The twin screams of the kneeling rcenaries died abruptly as Min-jae released his grip. They collapsed into the damp grass, clutching their mangled wrists, their breath rattling unevenly through their respirators. Their standard user interfaces were completely overwheld, flashing a cascade of structural failure notifications that their simple system-granted logic couldn't resolve.
Min-jae didn't spare them a second glance. His bare feet stepped over their convulsing forms, his golden-ringed pupils shifting focus toward the remaining two targets at the edge of the tree line.
Kang-hyun, the vanguard captain of the Black Viper Syndicate, stood frozen. His curved daggers, usually steady enough to slit a throat between heartbeats, were trembling. Behind his matte-black visor, his eyes darted from the two crippled n on the grass to the corpse of his front-line specialist, whose neck had been completely caved in by a single, casual slap.
"Captain..." the Mage in the rear whispered, her fingers whitening as she gripped her twisted wooden wand. Her face was completely drained of color. "The... the data. His physical impact didn't register a single point of mana, but the kinetic calculation... it broke the system's threshold ter. He didn't use an armor-piercing skill. He just... he just hit him."
"Shut up," Kang-hyun hissed, though his own throat was completely dry.
He was a Level 26 hunter. He had survived the bloody, lawless initial hours of the Convergence in Busan by being colder, faster, and more ruthless than anyone else. He had traded his conventional human morality for a set of B-Rank shadow skills that made him an invisible executioner. But standing five paces away from this bare-chested teenager, he felt like a child stripped of his wooden sword. The boy didn't possess a visible aura, yet the sheer physical space around him felt dense, heavy, and completely unyielding—like the gravity of a collapsing mountain.
"You're not a rookie," Kang-hyun said, his voice dropping into a low, desperate snarl as he tried to stabilize his stance. "The Chairman's data was garbage. You didn't just 'awaken' a hidden class yesterday. Who are you? Which guild is backing your vessel?"
Min-jae stopped three paces away from them, his long, lean arms hanging loose at his sides. His chest, marked by that faint, jade-tinted luster of the completed [Jade Bone] realm, didn't move with the rapid, shallow breathing of combat adrenaline. His golden Core Engine spun within his torso with a smooth, silent rotation, keeping his baseline pulse completely undisturbed.
"You corporate rcenaries always ask the sa questions," Min-jae said, his voice carrying that deep, tallic resonance that caused the stagnant water of the nearby river pronade to ripple. "You think everything in this world has to belong to a ledger. You think because a screen gave you a grade and a financial backer gave you a weapon, you own the territory. But the mont you et a man who earned his strength by breaking his own limits... your entire economy collapses."
"Don't look down on !" Kang-hyun roared, his fear finally erupting into pure, survival-driven aggression.
[Active Skill Initiated: 'Viper's Coiling Strike (B-Rank)'.]
[Your Agility parater is artificially inflated by 150% for 2 seconds.]
[Your blades ignore 50% of the target's physical density modifiers.]
With a sudden, violent expansion of his shadow-mana, the captain didn't just lunge—he fragnted. To a standard human eye, it looked as if three identical versions of Kang-hyun erupted from the mist, their curved daggers weaving a complex, overlapping web of green, toxic light that targeted Min-jae’s eyes, throat, and femoral arteries simultaneously. It was a perfect, textbook execution of a high-tier assassination sequence.
But to Min-jae, whose baseline Agility sat at 55 and whose Perception was an advanced 35, the high-speed illusion was nothing more than an uncoordinated, clumsy flailing of limbs. He could see the precise lag between the system's data command and the actual movent of the captain's muscles—a magical friction that every user possessed because they relied on a screen to move their bodies for them.
"The logic of your movent is too rigid," Min-jae whispered.
He didn't deploy his internal energy pool to form a defensive wall. He didn't even drop into a standard blocking posture.
He took a single, precise three-inch step forward and to the right, using the flawless structural leverage of his [Perfect Alignnt] condition to slip directly into the narrow vacuum gap between the three shadow illusions. The green-glowing, poison-coated daggers sliced through empty air, passing a re hair's breadth from his left shoulder blade.
"What—?!" Kang-hyun’s real body materialized out of the shadow, his yellow eyes widening in pure horror as he realized his ultimate skill had completely missed its target without the boy even looking at the blades.
Before the captain could adjust his weight to execute a retreat command, Min-jae shifted his hips, his alignnt locking into an immovable column. He drove his right hand straight forward, his fingers closed into a tight, compact fist.
He didn't use True Ki. This was pure, unadulterated physical mass delivered with absolute structural efficiency.
Formless Style: Iron Hamr.
His fist caught Kang-hyun cleanly in the center of his reinforced leather breastplate.
BOOM.
The sound was not an explosion of magic; it was the dense, terrifying crunch of solid bone and carbon plating eting a superior physical force. The raw 50 points of Min-jae’s Strength traveled entirely through the captain’s torso, caving the armor plating inward by three inches and shattering his sternum into fine powder. The kinetic shockwave didn't drop him—it lifted him clean off his feet, propelling him twenty yards through the air before he crashed heavily into the trunk of a massive weeping willow tree, the impact splitting the ancient wood down the middle.
Kang-hyun slumped into the grass, his curved daggers slipping from his unfeeling fingers. His matte-black respirator cracked open, a torrent of dark, thick blood spilling over his chin as his crimson eyes went completely vacant.
[You have defeated a Level 26 Shadow Stalker (Vanguard Captain).]
[The Overmaster System converting entity's vital essence...]
[You have gained 8 points of 'True Ki'.]
[Current True Ki: 12 / 100]
Min-jae retracted his hand, his knuckles completely white, clean, and uninjured. The faint, jade-tinted sheen of his [Iron Skin] had completely repelled the toxic blood before it could touch his skin layers. He slowly turned his head toward the last remaining mber of the squad—the Mage.
The young woman was on her knees, her twisted wooden wand lying forgotten in the dirt. Her universal interface was flashing a massive, red warning icon that she couldn't dismiss.
[Warning: Your party leader has been terminated.]
[Party synergy has dropped to 0%.]
[Flee imdiately.]
"P-Please..." she whispered, her voice cracking as she looked up at Min-jae’s gold-ringed pupils. "I... I was just hired for the sector clear. I didn't know... I didn't know about the bounty details."
Min-jae walked over to where her wand lay, his bare feet making no sound on the concrete pronade. He didn't look at her face; his eyes strictly calibrated the structural density of the rare-grade magic focal point. He picked it up by the tip. The wood humd, a blue system prompt appearing before his eyes.
"Another toy," Min-jae murmured.
With a casual flick of his thumb, he circulated a single unit of his newly harvested True Ki into the grain of the wood. The pure, physical pressure of his internal energy violently clashed with the synthetic mana matrices woven into the item.
CRACK.
The twisted wand split down the center, its core crystal shattering into dust that drifted away on the river wind.
The Mage gasped, her face turning entirely pale as she felt the destruction of her primary weapon through her system link, a chunk of her own mana pool draining away from the feedback.
"Go back to the Mirae Tower," Min-jae said, his voice a low, solid vibration that seed to freeze the blood in her veins. "Tell Chairman Lee that his ten billion won is a very small number. Tell him that if he wants to protect his magical monopoly... he needs to send sothing that can at least survive a single slap."
The young woman didn't reply. She scrambled backward on her hands and knees before turning and running into the purple mist, her heavy boots splashing frantically through the puddles as she fled toward the safety of the corporate lines.
Min-jae stood alone beneath the split willow tree, his hands loose at his sides, his chest completely still as his golden Core Engine quietly spun within his core. He turned his gaze toward the center of the Gangnam district, where the three B-Rank gates were beginning to pulse with a blinding, volatile light.
"The appetizer is over," Min-jae whispered, his body suddenly blurring into a gray distortion as he executed the first movent of the Formless Step, vanishing into the dark mist over the river. "Let's go see how much essence those corporate gatekeepers have accumulated for the main course."
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