Chapter 208

Chae Junhyeok…?

Perched on the greatsword and looking down at the carnage below, Cha Yul's eyes narrowed sharp.

Julia, in the middle of tearing monsters' limbs apart without mercy, also caught sight of the blond man standing squarely in the middle of the hall — and her brow furrowed a fraction.

"Deputy Guild Master?"

But something about the still-standing Chae Junhyeok was off.

Empty eyes, drained of any life.

His mouth clamped shut, without a word, the man slowly extended a hand toward Julia.

[Explosion]

Boom! Kra-ka-krak—!

Julia kicked lightly off the floor and slipped clean out of the blast's path.

Through the billowing black smoke, her eyes cooled into a chill.

…Brainwashed? Or a knockoff wearing his skin?

Either way, this wasn't the place to sort truth from fake — the surroundings were too loud.

Monsters were bearing in from every side, teeth bared, an endless rush.

"Cleanup first, I suppose."

Julia muttered it dryly, turned her back on Chae Junhyeok, and moved on the horde with heavy, measured steps.

But—

Bang!

Bang, bang!

The man wearing Chae Junhyeok's face kept firing off explosions, harassing her from behind in nagging little bursts.

At last Julia clicked her tongue, short and clipped.

"Forgive the discourtesy."

The words came out of her mouth exquisitely polite, unfailingly courteous.

But the action that followed had none of the elegance of her tone. It was pure ruthlessness.

Shhhoom— WHUMP!

The iron rod she hurled tore through the air with a keening whistle, drove clean through the fabric of Chae Junhyeok's coat, and buried itself deep in the wall.

That wasn't the end.

The instant the rod was airborne, she flicked stone fragments up off the floor with the tip of her foot, and drove one heavy kick after another into them.

Thwack! Thwock! WHAM!

The stone fragments rained in like buckshot and nailed Chae Junhyeok's sleeves and trouser legs to the wall, pinning him perfectly.

"Nnngh!"

With his limbs bound, Chae Junhyeok twisted his body and thrashed hard.

But pinned there by that absurd, brute strength, he couldn't so much as twitch.

Watching the sight, Cha Yul shouted, urgent.

"Chae Junhyeok! Director!!!"

But Chae Junhyeok didn't so much as look his way.

Like an assassination machine that had locked onto Julia and nothing else, he only strained silently to drag his mana up again.

Something's definitely wrong.

The Director on any normal day was a man who, wherever he was and whatever he was doing, snapped his head around the instant the kids called his name.

But the Chae Junhyeok in front of him didn't have a speck of interest in Cha Yul.

What is this. What was done to him.

While Cha Yul's face twisted in thought, the battlefield around them was being cleared with overwhelming speed under sheer violence.

"They're weaker than at the start."

Drenched in a fine spray of blood, she flicked the droplets off with a blank face and muttered it.

Kra-ka-krak—!! Kra-thoom!!

Under Julia's merciless brute strength, the monsters burst apart without even managing a shriek.

The rate at which she was breaking them far outstripped the rate at which the dungeon spat them out.

The one-sided slaughter went on for a while.

"That's the last of them."

The bizarre chorus of shrieking that had filled the room a moment before cut off, just like that.

She'd wrung the life out of the very last monster.

Having wiped out every monster in the room in the space of moments, she sprang up in a light leap.

Then, with one hand, she plucked both the greatsword and Cha Yul from the wall and set them lightly down on the floor.

Cha Yul was still running hot, but thanks to the S-rank potion, he'd recovered enough to stand on his own without much trouble.

The two of them walked up in front of the still-thrashing Chae Junhyeok.

"Hmm… now only the Deputy Guild Master's left."

Julia folded her arms and looked down at him.

Chae Junhyeok's mouth was still clamped shut, and his eyes brimmed with murderous intent as he strained to detonate another explosion the instant he could.

"Looks like a fake to me."

"On what grounds?"

At Cha Yul's question, Julia jerked her chin at Chae Junhyeok's arm.

"Look at his right arm."

The black scar on Chae Junhyeok's right forearm — visible only to Awakened eyes.

But on this man's forearm, there was no trace of it at all.

"…Yeah. This definitely isn't the real Director."

"Then it's fine to finish him."

Julia raised her pure-white greatsword and began the downward stroke toward the fake's neck—

"!"

Whoosh—!

Cha Yul's body shot forward like a released arrow.

His head knew perfectly well it was a fake.

But at the split second the blade was coming down on the Director's face, his body reacted ahead of his reason.

Chhhinnnnng—!!!!

Cha Yul's gauntlet slammed head-on into Julia's greatsword.

"…!!"

Cha Yul clenched his teeth and pushed his ability to its limit, trying to absorb the greatsword's energy.

But his opponent was a second-awakened Awakened.

"Ghhk!"

BOOOOOM—!!!

Unable to handle the energy, Cha Yul's body was blown across the room like a cannonball and slammed into the solid wall.

"Why did you block me?"

At Julia's genuinely puzzled question, Cha Yul looked down at his own hand, thrown off.

"My body… moved on its own."

Unable even to make sense of what he'd just done, Cha Yul bit down hard on his lip.

"…I won't get in your way again. Do what you want."

Only then did Julia raise the greatsword again.

Without hesitation, the blade began its descent toward the fake Chae Junhyeok's nape—

Flinch.

Chae Junhyeok, who up to that instant had been leaking nothing but killing intent, jerked to a halt and lifted his left hand, gripping his own right forearm tight.

That fleeting motion.

BOOOOM—!!!!

Another shattering crash rang through the room.

Cha Yul had thrown himself in front of Julia one more time.

"…?"

Julia's eyes narrowed again, uncertain.

But the one who was truly thrown was Cha Yul himself.

"Didn't you just see the Director grab his own right arm? That's too much of a habit for a knockoff. What if it's the real one, brainwashed?!"

"But the scar's missing."

At Julia's flat reply, Cha Yul shot back quickly.

"Could be healed! Or some trick specific to this dungeon. The risk of killing him without checking is too high."

"When we first entered this Gate, the scar was clearly there. It was there when the monsters hauled him away, too."

"But—!"

The two of them were locked in a taut standoff, neither about to give an inch—

"…Ngh."

Along with a short groan, Cha Yul flinched and turned around.

Cha Yul had caught the greatsword itself, but the sharp gust of pressure from that last swing had grazed Chae Junhyeok's cheek.

Tick.

A shallow cut opened across Chae Junhyeok's pale cheek, and a bead of blood welled up.

"…Wait."

Julia, watching, suddenly went quiet, and her eyes cut to the massive ice pillar looming in the center of the room.

On the pillar's surface — at the exact position matching where Chae Junhyeok's cheek had been cut — a faint hairline crack had scored across it. Something that had not been there a moment before.

"Don't tell me…"

Julia's eyes glinted sharp.

The next instant, at a speed Cha Yul couldn't even track, she snapped her wrist and drew a shallow slice across Chae Junhyeok's forearm.

Slash!

"What do you think you're—"

Just as Cha Yul was moving to stop her, eyes glinting cold, the impossible happened.

Splash—!

The very instant blood burst from Chae Junhyeok's arm—

Crrrrrack—!

An identically deep fissure carved itself into the massive ice pillar.

"This is…!"

Watching intently, Julia murmured, quiet.

"Looks like this body and the ice pillar are linked."

Julia's eyes swept the interior of the ice pillar, then cooled and settled on Chae Junhyeok's throat.

"Which means, to get the blue bouquet out of the pillar…"

Cha Yul, having grasped the situation perfectly, went ice-cold in the face in an instant.

At the same moment, in the Old door.

The dead of night, everything sunk into stillness.

His long-running strategy meeting with the raid finally over, Cheon Sangcheol returned to his own room and flung off the knight's armor squeezing him tight, irritated.

Klang! Chhhrrring—!

"Ah, sons of bitches, seriously…!"

Not even the clatter of iron rolling across the floor was enough to burn off his temper — huffing, he laid savage kicks into the table and the chairs.

Getting dragged into this damned Gate against his will was enough to lose his mind over on its own — and now, on top of it all, he was being made to run the clear just because he'd once crossed paths with that insufferable Chae Junhyeok bastard.

There was not one single thing about any of it that he liked.

"Hnn, hff…"

That was when it hit him.

The instant he registered afresh that he was currently inside a Gate, Cheon Sangcheol's hands and body started shaking uncontrollably.

He clasped his trembling hands together roughly, face draining bloodless.

He'd managed a passable performance of composure in front of the others, but alone now, the fear he'd been pushing down was boiling up from the pit of him.

He couldn't set foot inside a Gate.

More precisely — his body had become one that couldn't set foot inside one.

Eight years ago.

Ever since the day he'd killed Choi Jiyeon and Yeon Minjun with his own hands.

The day he'd sacrificed Yeon Minjun as a meat shield and rolled Choi Jiyeon down into the yawning depths of a ravine.

Cheon Sangcheol had spent a long stretch in the hospital afterward, wrecked by acute stress and nervous collapse.

At first, the paltry stab of guilt had gnawed at him for a while.

But befitting a son of Cheonun Group, he shook that feeble emotion off admirably and returned to the field.

The problem came next.

In the Gate he re-entered, the monsters' faces had turned into the grotesquely twisted faces of Yeon Minjun and Choi Jiyeon.

That day Cheon Sangcheol had vomited his guts out and been dragged out like a dog.

Even afterward, out of spite, he'd tried entering Gates a few more times, but the result was always the same.

In the end, he'd become a piece of trash unable to set foot in a Gate.

An Awakened who couldn't step into a Gate.

That put you lower than a stone lying in the street — nothing but dead weight.

He was, in name and on paper, the Guild Master of Cheonun Guild — one of the country's leading guilds — but nobody actually followed him.

The hunters in the guild were only ever mercenaries either bought outright with cash or leashed by vicious debt.

Men without a gram of loyalty, laughing at him behind his back for a cripple; even his own blood — his older brother and sister — trampled him openly, treating him like a bug.

"Fuck! I shouldn't be stuck here playing house at some hour like this…! All because of those bastards!"

Eight years.

Eight straight years of filthy sneers and contempt he'd had to endure.

At first he'd thought the horrific hallucinations came from guilt.

But there wasn't so much as a handful of that kind of trash emotion left in him now.

What remained was pure, brutal hatred for Choi Jiyeon and Yeon Minjun, and the bone-deep grievance that this was somehow all their fault.

The one saving grace was that the monsters and NPCs in this Gate weren't showing up wearing those two's faces.

But Cheon Sangcheol couldn't let his guard down.

He didn't know when the perfectly ordinary faces in front of him might warp into bloody vengeful ghosts and lunge at him, so with every breath his heart lurched in extreme anxiety.

"I'm getting out of here alive, whatever it takes. As long as this damned little farce ends without incident, I'm walking out."

Cheon Sangcheol gnawed on his fingernails, agitated, his glittering eyes darting from side to side.

"Once I'm out, I'm killing that old woman and her daughter for real this time. Their traces are still hanging around, that's why I've been stuck with these hallucinations — has to be."

Vicious murderous intent aimed at Kim Sunja and Yeon Ari.

He was grinding his teeth and muttering that killing intent when—

Knock, knock—

A cautious knock came at the firmly shut door.

Cheon Sangcheol jumped, shoulders twitching, and snapped out sharply.

"Who is it!"

The voice from the other side of the door was a familiar one — one of his siblings.

Cheon Sangcheol, taut as a wire, felt his guard loosen with a pop at the familiar voice, and let out a breath of relief.

What the hell. Scared me half to death.

Grumbling irritably, he crossed the room and opened the door.

"What are you doing here in the middle of the night?"

He fired it off snappishly, but there wasn't a shred of suspicion in him as he pulled the door open and let the unexpected guest into the room.

Click.

The heavy door swung shut, and the sound of the solid lock engaging carried down the corridor.

And after a very brief silence.

"…AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH—!!!"

Out into the empty hallway beyond the door burst Cheon Sangcheol's horrific scream, sharp enough to rip an eardrum in two.