Chapter 95

“As of 11:00 AM on the 3rd, we have yet to detect return signals from the Korean hunters, Nam Shin-hoo and Kwon Haeju, who infiltrated the EX-Rank anomaly. Dungeon gate metrics remain stable, with no unusual developments to report.”

“Hmm… Is that so? I knew it. They radiated an extraordinary presence from the moment I first laid eyes on them, and I had a gut feeling they would cause a massive stir. Looks like I’ll be updating my guidebook for the first time in ages.”

“Bale Taylor.” Glys Roban interrupted, his voice dropping to a glacial chill. “Your reaction just now makes it sound as though you genuinely believe those Korean amateurs penetrated deeper into the labyrinth than we did.”

“Oh, come on. No way.” Bale drawled, casually sliding his designer sunglasses into their pristine case. “I’m saying they went deeper than you did.”

Glys Roban led the deepest, most successful strike team the United States had ever deployed into the anomaly. Even for Roban, crowned the absolute strongest hunter in America and arguably the world, the EX-Rank labyrinth had been a devastating crucible.

With oxygen catastrophically depleted and lethal toxins saturating every square inch of the environment, it was a hellscape fundamentally hostile to human survival. Furthermore, the second biome was absolute torture, a zone where gravity violently and unpredictably inverted with every single step.

When Roban first breached that threshold, he had been forced to combat those horrific spatial restrictions while simultaneously fending off relentless ambush predators. By the time they barely limped out of the third sector, half his elite squad had been slaughtered and the survivors teetered on the brink of death.

Roban himself had only managed to escape by dragging his mangled lower body across the threshold, and had the S-Rank healer Yosepian not intervened with a miraculous display of power, he would have been permanently crippled.

Since Roban’s catastrophic expedition, the vast majority of teams dispatched into the abyss failed to even reach the final checkpoint documented in the guidebook. Even though their vanguard had purged the monstrous ecosystem, the baseline environmental penalties alone were apocalyptic.

Therefore, it was mathematically impossible for a mere duo of Korean hunters to survive in such an unforgiving void. Washington knew this perfectly well, which was exactly why they had comfortably dangled the absurd, impossible reward of treating Korea as a sovereign equal.

“So, speaking of which.” Bale smirked. “Care to make a wager on exactly how far the Korean team made it before they died?”

“I don’t entertain obvious bets.” Roban’s tone was glacial.

“Are you absolutely sure about that?”

Today, Bale Taylor was ruthlessly scratching at Roban’s deepest insecurities. Roban ground his teeth. They had always possessed fundamentally incompatible chemistries, but today, Bale was infuriating enough that Roban harbored a vivid fantasy of hanging him by his neck from the roaring falls.

“They say you never truly know how the world will turn.” Bale continued breezily. “Think about it. When Hunter Kwon decimated that S-Rank dungeon in record time recently, who could have possibly predicted it? To think a marginalized Asian nation like Korea would pull off a miracle like that.”

A vital thread of Roban’s immaculate patience finally snapped. Bale Taylor had just ruthlessly weaponized a painful memory he had painstakingly buried.

Breaking news delivered at the crack of dawn had revealed that Kwon Haeju’s Epic Guild had completely shattered the global record, ascending as the fastest guild in human history to clear an S-Rank anomaly.

“I suppose so.” Roban’s voice was stiff. “Such an anomaly did occur.”

It was the humiliating day Glys Roban had been violently stripped of one of his longest-held records. He still vividly remembered the agonizing tick of the second hand on his office clock when his aide delivered the devastating report.

But it seemed it was finally time to permanently erase that humiliating memory.

The Kwon Haeju that Roban had physically evaluated in person was disappointingly unremarkable. He radiated zero momentum or ambition, merely hovering passively behind Nam Shin-hoo and moving lethargically like a puppet tethered to his commander’s strings.

Hunter Nam Shin-hoo was an infinitely more intriguing specimen. Though his nation was small, he flawlessly managed Korea’s apex guild, suggesting he possessed a reservoir of deeply hidden capabilities.

I really should have shaken his hand back then.

Roban mentally cursed the advanced diagnostic artifact he had secretly strapped to his chest beneath his tailored shirt at the tarmac. Capable of reading an opponent’s latent skills and raw stat distribution, the A-Rank tool couldn’t comprehensively decrypt an S-Rank hunter’s encrypted data, but it would have provided a vital baseline estimate of their destructive potential. Allowing Shin-hoo to bypass physical contact had been a monumental tactical failure.

“Sir, we’re detecting a massive reaction at the entrance!” The aide, who had been sweating profusely while monitoring the tense exchange between the two titans, suddenly shrieked.

The entrance to the EX-Rank dungeon catastrophically expanded. The gateway, previously a chaotic vortex of cyan and purple, violently distorted and mutated its geometry. The perfect circle warped into a jagged oval, snapped into a sharp diamond, and then aggressively wrinkled, collapsing inward upon its own center of gravity.

Massive volumes of water from the falls were sucked into the dungeon’s maw, an entrance that had previously maintained absolute structural integrity despite the cascading river.

Was the spatial crack fracturing, or was an entirely new apocalyptic catastrophe unfolding?

The elite hunters stationed around the perimeter of the waterfall simultaneously drew their weapons, shifting into aggressive combat stances to intercept this unprecedented phenomenon.

Slowly, the mystical light enveloping the gate began to hemorrhage, the blindingly radiant beams of energy sinking heavily into the churning water. It was a visual phenomenon completely absent from any historical record.

Staring intently into the roaring falls, the aide’s voice trembled violently. “The dungeon entrance is… it’s disappearing, sir.”

The ominous gateway gradually bled out its momentum, shrinking rapidly until the aperture was barely wide enough for a single human to squeeze through.

What the hell did they do inside? Roban’s mind raced.

The iridescent light surrounding the entrance completely suffocated. Countless military and association personnel gathered around the perimeter stared blankly at the dead center of the waterfall in paralyzed disbelief.

The apocalyptic labyrinth that had abruptly materialized and plunged the entire United States into existential terror had vanished without a single warning tremor, simply ceasing to exist with two Korean hunters still trapped inside its belly.

“L-look over there! It’s a person!”

Every eye in the vicinity violently snapped toward a single coordinate. At the trembling tip of the shouting hunter’s finger rested a figure curled tightly into a fetal position on the slick rocks, his head of pitch-black, curly hair bowed deeply as he shuddered.

The silhouette was undeniably familiar. It was Hunter Kwon Haeju, one of the two men who had marched into the EX-Rank abyss.

Confirming the identity of the survivor, Glys Roban approached with predatory caution.

Why is there only one of them?

Two men had definitively crossed the threshold, yet only one had been violently spat back out. Could something catastrophic have decimated them inside, something so instantaneously lethal they couldn’t even trigger a Return Stone?

This is highly problematic.

Roban’s mandate for the Korean hunters to raid the EX-Rank dungeon was solely a geopolitical flex of absolute dominance. It would have been perfectly acceptable if they failed to enter entirely, and if they had breached the entrance only to cowardly retreat, he could have publicly humiliated them on the global stage.

A confirmed casualty, however, was a completely unforeseen diplomatic nightmare. Had he severely overestimated the resilience of a foreign nation’s S-Rank assets?

“Um, Lord Roban… If this escalates, how do we handle the diplomatic fallout?” The aide, clearly mirroring Roban’s internal political calculus, asked in a highly distressed whisper.

With a confirmed casualty occurring in Korea, a nation already suffering a critical deficit of S-Rank deterrents, the international community would absolutely not remain silent.

The European Union, perpetually hunting for leverage against American hegemony, and rival domestic guilds eager to usurp Roban’s throne would unanimously weaponize this tragedy, relentlessly accusing him of endangering the sovereignty of an allied nation with draconian demands.

Separately, the spontaneous eradication of the EX-Rank dungeon demanded an immediate, exhaustive investigation. They had zero intelligence on whether it was permanently deleted, temporarily dormant, or actively mutating into a more catastrophic anomaly. None of these scenarios were politically or militarily acceptable, and just mapping the variables made Roban’s temples throb with a vicious migraine.

“Let’s assess the immediate situation first.” Roban’s voice was smooth.

In the distance, Kwon Haeju remained entirely frozen, his head bowed to his knees. Judging by his shuddering back, the boy might have been sobbing. How utterly pathetic.

He should have just abandoned his pride and retreated the second the atmosphere felt lethal.

There was absolutely nothing in the universe more valuable than one’s own continued existence. Clicking his tongue in undisguised disgust, Roban called out to the broken survivor.

“What exactly happened in there?”

Zero response came. Burying his face deeper into his hands, Haeju trembled even more violently.

Observing the erratic motion, Roban realized something was fundamentally wrong. That wasn’t the helpless shuddering of a man sobbing in grief, but the rigid, terrifying posture of a man who had tensed his entire muscular structure to concentrate a monstrous amount of kinetic force entirely into his hands.

Realizing exactly what Haeju was attempting to execute, Roban immediately sprinted across the slick rocks, violently seizing the younger man’s wrists and yanking his arms away from his face.

“Are you completely insane?!” Roban roared.

Haeju’s hands and eye sockets were drenched in fresh blood. Having literally attempted to gouge his own ruined eyes out of his skull with his bare fingers, he glared at Roban with a face flushed crimson with madness. His sightless, silver-gray irises, saturated in his own blood, gleamed with the feral malice of a demon clawing its way out of hell.

Radiating a thick, suffocating aura of pure bloodlust, Haeju slowly stood up and scanned the perimeter.

He felt the familiar, mundane atmospheric pressure and the buzzing presence of the countless humans surrounding him. He had been forcibly extracted outside, all by himself.

“I have to go back in.” Haeju’s voice was a broken, guttural snarl.

“Absolutely not.” Roban’s tone dripped with authority. “Explaining exactly what transpired in that anomaly takes absolute priority.”

“You are not moving a single inch until you comply. If you want our medical staff to heal those self-inflicted wounds, brief us on the tactical situation immediately. As for your recovery, we will treat you once we safely relocate to Washington!”

Haeju moved. He effortlessly shoved aside the annoying mayfly attempting to block his path. Armed personnel around him shouted commands, drew weapons, and desperately tried to restrain him, but they were less than dust beneath his boots, not worth a fraction of his attention.

Haeju’s mind was a chaotic, fragmented blur. The current reality felt entirely synthetic, exactly like wading through the viscous, suffocating depths of a lucid nightmare.

“Understood.” Roban pivoted smoothly, attempting to salvage his absolute authority. “Hunter Kwon Haeju, if it is too traumatizing, we can conduct the debriefing after you receive medical treatment. You look severely disoriented, so I am willing to grant you that much leniency.”

“Lord Roban, the target’s mental state is highly unstable. I strongly suggest you fall back to a secure perimeter.” The aide urged frantically.

“Do you honestly believe I could possibly sustain an injury from him?” Roban scoffed, his ego flaring. “The rest of you, step back and stand down.”

They were so goddamn noisy.

The absolute reality that he had left Nam Shin-hoo behind in the abyss and emerged completely alone was a nightmare more horrific and agonizing than anything in human history. Therefore, this absolutely, fundamentally could not be reality.

Smearing the blood flowing from his mangled eyes across his cheek, Haeju staggered forward. The entrance to the EX-Rank dungeon had definitively been anchored to these exact coordinates, but strangely, horrifyingly, he couldn’t find a single trace of it now.