The Central Plaza
The trek toward the northern transit plaza felt like walking through the jaw of a waking beast. All around us, the familiar cityscape of Gwangbuku was fracturing. Car alarms wailed in disjointed choruses, thick black smoke columned into the air from abandoned vehicles, and the distant, terrified screams of thousands of people echoed off the concrete walls.
Minsoo kept close to my side, her knuckles white around the handle of her steel crowbar. Thanks to the four points she had dumped into Agility, her movements were remarkably fluid now. She was stepping lightly over the shattered glass and discarded belongings that littered the asphalt, her enhanced reflexes keeping her perfectly balanced despite her trembling shoulders.
"Oppa," she whispered, her eyes darting toward a dark, smashed alleyway as we hurried past. "The air... it feels thick. It's getting harder to breathe."
That's the mana density rising," I replied, keeping my eyes locked straight ahead. "The regional barrier is solidifying. Once it fully locks in, this entire district will be completely cut off from the rest of Seoul. We're running out of time."
As we rounded the final corner, the central transit plaza opened up before us.
It was an absolute disaster zone. Hundreds of people were jammed into the intersection, bottlenecked by abandoned buses and light rail cars. They were pushing, shoving, and screaming at the top of their lungs, completely blind to the fact that their collective panic was broadcasting a massive signal to the system. To the Constellations looking down, this plaza was nothing more than a giant bait bowl.
Help me! Someone help my leg!" a woman cried out from beside a flipped SUV, but the crowd simply surged past her, driven by the primal urge to run.
"Ryo, we have to help them!" Minsoo gasped, her medical student instincts kicking in as she instinctively took a step toward the injured woman.
I caught her shoulder, pulling her back firmly. "Look up, Minsoo. There's no time."
High above the plaza, the sky didn't just have a single portal anymore. It was webbed with glowing, violet fractures. The thin, thread-like currents of malicious energy I had felt earlier were rapidly coalescing into heavy, suffocating pools.
Any second now, I calculated, my pulse quickening.
Suddenly, a violent tremor rocked the asphalt, throwing several fleeing people to their knees. The violet fractures in the sky shattered completely, and a localized system announcement echoed directly into the minds of everyone present.
[Warning: A Regional Event has been triggered in Sector 4-B.]
[The First Trial's Core Guardian is descending.]
A collective, horrified hush fell over the crowd as a massive silhouette began to emerge from the central rift. It wasn't a standard, low-tier ghoul. It was massive—easily standing eight feet tall—with a grotesque, muscular frame covered in pale, leathery skin. Its face was a featureless mass of teeth, and long, rusted iron chains were fused directly into its forearms.
[Regional Boss: Chain-Bound Abomination
A collective, horrified hush fell over the crowd as a massive silhouette began to emerge from the central rift. It wasn't a standard, low-tier ghoul. It was massive—easily standing eight feet tall—with a grotesque, muscular frame covered in pale, leathery skin. Its face was a featureless mass of teeth, and long, rusted iron chains were fused directly into its forearms.
[Regional Boss: Chain-Bound Abomination (Rank C-)]
The crowd froze in absolute terror. In my past life, this was the exact moment the plaza turned into a graveyard. The fake Hero had been trapped in the middle of this stampede, surviving only because the creature's initial rampage had cleared a path for him to stumble blindly into the hidden container holding the Dragon's Eyes.
I scanned the plaza, completely
I scanned the plaza, completely ignoring the roaring boss monster. My eyes darted across the storefronts, the abandoned buses, and the structural pillars of the transit station until they locked onto a small, unremarkable maintenance alcove hidden beneath the central stairwell.
There, tucked away in the shadows where a normal human eye would never look during a monster attack, was a faint, pulsating distortion in the air. To anyone else, it looked like a trick of the light or heat rising from the pavement.
But I knew exactly what it was. It was the rendering error. The glitch in the system's item distribution.
Minsoo, follow my exact footsteps," I commanded, drawing the crowbar from my jacket. "Don't look at the boss. Just run!"
Before she could even respond, I bolted toward the alcove.
The Chain-Bound Abomination let out a deafening roar that shattered the remaining windows of the plaza, swinging its massive arms. The rusted iron chains whipped through the air, instantly crushing a concrete barricade into dust and sending a wave of screaming civilians scattering in every direction.
its hairless jaw splitting open as it caught the scent of two humans moving with deliberate purpose rather than blind fear. It raised a massive, chain-wrapped fist, preparing to bring it down right onto our path.
I didn't slow down. My hand hovered over my closed status window, my mind tightly gripping my 20 unused stat points. If its baseline requirements demanded a sudden dump into Strength or Agility to retrieve it, I would force the allocation in the exact microsecond I touched the container.
I'm taking your future, I thought, my gaze locked entirely on the pulsating distortion just yards away. Every single bit of it.