Volume 8

“Is this what hell on earth would look like?” The last volume opens inside the enemy. Under black clouds the Dragon King, the Monarch of Destruction, stands atop a city of ashes. His heart, which seemed to have turned to stone in his long wandering of the gap between dimensions, has begun hammering again, because the Shadow Monarch has revealed himself, which he took as a declaration of war. Yet the Shadow Monarch has hidden again, though one human country has already been wiped out.

Of course, the Dragon King reasons, attacking would be suicide for a rival with a little over 100,000 soldiers when the World of Chaos fields ten million. Not knowing where the blow will fall, he advances with care, and wonders whether the Shadow Monarch means to let his own kind be wiped out so that he can raise them as soldiers. When missiles begin to fall he finds the humans’ last effort boring, his unease turns to anger, and he shows his true form for the first time on Earth, a threat that fills the whole sky. One breath of pure destruction swallows the fighter planes in under a minute. Then he roars his challenge.

Jinwoo Sung hears it in the dark, unnecessarily large hall of the white castle Beru built for him, and his three marshals, Beru, Bellion and Igris, beg him not to go. His answer is that Ashborn, the Shadow Monarch before him, liked this side of him: what would Ashborn have done? Bellion remembers Ashborn standing alone against the other Fragments of Luminosity when they rebelled against the Supreme Being, sees the same thing in this man, and gives way.

“I will be with you until the end, my lord.”

“Took you long enough,” Jinwoo says, grinning. He takes out his phone to call his family, cannot make himself press the button for fear of losing his nerve, and crushes it. Then he draws the twin daggers Kamish’s Wrath from his inventory, tears his shirt into strips and binds them to his hands.

In Seoul, President Jinchul Woo of the Hunter’s Association reads the news by his grandfather’s rule: the trouble is real when the anchors try to stay calm. Jinchul, who knows the enemy through the memories Jinwoo shared with him, has not reached Jinwoo in three days and half expects he has fled to another world. He prays to the ceiling, “Do not abandon us,” then freezes at the television.

On the battlefield, an American pilot, shot down like the Canadian air force before him, parachutes in among the beasts and empties his pistol. Then the cockroach-like monsters are torn apart, and an Asian man with unmistakable daggers stands with his back to him. “H-Hunter Sung? You’re Jinwoo Sung, right?” Jinwoo sends him off, the soldiers of the World of Chaos charge, and he says the word that runs through the whole series: Arise.

The bugs he cut down get up as shadows, black steam pouring off them like flame, at full strength: the System no longer holds the Shadow Monarch’s power down, so the stronger the creatures of Chaos, the stronger his soldiers. Jinwoo, daggers in his preferred reverse grip, cuts a pillar-wielding giant down at the ankle and lets the bug-shadows finish it; then its faceless shadow pries the pillar out of its own corpse and bowls the beasts over like toys. When they begin to flee, Jinwoo asks them, in the language of the Monarchs, what they are afraid of.

From the centre of his army the Dragon King finds him at its eastern end. The Transfiguration Monarch, King of Evil Specters, who wears the body of a short middle-aged man, urges him to commit every army. The Dragon King cuts him off: “Where is the army of the dead?” A magic eye confirms that Jinwoo is fighting alone, his army nowhere to be found, in his shadow or out of it. Smelling a trap, he holds back while the armies of Chaos shrink and the army of the dead swells, every new Arise spreading a sea of black across the plain like a tsunami.

He is right that it is a trap, and wrong about where. Elsewhere on the battlefield Thomas Andre, master of America’s Scavenger Guild, faces the King of the Monstrous Humanoids, the Monarch of Iron Body, and the entire shadow army pours out from behind his own back. Jinwoo has hidden it in Thomas’s shadow. The ambush kills the Monarch.

The third chapter’s title is the plan. The Dragon King finally comes for Jinwoo himself and follows him into the place where the whole shadow army, fresh from the ambush, is waiting, and has the Transfiguration Monarch open gates to pour in his own forces. Jinwoo answers with the dragons’ own weapon, Dragon’s Fear, learned from the rune stone of Kamish, the dragon whose fang became his daggers. He dismisses his shadows and lets it loose, and the dragon army freezes where it stands, the Transfiguration Monarch with it.

Jinwoo seizes the Dragon King and swaps the two of them through the shadows to his own fortress on an empty island. The named shadows go to work and land real blows; the Dragon King laughs, answers with a Dragon’s Fear of his own that freezes every shadow, and remakes the land with one Breath of Destruction. Then, in human form, he offers terms. Stand with him against the Rulers, and he will spare Jinwoo’s family and country, even leave Earth. Jinwoo reads murder in his eyes and refuses.

The fourth chapter is the all-in fight its title promises, fought for a reason the Dragon King grasps too late: Jinwoo does not need to win it alone. He needs to hold the strongest of the Monarchs in one place and fight hard enough to tear space open. Even his best weapons fail him, because Kamish’s Wrath, made from the fang of one of the Dragon King’s own dragons, cannot pierce its king. He holds him anyway.

Space splits, and the Rulers descend in their true forms, let through by the wound the duel has torn and by their human vessels. Watching them come, the Dragon King admits he has lost the war. Jinwoo tells him he knows his part in the old betrayal of Ashborn by Balan and the King of Beasts, and passes on Ashborn’s regards. The Dragon King lunges, the Rulers’ spears run him through, and he breaks apart on the wind.

The brightest Fragment, first among the Rulers, thanks him, and Jinwoo asks to use the Cup of Reincarnation, the Supreme Being’s relic that turns back time. The warnings are blunt: the Monarchs keep their memories and will come again; the Cup has one use left; if he stays he will be remembered as a hero, and if he goes back and wins, no one will thank him. He sets his terms: send no one to Earth, awaken no mana there, and leave every Monarch to him, alone, in the gap between dimensions. Too many people were lost. He is much like Ashborn, the Ruler tells him, and the Cup turns time back ten years.

Jinwoo wakes as a boy in a whole, happy family, his father alive, and weeps. After a short taste of ordinary life he leaves a note saying he will come back when his work is done, and goes into the gap for twenty-seven years, hunting the Monarchs one by one and taking their armies into his own. The Dragon King, who remembers everything, is saved for the end. Jinwoo wins. On Earth, about two years pass.

In America, Norma Sellner, gifted with visions two years earlier, prophesies that a god of death will descend. A gate opens over Seoul and nothing seems to come out of it, except a boy who still looks like a teenager, slipping through the crowd. The Rulers’ envoy is waiting for him. At a table by a shop window he floats moving Jinwoo to another world, since an Earth without mana cannot bear his power; Jinwoo asks whether they mean to seal him away now that he has served his purpose, and the frightened envoy backs off. Alone, Jinwoo wonders whether any place is left for him. Then a schoolgirl walks past the window: Haein Cha, years younger than the swordswoman he knew, and never to be one. He decides to stay.

Most of the book is still to come: bonus stories, vignettes in which the people Jinwoo saved go on living without knowing it. Their order in the novel is uncertain: the Korean edition’s chapter list opens with a story titled for a Hunter’s Association employee, which the webtoon saves for last, and gives Igris and Fang a chapter each. This page follows the webtoon’s order. In one, Jinchul Woo is a violent-crimes detective in his fourth year who feels that something is missing. Criminals keep turning themselves in, terrified of a shadow monster that gave them twenty-four hours to confess. When the police leave one confessed man tied up in a warehouse past his deadline, giant ants rise out of his shadow, knock out the officers and kill him, and one of the ants smiles and waves at Jinchul as if it knows him.

Jinwoo, meanwhile, goes to high school. The teachers have been told he ran away from home for two years and mark him as trouble. Kisul, the teacher the students call the Venomous Snake, moves to discipline him, sees the shadow army’s aura gathered around him, and backs away. With his middle-school friend Younggil, Jinwoo joins the track team for a reason only he knows: before she became a hunter, Haein Cha ran, and competitions are where he can find her. He outruns the whole team at the tryout, and the Venomous Snake, watching from a window, catches sight of Beru and faints.

Kisul tells Jinchul about the ant monster over drinks, and Jinchul brings Jinwoo a drawing of it. Their hands touch over the page and Jinchul’s memories come back: this is Hunter Sung. How long did he fight? Twenty-seven years, Jinwoo says, and he regrets none of it. Jinchul suggests he think about the police.

In April a gate opens over a desert in the American West. The envoy explains that the Titans, rock-eating giants from outside who once took on the Rulers and were driven off, have turned toward Earth, drawn, Jinwoo suspects, by his power. The shadow army crushes them, Bellion takes their leader, and Jinwoo extracts them all. Alarmed American officials, at David Brannon’s suggestion, ask Norma Sellner, who half remembers what he did and vouches for him without hesitation. At a track meet a rival school’s monster rookie, Chul Kim, who in the old world fought for Jinwoo as Iron, feels an overwhelming urge to kneel to him and does, in tears; Jinwoo edits the moment from his memory and tells him to live well.

Haein reaches the finals of her event with a bruised ankle, and Jinwoo heals it. When she asks whether they have met somewhere, he tells her he will answer if she ever beats him in a race. The friendship that starts at the track lasts; by the later stories, both grown, they are married.

Igris and Fang each get a story in the shadows’ realm, where the soldiers, taking on their master’s mind, drill, doze and play like people. Fang wears a robe Beru made after Jinwoo’s hooded jacket, and bearded dwarves carve him a staff from a fragment of the World Tree to hold the Orb of Avarice. Igris remembers their first duel, how close he came to killing the weak boy, and how, when Jinwoo won, he saw his old lord in his eyes. He serves him now as master and friend.

Ilhwan Sung, Jinwoo’s father, is a firefighter in this world and never became a hunter, but he remembers the old one: the Rulers’ power, and the years of guarding his son. When he sees young Jinwoo he hides his tears. Then he asks the envoy to erase his memories, so that he can be an ordinary father who worries about his son.

Jinho Yoo, a nervous college freshman at a pork-belly restaurant, is hearing horror stories about a terrifying senior when the senior himself sits down across from him. Before long they are brothers again. Joohee Lee, on her way to nursing school in Seoul, passes Jinwoo near a hospital and asks whether they have met. No, he says, and smiles. Gunhee Go, gravely ill, drinks a potion left for him by a strange young man and recovers.

Then Jinwoo becomes a police detective. Sehwan, a rookie joining the violent-crimes unit, learns that his new partner is a legend. A young woman insists that her friend Jinee did not take her own life. Jinwoo raises Jinee as a shadow, hears the truth about her stepfather, confronts the man in the shadows’ realm and leaves him to the ants. Jinee asks one favour, and Jinwoo delivers the birthday present she never got to give her friend.

Years pass. Jinho confides that he means to propose to Jinah, and Jinwoo tells him to just be himself. Jinwoo and Haein are married, with a baby son, Sooho. Igris wants the boy properly schooled and Bellion wants him trained with a sword, and Haein tells Jinwoo to come home early until the baby can walk. Soon she is phoning to say that Sooho is flying and floating the furniture.

Jinchul, now chief of police, brings word that Gunhee Go is dying. He declines a second potion and asks instead to remember the old world. Given his memories back, he weeps, and dies in warm sunlight, and Jinwoo tells him that he was a hero too.

Beru gets a story of his own. However he hides, the baby finds him, eyes shining; the dwarves recarve Jinwoo’s statue in the shadows’ realm to hold Sooho; and when gangsters break in for revenge, Beru quietly deals with them. But in kindergarten the other children shy away from the little Monarch, and Jinwoo seals away Sooho’s powers and his memories of the shadows. Shown the drawing Sooho once made of him, Beru weeps his goodbye.

Then Sooho is a teenager. He quietly beats the bully Eunchul’s gang to protect his classmate Sungho and lets Sungho take the credit. Bored, he is about to leave when time stops and a gate opens in the classroom. Where it leads in the novel is unconfirmed; the webtoon’s version is in the aside.

What the Epilogue holds could not be confirmed either. The Korean edition gives it six chapters, opening with Beru’s memories and closing on one titled “goodbye”; one reviewer of the Yen Press volume finds the ending epic, a little sad, and plain setup for another series. The weakest hunter of all mankind ends it remembered by almost no one, his family alive.