Keiser and I returned to the portal of incidence—the gate he came from was the only one left. The Deokso dungeon with a one-person restriction for entry now had two inside. And the purported class of the dungeon was 1st class even though 2nd and 3rd class succubi appeared. Despite my inexperience as a hunter, I wasn’t dense enough to not know something was up. If anyone other than me infiltrated this dungeon, they would have died. Heck, even someone like me—with a monstrous trait—almost died.

Through talking with Keiser in fragments, I learned he wasn’t actually Canadian. He was a 3rd class hunter who lived here and there with no set presence. The ten national rankers were between high-3rd class and low-4th class. Although he never stated such aspirations out loud, nor did I ask, Keiser weapon convinced me he was soon to become the eleventh ranker. If the sword’s sparks in my hand could kill 2nd class succubi on the brink of 3rd class, I could only imagine how powerful it was in his hands—not to mention that only he could access the true potential of the artifact.

I didn’t mention my class at all, as he seemed to assume I was 3rd class like him, given that I’d wiped the floor with the succubi. I had no intention to disillusion such thinking, as I’d need to justify my power through my trait, which was a secret no one should know.

He was—at the end of the day—still a stranger.

We came to the agreement of entering the gate once my wound closed again. While I was unable to move my life side, it couldn’t deter me. Those succubi would succumb to their own attacks anyways.

According to him, the Canadian dungeon was on the brink of a monster outbreak given the overpopulation of drakes inside. While it was a dungeon with no restrictions on number of entries, few Canadian hunters were capable of dealing with that many 3rd class drakes, even as a team. So Keiser took it upon himself to clear it.

Everything went well, and the drakes of the dungeon were mostly exterminated. That is, until he discovered a second gate within the drake dungeon. I could guess the rest from there, but instead of a thank you, he insisted he would have been fine against the gang of succubi.

He’d manage somehow without my intervention and I needed to take care of my life first before protecting others, was what he said.

“Cheong-Sin, your English is quite good for a non-native.”

“Thank you. I learned it in school.”

“Language isn’t something you can pick up from schooling alone.”

“Haha.”

He jokingly slapped my injured shoulder, which was supposed to sting—in fact, it was a bad sign that I had no reaction at all. Any nerve connection down my arm was severed.

Keiser did not seem particularly worried about the injury, as it was all in the day's work of being a hunter, so I took his attitude as a reason to stay calm. It was but a flesh wound at the end of the day. Just a flesh wound—no. It was not even a scratch. The concept of being crippled was implausible. It’d heal somehow. Numerous hunters had outrageous healing traits. It was difficult not to get healed when most of those hunters worked in a medical industry specialized for hunters.

“You ready?”

I nodded. And with that, I took the lead.

Thus began our escape from the dungeon.

Greenery of all sorts spewed out into my vision once my body entered the gate. The drake dungeon was a forest. The ground was damp, as were the arboreal fumes lingering in the air. My body felt sweaty while losing no sweat.

Immediately, dozens of rings echoed in my ears.

[You have slain a Succubus (lvl.268).]

[You have…]

The rest that had yet to strike changed their methods to brute force. But before they could reach me, Mystletainn cleaved their heads off. The force of Keiser’s sword struck like a two-handed greatsword despite being a one-handed weapon.

While they were focused on me, Keiser stepped out of the gate prepared. Since succubi had weak constitutions, Keiser had no issues. They were fragile enough to succumb to their own reflected attacks, not to mention that all the 3rd classes were taken care of by me prior. He had a class advantage, which was huge. With no ambush like the first time, they were fodder to him.

It wasn’t a massacre, because despite possessing bodies of blood, they were anything but alive. These succubi were monsters. And monsters existed as stones and water did; with no rhyme or reason, no sane individual could respect them as mortal counterparts. Even animals sent to the slaughter cherished their lives enough to run away.

If monsters were like any other creature, like humans and animals, they’d drink water, devour flesh, and act in the name of fear. But they didn’t. Despite masquerading as animals, sometimes with human figures, all they seemed to do was hunt humans with no alternative goal. The exceptions that hunted their own were few. And they needed no sustenance to survive. The mana inside dungeons and on Earth were enough to bless them with immunity against natural causes. Their desire for carnage was, alas, the slayer of their immortality.

Therefore, no guilt was necessary to handle them…

Just like plants, there was no reason to not plunge a hand into their corpses to harvest fruit.

“Don’t waste your time on spare change.” Keiser sheathed his sword. “We need to move. Now.”

Right. Our agreed upon objective was to leave the dungeon, not make money. It was the rational thing to do considering the unprecedented occurrence of two dungeons linking together. Neither of us knew when something even crazier would happen. The worst outcome would be us getting wrapped up in it. But still…

Once Keiser turned his back to search for a path, I speared my foot into one of the bodies.

Nothing. No magic stone.

“Found it,” his voice alerted after I tore open more corpses. Unfortunately, these succubi were poor.

Keiser led me down the forest path. There were marks drawn across every other tree. It went to show Keiser’s experience as a hunter, to even go so far as mark his exit for ease of escape. Some white sap seeped out of the chipped bark, making the markings easy to identify. Through them I knew exactly how to reach the entrance.

“SSSSS!!!”

Heat came from the back. But right before the flames could scorch my back, I sent them off. My reaction was too slow to make anything of the flames like I’d done with the sparks. It required too much concentration to pull off a second time. The drake failed in its sneak attack. But unlike the succubi, it was immune to its own attacks. Even so, fire was fire, and I was able to confuse it temporarily when it saw its own flames returning.

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Sparks manifested around the lizard’s neck, and the moment Keiser unsheathed Mystletainn, those sparks collapsed inward along his sword’s trajectory, shaving off the drake’s neck as a matter of formality.

Without sparing its corpse another glance, we ran, with me, as the slower man in front, escorted by Keiser from the back.

Keiser swiped his sword momentarily while running. I called them swipes, but to be more accurate, I was basing my description off of afterimages and sparks of electricity weaved into dancing threads that slit the throat of approaching drakes.

My focus stayed solely on tracking the marked trees and running past them. With an injured arm, it was difficult to control my body-weight efficiently for running. Nevertheless, I had the best possible hunter, escorting me out of a 3rd class dungeon. The way he slew them was making me question if those drakes were even 3rd class to begin with. His movements were effortless much like the way I handled the succubi. There was no fight to be had. This was a hunter tasked with dungeon extermination—he acted like a farmer shoveling away old stems for new seeds to take root.

Could Park Soo-Mi, being the world-renowned ranker of Korea, kill these drakes as effortlessly as him? I didn’t know.

Whenever flames shot our way, I’d deflect them back as retaliation even if it did nothing. While the trees were seemingly immune to fire, the rising temperature was taking a toll on us. It was a wonder how this dungeon did not evolve into a netherworld with magma spewing out in chunks from the ground. Global warming would speed up ten-folds if fire-breathing monsters such as these drakes raided Earth en masse.

The swirling purple silhouette came into sight fast. The rift in reality that was the dungeon’s entrance neared.

A few drakes continued stalking us, keeping a distance far enough such that Keiser couldn’t deal with them, and they were unable to deal with us. Time after time, I’d proven their fire ineffective, but even so, they did not give up. Like relentless machines that didn’t know how to quit, they continued firing shots after shots, only to eat those returned flames with their face later on. Fear did not tempt them even after Keiser’s demonstration.

“Go! Now!”

Keiser urged me to speed up. The gate was within leaping distance of. And the drakes, as if stuck in a perpetual cadence, took the opportunity to lash out a collective breath of fire at us. They worked as a team for once. But this wasn’t a television show about fusing power rangers.

I shifted to the left, and Keiser, trapped in his momentum, sped past me into the gate. The purple hue immediately clouded into crackling red. The gate was going to collapse.

But I stood my ground.

In the split moment where the flames blew against my hair, I attempted something beyond common sense.

The fire, seemingly rebirthed with a consciousness of its own, erected a barrier around me and the gate.

I could hear something shattering behind me after entering, and when I recovered from the spatial distortion caused by the gate, the gate that was supposed to be behind me engulfed itself from the center, continuously shrinking, almost squinting close, until it shrunk too far out of existence.

For the first time in history, a dungeon dissolved from the face of Earth, and it happened in front of my eyes.

As for Keiser who arrived before me. There was a mixture of confusion and amusement in his contorted brows. His black silver hair was messy, with drops of sweat misshaping its style.

Situated behind him was a task force. It was a crew of men with backpacks and blood-rusted axes, along with three or four hunters made distinguishable by their armored vests and weapons. Even though I was bad at reading English, the universally known logo—a bright smile laced with omens of death—imprinted on the task force’s equipment revealed their identity.

They were the clean-up crew tasked to procure monster corpses from the dungeon.

With the dungeon gate disappearing, that wasn’t possible anymore.

~~~~~

“Where are we going?”

“A place to rest.” Keiser sank deeper into his seat as he said that. “Why do you ask? Are you in a hurry to return to Korea?”

“No. It’s just…” I didn’t think my first time riding in a limousine would be right after a close call with death.

Luxurious was the only way to describe it. Keiser was loaded. I was even considering calling him my role model when I saw how carefree he was in loisting his blood-stained shoes over the opposite seat, treating it as a leg chair.

After getting my body checked up on by emergency personnel, I was healed. Even though it was a legendary trait specialized in recovery, I was still instructed to rest for a week. My left arm regained functioning, but lifting it was a pain.

“You drink?”

“What?”

He tossed me a glassed bottle of beer from the fridge—a logo recognizable by all as a cheap brand—before popping open his own and releasing an ecstatic ~Aahhh after the first glug.

I took a gentle sip after prying the bottle cap open with my superhuman strength just as he did. The steel dented before my hand did. The taste wasn’t bad, and as expected, it couldn’t compare to soju in terms of potency, but it was perfect as a substitute for soda while being more interesting than lukewarm water.

It was refreshing. Was this what drinking after work felt like? I couldn’t imagine drinking after a store shift since I was usually gassed out. Hunting was definitely more exciting than convenience store work.

Silence brewed between us as we chugged our beers. When Keiser finished his first, he opened a second. Before the third was opened, he turned on the television, catching me by surprise. It wasn’t odd that there was such a device on a limousine, but my mind wasn’t expecting one.

As it turned out, the news just happened to be talking about Korea.

“Almost every dungeon in Korea yesterday experienced an outbreak. Thankfully, the quick response from ASH and top Korean guilds including the national hunter, Soo-Mi, have subdued the situation. Despite the quick subjugation of monsters, many areas, particularly central districts of Seoul, have been devastated by monster attacks.”

My immediate instinct was to contact noona to make sure she was safe, but there was no way to. She was a person who believed in face-to-face conversations over the phone. Even now, I could imagine her sitting at her third-floor balcony looking over the concrete streets trampled by monsters…

Well, if I could imagine that, I was sure she’s fine. While ordinary, noona was a person who survived the Imjin War and fought alongside Admiral Yi in the 1500s. There was no way she’d succumb so easily. I wouldn’t call her noona otherwise.

“Nations around the world have experienced mass outbreaks as well, but none have faced it as extreme as Korea, a country renowned for its lack of monster outbreaks over the years from expert management of dungeons. Professionals say the continued restriction of outbreaks via annual dungeon exterminations over decades have culminated into this huge eruption across all Korean dungeons. This would corroborate the leading theory that dungeons in a given region are all linked to each other in some…”

It was then that Keiser spoke.

“Chong-Shin.”

He misspoke my name by a few tones, but my attention followed.

“What do you think?”

“Think about what?”

“That bullshit.” He pointed to the news reporter on the screen.

“It’s unfortunate.”

A monster outbreak. If it wasn’t unfortunate, then what was it?

“HAH!” He downed the bottle and slammed it on the fridge.

“Do you remember when dungeons first appeared on Earth thirty years ago, Cheong-Shin? Everyone calls it Earth’s First Cataclysm. Just like the meteor that destroyed the dinosaurs, this was termed the event that would kill all humans.”

I wanted to reply that I was born after The First Cataclysm, but hearing his reddened voice augmented by the alcohol, it seemed to be the opposite for him. Contrary to his 20s appearance, he was apparently much older than that. It may have been more proper to refer to him as a young grandpa.

“It looked exactly like this back then—with monsters roaming the streets of London being more common than seagulls on a beach! Somewhere along the way, we humans managed to escape this extinction event. And by luck… ” He chuckled, slowly coming to a somber realization. “We managed to win with many sacrifices…”

He snapped the neck of the third beer bottle and took a long hard swig to drown out whatever was on his mind.

“Mass dungeon outbreaks aren’t what we should be worrying about, Cheong-Sin.”

He sighed.

“The Second Cataclysm is fucking here.”