Chapter 370
Cold sweat ran down Kwon Taehyuk’s cheek.
Watching the drops of sweat darken the ground, Kwon Taehyuk consciously tried to steady his ragged breathing.
But it wasn’t easy, because his heart was pounding with abnormal force.
‘What is this?’
Trying to hide his trembling hand, Kwon Taehyuk deliberately gripped the hilt of his blade and blinked slowly.
The pain that had been crushing his entire body had disappeared cleanly thanks to Cha Seohu’s skill. But the problem wasn’t physical pain.
Kwon Taehyuk had always fought on the front line, so he was used to pain to a certain degree, and enduring it had become second nature. It would be a lie to say he felt no fear at all, but since he chose that front-line position himself, he had always been prepared.
But just now...
The moment he drove his blade into Cha Sahyeon’s body, and the instant he was buried in shadow like water crashing out of a collapsing dam—
After the horrific burning sensation, like his whole body had fallen into lava, his consciousness had been forcibly dragged somewhere.
He couldn’t understand what kind of sensation it had been. It was a feeling so far beyond common sense, an experience reason couldn’t comprehend.
He could feel every part of his body, and at the same time, it felt like all of it was being erased.
His arms and legs were cut off, then his lower body, and finally his upper body.
The feeling that only his head remained, floating somewhere. The experience of wanting to struggle, but having no body left—of being left with only a head and sinking into endless despair.
It was absurd. To begin with, how could a person still be alive with their head cut off and feel something like that?
And yet it had been possible. Only for a fleeting instant, but it had definitely happened.
Just remembering it was horrifying enough to send chills through him. His hand started shaking even harder.
‘If...’
If no one had pulled him out.
If he had been buried in that shadow and it had ended there.
Then... would he have had to remain in that state? With only his head left? Longing for the body that was no longer attached to him... for how long, endlessly?
The thought alone made it hard to breathe.
To be left alive with only consciousness in a place where time couldn’t even be felt. He definitely would have gone mad without lasting long at all. Even an S-rank mind would have shattered into something less than dust.
“...sir. Guildmaster!”
Someone’s hand grabbed his shoulder and shook him roughly.
Hhk—Kwon Taehyuk let out a breath. Only then did he realize he’d stopped breathing.
“Are you all right?”
A familiar voice reached him. Kwon Taehyuk lifted his head.
Cha Seohu was looking at him with his eyes twisted in worry. It was Cha Seohu who had shaken his shoulder.
“...I’m fine.”
Kwon Taehyuk forced out the answer in a dry, parched voice and barely got himself upright.
His mind came back to him belatedly.
Right. This wasn’t the time to be trembling in fear. He turned his body, gripping his blade tightly with a hand damp from cold sweat.
The first thing he saw was the black shadow sloshing and swelling across the ground.
Even though it couldn’t approach because it was blocked by the white light Cha Seohu had spread out, the moment he saw it there with his own eyes, his body locked up on its own.
Kwon Taehyuk bit his tongue.
‘Damn it.’
Could he fight in this state?
When just seeing the shadows writhe made his body stiffen?
But there were people behind him he had to protect. Cha Seohu, who was still spreading Divine Power over him even at this very moment.
If not for Cha Seohu, he wouldn’t have recovered from those injuries just now. He would have died as he was.
He owed Cha Seohu more debts than it was meaningful to count.
So he wasn’t in any position to sit there shaking because he was scared.
He had to protect him somehow. More than just protect him—he had to save everyone the way Cha Seohu wanted and get them out of this place.
Even if it really meant his neck being cut off like in a nightmare.
That was the only way to repay that debt.
“I’ll... go again.”
Thankfully, this time his voice came out steady, the way it always did.
With that declaration, the blades that had fallen around Kwon Taehyuk rose into the air again.
Including the one in his hand, a total of eight blades circled around him, their tips aimed straight ahead.
***
Eun Woojeong kept walking without stopping toward the place the blond man had pointed out, and finally came to a stop deep in the forest. Since he had come so far, Cha Sahyeon’s shadow no longer reached this place, so it was bright.
He had been walking long enough that he was starting to wonder whether he’d been tricked.
“Ha.”
Letting out a short, disbelieving laugh, Eun Woojeong brushed his hair back with an irritated hand.
Maybe he really had come here for nothing. To begin with, it made no sense that he’d listened to someone he didn’t even know and followed that person all the way here.
‘Why did I go along with it so easily?’
He should have realized it from that shameless line—that the responsibility was entirely his, and the other man was only giving him a choice.
Judging by the way he’d interfered like this, he was probably one of the men those fake-religion bastards had sent.
Just as Eun Woojeong was debating whether he should go back now and enter the shadows, or find the blond man who had interfered with him and kill him instead—
“......?”
The foot he had been about to turn on stopped.
‘The shadow....’
His gaze dropped to the ground beneath him.
His own shadow was trembling strangely, twisting into odd shapes.
He definitely wasn’t moving, and there wasn’t the slightest breeze around him. But things like tentacles kept sprouting from the shadow, writhing, then vanishing.
Eun Woojeong slowly lifted his head.
Everywhere his gaze went, he could see shadows moving. The shadows of the brush beside his own, the shadows of the trees, the shadows of the clouds.
Following the places where the shadows were shaking strangely, he soon found himself surrounded by darkness.
Not because the sky was covered in shadow, but because the forest had become so deep that it was naturally dark.
There, Eun Woojeong noticed the faint sound of breathing, along with a trace of someone’s presence.
Leaves overhead blocking the sky, damp air heavy with moisture, moss underfoot. Approaching the direction the sound was coming from, Eun Woojeong narrowed his eyes.
“It’s a kid?”
A very young child was lying in the middle of the grass.
As if trapped in a nightmare, the child’s pale face was soaked in cold sweat. Black hair, damp with sweat, clung to the forehead.
“Hm....”
Eun Woojeong’s expression turned complicated.
So he came all this way because that suspicious man told him to, and there was a child here? He had no idea how he was supposed to take that.
‘Doesn’t look like Cha Seohu’s younger brother.’
There was a resemblance, but the younger brother he’d seen hadn’t been this young. He’d even seen him wearing the choker item before, so he was sure of it.
That said, it also felt wrong to leave this child alone in the middle of the forest.
With a sigh, Eun Woojeong finally bent down and picked the child up. Seeing the child up close, he could make out the face more clearly.
Maybe it was because of the black hair. Somehow, the child gave off more of a resemblance to Cha Seohu’s younger brother. No... maybe he looked like Cha Seohu, too.
‘I really don’t know what I’m doing right now.’
He had come to save Cha Seohu, and instead he was rescuing some completely random child.
Hoping only that he wouldn’t come to regret this decision later, Eun Woojeong turned back the way he had come.
And it was the moment he emerged from the deep forest, where not a single ray of sunlight reached, and stepped into the sunlight—
“What the—”
Eun Woojeong stopped on reflex.
The weight in his arms grew lighter, and the child’s body started to blur.
Startled, Eun Woojeong furrowed his brow. Under the sunlight, the child’s body that had begun to blur now started breaking apart like dust, scattering to pieces.
It all happened in an instant.
Before he could even try to stop it, the child vanished just like that.
Eun Woojeong blinked, then let out a stunned laugh—and at that very moment, a tearing roar exploded from the sky.
Kurururung!
A deafening crash, like a giant drum being ripped apart, shook heaven and earth.
Then the shadows that had been swallowing the sky and spreading nonstop suddenly stopped. And then, like an army whose main camp had just been attacked, they began retreating in urgent haste.
Eun Woojeong lifted his head, watched all of it happen, and smiled with a furrowed brow.
“Looks like I hit something important.”
At the very least, it seemed the blond man hadn’t been lying.
***
“Wait, Guildmaster. This time I’ll go first. So—”
Ryu Sunghyun, worried because Kwon Taehyuk looked bad no matter how he looked at it, hurriedly stepped in, about to take the lead himself.
Kugugung!
The ground shook violently, and the shadows spread across the floor convulsed.
“Ugh....”
The one who let out the groan was none other than the Catastrophe.
His body, which had been pouring out a massive amount of shadows from inside itself, staggered.
Through the hair spilling down and shaking, his eyes trembled violently. The green eyes turned toward the three people standing in the light.
“Uh, hye... ung....”
The Catastrophe mumbled in clumsy, broken pronunciation, as if someone were forcing the mouth to move.
“I, I, stop....”
The Catastrophe, muttering like a child, suddenly clenched his teeth and threw his head back.
A bad feeling hit, and Kwon Taehyuk hurriedly pulled Cha Seohu into his arms and shouted.
“Get back—!”
Before he could even finish, an even greater mass of shadow exploded out of the Catastrophe’s body.
A wave of shadow rose high enough to touch the sky and crashed down on Cha Seohu’s group.