Chapter 102
Chapter 102
Chapter 102: How Dare You, a Mere Fake.
Pungent fumes pricked his nostrils, accompanied by the bewildered chatter of the rattled Hunters.
“Where is all this smoke coming from?”
“Could it possibly be… a blaze?”
Indeed, this was precisely the way it had started.
“From what we can see, it hasn’t traveled very far yet.”
“Even so, someone needs to investigate.”
Every single detail was playing out just as it had 1 year ago.
At this stage, not a single Hunter present, Min-jun included, suspected that this incident would erupt into an inferno capable of swallowing over half of the Gate.
All of them had naively assumed it was merely a minor spark that could be suppressed with ease.
Yet.
The flames surged onward far faster than anyone could have anticipated.
Step by step, the recollections of that fateful day rushed back into Min-jun’s mind with harrowing clarity.
And at that exact second.
Stumbling, Min-jun lost his footing and dropped straight to the dirt.
The sheer weight of those horrific memories crashing in at once was simply unbearable.
“Oppa, oppa?”
The instant he hit the ground, a panicked Sia rushed to shake his shoulders, her voice filled with desperate worry.
Beside her, the remaining Hunters crowded around Min-jun with grim expressions, checking his state.
Yet to Min-jun, their frantic faces and voices were reduced to a distant, hazy blur.
His body and spirit were already pushed past exhaustion after single-handedly battling through an S-rank double dungeon that went far beyond his limits, and now, the most agonizing, nightmare-inducing trauma of his entire twenty-five years of existence was being restaged right before his eyes; retaining his sanity was practically an impossibility.
He had somehow endured until this point, but he was rapidly reaching his breaking point.
Before long, a towering sea of fire would sweep across this very ground, replicating that horrifying day step for step.
And he would be forced to watch once more as Sia’s flesh caught fire, listening to her agonizing, bone-chilling screams all over again.
“Ugh….”
Throughout all his excursions into various Gates, never had one made him feel so profoundly sickened and wretched.
To believe that a Gate could probe a challenger’s deepest memories only to drag forth their most excruciating wound.
Pure revulsion, paired with absolute helplessness.
As waves of dark, suffocating emotions swarmed his entire being, his stomach churned violently, threatening to make him retch on the spot.
“Oppa. Oppa? Can you hear me? Are you really alright?”
In the midst of the chaos, Sia withdrew a potion bottle from her subspace and carefully pressed it against Min-jun’s lips.
“Ah….”
The draught allowed him to regain some semblance of clarity, yet ironically, that clear head meant Min-jun was forced to perceive the unfolding nightmare in full awareness.
“Oppa. I realize how bad it is, but we must stay together and keep moving for now. The fire—.”
Sia could not even finish her sentence before a gigantic blaze expanded wildly across the terrain in a split second.
“This is bad.”
The fire, which had looked so manageable just a short while before, tore across the area with terrifying speed.
“Kyaaaah!”
“H-how is it spreading this fast?!”
Terrified by the sudden wall of roaring heat, complete panic broke out among the group.
Every Hunter scrambled to pull whatever artifacts they possessed from their subspaces to activate them, yet nothing made a dent.
Sia, wielding magic, alongside a water elementalist—the two people most qualified to battle an inferno—threw themselves forward to quell the blaze, yet their efforts proved entirely futile.
They expended every drop of their energy, but at best, they merely managed to stop the fire line from creeping forward a tiny fraction.
One might assume that having an A-rank Hunter like Min-jun on the field would easily turn the tide.
However, Min-jun’s subspace refused to open at this moment.
More importantly, as a straightforward swordsman, he possessed no natural affinity or technique for putting out wild fires.
He considered cleaving the land with Sword Aura to establish a protective barrier, yet that would never address the core danger.
Ultimately, given their grim circumstances, the sole method Min-jun possessed to extinguish such an inferno was a Dragon Word.
Yet Min-jun was currently in no condition to invoke Dragon Words.
The only instances Min-jun had ever managed to summon Dragon Words were moments when his life hung by a thread, or crises of comparable desperation.
Yet the inner catalysts that once allowed him to unleash Dragon Words back then—such as a ferocious determination to live—were presently crushed flat beneath this monstrous trauma.
It was hardly surprising, considering his ruined body and depleted spirit were being forced to collide head-on with his worst living nightmare.
Min-jun decided to focus entirely on what little he could actually accomplish.
He threw all of his physical power into swinging his blade, carving out a firebreak against the encroaching blaze.
Concurrently, he desperately attempted to command a Dragon Word to extinguish the flames entirely.
[Vanish!]
Regardless of how many times he forced the phrase out, the Dragon Word utterly failed to ignite.
Instead, the more he strained to speak those words, the more violently his surroundings spun, bringing fresh waves of nausea that made him gag.
By this juncture, Min-jun realized the harsh reality.
His shattered psychological state made it impossible to produce a Dragon Word.
Nevertheless.
Even in his dazed and unsteady state, Min-jun refused to yield, persistently attempting to chant the Dragon Words.
He did so clinging to the thin, desperate hope that an unrelenting effort might yield a sudden stroke of fortune.
And above all, even if this was an unchangeable piece of the past, he could not bear to endure the sight of losing Sia once more, powerless and frozen as she slipped away.
Yet miracles did not occur.
Owing to Min-jun’s fierce resistance, the advance of the flames was held back slightly longer than it had been 1 year ago.
Even so, it did nothing to alter the inevitable conclusion.
The inferno flared with ever-increasing fury until, in the blink of an eye, it closed the distance right up to their feet.
“W-what are we supposed to do?!”
“Water! Is there any river or stream around here?!”
“Forget about the fire! Run, we have to escape immediately!”
The entire zone descended into absolute bedlam.
Extinguishing the blaze was an impossibility; his sole option was to grab Sia and flee.
Yet.
“Kyah!”
“Sia!”
“Sia!”
As if cursed by fate, Sia had pushed her mana reserves to the absolute brink, tumbling into severe mana exhaustion just as she had back then.
Every single detail mirrored that past tragedy precisely.
Sia’s magical depletion ran so terribly deep that the low-tier draughts carried by a D-rank Hunter did nothing to stabilize her; regardless of how many bottles she swallowed, she showed no signs of recovery.
With catastrophe compounding upon catastrophe, Sia suffered horrific burns, and the outcome that followed, as he remembered all too well… was her death.
Still.
‘It isn’t over yet.’
If the timeline held true to Min-jun’s memory, torrential rains would descend from the heavens within an hour, and only then would the inferno finally be quenched.
This meant that if he could merely survive and keep her safe for that single hour, he could shatter the cycle of this tragedy.
“Sia, climb onto my back.”
“I’m fine, oppa. I can still walk on my own.”
From the toll of mana exhaustion, even the simple act of parting her lips appeared excruciating, yet Sia pushed Min-jun’s offered hand away.
It was a blatant falsehood.
A gentle lie meant to keep Min-jun from despairing over her.
Tricked by that very lie 1 year ago, he had allowed Sia to meet her horrific end.
“Get on my back right now!”
Sia waved her hands to brush him off, insisting she could manage just so she wouldn’t drag him down, but Min-jun, who already witnessed this future, thrust his arm toward her once more.
His own state was wretched, but he retained enough physical stamina to hoist a single person onto his back and sprint.
Provided he carried Sia and fled this zone at the peak of his speed—
He could prevent the exact catastrophe of the past from unfolding again.
Eventually, Sia surrendered her weight to him, and with her resting across his shoulders, Min-jun broke into a run, wringing out every remaining shred of his vitality.
His lungs burned fiercely with every shallow breath.
Scaling this dungeon had drained him to the core, and confronting this grotesque trauma he swore he would never relive had pushed him to the edge of delirium.
‘What in the world am I even doing?’
In the rational corners of his mind, Min-jun understood that the girl resting on his back was not the Sia he had loved.
Even so, staggering through the heat, Min-jun ran desperately forward, carrying her with all his might.
At the start, he maintained a steady pace, yet as his stamina bottomed out, the raging inferno closed the gap right at his heels.
He gasped violently for air, while behind his ear came the sound of Sia’s broken, rattling gasps.
Min-jun understood perfectly that the genuine Sia was stationed safely beyond the Gate.
Yet could there not be a chance that this Sia was real as well?
Perhaps she was another authentic Sia, existing somewhere across countless diverging dimensions.
His thoughts were far too muddled to distinguish truth from deceit, reality from illusion.
“Sia, hold on… just a little bit longer.”
His chest pounded so violently it felt ready to rupture.
Thinking back, he had survived hardships far more grueling than this. His recent training regimen under Rokan had been torturous enough to leave him vomiting after every session.
He was capable of enduring this.
No, he had no choice but to endure.
Yet willpower alone was never enough to conquer every barrier.
Clenching his teeth and rushing forward at breakneck speed, Min-jun’s foot snagged on a stray boulder, causing him to lose his footing and crash hard against the earth.
“Aaargh!”
Min-jun rolled roughly across the jagged terrain.
Yet in that moment, what concerned him infinitely more than his bruised body was Sia’s safety.
Realizing his grip had slipped during the impact, Min-jun scrambled to scour the vicinity for her figure.
When his eyes finally landed upon Sia……
The merciless fire had already wrapped around her form.
Exactly the way it happened back then.
“Aaaaaaaaagh—!”
Sia let out a piercing, soul-shattering shriek.
Dragging his battered leg across the earth, Min-jun crawled toward her, yet there was nothing he could accomplish now.
Even as he coughed up crimson blood and shrieked Dragon Words into the air until his throat tore, the blaze clinging to Sia’s flesh refused to die.
His subspace remained sealed shut, and there was no water in sight.
There existed zero means to douse the flames.
Ultimately, nothing had altered from 1 year ago.
“Op… pa….”
Engulfed entirely in scorching fire and twisting in agony, Sia forced out a trembling whisper, reaching her burning hand toward Min-jun.
He felt as though his heart were being violently ripped to pieces.
Yet Min-jun violently shook his head.
The scene unfurling before his eyes could not possibly be real.
It was nothing more than an unnervingly tangible hallucination.
Yet this was merely the prelude rather than the finale.
From this juncture forward, events began to veer drastically away from the memories Min-jun harbored.
“This is all… because of you, oppa….”
Sia’s lips parted to deliver accusations that the real Sia would never utter.
She had never been someone to place blame on others, let alone vent such malice toward Min-jun.
“Today… was my birthday! My actual birthday! Out of all the days you could pick, why did you have to drag me to a Gate?!”
“S-Sia.”
“Had you simply chosen any other day, none of this would have occurred!”
With his reasoning shattered, Min-jun stared at Sia in a stupor.
Even with the flames consuming her entire frame, even as her limbs rapidly charred into black husks before his eyes.
Curiously, the pooling tears brimming with venom in Sia’s eyes remained clear as day.
“Why… why must this happen?! Why am I forced to perish all because of you, oppa?!”
Her vocal cords tore, and her visage began to distort, warping into an increasingly grotesque monstrosity.
Even as her form abandoned any resemblance to Sia, the spite burning within those eyes never wavered.
“I refuse to perish by myself. If I must burn, you are coming with me, oppa. I will never find peace otherwise.”
The creature that had been mimicking Sia’s likeness finally started shedding its disguise, laying bare its genuine horror.
A nameless aberration that made its lair at the highest peak of this tower.
Its method was to peer into the psyche of challengers ascending the spire, pinpoint their deepest psychological scars, and reconstruct those tragedies to crumble their resolve from within.
Nor was it satisfied with mere reenactments; the beast took sadistic pleasure in twisting those memories to utterly break the challenger’s spirit.
Precisely as it was inflicting upon Min-jun at this very second.
‘Sia.’
Trapped inside a nightmare, an individual could scarcely tell dream apart from waking life.
Without even realizing it, Min-jun had completely forgotten that he was currently standing within the bounds of a double dungeon.
Every syllable spat by the fraudulent Sia pierced through Min-jun’s heart like an iron spike.
“You are utterly pathetic, oppa. If you possessed even a fraction more power, none of this would have happened!”
All the while, the fake Sia’s silhouette deformed into an ever more monstrous parody.
While the tone retained an eerie resemblance to her voice, the manner of speech was visibly morphing.
“….”
Each vitriolic word hurled by the monster wearing Sia’s voice mercilessly ripped open the scar that Min-jun had only just begun to mend.
“Speak to me! I told you to answer me!”
“Sia. I—.”
“Silence!”
The counterfeit Sia swung her blazing arm straight toward Min-jun.
It was an uncoordinated strike.
Yet Min-jun, robbed of his senses, barely managed to tilt away in time.
He had no idea how to bring Sia to a halt.
Or perhaps the hour was already far too late.
Perhaps the right course was to surrender entirely, breaking free from this suffocating guilt and torment.
Just as the embers of Min-jun’s consciousness were on the verge of fading completely into the dark.
Min-jun’s jaws parted, moving entirely apart from his own intent.
[How dare you, a mere fake.]
The words resonated in a spine-chilling, guttural cadence—a sound that carried neither Min-jun’s mannerisms nor his voice.
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