Ryu Sunghyun took the lead, with Kwon Taehyuk in the middle carrying the unconscious J on his back. Eun Woojeong followed at the rear as the three of them descended the long staircase leading underground.
“This goes ridiculously deep. If someone missed a step and rolled all the way down, even an S-rank would die just like that, wouldn’t they?”
Eun Woojeong’s idle joke echoed through the underground space. Of course, neither Kwon Taehyuk nor Ryu Sunghyun answered.
After going down for a long time, the three of them found a door. Ryu Sunghyun and Kwon Taehyuk opened it while bracing for an attack that might be waiting on the other side, only to be met with a place so empty it felt anticlimactic.
A wide chamber with a chandelier.
But the sharp-eyed S-ranks immediately noticed the faint footprints left on the floor, and the dried bloodstains in the middle of the room.
“Is it Hunter Cha Seohu’s blood?”
Ryu Sunghyun hurried over to check, then shook his head.
“No. I don’t think so. It dried a long time ago.”
But his voice was much more rigid than before. Even if it was not Cha Seohu’s blood, the mere presence of bloodstains made the unease worse.
The expression on Eun Woojeong’s face, entering behind them, also turned cold.
“Let’s keep moving. If it were Cha Seohu, he wouldn’t have stopped just because he found bloodstains or a corpse.”
With a bitter smile, Eun Woojeong strode past the bloodstains and headed into the corridor straight ahead.
“Wait, don’t just go in there by yourse—ah...”
Kwon Taehyuk, who had started to stop him, let out a deep sigh at the sight of Eun Woojeong pushing ahead without hesitation, as if he had been frustrated for a while now.
Hurrying after him into the corridor, Kwon Taehyuk and Ryu Sunghyun both narrowed their eyes.
“It looks like the inside of a hospital. The excessive whiteness, I mean.”
At Ryu Sunghyun’s mutter, thick with distaste, Kwon Taehyuk nodded and looked around while still carrying J.
White walls and floors without a speck of dust. White lights of the same sterile color were fixed to the ceiling.
“What taste...”
Apparently Eun Woojeong found it just as irritating. Leaving behind a short sneer, he quickened his pace.
Just as when they had first come down the underground stairs, the three of them walked in silence through the same endless white corridor for a long time. Fortunately, before Eun Woojeong’s irritation could finally explode, they found a door.
“Wow, I was seriously about to lose it. If this crazy white had kept going just a little longer, I really would’ve smashed the wall.”
With a shameless tone that was half joke, half sincere, Eun Woojeong strode toward the door.
“Wait. Don’t open it recklessly. We have no idea what’s on the other side.”
“And if we don’t? Are we going to stand here waiting all day? If we want to find Cha Seohu before something happens to him, we don’t have time to spare like that.”
“That’s not what I mean. At the very least—”
Before Kwon Taehyuk could finish, Eun Woojeong kicked the door hard.
Bang!
With a deafening crash, the door failed to withstand the force of an S-rank and flew into the room crumpled like paper.
Kwon Taehyuk parted his lips in disbelief, while beside him Ryu Sunghyun dragged a dry hand over his face.
“See? Nothing happened at a—”
Eun Woojeong, mid-shrug, suddenly spotted something inside the room and stopped.
At that, Kwon Taehyuk and Ryu Sunghyun also instantly looked past the doorway and froze in shock.
“Hunter Yoon Jeha!”
In the middle of the room stood a transparent glass coffin.
Inside, leaning at an angle among flowers, Yoon Jeha was trapped with her eyes closed. Her pale face looked creepily like a corpse.
Horrified, Kwon Taehyuk handed the unconscious J over to Ryu Sunghyun and rushed forward.
After making sure there were no devices attached to it, Kwon Taehyuk tore off the glass lid of the coffin without hesitation and threw it aside.
Carefully reaching out, he touched her neck, then let out a long breath of relief.
“She’s alive. She’s just asleep.”
Ryu Sunghyun, who had been waiting tensely, relaxed in relief as well.
Standing one step behind them with his arms folded, Eun Woojeong shrugged.
“At least that was the most urgent and entertaining thing that’s happened since we came in here. She’s the one who made Cha Seohu come all the way here, right?”
“There must have been a reason she was captured. Hunter Yoon Jeha is S-rank too, so she wouldn’t have gone down easily. No—more than that, the condition was that she wasn’t supposed to fight. The promise was that once she identified the location, she would wait for us. And Hunter Yoon Jeha isn’t stupid, so she would have acted accordingly.”
Eun Woojeong listened to Kwon Taehyuk’s explanation with bland disinterest, then jerked his chin toward J, who was in Ryu Sunghyun’s arms.
“You said it has something to do with this kid, right? Then it’s obvious. That woman doesn’t exactly look loyal enough to keep a promise she made with Cha Seohu.”
“...Let’s at least hear it from the person involved.”
The white corridor, the white room, and even the white flowers filling the coffin.
Frowning at the unsettling feeling, Kwon Taehyuk lifted the sleeping Yoon Jeha out of the coffin and carefully laid her on the floor.
“Hunter Yoon Jeha, get a hold of yourself. Hunter Yoon Jeha!”
But no matter how many times he called her name and shook her shoulder, Yoon Jeha would not wake.
Even if she had been drugged with something like sleeping pills, with this much shaking she should at least have frowned or twitched her fingers.
But Yoon Jeha did not move at all, as if she were dead.
“A skill?”
“At the very least, it’s clearly not an ordinary state of sleep.”
Ryu Sunghyun narrowed his eyes awkwardly.
An unconscious J and a sleeping Yoon Jeha.
In a place that was effectively enemy territory, carrying one of them around might have been possible, but not both.
More than anything, unlike Yoon Jeha, there was no telling what J would do once he woke up. The risk was even greater because he could easily lunge at them and attack just as he had in the church.
Kwon Taehyuk seemed to be thinking the same thing as Ryu Sunghyun, because this time he could not easily say they should bring him too.
“Great. Then we leave both of them here and move on.”
Catching on at once to the conflict the two men were having, Eun Woojeong flashed a crooked smile.
“You’re not about to say something insane like we should take them with us again, right? I’m warning you now, I absolutely will not lift a finger. Especially not for that little bastard. If he wakes up and stabs you in the back while he’s on your shoulders, don’t look at me.”
“Ha...”
Kwon Taehyuk let out an irritated breath and pressed his fingers hard against his temple.
Things were already complicated enough, and Eun Woojeong’s taunting voice was pushing his patience to its limit.
Ryu Sunghyun also looked exhausted, but he pulled himself together faster than Kwon Taehyuk did.
“This time, he’s right. We can’t take both of them. At most, one. And that one has to be Hunter Yoon Jeha. In the first place, Hunter Cha Seohu came here alone to save her.”
“...Understood.”
Kwon Taehyuk set aside his discomfort and nodded.
Cha Seohu, who had gone ahead first to save Yoon Jeha, was nowhere to be seen, and the pressure of the fact that they had found Yoon Jeha first instead weighed heavily on him.
'Please, nothing can have happened to him....'
Forcing away the ominous premonition, Kwon Taehyuk reached out to lift Yoon Jeha onto his back.
Then—
A cluster of yellow light suddenly appeared out of nowhere and wrapped itself around Yoon Jeha’s body where she lay on the floor.
The light flashed for only the briefest moment and vanished, and astonishingly, as if life had been poured back into an empty shell, Yoon Jeha’s eyelashes trembled and a faint groan escaped her.
“Ugh...”
It was unmistakably the look of someone just waking from sleep.
Kwon Taehyuk quickly called out to her.
“Hunter Yoon Jeha, are you all right? Are you awake?”
“Ugh... wh-what? Guildmaster Kwon Taehyuk?”
Yoon Jeha’s eyes flew open. Pressing a hand to her forehead at the faint headache, she pushed herself up and looked around, her face hardening.
“Wait. What is this place? Where am I?”
“District T-27. Don’t you remember? You came to find your younger sibling.”
Only then, as if what had happened before she lost consciousness came back to her, Yoon Jeha’s eyes widened.
“That’s right. So then... I was going to... these cult bastards...”
Speaking in a confused, groping voice, Yoon Jeha’s gaze soon shifted to J in Ryu Sunghyun’s arms.
Her red eyes shook violently.
Gloop.
The thick liquid made a strange sound as it dripped onto the laboratory floor.
Half of Cha Seohu’s body was no longer visible.
His entire upper body had been sucked into the Cult Leader’s body, and only his lower half remained, limp on the bed.
“Ahaha, ahaha...!”
Several of the tentacles protruding from the Cult Leader’s body writhed energetically, trying to swallow the rest of him.
The Cult Leader burst into a choked laugh, overwhelmed by the richness of the vitality he could already feel even from swallowing only Cha Seohu’s upper body.
“Mr. Cha Seohu, you really are...! The best. You’re absolutely the best. I knew it.”
In time with the laughter, the body swallowing Cha Seohu trembled faintly.
“To think it would be this much after swallowing only half of you—far beyond even my expectations. Haah... how tragic it would have been if I’d failed to recognize you and let you slip away.”
Whispering softly, the Cult Leader urged him on in a voice thick with excitement.
“Now, come in quickly with the rest of you too. And dream happily. Inside me.”
At those words, the hand that had not yet been fully swallowed dropped limply off the side of the bed.
Then it happened.
Golden light flashed and flooded the entire laboratory.
It lasted only an instant, too brief even to blink.
Sensing the strange change belatedly, the Cult Leader opened his mouth.
“What just—”
But he could not finish.
His throat was cut.
Nothing was visible, and there was no sound.
The Cult Leader’s head dropped with a dull thud. His entire body tilted backward, and Cha Seohu, who had not yet been completely swallowed, slipped back out.
“Not too late, then.”
Catching Cha Seohu as he fell from the bed and lifting him into his arms, Chronos let out a breath.

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