500 (5)

Jang Si-hwan’s expression immediately twisted. At the same time, he let out a self-mocking laugh.

The friend beside him, who was supposedly his childhood friend, was not acting as a strategist at all and was only spouting naive nonsense.

Because of that, he also felt bitterness toward himself for having such a friend.

Chae Gwanhyeong was a typical brute-force type of character. Unfortunately, his intelligence was lacking. He absolutely needed someone with the brains to set the direction and make delicate adjustments.

“Gwanhyeong.”

“Huh?”

“If we pull even a little of our forces away, do you think The Abyss will kindly take our situation into account and wait?”

“If we make it a speed battle…….”

“I’m asking whether The Abyss won’t do that kind of speed battle too. You experienced firsthand how cunning those bastards are, didn’t you?”

“Ugh…….”

“And right now, we’re throwing small fries to The Abyss and laying the bait nicely. Is there any need to kick over the dinner table?”

“Sorry.”

“We’re making cheap business out of lives we were going to throw away anyway. Just wait. If we keep throwing them in, they’ll let their guard down someday.”

Even at this very moment, many lives were disappearing on the battlefield in northeastern Gyeonggi.

They were sacrificial lambs Jang Si-hwan had “carefully” selected. They were also people classified by the guild as outside its fighting strength.

The hunters dispatched to the field would be acting with the sense of mission he had instilled in them and their love for the guild, but, well.

Jang Si-hwan did not feel the slightest pity or regret over their lives disappearing.

Rather, he was proud. Because he had turned worthless lives that no one would have cared about into meaningful ones.

Later, he intended to build memorial stones and memorial towers to “publicly” console their deaths. In some way or another, it would become a splendid and impressive production.

At that moment, Chae Gwanhyeong, who had been watching Jang Si-hwan’s mood, changed the subject.

“Don’t you think exchanges with Takashi, Yu Cheonghwa, and Emilia have all gotten sparse lately? Well, that Takashi bastard has been an eyesore since before.”

“You hate Takashi that much?”

“That bastard’s fate is to be holed up in some room. He’s not even that cooperative with you.”

“I was already thinking of reorganizing things.”

“How?”

“For now, at the current point, I definitely trust you, Casey Rex, and Ranbir Kumar, Gwanhyeong.”

“Well, thanks for that. Sometimes I wonder whether you really trust me. Of course, that’s just what I think.”

Even while saying what he wanted to say, Chae Gwanhyeong subtly left himself an escape route, and fear was buried in that sight.

If they were childhood friends, he should sometimes have been able to treat his friend without distance and without fear, but…….

To Chae Gwanhyeong, Jang Si-hwan was his friend and, at the same time, his lord.

It was a relationship mixed with an ironic structure, both horizontal and vertical.

Even Chae Gwanhyeong, who usually acted proudly as if he feared nothing in the world, was nothing but a mouse before a cat in front of Jang Si-hwan.

“Don’t worry about Elizabeth. She’s almost come over. I can control that X well enough.”

“That German guy you were contacting before, Lars Abel or something? What about him?”

“I’m thinking of giving up. It annoys me that he acts far more arrogant than his station deserves, and it disgusts me that he keeps testing the waters.”

“Right. You, Si-hwan, have no need to bow and scrape. Who in the world would dare look down on Jang Si-hwan?”

“Instead…… there are three people I want to speed up relationship progress with.”

“Tian Yunha of Taiwan?”

“Yeah. Tian Yunha is included. And Dennis Jacobs of Canada. The last one is…….”

“Don’t tell me it’s Shin Kang-hoo. Seriously?”

At Chae Gwanhyeong’s words, Jang Si-hwan nodded. At that, Chae Gwanhyeong’s expression twisted.

In Chae Gwanhyeong’s eyes, Shin Kang-hoo was a bastard far more disgusting than Takashi. He had the arrogance of thinking the world revolved around him.

The fact that the leader he respected so deeply had consistently taken a low stance toward such a guy made him angry.

No matter how he thought about it, Shin Kang-hoo was an obstacle who should be killed before he grew even bigger rather than someone to get close to.

In Chae Gwanhyeong’s eyes, Shin Kang-hoo looked like nothing but someone who deserved to die.

But his friend Jang Si-hwan had, at some point, fallen into a deep unrequited love. It was a terrible curiosity.

Meanwhile.

The Memoria raid was entering the very final stage.

Kang-hoo took note of the fact that Memoria copied and used other skills, then countered with the Five-Colored Blessing skill.

Because most skills dealt magic-based damage, once magic immunity manifested, he was invincible.

So when it was confirmed that Memoria had used a skill whose entire damage amount was magic damage.

While in a magic-immune state, he cleanly received Memoria’s attack and poured in all of the team’s finishing skills.

Blood Flower and Dark Energy Ignition linked together after Kang-hoo’s focused attack.

With Park Dong-jae’s buff and Ayane’s Magic Bullet - Wave attack continuing on top of that, Memoria had no way to endure.

With Memoria’s death, he reached level 503. As expected of a boss affected by the Extreme Period, the experience was very satisfying.

Since there was a first-clear special privilege, he wondered what kind of reward would come out, but a common magic stone reward did not appear.

Instead, a rare reward incomparable to a magic stone reward appeared. It was a buff!

“Wow…….”

“Holy shit, we’re getting a buff this easily? What is this, some kind of novel?”

Ayane’s astonished face, her mouth hanging open, and Park Dong-jae’s intense denial of reality(?) overlapped.

Buffs related to mana were far more precious than precious. To begin with, obtaining one was close to impossible.

Mana shortage, which was also a chronic problem for hunters, was a problem in the past, was a problem now, and would continue to be a problem in the future.

Yet this buff had two options attached that scratched that exact itch, so it was only natural to be shocked.

With that buff, it was like rain in a drought for Park Dong-jae, who consumed a lot of mana when using buff and debuff skills.

And Ayane would also be able to fire magic bullets far more actively than now.

Because the burden of mana consumption would be greatly reduced. It would become a situation where she did not have to conserve mana as much as before.

‘Then with the Age of Savagery effect plus Meditator, that’s a 60% reduction. This is seriously huge.’

Both Age of Savagery and Meditator applied a reduction to the maximum mana usage of skills.

In this form, with the mana that had previously allowed him to use a skill five times, he could now use it six times.

The number of skill repertoires he could add in a short moment would increase. It would create strategic variables.

Permanent buffs were truly precious.

Of course, top-tier hunters possessed a great number of these precious buffs. That was why they were top-tier.

If he steadily obtained buffs now, later, when they meshed with his further growth, they would produce explosive efficiency.

‘Collecting skills, constellations, and items will be essential from now on too…… but any buffs I remember, I’ll have to mark as mine no matter what.’

There were countless buffs he could think of right away.

Among them, there was also a one-time debuff that cut the opponent’s health by 50%, and another debuff that made the opponent an idiot.

Since having them would make them useful somehow, he intended to be a little greedier.

While the team briefly reorganized.

Kang-hoo looked over the skills he could plunder from the dead Memoria.

Unfortunately, the mechanism that brought and used skills seemed to have been an “ability,” not a skill. It did not exist on the list of skills that could be plundered.

There were many skills displayed on the plunderable list that Kang-hoo had not expected.

Because throughout the entire battle, Memoria had only used the ability to bring and use skills.

There had been no chance to see Memoria’s own innate skills. But looking at the list, there were many useful skills.

So his time of deliberation grew quite long. There were too many skills, so he wondered which would be the most efficient.

‘Yes, this is it.’

After weighing several skills, the skill Kang-hoo finally chose was a recovery skill.

It was also a choice he made because he had thought of a good trick that would allow him to use that skill more persistently.

He had gained a skill with the directionality of a healer. Of course, it did have the handicap of being usable once per day.

However, the reason Kang-hoo boldly chose the Great Recovery skill was because there was a reuse method that utilized a trick.

Using Selfish Trade.

By utilizing this skill, he had reset Blood Flower whenever necessary until now. Because of that, he had also used Blood Flower two or more times on the same target.

Of course, activating Selfish Trade was not easy. He had to block an enemy’s skill in a fleeting instant.

But in a situation where the calculation worked, the success rate was 100%. Depending on the situation, he could glimpse the possibility of using Great Recovery several times.

‘The fact that I even have a divine power stat is also a strength. If I only had mana, this would have been a skill I could only suck my fingers over.’

Looking at it again, the Great Recovery skill seemed highly useful.

A skill that could remove all status abnormalities at once and completely recover health was rare.

After coming to No. 17 Dungeon, he felt as if he had been enjoying plenty of benefits without suffering at all.

Even as time passed, Jang Si-hwan would never know what had happened inside here and what kinds of special privileges he had enjoyed.

Yes, ignorance was bliss. If he found out, it would not just become an illness of the heart—he would be sick with envy.

After leaving No. 17 Dungeon, Kang-hoo’s group immediately began moving along the full-scale North Korea raid route.

Kang-hoo had already planned the route they would take before they came, and the discussion was over, so there was no need to talk further.

What Kang-hoo put the most effort into was finding the Dark Energy monsters hidden here and there across the vast land of North Korea.

What made the process easy was the second privilege of his main constellation, Cataclysm – Darkness.

Thanks to this privilege, Kang-hoo and his party were able to pick out and hunt only the monsters from which they could obtain Dark Energy, as if using tweezers.

It spared them the trouble that a hunter in an ordinary case would have had to go through by killing everything.

As a result.

Over two days, Kang-hoo raised his Dark Energy by nearly 1,500.

That was largely thanks to hunting those with substantial Dark Energy rewards that had been hiding in places almost untouched by hunters.

If he had used the orthodox method of killing everything in sight, it would have been hard to raise it by even 150, let alone 1,500.

Of course, the person who benefited the most from the precision raid was Kang-hoo, but that did not mean Ayane and Park Dong-jae gained nothing.

When they reached the tail end of the raid.

Ayane and Park Dong-jae were met with a message they had never expected.

The seventh stat, a hidden stat said to open only when fortune followed fortune, had been unlocked.

It was the appearance of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that the two of them would never have even experienced if Kang-hoo had not been there.