Chapter 99

Now that I had persuaded Ahn Yoonseung, there was no reason to hesitate any longer.

‘Now that that’s settled, I should get started immediately.’

I took out my phone and called the person at the top of my contact list.

There was something I needed to ask Seonwoo Yeon.

***

Today was November 10—the second day of winter.

While everyone else was already making a fuss over the first icy winds of the season, I had no time to appreciate the change in weather.

The cold was the least of my concerns.

A festival of blood was approaching.

“Hello? Seonwoo Yeon-ssi, are you free to talk right now?”

It had been approximately three months since the boss mysteriously disappeared. At this point, an incident could occur at any moment.

I decided to put the tracking method I had devised into action immediately.

This time, I would approach the problem from a more logical angle.

“Seonwoo Yeon-ssi, can association employees access gate-auction records?”

—Of course. Gate transactions are public information, so you can look them up yourself, Kiryeo-ssi.

“Is that so? Unfortunately, I’m outside at the moment. Could you search them for me?”

—Right now?

“Yes. Right now.”

Come to think of it, the Rakshasa Temple must have chosen the Imoogi’s hiding place with great care.

No matter how audacious they were, they would never leave something as rare as a growing boss in an arbitrary location.

However, even after identifying a suitable gate, taking possession of it freely might have proved difficult because of its location.

In that case, they might have used the most reliable method available to secure permanent control over a specific gate.

‘An official transfer of ownership through the association.’

Then what conditions would their chosen gate have needed to meet?

I identified four initial criteria.

◆ Transactions completed before August

First, since the Imoogi disappeared during the incident in August, they must have prepared its hiding place before then.

◆ Bids submitted by individuals

All corporate transactions could be excluded.

There would be no advantage in purchasing a gate intended for a terrorist attack under the name of a business.

◆ An environment suited to the water attribute

Considering the type of monster they intended to raise, this condition was indispensable.

◆ Enough space to conceal the boss

That one required no explanation.

“Hmm.”

In any case, I attempted to reconstruct the Rakshasa Temple’s reasoning and narrow down the gates they might have purchased.

—There are thirteen matching results.

A total of thirteen gates satisfied all four conditions.

However, after excluding those whose entrances were still open...

—The results have been narrowed down considerably. Five gates remain.

“...”

I reduced the list once more.

If I were Su Yehwi...

If I believed dungeon shocks were divine punishment, and that humanity deserved to atone for its sins by being slaughtered by monsters...

Then I might have considered one final condition when choosing a cradle for the Imoogi.

◆ A densely populated area

The most heavily populated city in the country was Seoul.

[1 matching result]

Among all the gates suitable for raising an Imoogi, only one was located in Seoul.

[Damp Cave]

[Grade: E]

[Description: A Poison Frog capable of producing lethal venom appears as the boss.]

Of course, there was still a strong possibility that my reasoning had been flawed from the beginning. I could not say with certainty that the Imoogi was hidden there...

“I’ll hang up for now.”

But there was no point in agonising over it.

I would simply check for myself.

After ending the call with Seonwoo Yeon, I headed straight for the location.

***

The Rakshasa Temple probably believed that no one understood gates better than they did.

That assumption was dangerous.

An alien had already deciphered their rules.

‘If any Earthlings remain inside a dungeon, the dungeon attempts to send them out.’

The creators of the gates apparently had no desire to leave Hunters stranded indefinitely in another world.

That was why an exit always appeared after the boss was killed—a considerate mechanism urging the surviving Hunters to return to Earth, complete with a bright light to guide them home.

“Hmm.”

However, the exit created upon the boss’s death possessed characteristics that distinguished it from an ordinary passage.

It could not be destroyed.

No matter what happened, it was designed to remain open until every survivor inside the dungeon had returned.

‘How thoughtful of them.’

The boss must still be alive inside the cult’s sealed gate.

There was no other possibility.

If the boss died, the gate’s special properties would immediately create an indestructible opening within the cult’s secret space—a passage leading directly back to Earth.

Once that happened, the police would be able to pursue them regardless of what precautions they had taken.

“According to the coordinates Seonwoo Yeon gave me, it should be somewhere around here...”

Now that the deduction was complete, it was time to verify it.

“Ah! Here it is.”

I stood in an alleyway in Seoul.

This was where the gate known as [Damp Cave] had originally appeared.

Now, however, there was no luminous blue entrance in sight. All that remained was a stretch of dull asphalt.

According to the official report, the dungeon had been cleared in September.

‘Hmm.’

Of course, I had no way of knowing whether the owner’s report was true.

Therefore, I had decided to determine personally whether the Rakshasa Temple had tampered with the Damp Cave.

More precisely, I would test my theory using the gate characteristic I had just considered.

‘The boss here... Was it an E-Class monster called the Poison Frog?’

Once again, the boss monster was the most important element in escaping a dungeon.

Every boss was linked to a specific set of coordinates on Earth, allowing an exit to be formed at any time.

Even if the entrance was destroyed and the dungeon became spatially isolated, that connection to the designated coordinates was never severed.

‘Put another way, as long as the boss remains alive, traces of its connection to those coordinates must remain.’

And judging from everything I had observed so far, dungeon exits generally appeared near the location where the original gate had manifested...

It was an inversion of the usual approach.

I would estimate where the exit from [Damp Cave] ought to appear, then attempt to detect the traces of the Poison Frog’s magic that remained linked to those coordinates.

‘...’

Well, that was the theory, at least.

‘Would Seonwoo Yeon even understand this if I tried to explain it to her?’

I glanced aside, then quickly abandoned the thought.

There was no reason to explain the entire process to an Earthling anyway.

To be honest, this tracking method had an extraordinarily low probability of success.

It was akin to searching for a single drop of ink dispersed throughout an entire lake.

‘The traces are far too faint...’

I would have to detect remnants of magic so subtle that Earth’s current technology could not even conceive of them.

Nevertheless, I decided to try this method first.

Tap.

Failure was the mother of success...

Though, naturally, that was not my actual reasoning.

The ability to sense mana was an innate talent of the soul.

And, as always, mine was the soul most beloved by the mana of this world.

‘There’s no possibility that I’ll fail at something like this.’

A natural blessing was more than enough to make a person arrogant.

***

Twenty-four hours later.

I sat in a consultation room at the Hunter Association, looking thoroughly miserable as I held a blood-soaked tissue beneath my nose.

“Hunter Kim Kiryeo.”

“Yes.”

“Um... Are you injured?”

“No.”

To explain how I had ended up in this condition, I would have to go back one day.

I had remained awake for nearly twenty-four consecutive hours in order to carry out my plan successfully.

“I merely got a nosebleed from overwork.”

First, let me state the conclusion.

After completing my search, I discovered that the boss of [Damp Cave]—the Poison Frog—was still alive.

The gate was indeed a secret cradle controlled by the Rakshasa Temple.

“O-Overwork?”

However, revealing such an advanced tracking technique to the Earthlings would expose far too much about my abilities.

For the moment, I was reporting my findings to the police and the association using only the evidence I had gathered, claiming that the Damp Cave presented an exceptionally high risk.

“Wow, that’s honestly rather shocking. So the association is basically saying they’re not going to do anything?”

“Well, it’s less that they won’t do anything and more that there isn’t much they can do...”

“Ha! After reporting it to both the police and the association, all they can do is install a single surveillance camera at the location?”

Well, there was the result.

Apparently, the people in authority would only come to their senses after an Imoogi had bitten them.

No matter how much new information I provided, nothing changed.

‘Seriously?’

We knew for a fact that those cultists were terrorists.

It was also true that the bosses had disappeared.

So why would no one believe me when I said the Imoogi was going to appear?

After I had handed them this much information, shouldn’t they have arrested every member of the Rakshasa Temple, from its leaders all the way down?

Instead, these people continued insisting that because nothing had happened yet, there was nothing they could do.

“Kiryeo-ssi.”

Forget it.

I should never have placed my trust in inferior mammals.

I clicked my tongue and rose from my seat.

At the same time, I opened an airline website on my phone.

I intended to book a flight to Jeju Island immediately.

‘Let’s see. Which flight leaves the soonest...?’

In an instant, I decided that I would spend the winter on an island.

But then—

A thunderous explosion erupted somewhere in the distance.

“Hmm?”

It sounded as though an entire factory had just blown apart.

Seonwoo Yeon and I raised our heads at the same time.

“That came from outside, didn’t it?”

“Yes.”

When I stepped into the corridor to investigate, I found the other people there looking around with startled expressions.

“What was that?”

“Did something happen?”

“Could it be a dungeon break?”

“Whoa! There’s smoke over there!”

At last, a man pointed toward the window.

Everyone nearby turned their heads in unison.

The moment I looked in the direction he indicated, a chill ran down my spine.

That place...

It was exactly where I had spent the entire previous day.

“This...”

“Could it be...?”

Seonwoo Yeon must have reached the same conclusion at that moment.

Yes.

We had identified where the dungeon break would occur.

But we had still failed to discover the most important piece of information.

‘Damn it!’

I rushed to the corridor window.

“Gasp!”

Far in the distance, an impossible sight was unfolding against the side of a skyscraper.

An enormous, black, serpentine creature was coiling itself around a seventy-storey building, its body rising steadily toward the sky.

‘Aah!’

It was incomprehensible.

An Imoogi was ordinarily an agile A-Class boss measuring approximately twelve metres in length.

But that creature was not merely metres long.

It appeared to be almost a kilometre in length.

“Hey! Turn on the analyser!”

“What kind of monster gets that huge?”

For a moment, I wondered whether the creature was truly an Imoogi at all.

Apparently, PIXY’s analysis equipment had reached a similar conclusion.

In the end, Earth’s machinery displayed the creature like this:

[???]

[Grade: ?]

[Description: No registered information available.]

The people gathered in the corridor began to recoil from the unidentified being.

The unknown had always inspired fear in intelligent creatures.

But this was precisely where the analyser’s concealed function came into play.

If uncertainty was what inspired terror, then simply assigning a classification to an unknown entity could alleviate at least some of that fear.

The International Hunter Federation, which oversaw the information uploaded by analysers, had created a system for situations in which multiple previously unidentified monsters of similar appearance emerged at the same time.

In other words, the system assigned provisional names to newly discovered monsters.

For rapid classification, those names were generated by randomly combining words...

[In□□□□□□]

Whirrr.

One character at a time, the monster’s designation began to appear.

[Inevitable □□□□□□]

The remaining spaces were soon replaced by specific words, granting the creature its name.

[Inevitable Malice]

Yes.

That was the new name given to the Black Disaster.

[Inevitable Malice]

[Grade: S]

[Description: (*Real-time update) Mana readings indicate that the estimated grade exceeds the A-Class range.]

“Aaah!”

“What is that thing?!”

Korea’s first S-Class dungeon break had begun.