IEUST 05

Chapter 5

The damp chill of the cave settled over the worn leather gloves.

Chaeho lightly clenched and unclenched the grip of the iron sword in his hand. It was a familiar weight, one he had held so often that calluses had formed across his palms.

An E-rank dungeon on the outskirts of Seoul. This shabby cave allowed individuals to enter alone, making it the perfect place for someone like him, who wanted to avoid other people’s attention and any unnecessary suspicion.

This should be just right for a warm-up.

The inside of the dungeon reeked strangely, a mixture of stale dust and the smell of blood that had yet to dry completely. An ordinary D-rank Hunter would have been reluctant to enter alone without forming a party, but Chaeho was different.

For years, he had worked as a porter for C-rank parties, observing monsters so obsessively that he had practically grown eyes in the back of his head. If there were only one or two E-rank monsters like goblins scattered around, he could handle them without even using a skill.

Rustle.

The sound of a rolling pebble came from the darkness.

Chaeho stopped walking and raised his sword diagonally. From beyond the curved passage, where his vision could not reach, a goblin with yellowed teeth crawled into view.

The moment it spotted Chaeho, it let out a shrill scream and charged.

“Keieeeek!”

A crude dagger thrust toward Chaeho’s thigh.

Chaeho did not panic. The moment the goblin’s shoulder jerked, he had already read its trajectory. He lightly knocked his sword downward, sending the dagger flying.

Clang!

With a dull scraping sound, the goblin’s stance collapsed.

Chaeho did not miss the opening. His iron sword traced a smooth arc and slashed across the goblin’s throat.

“Ghk, kurgh….”

With a short death rattle, dark red blood soaked the floor. The goblin collapsed, convulsed for a moment, and then breathed its last.

It had been a fight relying purely on physical ability and swordsmanship, without using a skill. Chaeho felt the muscles that had been stiff throughout the night gradually loosen.

“Good. My instincts are still sharp.”

Just as Chaeho muttered that lightly and was about to continue walking—

Whoosh!

As if the thick smell of blood had been a signal, bizarre shrieks erupted simultaneously from the cracks between the rocks near the cave ceiling and from his blind spot on the right.

“Kieeek!”

“Kyaaah!”

Two goblins had been hiding in the darkness.

One leaped down from above, striking downward like a falling hammer, while the other stayed low to the ground and crawled forward, aiming for Chaeho’s ankle.

It was more than a simple ambush. It was a coordinated attack with deliberately staggered timing.

Even an experienced D-rank Hunter would have trouble avoiding such a vicious pincer attack if caught off guard for even an instant. Two rusted, dull blades rushed toward Chaeho’s neck and legs.

At that moment.

Chaeho instinctively drew up the sensation he had honed while pushing himself to the limit in the training room the previous day.

Now.

He decided to activate the skill for exactly one second.

Thrum.

A cold vibration struck his mind, and the flow of time around him stretched to an extreme.

The goblins’ shrieks, which had been ringing painfully in his ears, became distorted into bizarre, low-pitched groans, while the dust falling from the ceiling seemed to hang motionless in midair.

An enormous amount of information flooded into his extraordinarily clear field of vision.

The wrinkles across the nose of the goblin dropping from above. The angle of the dagger gripped in the hand of the goblin scraping along the floor. Even the awkwardly distributed centers of gravity of the two creatures.

What idiots.

The tangled paths of the two goblins were perfectly clear to Chaeho.

If they continued along their current trajectories, the knee of the goblin falling from above would inevitably collide with the shoulder of the one below. There was absolutely no need to forcefully twist his body or try to move faster.

Chaeho simply took half a step backward, ever so lightly, moving along the trajectory he had already read.

Then he deactivated the skill.

Flash!

The world returned to its original speed.

The two goblins, which had been violently cutting through the air, were thrown into confusion when their target suddenly disappeared from their sight. The two blades that stabbed into empty space ended up striking only each other’s openings.

“Kiek?”

As expected, the body of the goblin falling from above came crashing down onto the one below.

Crash!

With their paths tangled, the two creatures tumbled awkwardly across the floor and lost their balance. It was a fatal opening. They could not defend themselves, nor could they even properly control their own bodies.

Chaeho did not miss that brief moment.

His foot, which had been planted half a step back, shot forward like a spring, and he thrust his sword in with a smooth, economical motion.

Thud! Thud!

The tip of his sword pierced the heart of the goblin that had fallen first. As he pulled the blade free, he simultaneously slashed across the throat of the other goblin, which was still flailing around.

“Kaa, aah….”

The two goblins fell helplessly to the ground, spewing blood.

From beginning to end, the entire sequence had been executed cleanly, without a single unnecessary movement.

Chaeho casually flicked the blood from his sword into the air.

He was not even breathing heavily. His gaze shifted toward the translucent status window floating in midair.

Remaining Usage Time: 9 seconds.

This is insane.

Chaeho let out an involuntary chuckle.

Exactly one second.

That brief instant he had desperately broken down into tiny fragments in the training room while dodging rubber bullets had, in actual combat, been an absurdly long and extraordinary opportunity—long enough to hold an opponent’s life in the palm of his hand.

With just one second of time deceleration, he had been able to crumple the two goblins’ staggered ambush like a scrap of paper.

This skill was not simply a way to buy time.

It was a merciless weapon that allowed him to strip away an enemy’s trajectory, construct a path that caused them to collapse on their own, and then drive his blade into their weakest point. The power he had understood only in theory was on an entirely different level when he experienced it firsthand while cutting into the flesh of actual monsters.

“At this level, I can go deeper.”

With a clear sense of inspiration, a cold gleam spread through Chaeho’s eyes.

The deeper Chaeho ventured into the dungeon, the more rapidly the number of goblins increased.

When a wide open area appeared, torches stuck into the cave walls illuminating the space, more than a dozen goblins wandering in groups all turned their heads toward Chaeho at once.

“Kieeeeeek!”

“Kyaaah!”

Having discovered the intruder, the monsters kicked up clouds of dust from all directions as they tightened their encirclement.

Rusted weapons came flying from every direction—front, back, left, and right. Under normal circumstances, a D-rank Hunter would have been forced to desperately retreat toward the cave wall to avoid exposing their back.

But Chaeho did not stop.

Instead, he walked straight into the middle of them.

Thrum.

At the instant a spear came flying along the most threatening trajectory, Chaeho activated his skill.

This time, 0.5 seconds.

The flow of the world became viscous and slow, as if it had sunk into mud. The rotation of a pebble suspended in midair, the angle of the spearhead thrusting forward from the front, the force with which the goblin on the left pushed off the ground.

Countless pieces of information poured into Chaeho’s mind.

The two on the right will get tangled up with each other. If I take out the one on the left, the path will open.

Chaeho pinpointed a safe gap outside the trajectories of the attacks and twisted his upper body, taking control of the blind spot.

Skill deactivated.

Flash!

The world returned to its normal speed, and Chaeho’s sword carved a vicious arc through the air.

The goblin’s spear missed its target and flew harmlessly past, throwing the creature’s center of gravity off balance. Chaeho kicked precisely behind its knee from behind, sending it crashing down, then sliced through the back of its neck.

“Kiek!”

The moment one fell, a gap opened in the encirclement.

Chaeho slipped through that opening like a ghost, weaving between the monsters.

Thrum. Flash.

Thrum. Flash.

He did not maintain the skill for long.

Nor did he waste it like some universal invincibility skill. He activated and deactivated it only during those heart-stopping instants when a monster’s unpredictable attack was about to reach him, when he was surrounded on all sides and facing an immediate threat of death.

When his vision slowed, he found an opening.

Then, the moment he deactivated the skill, he drove in his counterattack.

The insight he had accumulated from observing hundreds of battles during his years as a porter.

And the minimal evasive movements he had carved into his body through endless training sessions that had made him want to vomit.

When those things mixed with the smell of blood from real combat, something strange happened.

Clang! Slash!

“Kyaaak!”

“Kiek!”

Every time his sword flashed, goblins dropped like rotten logs.

There were no flashy skill effects in his movements, nor any explosive force capable of shattering the ground.

But they were terrifyingly simple and efficient.

The goblins’ attacks missed even the hem of Chaeho’s clothes by the width of a sheet of paper, while his sword always pierced the vital points they left most defenseless.

It was almost as if the goblins themselves were sticking their necks out toward the tip of Chaeho’s blade.

“Haaah!”

The last remaining goblin leaped desperately at him, but Chaeho was already standing at its landing point, his sword thrust upward.

Stab!

The tip of the sword pierced beneath the goblin’s chin and passed straight through to the top of its skull.

The convulsing goblin went limp and breathed its last.

Drip. Drip.

The only sound filling the quiet cave was the blood running down the sword and dripping onto the floor.

“Hoo.”

Chaeho pulled out his sword, shook the blood off onto the ground, and let out a long breath.

More than a dozen goblin corpses lay scattered around him. It was a number that the old Chaeho, fighting alone, would have struggled to escape from, let alone defeat without injury.

But now, there was not even a scratch on Chaeho’s body.

He was not gasping for breath, nor were his muscles screaming in pain. The battle had ended so anticlimactically that beads of sweat had barely formed along his back.

Once again, a status window appeared before his eyes.

Thanks to using the skill only in short bursts at the most dangerous moments, he still had plenty of time left even after wiping out an entire goblin colony in the dungeon.

Pretty useful.

There was no trace left of the D-rank Hunter who used to passively hide behind others and carry their luggage.

This was the moment Chaeho felt with his entire body just how terrifyingly well the tactics of prediction and positioning he had honed in the training room worked in real combat.

Beneath the faint torchlight illuminating the dark cave, Chaeho tightened his grip on the worn sword.

A cold smile spread across his lips.