hotmtlnovel Chapter 351: Observation (1)
Chapter 351: Observation (1)
Chapter 351: Observation (1)
The consecutive blood-bursts were something even a Spider Knight could not possibly withstand.
Enduring the first explosion that hit its whole body had already been a small miracle—that was how deep the wound was.
“...”
Though the spark of life was fading fast, Emilia stood with her arms folded, unchanged.
Kang-hoo was the same.
Even though it was clear the Spider Knight had lost its life, he did not let his focus slip.
Sure enough—
Whaeaeaeang!
From within the dead Spider Knight’s viscera, countless insects suddenly shot into the air.
Bugs that, in an instant, pierced through everything in their way—inner shell, outer shell, anything that got in the way.
The insects, also called “Paralysis Gnats”, did not have killing power, but a bite induced brief paralysis.
On a battlefield, that was fatal.
Because even a moment of immobility made you an easy target for something horrible.
But by that time, Kang-hoo had already sketched out his counter for the Paralysis Gnats.
【Dark Energy Ignition】
Fwoooooosh!
Using the dark energy he had scattered in advance as a medium, he ignited it all at once, perfectly timed.
Since he had sown that dark energy around the Spider Knight’s body from the start, the area was narrow but the concentration high.
Kkieeeek! Kkieek!
Enveloped by black flames, the Paralysis Gnats turned to ash before they could even properly take flight.
They had neither hard shells nor fire resistance, and were utterly helpless.
Like moths diving into fire, they were annihilated to the last.
‘Nice. With that many selectable options, he’s rolling out Plan A, Plan B, Plan C in smooth sequence.’
A smile tugged at Emilia’s lips. She had expected it, but his response was cleaner than that.
Even after killing the fairly tricky Spider Knight, Kang-hoo did not relax.
He had prepared in case of contingencies and, the moment a variable appeared, he cut off any chance of a counterstrike.
It was a picture that could not exist unless he had thought and decided from beginning to end.
Not luck or some fluke. It was a refined ploy—calculating variables to counter variables.
“...”
Kang-hoo looked back.
Emilia, extending both palms forward and pushing the air as if to urge him on, signaled for him to advance.
The observation started now.
With such a clean opening, it was only natural to expect the rest. It felt like her expectations had been filled from the very start.
On a hunch, Emilia formed a spell seal at her fingertips and sent a signal to Kang-hoo.
A gesture asking if he wanted her to add firepower if needed. But before the seal even formed, Kang-hoo shook his head.
“Heh.”
Stubborn, that much was certain.
She had secretly hoped he would say he wanted to do it himself, and things went just as she thought.
From then on, Emilia’s observation continued.
Various monsters blocked Kang-hoo’s path, and each time, he drew a new option.
Emilia watched strictly from an observer’s standpoint. She did not offer even the slightest help.
From Kang-hoo’s flow of battle and his before-and-after responses, she felt two big things.
‘Skill diversity. It’s so excellent it would outclass anyone in Justice you put up against him. No—he’s ahead.’
The diversity—no, the abundance—of Kang-hoo’s skills surprised even Emilia, who rarely felt impressed.
It wasn’t a picture where he had simply inflated the count by brute force. The composition of the skills was superb.
Normally, a hunter’s skills deepen and branch in ways related to his specialty.
For example, a hunter who handled fire well would be granted a basic fireball skill— after which it deepened into something like creating flames, or forcibly igniting a target. ŗᴀNộBЕś
Or it branched by splitting one fireball into many, letting them be cast simultaneously.
In the end, since the root was the same—“flame”—you could predict the direction.
Emilia had also specialized in long-range high-power damage exactly in line with her specialty.
In other words, she lacked effective skills for true close-quarters skirmishing.
That was why, in team play, her position was always the very rear.
When she had to clear a dungeon solo, she always built her plan around striking first before the monsters could close distance.
‘But Shin Kang-hoo is different. He doesn’t fit the assassin mold that specializes in even-closer-than-close combat.’
For an assassin, he had far too many skills usable at range.
Dark Energy Ignition was one she had just seen with her own eyes.
So long as he dispersed dark energy in advance, he could ignite it from as far away as he wished.
It lightly shattered the common notion that an assassin was forced into ultra-close quarters.
Moreover, the very act of “igniting” dark energy was at odds with the assassin’s nature.
Strictly speaking, it was a trait branched toward black magic—far from an assassin’s orientation.
At first, she wondered if he had learned from a black mage’s skill book, but the firepower was far too strong for that.
Usually, when learning skills from another class, efficiency plummeted to a tenth.
But the Dark Energy Ignition Emilia observed in Kang-hoo showed none of those penalties—it was a complete skill.
‘Evasion. Burst damage. Deception. Defense.’
Keywords that don’t normally blend into a single class were fused together in Kang-hoo.
Skills didn’t increase by luck. They grew through proper causes and processes.
‘The foundation is good. Like truly fertile soil—whatever you plant, the fruit is bound to be luscious.’
It seemed her main constellation, “Inner Eye”, hadn’t marked Kang-hoo’s potential as infinity (∞) for nothing.
There was good reason—and now that she saw it with her own eyes, she nodded.
And there was one more realization.
What Emilia rated just as highly as Kang-hoo’s skill diversity was his situational judgment.
The route she had guided him along in this dungeon was not a route of raw power contests.
It was built so that every monster encountered had surprise patterns and was specialized to induce variables.
Monsters thought dead suddenly self-destructing, or molting to enter a second evolution, and so on— from the opponent’s standpoint, they were cases where you couldn’t take a monster’s death at face value.
On top of that, there were instances of “charging”-type skills—sophisticated compositions for mere monsters.
Charging meant gathering that much power before release, making damage calculation a difficult variable for the opponent.
But Kang-hoo cleanly endured and evaded such assorted variables.
In some cases, he seized the opening and cut off the pattern early with an aggressive offensive.
‘Now I understand why Takashi said Kang-hoo was more reliable and smarter than him. He’s right. Kang-hoo is far smarter.’
Emilia chuckled to herself.
Today, she could observe Kang-hoo far more properly than during the four-person raid, and she became convinced.
Kang-hoo was a hunter different from the seed. No wonder Jang Si-hwan had an eye on him.
From that point on, the observation became, for Emilia, less a test and more a seat for satisfying curiosity.
Having already acknowledged Kang-hoo’s skill, she no longer needed to judge his ability with a cold yardstick.
In many respects she was astonished by his skills—and, in part, envious.
It was common to see monsters before Kang-hoo lose their sense of direction or behave as if blinded, flustered.
Meanwhile, Kang-hoo possessed the ability to move without lighting so much as a single flame even amid pitch darkness.
He also located in advance the insect monster “Mana Fly” that obsessively targeted hunters who emitted mana.
And that wasn’t all.
There were strange phenomena where his body toughened and then returned to normal repeatedly, and each time the clothes he wore hardened.
It felt like watching a reinforced suit. Among hunters, suits were components already long abandoned (dead storage).
On top of that, not only did he absorb mana from dead monsters... a massive slime suddenly appeared and served as a shield, blocking attacks on Kang-hoo’s behalf.
Emilia was sure.
‘It wasn’t by chance that Yuuji died and Eclipse’s executives died. Their deaths were set from the start.’
Those hunters who lost their lives to Kang-hoo didn’t die because he was lucky or because they got careless.
It was the complete result Kang-hoo had produced with his own skill. She had to acknowledge it.
Now that she had drawn the conclusion about Kang-hoo she had been pondering but unable to confirm, she felt relieved.
At the same time, she became far more curious—and more interested—in him.
Currently, every member belonging to Justice had been forged over a long time.
But Kang-hoo had been a hunter for only a few months since his true growth began.
Back when he was confined in the Cheongmyeong Detention Center, it was common knowledge he had been a level 10 hunter.
‘If he were given the same time...’
She felt sure that if Kang-hoo were given the time and environment her teammates had, he would surpass them.
And she also felt that there would be no problem at all playing on a team with Kang-hoo from here on.
Normally in team play, an assassin was a sub-position who looked for a perfect burst window as support.
But unlike such mold-locked assassins, Kang-hoo had the ability to hold monsters like a tank.
The Collapse, Thunderstrike Tremor, and Tricolor Formation she had seen earlier were examples.
He possessed quite a few skills that could pin monsters down and suppress their movement.
“This is genuinely fun.”
The frown that had stayed on Emilia’s brow while she meticulously analyzed Kang-hoo from A to Z finally smoothed out.
For the first time, she had found a hunter whose growth she wanted to watch.
Like a fan watching an idol’s practice and growth even before debut.
Shin Kang-hoo clearly had that kind of value. It was a moment she deeply empathized with Takashi’s feelings.
Some more time passed.
Kang-hoo silently pressed on with the raid, pulverizing monsters, and the results converted neatly into experience.
Midway, to keep the fights smooth, he used two Mad Solarkiums—that was the only cost.
He had 22 Mad Solarkiums left; more than enough not to need additional procurement.
Before long, his level was 325.
【Shin Kang-hoo Lv. 325】
【Class: Assassin】
【Innate Talents: Quite Superior Mainstay / Outstanding Dynamic Vision / Versatile】
【Strength 1457】【Agility 1573】
【Vitality 1115】【Mana 31】
【Antimagic 1485】【Toughness 1075】
【 Dark Energy 1115】【 Holy Power 125】
‘If I just raise Holy Power, then excluding Mana—which needs no investment—my stats will form an even hexagon.’
Looking over his stats after a while, he was satisfied—they had all risen evenly with no deficiencies.
It was a stat layout totally unlike the assassin’s usual reality, where investing in Vitality, Antimagic, or Toughness was hard.
Just then—
Emilia, who had been keeping her distance and quietly watching Kang-hoo, had come up beside him without his noticing.
Because she’d been in strict observer mode, Kang-hoo hadn’t planned to call to her—but it seemed there was a new issue.
When he wiped the sweat from his brow and looked at her, Emilia made an enticing suggestion.
“Kang-hoo. Since we’ve come this far, want to take down the middle boss monster before we head back?”
“The middle boss?”
“Yes. Its name is Sebum. A human-male-shaped spider monster whose four legs fire killing beams—that’s its trademark.”
A spider.
And a humanoid monster.
At those words, only one case sprang to mind.