Chapter 184 – The Authority of Predation (Part Three)

Seol Ah-yeong, her face pale, took a step back, then another.

Then, she began to run with all her might.

The upper-torso giant, dragging its massive body, was approaching her, laying waste to the entire city with mere casual movements.

Despite Seol Ah-yeong retreating at full speed, the distance between them hardly widened, its size seemingly defying perspective.

From a distance, its movements appeared sluggish, but in reality, they were incredibly fast.

“Graaaaaaaah!”

The giant’s roar echoed thunderously throughout the city.

Black liquid dripped from the giant’s torso as it moved, splattering everywhere.

The unidentified liquid melted everything it touched, erupting into flames and starting fires.

A monster whose very existence was a cataclysm.

“Dammit! What the hell is that thing?!”

Seol Ah-yeong glanced back while running and cursed violently.

It was the first time the prideful woman had ever fled from a monster.

But she had no choice.

Her senses, honed by countless battles, and the aura emanating from the giant screamed at her not to engage it.

Mentally assessing its rank—S or A—was pointless.

This wasn’t a simple matter of a monster’s rank.

She would bet her entire fortune that the giant before her was on a completely different level from any monster that had appeared before.

“Hey! What the hell is that thing?”

“- Th-that… We need a little more time!”

She could hear the flustered man on the other end of the communicator shuffling through data.

No Gate signal had been detected in the vicinity, and neither the monster’s information nor its rank could be properly identified.

Even if they missed a newly formed Gate, the observation team had a separate system for measuring monsters, but they couldn’t glean any information from the giant’s appearance and wavelength alone.

If they couldn’t even determine something as simple as its rank, there was no hope for anything else.

“Useless bastards, always failing when I need them!”

Spitting the words venomously, Seol Ah-yeong ripped out her communicator and threw it away.

It was obvious they wouldn’t find any useful information until this whole mess was over.

While running at full tilt, she suddenly sheathed her sword at her hip and turned around.

*Screeeech!*

Her feet scraped against the ground, and Seol Ah-yeong lifted her head to look up.

The sight of the giant dragging its colossal body filled her vision.

It was a sight that would make even her, a veteran of countless monster battles, despair.

But she wouldn’t give up.

She extended both arms and drew upon all her strength.

She manifested her gravity manipulation ability, and a massive hole opened right in front of the giant’s head.

*Vwoooom!*

The hole torn in space generated a powerful gravitational pull, sucking in everything around it.

Sucking in its entire massive body would be impossible, but its head, perched atop its upper torso, was a different story.

The giant’s head, dripping with black slime, began to distort as it was sucked into the hole.

Despite its immense power, resistance was futile against a force akin to a miniature black hole.

Even though its head was small relative to its body, it was still enormous, and it took some time, but the massive, reality-distorting hole eventually devoured the entire thing.

*Fwoosh!*

The rift vanished, its job done, and Seol Ah-yeong broke out in a cold sweat.

She had used a significant amount of power, and for a moment, her body felt drained.

The giant, however, which had just lost its entire head, was completely unfazed.

*Ruuuumble!*

The upper-torso giant swung its massive arm.

An enormous area was swept clean, the terrifying force gouging out the earth and unleashing a shockwave.

It acted as if losing its head was of no consequence.

Seol Ah-yeong barely managed to escape the blast radius using her gravity manipulation, but she couldn’t hide her astonishment at the sight.

Secondary damage from the shockwave and tremors, along with the giant’s black slime splattering everywhere, destroyed and burned parts of the city.

Just then, the giant extended its left arm, and a colossal fist hurtled toward Seol Ah-yeong.

It was aimed precisely at her, moving with a speed that defied its size.

Seol Ah-yeong chose to meet it head-on.

*Vwoooom!*

Once again, a hole appeared before her, directly in the path of the incoming fist.

And again, the giant’s fist began to distort and get sucked in.

An attack with such a large, telegraphed motion was useless against Seol Ah-yeong, who was prepared to counter it.

The creature’s fist was being relentlessly pulled into the void.

But the giant, having already lost its reason, pushed its trapped fist forward even harder while simultaneously swinging its remaining right arm.

For Seol Ah-yeong, who was focusing all her power in one spot, this could be a fatal blow.

“You think I didn’t see that coming?!”

Seol Ah-yeong, gritting her teeth, yanked her outstretched arms back and shouted.

As she moved, the position of the hole that was consuming the giant’s fist was also adjusted.

The rift zipped between the giant’s outstretched arms, and its right arm was also caught, beginning to be pulled in.

*Craaaack!*

The giant’s two fists, large enough to more than fill the hole, were being ground to pieces within it.

But their sheer volume meant it would take a long time to consume them completely, and there was something Seol Ah-yeong hadn’t anticipated.

*Rumble-rumble-rumble!*

The giant’s upper torso, which remained even without its two arms.

Its entire body tilted precariously.

The black mass blotted out the sky, casting a pitch-black shadow over her.

“Dammit.”

Seol Ah-yeong muttered under her breath.

Even a rift created with all her strength couldn’t withstand the giant’s entire body.

But it was far too late to retract her ability and dodge.

Just as the word ‘surrender’ flickered in her mind.

*Swoosh!*

An Awakened in a black coat burst onto the scene before her.

As she stared, bewildered, at the back of the unknown woman who had leaped into the death zone just before being crushed by the monster’s body, a startlingly cold aura settled over the area.

*Fshhhhhhh…*

Seo Jeong-hwa’s hair turned white, and the surroundings were instantly covered in frost.

The ground, the buildings, and even the massive giant’s arms and entire torso, which had been about to crush them, froze solid and stopped.

The only ones unaffected were Seo Jeong-hwa and Seol Ah-yeong, standing in the heart of the frost.

“You… You’re…”

Seol Ah-yeong’s brow furrowed as she recognized Seo Jeong-hwa’s face.

One of the members of ‘Beta,’ the private team created by Kang Il-hyeon before he disappeared without a word.

She had read a report on her, a mysterious top-tier rookie who had suddenly grown into an A-Rank Awakened.

“First, let’s get out of here.”

*Fwoosh!*

As soon as she had frozen the giant, Seo Jeong-hwa grabbed Seol Ah-yeong and leaped sideways with all her strength.

Even her extreme cold wasn’t enough to stop the giant’s movements forever.

*Crack-crack-crack!*

As the two quickly moved out of range, the ice encasing the giant shattered.

The giant, which had been about to topple over, instantly regained its balance and swung its right arm at Seol Ah-yeong and Seo Jeong-hwa, who had put some distance between them.

The massive fist came sweeping in low, smashing through obstructing buildings with incredible speed and power, closing in on them in an instant.

But before the fist could reach them.

“Uraaaaaaagh!”

Lee Dong-won, who had been waiting on a nearby rooftop, let out a roar and threw a punch of his own.

*KABOOOOM!*

The colossal fist of the giant versus the fist of Lee Dong-won, who looked like a dwarf in comparison.

But it was the giant’s fist, not Lee Dong-won’s, that shattered.

His ability, Pulverize.

An SS-Rank ability had been unleashed.

*Crack-crack-crack-crack!*

Cracks suddenly spread across its fist and arm, which then crumbled into dust like sand, causing the giant to flinch and step back involuntarily.

Lee Dong-won, on the other hand, was completely unharmed, having pulverized even the monster’s slime that had made contact with his fist.

“Glad we made it just in time.”

Lee Dong-won said, glancing back.

Just then, Seo Jeong-hwa and Seol Ah-yeong leaped up from below and landed beside him.

“How did you know to come here…?”

“How could we not, with a commotion this big? Besides, this isn’t the only place where a monster like that has suddenly appeared.”

Lee Dong-won replied to Seol Ah-yeong’s question with a shrug.

They too had been tied up by a surprise Gate that had appeared moments before, and were only able to move after the guild members’ brainwashing was broken.

But the news from headquarters over the communicator was even more shocking than the situation with Eclipse.

Without any sign or trace of a Gate opening, monsters of an unbelievable scale had suddenly appeared all over the world.

They had rushed to this location since it was the closest, but they’d heard that fourteen such monsters had appeared, making the situation impossible to contain.

“Where in the world did these monsters come from?”

“W-wait!”

The giant writhed as if in agony. Watching it, Seol Ah-yeong suddenly sensed something was wrong.

But Seo Jeong-hwa and Lee Dong-won, far less experienced than her, didn’t notice anything, and Seol Ah-yeong had no time to warn them.

The writhing giant suddenly lifted its upper torso and slammed it into the ground as if it were diving into the bare earth.

*KRA-KOOOOOM!*

The giant’s body instantly disintegrated, turning into the same slime that had been dripping from it, and flooded out in all directions, engulfing the entire city.

Faced with this unbelievable sight, even the three A-Rank Awakened were helpless, and they were swept away into the monster’s body.

***

“Keuk, cough!”

In the middle of the ruins, which had become a sea of fire and molten debris.

Someone let out a series of harsh coughs.

It was clearly a man’s voice, but it wasn’t Lee Dong-won, the only man in their group.

The three Awakened who had been fighting the giant were swept away by the black flood, barely surviving thanks to their Defensive Coats.

All of them lay unconscious on the ground.

“Damn it! Damn it…!”

The man, having finally stopped his violent coughing, slowly pushed himself up from the ground.

A man with jet-black hair and scars all over his body.

Exuding a strange, alien aura, he stared ahead with eyes burning with rage.

His vision was filled with nothing but the thoroughly destroyed city.

But that still wasn’t enough.

“That bitch! How dare she do this to me… I’ll tear her limb from limb and kill—!”

The man slammed his fist on the ground, spewing uncontrollable rage.

But suddenly, a chilling sensation washed over him, and his words caught in his throat.

The man’s pupils trembled for a moment before he slowly turned his head to look behind him.

There, standing before him, was Baek Il-ho in his white coat.

“Who are you going to kill, and how?”