Nonhyeon-dong Dungeon Explosion Incident (18)

He selected the record in question and started playback. At once, the surrounding scenery shifted into the Nonhyeon-dong area.

-Stop them!

-Civilian evacuation is…….

Awakened hurried past Kwon Seojin in a blur. Some even passed straight through his body. It looked exactly like reality, but it was only an illusion, so that was only natural.

When he first used the skill, he often got startled without thinking, but now that he was used to it, he could calmly focus only on the situation he wanted to confirm.

At first, it unfolded with an atmosphere similar to today’s battle. The mood began to change when they tried to gather the regular monsters into one place and bombard them.

-Damn it, are those tactical guys out of their minds?

-The barrier’s breaking!

-I know…!

-Aaaagh!

Some of the defensive skills failed to withstand the bombardment’s firepower and shattered. As a result, the raid teams sheltering under the broken skills couldn’t avoid getting hurt.

Perhaps luck was with them, because there were fewer critically injured than expected. Still, compared to today’s raid, the number of wounded was several times higher.

‘So the divergence already started here.’

Watching them pull the injured back after the bombardment ended, Kwon Seojin recalled today’s breaking news alerts and the posts flooding various communities.

-That was the last one we killed!

-Then why isn’t the clear message……?

-What the hell… a sleeping monster?

-Damn it, the boss was hidden in the structure?

It was when they tried to pull out the wounded first and then clear away the bombardment debris. The synthetic beast Do-ol appeared as the boss. This part was identical to what happened this time.

-Those bastards went in first!

-Run, before they steal the credit!

When the boss appeared, some raid teams immediately charged toward it. But there weren’t as many as you might think.

-Do you really have to rush ahead like that?

-It’s rated as an S-rank boss. We need to be careful before we jump in.

-Our team can’t go out right now. Our leader’s injured—what do you want us to do?

There were plenty of teams insisting on caution, or using injured teammates as an excuse to hang back.

It was a textbook scene of unity failing.

Those Awakened who had taken the front moved to stop the boss however they could. The most conspicuous among them was the Hyeonghok Guild raid team, led by Guildmaster Song Jiwoo.

In a raid scene where cohesion had broken, the performance of the only team that had an S-rank Awakened stood out all the more. It was only natural—this had become a solo fight rather than a team fight.

Some people admired the Hyeonghok raid team and Song Jiwoo’s visible accomplishments. In this situation, they were the ones firmly hooking the boss’s ankle, at least.

But of course, not everyone was admiring them.

-Damn it, those Hyeonghok guys have been running wild however they want since earlier.

-They’re doing that because they trust their guildmaster.

-The impressive one is Song Jiwoo, not them.

-Honestly, isn’t Song Jiwoo being like that over there a nuisance too?

-Exactly. If she’s dumping firepower solo like that, how are we supposed to coordinate a pincer?

Complaints about the Hyeonghok Guild spilled out from all over. There were several times more voices of dissatisfaction than voices of admiration.

And those complaints had their own reasoning. Their habit of projecting firepower first without checking the front and back was getting in the way of coordinated attacks.

But there was an even stronger reason than that.

It was, naturally, jealousy toward the only guild in the area that had an S-rank Awakened.

In the Gangnam-gu area, there were plenty of Awakened and guilds who felt inferior to Song Jiwoo and the Hyeonghok Guild. They just couldn’t openly show that inferiority or dissatisfaction, given how often they needed to ask for cooperation.

‘But when they faced a battle situation that got twisted into nonsense… the complaints they’d built up finally spilled out. …Though Hyeonghok wasn’t the only one who got an earful.’

-If those Woojae guys hadn’t gotten greedy for no reason…

-Did everyone who got hurt back then really come back?

-Mostly. But some of them are trying to slip away…

Complaints aimed at the guild that caused trouble before the boss appeared, and at Awakened who wanted to bail out of a fight that didn’t look profitable.

-So what’s actually going on right now?

-From what we can see…

-Hey, tactical team. You still haven’t settled on a plan?

Anxiety, too, over a situation where information and tactics weren’t being relayed properly.

No matter how you looked at it, it was bad.

‘Right. And after this… I’m sure there was another accident, and the battle dragged on.’

Just as Kwon Seojin finished that thought, a group of Awakened started fighting each other over the monsters.

Their skills that defended against mental-type debuffs got disrupted, and they were hit by the synthetic beast Enemy Knight’s debuff skill.

‘The problem was that there was no tactical system capable of coordinating all the Awakened who showed up on-site.’

It was an accident that wouldn’t have happened if the tactical structure had been properly established. But back then, the tactical team formed by multiple guilds was said to be overflowing with discord to a bizarre degree.

‘And it turned out they’d all been caught in a Constellation prank as a group.’

It was something revealed when the truth of the incident was investigated after the explosion was contained.

According to testimony from a guild member on the tactical team, Constellations watching the raid scene had played pranks by assigning quests or applying debuffs. When the involved parties released their Interstellar Network system logs, that testimony was proven true.

‘…And that’s why people said the real war started after the boss hunt was over.’

Before long, the Awakened illusions were taking down both the synthetic beast Do-ol and the synthetic beast Enemy Knight. All sorts of absurd discord and accidents happened, but the hunt itself succeeded.

The record that had been replaying as an illusion ended the moment the hunt succeeded and vanished. The scenery returned to his tiny rental room.

‘And what happened after that…’

Kwon Seojin checked the information that had reappeared on the search screen.

After the dungeon explosion was contained, what remained was a wide area of smashed roads and parts of buildings, a far higher number of wounded than expected, and spoils and clear rewards that were nowhere near enough to cover the losses.

It was only natural that the post-incident negotiation between guilds turned extremely hostile. And when that situation was reported, it was icing on the cake that the public scorned them for doing nothing but shifting blame to each other.

‘After this, relations between guilds that used the Nonhyeon-dong area as a base became pretty stiff. And…’

Guild relations mattered, but there was a bigger change than that.

After this Nonhyeon-dong dungeon explosion incident, combat guilds were half-forced into taking on the role of vigilantes.

That, too, was a natural result. No one knew when, where, or at what scale an explosive-type dungeon might appear again.

After explosive-type dungeons began appearing, people could no longer predict when and where monsters might spill out and attack.

It was a different kind of fear from the more predictable “normal” dungeon explosion incidents, or erosion-type dungeons.

‘The fear that your lived reality is being threatened directly.’

It wasn’t an overreaction. In fact, after the Nonhyeon-dong incident, the frequency of explosive-type dungeons shot up vertically. It was a real, tangible terror.

‘That part will be the same this time too.’

There was no way Constellations and the Interstellar Network would let a perfectly functional method for opening explosive-type dungeons rot away unused.

As early as tomorrow, all kinds of news would be reporting voices demanding that each combat guild defend its territory. A national-level emergency order might even come down.

‘But… the guild side will be different.’

Kwon Seojin’s gaze returned to the information about changes in inter-guild relations.

Back then, until the battle ended, they were tossed around by Constellation pranks and couldn’t find a point of agreement.

As a result, Gangnam-gu—centered on Nonhyeon-dong—became an area where inter-guild power plays happened frequently. Other guilds were dragged into the disputes of the guilds that had participated in the first explosive-type dungeon incident.

There was no way constant inter-guild conflict could help maintain public safety in the area.

With the dungeon threat that could explode at any moment, plus Awakened brawls layered on top, it didn’t take long for Gangnam-gu’s reputation to crash.

‘But this time, the kind of thing that would spark that emotional brawl got cut off.’

Unlike then, this time Ye Hyeonseong had stepped into the raid. Just one person stepping in changed a great deal.

‘Originally, there were already a lot of wounded even before entering the boss phase. But this time…’

Not only had the room for discord shrunk drastically, the number of wounded had dropped drastically as well. Most noteworthy of all was how few critically injured there were.

‘It felt like only two or three unlucky people got seriously hurt… and even those were injuries that would recover without aftereffects if treated properly.’

Compared to before—when there were well over ten, and several with severe injuries that couldn’t avoid aftereffects—it was different in many ways.

‘Objectively speaking… I can only say they were lucky in a lot of ways.’

To Kwon Seojin, Ye Hyeonseong’s tactics and orders were full of openings. It was almost surprising that the Awakened from each guild followed them without major complaints.

And yet, somehow, they finished the boss hunt without major damage. It truly was a lucky outcome.

‘But subjectively… should I call it “as expected”?’

More precisely, maybe it was that she looked different from the very start—like a sprout that was always going to grow into something else.

It didn’t matter that her directions looked clumsy. In the first place, it wasn’t common for someone to accept command on the spot, not run away, and still manage even that much.

And “clumsy” itself wasn’t a fatal problem. Time and experience could solve that.

What mattered was that she successfully resolved the situation using the people and objects on-site—and the items Ye Hyeonseong herself had—one way or another.

‘Even if there are multiple A-rank or higher Awakened on-site… distributing roles is a skill too.’

Kwon Seojin’s gaze drifted to a bag tossed into the corner. Inside the bag—an artifact of the subspace type—were all sorts of weapons, either granted as raid rewards or crafted by collecting materials.

Needless to say, it was an armory meant to imitate Ye Hyeonseong’s Infinite Corridor.

Objectively, that weapon bag was an extremely useful thing. It came with the premise that you had to know how to use every weapon inside, but he’d made it precisely because he could.

But if the comparison target was Ye Hyeonseong’s Infinite Corridor, it inevitably fell short. No matter how diverse the weapons and attributes were, it couldn’t beat Infinite Corridor’s ability to generate skill cards.

‘To begin with, that isn’t a skill you can beat with something like a mere subspace ability. …And that raid method wasn’t something you could copy just by having a lot of items either.’

At first, Kwon Seojin had thought the core of Ye Hyeonseong’s raid method lay in items.

It wasn’t completely wrong. If you looked at Ye Hyeonseong’s dungeon clear records, you could tell she used quite a lot of items.

But after watching from the side, it wasn’t just “using a lot.” The important part was elsewhere.

‘The timing of using items—and… the knack for finding a substitute method when you don’t have the item you need.’

Everything Kwon Seojin had done so far was like checking the answer sheet ahead of time and memorizing the correct answers.

More accurately, he’d memorized only the answers.

Up to now, he’d been in a situation where he could confirm the answers as much as he wanted, so memorizing the answer sheet alone was enough to produce results. But seeing what happened today made it clear that approach would hit its limit quickly.

‘Because events that never happened before will only increase.’

In the end, learning the core “knack” was what mattered. And the way to learn that knack was simpler than he expected.

When copying the answer sheet, it meant not only looking at the answer, but studying the solution process too.

In fact, while staring at answer sheets until now, he had learned a tiny bit of the method by accident—by copying blindly.

‘Anyway, it means that from now on, I need to pay attention to the process as well…’

After finishing his thoughts, Kwon Seojin activated the skill again.

Even if situations had started to change, there were still many incidents where he could reference the answer sheet. At least, there would be for a while.

So he needed to find incidents where he could practice imitating raid methods, and incidents that held something that would one day be useful.

Pulling up information about dungeons that would occur in the near future, Kwon Seojin soon focused on reviewing the data.