Chapter 357

Director Choi’s sword sliced through the air, passing right above my head. I leaned backward to avoid the blade, then gathered the rocks and dirt scattered across the floor and hurled them straight at Director Choi’s face.

“Argh!”

He shook his head hard to fling off the dust, then thrust his sword toward where I was standing.

‘Fuck.’

I pulled my body backward to dodge the blade. Because the ground was unstable, my feet slipped out from under me and I crashed into the wall. As a bonus, I rolled once across the ground with a loud clatter.

“Ah, fuck....”

Maybe because I’d slammed into the wall so cleanly, a dull ache spread through my body. As I slowly got back to my feet, Director Choi was glaring at me.

‘He’s fucking worked up.’

Our eyes met for a moment, and then he charged straight at me.

“Aaaaaagh!”

I couldn’t believe there was actually someone who shouted a battle cry in real life when we weren’t doing taekwondo or hapkido. Thinking it was kind of fascinating, I twisted aside to dodge and drove the dagger into his back.

Once again, it only grazed him, but because of the Skill, the wound opened up much deeper. I looked back and forth between the dagger and the wound, then said admiringly,

“That’s a nice Skill you’re using.”

“.......”

“Ah, the knife too.”

At my words, he flinched and whipped around to face me. I grabbed Director Choi’s face with one hand and shoved hard. I expected him to go sprawling, but maybe because he had some real weight to him, all I managed was to push him back a few steps.

At that moment, his long sword grazed cleanly across my side.

Along with the sound of flesh being cut, a hot pain spread around my waist. Gritting my teeth, I seized his wrist tightly and drove the dagger down hard.

“Aagh!”

Once I dug into the muscle, he naturally lost his grip on the long sword. Without looking back, I stepped on the hilt and kicked it behind me.

RRRUMBLE, CRASH!

‘What?’

I had been waiting for the sound of the sword hitting the wall, but what came from behind me sounded more like thunder. I instinctively turned my head, and behind me, rocks were collapsing with a roar as the floor suddenly gave way.

“.......”

“.......”

It looked like we had fought a little too violently on fragile ground.

‘We’re fucked, aren’t we?’

At that moment, the bastard with the dagger still stuck in him grabbed my wrist and forcibly twisted the blade free.

“Aaaaaagh!”

Apparently in pain, he gasped and wheezed, clamped down hard on my wrist so I couldn’t dodge, then punched me straight across the side of the face.

THWACK!

My head snapped to the side on reflex. Pain crashed through me all at once from my head down to my neck. The inside of my nose stung, so it seemed like I’d started bleeding.

THUD!

After getting hit in the same spot once more, dizziness started washing over me. When Director Choi raised his fist to hit me again, I stomped on his foot, and he bent at the waist with a sharp cry.

RRRUMBLE—

At that moment, an ominous sound came from behind us.

“......!”

I tried to shove him forward and get out of there, but I was already one step too late.

“Ugh!”

“Ghk....”

With the roar of rocks pouring down, my body suddenly dropped. The instant I felt the ground collapse beneath my feet, I reflexively grabbed Director Choi’s wrist.

“Uuugh!”

When I tightly seized the wrist I had already torn open with the dagger, the pain must have been unbearable, because he practically screamed as he clung to the floor.

‘Fuck.’

I looked down into the space below, which was so dark it looked completely empty.

“Wow....”

The bastard, who had reflexively grabbed my hand to keep from falling, seemed to finally understand the situation and said to me between ragged breaths,

“The ground collapsed?”

“Then what, do you think I suddenly decided to go bungee jumping?”

“Fuck! Does it look like this part is going to collapse too?”

“How the hell would I know?”

He sucked in several harsh breaths, then asked,

“Did the Chairman really order you to kill me?”

“Yeah! I’m an industrial spy going back and forth between Haeseong and the Hunter Association!”

“I knew it! The Chairman’s been acting weird lately. He even moved the Chairman’s office!”

Well, either way, he really had changed locations because of me, so that wasn’t exactly wrong. I quickly nodded and said,

“Yeah, exactly!”

“Then what conditions did you agree to this for?”

“I got paid, fuck!”

“You work for Haeseong, what money could you possibly need? And you, aren’t you supposed to have something going on with the Haeseong Guild Master? You betrayed them?”

What the fuck was this bastard talking about? He twisted my hand in his grip and asked again.

“How old are you?!”

“Pick up a rock and throw it, fuck!”

“Why?!”

“So I can measure the height, you fucker!”

At that, he picked up a piece of rock nearby and threw it downward.

“You fucking dumbass, just drop it. If you throw it with force, fuck! How am I supposed to measure the height?”

When I shouted at him, he finally picked up another rock and dropped it relatively gently.

‘Three seconds... four?’

Even roughly calculated, it had to [N O V E L I G H T] be about 50 meters deep. At that moment, the bastard suddenly hesitated, then muttered to himself.

“But... why am I keeping you alive?”

“......!”

The unlucky fucker had apparently come to his senses.

I reflexively looked up, and he gave me a nasty smile before relaxing his grip. I tightly grabbed onto the arm I was already sliding down, spun the dagger once in my hand to readjust my grip, and immediately drove it down.

“Gaaagh!”

Ignoring his scream, I forced the blade through muscle and even into bone, then tightened my grip around the hilt.

“Agh, agh!”

“Hoo....”

The risk of falling had decreased, but climbing back up still wasn’t going to be easy. I casually ignored the screams pouring down from above me and searched for somewhere I could plant my foot and kick off.

The wall dropped almost straight down, so there weren’t many places to step, but it looked like I could kick against it and use the recoil to climb while hanging onto him.

Blood kept streaming from his arm and started reducing the friction.

‘Fucking bastard, bleeding all over the place and making himself useless.’

I clicked my tongue inwardly, tightened my grip on him, and kicked hard against the wall.

“Ugh! Don’t, don’t move!”

“Hold on, asshole.”

THUD, I kicked the wall again, and this time I definitely got some recoil. I put my weight into it, used the wall as a foothold one last time, sprang upward, and climbed back up while practically dragging him down with me.

My back struck the ground with a hard thump, and a sharp pain tingled through my rib cage.

“......!”

I inhaled as though trying to expand my lungs again and broke into a coughing fit. After curling up and coughing for a while, I finally raised my head.

Director Choi, who had looked ready to rush over and stab me the second I got up, was nowhere to be seen.

‘Where the fuck did this bastard go?’

It wasn’t like he could’ve suddenly evaporated.

“Ghhk!”

At that moment, I heard him groaning near the edge of the cliff. I crawled across the ground toward the sound and saw two hands barely clinging to the edge.

“Save me!”

Apparently the hand I had stabbed couldn’t put any strength into its grip, because he kept slipping over and over. When I poked my head over the edge and looked at him struggling desperately below, he hurriedly said to me,

“Y-you... I’ll pay you more!”

“.......”

“More than the Chairman! Just save me first! That bastard isn’t actually a decent person. Let’s reform the Hunter Association together!”

“.......”

Hm. There was an easy route where I could just kill everyone... so why would I?

“You bastard! You said you liked money!”

“Well.... I don’t like it that much.”

“Don’t tell me you have some grudge against me....”

Of course not.

I kindly explained it to him.

“You were going to rack up a shitload of karma anyway, so I read the room and cut things off at an appropriate point for you.”

“What...?”

“It means if you die now, you’ll go to heaven, but if you die later, you’ll go to hell.”

No, wait. He had already done quite a few bad things so far, so maybe heaven was already out of the question? I wiped the dust off my face with my arm and continued.

“Deleting Hunters’ information at the Hunter Association, driving Hunter Sung Uijae out, taking money under the pretext of all kinds of support funds and pocketing it personally, using low-rank Hunters like disposable supplies whenever necessary, laundering items from inside Gates for personal use....”

“.......”

“You’ve already done a lot of fucked-up shit. If I save you now, are you suddenly going to become a good person?”

“If you kill me now... you’ll become a murderer!”

Hm? What was he talking about?

“No. This is a Dungeon, and you’re going to die in an accident, so why would that make me a murderer? Nobody knows.”

“You....”

“And technically speaking, it is an accidental death. Because you’re going to die from falling off here.”

“No!”

By the way, something suddenly occurred to me. It wasn’t something I intended to ask Director Choi. It was just personal curiosity.

Would Kwon Taehan get angry simply because I had ‘removed in advance’ the bastard who was going to use Hunters like disposable supplies throughout countless Dungeons in the future, repeat all the evil shit he had already done, and drive Kwon Taehan into a corner?

‘Why did he try so hard to change the Hunter Association?’

In the end, it would actually be easier to remove people like this in advance. Why deliberately keep variables alive while choosing the harder path? It probably wasn’t because he found it interesting, so it had to be some flimsy sense of morality. But did he really not care if that morality determined whether he survived or failed?

The reason Kwon Taehan had died so many times wasn’t just because of me. It was also because he was the kind of bastard who couldn’t do something like this.

Either way, regardless of what he wanted, I planned to give him another ‘gift’ this time too. After all, gifts weren’t decided by the person receiving them. They were decided by the person giving them.

I had already made up my mind to see everything through to the end in this life, so no matter what happened, I had to finish it.

I wasn’t going to make him repeat 999 boring lives.

That too had nothing to do with whether Kwon Taehan wanted it or not.

I was going to leave Kwon Taehan with only a single life....

“S-save me...!”

And this bastard’s life was going to end here.

I picked up a rock and brought it down directly on Director Choi’s fingers.

THWACK!

“No!”

With a vicious sound like bones being crushed, his hand slid straight off the edge. There was nothing on the cliff he could grab onto. I caught a brief glimpse of something like despair in Director Choi’s eyes at the very end, but I couldn’t be certain of that either.

THUUUD—!

‘Four seconds.’

About 63 meters, then. I pulled a light-emitting item out of my garter and shone it down the cliff.

“Hm....”

I stared quietly at the remains below that I had no particular reason to climb down and inspect, then put the item away and connected communications to Do Yehyun.

“How’s the situation? Is it over?”

I checked Do Yehyun’s location on the tracker and started walking. A moment later, Do Yehyun answered in a whisper.

-It’s not over yet.

“Really? Is everything okay?”

-It’s... unclear.

What did he mean, unclear?

“What do you mean?”

-The Dungeon Boss is almost dead.

“Right, then it’s basically over.”

-But one person was poisoned by the minerals....

“.......”

-I think they’re going to die.

Damn. I hadn’t planned on creating two casualties.

I answered calmly.

“Got it. I’m coming over.”