Chapter 131 – Headhunter (Part Eleven)

Rumble!

Kang Il-hyeon sprinted across the top of a toppling building, its foundation severed.

Above him, Asu and Marka, black wings unfurled, zigzagged closer. Two longswords aimed for him at once.

In response, Il-hyeon transformed the building beneath his feet, drawing hundreds of blades, large and small, from its exterior.

Shink!

The two largest blades, the first to shoot toward the monsters, were sliced apart by their swords.

The hundreds of blades following behind them halted mid-air, their points instantly reversing 180 degrees.

The blue-eyed Marka had used its psychokinesis to turn them back toward Il-hyeon.

Fwoosh! Sizzle!

The Phoenix materialized and incinerated the swords hurtling toward Il-hyeon.

But in that opening, Asu and Marka slipped past, and Il-hyeon found himself face-to-face with them.

Clang!

The two monsters swung their swords at incredible speed, then vanished, piercing through the thick building. Il-hyeon barely managed to parry their blows.

The attack had grazed his neck, but he had calculated that his Defensive Coat could easily deflect such a blow.

‘This is definitely not easy.’

Il-hyeon thought, glancing down at his tingling hand.

The black wings on their backs seemed to completely defy inertia, unlike anything he’d seen before.

They could execute drastic changes in direction without losing any speed, making their erratic mid-air movements incredibly threatening.

What’s more, their coordination was so perfect they might as well have been a single entity, each complementing the other’s every move in battle.

As a result, they left no openings and relentlessly targeted his.

It was no accident that A-Rank Awakened, even those at the Team Leader level, had fallen to them.

Rumble!

The ground beneath Il-hyeon’s feet shook violently, becoming unstable.

The already collapsing building broke apart, everything but the section Il-hyeon stood on plummeting to the sides. Only a few floors remained, floating in the air.

Asu and Marka appeared from either side, their black wings spread wide.

Then, they charged toward Il-hyeon.

Il-hyeon chose one—the red-eyed monster—and rushed in, their bodies colliding violently.

In that instant, Marka’s sword naturally struck for his back.

Thwump!

But the blade didn’t pierce Il-hyeon. It went through the Phoenix’s chest.

“Grrr…”

With an annoyed growl, Marka drove its sword deeper, but the Phoenix had no blood to spill.

It simply erupted in a blinding flash of light and flame, exploding along with the monster.

BOOM!

From within the blazing light, the Phoenix emerged, its wounds healed, more brilliant than before.

The Phoenix’s flames alone weren’t enough to inflict significant damage on an A-Rank variant monster like Marka, but it could buy Il-hyeon some time.

“Krrk!”

Asu, facing Il-hyeon, flashed its crimson eyes.

Seeing the creature radiating palpable hostility right before him, Il-hyeon offered a slight smile and twisted his blade.

Asu’s blade slid smoothly along the guard of Il-hyeon’s sword. In an instant, Il-hyeon changed the direction of his own sword, its tip aimed to pierce the creature’s neck.

Asu was forced to hastily change its stance and duck its head. Seizing the opening, Il-hyeon slammed his shoulder into it.

Thwack!

As the creature staggered back, a large hole opened up behind it.

From within, the massive maw of a green monster emerged.

Just as the maw—filled with tens of thousands of teeth and disproportionately large for its body—was about to swallow it whole,

Fwoosh!

Asu shot upward.

Its target gone, the ambitious green monster snapped its jaws shut with nothing to show for it, then lost its form and crumbled away.

Even when off-balance, its wings allowed it to maneuver freely, making it difficult to corner.

Moreover, the wings themselves had no physical form, so they couldn’t be cut, making them a particularly troublesome power.

Having taken to the sky, Asu and Marka looked down on Il-hyeon, their black wings spread wide.

Asu’s red eyes glowed intensely as it stared down at him.

He felt an ominous energy, but it didn’t seem to be a psychic ability. It was hard to discern its nature or make a preemptive move.

Crackle! BOOM!

At that very moment, a bolt of lightning struck from a clear sky.

The powerful bolt, accompanied by a deafening clap of thunder, struck Il-hyeon dead-on.

Its power far surpassed that of an ordinary lightning strike.

The few floors of the building held aloft by psychokinesis were shattered to pieces.

Everything around him, except for Il-hyeon himself, was incinerated, and black smoke billowed out in all directions.

As Il-hyeon fell from the sky amidst the debris, the Phoenix caught him and set him on its back.

“What… what was that? Does it have the power to call down lightning?”

Coughing, Il-hyeon checked his condition.

Normally, an ability of this kind would have a long casting time or several restrictions. But that strike had been so absurdly fast that, even without knowing what it was, he hadn’t been able to react.

Fortunately, his skin, which should have been charred black, was completely unharmed.

“It smells a little burnt… but I guess that’s the coat. It saved me.”

Il-hyeon stared blankly at his crackling Defensive Coat.

Even an A-Rank Defensive Coat, the kind issued only to Aegis Team Leaders, could never have withstood a blast of that magnitude.

But the black coat Il-hyeon wore was a tier above that.

It was a Defensive Coat specially provided by Choi Eun-chae, the head of Aegis’s research team, in exchange for the core fragments he’d given her.

A prototype, the first to implement a dual-core system using two A-Rank cores.

It packed twice the output of the strongest existing coat into a single garment, so its defensive capabilities were naturally far superior.

The system hadn’t been attempted before due to stability issues caused by its excessive output. However, after Choi Eun-chae recently identified and solved the problem through an all-nighter, it had passed all its tests and was merely awaiting field deployment.

And Il-hyeon had been given the perfect opportunity to use it.

“Still, this defensive mechanism… I feel like I’ve seen it somewhere before…”

Though subtle once converted to energy, something about it caught the attention of Il-hyeon, who could sense the flow of Ether.

The unprecedentedly powerful output and the way it defended against the attack were similar to the Defensive Coat worn by the Woman in the White Mask.

Just as the thought crossed his mind,

BOOM!

Leaving him no time for other thoughts, another bolt of lightning struck down.

‘It can use that thing consecutively?!’

Il-hyeon reflexively dodged the bolt.

The attack’s range and power were astounding, but now that he knew its ability, he wouldn’t be caught by the same trick again.

Upon landing, Il-hyeon immediately touched the ground. Countless insects materialized and swarmed upward.

Their small bodies and immense numbers formed a cloud like hazy dust as they scattered across the sky.

Asu and Marka sliced through any insects that came near, but the swarm’s true destination was above them.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

A chain reaction of explosions erupted above the heads of the winged creatures.

They were smaller than the explosive insects he usually summoned, so their power was reduced, but that didn’t matter. He had focused on numbers and the shockwave from the pressure, not killing power.

The intense pressure from the explosions blasted them downward. The seemingly endless chain reaction only ceased once their feet hit the ground.

“You won’t be flying anymore.”

Rumble!

As Il-hyeon spoke with a grin, the ground began to tremble violently.

The ground cracked open, and a massive torrent of water erupted from below.

The water, drawn up from a subterranean vein, first crashed over Asu and Marka, then swept away everything in the vicinity.

It wasn’t just the volume; his special power was infused within it, crushing the two monsters under immense pressure.

They scrambled to escape the water, but their black wings were useless for flight in these conditions.

Meanwhile, Il-hyeon walked through the torrent as if it were nothing and stood before them.

“Krrk…!”

“Kieeeek!”

Facing Il-hyeon, Asu and Marka radiated killing intent, their eyes filled with hatred.

It was a dreadful killing intent that would have overwhelmed most Awakened, but to Il-hyeon, it was nothing more than their final, desperate struggle.

The swirling water had already been shaped into a massive dome by his transformation ability. Il-hyeon charged forward, ready to face them both at once on the stage he himself had set.

Clang!

Two blades struck out erratically, dozens of times in a mere instant, and Il-hyeon parried every blow.

The monsters could no longer use their abilities.

They knew that unleashing lightning of that magnitude in the water would engulf them as well, and there was nothing nearby for their psychokinesis to manipulate.

The only thing around them was the massive torrent of water under Il-hyeon’s control.

Crack! Shlick!

After hundreds of blows were exchanged, Il-hyeon’s eyes flashed. Asu’s head was the first to go.

Once one of them fell, the other didn’t last much longer.

Thwump!

Il-hyeon’s sword was embedded in its forehead.

Marka’s blue eyes slowly closed as it sank to its knees.

And the moment both monsters were felled, the water that had surrounded them sank into the ground and dispersed.

“Hoo…”

Standing among the corpses of the fallen beasts, Il-hyeon slowly caught his breath.

Without any support, he had single-handedly slain two A-Rank named monsters.

He wasn’t sure when the turning point had been, but he could feel that he had become noticeably stronger.

He had taken a risk by using two A-Rank cores, but that alone wasn’t enough to overwhelm both of these creatures at once.

“The Predation ability… is this how I’m supposed to use it?”

Il-hyeon muttered, looking down at his hands.

During the fight, he had fallen into the same state he’d experienced when facing Oh Ji-seok, Aegis’s E-Team Leader.

This sensation, like walking a tightrope between reason and instinct, was slowly becoming familiar.

On top of that, an instinctive contempt for the monsters that relentlessly attacked innocent people, mixed with a strange sense of exhilaration from the battle itself, creating a complex, peculiar feeling.

It had subsided now that the fight was over, but it was a strange sensation, one he had never felt before.

‘Wait.’

Feeling a strange energy, Il-hyeon paused.

He looked down at the cores in his hands.

The two cores, emitting a white light, gave off a strange energy unlike that of a normal core. And it wasn’t the first time he’d felt it.

“This is… the third time, isn’t it?”

A smile spread across Il-hyeon’s lips.

An enormous, completely unexpected prize had fallen into his hands.