Chapter 29

Chapter 29. God Hunter

The Heavenly Demon Divine Art.

Literally, the martial arts of the Heavenly Demon.

The path of supremacy walked by the absolute being known as the Devil of Heaven.

An extreme training method that pushes the body to its limits and detonates the inner power buried deep within the core.

An ordinary human would have to stare at a wall and train for decades just to barely cross the threshold.

And without talent, they'd more likely fall into qi deviation and end up crippled.

But I was different.

I was Rag.

A being who had poured a hundred million Soul Points into maxing every Talent to its ceiling during character creation.

That overwhelming aptitude carried over in full to the physical body of my Avatar, Kim Jeong-seok.

Physical limitations?

Lack of talent?

Those things didn't apply to me.

The problem was my approach.

I was a mage to the bone.

Staff in hand, maintaining distance, pouring out firepower—that was how I fought.

For a mage, the sword was taboo.

Close combat was the last resort, the worst-case scenario that had to be avoided at all costs.

That was the orthodoxy I had believed in my entire life.

"Hoo."

I steadied my breathing.

The Holy Sword Abriel trembled faintly in my right hand.

'I need to shatter this bias.'

I closed my eyes.

I pulled up a single memory from the past.

A comrade who had charged alongside me toward the Tower's highest floor.

Sword Emperor Aritolt.

—Magic? Swordsmanship? What a joke.
—Only the weak make those distinctions, Jeong-seok.

He had always scoffed.

With a single blade, he carved through space and bent time.

His sword had long since ceased to be a physical rod of metal.

It was a phenomenon. A miracle. It was magic.

—When you reach the extreme, the boundaries crumble.

At the time, I'd thought it was nonsense.

A swordsman lecturing on magic had seemed laughable.

But looking back, he wasn't wrong.

Compared to Aritolt, I was plainly the weaker one.

I had been trapped within the frame of 'mage,' while he had shattered that frame and transcended it.

'Yeah, you were right.'

I conceded.

And I resolved.

To tear down that boundary myself.

To become an unprecedented monster—a mage and a warrior at once.

Flash.

I opened my eyes.

The Heavenly Demon Armor and shoes resonated.

My vision was stained red.

A dark afterimage shimmered in the air.

The phantom of the Heavenly Demon.

It moved.

It took a step.

It swung a blade.

Simple.

But within that simplicity, a universe was contained.

A flawless trajectory, stripped of all excess.

I mimicked it.

I raised Abriel.

My stance was awkward.

Like a child who'd stolen his father's suit.

The sword was heavy, and my footwork tangled.

'Damn it.'

I cursed.

My head understood, but my body wouldn't follow.

A mage's habits were holding me back.

I kept trying to create distance, kept reaching for mana before the blade.

But I didn't stop.

I swung, and swung again, carving away at myself.

Suppressing the mage's instincts, awakening the warrior's senses.

The Heavenly Demon's afterimage never tired.

Neither could I.

One day passed.

My muscles screamed.

But I didn't stop.

Three days passed.

The trajectory began to come into focus, little by little.

The tip of the blade no longer wavered.

A rhythm emerged in my footwork.

The armor began to feel like a part of my own body.

And on the seventh day.

I stood in the training grounds of the golden city.

"......"

Silence.

Not even the sound of wind.

Before my eyes, the Heavenly Demon's afterimage still lingered.

It raised its blade.

A downward slash.

The most fundamental strike—and the most devastating.

I raised my blade as well.

I held my breath.

I converted mana into inner power.

With a mage's computational ability, I calculated the blade's trajectory; with a warrior's body, I executed it.

Two disparate forces merged into one.

'Now.'

I brought it down.

CRASH!

An explosion of sound.

A dark energy erupted from the blade's edge and cleaved the training ground floor.

The earth split open with a crack, and a fissure dozens of meters long tore through the ground.

Dust billowed like a storm.

"......Ha."

A ragged breath.

My hands tingled.

But a smile spread across my face.

I could see it.

The landscape beyond the boundary Aritolt had spoken of.

Enlightenment.

Magic and martial arts were not different things.

In the end, they were merely different approaches to wielding power.

I was a mage.

A mage who had broken the taboo and taken up the sword.

Ding!

[You have entered the threshold of the Heavenly Demon Divine Art.]

[Skill acquired: 'Heavenly Demon Swordsmanship (1-Star).']

[You have torn down the boundary between magic and martial arts.]

[Hidden Trait, 'The One Who Surpasses,' blooms!]

'A Hidden Trait!'

An intrinsic quality.

Also known as a Unique Attribute—an absolute talent.

And this one had been labeled 'Hidden,' meaning a concealed trait had bloomed.

A thrill ran through me.

Before the Regression, the Hidden Traits I'd managed to scrape together through all that desperate struggle had amounted to just four.

That was the sum total gathered from climbing to the Tower's farthest reaches.

And now, already?

Just from entering the threshold of the Heavenly Demon Divine Art?

I checked the detailed information with trembling eyes.

[Hidden Trait: The One Who Surpasses]

[Effect 1: All weapon and skill proficiency gain increased by 100%.]

[Effect 2: Class-based penalties are removed.]

[Effect 3: Maximum grade for all skills expanded from 10-Star to 12-Star.]

"......Ha."

I was floored.

Rendered speechless.

I doubted my eyes and looked again.

But the text didn't change.

It was broken.

No—it was the kind of thing you'd believe was a System Error.

'Class restriction removal.'

That alone was a jackpot.

Skills that required proficiency lived and died by growth speed.

But depending on your class, there were walls that couldn't be crossed.

What happens when a mage picks up a sword?

Proficiency gain slows to a crawl.

What about a swordsman trying to learn magic?

Even sensing mana becomes an ordeal.

It was a kind of law.

But 'The One Who Surpasses' laughed in the face of that law.

I was a mage, but now I could learn the sword faster than any swordsman.

With a hundred percent proficiency increase stacked on top, my growth speed would be unrivaled.

But the true madness lay in the final line.

'12-Star.'

Limit Breach.

Normally, 10-Star was the ceiling for any skill.

10-Star was max level.

With each star rank, destructive power jumped exponentially.

Roughly a 1.5x efficiency increase per star.

If 1-Star was 1, then reaching 10-Star meant becoming approximately 58 times stronger—that was the accepted theory.

To break past that 58x wall?

You needed an item called a 'Star of Transcendence.'

A star that only dropped at astronomically low odds in the late game.

Using one of those barely let you push through to 13-Star.

Obtaining one was like plucking a star from the sky.

Naturally, it couldn't be bought with money either.

But this trait simply punched through that ceiling.

And not for a single specific skill.

It applied to 'all' skills universally.

'Insane.'

A laugh escaped on its own.

While everyone else hit the wall at 10 and despaired, I would be looking down from the realm of 12.

It wasn't just widening the gap.

It meant becoming something on an entirely different plane of existence.

A surge of fierce elation was coursing through me when—

Ding!

[Episode 3, 'The First Calamity,' begins.]

[Catastrophic entities are emerging across the globe.]

[Best of luck.]

......At last, it had begun.

The first Great Calamity.

In Episode 3, world-scale 'Disasters' emerged in waves.

Through them, monsters known as 'catastrophic entities' revealed themselves. Successfully hunting one yielded incredible rewards, but failure could mean the collapse of an entire nation.

Because the Disasters that descended upon the world lingered permanently and continued to grow.

Naturally, the vast majority of Avatars would join the fray.

'Because they drop runes.'

Runes.

Items that boosted additional abilities simply by possessing them.

Some even granted special abilities or Talents that couldn't be raised through normal means.

The 'El Rune,' which grants a momentary resistance to death, and the 'Tal Rune,' which grants protection from a sacred spirit, were prime examples.

And the rune I wanted was the latter.

'The Tal Rune. I absolutely need it to protect one side when I log out.'

Rag had Seria and the elves guarding him, but there was currently no reliable way to protect the physical body of Kim Jeong-seok.

With a Tal Rune, however, things changed.

The safety of both sides would increase.

Beyond that, the types of runes obtainable from hunting catastrophic entities were infinitely varied.

A major event that made even Avatars go wild.

But the ones engineering the Great Calamities were also them.

'A Great Calamity is a phenomenon born from numerous Disasters merging into one.'

I knew this.

A Great Calamity didn't refer to a single Disaster.

Countless Disasters had to be linked together to trigger one.

Which meant numerous Avatars would be using their Authorities.

And naturally, my right hand would react.

'Logout.'

Ding!

[Logged out.]

[Returning to reality.]

***

The sky above Seoul was torn apart.

RUMBLE, CRASH!

The atmosphere screamed.

Seoul, Gyeonggi, Gangwon, Chungcheong.

Localized Disasters erupted simultaneously across the entire Korean Peninsula.

An earthquake in Gangnam. A tsunami at Haeundae. A wildfire on Seoraksan.

Calamities of entirely different natures were converging on a single point, as though drawn by a magnet.

The destination: the heart of Seoul.

Five thousand meters above ground.

The earthquake's tremors shook the atmosphere.

The tsunami's moisture became black thunderclouds.

The wildfire's heat transformed into black lightning.

CRACK!

A bolt of black lightning struck the spire of Lotte Tower.

Glass rained down like a downpour.

People scattered like ants.

"KYAAAH!"

"The sky! The sky is falling!"

"Run! We're all going to die!"

Pandemonium.

Roads were paralyzed. Communications went dead.

The city that modern civilization had boasted of was reduced to a cauldron of primal terror in an instant.

But.

Within that hellscape, there were those who were smiling.

On building rooftops.

Atop collapsed bridges.

Or blending into the crowd, gazing skyward.

Their eyes glittered not with fear, but with greed.

'Finally.'

'It's here.'

The gods' Avatars.

They licked their lips.

GROOOOAN!

At the center of the black lightning, space split open.

A colossal eye stared down at Seoul.

A greedy eye.

A maw that seemed ready to swallow the entire world.

A catastrophic entity.

The Demonic Beast of Black Greed.

No ordinary Demonic Beast.

An artificial monster born only when dozens—hundreds—of lesser Disasters fused into one.

Something that could never occur in nature, an event monster designed solely for the Game.

"Heh heh heh......"

Choi Taemin, Avatar of a high-ranking fire god, clenched his fist.

Flames flickered across his entire body.

"I've been waiting for this."

The reason was singular.

Runes.

The spoils that dropped from slaying that monster.

Not mere items.

Sacred glyphs that fortified Divinity and broke through the limits of Authorities.

Coveted even by the gods themselves.

Under normal circumstances, they were unobtainable.

In Asgard, engineering large-scale Disasters artificially was nearly impossible.

The gods kept each other in check.

But this was Earth.

A game board where the rules were lax.

Avatars collaborated to trigger Disasters, merged them into a Great Calamity.

And then they hunted the result and hoarded the runes.

The perfect hunting ground.

The perfect farm.

"It's mine."

Avatars hidden throughout Seoul began to move.

They had no intention of even wearing the hero's mask.

The city was already in ruins.

All that mattered now was who pierced the Demonic Beast's heart first.

Seo Jisu, the Witch of Frost, raised her staff.

Lee Dohyung, the Berserker, drew his greatsword.

Dozens of Avatars were about to charge the beast in unison.

Ding!

A red message appeared before every Avatar across the globe.

[Grave Tidings.]

The Avatars stopped in their tracks.

Grave Tidings?

At this timing?

[The master of Tower Floor 18, the 'Lesser God of Plague,' has been slain.]

"......?"

The God of Plague?

A Lesser god of the Biological Lineage faction.

Dead?

But the shock didn't end there.

The messages didn't stop.

Ding!

Ding!

[The master of Tower Floor 15, the 'Lesser God of Drought,' has been slain.]

[The master of Tower Floor 12, the 'Lesser God of Collapse,' has been slain.]

Death notices, one after another.

Everyone could only reel in disbelief.

"What...... is this?"

"What the hell is happening?!"

......Because gods were being slaughtered simultaneously.