The Hero Returns

"Hmm..."

Osiris scanned Fafnir's underlings. They consisted of the lowest-ranked Predators that had only just evolved past the stage of Prey, as well as some who had barely managed to register their names on the tail end of the list of the One Hundred Evils.

"Their original boss...Wasn't it Lucifer, if I'm not mistaken?"

"If you're talking about that fool, he's right in here," Fafnir pointed to his own belly.

Osiris looked a little stunned as he muttered, "Devoured, huh?"

"I haven't had a fairly good meal in a long time. The power of corrupted divinity is a rare delicacy, after all."

Lucifer was one of the Ten Great Evils and the ruler of the Dark Realm, a world that countless Predators called home. He was also renowned as a Predator, infinitely close to reaching the level of Three Destroyers—a fallen, corrupted devil.

Osiris asked, "Even so, he was the ruler of the Dark Realm. Why didn't you make him your underling?"

"He was too proud of himself. He didn't get scared of me, too. A retainer like that would eventually stab me in the back. No point in making him one of my subjects, then."

"Indeed, you do have a point," Osiris shrugged his shoulders. "Since you have devoured Lucifer, then it seems that I must treat you now as the real master of the Dark Realm. Even though this world will soon disappear along with you."

"Do you believe that I will be defeated?"

"Not 'believe.' It'll be a reality soon."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Don't worry. Soon..."

Shu-wuwu...

Ku-gugugu—

Osiris's figure gradually thinned, and the marble throne he was sitting on began crumbling to pieces.

"You'll see for yourself."

"..."

Ku-rung, crumble—

Tumble, drop, crumble—

Fafnir glared at the fallen debris of the crumbling throne.

Osiris, who had been chatting to him only a second ago, was nowhere to be found now. Fafnir wasn't even able to sense how this Predator managed to vanish like that.

"Osiris, the master of Lucifer and the hidden true ruler of the Dark Realm," Fafnir mused.

The majority of Predators residing in the Dark Realm were under the impression that Lucifer was their ruler. However, Fafnir had already devoured Lucifer, which in turn, allowed him to learn the truth.

"My lord shall punish you."

Those were Lucifer's final words as he died in one of the most composed and calmest manners imaginable.

Fafnir mulled over those words and found them rather humorous, "How pitiful, it seems that your dear lord has forsaken you."

Osiris came to see him, but the member of the Three Destroyers didn't even try to regain the lost Dark Realm, nor did he even bother to avenge his fallen underling.

In fact, he ran away, meaning Osiris didn't amount to much in the end.

Fafnir had been concerned about Osiris inwardly, but now, he languidly sunk back in his throne.

Although Osiris's warning lingered in his mind, Fafnir decided not to pay any heed. One should not be retreating from war or conflict just because one was worried about losing.

Such an act was the complete opposite of Fafnir's desire for absolute dominion.

So, instead of retreating, Fafnir set his sight on the next target for his conquest, "After the Dark Realm, the next will be the God Realm."

He set his sight somewhere even higher up.

* * *

"Brad," Gordon Rohan, exiting from a business meeting, suddenly called out.

He was standing in the middle of the corridor and, just as always, looking at the screen of his phone. Except now, he was searching for someone he didn't usually search for.

"Brad, are you there?"

"It's been a while since the last time you looked for me."

Gordon Rohan turned his head in the direction of that voice to discover a face he hadn't seen in a long time.

"Yes, it's been a while. About a year or so, isn't it?"

It was Johnny Brad. He was an awakener who enjoyed an amicable relationship with Gordon Rohan. He would stick around the latter if he had nothing urgent to take care of and even helped run the company.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that about 30 percent of everything the Gordon Company had achieved so far was all thanks to Johnny Brad's contribution.

Johnny Brad asked, "What's going on?"

"Oh, it's nothing special, but here."

Tap, tap tap—

Gordon Rohan tapped the screen of his phone a couple of times, then showed what was on it to Johnny Brad next, "I need you to explain this to me, friend."

Johnny Brad stared at the screen and went silent for a little while.

His silence lasted long enough for him to finish reading the text message and then some. Even then, he still chose to say nothing.

His reply came quite sometime later, "They're all lies."

"You know, it would've been nicer if that reply came maybe 10 seconds sooner."

"Rohan."

"Brad, you know better than anyone that I never work with someone with a shady past. You know that I hate anything uncertain and unclear, don't you, friend?"

How could he not know that? That was Gordon Rohan's business management philosophy known throughout the world, after all.

He was not only the "perfect" awakener but also the "perfect" business owner. His philosophy was what allowed him to reach his current lofty heights.

"It might sound really simple and easy, but in truth, it's tough to pull that off. There aren't all that many complete and certain things in this world, after all. You need a ton of effort and determination to turn what's uncertain into a certainty. But Brad, your reaction just now—"

"Rohan."

"It's way too damn suspicious."

Squeeze—

Crunch—!

Gordon Rohan's phone was crushed within his palm. The device was crumpled into a sphere with the unmistakable imprints of his fingers on the surface. Rather obviously, it wouldn't be able to carry out with functions anymore.

"I wonder why?"

The questioning continued, but Johnny Brad still didn't reply.

Gordon Rohan waited for a long while for a reply to come his way. He leaned against the wall, crossed his arms in front of his chest, and then even watched several people walk past him in the corridor.

The silence carried on.

In the end, Gordon Rohan reached the end of his patience. He roughly brushed back his hair, which had been oiled a little too much, and began muttering to himself, "That's right. It could've been my mistake. When I think about it, from the get-go, nothing about you was clear or certain."

"From the get-go?"

"You didn't have a country. You didn't have parents. Hell, you didn't even have something as common as a Social Security Number. At first, I thought you were an orphan. Even then, I thought we could be good friends."

"Because my ability was extraordinary, was it not?"

"Right. That's all true back in the beginning. You were a big help to me, and I was a big help to you. I figured that, no matter what our individual end goals were, we would've become comrades with enough time. Well, I really thought that we had become friends."

"But what about now?"

"That's what I want to ask you, Brad."

Piiing—!

Several silver-colored spears suddenly appeared all around Johnny Brad. "You've never called me your friend once, have you?"

Johnny Brad contemplated something for a bit before finally opening his mouth, "Now that I think about it, yes, that's true."

Wu-wuwuwu—

The air wavered to bend and obscure Gordon Rohan's vision.

He blinked his eyes several times. He witnessed the silver spears he had generated seemingly melding into the figure of Johnny Brad.

"Sorry about that. But saying something that's the complete opposite of what's on my mind? That disgusts me too much, unfortunately."

With that, Johnny Brad completely disappeared.

The last thing he said became echoes that lingered in the corridor. Gordon Rohan, who was already getting ready with a spear in his grip, could only mutter to himself in a hollow voice, "So, it was true."

He had been feeling bad about getting suspicious because of just one text message from Su-hyeun. However, there was no need to sweat over it now. Johnny Brad was gone, and their ties would be severed cleanly from this moment on.

Gordon Rohan stared at the lump of the smartphone that got rolled into a ball by his own hand and then called out to one of his employees walking on the corridor, "Hey, can I borrow your phone for a minute?"

Gordon Rohan used the phone he borrowed from the employee to make a call. He had already memorized most of the numbers stored in his phone, anyway.

"Hey, yeah, it's me. I confirmed your text. I've also finished chatting to Johnny Brad. It was all true."

"Did you uncover anything useful?"

"No, not really. As soon as I brought it up, he just up and vani—Hey, what was that noise just now?"

BOOM—!

He heard the noise of something exploding through the phone. He even thought that he heard occasional screaming.

"You called me at a good time, actually."

"What's so good about it?!"

"I'll be sending you a new text on this phone's number, so..."

Buzz—

Just as soon as Su-hyeun said that, Gordon Rohan's borrowed phone buzzed.

"Don't hang around and get on with it, please."

Click—

The call ended there.

Gordon Rohan chuckled hollowly and confirmed the incoming message.

A short while later, he tapped on the shoulder of the employee, "I want to buy this phone of yours."

* * *

It had been a few hours since Su-hyeun began destroying the steles.

"How are things on your side?"

"I destroyed about 20 of them so far, but man, this is literally endless, you know."

Luslec's voice sounded a bit graver than at the beginning.

"By the way, these steles, they seem to be connected to the Dark Realm."

"The Dark Realm, you say?"

"It's one of the 'Three Realms' that Predators reside in. One of the Ten Great Evils, Lucifer, is the ruler of that place, but the thing is, that dude is connected to Osiris, one of the Three Destroyers. Anyway, the Dark Realm is similar to the God Realm where gods live together. But if these things are really connected to that place, then this is seriously bad, Mister Su-hyeun."

Luslec complained initially that he was being forced to work on something trivial. Still, it sounded like his mind had significantly changed. Su-hyeun had no clue what this Dark Realm was like, but at least he now had some idea after hearing the explanation of "many Predators reside there."

"The God Realm is where many gods live, so a world that's the opposite of that will be like..."

Just that alone was enough to alert him to the severity of the current situation.

If a gateway directly connected to a world tied to Osiris, one of the Three Destroyers, opened on Earth, it didn't take a genius to figure out what might happen next.

"For now, I think we need to destroy all the steles acting as mediums no matter what. The problem is, though, low-ranked Predators are occasionally stepping outside the dungeons."

"I've already dispatched my summons to a few places."

"That's not going to be enough, I'm afraid. Just one stele should be enough to complete this gateway, you see. The difference will be with the size of the gateway itself."

"We must continue as long as we can."

The trial of the 202nd floor—the outline of this once-vague goal of the trial of stopping the apocalypse—had been finally revealed.

"This thing obviously didn't happen in one or two days."

You would need a good few years to erect this many steles in many parts of the world, employ people to guard them, and keep everything super-secret to this degree.

And only one person seemed capable enough of engineering this whole thing, at least in Su-hyeun's mind.

"Johnny Brad."

That man was still shrouded in veils.

He was an S-Rank awakener and also known as Gordon Rohan's close aide. Still, he was someone who simply vanished from existence one day.

Back in Su-hyeun's past life, he believed that Johnny Brad had escaped to the Tower and didn't bother to return, but judging from the current state of affairs, it no longer seemed that simple now.

"He's connected to Fafnir somehow."

Whether Fafnir and Johnny Brad were in a master-servant relationship or even under some contractual relationship, what mattered now was that Su-hyeun had confirmed that Johnny Brad was in a relationship of some sort with Fafnir.

"I need to treat him as an enemy."

Crack—!

While organizing his thoughts, Su-hyeun punched another stele before him and shattered it.

"That was the 83rd one."

He was inwardly calculating the coordinates for the next stele. He was about to use the Earth Shrink Technique to head to the next location. But then...

Giii-iiiing—

Unlike all the other steles he had destroyed so far, this one reacted a little differently.

"This aura...?"

An aura leaked out from the destroyed stele before taking on a certain silhouette as colors seeped into it. This familiar aura made him shudder as it finished morphing into a figure of a creature.

"I was wondering who dared to interfere."

Su-hyeun glared at the giant image projected before him.

It had a body so tall that Su-hyeun needed to look up high just to see its head. Su-hyeun gazed at familiar red eyes shooting out creepy, ominous light. It had a head that wasn't a human's but that of a dragon's.

"So, we meet again, oh hero of humans."

This was the long-awaited reunion between him and Fafnir.