A Day Cursed With Bad Luck (4)

‘Over there…… they managed to peel one off.’

Barely dodging the attacks from the two juvenile Flightless Wyverns, Hyeonseong searched for the C-rank hunters.

She’d seen them fire off a pretty huge ice attack earlier, and it looked like they’d succeeded in pulling one wyvern’s attention back with it. The two of them were holding their own against the separated juvenile Flightless Wyvern.

‘Yeah—once it’s only one, it’s actually manageable.’

With the risk of being surrounded—or having their tempo constantly disrupted—gone, the two C-rank hunters handled the wyvern steadily and cleanly.

‘So I just need to keep dragging these two around until they finish that one.’

One worry fell away. This time, Hyeonseong barely avoided a tail-swipe from a wyvern that had closed the distance, rolling along the ground to escape.

‘By the way… is their only truly A-rank-level move just their breath?’

The two juvenile Flightless Wyverns stomped to send shockwaves, fired straight-line wind spells, tried to rush her down, then launched more wind spells in a messy barrage.

Some attacks she barely got out of the effective range of; others grazed her and left light damage.

All that time, the necklace effect never triggered even once. It stung and tingled, but the damage wasn’t big—meaning it wasn’t crossing the threshold.

‘Now that I think about it, the only thing that nearly hit me head-on was the breath.’

She briefly considered tanking one or two “weaker” hits on purpose, but rejected it immediately. Her stats were D-rank at best. If she miscalculated even once against an A-rank monster, she could die in a single blow.

‘Also—haven’t they gone a while without using breath?’

Dodging another sharp, chaotic gust of wind magic, Hyeonseong thought about it. The breath cooldown should’ve reset by now, but ever since they started chasing her, they hadn’t fired a single breath attack.

She recalled when they had used breath. The answer came fast.

‘It’s because I keep moving, so they can’t fire it.’

Every time they’d used breath, it was when they judged they could definitely destroy or kill—like when they erased the boulder field, or when they aimed at the fallen gatherer’s back.

‘So if I keep moving nonstop, then in theory I don’t need to worry about breath…’

A shockwave from a stomp made her body wobble. She barely caught her balance and forced her legs to keep going.

“In theory” was basically another way of saying “hard in reality.”

Hyeonseong didn’t have infinite stamina, and unfortunately, the juvenile Flightless Wyverns possessed a thing called intelligence.

If she dragged it out like this, she’d either collapse from exhaustion—or the wyverns would figure out a method to catch a fleeing prey.

Just like they did right now.

“Ghk!”

A violent wind roar slammed into her ears, and in an instant, wind wrapped around Hyeonseong’s body and lifted her into the air. A strangled scream burst out of her.

“Damn it—already?!”

Trapped in the center of the whirlwind, Hyeonseong looked down. The two juvenile Flightless Wyverns stared up at her from the ground.

Their chests swelled. A clear sign they were about to fire breath.

“Damn it—there’s no way to punch through a tornado!”

This dungeon didn’t look like the kind of place where whirlwinds or funnel clouds would form. Which was why Hyeonseong hadn’t bought any anti-whirlwind items.

And with her finances, she couldn’t stock up on stuff “just in case.”

‘What do I do?’

Two breath streams were coming. The necklace had two uses left.

‘If it’s simultaneous, how does the system count it?’

If the system treated simultaneous attacks as a single hit, only one use would be consumed. But if it treated each breath as separate, this one exchange would burn all remaining uses.

‘That can’t happen.’

And even if she blocked it once, it wouldn’t matter if she still couldn’t escape the whirlwind. If she stayed trapped, they’d obviously just fire breath again.

It would be great if the breath dispersed the whirlwind, but she had to assume it might not.

‘……Wait.’

A thought sparked. Hyeonseong squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them—and the current settings of Infinite Corridor spread out before her.

Infinite Corridor was currently partitioned into several sections based on item type. The first thing she’d done after strengthening the skill was organize it like this.

‘It said it can swallow anything… as long as it’s an “object,” right?’

The description definitely said that. Hyeonseong lowered her gaze again. Judging by their chest movement, the breath was about to fire.

‘……Nothing to lose!’

She immediately issued a command to Infinite Corridor.

Three empty partitions were created instantly. And right after that, the two juvenile Flightless Wyverns fired their breath.

Here’s the question:

Would an attack skill fired by a monster be judged as an “object”?

“Let’s find out!”

Hyeonseong thrust her fingertips toward the incoming breath. Her finger traced a horizontal line through empty air.

Following the movement of her fingers, space opened in a long slit. Her eyes still saw an ordinary landscape, but her senses—and the system messages—told her the truth.

One of the newly created empty partitions opened, and the breath slammed straight into it.

Hyeonseong got her answer immediately.

‘It worked!’

The empty Infinite Corridor swallowed both streams of the wyverns’ breath and shut.

Even in the middle of all that, a sponsorship came in.

“Ah—yes, Lord ‘Prankster of the Primordial Age’! Thank you again for your sponsorship!”

Hyeonseong greeted the Constellation as soon as she saw the message. Then she pulled up the item information for what had just been stored in the partition.

Infinite Corridor had recognized the breath as an item and swallowed it. That meant the breath should’ve been stored in item form.

When she loaded the stored item, she saw exactly one entry. She scanned it rapidly—without forgetting to set the info display so the Constellations could see it too.

Hyeonseong’s eyes widened like saucers. It was a far better haul than she’d expected.

Constellation reaction messages flooded in the moment they saw the info. Hyeonseong ignored them all. No one looked like they were sponsoring anything anyway.

‘With this…!’

She turned back toward the two juvenile Flightless Wyverns.

They swelled their chests again—breath stance. The whirlwind still hadn’t dispersed, so they meant to repeat the same attack.

“Not a chance!”

Hyeonseong reopened Infinite Corridor Partition 10 in the same direction as before.

System messages spilled out the instant the space opened. The wyverns’ captured breath fired immediately.

The size of the breath looked the same as a single wyvern’s breath—but the color was darker.

A normal single-breath was a pale ash-gray. The breath that burst out of Infinite Corridor was a deeper ash-gray than that.

“Waaaaaagh!”

The denser breath punched through the whirlwind, and the vortex holding Hyeonseong aloft scattered and vanished.

Hyeonseong began to fall. A scream jumped out of her on instinct.

“Damn it—cut it out with the ominous crap!”

She tried to ignore the chatter, but even Hyeonseong couldn’t easily ignore someone with an ominous name saying ominous things. She ended up snapping at the Constellation.

“I’m not going to die!”

Hyeonseong shouted and opened Infinite Corridor toward her projected landing point. An air-filled safety mat—commonly used to prevent fatal falls—dropped onto the ground.

Her body landed perfectly on it. Using the rebound, she rolled into a clean landing. The mat, which had once again saved her from fall-death, immediately returned to Infinite Corridor.

‘Enough Constellation nonsense—where’s the dragon?’

She looked for the monster right away. Because she’d been falling the moment the breath fired, she hadn’t seen whether the breath struck the juvenile Flightless Wyvern as intended.

She found the answer instantly.

One juvenile Flightless Wyvern was down on the ground.

‘Not dead… though.’

She checked its condition through the interstellar network system—again making sure to share the status with the Constellations.

The moment she shared the info, Constellation chatter surged again. This time they’d apparently read it faster than she did.

Hyeonseong quickly scanned the status readout. Unfortunately, it wasn’t dead.

But it was in a near-death state—its HP had been blown away by a single hit, and the powerful backlash from being struck mid-cast had stacked heavy debuffs.

‘Stun, paralysis, confusion, unable to use magic, slowed mana recovery… So movement and spellcasting are basically…’

“Ghk!”

Before she could finish, several razor wind blades shot toward her entire body.

Hyeonseong jolted and dodged frantically. The blades grazed her, slicing her hair, cheek, and limbs in shallow cuts.

Needless to say, it was the work of the one remaining juvenile Flightless Wyvern still in good condition.

‘Damn it. I let my guard down.’

One was standing perfectly fine right there, and she still failed to keep track—because she’d gotten distracted by how insane the captured breath’s power was.

And then Hyeonseong had to start playing tag with the monster again. The count was down to one, but the difficulty didn’t drop.

‘Crazy—its eyes are completely rolled back!’

Watching it rage like that, Hyeonseong couldn’t help feeling dumbfounded. For all their reputation, dragons were extreme individualists. They weren’t the type to get angry because an ally got hurt.

‘No—wait. They’re juveniles.’

There was exactly one exception: when a juvenile—hatchling-level—was attacked.

Even the most individualistic dragon would instantly fly into a rage if its eggs or juveniles were harmed, and would attack the culprit.

‘Don’t tell me that rule applies even between juveniles?’

That was the only explanation for why it started losing its mind.

‘So how do I deal with that?’

Dodging a stomp-induced crack in the ground, Hyeonseong thought again.

The “swallow their breath and return it” trick would be hard to repeat right away. It wasn’t easy to bait them into firing breath again.

‘It’s not like it’ll fire breath the moment I stop… and more importantly, it fired breath and its buddy got wrecked. If it learned from that, then it’s completely unusable.’

She needed something else.

Luckily, there was one thing lying around that could work.

‘A draconic body is pretty tough, right?’

The thing she decided to use was the other juvenile Flightless Wyvern—collapsed and near-death.

Even as a juvenile, a dragon was still a dragon. Unless it was an A-rank skill of equal tier, it would be tough enough to shrug off weaker attacks.

After flailing for a bit under the enraged wyvern’s wild attacks, Hyeonseong barely managed to pivot toward where the near-death wyvern had fallen.

The moment she turned, the enraged wyvern fired a couple straight-line wind attacks—and then suddenly stopped.

Hyeonseong immediately understood why.

‘It figured out my angle.’

When she glanced back, the enraged juvenile Flightless Wyvern was tapping the ground with its tail—like an annoyed cat.

It might look cute in another context, but Hyeonseong’s face twisted.

A lizard wasn’t doing that to “act cute.” It was clearly thinking through its next move.

While it hesitated, Hyeonseong tried to close the distance to the near-death wyvern. She kept running— but soon she had to stop. A wall of wind flew in and blocked her path.

“Tch.”

Hyeonseong clicked her tongue. It found a second usable method way too fast. Its intelligence was higher than she’d expected.

‘This is bad.’

She ran along the wall to the left, thinking hard. From the looks of it, the monster was using wind barriers to guide the direction Hyeonseong could move.

As if to prove her right, another wind barrier formed right in front of her.

If she turned left again, she’d be headed straight toward where the juvenile Flightless Wyvern was waiting. So the only options were to backtrack or slip off diagonally.

‘And my back is already sealed off…’

A dense wind pressure unique to the barrier brushed her back. In the end, her only choices were: the direction where the wyvern waited, or the two diagonal flanks.

‘If only I had a way to punch through—no chance in hell!’

Hyeonseong turned her body toward the wyvern’s direction and then tried to break to the wyvern’s right.

The moment she faced it head-on, it began casting an attack skill.

Pale, small spheres dotted the air around it—looking like either wind arrows or wind bullets.

‘Both can be mass-cast as long as it has mana…’

Hyeonseong frowned, unable to tell which it was.

She found out soon enough. After finishing the cast, the juvenile Flightless Wyvern fired— and what shot out were arrows.

‘Right. Those are way better for lobbing in arcs!’

Hyeonseong ground her teeth as she watched arrows fly in complex, varied trajectories.

There were so many that even rolling along the ground wasn’t enough—because some arrows pierced the earth and stabbed up from below.

She dodged everything she could, but there were plenty that looked unavoidable.

Each time she judged she couldn’t evade, Hyeonseong opened another empty partition of Infinite Corridor.

The wind arrows were swallowed and stored as items.

Each time she swallowed a wind arrow into Infinite Corridor, the stored item’s remaining uses increased by one.

‘So I’ve secured a weapon.’

While she kept dodging and swallowing wind arrow attacks, the near-death juvenile Flightless Wyvern ended up farther away again.

But in return, Hyeonseong managed to find the two C-rank hunters again—who were fighting the one juvenile Flightless Wyvern they’d separated earlier.

‘Ah—they got it.’

With perfect timing, the Destroyer’s axe blade successfully cut through the wyvern’s neck.

“Hey! Over here!”

The moment the system displayed the message that the juvenile Flightless Wyvern had died, Hyeonseong shouted to the two of them. They turned at her voice.

“Ye Hyeonseong?”

“What about the other one…?”

The two C-rank hunters rushed toward her.

“It’s over there! Take this one off me!”

Hyeonseong shouted again at the two C-rank hunters as they arrived. And as she did, she quickly scanned their condition.