From my perspective, this was the first time I had ever seen the Beast in its true form.
The S-rank hunter clad in dark clothing, however, showed no hesitation whatsoever. Whether a witness had just appeared in the dungeon or not, the Beast swung its power at the figure standing before it.
An entity occupying the same place at the top of the food chain as itself.
It had attacked Korea’s number-one-ranked hunter with its skill.
The extraordinarily powerful magic, capable of ignoring defensive measures altogether, was apparently known among Earthlings as [Designated Cut].
Jiiiiing.
Unfortunately, Haseong failed to evade the Beast’s devastating attack.
Now that I looked more closely, one of the hero’s ankles was exposed, the surrounding equipment seemingly torn apart by the Beast’s claws.
It had probably crippled his mobility first, ensuring that [Designated Cut] could not miss.
“Keuk!”
Blood sprayed through the air.
The Beast’s severing technique, a spell capable of cutting through space itself, mercilessly tore across Haseong’s front—shoulder, clavicle, ribs.
With his S-rank reflexes, he had managed to avoid taking the attack head-on.
But even a glancing hit from that technique was enough to shatter everything protecting his body and send blood scattering into the air.
And then Jung Haseong collapsed.
I had originally come into this dungeon hoping a casualty would appear as soon as possible.
But watching someone who had been alive only moments ago die right in front of me was far more shocking than I had expected.
Especially when that person was someone I had actually spoken to.
Someone with a fairly decent personality, no less.
A fellow Earthling.
“Jung Haseong!”
I reflexively threw myself between them.
Without thinking, I used my own body to intercept the Beast’s next attack.
Honestly, I still had no idea what was going on.
But whatever the reason, if Haseong took another hit in his current condition, he really would die.
‘Ugh.’
Boom!
The Beast possessed not only a severing technique that ignored the performance of defensive equipment, but also monstrous physical strength, enough to wield an enormous battle axe one-handed.
The instant the blunt side of that axe struck my body, an explosive noise erupted—and the weapon rebounded violently outward.
The tremendous repelling force, powerful enough to knock back even an S-rank hunter’s attack, came from the concentrated defensive effect of the [Sacred Tree Seedling].
‘That’s it!’
The problem was that the Seedling’s protection wasn’t completely invincible...!
‘No, seriously, what the hell is going on here?’
For now, I could understand why the Beast itself was here.
[Mimic City] had entrances connected to locations all over the world, and even now, the number of tunnels linking other regions to the dungeon continued to increase.
There was no rule saying that only Korea’s S-rank hunters could enter this place.
But there was one thing I absolutely could not understand.
Why had Jung Haseong been defeated so overwhelmingly?
Sure, his growth wasn’t complete yet.
But he was still the disciple of an archmage who had personally poured 128 hours into training him!
‘Heukh.’
It was then.
While examining the magic flowing through the Beast’s body, I noticed something.
A secret.
Perhaps in an attempt to conceal its identity, the Beast had used some sort of specialized magical item to alter the apparent quantity of magic within its body.
But what I was seeing went deeper than that.
In other words, such a superficial disguise was never going to fool an archmage.
‘Damn it! There were burn marks all over the place, so why was that bastard completely fine...!’
At that moment—
“Hunter... Kim...”
A faint voice came from behind me.
Haseong clearly hadn’t known I was inside the dungeon.
His expression was one of utter bewilderment, as though he had just seen a ghost.
But before he could even finish satisfying his curiosity, his eyes closed and his body went limp.
The massive blood loss had apparently caused his brain to shut down.
‘Oh my!’
I knew there were spare healing potions inside Haseong’s item box, but I couldn’t recklessly begin treating him.
I had no idea when the Beast might attack again.
So I took up a defensive stance, prepared to shield Haseong with my own body at any moment.
And then...
“....”
Uhm.
“....”
Hmm.
‘Huh?’
What was going on?
Strangely enough, the Beast wasn’t attacking.
An eerie silence settled over the area.
For some reason, the moment it saw me, the Beast tilted its head and froze in place as though it had malfunctioned.
One hypothesis immediately came to mind that might explain its behavior, but this wasn’t the time to dwell on it.
I needed to treat Haseong first.
‘Please don’t attack. Please.’
I rummaged through Haseong’s item box and pulled out a familiar-looking medicine.
Then I poured it generously over the young man’s body.
A battered hero lying unconscious with the entire front of his body torn open, while an F-rank desperately treated him...
For some reason, the sight felt strangely familiar.
Still, there was one fortunate difference this time.
The wounds were shallower than I had expected.
At least none of his precious internal organs had been damaged.
‘Aside from that... everything else is worse than last time.’
Cold sweat ran down my back.
If I had known something like this was going to happen, I should have paid more attention when the television kept talking about the Beast every single day.
Let me reconstruct what happened before I arrived, based on what I sensed.
The Beast probably detected Jung Haseong’s magic shortly after he entered the gate and immediately pursued him.
Then, the moment it saw his face, it activated a skill and launched a preemptive attack.
My disciple, currently sprawled across the ground, had most likely been dragged into the fight without even understanding why.
Besides, the Beast was a primitive sorcerer.
At that distance, there was no way it could have identified someone merely by the nature of their magic.
‘Then did it just judge him by the size of his Awakening level because he was S-rank?’
I was still thinking when an unexpected change occurred.
The Awakener wearing the beast mask, who had been glancing repeatedly in my direction, suddenly tightened its grip on the axe.
Then the Beast turned away from me and swung for the unconscious Haseong’s neck.
‘No, this is crazy!’
Clank!
Once again, however, the attack was stopped by the tearful sacrifice of a certain human shield.
I threw my entire body over Haseong to protect him.
The Beast tilted its elk-bone-covered head and made yet another incomprehensible gesture.
What followed was an absurdly persistent standoff.
Pacing back and forth.
The sorcerer known as the Beast circled around us continuously, searching for an opening.
Meanwhile, I kept my full attention fixed on it, moving whenever necessary to ensure that the axe blade never reached Haseong.
....
....
But I knew this would happen.
Heuk!
Boom!
“Heuk!”
Boom!
Apparently tired of merely searching for an opening, the Beast gripped its battle axe in both hands and swung it with tremendous force directly into my side.
As expected of an S-rank hunter, the impact was overwhelming.
So overwhelming, in fact, that even the protective effect of the [Sacred Tree Seedling] failed to absorb it completely.
My body was sent flying backward.
“Keugh!”
Clank, clank, clank!
But by this point, one thing had become clear.
The Beast still hadn’t used its strongest magic.
The severing technique.
Of course, considering how exceptional that spell was, it was only natural to assume that it consumed a tremendous amount of mana and couldn’t be fired off carelessly.
Even so...
It was strange that the Beast hadn’t used it against me even once.
Extremely strange.
And if I put that together with everything else...
‘For some reason, the Beast is reluctant to kill me.’
I didn’t spend long thinking about it.
I decided to exploit that hesitation and somehow create an opening.
This was a global dungeon where Earthlings from countries all over the world gathered.
That was why, as a precaution against emergencies, I had been wearing a Pixy translator ever since I entered.
Click.
I hurriedly forced my battered body upright and pressed the large button on the translator—the switch connected to its Korean-to-English translation function.
Then I shouted at my opponent.
“Stop it!”
A slightly awkward English sentence immediately came from the device at my waist.
“Stop it. Please.”
“....”
“Even if it’s only for a moment, let’s talk. I don’t know why you suddenly decided to kill Jung Haseong, but... if you just spare him, I will...”
But the Beast seemed completely uninterested in my attempt at negotiation.
Instead, it simply continued doing what it had been doing.
‘Oh my.’
As though it had somehow realized that my reaction speed was lacking, it abandoned the idea of killing the flame sorcerer on the spot.
Instead, it tried to take the unconscious hero away altogether.
The Beast’s sudden movement was far too fast for an F-rank like me to properly perceive.
But the instant I sensed an abnormal fluctuation in its mana, I squeezed my eyes shut and shouted.
“—Brooklyn Morgan!”
To protect Jung Haseong.
“Stop right now!”
I had already revealed a secret that should never have been spoken aloud.
Now that the cat was out of the bag, there was no point hiding anything anymore.
Beast.
Nuckelavee Killer.
A mysterious figure.
And, more recently, the proud owner of an impressive new title—
Humanity’s Threat.
The creature known by so many names was, in truth, a certain blonde foreigner I had met before.
An S-rank hunter from the Spectrum Guild.
Brooklyn!
“If I suddenly started speaking English through a translator, you should’ve figured it out yourself. If I really had no idea who you were, wouldn’t I have tried Chinese first, since it’s the most widely spoken language on Earth?”
At those words, the figure beneath the elk mask finally reacted.
Slowly.
She chuckled.
It was a strange, breathy sound, almost like a wild animal growling through an open throat.
After several more eerie noises like that, she finally spoke in a human voice.
“How?”
The mask was tossed aside without hesitation.
Now that her identity had been exposed, she apparently saw no reason to continue pretending.
But what emerged from beneath it was not the face I knew.
It was something entirely unexpected.
Not a single strand of hair remained on her head.
Even her eyebrows were gone.
Her face was ravaged by severe burns, the skin almost completely melted away.
And yet her eyes still possessed the same distinctive spark as always, revealing the young woman hidden beneath those scars.
Brooklyn, now wearing an appearance completely different from her usual one, moved her lips.
Her words were immediately translated into Korean and reached my ears through the device.
“You’re not surprised.”
Brooklyn seemed mildly intrigued by my lack of reaction to her unnatural appearance.
But honestly, I had already expected something like this from the moment I first saw the true ‘Beast.’
That American had long been famous as one of the world’s foremost users of regenerative abilities, after all.
‘She probably healed her wounds immediately during the fight with Haseong to minimize blood loss.’
And the fact that Beast was completely bald beneath the mask was probably intended to prevent any hair from being left behind for DNA analysis.
‘Moreover, with her face in that state, even the Searchers’ skills might not have recognized her as the “same person.”’
It seemed the reason Beast had managed to remain unidentified for so long wasn’t mere luck.
Haa.
Following a habit ingrained in this body, I pinched the bridge of my nose.
I had succeeded in stopping Brooklyn for the moment.
But this situation was looking extremely dangerous.
‘Probability that she changes targets and kills me to silence me: 90%...’
At this point, some people might raise an obvious question.
Brooklyn Morgan.
An S-rank healer so famous in the United States that she had even earned the nickname ‘Angel.’
How could someone like her possibly be Beast?
Under ordinary assumptions, it should have been structurally impossible.
Brooklyn’s awakened ability was healing.
Beast’s ability, on the other hand, was an aggressive form of spatial interference.
They were practically complete opposites.
If two fundamentally distinct attributes had manifested, the natural conclusion would be that they belonged to two different people.
But the mystery became easy to solve if one particular assumption was made.
‘This is a rare case.’
Brooklyn {N•o•v•e•l•i•g•h•t} Morgan was a Hunter with two awakened attributes.
With that one assumption, every contradiction disappeared.
But the deeper I thought about what dual attributes implied, the more disturbing it became.
This wasn’t simply a matter of possessing more skills than everyone else and calling it an advantage.
Magic was a concept intimately tied to a sorcerer’s mental image.
And because Earthlings had only recently awakened to sorcery, their attributes were often shaped by the image most deeply rooted within their minds...
Brooklyn had probably manifested differently from others because she carried within herself ‘contradictory desires that seemed as though they belonged to two different people.’
Yeah.
This wasn’t something as simple as putting on a superficial mask.
Not merely a persona.
‘Is her identity dissociated?’
Brooklyn Morgan was most likely a primeval sorcerer with multiple personalities.
Which created another problem.
Before entering this dungeon, I had sent Kang Changho a message telling him that I was heading into [Mimic City].
Judging from everything I had observed so far, our dear contractor normally started his day at around 6 AM.
But the problem was...
“Hmm.”
No matter how I looked at it, there was no way an F-rank like me could survive until 6 AM against a psychotic American with two attributes.
Should I just abandon Jung Haseong after all?
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