The situation itself isn’t lethal.

There is, in fact, a monster filling a vast space in the same room, but it shows no intention to attack nor any movement that looks like it’s preparing to attack, and true to a medium-class, there are no minions observed.

My classmate, Gong Gyeong-min, is alive.

And sleeping very peacefully at that.

He was lying inside a steel pod, his body plastered with life-support devices.

The helmet on his face—wired so thickly it looked like a human vascular system draped over him—appeared to be an immersive virtual-reality unit, the type the Chinese were said to be pushing hard to develop.

I don’t know the detailed principles or operating method, but it’s the sort governments don’t recommend, the kind that suppresses the user’s biosigns and consciousness to force deeper immersion in virtual reality.

Perfect for turning someone into a shut-in.

What world he’s in was shown by the monitor set beside the steel-and-glass pod.

Glug—

Listening to the large IV line pulsing, the yellow solution sloshing as it fed dotted rivulets into his veins, I approached him.

My primary objective is my classmate, but the thing I kept my eyes fixed on was that huge monster with the vacant, glossless black eye.

Five meters tall, just in height.

Its legs are short, but it has four arms as long as its height.

I don’t have Hunter weapons on me, so for now I have to rely on the rifle and the axe, but there are Hunter weapons in the vehicle we stashed outside.

That said, just like Yeom Dda-wan’s crew said, the monster only observes us and makes no movement.

Wondering what its purpose is, I went up to Gong Gyeong-min.

Tap tap—

I knocked on the pod.

No response.

THUNK! THUNK! THUNK!

I tried knocking a little harder, but he didn’t so much as twitch.

The monitor showed him lying in a virtual world, eyes closed.

Looks like he’s sleeping.

I looked under the monitor.

Just as expected, a computer.

A console governing this entire facility.

Whether it was developed off the groupware used by the National Ability ✧ NоvеIight ✧ (Original source) Agency or not, it wasn’t hard to operate.

First I checked the security camera feeds.

I cycled through the various cameras installed inside the base.

I found other people.

More precisely, people in the same state as Gong Gyeong-min.

Unlike the owner of the bunker, though, they were lying in steel pods packed into a narrow, cramped room rather than a wide space.

Their health was hard to verify—each pod’s glass was covered in a cloudy something.

No sign of the monster.

No—wait.

A few Extinction-types were slinking around inside what looked like the food store—more accurately, a freezer facility that seemed to be the IV storage.

Either they spawned naturally, or they teleported via the Rift’s power, one of the two.

It’s rare in the wild, but monsters can teleport.

They only use it when their route is artificially sealed off perfectly—say, when they’re confined in a human-made research facility.

It wasn’t on the route I needed to take right now.

I disengaged the lock on the entrance.

BEEEEP—

A loud sound and lights rattled the whole space, but he didn’t so much as stir.

Keeping an eye on the monster, I slowly headed to the exit.

The heavy door stood wide open, and below it a girl who looked like Woo Min-hee and a big dog snapped upright, waiting for me.

“Hold up.”

I went to the vehicle hidden in the ruins and grabbed a Hunter weapon.

Inside were two Hunter weapons and an exoskeleton rig, so I put on the exoskeleton.

Clack!

Having an assistant is handy in a lot of ways.

Especially with putting on a pain-in-the-neck exoskeleton.

I strapped on the boot-type leg exos that assist both feet and the unit that augments grip strength on my right arm.

“You look like a robot.”

Mark Two said as she looked at me.

The exoskeleton is insurance, nothing more.

I have no intention of closing to melee against a monster I don’t know—one with four arms.

I brought a Hunter weapon called a Spear.

Monster Punch is abundant in quantity and cheap to use on an unmoving target like that, but it explodes.

If I’m unlucky and the round punches through the monster’s body and hits a vital unit of the facility, things will get complicated.

The Spear is similar to my favorite Harpoonizer, but it’s more delicate.

Up to the point of embedding in a monster’s body, it’s like the Harpoonizer—named after a whaling harpoon—but unlike the Harpoonizer, which triggers a fierce chain of explosions, the Spear emits superheated steam and melts the monster’s trunk from the inside.

It’s a monster weapon specialized for tight interiors.

The downside is it’s expensive, and the destructive power of that superheated steam often comes up a little short, so it lost out to the Harpoonizer in the market.

But with an exoskeleton on, that won’t be a problem for me.

Against a mostly disabled monster, an exoskeleton that lets me leap three meters and bring an axe down with mechanical brute force should make a medium-class not that hard to kill.

That said, even with all this insurance, my plan is not to touch the monster.

If, as Yeom Dda-wan said, it’s some creature that, for unknown reasons, only observes humans, then there’s no problem.

The monsters that need killing are endless.

There’s no need to remove even the ones squatting in someone else’s house.

My objective is Gong Gyeong-min, nothing else.

It’s not like it’s hungry.

“Let’s go.”

It could be dangerous, but I brought Mark Two and John_nenon the Third as an extension of this recon.

She’s still young, but I intend to teach her how to adapt to the battlefield.

Basic combat training, concepts, and how to use powers—she learned them in the facility, but she still lacks experience.

She needs to get used to the field.

Like Sue did.

That small, cute kid turning into a warrior no weaker than her mother made me rethink human growth.

Other people’s kids really do grow fast.

Well, the fact my own life is unstable now is another reason I’m taking Mark Two along.

We’re here in the first place to kill Kang Han-min.

I went back into Gong Gyeong-min’s sanctum.

“Hold on.”

I headed to where the IVs were.

Under red lighting like a butcher’s lamp, the Extinction-types moving sluggishly turned to look at me.

They were the kind called Rapers, the type with blades at the groin.

A five-fingered new model did appear, but to this day the two representative Extinction-types are the Caterpillar and the Raper.

The Raper doesn’t have an official designation, but since everyone calls it Raper, the name stuck.

With no body that can unify monster nomenclature—and no Hunters left to grant that authority—what people call them is their names.

Take the Nemesis type: I’m the only one who calls it Nemesis; everyone else still calls it General type.

Rip—!

I cleared the Extinction-types fast.

The only weapon I used was the axe.

Bullets are a waste on slow, inferior under-classes.

The reason I bothered to spend time removing them was partly to secure Mark Two’s safety and eliminate variables, but the most important reason was this.

Press—

I pushed a button on the exoskeleton.

The moment I pressed it, my arm temporarily detached from the clip-on external frame, and the mechanical arm bowed upward, like a trebuchet bending the throwing arm deep.

Press—

I pressed another button.

THUNK!

With a crisp thrum, the mechanical arm brought the axe down and, literally, split the monster cleanly in two vertically.

A blow impossible by human strength—truly like a trebuchet.

“......”

Watching the monster dissolve into light particles, I reconstructed the attack in my head.

Usable.

Plenty usable in real combat.

As I listened to the creaking sound—like a rusty wreck of a hydraulic press gasping for breath—of it charging up, I slipped my right arm back into the detached exoframe.

Clack!

All the Extinction-types were down.

Time to take Gong Gyeong-min with us.

“Is this the classmate you mentioned, Hunter?”

“Yeah.”

I answered while glaring at the eyeball thing.

It’s definitely different from anything we’ve faced until now.

There’s an obvious presence nearby, and even while its fellow monsters are dissolving into particles of light, it makes no movement at all.

It’s a far cry from the “deactivation” you see in ordinary monsters.

It looks like the very act of sitting motionless and watching something is its purpose.

But what does it want to see?

Why observe us humans at all?

Don’t they already have enough data?

Is there something more it wants to know?

No—before that, does the Rift have any reason to observe humans?

No way to tell.

The Rift’s will is beyond human understanding—and we shouldn’t try to understand it.

That kind of thinking only creates a second Kang Han-min.

Under the monster’s gaze, I approached Gong Gyeong-min.

He was still asleep.

I worked the console and opened the lid.

Psssshh—

I looked at his arms—thin and wasted.

There was still some muscle left.

With a little recovery, he could be thrown back into combat.

I did the cold calculus I would’ve done back in my Professor days, whether I wanted to or not, and shook him.

“Gong Gyeong-min. Gyeong-min!”

No answer.

Is he just sleeping that deeply?

Or is that virtual reality unit not letting him go?

I worked the console again.

There it was.

[ Release Virtual Reality ]

A button to end his dream.

I clicked it.

With a beep—, a warning popped up.

[ Warning! The current user is in Stage-3 Deep Dive. Forcibly waking the user may cause severe adverse effects on consciousness. ]

[ Proceed anyway? ]

“......”

Looks like a pretty serious piece of gear.

Well, I guess you’d need this level of immersion to forget the horrible reality outside.

But his dream didn’t look like a paradise.

On the screen, Gong Gyeong-min—more precisely, his avatar—was awake.

Where he was wasn’t the Chinese-style fantasy realm he’d once shown me, nor the place with AI friends each with distinct personalities.

He was sitting in an empty room, with no one in it.

The room was thoroughly Korean.

A ceiling just over two meters; white-tone wallpaper; assorted tchotchkes for “decor”; a desk; a small window; a fluorescent light; a monitor and computer; a bed.

He was seated at the computer.

I watched what he did.

He was on the internet.

Even though he’d imported that Chinese-style dream realm wholesale, what he was doing was the same thing I used to do: the internet.

I couldn’t see exactly which site, but it looked like a forum similar to Viva! Apocalypse!

I looked at him.

He still lay completely motionless, imprisoned in his nightmare.

I looked around.

To wake him, I’d need a VR unit too.

I’d have to jump into that world and reach out a hand to him.

I think it’s viable.

No matter how I looked at it, the world he’s in didn’t look like any kind of ideal.

I couldn’t find a spare unit in the large space.

Looks like I’ll have to go to the room where the others were lying.

“Mark Two.”

“Yes.”

“Let’s move.”

Even if it’s an inert monster, leaving a child alone with it isn’t a good idea.

With Mark Two, I headed for where Gong Gyeong-min’s friends were—the place I’d confirmed on CCTV.

[ Dive Room ]

A pretty sizable door came into view.

Before I even swung it open, a bad feeling hit me.

“......”

I looked at John_nenon the Third.

Its ears were flattened.

Right.

A stench.

Bad enough to seep through the crack of a closed door.

“Hold on. Stay there.”

I pulled a pocket respirator from my coat, sealed my mouth and nose, and threw the door open.

“......”

A chamber of death, as expected.

Not a single living person.

It didn’t look like the Extinction-types I’d dealt with were the culprits.

The steel-and-glass pods covering the eight or so dead were all firmly shut, with no sign of being pried open from the outside.

I opened a few pods and checked the condition of the bodies.

No external trauma.

I looked at the IV lines that were still uselessly feeding nutrients into the corpses.

Maybe someone poisoned the IVs.

If so, the suspect list narrows to Gong Gyeong-min—but drawing conclusions here would be meaningless.

From an empty pod I took one VR unit and went back out.

Shrrrk—

I drew the axe.

“......”

I slowly turned around.

There was something, as expected.

Something rift-like and ash-gray.

A human.

No—call it an NPC.

That indelible NPC-like thing I’d seen once in Gong Gyeong-min’s nightmare stood in the dark.

Could that be the culprit?

But that’s only a phantom.

The flame of my hatred, which senses hunger, told me so.

It’s just one fractured hue of the Rift, refracted through the prism of a machine made by humans.

It wavered, and then it began to vanish.

It was a blink-and-you-miss-it incident, but in that blink, I noticed the NPC-like thing didn’t look like the female NPC I’d seen earlier.

“......”

No point puzzling over something I can’t understand. 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

All I need to know is that there’s still Rift interference in Gong Gyeong-min’s “paradise,” and that the interference is ongoing.

Back in the hall, Mark Two came up to me.

“Hunter.”

“Hold on. It stinks.”

“That’s not it.”

She pointed down the corridor.

Good thing I hadn’t sheathed the axe.

There was something beyond the hall.

A monster—or rather, a phantom.

A grayish-white ghost, similar to the one in the room of rotting corpses, was standing there in the corridor.

I needed to hurry.

I was about to stride past the ghost when it changed shape.

A fussy woman in glasses whom I didn’t know.

It looked more human than NPC, but the instant I passed it, it vanished like a mirage.

Thud—

Someone collapsed behind me.

Mark Two.

“What is it?”

I spun around at once.

Nothing there.

She had fallen by herself.

Her face didn’t look good.

Even though she’s usually expressionless, I could tell at a glance she was under significant mental stress.

“T-the teacher.”

“Teacher?”

“The teacher from the facility.”

“Facility?”

“Yes! They just appeared and disappeared...”

Whoever that teacher is, one thing is certain: to Mark Two, they’re an object of fear.

I held out my hand.

“Here.”

She took it.

Even through her cold hand, I could feel her heart pounding.

No doubt she’d just experienced very high-intensity stress.

Holding Mark Two’s hand, I returned to Gong Gyeong-min’s room.

The one-eyed monster with the black eye was still crouched there, watching us.

“......”

Could it be connected?

For a moment, I considered killing it, but soon dismissed the idea.

Information on that type comes first.

In a situation no different from a one-on-one with zero interference, I want to observe it.

I think I need to find out what sort of harm that Rift-spawned thing actually inflicts on us.

If what Yeom Dda-wan said is true, we’re going to be running into that thing fairly often from now on.

“If anything happens, press this button.”

I gestured to John_nenon the Third to guard Mark Two, then pulled the VR unit over my head.

Of course, I wouldn’t choose full immersion like Gong Gyeong-min.

I set it to display on a screen and operate by keyboard and mouse.

When I finished setting it up, a new window popped up.

[ It’s your first time. Please enter your nickname. ]

Tap-tap-tap.

Username: SKELTON

It wasn’t exactly surprising, but while I typed my nickname, a young woman appeared beyond the black screen and looked this way.

“......”

Tap-tap-tap.

SKELTON: (Skeleton) Get lost

Whether she understood my chat or it was just the Rift’s whim, the ash-gray woman vanished.

The black screen disappeared, and a pallid room spread out before my eyes.

Gong Gyeong-min’s room.