“Around twenty, perhaps. I don’t remember exactly. And the rankings you mentioned — I couldn’t see anything like that.”
“Pardon?”
“They simply grow stronger each time they appear. The first creature I encountered here was barely above the level of a beast. But now…… even exhausted as I am, they’ve climbed to nearly match me. I don’t know what level of skill you all possess, but the longer this goes on, the lower the odds of winning will become.”
Yuan spoke as though he was unaware not only of the rankings but of the creatures’ tiers as well. For a Hunter who received system support, it was effectively impossible to fail to register information that appeared right before their eyes.
Moreover, it was difficult to believe that Yuan — who had been trapped here fighting monsters for years — had repeatedly missed such critical information.
The system…… doesn’t exist here?
The powers he had spoken of. Yihyeon had only assumed they were another name for skills. But thinking about it more carefully, powers in Yuan’s world were closer to a force passed down through bloodlines. The rules governing power itself were fundamentally different from Yihyeon’s world, where skills could only be obtained through awakening.
Rather than opening his mouth prematurely, Yihyeon organized the information Yuan had shared. He decided there was no need to bring up the system if Yuan didn’t know it existed.
The total creatures killed so far — around twenty.
Then the ranking of 43rd might refer to the number remaining. If the creatures grew stronger each time one appeared, it was almost certain that the rankings were ticking down with near precision.
43rd-ranked, C-tier. The maximum tier for monsters was EX-tier — one step above EX-tier, which was the highest for Hunters with S-tier as their ceiling. The monsters in the single digits were likely S-tier or EX-tier.
Yihyeon wished this assumption was only half right. At this rate, just as Yuan had said, the longer the battle dragged on, the slimmer the odds of survival would become.
Only a handful surviving — or perhaps……
“You are unlucky as well.”
At Yuan’s words, Yihyeon set aside his thoughts and looked at him. Yuan closed his eyes as though exhausted and spoke.
“Like me, you have been trapped in this hell, left to wander.”
“……But there will be an end.”
“There is no guarantee we will hold out until that end.”
The voice that delivered the truth was cold, yet carried a quiet sorrow. Since Yihyeon was not an optimist either, he added nothing more beyond that.
Perhaps worn down by the long fighting. Yuan seemed to be gradually drifting into sleep. Yihyeon turned the potion he had been about to hand over in his fingers, then simply set it down on the ground.
“Still…… I would rather not lose so soon the first companion I’ve had in a long time.”
The hand that had been setting the potion down on the ground stopped for just a moment. Yuan’s words were small as a murmur in sleep, but they reached Yihyeon’s ears with perfect clarity.
“I hope you all live long…….”
Yuan lost consciousness then and there, drifting off as though fainting into sleep. Even in a body from which the need to sleep had been stripped away, he seemed to be closing his eyes to recover his strength. The face at rest after so long was so still and unguarded it was almost startling to look at.
Yihyeon sat beside him as he slept and gazed quietly at the potion he had set down on the ground. A man who had endured years alone in a world without even a system.
His words — live long — were not a simple well-wish. They were something closer to hoping that others would not have to suffer the same pain he had.
Beneath a sky of nothing but darkness, Yihyeon reflected on the twenty-four years he had lived. From the time when his name was all he had, to the life of a Hunter hopping from Gate to Gate with his life on the line. Somewhere along the way, life for him had shifted from something shared to something merely endured.
A life that thought only of survival, rather than giving and protecting. But Yuan had made Yihyeon think of something beyond survival for the first time in a long while.
Is it kinship.
Or perhaps he had found himself drawn into Yuan’s life — a mirror image of his own.
For several days after that, Yihyeon and the Hunters gradually adapted to the survival methods Yuan showed them. Mist drifting in from time to time, and rain falling beneath it. Yuan washed his body and wounds clean in that rain, and when the weather changed, he was quick to stay on guard.
Each time he sensed something stirring in the darkness, he poured everything he had into his attack. When the relentless rain of blades finally ceased, the riddled monster that emerged from the dust slowly melted away.
He acted as though teaching Yihyeon and the Hunters.
Leave no opening.
Seize the advantage by striking in the moments when the creatures’ guard is thin.
To him, Yihyeon and the Hunters might still be outsiders — allies not yet worthy of trust. Perhaps that was why it seemed he had preemptively cut off any option of cooperation or joint assault. As though he had always protected only himself — or rather, as though he was driving himself even harder than that, trying to prove something.
But even he, as the creatures grew stronger, eventually hit his limit.
For the first time, Yuan’s attack was deflected by a hard outer shell. He seemed unable to anticipate the next move and froze where he stood. It was only when the creature’s grotesque claws turned toward Yuan that Yihyeon and the Hunters finally moved.
“Yuan. You don’t have to push yourself that hard.”
The Hunters cut away the creature’s limbs, and Yihyeon’s fist crushed its head in a single blow. A clean, decisive kill.
The creature stopped breathing and melted away, and even where Yihyeon had come into contact with the creature’s boiling blood, his skin was unharmed. Nothing had managed to wound him yet.
When Yihyeon pulled back his fist and straightened up, Yuan finally came back to himself. His startled face trembled as it met Yihyeon’s.
He might have always assumed that Yihyeon’s strength was no different from his own. If that was why he had thrown himself to the forefront and driven himself to his limits, Yihyeon wanted to make clear that there was no need for it.
“I won’t ask you to trust us. But don’t make us be the ones to collect your body.”
Don’t push to the front recklessly and leave a burden behind.
That was what Yihyeon conveyed.
Yuan held his gaze on Yihyeon for a long while, and when his breathing had steadied, the tension finally left his rigid shoulders. The answer came only after that.
“……I see.”
Yuan moved at a slightly slower pace toward somewhere he could lean against. His shoulders swayed, unguarded, just as they had on the day they first met.
After that, Yuan did not fight alone. He launched coordinated strikes with not only Yihyeon but the other Hunters as well, and no longer threw himself recklessly to the front or into needless danger.
Yihyeon was satisfied.
That was enough.
How much time had passed.
The Hunter terminals had finally run out of power too.
The last date confirmed had been D+151.
More than five months.
The creature dispatched not long ago had been ranked 36th, B-tier.
They had grown that much stronger. Two of the Hunters who had fought alongside them had lost their lives.
Those remaining, including Yihyeon and Yuan, numbered eight.
This fight was, as he had anticipated, longer and harder than he had expected. There was no telling how much more grueling road lay ahead.
Even so, mentally, he was fortunately still holding together. Perhaps because he had Yuan — an unusual presence — beside him.
The longer the time spent inside the Gate stretched on, the more Yihyeon and Yuan talked.
Yuan had a family. That was something Yihyeon had learned one day after asking when he noticed Yuan taking out a battered, dented pendant to look at.
His husband, Edwin Winter, and Million — a child of his late sister whom he had taken in after her death. At the ducal manor there were servants who attended Yuan, and a nanny who had looked after him since he was small.
“But not one of them ever truly liked me.”
Edwin had accepted the marriage under pressure from the Brendy family, and the servants fawned over Yuan so as not to offend the household’s consort. The nanny who had cared for him had offered advice on several occasions, but once she fell ill, her visits ceased entirely.
And Million, the adopted child, grew more isolated with each passing day. Everyone found fault with the behavior of a child who was barely nine years old. Inside the manor and inside the academy alike, Million always kept people at a distance.
Yuan said that all of it had stemmed from his own greed.
“I had wanted a family that would embrace me.”
He had hoped to find in Edwin and the Winter family the warmth he had never been given by the Brendy family — but rather than being content with what was given, he had reached for too much.
Edwin’s attention, to fill the void within him. A complete role as the Winter family’s consort. And anything that stood in the way of that — even things precious to Edwin — he had pushed aside.
“Pathetically, I didn’t even properly realize that my own conduct was wrong. Blinded by greed, I lost control and moved toward what I wanted. But…… it was only after losing everything that I came to look back on those days here, thinking of what truly mattered.”
It hadn’t been easy, he said.
At first he had regretted it, then resented it, and as he struggled to survive until his body and mind had been worn to tatters — he had come to hate himself for being the one who had driven himself into this corner.
The more he hated himself, the more Yuan came to understand the depth of the wrongs he had built up. The Winter family, laid to ruin by Yuan Brendy. A young child, barely nine years old, left without anywhere to lean on, left to drift alone.
Yuan looked at the photograph inside the dented pendant and felt the weight of all of it. The man in the black-and-white photograph, unlike Yuan who was smiling brightly in it, had cold eyes and a rigid face.
And yet the look in Yuan’s eyes as he gazed at him was warm.
Yihyeon felt, for some reason, a coldness at his fingertips. There was no one around him the way Yuan had people around him — no one for him to protect, or to feel regret over losing. Most had died in the great catastrophe ten years ago, and those he had opened his heart to during his time as a Hunter had either fallen in battle or retired as time went on.
