The first thing he felt was cold.
Not the cold of winter or an air-conditioned room. This was something older than that—the kind of cold that lived in places that had never seen light. It pressed against his skin from every direction, patient and absolute, like it had been waiting for something warm to arrive.
Joon-ha opened his eyes.
Not the cold of winter or an air-conditioned room. This was something older than that, the kind of cold that lived in places that had never seen light. It pressed against his skin from every direction, patient and absolute, like it had been waiting for something warm to arrive.
Joon-ha opened his eyes.
Nothing.
Complete, total darkness. Not the darkness of a room with lights off. The darkness of a place that did not believe in light at all.
He was lying on his back on something that felt like stone. His chest hurt. His ears were ringing. The last thing he remembered was tye ground cracking open and the Gate entrance blinking out like a candle in the wind.
Move. Get up.
Hus body disagreed.
He lay there for a long moment, breathing. In. Out. The cold didn't get worse. Nothing moved in the dark. There was no sound—no wind, no distant monster cries, no voices from the rest of the party.
The rest of the party.
He forced himself upright.
Hnngh—
"Hello?" His voice came out smaller than he intended. It disappeared into the darkness like it had never existed. "Park-ssi? Anyone?"
Silence.
[Good morning, host.]
Joon-ha went completely still.
The words appeared in the air in front of him, not projected, not glowing exactly, but present, the way an idea is present inside your head.
Blue-white text that only existed because he was looking at it.
What the h*ll is...this?
[Current status: alive. Barely.]
[Current location: Grade 0 Gate—Designation CALAMITY-7]
[Current party members: 0]
[You are the only surviving member of your rais group.]
The words hung there. Calm. Clinical. Completely indifferent to the fact that six people had just died.
"What,"
[The Calamity Protocol has initialized within your body. You have been designated as its host. Congratulations.]
[Your rank has been assessed as NULL—below the minimum threshold of the Hunter Association's ranking system. You are, by every measurable standard, the least qualified individual who could have recieved this system.]
[The system acknowledges this is not ideal.]
Joon-ha stared at the floating text.
"Are you... insulting me right now."
[The system is providing accurate data. There is a difference.]
[FIRST QUEST HAS BEEN ISSUED.]
The text changed. What replaced it made his stomach drop.
--
[QUEST: CRAWL OUT]
Objective: Exit Calamity-7 alive.
Time limit: 6 hours.
Reward: System integration—Stage 1
Failure penalty: DEATH
[Difficulty: ★★★★★]
[Recommended rank: SS and above]
[Your rank: NULL]
[Good luck. You will need significantly more of it than most people.]
--
For a long moment Joon-ha just looked at the quest window.
Five stars. SS rank recommend. He was NULL. He had, to his knowledge, never in his life done a single thing that warranted five stars of difficulty. He once struggled with a D-rank goblin nest for forty minutes before another hunter took pity on him and finished it.
He stood up.
What else was he going to do?
Darkness wasn't complete, he realized, once his eyes adjusted.
There was something like light here, faint and sourceless, emanating from cracks in the store floor beneath his feet.
It was enough to swe by. Barely.
Enough to make out the shape of a corridor stretching ahead of him, carved from black rock, ceiling too high to see.
And at the far end of the corridor, something moved.
Joon-ha froze.
It was large. That was the first thing.
Large the way a building is larger, not because of its heig6but because of the space it occupied, the way it made everything around it feel suddenly smaller and more fragile. It moved slowly, draggy something behind it.
SCRRRITCH... SCRRRITCH...
The sound it made was like grinding stone, but alive.
[Calamity-class creature detected.]
[Name: VOID STALKER—Rank: Unclassified.]
[Correction: direct combat will result in immediate death.]
[The system suggests running.]
"I can see that," he whispered.
He ran.
--
The next four hours were the worst of his life.
Thud
Thud
Thud
He ran until his lungs stopped working correctly and then he ran more. The void Stalker did not chase him with urgency, it didn't need to. It simply moved, slow and inevitable, and the corridor kept leading him deeper before it started leading him out.
He found a side passage and took it. Found a chamber filled with something that hummed at a frequency that made his vision blur and crossed it with his eyes half-closed.
Three times he was certain he was going to die.
The first time, a fissure opened in the floor directly ahead of him mid-sprint.
CRACK!!!
He cleared it by a margin he didn't want to calculate.
The second time, something in the dark—smaller than the Stalker, faster... got close enough that he felt the air move against his neck before he threw himself around a corner and it lost him.
Whoosh—
Third time, his legs simply stopped.
He was in a narrow passage, stone walls close on both sides, and his body made the unilateral decision that it was don. He hit the ground on his hands and knees, chest heaving, vision swimming at the edges.
"Ha—ha—hah—"
[Host's physical condition: critical.]
[Stamina: 3%]
[Recommendation: do not stop moving.]
"I can't," he gasped.
[The system understands. However—the exit is forty meters ahead.]
Joon-ha lifted his head.
At the far end of the passage, ao faint he had mistaken it for another crack in the stone, was a silver of grat light.
Real light. Outside light.
He got up.
He didn't know how. His legs had bo business supporting weight and his hands were bleeding from the fissure jump and there was something wrong with his left side that he was deliberately not thinking about. But he got up, and he put one foot in the front of the other, and he walked the forty meters.
...Fwump.
The gate spat him out onto concrete.
He had one second to register Seoul sky, overcast, pale, real... before his legs finished their resignation and he went down.