Volume 2

The volume opens not on Jinwoo but on the people watching him. Sangmin An, manager of the White Tiger Guild’s Second Administration Team, and his subordinate Kichul wait at two different C-rank gates, phoning each other, to see whether a hunch is right. Jinho Yoo has been buying up the raid rights to C-rank gates in White Tiger’s area, and his partner, officially an E-rank called Jinwoo Sung, is clearing them faster than any E-rank should. Kichul calls in. Only two people, Jinho and Jinwoo, are going in; the hired squad stays outside. Inside, the dungeon is full of werewolves, the title Wolf Assassin does its work, and “mere C-rank magic beasts hadn’t stood a chance.” Sangmin has his noodles halfway to his mouth when Kichul calls back: the two are already out, and the squad is packing up. What would take an A-rank two hours, Jinwoo has cleared in thirty minutes; Sangmin has hit the jackpot. In the novel the guild’s president, Yoonho Baek, is leaning on Sangmin too, over dungeons White Tiger failed to buy for its rookies’ training; Sangmin’s eye is on bigger game.

He phones that evening. Jinwoo hangs up on the first call, taking him for a telemarketer or a loan shark; the second gets “Yes, this is Jinwoo Sung.” It is almost eight, but Sangmin is close by, and they meet at once at the café across the street from Jinwoo’s apartment, where Jinho made his own pitch. Sangmin hands over his card, gives a quick tour of Korea’s top five guilds (the Hunters Guild first; White Tiger broke away from the Reapers Guild, which once held the title), and then says it plainly:

“I’ll be straight with you. We would like to recruit you, Hunter Sung.”

White Tiger will double whatever Yoojin Construction has promised. Jinwoo relaxes when he sees that the guild has noticed the speed of his clears, not his secret, and he has signed nothing with Yoojin. He asks what White Tiger’s own building is worth (about fifty billion won, Sangmin says proudly), and then: “Can you give me the building?” Yoojin, he explains, has promised him one worth thirty billion. He phones Jinho, with the volume all the way up, to confirm the figure and offers Sangmin the phone. Sweating, Sangmin declines; sums like that are above his pay grade. Jinwoo ends the meeting there.

Something better than a guild is waiting: the System has a job-change quest for him. In the novel Jinwoo reads up on hunter classes online before he accepts. He wants an assassin’s job, and the blurb promises “Exclusive new weapons and skills from an assassin-class job.”

He opens the quest where no one will see, and steps through without having done his daily quest. The rules are strict: no potions, no Store, no full recovery, and no leaving before the quest ends. Inside is a medieval castle. The first armoured knight shrugs off his dagger and he has to beat it with raw strength; assassins strike from stealth and mages from range, and he resolves to raise his Intelligence and puts on every piece of armour he finds.

At the castle’s heart is a throne hall with an empty throne, and before it stands the knight commander, Igris the Bloodred, in red plate. Igris is faster and stronger. When the dagger proves useless and Jinwoo puts it away, the knight sets down his own sword, and they fight with bare hands. Jinwoo is hurled against the wall above the throne; when Igris calls his sword back to finish him, Jinwoo catches the blade in his hand and kills the knight with his dagger. He calls it luck. The rewards are Igris’s helmet, a rune stone for a telekinesis skill and a teleportation stone.

Then the real test begins: survive. The knights keep coming. Out of mana, his hands cut, Jinwoo fights on bare-handed for hours. The webtoon gives him a vision here of his old, weak self urging him to quit; the novel does not. On the brink of death, the daily quest he skipped runs out, and the System does what it always does to a Player who skips it: it drags him into the Penalty Zone, out of the trial and out of its rules. The Store works there. He buys mana potions, kills giant centipedes to level and heal, buys a dagger made for killing knights, the Knight Killer, and learns the telekinesis skill and how to throw a blade with it. Back in the hall he works it out: the knights give no experience because the mages are summoning them. He kills the mages, the knights crumble, and the last of the trial falls. He has lasted about four and a half hours.

The reward is a class. He wanted an assassin’s, “but the system seems to have other plans for him!” The class that suits him is a hidden one, Necromancer. He nearly refuses it; he accepts, and the class advances into something rarer, the Shadow Monarch. Its power raises the shadow of a dead body as a soldier, with three tries to a body and worse odds the stronger and longer-dead the body is, and it stores the soldiers in his own shadow. The command word is “Arise.” The fallen knights and mages stand up as his first soldiers.

Igris resists twice. On the third and last try the knight who guarded an empty throne rises, kneels to a new master, and keeps his name. He will be Jinwoo’s first and strongest named soldier, and the series will come back, much later, to whose throne it was.

Jinwoo sleeps like the dead, finds his bank balance grown past anything he imagined, and needs new clothes, because the old ones no longer fit the body the daily quests have built. Then he goes to his sister Jinah’s parent-teacher meeting. What would he do, the teacher asks, if Jinah awakened? He would never let her become a hunter.

The teacher has a worry of her own: Jinah’s classmate Songyi Han, an E-rank, is skipping school for raid money, as one of the placeholders Jinho pays to sit outside his gates. Songyi works out who Jinwoo is, calls him mister, and refuses to quit. So he asks Sangmin a favour: two places on a White Tiger training raid for new recruits at a C-rank gate, so that she can see what hunting really is.

The raid’s leader is Chul Kim, an A-rank tank on his way to the guild’s elite strike squad, with no use for two E-ranks. Fourteen go into a cave; behind them the gate turns red and seals. Outside, Sangmin phones his guild president, Yoonho Baek. A red gate opens only when its boss dies, or when everyone inside does, and inside it a day passes for every hour outside.

The cave is gone. In its place is a forest of tall evergreens under snow. Arrows of ice fly out of the treetops: one kills a C-rank, and Jinwoo catches the one aimed at Songyi. Two ice elves, whom the book calls Ice Slayers, jeer at them and vanish. Chul splits the party: the A- and B-ranks go with him to hunt the boss, and the C- and E-ranks are left behind. Heejin Park, a B-rank and in the novel a fighter, chooses to stay with the weak, and wonders aloud whether Jinwoo is really an E-rank.

He leads the leftovers deeper in and kills a charging ice bear with one punch. Then, readers of the novel report, he buys food and warm clothes for everyone from the System’s Store and simply has them wait. Bear meat roasts over the fire. Training alone in the cold that night, he finds a cave full of glowing eyes, a den of ice bears, and his shadows fight their first real battle. Shadow mages loose fire into the pack; the alpha tears through the soldiers until Jinwoo’s mana runs dry, and Igris alone cuts it down. Jinwoo raises the bears and their alpha, which will not get a name until the next volume.

Chul’s squad brought nothing with them. They starve and freeze for days, and in the novel they meet yetis, then ice giants, then the elves. Only Chul gets away.

Half-mad, Chul stumbles into the warm, fed camp, rages that they hid their supplies, and threatens them, until Jinwoo is suddenly behind him and flattens him with a single blow. Then the elves come out of the snow, cloaked, and their leader taunts the humans. Jinwoo answers in the elves’ own tongue: the System lets him understand and speak it. An elf steps up to duel and dies before his blade is raised. The leader, Barca, says that this one does not register as human, and offers to spare him if he hands over the rest; asked what the elves are, he stalls, and his answer starts over as if something has reset it. Jinwoo refuses, and the shadow army rises out of the snow.

One-on-one, Barca is stronger. He shrugs off the poison and paralysis of Jinwoo’s venom dagger and walks through the shadow mages’ fire. Then Chul wakes and goes for Jinwoo’s back, which, one reader of the novel notes, is just what Jinwoo had been counting on. Chul dies, and Jinwoo pulls his shadow up out of the snow: a hulking armoured tank with a shield, called Iron. With Iron holding the elf under the mages’ fire, Igris and Jinwoo finish Barca. Three attempts to raise him fail. Jinwoo keeps his dagger, Barca’s Dagger.

The gate turns blue. Five walk out of the fourteen who went in: Jinwoo, Songyi, Heejin and two C-ranks, Kijoong Yoon and Myunghwan Go. Yoonho Baek, White Tiger’s S-rank president, demands to know why his people died; Jinwoo points to the living, and Baek backs down. He keeps the press away from the survivors, denies that anyone stronger helped them, and tells Sangmin to recruit Jinwoo whatever it takes. Songyi goes back to school, though she still wants to be a hunter.

Morning brings Jinho to the door in gleaming new armour, ready to raid. In the next dungeon he sees the shadow army for the first time. It slaughters the beasts and even gathers up the essence stones; one reader of the novel singles out Jinho’s turn from seeing Jinwoo as a dangerous killer to seeing him as a benevolent leader. The two finish the raids Jinho needs to found a guild, and over beer and barbecue a tipsy Jinho becomes Jinwoo’s sworn younger brother. Jinwoo, meanwhile, turns the Demon’s Castle key over in his fingers. Jinho’s next hurdle is his father, Chairman Myunghan Yoo, who is founding a guild of his own: Jinho asks to run it, and the chairman agrees on one condition, that Jinwoo joins it.

Far away, in a dark dungeon in America, a man walks out of the gloom toward a terrified hunter and says that he wants to go home. Readers of this volume single the moment out: the man is Jinwoo’s long-missing father, Ilhwan Sung. Jinwoo, in Seoul, knows nothing of it.

He tells Jinah he will be gone about a week and uses the key: the Demon’s Castle, the S-rank instance dungeon whose gatekeeper, Cerberus, nearly killed him in Volume 1. The System sets a quest to collect demon souls, and he climbs floor after floor while his levels rise and his shadows clear whole halls.

On the fiftieth floor waits Vulcan, the Avaricious, ruler of the castle’s lower floors: a demon the size of a small building, quick for his bulk, who can fly into a rage that drives his strength higher. Jinwoo beats him. Among the spoils are World Tree Fragments and a red crystal ball, the Sphere of Avarice. One reader places the volume’s last pages here, on the fiftieth floor. When Volume 3 opens, at the end of that week, Metus, the necromancer of the seventy-fifth floor, has fallen too, and the System is about to tell Jinwoo what the fragments are for. He is still, on paper, an E-rank, and the Hunter’s Association is about to learn otherwise.