"Of course, Hyuk and the White Man are currently designated as hypothetical targets. I know you aren't ready to face opponents of that caliber right now, but you must realize that, eventually, you will be required to engage enemies on that level."
The Instructor didn't want to crush the Star-Link squad under too much pressure, but he had to force them to face reality. Shenan certainly had the resolve, yet resolve alone couldn't bridge a gap that wide.
She spoke up, "Instructor, I'm not trying to be negative, but realistically, the gap between us and those two is so vast that there isn't even a path to catching up."
"She's right."
A young woman wearing glasses nodded in agreement with Shenan. "Hyuk's raw power is enough to wipe this entire squad out in a heartbeat. I understand the purpose of Star-Link, but I don't see us being qualified to even be considered her peers, let alone her opponents."
The Instructor nodded calmly.
He then distributed a set of documents to each member of the squad.
"Did you know? The laws of the universe are what maintain our stable physical world. We observe nature and calculate various constants. In reality, if you were to tweak just one of those constants, even by the hundredth decimal place, our entire physical reality would likely collapse in an instant."
Hearing this, the woman with glasses felt a jolt of realization.
She understood what the Instructor was getting at.
The Instructor continued, "You will have the world's most advanced scientific teams assisting you in developing your individual talents. You'll be equipped with means to handle any situation. Do you think I want you all to just rush in like brawlers or comic-book superheroes to trade punches? No. This isn't a movie theater. We will do everything in our power to leverage the laws of nature through your abilities. I believe you will eventually manifest power that even you will find hard to believe."
"I understand now," Shenan said, the concept finally clicking.
It was true. While the raw combat power or the current strength of the Star-Link members wasn't high, the very nature of an Awakened talent was a supernatural force that could nudge the laws of the universe.
They were a technological civilization. They would calculate how to maximize that leverage to the extreme, squeezing every bit of combat value out of every single member.
A seemingly weak superhuman might only be able to turn a glass of water into ice. But the essence of that talent could be the manipulation of entropy, the ability to reverse the fundamental decay of the universe.
The strategy was twofold. While developing their own, Star-Link was also focused on recruiting superhumans with high raw combat power. And the person they wanted to reach most was Hyuk.
Unfortunately, Hyuk had vanished without a trace.
Chubbs asked, "Instructor, for a special unit like Star-Link, shouldn't superhumans like them have codenames?"
The Instructor tapped on Hyuk's profile.
"For instance, her codename is 'Powerful.' Based on all available intelligence, she is the undisputed strongest superhuman in the world."
"That's pretty badass," someone muttered.
...
Meanwhile,
A man with slicked-back hair in a white suit stood atop a mountain of rubble, directing an excavator to clear the debris of the ruined basement. He looked identical to Manager Bach.
"Yes, yes, that's the spot."
Eventually, the excavator unearthed a massive steel safe.
"Yes! That's it!"
Manager Bach's old subordinates ran over, stunned at how closely this man resembled their former boss.
The man took off his gold-rimmed sunglasses, flashing a brilliant smile. He turned to the bewildered lackeys and said, "My brother is dead. I'm here to inherit his estate."
...
The undercurrents of the world were churning. A quiet equilibrium was being shattered, only to be reforged anew. With a single battle, Hyuk had kicked open the door to a new era.
She had become a symbol.
She had become a legend.
After that day, she vanished from Jpscan City. No one knew where she went or what she was doing. Countless factions and individuals sought to contact her, but it was as if she had simply evaporated from the face of the earth.
...
The Arctic.
An arctic gale howled across a desolate landscape of ice and snow.
A lone figure gradually emerged from the blizzard. Her hair was crusted with frost, and she was dressed in a simple short-sleeved T-shirt and a casual jacket.
It was Hyuk.
She had left civilization far behind, seeking refuge in this frozen wasteland.
Type Zero asked, "Are you avoiding civilization?"
To that, Hyuk replied, "Crowded places are making me more and more irritable. I get this urge to make the entire world go quiet, but I'm afraid I wouldn't stop until everyone was dead. It's... peaceful here."
As her power grew, her hearing and sense of smell became sharper. The cost was the constant, deafening roar of white noise in her ears, which made her exceptionally temperamental.
She needed to steady her mind.
She needed to train.
She refused to become a beast driven by impulse. To avoid losing control, she had to learn to adapt and master her emotions completely.
Hyuk didn't want to erase her rage; she wanted to ensure that even in the heat of fury, her reason would remain intact. She could feel her patience wearing thinner by the day.
This wasn't something that could be achieved overnight.
"So, you're planning a world tour?"
"I want to experience the silence of nature, the bite of extreme cold, the heat of molten lava, and the solitude of the deep sea. There's so much to do. I want to find my limits, and see what the rest of this world looks like along the way."
"I hope it helps you."
"Any word on the Vinespawn?"
"Nothing. The whole world is looking for you right now. I've done my best to scrub any videos or information linked to you, but some people moved too fast. They've stored original files in air-gapped systems and signal-dead zones. I can't touch those."
"It doesn't matter."
"How is your injury?"
Nearly the entire right side of her chest had been hollowed out. It was a severe wound, and Type Zero was genuinely concerned, even though Hyuk seemed perfectly functional.
Hyuk glanced down; the hole was significantly smaller, a sign that her bones and right lung were steadily regenerating. "It's fine. Another week or two and I should be fully healed."
Compared to her terrifying physical strength, her healing factor felt a bit sluggish.
...
A week later.
An extreme explorer collapsed in the middle of a blizzard. The sub-zero temperatures had drained the last of his stamina. As the snow began to bury him, his consciousness faded into darkness.
At the brink of death,
A hand reached out and hoisted the explorer from beneath the snow. When he finally opened his eyes, he found himself inside an ice cave.
Sitting across from him was a young woman. She was wearing nothing but a thin casual jacket that seemed absurdly inadequate for the cold, and she was busy gnawing on a slab of raw polar bear meat.
A polar bear?
The realization hit the explorer like a jolt of electricity, making him jump in shock.
The first thing he asked was,
"Aren't you freezing?"
"I'm fine."
As she spoke, Hyuk tore a chunk of muscle from the polar bear's carcass and handed it to the explorer. Though it was raw and bloody, he devoured it ravenously; he was starving.
In the middle of the arctic frost, every cell in Hyuk's body seemed to function like a furnace. From the moment she stepped onto the ice, she hadn't felt the slightest chill.
Hyuk wasn't actually hungry. She had wanted to see how long she could go without food, but considering that calories would accelerate her body's self-healing, she decided to have a snack.
She didn't mind whether the meat was raw or cooked.
The explorer found her presence strange. To him, Hyuk didn't look like an extreme adventurer, much less a tourist. This wasn't a path any traveler would take.
"Thank you for saving my life."
"It was nothing."
Hyuk hadn't spoken to anyone in quite a while. Her phone had died from the extreme temperatures, cutting off her connection with Type Zero. Now, she actually felt like chatting.
She told the explorer she was from East Asia and wanted to feel the arctic chill, so she came here alone to experience the raw power of nature.
She mentioned that the noise of the city made her irritable and that she sought a moment of peace in the vast wilderness. After being away from people for so long, her desire to talk had clearly intensified.
"It's true. Getting away from the crowds gives my mind a temporary sense of peace. The wonder and majesty of nature makes me feel... washed, purified."
The explorer couldn't have agreed more.
Every year, many adventurers came to the Arctic only to sleep forever beneath the ice and snow. Being rescued by Hyuk was nothing short of a miracle.
After their brief encounter, Hyuk soon parted ways with the explorer. He was merely a fleeting moment in her journey, one of the many people she would cross paths with.
...
A few days later.
She stood alone at the absolute North Pole, staring up at the sun. It was currently the height of the polar day; the stars should have been invisible against the washed-out sky.
But as her body continued to evolve, her eyes had begun to undergo a profound change. She could perceive spectrums of light invisible to the average person.
The starlight of the daytime sky, though faint, was captured by her gaze. A tapestry of stars spread across the heavens, and the brilliance of the Milky Way unfolded before her.
Another explorer who had also reached the Pole saw her staring upward and remarked, "It's the polar day... you can't see the stars with the naked eye right now..."
He glanced away for a fraction of a second, and when he looked back, Hyuk had vanished.
"Where did she go?"
The explorer was left in stunned silence.
...
Half a month later,
Hyuk appeared at the Kilauea volcano on the island of Hawaii, just as the restless mountain began to erupt once more.
A drone filming the eruption captured a figure on the rim of the crater. It was a woman, soaking in the molten lava as if she were relaxing in a hot spring.
"My god!"
The photographer couldn't believe his eyes. He zoomed in on the footage, confirming with absolute certainty that it was a person. After digital enhancement, the result was undeniable.
It was a young woman, bathing in liquid fire.
Lava temperatures hover around 1,000 degrees Celsius, but to Hyuk, it felt like nothing more than a warm bath. Not even a single strand of her hair would singe.
She sank beneath the surface of the magma, isolating herself from the world for over two weeks as she listened to the deep, resonant groans of the tectonic plates.
When she finally awoke, she stepped out of the flow. The cooling magma hardened into crusty rock before crumbling away from her skin. The photographer caught one last blurred shot of her silhouette from a distance before she was gone.
Her injuries were now completely healed. The hole in her chest had vanished, leaving no trace of the catastrophic wound, not even a scar.
Then, Hyuk rocketed into the sky. Her body shattered the sound barrier, hitting Mach 2 in seconds, then Mach 3, trailing a deafening sonic boom as she shot straight toward the stars.
She pierced the white clouds of the troposphere and ascended through the atmosphere. The sun grew increasingly blinding, its ultraviolet rays intensifying as she shattered the boundaries of the stratosphere, the mesosphere, and the thermosphere in rapid succession.
Finally, she reached the exosphere.
At an altitude of roughly 1,000 kilometers, where the edge of the atmosphere blurs into the cosmic void, the sunlight struck her directly with searing heat.
Hyuk spread her arms, letting the fierce radiance wash over her. She couldn't absorb the sunlight as energy, and though she felt a burning sensation against her skin, she remained completely unharmed.
A satellite captured her silhouette, relaying the imagery back to the surface. Ground agencies reacted immediately, scrambling to find a way to initiate contact.
But the distance was too great; they were powerless to reach her.
And so, Hyuk drifted in space for two months. It wasn't that she had no need for oxygen at all; she was simply capable of holding her breath for an incredibly long duration, and two months was far from her limit.
During those two months, the various radiations of the void failed to affect her body in the slightest. Her cells were aggressive and resilient, remaining utterly indifferent to the constant barrage of cosmic rays.
It was quieter here than anywhere else on Earth, and Hyuk bathed in that absolute silence. Those monitoring her from the ground had almost convinced themselves she had died in the vacuum.
...
At a certain ground facility.
The satellite relayed real-time imagery. As the sun cast a brilliant crown of light around the curve of the Earth, Hyuk's figure stood poised against the horizon, looking every bit like a celestial deity.
The monitoring technician trembled.
"She looks... just like a god."
"No," his colleague corrected him, his voice steady.
"By the standards of mythology, she is a god."
Her mere presence there left them utterly helpless. Space stations and satellites couldn't get close enough to intercept her. Rumors were already circulating that the agencies below were preparing a new launch window specifically to reach her.
...
One day, two months later.
Hyuk's body began its slow descent. Drawn in by the Earth's gravitational pull, her falling speed steadily increased until she ignited into a brilliant streak of fire, friction tearing at the atmosphere.
Ground agencies burst into a frenzy of activity.
"Quick! Calculate the landing zone!"
"It's in the Pacific!"
A short while later,
The plummeting Hyuk smashed into the Pacific Ocean, triggering a colossal explosion of spray. Her body sank into the depths, disappearing into the dark, silent blue.
At some point,
She opened her eyes. The deep sea was a void of absolute darkness, but her vision quickly adjusted, capturing even the faintest flickers of light.
And just like that, the abyss was no longer a void to her.
She treated the crushing water pressure as if it were nothing. Hyuk watched as bizarre, alien-looking fish swam past her, sights she had never witnessed before.
She roamed the oceans, encountering massive and grotesque deep-sea leviathans and discovering ancient shipwrecks resting on the continental shelves. She swam alongside the schools of fish and stood among the ghosts of the sunken vessels, a silent witness to the silent majesty of the sea floor.
She emerged from the ocean and scaled the highest peaks. She strolled through thundering avalanches, bathed in the heart of lightning storms, and trekked through the fury of hurricanes and sandstorms.
She conquered the Earth's most hostile environments and extreme weather one by one. Her footprints covered the globe, and her mind grew steadily quieter with every mile of her journey.
Eventually, Hyuk returned to society. She dressed in a fresh set of clothes and draped a long white robe over her shoulders like a returning traveler, stepping back into the bustling, noisy crowds.
She re-entered civilization in Nepaneta, a place with a distinct local charm. As she walked through the slightly chaotic, crowded streets surrounded by a sea of people, the inner turmoil that had once plagued her was gone.
She asked Type Zero,
"How long have I been away?"
"If we count from the Jpscan City Incident, it's been nine months."
Neither too long nor too short.
The world hadn't changed as dramatically as she had expected. The existence of superhumans was an open secret among the world's elite, yet the general public remained blissfully unaware.
Online, news regarding superhumans was dismissed as urban legends. Meanwhile, world leaders had initiated a series of contacts with various alien species, keeping the intelligence classified at the highest levels.
"Did I miss anything major?"
"Three months ago, there was a clash in North America. It caused some significant damage, but compared to what you did to Jpscan City, it was child's play."
Type Zero wasn't one for flattery; she was simply stating facts. Even nine months later, Hyuk remained the absolute apex predator on Earth.
She was terrifyingly strong nine months ago.
Now, she was on a different level entirely.
"Any luck with the Vinespawn?"
Type Zero sent a text-based emoji: (┬_┬)
In her usual deadpan voice, she replied, "Still no luck."
Hyuk didn't push it. If she couldn't find it, she couldn't find it; nagging wouldn't change anything. She was starting to wonder if the Vinespawn that killed her parents had already been taken out by someone else.
It was a distinct possibility.
A tricycle carrying a refrigerator rattled past her. The poor road conditions made the vehicle bounce violently, and since the fridge wasn't secured, a particularly sharp jolt sent it toppling toward Hyuk.
Bystanders shouted a warning.
"Watch out!"
Hyuk didn't understand the local dialect, but she didn't need to. She casually reached out a single hand, caught the falling fridge, and shoved it back into place, all while continuing her conversation with Type Zero through her Bluetooth earpiece.
A man nearby watched the scene, then quickly began following her. He trailed her for several blocks as the crowds thinned and the surroundings grew more secluded.
After rounding a corner, Hyuk stopped and waited for him.
She asked, "Why are you following me?"
"Powerful."
The man who had been following her recognized her immediately. He used her widely known codename and dropped his disguise, his body shifting into its true form, a slender, faceless entity with skin as white as porcelain.
"My name is Terminal. I am a Merger from the Planet Fusion."
Hyuk didn't attack immediately.
"Cut to the chase."
To her surprise, Terminal's response left her speechless. She had considered many possible reasons for being approached, but she had never anticipated this one.
Terminal dropped a bombshell. "If possible, we hope you can bear an offspring carrying our genetic legacy. Just one would suffice."
"..."
Hyuk was silent for a long moment.
"Is this some kind of joke?"
Terminal quickly clarified, "Certainly not with me. I am female and infertile. We have already prepared the most noble and handsome male Merger for you. Any offspring you produce will inherit your unparalleled strength alongside our fusion capabilities. It would be the ultimate bloodline!"
Hyuk didn't bother responding.
She let her actions speak for her, simply turning around to walk away. What kind of interstellar prank was this? To ask her for that kind of help, what was going on in the heads of these Mergers?
Terminal felt a surge of regret. Her species, the Mergers, possessed a truly unique talent: any individual carrying Merger genes could fuse with another.
The resulting being would possess the combined strength of both participants. Most staggeringly, there was no upper limit to the number of people who could join the fusion. In theory, an entire planetary population could fuse into a single entity.
This was exactly why they coveted Hyuk's genetics. The stronger the individual, the more powerful the resulting fusion. They were constantly scheming to elevate the potential and raw power of their descendants.
Terminal stared at Hyuk's retreating back.
If they couldn't convince her to bear a child, then acquiring her genetic material through other means would suffice. A single drop of blood, or even a strand of hair, would be enough.
Planet Fusion lacked the technology for cloning or genetic engineering, they didn't even have the concepts for them. But Earth did. Since arriving, the Mergers had learned that such technology existed.
BOOM!
Dirt exploded upward as the raw force of a leap left a small crater in the ground. Terminal moved with blinding speed, her fingers reaching out to snatch a single strand of Hyuk's hair.
The result was instantaneous.
Hyuk merely caught the movement with the corner of her eye. She spun around and delivered a single, sharp ridge-hand strike that severed Terminal's head from her shoulders. Terminal hadn't even had the chance to react.
[ Infinite Overload · Potential Unleashed ]
[ Strength: 9,300 tons ⬆ ]
Killing a single Merger had granted Hyuk a 175-ton boost, proving that Terminal had been quite powerful. Unfortunately, she was facing Hyuk; she died without being able to offer any resistance.
Since her battle with Manager Bach, Hyuk's extreme hostility toward aliens had softened slightly. She no longer killed them indiscriminately, but for those who dared to attack her or display open aggression, she showed no mercy.
VRRR...
After a long hiatus, that familiar resonance returned.
Type Zero: "A door has appeared nearby!"
It was that same unique sensation. The very second the door materialized, Hyuk felt that magnetic pull again, as if she had been personally selected. Having been chosen twice in a row, she wondered if it was a coincidence or an inevitability.
"Chosen again?"
"Yeah."
Type Zero was puzzled. She had never been chosen by a door. Was it because Hyuk was so powerful that every door took a special liking to her?
Perhaps.
She suggested, "Maybe you could try to stop anyone else from entering. If the door isn't opened, maybe you won't be forcibly pulled inside."
Hyuk considered it for a moment before shaking her head.
"My gut tells me that doing that would be dangerous."
"Then I can only wish you a safe and speedy return."
Type Zero had no desire to go to the other side. If there was no network there, she would be in serious trouble. If her electronic vessel were damaged, she could face eternal slumber or true death.
Neither was an outcome she was willing to risk.
The door wasn't far away.
It was a dilapidated wooden door. Hyuk arrived before any other superhumans or extraterrestrials could reach it. Upon seeing the door, the system interface flickered to life.
[Serial No. 273948216: A two-way conduit leading to Quadrant 858. This quadrant reveres Order and Civilization, lighting the beacons of progress in the name of Law.]
[Closure Countdown: 9 days, 23 hours, 45 minutes]
The door's duration was similar to the previous one. Without waiting for others to arrive, Hyuk stepped forward, pushed open the wooden door, and strode through.
Shortly after her departure, several others drawn by the door's call arrived. Type Zero, monitoring through a phone left nearby, confirmed that more than ten people eventually entered the door.
...
On the other side.
Quadrant 858, Planao.
Hyuk emerged in a city ravaged by war, reduced to a landscape of desolate ruins. Unlike her previous experience where the exit was far away, the door stood right behind her.
She looked back.
[Serial No. 273948216: A two-way conduit leading to Quadrant 042. This quadrant holds infinite possibilities, a nexus where all paths converge.]
[Closure Countdown: 99 years, 364 days, 23 hours, 40 minutes]
"Ninety-nine years?"
Hyuk was stunned.
Could the difference in time flow between the two sides of the door really be this extreme?