Pruina (3)

Afterward.

Kang-hoo’s party was able to advance to the area where the boss monster was staying without any major problems.

That was because the overall level of Full Moon Dungeon was not extremely high. His teamwork with Park Dong-jae was good too.

‘I’ve also been eating Solarkium whenever I raised the clearing speed in between, and I’m already at 15. The Gold Card limit will be renewed soon. Should I buy 2 billion won’s worth all at once then?’

While looking into his subspace, he thought that as he looked at the Solarkium, whose number had decreased quite a bit.

Thanks to the Gold Card provided by Spitfire Guild, he always had a free limit of 2 billion won every month.

Usually, Kang-hoo had used that limit to buy consumables. Representative examples were Solarkium and Mad Solarkium.

He had never particularly felt guilt or burden while using the card.

It was the price paid out of gratitude by Ganiere and Melissa, the masters of Spitfire Guild, for helping them recover their son’s body.

However, after that, he had not had any separate exchanges with Spitfire Guild.

‘Even for the sake of sweeping up Hematite, I do need to go to the UK at least once…… Choosing Spitfire Guild as a stepping stone wouldn’t be bad.’

Spitfire Guild was not a guild that was especially successful in the UK.

If one judged only by guild ranking, they tended to move back and forth between 13th and 17th place.

However, their connections were wide and deep across the board. They had no sworn enemies and no allies they blindly trusted either.

The UK was more exclusionary toward foreign hunters than one might think, so activity there was not easy.

If Spitfire Guild could mediate in this aspect, a short period of activity should be possible.

When he stared ahead, he saw the name of the main boss monster they would soon have to face.

She was an existence whose attribute could be felt immediately just from the modifier. Her actual appearance was also humanoid, as if ice had been carved into shape.

“Hyung, should we rest for a bit?”

“Let’s do that. You can’t keep your mouth closed. Managing your breathing must not be easy.”

“It feels like the air is getting thinner too. Is there altitude sickness in dungeons too?”

“The laws of nature apply to dungeons as well. Our starting point was probably 2,000 meters above sea level to begin with.”

“Really? How did you know, hyung?”

“How else would I know? I found out by sending Mumyeong. His vision is shared with me, so I can know without going myself.”

“Good thing I brought an oxygen can. I need to breathe some of this.”

Park Dong-jae lay down on a rock just like that, put his mouth to the opening of the portable oxygen can, and began inhaling oxygen with all his strength.

In contrast, Kang-hoo’s expression was calm.

Perhaps because of that.

Park Dong-jae, who had been desperately inhaling oxygen, burst out in a hollow laugh as if something was absurd and spoke.

“Ha. Don’t you get tired, hyung?”

“Not enough to say I’m tired. Just a little fatigued.”

“Assassins are the type who use energy explosively over a short period of time to kill monsters, aren’t they? Usually, job classes like this can’t help but have poor endurance.”

“Usually. Usually, that’s true.”

“I’ve worked with quite a lot of assassins so far too, but there were many assassins who were hopeless in prolonged battles, you know?”

“I see.”

“But you don’t seem to have a problem with either short battles or long battles. You don’t even have any common symptoms of altitude sickness.”

“It must be thanks to steadily raising my stamina.”

“No. It’s not something like that. Hyung, you’re…… just innately broken. You know, like a genius from birth.”

“Kuh, what are you trying to say?”

“I just really want to know at least one of your weaknesses. Like, maybe you’re ticklish, or there’s some part of you that’s not masculine, or something like that…….”

At Park Dong-jae’s gaze, which swept over his whole body in a suspicious way, Kang-hoo shuddered and slightly backed away.

Then Park Dong-jae giggled and soon changed the topic.

“Hyung. Do you know that the search frequency for information about you on the Black Network has been skyrocketing lately?”

“No. I haven’t gone in there.”

“To get straight to the point, the response is explosive. But there’s both a good meaning and a bad meaning to it.”

“I can roughly guess the good meaning. What about the bad meaning?”

“The demand and frequency of collecting information on you are high from Russia. It’s probably Kashimar Guild, right?”

“That’s nothing new.”

“The next highest frequency is from the US. I haven’t analyzed why there’s demand there yet.”

“The landmass is wide, and there are many guilds. There must be many people who would take an interest in me.”

The US was a country whose doors were wide open even to hunters of foreign nationality. Activity there was also almost unrestricted.

That was why recruitment of talent was also active. As long as they saw potential, they did not care about level.

“Interest in you will probably keep rising, hyung. With the Daejeon incident this time, your stock will rise even higher.”

“It unintentionally became a showcase.”

“Right. And it wasn’t even one-on-one, but an assassination succeeded against many. And stories about Kang Dong-hyun are also getting known.”

“Stories about Kang Dong-hyun?”

“Yeah. Seeing as the news got out even though there were no witnesses, doesn’t that mean it was 100% an inside job?”

“Kang Tae-yang?”

“I think so.”

It was plausible.

In fact, if they had made up their minds to conceal it, Kang Dong-hyun’s incident this time could have been buried at Eclipse’s level.

As for the hospital, they only needed to keep mouths shut, and there was no reason his subordinates would go around blabbering.

Yet the circumstances had become known. That meant it would be reasonable to see it as Kang Tae-yang intentionally leaking the information.

It was a public declaration that further devalued his impulsive and emotional younger brother Kang Dong-hyun, announcing that his era had come to an end.

Kang-hoo could realize that Kang Tae-yang was cleverly using this incident.

“But there’s one huge piece of information that buried even your issue right away. Want to hear it?”

“What is it?”

“Do you know a dungeon in Saudi Arabia called Narun?”

“Narun?”

“Yeah, apparently Narun is an Arabic word symbolizing hell? In our language, it means Hell Dungeon.”

In the original work, almost nothing had been said about the Arab world.

If he had written it longer, there would have been many stories to cover worldwide, but the main setting had been Asia.

When Kang-hoo’s eyes sparkled for the first time in a while, Park Dong-jae caught his curiosity and excitedly continued speaking quickly.

“They say it’s an open-type dungeon, and the inside is made up of an absurdly huge castle. It takes the form of entering from outside the outer castle, then the outer castle, the inner castle, and then the underground palace.”

“When you enter the dungeon, you’re outside the outer castle, so it seems like a field. Then you break through the outer castle, break through the inner castle, and only then does the path to the underground palace open?”

“That’s right. But the level of the monsters there is on a completely different dimension from ordinary dungeons.”

“Civilized monsters?”

“Yeah, exactly! You know those things, right? Medieval armies that seem like they’d only appear when we read fantasy novels. Can you guess what kind of feeling I mean?”

“Something like the knight orders and mage corps of a kingdom or empire.”

“That’s it! Maybe because of that, the internal clearing seems really difficult. The monsters also say something, but they say even that can’t be interpreted.”

“The fact that it’s becoming a hot topic must mean that many hunters have gathered there, so it must be high risk, high return.”

“When you use skills there, your proficiency rises three times more than when using the same skills in other dungeons. The basic reward level is also high. So it seems to be regarded as a land of opportunity.”

“The survival rate?”

When evaluating a dungeon’s difficulty, the most important thing was the survival rate, the probability of returning alive.

Usually, if it was below 25%, it was classified as a truly difficult dungeon. It meant only one out of four returned.

However.

“10%. The problem is that nine out of ten don’t all die only to the monsters.”

“There seem to be quite a lot of hyenas aiming for the backs of the beasts aiming for the land of opportunity. And there are other hyenas aiming for those hyenas too.”

It was the worst survival rate.

That was probably why it had become an issue on the Black Network.

Those who used the underground community preferred battlefields where conflict, betrayal, and secret struggles ran rampant.

“The story is interesting, but. I don’t think we’ll have any reason to go there. It’s too dangerous, isn’t it? Hahaha.”

“Well. Will that really be the case?”

Park Dong-jae thought they had merely talked about interesting gossip and laughed it off.

But the thought engraved in Kang-hoo’s sparkling eyes was going in a completely different direction from what Park Dong-jae expected.

Kang-hoo was seriously showing interest in the Narun dungeon.

It was not simple curiosity.

It was very serious interest, coldly estimating the possibility of clearing it.

After they finished a sufficient rest, Kang-hoo and Park Dong-jae’s攻略 of Frost Queen Pruina began.

According to what had been agreed upon with Kang-hoo.

It had been decided that Park Dong-jae would only renew Acceleration and damage amplification buffs on Kang-hoo.

And he would go all in with all his remaining capacity on implementing a debuff that reduced Pruina’s defense.

As soon as the battle began and Kang-hoo started sharply rushing in.

Pruina immediately targeted Kang-hoo and Park Dong-jae at the same time and fired frost spheres with both hands.

It was a freezing magic in that kind of form, one that could probably be substituted with the English-style expression Ice Bolt.

Kang-hoo installed Strange-Form Illusory Formation in the middle of the movement path of the frost sphere heading toward Park Dong-jae.

Then.

Schiing!

The direction of the frost sphere that had been passing in a straight line over Strange-Form Illusory Formation suddenly bent to the right.

It had bounced off toward an entirely wrong place.

Evasion activated!

Thanks to that, Park Dong-jae no longer needed to move and readjust his position from where he had been.

When Kang-hoo glanced back, he saw Park Dong-jae reacting by giving him a thumbs-up.

Seeing that he was so relaxed in a situation where even being tightly tense would not be enough, Park Dong-jae was also someone extraordinary.

In any case, since he had easily avoided the frost sphere, an attack chance immediately came to Kang-hoo.

Looking at Pruina’s movements, she was humanoid, but she was not on the agile side.

She was closer to the type that made large motions.

And created high-firepower freezing skills. One blow was powerful, but it was not continuous.

She could be considered the complete opposite tendency from Quentin, whom he had faced earlier in the hybrid zone of Western Australia.

Quentin had been an agile guy who could counterattack at any time if given even one second, no, even 0.1 seconds of leeway.

But Pruina was not that type. For Kang-hoo, who enjoyed battles fought within brief moments, she was the best prey.

The attack option that opened the first salvo was Fire Rain.

Since the lasting effect of the Solarkium he had eaten earlier still remained, he used mana generously as well.

Fwoooosh!

Then, fire rain with a much higher density per unit area than Fire Rain, which only consumed basic mana, fell.

At the same time, it struck an area far wider than the expected range as an area-of-effect attack.

The scarlet rain pouring down from the air created thick whitish smoke each time it touched Pruina’s body.

Chiiiiik! Chiik!

“Kyaaaak!”

When the attack of the fire attribute, her opposite, densely struck her entire body, Pruina also looked flustered.

It seemed she had not expected the fire damage to be this great. Her surprise was obvious.

The reaction to Fire Rain, which he had lightly thrown out as a probe, was far too good.

If so, there was no need to reveal his strategic card late.

Because this moment might become the biggest, most perfect opportunity in this battle.

‘In that case.’

Kang-hoo smiled as one skill came to mind, one that suited the Frost Queen, who would fear fire the most.

He thought that with this one, he might be able to end the fight with Pruina early.