Author's Preface
The next morning Blue woke on a bed inside the guilds infirmary. He looked around, the space was immaculate as a hospital should be. 5 other beds laid behind massive curtains seperating them all. A machine beside him beeped consistently, there hung a bag of fluids leading to the IV in his arm, a blood pressure cuff wrapped around his bicep, and bandages where wounds once were. Blue sat up and tore off a bandage. "Gone? Just like that?" His eyes widened as he tore off the other bandages in his chest and cheek. All the wounds from the gate were gone. All that was left was a thick scar running down his abdomen from Mal’kareth's blade. Blue tore the IV out of his arm, ripped off the cuff and swung his legs over the side of the bed to the floor.
Aaron walked in as Blue was about to stand up. "I'm glad to see you're okay."
"I feel fine, whatever you did while I was passed out has me feeling great." Blue smiled as he pushed himself up off the bed.
"You can thank the cleric later... for now, since you're feeling good enough. Follow me."
Blue hesitated and stared at Aaron for a moment. Aaron turned and walked out. Blue was in a hospital gown, no clothes on but some underwear. "Let me get-"
"NOW!" Aaron's voice cut him off from outside the door.
Blue shook his head and ran out of the infirmary and followed Aaron to his office.
Inside the office the atmosphere was different. Quieter. Heavier. Eve stood off to the side, arms crossed, her expression tighter than usual. Across the room, four members of the Buckeye Guild stood near the wall, people Blue didn’t recognize. None of them spoke. They were there to listen. To evaluate. To understand what went wrong in the gate.
Blue sat in the chair across from Aaron’s desk. Bruises ran along his arms and neck, faint discoloration already settling in beneath the surface. He looked better than he had the night before. Aaron didn’t sit. He stood behind his desk, hands resting against the edge, watching him. Not impatient. Not angry. Focused.
“Start from the beginning,” Aaron said. Blue didn’t answer right away. His eyes lowered slightly, his mind already drifting back to the gate. Back to the moment everything shifted. He exhaled slowly. “…I knew something was off the second we stepped through.” And just like that, the room faded.
The moment Blue stepped through the gate, something felt off. It wasn’t the usual pressure that came with entering a dungeon. He had felt that plenty of times now, both on Earth and in Murim. This was different. Subtle, but wrong in a way that settled into his instincts almost immediately. The terrain stretched out in front of them, uneven ground broken by clusters of dark trees and jagged stone. The air carried a faint dampness. Blue slowed slightly as he walked, his eyes moving across the environment instead of the path ahead. There was something about it that felt familiar. The trees, the entire enviroment. A memory surfaced whether he wanted it to or not. The Black Pines. A missing scout party. And something waiting deeper in the forest.
Back then, he hadn’t understood what he was walking into. He had followed, reacted, survived. This time was different. This time, he recognized it. Blue exhaled quietly and kept moving. Up ahead, movement broke the stillness. Goblins. Dozens of them poured out from behind the trees, small, fast, and disorganized. Their weapons were crude, their movements frantic, the kind of enemies most hunters barely needed to think about.
Tim didn’t hesitate. “Finally,” he said, already stepping forward. “Something worth warming up on.” The team followed without question. Steel met flesh. Abilities flared. The goblins dropped quickly, one after another, barely able to mount any real resistance. It was messy, but efficient, exactly what they had expected from a C-rank promotion raid. One of the men laughed as he cut another down. “If this is the best they’ve got, we’re walking out of here with our rank by dinnertime.”
Tim grinned. “Told you. Easy.” Blue stayed back, watching. Not the goblins. The way they moved. The way they didn’t panic the way they should have. They scattered, but not wildly. It felt controlled, like they were making space for something else. His gaze shifted deeper into the trees. Then the ground trembled. Once. Then again, heavier this time. The goblins pulled back, retreating into the shadows they had come from. The team slowed.
“What was that?” one of them asked, tightening his grip on his weapon. Tim didn’t step back. If anything, he leaned forward. “There it is,” he said. The trees parted just enough for it to emerge. The ogre stepped into view, massive and uneven, its body built from layers of muscle that looked almost too dense to move the way it did. Its skin was rough, scarred, and thick. For a brief moment, no one moved. Then Tim stepped forward. “Now this feels like a promotion raid.”
They attacked together. The first exchange was strong. Coordinated enough. Their strikes landed cleanly, blades cutting into flesh, abilities striking with enough force to stagger the ogre back. It roared. Then the wounds closed. Not instantly, but fast enough to matter. Flesh pulled itself together. Blood slowed, then stopped. Cuts that should have weakened it simply disappeared. “What the hell?” someone muttered. “Don’t stop!” Tim snapped. “It’s just regeneration. Burn through it!”
They pressed harder. More power. More strikes. Stronger abilities. The ogre took it all. And kept moving. A heavy swing caught one of the men and sent him crashing across the ground. Another barely avoided a follow-up strike that cracked the earth where he had been standing. “Spread out!” someone shouted.
The team created openings, trying to overwhelm it through sheer force. It didn’t work. Blue watched for a few seconds longer, his eyes tracking the pattern. The movement. The recovery. The way its body responded after each hit. He had seen this before. Not exactly the same, but close enough. They weren’t going to win like this.
Blue stepped forward. At first, no one noticed. They were too focused on trying to bring it down before it overwhelmed them. He didn’t rush. He didn’t force it. He waited. The ogre swung again, wide and heavy. The team scattered, creating space without meaning to. For a brief moment, its neck was exposed. That was enough. Blue drew his sword. The motion was clean and controlled, nothing wasted. As the blade came up, he gathered his qi the way Cheng and Yeol had taught him, pulling it in and condensing it along the edge. There was no flare. No dramatic release. Just pressure, dense and focused, wrapped along the blade.
He stepped in and cut. The blade moved first. The energy followed. A sharp arc left the edge of his sword and traveled through the air, fast and precise, cutting cleanly through the ogre’s neck. For a split second, nothing happened. Then the head separated. The body stood there for a moment longer before collapsing under its own weight. No regeneration followed. No movement. It was over. Silence settled over the group. One of the men took a step back, staring. “What was that?”
No one answered. They were all looking at Blue. He stood there, sword lowered slightly at his side, staring at it. A grin had spread across his face. Not arrogance. Not pride. "I can't believe it actually worked. Although it does use alot of qi." Blue thought to himself as he just looked at the blade in his hand. Then the expression faded. His eyes lifted, moving past the fallen ogre and deeper into the forest. The pressure in the air hadn’t lifted. If anything, it had gotten worse.
Aaron leaned back slightly in his chair, watching him. “When did things go wrong,” he said. Blue exhaled slowly, his eyes drifting for just a moment before settling again. “We thought we could handle it after the first ogre,” he said. “It was regenerating at first, but once I cut its head off, it stopped. We figured that was the worst of it.”
His jaw tightened. “I told Tim we should head back.” Aaron’s gaze sharpened slightly. “And?” Blue gave a faint, humorless breath. “He didn’t want to hear it. Said we were already inside. Said if we turned back after one boss, we didn’t deserve the promotion.” Eve shifted where she stood, but she didn’t interrupt. “We went deeper,” Blue said. Aaron didn’t move. “Then what?”
Blue’s gaze lowered for a second, then lifted again, but he wasn’t in the room anymore.
The deeper they pushed into the forest, the quieter it became. At first, it didn’t feel wrong. If anything, it felt like progress. The constant movement of goblins through the trees had stopped. No more ambushes. No more shrieking from the brush. Just open ground and a clear path ahead. One of the men let out a short laugh. “Guess that was it. Boss down, path cleared.”
Tim didn’t slow. “Keep moving,” he said. “Anchor’s deeper in. We clear it, we’re done.” Blue followed behind them, his eyes moving over the terrain again. There were no bodies. No signs of retreat. No broken brush where enemies had fled. It wasn’t that the forest had been cleared. It felt like something had been removed. His grip on his sword tightened slightly. Something was off. They broke through the tree line and stepped into a wide clearing. Flat ground. Open space. No obstructions.
For a moment, it almost felt like relief, like the dungeon had given them room to breathe before the end. One of the men stepped forward, scanning the area. “This it?” No one answered. Because at the same time, the forest around them shifted. Not beneath their feet... around them. Blue’s head turned sharply as movement began to ripple through the tree line. Goblins. At first, just a few shapes slipping between trunks. Then more. Then dozens.
Within seconds, they were everywhere. They poured out from every direction, filling the edges of the clearing until there was no space left between them. They didn’t rush. They didn’t scream. They formed a circle closing them in. One of the men cursed under his breath. “That’s… not normal.”
Blue didn’t respond. His eyes were already moving past them. Then the ogres stepped out. One emerged from the trees. Then another. Then another. Each one massive, each one easily matching the creature they had just barely managed to bring down. They spread out behind the goblins, forming a second layer, sealing off any path forward or back.
The clearing wasn’t open. It was enclosed. Tim’s voice came out sharper than before. “Hold formation.” But it wasn’t steady. Not anymore. Then something heavier moved behind them. A single step echoed through the clearing, deeper than the others. The goblins shifted. The ogres parted. And something larger stepped forward. It towered over the rest, its frame thicker, its presence alone pressing against the air in a way the others hadn’t. Even the ogres gave it space as it moved to the front.
Blue’s eyes locked onto it immediately. This wasn’t just another boss. “…That’s not C-rank,” one of the men said quietly. No one argued. Because they all knew it. Tim took a step back. Just one. But it was enough. Blue saw it happen, the exact moment everything shifted. The confidence that had carried them into the gate cracked. They weren’t pushing forward anymore. They were surrounded. And whatever stood in front of them now was going to decide who made it out.
Blue leaned back slightly in his chair, letting out a slow breath before speaking again. “I can’t walk you through every second of it,” he said. “It was too chaotic for that. The moment they closed in, everything broke down. Our formation didn’t last more than a few seconds. After that, everyone was just fighting whatever was in front of them, trying to stay alive." Aaron didn’t interrupt. Eve didn’t either. “The goblins hit first, then the ogres pushed in right behind them. Once they were on us, there wasn’t any way to control the situation. We weren’t fighting as a team anymore. It was just… survival.”
Blue paused for a moment, not because he didn’t know what to say, but because he was deciding how much of it actually needed to be said. “When things finally slowed down, we managed to clear most of them. Not cleanly, but enough to breathe for a second.” His eyes shifted last Aaron as he stared at the wall behind him.
“That’s when Tim moved.” Eve’s posture stiffened. “He didn’t think twice. Saw the big one and rushed it. Figured it was the boss. Thought if he took it down, everything else would fall with it.” Blue’s expression didn’t change. “He didn’t make it far. The ogre swung once. That was it.” No embellishment. No dramatics. “He was cut in half.”
Eve looked down, her jaw tightening. The others in the room stayed silent. “I tried to pull the rest of them back,” Blue continued. “Tried to get them to regroup, but once Tim went down, they weren’t thinking anymore. They rushed it. No coordination. No plan. Just… reacting." He shook his head slightly. “I did what I could to keep them alive. Covered where I could. Pulled them out when they got too close. But they kept going back in. All they saw was red, they went mad and wouldn't or couldn't stop."
Blue hung his head and looked at the floor. “One by one, they went down.” Aaron leaned forward slightly, his attention sharpening. “In the end, it was just me and the huge ogre,” Blue said. “I was already worn down at that point. Keeping them alive, fighting everything before that… it took its toll.” He flexed his hands as he stared at them. “But it didn’t matter.” He looked up and met Aaron’s eyes directly. “I took it down.” No pride. No emphasis. Just a statement.
“After that, I found the anchor, cleared it, grabbed whoever was still alive, and got out.” The room stayed quiet, not because it needed tension, but because there wasn’t anything to interrupt. Blue had said everything that mattered.