Chapter 13

Chapter 13

Blink. Blink.

Beyond the transparent protective wall, a red warning light flashed at regular intervals.

Chaeho rolled his stiff neck from side to side as he walked toward the center of the training room. The thick special urethane mat covering the floor softly cushioned his steps.

It was the day after he had successfully completed his short-term mercenary job in a C-rank dungeon.

In the past, when he had been stuck doing every unpleasant chore for the party, a single dungeon run would have left him bedridden with aches for several days.

But things were different now.

There was still a dull soreness in his muscles, but his body actually felt lighter, and his mind was calm.

He had heard through the grapevine that rumors were beginning to spread among the parties he had recently worked with.

Apparently, there was a highly skilled D-rank Hunter who had an uncanny ability to read the flow of battle.

But Chaeho wasn't the kind of person who would get carried away by praise or other people's attention.

Rumors were nothing more than words passed from mouth to mouth.

When a monster's vicious claws came flying at him in a real battle, whether he avoided them and saved his companions' lives depended entirely on his own ability.

It was his day off, so he could have spent the entire day relaxing.

Instead, his feet naturally carried him to a training facility reserved for Hunters.

Resting and loosening up his body would have been nice, but before the razor-thin sensations he had experienced while gripping his sword inside the dungeon faded, he wanted to carve them firmly into his brain and muscles.

Chaeho approached the control panel in one corner of the empty training room.

His fingers moved quickly as he adjusted the settings of the target-striking machine.

He skipped right past the basic settings normally used by D-rank Hunters for warm-ups.

Without hesitation, he dragged the difficulty bar on the screen all the way up to the upper level of C-rank.

Once the settings were confirmed, dozens of gun barrels hidden inside the walls and ceiling slowly emerged.

Every single one pointed directly at Chaeho.

It was an intimidating sight.

"Start."

Chaeho muttered quietly and pressed the start button on the panel.

He immediately rushed toward the center of the training room and lowered his stance.

Papapapang!

With a series of heavy explosive sounds, pitch-black rubber bullets poured toward him from every direction like a storm.

Their speeds and trajectories were completely unpredictable.

Some bounced violently off the floor and aimed for his chin.

Others dropped straight down from the ceiling toward the top of his head.

Some curved widely through the air and slipped into his blind spots.

It was a brutal difficulty setting where even someone desperately widening their field of vision would struggle to last ten seconds before being knocked to the floor and covered in bruises.

Chaeho stood perfectly still and narrowed his eyes.

Black dots rushed toward him, filling his entire field of vision.

Among the countless bullets, his gaze immediately locked onto three that were currently on trajectories toward his vital areas.

Time Slow.

A silent switch flipped inside his mind.

At that moment, the mechanical noises hammering against his ears and the storm of bullets rushing toward him suddenly slowed, as though they had fallen into a thick swamp.

The trajectories of the rubber bullets, seemingly frozen in midair, became clearly visible before his eyes like a three-dimensional model.

But unlike before, Chaeho didn't maintain the skill for long.

Just before one of the bullets reached his cheek, he confirmed only the minimum information he needed about its trajectory.

Then he immediately canceled the skill.

Tak.

The speed of the world snapped back to normal.

Chaeho tilted his head slightly and twisted his upper body with sharp precision.

A rubber bullet barely grazed past his ear, leaving behind a sharp friction sound.

At the same time, he bent his knees and rolled his body to let another bullet bouncing off the floor pass harmlessly by.

The last bullet came from an angle that was difficult to dodge.

Chaeho struck it aside violently with the handle of the short wooden sword in his hand.

Thud! Thwack!

Heavy impacts rang out one after another.

There was no wasted movement.

Activate the skill for the briefest instant.

Read the direction of the attack.

Immediately deactivate it.

Then move his body.

The entire purpose of this training was to eliminate the wasteful habit of forcibly stretching the time available for his eyes to see and his brain to think.

He wasn't simply relying on the reliable shield called his skill and following everything with his eyes.

Whenever he discovered an opening inside the slowed world, he trained himself to immediately thrust his sword or twist his body toward it.

It was a process of sharpening his natural reflexes and split-second judgment to their absolute limits.

One more time.

The skill activated and deactivated again.

0.1 seconds.

Sometimes even less.

Slowing and accelerating repeated over and over again like a flickering fluorescent light.

Blindly depending on a skill was always dangerous.

There was no way of knowing when its power might become restricted or completely exhausted.

Even if he found the correct answer inside the slowed world, a miraculous ability like this would still be meaningless if his body wasn't fast enough to carry out that answer.

Surrounded by an endless storm of rubber bullets, Chaeho silently continued training as sweat scattered from his body.

The irregular and merciless barrage continued for more than ten minutes.

Beep—

With a dry mechanical sound announcing the end of the session, the barrels protruding from the walls withdrew back into place.

"Hoo..."

Only then did Chaeho put down the wooden sword in his hand and release a rough breath.

His light training clothes were completely soaked in sweat and clung tightly to his body.

Drops of sweat continuously ran down his forehead, passed his chin, and fell onto the floor.

Hundreds of black rubber bullets were scattered across the urethane mat.

Three or four areas on his shoulders and thighs were red and stinging from grazing hits.

However, there wasn't a single place where he had taken a direct enough hit to make his bones ache.

As Chaeho caught his breath and reached for the towel he had left nearby, a translucent message window quietly appeared in the corner of his vision.

[Proficiency of Time Slow has increased.]

[Total Daily Usage Limit: 13 seconds]

Chaeho's hand froze in midair.

"Thirteen seconds."

Still breathing heavily, he stared at the translucent letters.

When he had first obtained the skill and spent several days practicing until he reached his limit, the total usage time had increased from ten seconds to eleven.

Only one second.

But this time...

It had jumped by two entire seconds at once.

That meant the increase wasn't a fixed value that simply rose by exactly one second each time.

Real combat experience. And the quality of the training.

A hypothesis clearly began taking shape inside his mind.

His proficiency didn't increase simply because he kept the skill activated for as long as possible and wasted his daily usage time.

It was about those razor-thin moments when he was pushed to his limit.

The ability to activate and deactivate the skill like a flickering light, using it only during the most efficient and dangerous moments.

Feeling incoming attacks against his own skin while calculating the most extreme timing.

That kind of precise control was what had dramatically increased his proficiency.

A faint smile appeared on Chaeho's sweat-covered lips.

To someone else, the difference between eleven seconds and thirteen seconds might seem meaningless.

It was such a short amount of time that it could disappear with a blink and a single breath.

But for Chaeho, who divided the world into 0.1-second pieces, those additional two seconds were an entirely different level of resource.

At least twenty more times.

During moments of danger, that meant twenty additional chances to read an enemy's trajectory and slip into its blind spot.

The pressure of having to conserve the skill because of its limited usage time had decreased considerably.

It was a definite and valuable reward.

Enough to turn the flow of battle around two...

No, perhaps even three more times.

Chaeho hadn't expected a mere increase of two seconds to feel this reassuring.

"It's improving much faster than I expected."

Chaeho picked up a bottle of water from the floor and drank half of it in one go.

As the cool water flowed down his throat, the intense heat inside his exhausted muscles seemed to calm slightly.

He dried his wet hair with a towel and left the training room with light steps.

After returning home, Chaeho went straight to the bathroom and took a cold shower.

Once refreshed, he casually pulled on an old, stretched-out T-shirt and sat down in front of his desk.

The fatigue from the dungeon raid and the harsh training session hit him all at once, leaving his entire body heavy.

Even so, he couldn't lie down yet.

He opened the bottom drawer of his desk.

Beneath various receipts and useless pieces of junk was an old notebook.

Its cover was worn and frayed around the edges.

It was a record that belonged only to him.

Something he had never shown anyone—not even his family.

Chaeho picked up a black pen and carefully wrote down today's date.

[Total Daily Usage Limit: 11 seconds -> 13 seconds]

Below that, he filled the page with detailed notes.

The tiny errors he had noticed in the timing of his skill activation during today's training.

The dull strain placed on his eyes and muscles whenever he repeatedly activated the skill in quick flashes.

He also carefully recorded the movement patterns of the Blade Wolves he had encountered in the recent C-rank dungeon, even going so far as to note the exact angle at which their knees bent when they stepped on different terrain.

Only the quiet scratching of the pen against paper filled the silent room.

Chaeho flipped through several pages and briefly reviewed his previous records.

There was the short note from back when his limit had still been ten seconds, when he had flailed around his room trying to catch a flying housefly.

Then came the habits and characteristics of the many monsters he had encountered while working as a short-term mercenary.

All the information he had gradually accumulated was laid out before his eyes.

Every time he reviewed those records, one fact became painfully clear.

Just because I can see through a monster's weakness doesn't mean it'll politely die on my sword.

Chaeho lightly tapped his chin with the tip of his pen.

In the end, it was his own body that had to avoid the enemy's attacks and thrust the weapon into them.

No matter how much his skill slowed the world or how clearly he could see an enemy's openings, if he lacked strength or ran out of stamina and his legs gave out, he wouldn't even be able to dodge a club that he could clearly see coming.

Dying because your eyes couldn't follow the attack...

And dying because you could see it but your body couldn't move...

On the battlefield, the result was exactly the same.

If my fundamentals can't support me, then this skill is nothing more than a fancy trick.

The limitations of a D-rank Hunter's body were obvious.

He had obtained a miraculous ability.

But depending entirely on that powerful weapon and hoping for miracles would be no different from covering his own eyes and walking along the edge of a cliff.

He had to relentlessly improve his basic combat ability and physical capabilities until he could instantly respond to a monster's surprise attack even without using his skill.

That was the unwavering principle for long-term growth that Chaeho had established and underlined inside his notebook.

Instead of rushing toward higher-ranked dungeons like others and chasing fame, he would build himself firmly from the ground up.

A foundation strong enough that even the smallest crack wouldn't cause everything to collapse.

Chaeho closed the notebook and placed the pen on one side of the desk.

"There's no need to rush."

His quiet voice was calmer than ever.

He was growing stronger so quickly that it almost felt as if the entire world itself had slowed down.

But that didn't mean he needed to rush his life as a Hunter.

Time was always on his side.

Chaeho pushed the drawer shut.

Click.

The sound broke the silence of the room.

He rubbed the stiffness from the back of his neck with one hand and stood up.

Tomorrow, he decided, he would push his upper-body strength all the way to its limit.