Chapter Text
✧ ✧ ✧
The first time Sung Jin-Woo (who had once been Eleanor Potter, a long time ago, in another life) had heard the term Soulmate being tossed around was when she was five years old and stuck in the middle of the most boring preschool lesson she had ever been forced to attend.
Frankly, she had been quite sure that someone was trying to pull her leg.
Because seriously? Soulmates?
To her, personally, that sounded like some kind of really bad joke. Always had and probably always would. As someone who had met Fate, the apparent culprit behind the entire Soulmate thing (according to her teacher, at least), she was pretty sure that the entire bullshit actually was some kind of bad joke.
She certainly wouldn’t put it past the deity.
Soulmates existed, she learned in that lesson.
Somewhere out there, everyone had a person who was basically the other half of their soul. Jin-Woo, who had been reborn seven times at this point and had therefore quite a bit of experience in the field of all things Death™ and Supernatural™ (not that Supernatural), was pretty sure that her soul was fine and entirely whole all on its own, thank you very much, just as it had been for centuries now.
Still, she had to force down the overwhelming urge to throw herself off the closest cliffside (or building—something much more realistically found in Seoul, South Korea, one of the largest cities in the world) just to get the chance to yell at both Death and Fate for their newest bad decision. Considering her previous experiences with getting killed (or killing herself—mental health was nothing but an illusion for immortals like herself, she had come to realise), she was sure that she’d have at least five minutes of shouting to her heart’s content before her body would regenerate itself well enough to be considered alive again.
Which might actually be a problem, now that Jin-Woo thought about it—she was relatively certain that the children in this world were generally incapable of that kind of regeneration, and with how densely the city was populated, there’d be no way no one would notice her antics.
So. No suicide then.
Huh.
Instead, Jin-Woo stayed where she was and listened to the preschool teacher go on and on in her terrible baby-voice, explaining the concept of the supposedly perfect love story to a bunch of kiddos that had absolutely zero concept of romance and still thought contact with the other gender would give them cooties.
Which was probably why the lady was calling the supposedly other half of their soul “the bestest friend you could ever wish for”.
As much as Jin-Woo hated being a child and being forced through school over and over and over again, the way adults constantly attempted to censor stuff and dumb things down to be child-appropriate would probably never not be hilarious.
“Your Soulmate is the person you’ll be closest with, the one who knows everything there is to know about you,” the teacher threatened them in a coo (though she would probably call it ‘explaining’ if asked), smiling so brightly that it was almost disturbing to look at. “You are connected to them not only through your soul but also through your mind. Some of you may have already started to hear them even, the voice inside your head that speaks to you.”
That was the point at which Jin-Woo decided to stop listening to whatever other nonsense the lady might spew out next, dropping her head onto her table to prepare for her nap instead.
A voice inside her head? Seriously?
That was how Fate had decided Soulmates would get to know each other?
It was like the deity was just frothing at the mouth at the chance to throw Eleanor’s old trauma back at her in the unfunniest way possible—in hindsight, maybe Jin-Woo shouldn’t have cheated at poker the last time she’d seen the deity, but, in her defence, how had she been supposed to know that the literal embodiment of Fate would be this sore of a loser? A bloody voice in her head.
No thank you, Fate, really; she had absolutely zero need of experiencing that bullshit ever again—even if the person at the other end of that connection wasn’t Voldemort this time around, she still had lingering trauma that she’d likely never be able to resolve.
And there definitely was someone at the other end; she could feel it.
Now that she knew that there might be someone there, it was as easy as breathing to look past her occlumency shields without them so much as even noticing her presence in their head to confirm it—a single glimpse from behind the walls of her mental fortress.
The foreign thoughts came to her as if they were her own, familiar in a way that was entirely unnatural and absolutely disturbing. She could hear him now, the voice of a young boy who was evidently just as bored in school as she currently was, complaining in Mandarin about the exercises given to him by his teacher. Some kind of science, she’d guess—biology?
Merlin, how she hated biology.
She’d always been better at physics and chemistry, all so nice and orderly and, above all, the exact same every time she was forced through another decade of regular human schoolwork. Biology, on the other hand, had never once had the same curriculum twice, and while she usually would have been thankful for the breath of fresh air, it was now a bit detrimental to her overall goal. As much as Jin-Woo hated the thought of being forcefully bound to someone else, and never mind the fact that she was planning on never again acknowledging this bond between herself and the other child, she would have nonetheless liked to know how old the boy was. Like this, it was most certainly impossible to even guess at the child’s grade, and therefore his approximate age.
Oh well, she thought to herself as she crept back behind the secure walls of her mental fortress, easily blocking out the connection once again—more than ready to take her nap and never wake up again, who cares?
At least she had figured out what the resident Weird Shit™ of this Dimension seemed to be.
✧ ✧ ✧
Nine years later, Sung Jin-Woo stared at the swirling blue of the portal in the parking lot of her middle school and mentally corrected that statement.
Shit, apparently, had just gotten Weirder™.
✧ ✧ ✧
Sung Jin-Woo (who had once been Eleanor Potter) was at least somewhat proud to say that she had seen a lot of Weird Shit™ over the course of her several reincarnations.
It was kind of the point of the whole thing, really, the deal she had struck with Death when she’d died the first time around. Her first life had gone off the rails when she’d been a toddler and Death had decided to have mercy on his Master years later, promising her lifetimes full of fun—bound to no one (see how that had turned out?), free to do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. So long as she sometimes helped the deity out with something along the way, she was free to live the way she wanted to—and whether that meant murdering her way across a countryside, becoming a gardener or occasionally moonlighting as an internationally wanted thief, that was entirely up to her.
The results had always, always been Weird™—partly because of her rather questionable life choices and partly because the Worlds she’d been thrown into had simply been weird.
This time, though, it was entirely the World’s fault.
In her third life, Eleanor had ended up reborn in a Reality that was, essentially, exactly like Tolkien’s famous Middle-Earth, except for the fact that she had been born as Bilbo Baggins, female edition.
Up until now, that World had been the weirdest by default, simply because for the longest time, Eleanor-turned-Azalea-Baggins had been entirely unable to look at anyone without thinking of them as a character in a book she had once read. It hadn’t stopped her from saving a few lives during the infamous Battle of the Five Armies, of course, and it definitely hadn’t made her walking holiday to Mordor immediately after (and yes, she had indeed simply walked into Mordor) any less satisfying.
Living in a book she had once read, even if she did her very best to completely annihilate the original plot, was very strange.
The strangest.
At least she had thought that it was the strangest until her current World had hit her not only with bloody Soulmates but also the type of Hunter-Dungeon bullshit usually only found in comics and video games.
At least, she tried to console herself rather half-heartedly; there was no actual levelling system. (Ten years into the future, Jin-Woo would look back to this exact moment and realise that she had just majorly jinxed herself.)
There were a few things the world as a whole managed to figure out over the course of the first few months of their new reality, starting with the fact that the blue portals spawning all over the planet led to other Dimensions filled with monsters hell bent on murdering all of them.
Humanity promptly dubbed the portals ‘Dungeons’ because of fucking course they did. (She should really stop expecting shit from them.)
These Dungeons, they discovered, were mostly made up of caves—huge, dark tunnels full of glowing rocks and magical crystals (dubbed ‘Glow Stones’ and ‘Mana Crystals’ because, apparently, humanity had decided that they would stick with the clichés no matter how dumb they sounded), all ultimately leading to a big chamber with one monster that was stronger than all the others found in the Dungeon. Which people, of course, dubbed the ‘Dungeon Boss’.
Privately, Sung Jin-Woo thought that humankind, collectively, had played far too many video games prior to the appearance of the Dungeons. And read too many books, that too.
It would definitely explain why people had taken one look at the humans that had suddenly broken out bloody superpowers—superhuman strength and speed, enhanced senses, literal magic, weird summoning, healing spells, just about everything imaginable—and had taken to calling them Awakened and Hunters instead of, you know, superheroes.
Because, apparently, superheroes were out nowadays, who would have thought? Certainly not Jin-Woo.
(She was a little disappointed when not even one awakened military grunt rose to claim the title of ‘Super Soldier’. Not even the American ones. She couldn’t possibly be the only Marvel fan in this entire Reality, could she?)
In all honesty, it was almost a little startling how fast life with Dungeons turned into the norm after the emergence of Hunters.
The monsters that had broken out of their Dungeons (which happened after a week of them going uncleared, they managed to discover rather quickly) and killed thousands of people all around the world, immune to any form of modern warfare, were quickly struck down by a bunch of untrained civilians with swords, wands, and a whole lot of pent-up rage and just overall anger issues.
From their suddenly larger-than-life shadows, almost entirely new governments emerged, so-called Hunter Associations forming in just about every country of the world, trying to wrangle their reality back into some semblance of order. They assembled teams to clear out Dungeons before they could break, fought for new laws and representation and research, and even imposed punishments if necessary.
And the world adjusted.
For most of the world that simply (Ha!) meant adjusting to a new world order—it meant getting into traffic jams because a Dungeon had spawned on the road to work, it meant hearing children enthusiastically tell everyone who’d listen that they were dreaming of becoming a Hunter one day, it meant entirely new fields of science and steady jobs with just as steady income.
For Sung Jin-Woo, it meant watching her newest father go from a regular fireman to one of the two strongest men in their country. To a man who walked out the door to clear a supposedly easy Dungeon and never came back.
But her father wasn’t dead, Jin-Woo knew that.
He wasn’t.
When he left the house that day, he had still had more than a decade left until he might die, the possibility of a future death nothing but a faint black shimmer hovering just beneath a surface only she could see through, clear as day to her eyes only. Her father hadn’t died in that Dungeon. It hadn’t been his time yet. Jin-Woo would have felt him die.
Sadly, she was the only one aware of that, and it wasn’t like she could just tell people.
At the age of fifteen, Sung Jin-Woo was left where she’d been half a dozen times before—halfway to being an orphan. Hell, she basically was an orphan, despite her current mother being still alive, despite her being supposed to stay that way for many more years to come.
But with the breadwinner of the family gone, Park Kyung-Hye was almost constantly at work in an attempt to put whatever food she could onto the table. She might as well have been dead, too, considering the way she left Jin-Woo to deal with everything.
It was her who made breakfast in the morning, who ensured that her eight-year-old baby sister made it to school on time, who made sure that Jin-Ah had lunch packed and that she did her homework when she came home in the evening. It was Jin-Woo who cooked dinner, who cleaned the apartment, who went out to get groceries.
The truth was that, in barely less than a week, the Sung siblings had lost both parents.
✧ ✧ ✧
Sung Jin-Woo was seventeen when she saw her supposed Soulmate for the first time.
At that time, at the other end of the world, an S-Class Dungeon had broken, the giant dragon that had fled its insides laying waste to the entire west coast of the United States, S-Rank Hunter after S-Rank Hunter falling under its sharp claws and teeth.
Kamish, people called that thing.
And Sung Jin-Woo was not a Hunter, she never had an Awakening and she honestly didn’t want to have one either, but she was several hundreds of years old (no matter what the hormones in her body had to say about that) and the veteran of multiple wars—never mind the fact that she had fought her fair share of dragons over the years, which was most definitely more than any of those S-Rankers could boast about.
She was Death’s Master.
She was the most powerful witch of the century.
And she was, quite honestly, itching for a good fight—for blood to be spilt at her hands, for a chance to let loose her magic, for a chance to prove herself superior. Itching for something she knew she couldn’t do.
For just a moment, she’d considered stepping in anyway, just differently. Not in person.
It would be so easy, she lamented privately.
She wouldn’t even need to apparate over to the States, not really—all she needed was to snap her fingers, right here, right where she was sitting next to her baby sister, and the giant thing would die, its soul ripped straight from its body and down into the endless abyss of eternal nothingness that was death.
Nothing else.
It would be over in a matter of seconds; no one would ever even need to know—she could just kill that thing, and whoever was still alive over there could take all the credit.
She’d have an outlet, they would have the glory—it would be a win-win situation for everyone involved!
Then the shaky camera that had been capturing parts of the battle—the massacre, really—panned just a little to the side, rattled by the tremors Kamish’s every step caused, and suddenly there was a man in frame.
Tall, dark-haired, pale-skinned, and bloody. So very bloody.
His clothes were torn, half of his blood-soaked midriff exposed to the open air, a gaping wound beneath his rips slowly oozing blood in a steady river of deep red. Just like the cuts on his arms and legs and chest and face—his everywhere, honestly, his entire body was covered in open wounds and only half-dried blood.
Jin-Woo looked at that bloody mess of a Hunter and something in her mind clicked, exactly as that horrible preschool teacher twelve years ago had told her it would.
She looked at him, and it clicked, and for a single moment, her mind simply blanked.
Huh.
Despite not actually doing anything, Jin-Woo felt strangely winded.
All of a sudden, there was no longer enough air in her lungs, her limbs felt numb in that terrible way they did after sitting in the same position for too long, and she knew that she was blankly staring into space like some kind of nutcase; she knew, but there was simply nothing she could do.
The truth was that Jin-Woo hadn’t thought of her Soulmate in years, not really.
When the Dungeons had first emerged, she had taken a short peek over the walls of her mental fortress, just to see if the boy on the other side was still there and, finding him alive and quite literally kicking, had then gone back to ignoring his existence. Her mother hadn’t asked about either her or her little sister’s Soulmate since their father had vanished in the depths of that Dungeon (he was not dead), and it was not like she had anyone else but her sister to talk about these kinds of things—and Jin-Ah was only ten, uninterested in romance and the like.
She hadn’t thought about her Soulmate in years.
And yet there he was, on live television, fighting a dragon.
By the time Jin-Woo managed to get her head back on straight, the desperate fight of the S-Rankers had ended in humanity’s victory, only five of the dozens of fighters left standing—her newly discovered Soulmate amongst them.
Her Soulmate. Liu Zhigang. A young man from Tianjin in his early twenties. One of the only five newly dubbed National Level Hunters, the supposedly strongest Hunter in all of Asia, China’s one and only Seven Star Hunter.
That evening, Sung Jin-Woo took another peek across the walls of her mental fortress and found herself faced with the sheer and unadulterated terror of freshly created PTSD, a complete mess of fear and anxiety and panic crashing into her shields like an uncontrollable tidal wave.
It was not care that had her reaching out and smoothing over the edges of the freshly jagged mind before her with her magic, numbing the pain and calming the fear. It was not pity that had her thinning the walls of her shields for just a little while (years), just weakened enough to know whenever Liu Zhigang was plagued by nightmares that needed to be chased away.
If anything, it was solidarity, from one warrior to another—a helping hand from someone who’s already been through all the same nightmares before.
That was all it was. Nothing more.
✧ ✧ ✧
Sung Jin-Woo awakened as a Hunter in her last year of High School.
It was not something she even realised had happened at first—there was no sudden overwhelming boost in her strength, no noticeable increase in her speed, no startling leap in her overall agility. Nothing.
Like an idiot, Jin-Woo didn’t realise that something was different until the signs were practically jumping her in the face—in this case, her mother simply failing to wake up one morning, no matter how much both of her daughters tried to shake her awake.
Eternal Sleep, the doctor explained to their little family the day after, when their mother was finally awake again. Park Kyung-Hye had caught Eternal Sleep, an incurable magical sickness that had appeared along with the gates, one that would inevitably put her to sleep for the entire rest of her life.
A sickness that was a product of prolonged contact with a Hunter.
A week later, Jin-Woo slipped off to visit the Hunter Association without telling her family, requesting an assessment of her Rank.
She came out of the building as a registered E-Rank Hunter—which, admittedly, felt both incredibly right and so incredibly wrong at the same time that it left her with a headache.
E-Ranks, everyone had realised by that time, were barely any different from regular unawakened individuals. They were neither faster nor stronger than your normal human; they simply possessed a little bit of Mana. And Sung Jin-Woo, who definitely must have awakened at some point over the last year to be able to cause her mother’s sickness, had neither become any stronger nor had she become any faster.
The only thing that was wrong about her assessment as a run-of-the-mill E-Ranker was the undeniable fact that Jin-Woo-who-had-once-been-Eleanor had a bit more than just a little Mana.
Calling her Mana pool little was rather like calling the ocean a puddle—a vast understatement.
It was an ocean that she had, admittedly, suppressed to an absolutely unholy degree upon testing.
She’d been aiming for a D-Class, but in the end, that didn’t make much of a difference either way. Jin-Woo had no desire to become a famous and rich Hunter, and as such, her official rank was something she couldn’t care less about. Now that she was done with school, she could easily admit that she was far more comfortable with the thought of fighting monsters for a living than with the idea of working nine-to-five as a paper pusher, but she’d been famous often enough by now to know that she wouldn’t subject herself to that bullshit ever again if she didn’t absolutely have to. Being a Hunter was better than not being one, but she would not be a famous one.
Hopefully.
If she’d played her cards well, Jin-Woo would be able to pay the rent for their apartment, her mother’s upcoming hospital fees, and maybe even Jin-Ah’s future college tuition.
As daunting as it may sound, she was sure that she would be able to pull it off.
✧ ✧ ✧
Sung Jin-Woo was nineteen when her mother went to sleep in the evening and didn’t wake up again—not on the next day or the one after that.
Or any day after that, for that matter.
Sung Jin-Woo was nineteen when she took custody of her twelve-year-old sister and started to work as an independent E-Rank Hunter with a Brawler Class, taking on every job that came her way to pay the bills.
✧ ✧ ✧
Sung Jin-Woo was about to turn twenty-two the first time she felt a foreign tap on her occlumency shields.
She had no clue what had prompted it, but somehow, Liu Zhigang had managed to discover the wall between their minds and was now semi-constantly prodding at it like an overly curious toddler, trying to find his way onto the other side.
He would fail, of course—technically speaking, Jin-Woo had been practising her occlumency for far longer than the man had even been alive and even as an actual teenager, the first time around, she’d had some semblance of success in her attempts at keeping Lord Voldemort out of her head. She had been able to keep that bloke out of her mind with barely any training, so she was rather sure that nothing short of a natural Legillimens would be able to even come close to breaking her shields—and Liu Zhigang was definitely not a born Mind Reader.
Never mind the fact that he was also far less aggressive in his approach than anyone else who’d ever attempted to break into her mind.
She was sure it was because he could tell that it was this wall that was keeping him from his Soulmate. Was somewhat sure that he was unwilling to risk hurting her.
Like this, she knew for a fact, the Hunter would never be able to get to the other side of her walls.
Still, she had to hand it to the guy—he was certainly persistent.
It would be far more impressive if his attempts weren’t giving her a headache, though.
✧ ✧ ✧
Jin-Woo would never admit it out loud, not even to herself, but she was keeping tabs on Liu Zhigang.
Now, truth be told, it wasn’t unusual to keep tabs on the most powerful people on the entire planet; she knew that, especially since these powerful people were also the most popular celebrities of their time.
Keeping tabs on him was not unusual—it was barely any different from following Taylor Swift on Twitter.
In addition to that, she was also keeping tabs on all the other National Level Hunters as well—on Thomas André, and Christopher Reed, and Siddharth Bachchan, and all the others. But where she was only occasionally checking in on the other Hunters, reading some articles on whatever they were currently up to maybe once every two weeks or so, she had an almost compulsory need to check in on Liu Zhigang every few days.
And unlike with the other National Level Hunters, she didn’t stop at articles either—she checked the most popular social media posts from actual fan sites, looked at photographs, and sometimes even watched videos of the man’s interviews.
She wasn’t stalking him, she told herself (and Jin-Ah), she was simply keeping tabs on him. On her Soulmate (she didn’t tell Jin-Ah about that part, though).
Frankly, it wasn’t anything to be embarrassed about (even if her little sister thought that she had a celebrity crush, which was indeed rather humiliating). Evidently, a lot of people were doing the same thing, and she was reasonably sure that just about all of them had far less of a reason to do so, compared to her. Seriously, the man was literally her Soulmate. It was completely normal to check in on one’s Soulmate.
The only problem with all of this was that Jin-Woo still hated the concept of Soulmates.
She despised the thought of being bound to another, of her mind being forever connected to someone else without her consent. Detested the thought of someone else deciding who’d be perfect for her. Loathed that she was clearly and undeniably attracted to the man she knew to be on the other side of this bond, and not just physically at that.
Hated that she wasn’t sure if that attraction was natural because Jin-Woo just so happened to be attracted to Liu Zhigang, or because Fate (that Bitch) had decided that she had to be.
Sung Jin-Woo hated the concept of Soulmates.
Sung Jin-Woo also not-stalked all of her supposed Soulmate’s socials on a regular basis.
It was absolutely infuriating, and she had already needed to Reparo her phone on seven different occasions over the past month alone, just because her rage at her own actions had caused her to smash the stupid thing against the closest wall (which she had also needed to fix, seven times) in an embarrassingly childish fit of anger.
No matter how often she tried to focus on something else while on her phone, she couldn’t even browse her own socials without the famous Hunter popping up on her dash, the algorithm long since programmed to practically spam her with all available news about the man and some ‘classics’ caught on video over the years. And whenever she decided to delete an account and start anew, her curiosity would catch up to her sooner or later, pushing her back into an endless circle she couldn’t seem to escape from.
Next time she saw Fate, the young woman vowed silently as she scrolled through Twitter one hunt-free afternoon, she’d punch the deity in the face.
As if to punish her for the thought alone, she caught the words “your Soulmate” in the subtitles of a video clip she had just scrolled past and proceeded to almost drop her phone onto her face in her haste to pull it back up and watch whatever it was about.
“Is there anything you’d like to say to your Soulmate, in case they ever watch this?” The subtitles read, the camera focused entirely on Liu Zhigang as he turned around to whoever had asked the question with a contemplative look replacing the usual devil-may-care expression he was so well-known for.
Jin-Woo hastened to raise the volume of her phone, hands weirdly shaky, and she managed to just about catch the tail end of the asked question (the ‘interview’ was in English, surprisingly enough) before her supposed Soulmate decided to answer.
“If I could tell them anything I want?” He hummed in that unfairly smooth voice, golden-glowing eyes staring straight past the camera in a way Jin-Woo recognised from other people communicating with their destined partners, an attractive a slight smirk tugging at the corners of his mouth in surprisingly obvious amusement. “I guess if I could tell them anything I want, I’d ask them to finally pull down whatever wall they’ve managed to build between our minds. I’d like to actually hear their voice at least once in my life.”
The National Level Hunter turned away on that last sentence and left without another comment (he was being unnecessarily dramatic—not that Jin-Woo had any leg to stand on here), completely ignoring the plethora of yelled questions he was leaving behind, and the video looped the moment he fully turned his back.
As expected, the video was trending within ten minutes of being posted, and the internet was going absolutely wild.
Some flipped out over the fact that someone had actually managed to completely block their Soulmate from their mind, some cried about how they couldn’t understand why someone would willingly block out Liu Zhigang, and others yet again were going absolutely feral over the oh-so-sad fact that one of the most powerful men in the world had never before been allowed to hear his Soulmates’ voice.
The hashtag #LiuZhigangsSoulmate was trending for months on end after the video was posted.
✧ ✧ ✧
Sung Jin-Woo was twenty-three the first time she (consciously) considered thinning her Occlumency Shields just enough to talk to her Soulmate.
Said contemplation lasted for all of two seconds.
The resulting slightly feral-sounding scream of rage that escaped her throat accidentally set the curtains in the living room on fire, and blew up the glass of water on the coffee table that she had intended to drink.
That evening, in an act of somewhat petty defiance, she ended up adding an additional meter of brick to the already towering height of her mental fortress, just to be contrary and petty.
The vague feeling of amusement she got in return had her curtains smoking dangerously.
✧ ✧ ✧
“My Soulmate just had his Awakening!” Jin-Ah told her one evening in late spring, eyes vacantly staring into space in the way people did when focusing on their Soulmate.
Unlike Jin-Woo, who had just straight up built a wall to avoid dealing with the whole shared-mind bullshit Fate had invented in what must have been some kind of drunken haze, most people learned to tune out their partners as they aged, shoving their consciousness so far out of focus that they became more of a humming presence in the back of their heads than an omnipresent entity, thoughts only audible when focused on.
It was a little relieving to know that the possibility of privacy did exist even for regular Soulmates, but Jin-Woo still preferred her method of pretending like she didn’t even have a Soulmate in the first place.
Still, unlike her, Jin-Ah was fond of her Soulmate in the way most people tended to be (she tried not to think about the fact that the behaviour reminded her a bit of a cult, every person on Earth seemingly indoctrinated to think that this was actually a good thing).
She talked to him daily, trusted him even with things she was hesitant to tell Jin-Woo about, and right now she was looking so incredibly proud of her partner that the older girl had to hold herself back from cooing over how absolutely adorable her baby sister was.
“That’s great.” She told her instead, patting her head softly, unwilling to ruin this moment for her. “Tell him congratulations from me, alright?”
Privately, she threatened Fate in her mind.
If Jin-Ah’s Soulmate were to die before they ever had the chance to meet, she would make the stupid deity pay. Jin-Woo disliking the concept didn’t mean that she didn’t want her sister to be happy—and if that Soulmate of hers made her happy, then Jin-Woo had no intention of letting anything happen to the bloke, whoever he may be.
✧ ✧ ✧
Sung Jin-Woo was freshly twenty-four when the Weird Shit™ reached a new all-time high.
✧ ✧ ✧
The raid started as any other raid before did and as any other raid should, at least between independent Hunters without meddling Guilds involved—they chose a raid leader, gossiped a little over everything and nothing, and got a brief overview of what to expect of the Dungeon they were about to enter.
Everything was as it should be.
Honestly, Jin-Woo couldn’t even claim that the normality of it all should have tipped her off, because every single raid she had ever joined in the past four and a half years had been exactly like this.
There’d been nothing there to tip her off. Her or anyone else, for that matter.
They cleared the Dungeon with as much ease as they had expected, slightly disappointed with the low-quality loot of it all, but overall unharmed and also rather fast.
Maybe it was that ease that had made them careless, deciding to throw caution to the wind and to go down a path that might or might not lead them to the true boss of the Dungeon, voting thirteen to three in favour of the decision.
A decision that would lead to multiple deaths in their party, Jin-Woo realised the very second the final vote to go on was cast, the invisible shadow that foretold certain death exploding beneath the skin of most of the Hunters around her, the impending doom visible to her and her alone.
What protest she offered fell on deaf ears—the majority had voted for moving forward, and there was nothing she could do to change that, save for straight-up mind controlling them into it and wiping their memory clean after. An impossible option, given her complete inexperience with Memory Charms and the sheer size of their group, never mind whatever effect the charms might have on their Soulmates.
People would die today, she came to terms with that at that moment.
What she hadn’t realised, evidently, was just how gruesome their deaths would be.
Jin-Woo’s been through war. Through multiple wars, in fact—the magical kind that had monstrous spells flying everywhere, the traditional kind of steel and swords that had her slipping on blood and intestines as she scrambled across dirt and corpses to get to safety, and the modern kind that had her dodge bullets and defuse bombs, aware that every moment could be the last.
She’d seen bloody before. She’d seen massacres before.
Somehow, the Double Dungeon was worse.
Not because it was more horrifying than any other battlefield she’d ever been on, no.
She had watched other people get decapitated before. Hell, she herself had been decapitated before, even (unpleasant affair, that). She had seen other people lose just about every limb one could lose (had lost quite a few herself, too), and she had seen more people get squashed beneath boulders and buildings than she could honestly care to remember. More than she wanted to remember, either. She had even seen someone get squished like a bug beneath a giant’s heel before—although a combination of the two was a first, even for her. The burning (or rather, cremation) of living people also wasn’t new; the pungent stench of burning flesh an old but unwelcome acquaintance of hers by this point.
All of this was familiar to her. But what made this place worse than any other battlefield was her inability to stop their deaths from happening.
In war, on a battlefield with hundreds or even thousands of other people, saving everyone was not a viable option. People died in war; that was just the way war worked, and she had stopped fighting that inescapable truth a while ago. There was always someone.
As long as there were fights, there’d always be death, too.
This though? This wasn’t war. This was a Dungeon that she had entered with sixteen other people, and only five of them were set to make it out of here alive.
Which was stupid because there were only sixteen of them here—leaving war with no casualties was impossible, even with her powers, she could never even hope to achieve a feat like that. But a Dungeon with only sixteen people should have been possible. Should have been entirely in the realm of achievable.
But still, the Summoning Charm she used on the first Hunter, the one that decided to go for the doors, was too slow; the statue, somehow, impossibly, was faster than her spell. He lost his head before her magic even touched his clothes.
She was able to combat the panic caused by the moving statues by casting some spells designed to calm the mind, but that was, quite frankly, the only thing that worked out the way she intended after that. Well, the only spell that worked out as intended—they lost three Hunters in the attack that followed, the lot of them unable (or maybe simply unwilling) to follow her instruction to duck fast enough to avoid certain death.
One more infuriating idiot was lost to the giant statue’s ridiculous laser eyes before she managed to get behind the rules of the place.
The first one, at least.
The last semblance of peace her spell forced onto her fellow Hunters disappeared as the giant statue made to stand and proceeded to squash one of their numbers beneath its heel—which, admittedly, was kind of the man’s own fault for not listening to her when she told him that he was praying to the wrong god.
The feeble justification didn’t make the way his blood splattered across her arms any less unpleasant.
It was hopeless, these blood splatters told her.
The other Hunters were panicking now. Lee Ju-Hee was practically dead weight as the B-Rank Healer stumbled after her, barely able to stand in her (understandable) fright. Song Chi-Yul had lost one of his arms in the largest statue’s first attack, rendering him not entirely useless but also not in peak condition. Another Hunter Jin-Woo couldn’t even remember the name of died beneath the heel of the giant stone statue, frozen to her spot in panic. Park-ssi fell to one of the smaller statues at the edge of the temple, split in half with just one swing of the massive sword.
On their way to fulfil the Second Commandment, to praise the god by standing beneath statues with instruments, they lose another four Hunters, leaving Jin-Woo with the same five people she had known would survive this encounter.
And without a leg. That too.
It was a little embarrassing to lose a leg to a stupid stone statue of all things, but considering the fact that the thing would either reattach itself at some point in the next fifteen minutes or simply regrow entirely in a few hours, Jin-Woo really couldn’t care less right now.
She’s had worse. She would most certainly continue to have worse. The pain was manageable, too—laughable, in fact, compared to all the other things she survived before.
What they needed to focus on, she told Lee Ju-Hee as the other woman tried to fuss over her, was not her leg but their way out of the temple. Just because Jin-Woo knew that the others would make it out alive didn’t mean that they could become complacent.
Of course, all the other people in the room were apparently idiots, though, so it took a few minutes to get everyone situated around the altar. She’d never know why these people thought this place to be the perfect location for a fight, but honestly, she’d rather not know either way.
Men, honestly.
Cowards, honestly, she corrected herself only minutes later.
Jin-Woo was not going to lie—she had expected someone to make a run for it, even with her second calming charm hovering above them all like a security blanket. Not everyone handled pressure the same way and not everyone handled looming death the same way, never mind the fact that the other three not-Lee-Ju-Hee’s and not-Song-Chi-Yul’s had probably never actually trusted her in the first place.
That being said, Jin-Woo was still disappointed.
Her disappointment was immeasurable, in fact, and her day was ruined. Quite literally at that, because she had just ushered the other two out of the closing doors, leaving her behind with only one leg and a bunch of murderous stone statues out for her blood.
The good news? She no longer had any witnesses. Now she could use her magic as openly as she wanted without needing to explain to anyone that she was only pretending to be a Fighter Class because her life was so incredibly boring that she needed the adrenaline rush only close-range combat could give her.
Hoo-fucking-ray.
A quick Accio had her severed foot flying back towards her, the limb automatically steering towards its intended place at her still bleeding stump of a leg. It was close to reattaching itself, she knew, able to feel the magic at work—she just needed to leave it alone, let it do the rest on its own. It wouldn’t take long now.
She had something else to focus on anyway.
The doors of the temple were closed now, leaving her to die at the hands of the stone statues steadily closing in on her—something that was rather unfortunate considering the fact that Jin-Woo quite literally couldn’t die, not permanently at least.
So, if she didn’t want to be trapped here for the rest of her natural lifespan, she would need to find a way out of the temple that wouldn’t result in a Dungeon Break—Merlin knew she couldn’t let these things get out of here, seeing what they did to C-Ranks and below and what they would also probably be able to do to Hunters of an even higher Rank, never mind all the civilians on the other side of the Gate.
No, she needed to clear this Dungeon and getting rid of these stupid statues would definitely be her first step.
Or, well. She thought that it would be her first step until the stone knight she had just blasted to pieces with a Bombarda started to piece itself back together. The statues, it seemed, were just as immortal as Jin-Woo herself was.
That, she privately found, threw a bit of a wrench into her plans.
That probably meant that she wasn’t supposed to fight her way out of this place. Which was kind of logical. After all, normal Dungeons usually had a Boss Chamber that required Hunters to simply fight whatever Boss (singular!) they found in there—not a place that functioned on a bunch of riddled commandments that reminded her far too much of her first year at Hogwarts.
No, her best bet for escaping would probably be getting the third commandment over and done with.
What she needed to do was to somehow stay in this circle until the blue flames surrounding her were all extinguished.
Jin-Woo could probably continue to blast the oncoming statues to pieces to keep them away, but she was not sure if that would work for long enough to wait out all the flames around the altar. Now that she was the only one left in the circle, she noticed that their progress was visibly slower than before. Like this, it would take ages for the last of the blue flames to vanish.
As powerful as she was, without back-up, it would only be a matter of time before one of the stupid statues would either get a lucky hit in or just straight up sneak up on her from behind.
The way things looked now, she’d probably die before all of the flames did, all things considered. Which, honestly speaking, wasn’t as bad as it sounded. Usually, dying left her unconscious for a few minutes at most (depending mainly on the type of death and the damage done to her body and brain that needed to be healed) before she’d gasp awake again, fit as a fiddle and ready for whatever the world might throw at her next. And considering that the statue’s main objective seemed to be her untimely demise, letting them ‘kill’ her might actually be the better option here. With their objective over and done with, they shouldn’t be bothering her once she’d revive and if they did—well, in that case she’d try her luck with the blue flames.
Yeah, that sounded perfectly doable. Right?
Stepping back on her freshly reattached leg, Jin-Woo hopped onto the altar behind her, gracelessly flopping onto her back, spread-eagled.
“C’mon,” she called out somewhat impatiently to the statues surrounding her far too slowly. “Kill me. Please?”
She watched with wary eyes as one of the stone knights stepped closer, trudging up the stairs of the altar until he hovered above her, heavy sword raised over her chest, tip pointing straight down at her chest.
This will hurt, she told herself as a form of mental preparation.
YOU HAVE MET ALL THE REQUIREMENTS TO COMPLETE THE SECRET QUEST: “COURAGE OF THE WEAK”, the weird blue screen that suddenly popped up in front of her nose told her. IF YOU DECLINE, YOUR HEART WILL STOP BEATING IN 0.02 SECONDS. DO YOU ACCEPT?
Well, she told herself this time, even for someone unable to actually die, this one’s a no-brainer.
Sung Jin-Woo chose ACCEPT.
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