"Babe, it's time to wake up…"
It was October, 2020, 2:25 PM. Deep inside a Rank A Rift, a team of Hunters had set up a makeshift camp among the ruins of a structure swallowed by the portal.
Han Jaemin, exhausted from the previous night's battle, lay asleep on a bed of woven straw. Beside him, a man with dark brown hair rested, propped up on one arm while the other absentmindedly twirled small strands of Jaemin's hair between his fingers.
"Five more minutes… please."
"And when do you plan to actually wake up?"
"Hyung, we still have time before the next patrol…" Jaemin's voice was muffled, his eyes heavy with lingering sleep.
The man with dark brown hair smiled, leaning a little closer, almost as if he wanted to capture that moment for himself alone.
"If you keep asking like that, I might actually give in," he teased, his fingers trailing down to trace the line of Jaemin's jaw with gentle affection. "But don't come crying later when the leader starts yelling at you."
Jaemin cracked one eye open, just enough to catch his expression. A lazy smile tugged at his lips
"If it's you waking me up, I don't care if I get yelled at all day."
For a moment, silence fell over them. Only the distant sound of wind passing through the ruins and the calm rhythm of their breathing filled the air. The man let out a soft, short laugh, almost nervous, before lowering his head until his forehead rested against Jaemin's.
"You have no idea what you do to me…" he murmured, as though it were a secret stolen away by the wind.
In that instant, with no monsters, no Rifts, no death, there were only two men, lying on a bed of straw, clinging to a fragile illusion of peace.
***
Han Jaemin stood atop a grotesque pile of beastly corpses. Cracks in the cavern ceiling allowed narrow beams of light to cut through the darkness, illuminating only fragments of the massacre. The rest was left to shadows that crawled across the walls and floor, dancing silently around him.
He shook his head, willing the memory away. But the harder he tried to push it aside, the more vivid it became.
The warmth of a hand in his hair.
The rasp of a voice calling him back to reality.
The smile he would never see again.
Jaemin's fingers curled into a fist. His nails dug deep into his palm until blood trickled down, sliding along his knuckles before dripping softly onto the stone floor.
Not that he cared about physical pain. After so long, pain had become nothing more than another reminder that he was still alive.
'When… when will this finally end?'
Jaemin had repeated that question for so long he no longer remembered when it began. Perhaps the first time he saw real blood. Or maybe the day he lost everything in that cursed Rift. It didn't matter. The answer never came, and peace never followed. Even when he thought he'd found a fragile thread of it, the System always seemed determined to drag him back into chaos.
He climbed down from the mound of bodies quickly, each step sinking into the carcasses beneath his boots, making them shift and slide as though they were still alive.
But they weren't.
Of that, Jaemin was certain, after all, he was the one who had killed every last one of them.
A distinct sound made him stop: hurried footsteps, uneven and human by the rhythm and the vibrations echoing through the stone.
"Jaemin-nim!" Chae-won's clear voice cut through the tension. She sounded genuinely relieved and worried all at once, a mix of emotions Jaemin himself hadn't received in a very long time.
She appeared first at the entrance of the tunnel he had come from, her eyes widening the instant they fell on the scene. Behind her, the others stumbled in, some staggering, others nearly tripping over each other. They had waited as long as they could, but the silence after the battle had unsettled them. Inside a Rift, silence was, ironically, the worst omen of all.
"We… we didn't hear anything anymore…" Chae-won gasped, clutching her chest with trembling hands. "We were worried…"
Old man Seonghwan was the next to speak, his voice dripping with disbelief.
"Gods… he… he killed them all… alone."
There was no praise in his tone, no gratitude for being saved. Only fear.
Jaemin dragged a hand across his face, smearing away another patch of half-dried blood. His voice was low, edged with annoyance:
"You should've stayed where I told you."
Park Chae-won took a hesitant step forward, unsure of how to react. Her eyes darted over the ground soaked in blood, the grotesque mound of corpses behind him, and at the center of it all, Jaemin himself. Her stomach churned violently; she nearly emptied her breakfast right there. But who could blame her? For most of them, this was their first time seeing so many bodies, even if they belonged to monsters, it was still terrifying, revolting, and far too real.
Because Chae-won was, after all, just a civilian. She woke up every morning at six, had her coffee, and went to work as a financial analyst for an insurance company in Seoul. It wasn't her dream job, not what she had once hoped to become as a child, but it paid well. For her, the world of Hunters, of Rifts, of blood and death, was something distant, almost unreal, a reality she had never cared to know or be involved in.
Maybe that was why, when she found herself trapped inside this Rift, she still hadn't fully grasped it. That it was real. That it was more dangerous than she had ever dared to imagine.
'B-Blood… this is…'
Instinctively, she stepped back.
But it wasn't Jaemin she feared. She wasn't recoiling from him. She was terrified because she realized that if he hadn't been there, it would have been her lying in that pile, crushed beneath the monsters.
Seonghwan, catching her hesitation, pounced on it like a vulture.
"See?!" He jabbed a trembling finger at the Hunter. "This isn't natural! No one does this alone! It would take at least four Rank A Hunters to take down this many!"
The old man stepped forward, his face twisted with indignation. It was almost impressive how precisely he recalled the equivalence charts issued by the IHA, the International Hunters Association.
Civilians often carried a naive misconception: they believed that a Rank C Hunter could defeat a Rank C monster one-on-one. But reality was harsher. Inside a Rift, monsters fought in an environment saturated with mana, where even the terrain itself bent in their favor.
That was why the IHA's official equivalence scale was clear:
A Hunter needed to be at least one full Rank above the monster to stand a real chance of victory in direct combat.
[Combat Equivalence Table (CET) — Issued by the IHA
Rank C Monster = 1 Rank B Hunter (or 3–4 Rank C Hunters working together).
Rank B Monster = 1 Rank A Hunter (or 6–8 Rank B Hunters).
Rank A Monster = 1 Rank S Hunter (or 10–13 Rank A Hunters).]
"And don't even try to lie. My grandson is a Hunter, part of the Hwarang Guild! He explained all of this to me."
Seonghwan pressed on, his finger still pointed at Jaemin's face. The young man and the older woman beside him quickly averted their eyes, embarrassed by the old man's behavior. Chae-won and little Haneul, by now, were both waiting for Jaemin to react, or at the very least, show his Hunter registry and shut the old man up.
Chae-won raised her hand, trying to diffuse the tension before it escalated further.
"Sir, please… he saved us. Without Jaemin-nim, we wouldn't even be alive right now."
Haneul darted forward, planting himself between Jaemin and the old man, his tiny hands clutching tightly at the Hunter's pants.
"Stop yelling at Hyung! He didn't do anything to you!"
The old man snorted, spat on the ground, and barked back:
"Saved you? Can't you see? This is dangerous. He's not just a Hunter, he could just as well be a criminal or… or that! A monster! A monster wearing human skin!"
The words echoed through the cavern, bouncing off the walls until they seemed to multiply. Monster. The accusation rang in Jaemin's ears, over and over again.
He remained still, the golden glow in his eyes already gone, replaced once more with the dull brown that stared back at them. His clenched jaw betrayed the answer that almost slipped past his lips.
But he didn't have the chance.
BANG!
A thunderous crash reverberated through the corridor to the left, strong enough to shake loose small stones from the cracks in the ceiling.
Moments later came the footsteps. The rhythm was too steady, too coordinated to belong to panicked civilians. These were Hunters, and they were headed straight for the group.
Normally, the entrance and exit of a Rift followed a relatively predictable pattern.
When a portal first opened in the outside world, it remained unstable for several minutes until its oval shape solidified. Once stabilized, any Hunter could pass through the barrier to enter. The exit, in theory, worked the same way, simply retracing your steps back through the gate would eject you into reality once more.
But that was only theory.
In practice, the sheer saturation of mana inside a Rift bent the rules of reality itself. Most of the time, yes, portals functioned as doors, open until the boss was defeated, or until the countdown expired. But in rare cases, some Rifts imposed special conditions that rewrote the very terms of survival.
Some portals restricted entry to a fixed number of Hunters. Others sealed shut once entered, allowing no exit until the boss lay dead, or until every intruder was. Some demanded objectives: slay a set number of monsters, survive a labyrinth, endure for a given span of time before any path forward appeared.
These exceptions were a Hunter's nightmare, because the CET, the Combat Equivalence Table, and every calculation the Association could provide, became meaningless the moment the Rift decided to play by different rules.
And given that these Hunters had already reached the final floor of the Rift, barely one or two hours after its opening, only two possibilities remained: either this was one of those rare Rifts with special conditions that granted shortcuts once fulfilled, or, far more likely, they were a team of high-ranked Hunters, strong enough to crush every monster on the way down without losing time.
Jaemin had already dismissed the possibility that they had been pulled in with his group during the portal's formation. If they had been nearby, he would've felt them. Before crossing, he hadn't sensed a single presence carrying that density of mana, that aura heavy with malice and power.
It didn't take long for the owners of those footsteps to reveal themselves.
Six Hunters emerged from the mist of the corridor, weapons in hand. Their armor was reinforced, yet stylish, designed not only for protection, but also to impress. The insignia stitched into their chests, a black lotus bleeding its petals, left no doubt which guild they belonged to.
"The Black Lotus!"
The young man from Jaemin's group shouted, relief bursting into his voice.
The six didn't look the least bit tense. Some even wore mocking smirks. The difference between them and the civilians was stark. The way they carried themselves, the way they moved, it was clear they were high rankers, between A and B. All except one.
Walking slightly behind the rest stood a tall man with light, nearly platinum hair slicked neatly back. Even at a glance, it was obvious his body was carved for battle, each muscle honed and defined. His eyes, cold, sharp, a piercing shade of blue, swept over the scene: the pile of carcasses, the trembling survivors, and at the center of it all, Han Jaemin.
The group halted, surprise flashing across their faces as they realized someone had already cleared the chamber. Murmurs broke out among them.
"Wait… did they take care of all this so quickly?"
"No way. I don't sense any mana from them at all."
Park Chae-won turned sharply, her eyes widening at the sight of the uniforms. Even she, someone who had never cared about Hunters or Rifts, couldn't mistake them.
The Black Lotus Guild.
Their name appeared on television constantly, plastered across headlines describing them as national heroes. "The guild that kept Korea safe," the reporters would say, always accompanied by well-edited footage of smiling Hunters after clearing Rank A Rifts. Sometimes, they were even shown on international broadcasts, celebrated for their feats abroad.
But for all the perfection of their public image, there were whispers. Rumors that never reached mainstream outlets, but circulated through companies, anonymous forums, and hushed workplace gossip.
Chae-won remembered one rumor in particular. A lunch break, months ago, when a colleague leaned in with a conspiratorial tone:
"You know about the Osaka incident? I heard Black Lotus was involved."
The words echoed now, clearer than they'd ever been.
"Apparently the government begged them to close the Rift, but they refused. They just stood there and watched… until the break happened. Hundreds died."
At the time, Chae-won had laughed it off, treating it as another piece of internet exaggeration. But now, staring at those black uniforms, the lotus embroidered in silver thread, a chill crept down her spine.
Whether it was true or not no longer mattered.
The simple act of remembering that rumor, in this moment, was enough to make the presence of Black Lotus feel less like salvation… and more like a threat.