Volume 4

The volume begins a moment after the last one ended. On the castle’s hundredth floor, beside the corpse of Balan, the Demon Monarch, Jinwoo unwraps the bandages from his hand and gathers what the Monarch dropped, a ring among it.

“Incredibly, there were four level-up notifications.”

Then the window he has been waiting on for a whole volume. The Elixir of Life, two ingredients out of three since the recipe turned up in Volume 3, is now craftable: the Purified Blood of the Demon Monarch is in his hand. He crafts it, and the novel lets him be young about it.

“‘Yes!’ Jinwoo threw both arms in the air”

The bottle of blood is not even used up; the Spring Water from Echo Forest runs out first, so more of it would mean more elixirs. Six wooden bottles of the Elixir appear on the ground, and the item card repeats its promise: a potion that cures all diseases, so long as a whole bottle is drunk. He stores all six and the leftover ingredients in his inventory with great care.

One more thing before he goes. Kaisellin, the winged dragon Balan rode, lies dead among the demon corpses, and Jinwoo extracts its shadow. He starts to say its old name, decides that nine letters are too many, and calls it Kaisel; the dragon roars at its new name. It is a knight-rank soldier, good at the very least for riding. Esil, his demon guide, turned back at the ninety-ninth floor, so there is no one but his own soldiers to see it.

“His priority was to get out of there and see his mother.”

He gets home by Shadow Exchange, a skill he has only just earned as the quest’s reward, which swaps his place with any shadow soldier he chooses. He picks one of the five shadows patrolling his neighbourhood, not the ones hidden in Jinah’s shadow, since stepping out of his sister’s shadow would give her a fright. It is ten at night and visiting hours are over, and he does not wait for morning. In an empty alley he summons the dragon, which lowers itself for him to climb on, and he flies to the hospital.

The first chapter also cuts away, as this book often does. At the Hunter’s Association, with the raid on Jeju Island close, staff go through Japan’s intelligence: satellite footage of the first three Jeju raids, shot with a camera that can see mana. Japan has an answer ready for the way the ants signal to each other.

“They said they’d use a disruptive electromagnetic pulse.”

President Go, in charge of the Korean side and bound to weigh every possibility, wants to know how likely the ants are to rush back to their cave once they realise the queen is in danger. Then a wave of mana sweeps in from far away, and he asks whether anyone has reached Hunter Jinwoo Sung yet. The same wave stops two old comrades drinking at a neighbourhood food stall: Yoonho Baek, president of the White Tiger Guild, and Byunggu Min, the younger of the two, a retired S-rank healer and, the narration reckons, probably the first S-rank in the world to retire with all his limbs intact. Byunggu asks whether Yoonho is really going back, and reminds him how Eunsuk died. Yoonho is going, and is plainly looking forward to it:

“If we let the ants be, soon the whole of Korea will be infested.”

It is, he admits, a cool excuse: guilds cannot refuse the Association’s call anyway. Byunggu shakes his head.

At the hospital Jinwoo gives his mother a bottle of the Elixir. After about four years of a sleep no doctor could break, she wakes. The E-rank raids for her hospital bills, the daily quests, the hundred floors: all of it was for this bed, and the volume is barely one chapter old. Soon she is discharged and going home, and Jinah has her mother back. The publisher’s copy puts it simply: Jinwoo’s priority is bringing his recently recovered mother home.

The raid itself was set up at the end of the last volume, after a winged ant escaped Jeju and killed people before hunters brought it down. The plan is an alliance: Japan’s S-ranks will land on the island and draw the swarm while Korea’s slip into the nest to kill the queen. The Association announces the fourth Jeju Island raid, and Byunggu Min, who saw Eunsuk die there, changes his mind and signs on as the strike team’s healer.

President Gunhee Go asks Jinwoo to join it. He hesitates. For three volumes he levelled up to pay for his mother’s care and then to cure her; now she is awake in her own home, and for the first time he has a reason to stay there. Japan’s S-ranks arrive in Seoul to train beside Korea’s before the raid, and the third chapter is named for their leader, Ryuji Goto, Japan’s strongest hunter. By the fan wiki’s account he is the only member of the Japanese team the novel names at all.

Goto challenges Jinwoo, Korea’s newest S-rank, to a bout of his own. It grows serious, and the others pull them apart before either can go all out; there is no winner. Before the hunters go their ways, Jinwoo does something quietly: he leaves a shadow soldier hidden in several of their shadows, as watchers and as anchors for Shadow Exchange. Then he turns the raid down and stays home with his mother.

The volume now goes where no hunter has been. Inside the island’s mountain the colony is starving, and its queen has been breeding toward something. An egg far larger than the others splits, and out of it comes a black, winged ant that stands like a man: the King. The fan wiki suspects a debt to Meruem, the ant king of Hunter x Hunter: a queen breeding a ruler who grows by eating what he kills.

The raid begins. Ships ring the island. The Japanese land in the open and flare their mana as a beacon, and the black tide of the colony turns toward them. Korea’s strike team (Haein Cha, Yoonho Baek, Jongin Choi, the tank Dongwook Ma, the archer Taegyu Lim and Byunggu as healer) flies in over the burned island, Choi’s fire clearing the flying ants, and drops into the nest. An A-rank cameraman goes with them, and the raid is broadcast live. In the egg chamber they pass one shell far bigger than the rest, already empty, and press on for the queen.

The King finds the Japanese first. It comes up behind their line and kills them one after another, while the Koreans below fight through the queen’s guards: Baek half-turned into a white tiger, Ma holding the line, Choi filling the cavern with fire, Lim’s arrows, Byunggu healing. Haein takes the Ant Queen’s head, and across Korea people watching on television cheer. But the queen’s dying scream is a summons. The whole colony turns back toward the nest, and the King arrives first.

It breaks the team in moments. Haein is beaten unconscious; Ma loses both arms, which Byunggu regrows; Baek and Choi are cut down. Byunggu hides to keep healing them, and the King finds him. It kills him, and because it grows by eating, it comes away with what he had: healing, and speech. It tells the survivors they are too weak and asks where their king is. Then it flies off to look for one.

On the surface, Goto finds several of his teammates dead and is unmoved. He reports to Matsumoto, head of Japan’s association, and the alliance shows what it was: a plan, which Goto shared, to let Korea’s S-ranks die in the nest. Matsumoto orders the Japanese to withdraw and leave the Koreans to it. Before Goto can obey, the King lands in front of him and asks whether he is the king of humans. Goto says yes. Seven of Japan’s S-ranks die on Jeju, Goto among them.

In the nest the colony is pouring back toward the cornered, wounded Koreans when black soldiers climb out of the hunters’ own shadows. In Seoul, Jinwoo has felt it through the soldiers he left there. He uses Shadow Exchange.

Jinwoo steps into the nest, and Igris, Iron and Fang cut the ants back. His potions bring the wounded S-ranks round, all but Haein, whose injuries, the System tells him, are beyond them. The King comes back from killing Goto and asks the room for its king. Jinwoo steps forward alone.

The fight is caught on camera, and the country that cheered Haein’s stroke watches its newest S-rank take the King on. The King is fast, and it has collected weapons by eating: a paralysing venom, Byunggu’s healing. None of it is enough. Jinwoo gets stronger in the middle of the fight, the King heals what he cuts and calls its swarm, and Jinwoo’s army answers it. When the King tries to run, Jinwoo pins it and ends it. A reader of the novel grumbles that the monster the book spent a chapter building up loses almost at once, which is rather the point: the volume is not about whether Jinwoo can win any more.

Haein is dying, and no helicopter can reach her in time. Jinwoo turns to the dead. He raises Byunggu Min’s shadow, and the healer, without being told, heals her. Then Yoonho Baek asks Jinwoo to let his friend go, and Jinwoo cancels the extraction. A soldier, for once, is given back.

With the others gone, he raises the Ant King. The new shadow speaks and asks for a name, and Jinwoo calls him Beru (the fan wiki traces it to Bernard Werber, author of The Ants). Readers of the novel rank him a general, above Igris and Fang, and one notes that Jinwoo himself is now level 100, the milestone the webtoon also reaches as the raid ends. Jinwoo raises the queen as well, finds her shadow weak, since her power was in breeding, and releases her. He turns the dead colony into an army of his own and sends Beru after the stragglers. In the novel, by one reader’s report, only a few of the ants had wings and none of them reached the mainland once the King was dead. For two more days the hunters around the island mop up the leaderless ants, and Jeju is human ground again after four years. Haein wakes on the way home, and is told who saved her.

The world has watched the footage. One chapter is called “All Eyes on Jinwoo”: one reader reports that the novel gives a whole chapter to online forum posts about him, and another that it widens to world politics, how each country manages its hunters, with China copying other nations’ hunter technology and the United States drawing in foreign hunters as a melting pot. America’s strongest hunter, Thomas Andre, is introduced. Not everyone is grateful; some say people died because Jinwoo came late. At Byunggu Min’s funeral, Yoonho Baek thanks him. Japan, meanwhile, has lost seven S-ranks, its best hunter among them, to a trap it set for someone else.

The next proposal comes from America. An agent of the American hunter bureau, Adam White, takes Jinwoo to the bureau’s deputy director, who offers him citizenship. Then Norma Sellner, an upgrader who can raise a hunter’s limits, takes his hand, sees something immense inside him and recoils. There is no limit to raise. Jinwoo leaves resolved to stay independent, which means a guild of his own. By the volume’s end he also knows what the pitch-black key from Volume 3 is for: it leads back to the double dungeon where it all began, though it cannot be used yet.

The guild has a vice president in Jinho Yoo, who gave up his father’s backing to follow Jinwoo, an office, and a working name that the last chapter’s title gives as SoloPlay. It has no other members. Then its first applicant walks in: Haein Cha, vice president of the Hunters Guild, who wants to leave one of Korea’s biggest guilds to join a guild of two. Jinwoo, by a reader’s report, hears her heart beating fast, as if she were nervous, and wonders what scheme she is planning.

He gives her an entrance test against his shadows. She beats Igris, then asks to face Beru, who outclasses her and, when she lands a blow, forgets himself; Jinwoo has to stop him. A reader notes Beru hesitating over his master’s orders, a hint of more to come. Asked why she wants in so badly, Haein admits that she likes him. Jinwoo, in one reader’s words, either does not notice or is not looking for romance, and he turns her application down.

So the volume that began with the end of his oldest goal ends with the start of a new one: a guild that is barely more than two men and a working name, a key to the place where it all started, and a woman with the best nose in Korea who has just been told no. Volume 5 picks up all three.