As far as I could, I ran.

The rain of shattered glass etched their noise into the floor behind me. Luckily, for even a shabby convenience store like this, there was an emergency backdoor exit leading to the alleyway

That green thing behind me wasn’t an ordinary goblin. Heck—when the hell did goblins get so damn big? Not even a tow truck could run it over.

I made a sharp turn while slamming the backdoor behind me.

It somehow nicked me with the claws of its hands—or at least that was what I thought. It wasn’t a mere papercut as I assumed. Pain was the simplest description, but the more frightening aspect was the sharp delay between the clicking of severed tendons and the sting of the breeze rampaging through the exposed flesh and bone.

If my assumptions were correct, that thing was at its first evolution. In other words, at the minimum, it was level 100, a 1st class monster. On the off-chance that it was a 2nd or 3rd class monster, then it was my good fortune that it hadn’t killed me instantly but was instead playing with its food. As for 4th classes and beyond… Death was inescapable for classless people.

I couldn’t remember for the life of me when the last time I physically exerted myself was, but surprisingly, I ran at a decent pace. My physical prowess may have been influenced by my own increase in levels, albeit the fact that most active hunters were level 30 at the minimum, not to mention my measly level 9.

Having popped a cigarette here and there when I first started the job, I knew the back alleyway of the block the best. A few narrow forks existed, although I didn’t know how helpful they would be in escaping

While navigating as best I could, it was irrefutable that these alleyways were dirty from eons of neglect.

The aged trash bins worked somewhat as obstacles, though I could feel the damned thing’s breath sliding right over my shoulder

Once I managed my way onto the center street, more monsters appeared in sight, though they did not immediately notice me. They seemed to be preoccupied with something else, so I had the wiggle room to hop into a nearby clothing store with its windows already broken into.

“Fucking…”

The skin of my right wrist was screwed enough to reveal bone. I took my shirt off, despite the breeze of winter wind gazing down my back. It wasn’t as cold as I remembered it being when I woke up, which I attributed to my adrenaline rush. It wasn’t like there was a walking furnace on the streets.

Using the cloth as a makeshift bandage, I forced myself to bear with the wound.

My heartbeat was stupidly fast. I could hear it pumping in my ears. But oddly, I wasn’t out of breath.

At times like these, having a knife on hand was nice. Naturally, a knife couldn’t do shit against those monsters. It wouldn’t be able to penetrate the tissues of the cheek even if I stuck the knife inside their jaws. But just having something in hand, like a wooden handle to hold onto, was relieving. So I grabbed onto the largest glass shard laid on the floor, not that grabbing it would put my mind at ease like a child cuddling a teddy bear would or a baby sucking a pacifier would.

“EEEKKK!”

More shrieks came from outside. The last voices groaned in desperate resistance, and then silence.

My immediate thought was that the hunters came. Hunters of the upper caste capable of eliminating 1st and 2nd class monsters must have arrived to handle the monster outbreak.

And yet, my instinct reminded me to cup my mouth in an effort to repress the sound of my breath.

Why had it suddenly grown quiet?

My suspicion rose as did my anticipation. Why did there have to be a monster outbreak now? After all these years, Seoul had been safe and sound from monster outbreaks due to the management of ASH hunters in continuously clearing out all nearby dungeons to prevent such outbreaks from happening.

For a normal, classless individual like me, all it took was less than a single second for my head to leave the body. Not even a clean cleave was necessary for 2nd class monsters—my head could just as easily be bashed in with a light tap as if I were a cockroach. But unlike a roach, I could not live without a head. Even so, I couldn’t resist the temptation to peek my head out the broken window.

And what laid outside was the personification of hell on Earth. Flames clad in morning sun razed about, burning on concrete surfaces that shouldn’t be flammable. All that remained of the monsters—including the goblin that had chased me, were reduced to blackened corpses.

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I quickly shrank back, hoping whatever had caused it, wouldn’t come for my life next.

I could only think of a single hunter who could wield fire in such a manner that eliminated dozens of 1st and 2nd class monsters in an instant. That was the 2nd ranker—the second best hunter in the world. But it couldn’t have been, because he was an American man who lived, slept and shat on American soil.

It wasn’t long that I needed to wait. A single shadow cast upon dawn’s light moved my attention upwards.

Hell had come to me with a devil spawn. The living, breathing, incarnation of the damned itself found me. The fire in its eyes rampaged about. It possessed the form of a winged human—but was it an emissary of heaven or a crooked sinner? While clad in divine light, its body shrouded itself in the devil’s fire.

The question I had resolved itself.

It was this angel who killed them all. A hunter didn’t do it, but a monster. This was a monster that killed other monsters.

It reached its hand out to me before I could gasp.

Through the fire expressed in its palm, the being revealed its nature as neither good, nor evil—but the grim reaper.

I was to die today.

That fire, no matter how I saw it, was the end. It was incomparable to the infant blue light Ahn Hajin shot at me. This flame was matured with the taste of death, carrying with it something far worse than mere heat.

But this time, I had a feeling. Unlike with Ahn Hajin, I didn’t have a moment of shock, where my body, overrun by instinctual fear, would raise its arms in defense. Something was telling me to embrace its attack because there was nothing I could do.

Yes.

That was the answer.

There wasn’t anything I could do.

So I shouldn’t do anything at all.

[You have slain Avarice, Fallen Angel (lvl. 327).]

[You have leveled up.]

[You have leveled…]

[You have performed an impossible feat.]

[You have slain a monster 3 classes above you.]

[You have earned a title for directly resisting against the properties of Cursed Hell Fire.]

[As an existence who has overcome the boundary of leagues, you have earned a title.]

Perhaps the greatest irony was the fallen angel’s inability to resist its own flames.

Seeing the list of messages bloom in my mind’s eye, I couldn’t help but grin.

I leapt out of the window, and as I expected, a burnt up corpse sat there. Any remaining facial features were burnt off along with the feathers, leaving behind a rack of external bone that used to be a set of elegant wings.

This thing was level 327. In other words, it was a 3rd class monster—a creature that only appeared in S-rank gates. That meant it could have a 3rd class magic stone…

I was drooling just thinking about how much it would sell for.

Unfortunately, the corpse itself was probably too damaged by the flames to be sold even if it were the remains of a 3rd class monster. Most monsters of this class would be used to create luxurious artifacts in the form of armor or weapons for the best hunters and guilds. But judging by the state of the body, it was unlikely to be useful for anything as it was deprived of its original cursed flame property.

Despite that, there was still a chance it had a magic stone.

So without hesitation, I stabbed the glass shard into its chest, wrongly thinking the defense of its skin had dropped given it was dead.

The shard ended up shattering, and strangely, my hand remained uninjured despite my fingers collapsing into the glass when it shattered.

Finding the phenomenon intriguing, I spared a glance at the glass in my hand, then crushed it once more, this time returning as dust. After dusting it away, my palm revealed itself without the smallest of scratches on its surface.

My wrist was also no longer pulsing, prompting me to tear away the bloodied cloth.

Normally, level ups did not heal the body physically, though it was known that it often improved mental fatigue and restored a miniscule amount of mana for hunters who used magic. And yet, for me, the process of numerous successive level-ups had somehow magically restored it.

The thought came to me then.

I pointed my two trustworthy fingers: the middle and index; and with brute speed faster than gravity, I plunged it into the corpse.

Purple blood splattered, indicating that I had succeeded in penetrating flesh that was as sturdy as iron.

After some gruesome digging, I finally found it. A pale crystal emitting a blazing light stuck to its still beating heart like a parasite. It was dead obviously, but given that it was a monster of the 3rd class, its longevity wasn’t unusual.

I plucked the magic stone from the heart and wiped away the blood with my once blue t-shirt that was now a red rag. Much like the creature it was once a part of, a divine, but sinister glow radiated from the crystal. As I secured it to my pocket, I could already hear the sound of paper bills shuffling out from the atm into my pocket.

Around me were several other bodies, all burnt to a crisp. But if I were lucky, they’d have magic stones too.

While I relished in my newfound wealth, a horrified voice woke me from my daydreaming.

“Were you the one who killed that mutant 3rd class monster?”

The speaker was a young woman. Judging by the armor she wore, the spear on her back, and the throwing knives stashed around each limb, this must have been the singular hunter dispatched to take care of the monster outbreak. She was late to the scene, but I didn’t bear that as a grudge given her fame.

Her face, synonymous with the word “genius,” was so well-known on advertisement banners and Korean newspaper headers as “the” Korean hunter that even secluded monks would be able to call her by name despite a first-time meeting.

“Hello,” I said. “Nice to meet you, Ranker Park Soo-Mi-nim.”