his traumatized muscles were currently in the natural recovery phase, making the use of a high-grade healing potion at this point a total waste of resources.