The attack left no room to dodge — it struck Yihyeon directly, hitting him square as he stood at the front, and then shattered into pieces like glass.
The skin exposed through his torn clothing was solid and unscathed. The transparent debris scattered, and the rebounding wind raked through the surroundings. Yihyeon watched the one who had attacked him through the hair falling across his face.
The tattered robe fluttered in the gust before flipping back over the man’s head.
In that instant, everyone present froze where they stood.
And that wasn’t limited to Yihyeon and the Hunters. The other party, upon seeing Yihyeon, blinked rapidly in visible confusion.
What was reflected in his eyes when he looked at Yihyeon was no different — surprise for surprise.
Unlike Yihyeon, the man’s skin was covered in wounds, and his frame was thin. And yet, the slightly longer hair that fell across his face was a pale violet, and the eyes that reflected Yihyeon back at him were violet as well.
His appearance, build, hair color, eye color — all of it……
It was a perfect match to Yihyeon’s own, as though reflected in a mirror.
In that instant, every Hunter snapped to attention and gripped their weapons. This was the interior of an unidentified Gate. Nothing, no matter how inexplicable, would be out of place here. Something like a monster parasitizing a human body, or stealing a person’s shell like a doppelganger.
The Hunters, weapons in hand, were on the verge of lunging at the unidentified man with murderous intent.
“Everyone, hold your positions.”
Yihyeon stopped them. They all paused, eyes cutting to Yihyeon. They couldn’t understand why he, who should have been the most unsettled of all, was the one holding them back.
Yihyeon knew too. That the one before him might be a monster that had taken on his appearance.
But, for some reason, the face of the man who had looked at Yihyeon drained of color — and then slowly shifted, carrying a flood of emotion.
Bewilderment. Suspicion. Conflict. And finally — relief, and grief.
The man faced Yihyeon with all hostility and tension gone from his bearing.
The moment Yihyeon saw those eyes, brimming with a longing that had been held for a long time, he had no choice but to lower his guard as well.
He couldn’t put it into words, but he felt he understood.
That the man, just like Yihyeon, was a person with a single, genuine soul.
After convincing the objecting Hunters, Yihyeon sat with the unidentified man amid the ruins and spoke with him. The monster called Sabnack that the man had taken down was gradually dissolving, its flesh melting away until only bone remained.
Looking around, there were piles of such monster bones scattered everywhere.
Just how long had this man been here, fighting alone?
Then the man spoke first.
“I am Yuan Win—…… No. Yuan Brendy.”
The name he delivered through dry lips, gripping his tattered robe tightly.
It was different from Yihyeon’s, but it suited the refined air that emanated from him.
Yihyeon spoke as well.
“I’m Yihyeon.”
Yihyeon. From around the time he had been abandoned at the orphanage, his name had always been Yihyeon. Twenty-four years of living without even knowing whether his name was Yihyeon as a whole, or just Hyeon.
People sometimes asked which part was his name, but Yihyeon would only tell them to call him whatever they liked. Those who had grown used to two-syllable names always called him Yihyeon.
“Yihyeon…….”
Yuan turned the name over quietly for a moment, then asked.
“What country did you come from?”
“A place called Korea. It’s probably a country that doesn’t exist in your homeland.”
Since his awakening, Yihyeon’s physique and appearance had changed. His overall impression was still distinctly Korean, but his features had grown sharper and more defined. A certain foreign quality had been added to that, which often earned him misidentifications about his nationality — yet no one could pin him down to any particular country.
It was because Yihyeon’s appearance was too singular to categorize. His looks after awakening, put generously, had taken the best of both Korean and foreign features — and put less generously, made it impossible to tell where he was from at all.
The probability of someone with an identical face and bone structure existing under the same sky.
Yihyeon saw it as virtually zero. That was naturally enough to lead to the conclusion that Yuan’s homeland might be somewhere different from his own.
“As I thought — different from me.”
Yuan seemed to have arrived at the same thought, murmuring it like a breath let out.
With a face worn through to the bone with exhaustion, he raised his head and stared directly into the darkness that blanketed the sky. There were no stars, but a faint light rising from the ground below traced pale patterns against that darkness. This place, however, was as cold as the edge of a continent.
Yihyeon might be able to endure it, but the bone-deep cold would be reaching the other Hunters and Yuan. Yuan exhaled a white breath and spoke.
“The place I came from is the Fulheim Empire on the Torka Continent. I was the third son of the Brendy family — a founding meritorious family of that nation.”
It wasn’t so much longing as it was an aged weight in Yuan’s words. A family of founding merit. The position of being born as that family’s third son. His world seemed very different from Yihyeon’s modern society. But the weight placed on his shoulders looked similar to the weight Yihyeon had carried since becoming a Hunter.
That particular heaviness — the kind that demands you meet the expectations of others and never lose.
Yihyeon asked him.
“How did you end up getting caught up in this?”
“I saw a rift form and came to it myself. At the time…… I didn’t anticipate something like this would happen.”
His voice was helpless and heavy, like someone who had made a grave mistake. If he could dispatch a C-tier monster on his own, Yuan’s skill level had to be at least equivalent to a B-rank Hunter.
Did he come in seeking merit? Or was he trying to prove something?
Yihyeon chose not to press for that reason.
“How long have you been here?”
Instead, Yihyeon looked at Yuan’s condition and asked something else. How long he had been trapped here, fighting monsters. His worn state and the scars that had closed over his wounds made it clear this wasn’t a matter of a day or two.
Yuan reached into his robe and pulled out a watch with a cracked glass face. The watch had stopped.
“……The last day I counted was 361.”
That fact left Yihyeon stunned. It was close to a full year.
“You killed monsters here alone for an entire year?”
Yihyeon knew that time inside a Gate ran on a different track from reality. Depending on the type of Gate, clearing could take a day or a month. There was no precise pattern, but a month inside a Gate amounted to no more than a few hours in the real world.
Yuan’s one year would likely be no more than a few days in his own world.
Yuan gave a dry, hollow laugh.
“It’s probably been longer than that. Whether a year and a half, or two years — I can’t know anymore.”
“…….”
There were no words to add beyond that. The time he had endured, killing monsters alone — it pressed down on Yihyeon’s imagination as something harshly beyond comprehension. Inside a Gate, physiological urges like hunger and the need to sleep disappear.
But fatigue and pain were felt exactly the same, and having to stay awake and keep watch over his surroundings without rest meant he must have lived through days that were emptier and longer than anything Yihyeon could picture.
Yuan began to speak of himself, as though forgetting the solitude of the past, murmuring it aloud to no one in particular. The stale emotions and memories he had kept piled inside for so long — he laid them out before Yihyeon, as though hoping someone would finally hear them.
Yihyeon talked with him for quite a long time, this person he had only just met. Yuan spoke of himself and his homeland the way someone might when introducing themselves for the first time.
His homeland was very different from where Yihyeon had been. Likened to Yihyeon’s world, it was closer to a medieval feudal society where a class system existed.
There too, he said, a Gate — called a rift in his world’s terms — existed, and those with powers would enter rifts and eliminate creatures to extinguish them.
Yuan’s Brendy family was a great noble house that had maintained its standing since the nation’s founding by extinguishing rifts generation after generation. It was simply that Yuan alone had been born with an unremarkable level of power, which had left him with a low standing within the family.
When he spoke of that, it was the only moment Yuan lowered his head as though he had no face to show.
“Did you perhaps want to prove something to those around you?”
“…….”
Yuan’s lips moved faintly for a moment, then he shook his head without strength.
“It wasn’t anything so grand. I simply…….”
As though feeling the biting cold, he curled himself further into his tattered robe. He looked almost as though he was trying to protect himself from some painful memory. Yihyeon sensed he was reaching his limit and reached for a potion as he asked.
“Just one more thing. While fighting the creatures — did you discover any clues or anomalies that could lead to extinguishing the rift? Even something small is fine. Tell me whatever you know.”
“…….”
Yuan stared down at the ground for a long moment, then answered in a dry voice.
“I don’t know. All I know is that creatures appear as time passes, and if you kill them, you’re given time to keep surviving. That’s all.”
“The creatures had rankings. How many have you killed so far?”
The ranking information displayed in the system was what he needed. Whether that ranking counted the ones killed, or the ones remaining, would completely change the difficulty of the clearing.
If it counted the killed, there was no way to gauge the timeframe — but if it was the remaining count, he could read the appearance pattern of the monsters and estimate how long clearing would take.
Above all, it would give a clear and direct read on how far along the clearing had progressed.
But what came back from Yuan was an answer Yihyeon hadn’t expected.
