Chapter 93

Through the Vesper Ring, Kwon Haeju’s emotions flooded into Nam Shin-hoo with naked clarity. The gemstone, previously pitch-black with suffocating terror, abruptly blossomed into a vibrant, brilliant pink that flickered like a warm flame. The sheer, unabashed intensity of Haeju’s infatuation was so profoundly jarring that it entirely neutralized the dungeon’s apocalyptic dread. Fresh oxygen flooded Shin-hoo’s constricted lungs as the crushing psychological gravity evaporated, drawing a breathy, disbelieving laugh past his lips.

“Alright,” Shin-hoo conceded softly. “I’ll grant it.”

The emotional current radiating from the ring instantly thickened with euphoric heat.

Capitalizing on the shattered tension, the duo rapidly accelerated their ascent. Halfway up the desolate stone mountain, a razor-sharp wave of bloodlust violently pierced the lingering atmospheric dread.

Swoosh. Tearing through the air, a massive avian silhouette snapped its beak and plummeted in a kamikaze dive straight toward the rocky slope.

“Monster.” Shin-hoo pointed upward. “A colossal hawk.”

Airborne adversaries were notoriously difficult to subjugate. Shin-hoo’s elemental mastery functioned similarly to a mage’s arsenal, but his maximum destructive yield relied heavily on point-blank contact rather than ranged barrages.

“More are converging,” Haeju announced.

Trailing the vanguard, a massive flock materialized in the sky and rapidly organized into a lethal strike formation. Their numbers lacked the grotesque, swarming density of the acidic eels, yet each individual bird easily dwarfed three adult men in sheer mass.

“Evasion takes priority,” Shin-hoo ordered.

Their sole objective was extracting the Egg and escaping, meaning a protracted aerial war would only hemorrhage vital time and stamina. Weaving frantically through the plunging barrage, the two hunters vaulted up the treacherous incline.

…! Tracking them with cold, predatory calculation, the lead hawk suddenly aborted its attack vector and violently slammed headfirst into the mountain, rattling the entire peak and showering the slope with loose gravel.

And the hawk…

“Did it just kill itself?”

The colossal beast collapsed with its shattered beak buried deep within the stone and its massive wings draped limply over the jagged rocks. This bizarre, suicidal spectacle sent a sickening chill cascading down Shin-hoo’s spine, a distinct, creeping horror entirely separate from the biome’s synthetic fear. The monsters weren’t hunting. They were engaging in a fanatical, ritualistic mass suicide.

There was no time to process the madness. The approaching flock closed the distance with cloudy, blood-red eyes gleaming with that exact same frenzied fanaticism.

“Keep moving up! Now!” Shin-hoo roared.

Another hawk plummeted from the sky, violently burying itself into the rock where they had stood a fraction of a second prior. An unnatural avalanche of debris instantly cascaded over the corpse, swallowing it whole until not a single feather remained visible and seamlessly integrating the beast into the mountain.

Only then did the horrifying reality of the terrain click in Shin-hoo’s mind. This towering, jagged peak wasn’t a natural geological formation. It was a colossal, accumulated mass grave built upon the corpses of countless suicidal avian monsters.

The realization that they were sprinting across a subterranean mountain of thousands of festering carcasses made Shin-hoo’s stomach churn. He tightened his grip on Haeju’s hand and violently surged upward.

While the hawks’ sheer kinetic velocity was devastating, their targeting parameters were noticeably flawed. Their objective wasn’t to slaughter the intruders, but to ‘purify’ the mountain itself. Wherever human boots desecrated the stone, the birds weaponized their own bodies to obliterate the tainted rock and layer fresh graves over the intrusion.

Hah… Shin-hoo gasped for air, suffocated not by physical exhaustion but by the sheer, crushing weight of unprecedented malice. The fanatical hostility of the environment choked him. Hunted like blasphemers trespassing upon a sacred altar, they sprinted frantically toward the apex.

The exact millisecond they breached the summit and laid their hands upon the blindingly radiant Egg, the apocalyptic terror and suffocating pressure vanished into thin air.

The relentless, suicidal bombardment from the sky ceased instantaneously.

“…” The massive flock merely banked upward, hovering in the sky with elegant, predatory grace. They silently observed the two intruders standing before the artifact, their piercing gazes heavy with an eerie, expectant weight.

Swallowing hard against the sudden, unnatural tranquility, Shin-hoo exhaled. “Is it over?”

“I certainly hope so,” Haeju murmured. “That was an exceptionally brutal sector.”

Cradled in its nest, the Egg thrummed with a rhythmic, visceral pulse identical to a beating human heart before it abruptly began to mutate.

…! As if eagerly responding to their arrival, the colossal object rapidly condensed. Initially dwarfing a grown man, it shrank below their heads, plummeted past their waists, and finally ceased its transformation once it condensed into a dense, fist-sized sphere.

“What the…?” Reaching down, Shin-hoo effortlessly scooped up the stabilized artifact.

The moment his fingers brushed the surface, a familiar interface materialized.

[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.
Success Rate: 40%]

Shin-hoo’s eyes widened in sheer disbelief.

The interface had refreshed. In a matter of days, the probability had skyrocketed a massive ten percent, a staggering leap considering the agonizing weeks it normally took to move a single decimal point.

This was the correct answer.

The Egg was a critical catalyst for the quest. Regardless of its future implications, it was an undeniable keystone for saving humanity.

Shin-hoo’s tactical pragmatism instantly kicked into overdrive. Given this revelation, surrendering the artifact to the United States was no longer viable. He needed to smuggle it back to Korea and completely bypass the diplomatic agreements by coordinating a watertight alibi with Haeju.

BEEP.

A shrill, catastrophic alarm shattered his thoughts.

— WARNING —

A system window violently materialized in his vision.

[%ㅁㅇA!ㄱ^{?>&2`11(ㄴ=+35§6ㅌㅊ%]

Incomprehensible, corrupted syntax glitched across the holographic display like static on a shattered television screen. The fragmented text writhed wildly before violently forcing itself into a decipherable sentence.

[CRITICAL OVERRIDE: All Skills and Spatial Inventories are permanently locked. The physical stats of all entities within the designated sector are forcibly restricted to 1.]

“What?!” Before the panicked gasp fully left Shin-hoo’s throat, Haeju violently lunged and enveloped Shin-hoo in his arms. As the bedrock beneath their boots convulsed, Haeju launched them toward an adjacent, stable boulder.

The instant Shin-hoo’s boots slammed against the stone, a shockingly alien sensation ripped through his legs. A sickening, throbbing ache flared in his soles and knees, manifesting as a mundane physical recoil that wouldn’t have bothered an ordinary civilian, let alone an S-Rank apex predator.

This is…

The horrifying reality of having his stats reduced to one violently crashed over him.

“Kwon Haeju, activate your Return Stone! Now!” Shin-hoo roared.

“I can’t.” Haeju’s face twisted into a mask of pure, unadulterated dread. He bit his lip and shook his head. “I’ve been trying. The spatial inventory refuses to open.”

The catastrophic system warning was absolute.

“My skills are completely suppressed as well.” Haeju’s voice dropped to a harsh whisper. “Nothing is responding. It feels exactly like the days before my awakening.”

Haeju’s complexion paled drastically. Fully aware of his own blindness, he still desperately tore off his eyepatch and squinted furiously in a futile attempt to comprehend the collapsing environment.

“We have to move.” Haeju urged him forward. “We need to find cover until the suppression lifts.”

Logically, Shin-hoo agreed, but his feet remained glued to the rock.

No, there was simply nowhere left to run.

“Why are you freezing? Give me a heading.”

“There’s nowhere left to go.”

Standing atop the desolate peak, Shin-hoo stared at the collapsing horizon, bearing witness to the apocalyptic shift that Haeju could not see.

The boundaries of reality were physically contracting. The biomes they had traversed, along with the uncharted territories ahead, were violently closing in around the stone mountain.

It resembled a monolithic, world-ending wall converging on their coordinates. This encroaching barrier mirrored the spatial divisions they had previously crossed, yet it was infinitely more terrifying.

Stretching endlessly from the earth to the heavens, the perimeter rapidly squeezed the airspace. Beyond that shimmering boundary lay a desolate, blood-red void, unfathomably deep and harrowing as the darkest reaches of the cosmic abyss.

“…” Shin-hoo had never stepped beyond such a boundary, but his primal instincts screamed the absolute truth.

If that wall touches us, we die.

No, ‘death’ was far too grandiose a term for what awaited them. They would be casually erased, reduced to microscopic, insignificant dust motes devoid of even a single gram of existential weight.

The dimension beyond that wall was a realm strictly forbidden to humanity.

It was the true ‘Outside’.

It was a domain completely devoid of logic, physics, or sanity. This inherently twisted, chaotic space represented a true cosmic reality that fragile human minds were never meant to observe.

Every catastrophic penalty and environmental hazard they had endured thus far was merely a synthetic, curated terrarium mimicking a fraction of the Outside.

The dimension beyond that collapsing wall was the true, unfiltered manifestation of an EX-Rank anomaly. The dungeon’s real entrance was only just now tearing open.

What… what do I do?

Faced with absolute, cosmic insignificance, Shin-hoo’s mind flatlined into white noise. The indomitable willpower that had weathered countless regressions, gruesome deaths, and suffocating despairs crumbled like a pathetic sandcastle against a tidal wave.

His tactical brilliance evaporated. He had no idea how to maneuver, how to survive, or even how to command his lungs to draw breath.

“Snap out of it!” Haeju roared. His hands closed like vices over Shin-hoo’s trembling fingers. Reading the catastrophic plunge of Shin-hoo’s emotional state through the Vesper Ring, Haeju violently pulled Shin-hoo by the shoulders to anchor him. “We are going to be fine. I don’t know what is happening, but…”

A bitter, tragic irony struck Shin-hoo. Thank god he’s blind right now. Because his vision had faded, Haeju was spared the paralyzing sight of the cosmic executioner’s block closing in on them. He only sensed the drastic environmental shift, not the impending erasure.

Biting his lip until he tasted copper, Shin-hoo stared at the younger man.

I have to keep him alive.

Kwon Haeju was the sole variable that had to survive and be carried into the future. That single objective was the entire reason Shin-hoo had clawed his way back from the grave and fought so desperately until this very second.

Yet, he was staring down the barrel of absolute failure, having achieved absolutely nothing.

If Haeju died here, the apocalypse was guaranteed. The pathetic Nam Shin-hoo had squandered his miraculous second chance and failed the world once again. And the most agonizing tragedy of all…

Kwon Haeju’s life was cut even shorter than in his previous life.