A Hunter on Borrowed Time Keeps Surviving - Chapter 36

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Episode 36.
Siul’s gaze did not waver from the creature’s head.
【Danger Rating: 9】
The boss of Corpse Swamp—Sin’s Morga.
The diamond-like gleaming black scales and a body length more than twice that of an ordinary Morga matched exactly what had been recorded in the documentation.
The actual photograph of the boss left by Jang Jin-yeong’s party also bore the identical visage to the creature before his eyes.
‘That’s definitely the boss… but why….’
The Danger Rating was nine.
One digit short.
For a boss of an S-Rank Dungeon, it should normally be rated as a ten for an A-Rank like Siul.
Every boss he had faced until now showed not a single exception to this rule.
That made it all the more strange.
Siul knew well enough that the Quest System was not sloppy enough to be written off as a mere error.
‘Is this thing not actually the boss?’
Naturally, his reasoning pivoted in that direction.
‘Maybe it just looks like the boss on the outside but is actually a minion instead. Or… could it be a clone?’
While Siul was constructing various hypotheses, Sin’s Morga was also intently scanning something with its eyes.
Within the creature’s crimson pupils, beings invisible to all others came into sharp focus.
The faces of the dead encircling Siul.
“Shhhhrieeee—!”
Sin’s Morga suddenly roared.
A tempest of powerful Magical Power crashed down upon him, shaking the ground itself.
Siul instinctively raised his blade.
Then Sin’s Morga’s black scales trembled, and a blinding light spread outward.
“Ugh!”
The flash tore across his vision.
Siul shut his eyes and staggered backward.
When he opened them again, Sin’s Morga had vanished from the arena.
In its place, another stood—or rather, others.
“……You.”
Siul’s expression froze cold.
Several months ago, his party members who had been caught in the Black Gate alongside him appeared before him.
They were clearly dead.
Yet their forms appeared far too vivid to be mere illusion.
“…….”
Siul turned his trembling gaze upon them.
Most of them were covered from head to toe in grave wounds and blood.
One with an arm torn clean away.
Another with the abdomen ripped open, organs laid bare.
Still another with the neck twisted at an unnatural angle.
It was a sight almost unbearable to witness directly, yet Siul did not avert his eyes.
Instead, he strove to take them in fully.
“At least this way, I can see you all.”
Siul already knew these were manifestations of Sin’s Morga in disguise.
Yet he spoke to them nonetheless with the courtesy one would show to the departed.
“I am grieved that you passed with such suffering. I can only pray that in your next life, you are reborn into bodies whole and unburdened.”
It was a form of blessing.
Though they were not truly the dead, seeing their faces meant he could not help but offer prayer as one who had survived.
The figures wearing the guise of the dead, however, twisted their expressions with venom and spat upon his words.
“Why did you run alone?”
“You said you’d save us!”
“You abandoned us!”
They dragged their blood-soaked bodies forward, hurling themselves at him from all sides.
Their voices were identical to the originals.
They were mercenaries who had joined the team and met Siul for the first time that very day, yet they had treated him with kindness in his first raid ever.
Had the Black Gate never engulfed them, perhaps that bond would have grown deeper still.
“I apologize, all of you.”
Siul bowed briefly, then raised his blade.
Before long, the specters had encircled him, closing in from every direction.
Clang!
Siul’s longsword thrust forward and severed the young man’s neck.
In that instant, the youth’s body twisted like clay, transforming into sharp black scales.
Not just the young man—all the corpses shifted into black scales.
The scales converged into a single form ten meters above Siul’s head.
A hissing sound pierced the air.
Sin’s Morga looked down at Siul from above, flicking its tongue.
A wet slapping sound, then a heavy constriction.
Sin’s Morga’s tail wrapped around Siul’s body.
He was completely bound—invisible even below the nose.
Another prolonged hiss.
Sin’s Morga smiled, certain of victory.
In truth, whenever its tail had properly restrained an opponent, it had never once tasted defeat.
Bones crackled and splintered.
As Sin’s Morga’s tail constricted around Siul’s body, his skeleton shattered like powder.
With this, Sin’s Morga unhinged its massive jaw and stuffed the mangled corpse into its maw.
The wet, rhythmic sounds of chewing were utterly brutal.
A deep swallow.
Sin’s Morga stroked its belly with its tail and laughed.
When it consumed a hunter of high rank, the magical power absorbed into its body surged correspondingly—a grand harvest indeed.
Just then, Zero released its invisibility and fluttered its wings from a distance.
Zero had watched its master be devoured by the monster without so much as a flinch.
Instead, it let out a soft, mocking laugh.
【The skill Stone Wall Construction activates.】
The center of Sin’s Morga’s belly suddenly bulged outward.
As if someone inside were pushing upward with their fist, the smooth scales warped and rose in a rounded protrusion.
A confused hiss escaped the beast.
Sin’s Morga’s body trembled.
The sensation was strange—the meal it had just swallowed seemed to be writhing inside its belly.
Then that protruding mass convulsed again, violently this time.
A sharp punch from within.
This one was far more powerful.
The bulge thrust upward further still, and Sin’s Morga’s torso began warping into an unnatural shape.
The rounded trunk deformed into a square.
As if forcibly crammed into a rectangular frame.
Seeing this, Zero rolled across the ground with laughter.
“Kyarr-kyarr!”
The sight of the serpent’s body swollen into a blocky cylinder was simply hilarious.
But Sin’s Morga had nothing to laugh about.
A strangled, prolonged hiss tore from its throat.
The pressure building inside its body made it heave.
Its throat convulsed violently.
Soon Sin’s Morga could bear it no longer and threw its head back.
Its massive jaw flew open.
The moment its maw gaped, a thick stone wall erupted from within.
Sin’s Morga hung impaled on the pillar of stone like meat skewered on a pike, its jaw held agape.
Ragged hisses escaped its throat.
Its crimson eyes rolled in barely contained panic.
Then footsteps sounded from atop the stone wall.
A man walked casually up the stone surface, his pace as leisurely as a stroll.
It was Siul.
“Woof!”
Zero barked brightly upon spotting its master.
He returned with his longsword slung across his shoulder, his body bearing not a single wound.
“Your insides are cleaner than a Wyvern Goblin’s. Maintenance is key, apparently.”
Siul stood atop the stone wall, looking down at Sin’s Morga.
The beast’s trembling crimson eyes filled his vision.
“I was curious whether the skill would activate even inside its gut.”
Siul tapped the stone wall with his palm, a faint smile crossing his face.
“Skills truly are remarkable.”
A final, anguished shriek tore from Sin’s Morga’s throat.
Sin’s Morgath let out a roar seething with fury.
Black scales bristled and quivered.
It twisted its body, straining to break free from the stone wall.
That was when Siul tilted his head.
“Making a fuss won’t do you any good.”
He glanced down at his feet and continued.
“I’ve left quite a lot of things behind as I’ve climbed up here.”
Before that warning even finished, an alert window bloomed in Siul’s vision.
【The skill ‘Footprint Mines’ activates.】
Boom!!!
A tremendous explosion erupted.
The moment one Footprint Mine detonated, the detonation devices beside it responded in a chain reaction.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Sin’s Morgath’s body burst open in multiple places.
“Shrieeeeek—!!!”
The scream was swallowed by the roar of the blasts.
Along with the crumbling stone wall, it vanished into the smoke.
* * *
When the smoke from the Footprint Mines cleared, the corpse of an enormous serpent lay sprawled across the swamp.
It was Sin’s Morgath, its entire body shredded and torn apart.
Nearby, another corpse equally unrecognizable lay rolling across the ground.
【The trait ‘Immortality Until Death’ activates.】
Torn flesh and split muscle knit back together, broken bone ground back into place, each sound sharp and deliberate.
Before long, the corpse reformed into Siul’s body.
“There we go.”
Siul rose calmly and stretched.
Then a small shadow swooped down and perched on his shoulder.
“Chirp!”
It was Zero. The creature thrust its head forward, demanding to be petted.
“Did you hold back on purpose? You noticed I was planning to attack from inside its body?”
Siul scratched between Zero’s horns as he asked.
“Chirp! Chirp!”
Zero affirmed enthusiastically, seeking praise for being even more clever and perceptive than before.
Siul scratched under Zero’s chin once more, then suddenly looked up into empty space.
The dungeon clear notification still hadn’t appeared.
‘…As expected.’
Siul’s gaze fell upon the serpent’s corpse in the swamp.
‘That wasn’t the boss.’
Siul swept the area with a cold, steady eye.
Beyond the thick fog, Magical Power trembled faintly from very far away.
Someone from the Supernova Team seemed to be fighting.
“Zero, I’ll give you more praise when we get back home. For now, stay close to my side like before and warn me if anything appears.”
“Chirp!”
Siul stood and began running toward where he’d sensed the presence.
“…?”
But a few minutes later, something felt wrong.
No matter how fast he ran, the presence he should have been drawing closer to never drew any nearer.
What’s more, even after covering twenty or thirty paces, the scenery around him remained unchanged.
The corpse of the serpent and the terrain cratered by the explosion kept repeating endlessly.
‘Surely…’
That was when Siul understood.
‘The fog wasn’t just obscuring my vision.’
It was functioning as a Barrier, warping the space inside the dungeon itself.
Siul was trapped in his current location, unable to move anywhere.
‘Damn…!’
There was no way to help the other team members like this.
Throwing punches into empty air produced no resistance, so breaking through the Barrier seemed practically impossible.
‘What do I do…’
As Siul pondered, he suddenly recalled a certain item.
He reached for it—
Siul retrieved the Hidden Roulette from his inventory.
‘Hidden bullets are guaranteed to hit, right?’
Whether that applied to invisible enemies remained untested.
But if it worked, he could participate in the fight without stepping directly onto the battlefield.
Click.
Siul spun the cylinder and loaded a round to test it.
The teal crosshair spread through the mist, sweeping across the arena.
【Target acquired.】
“What?!”
Siul’s eyes widened as he watched the crosshair move.
Seven. Exactly seven targets emerged from within the fog.
From the last raid, he’d confirmed that the Hidden Roulette didn’t lock onto allies.
Which meant all seven targets were monsters.
【Please fix your gaze on your desired target for clear target confirmation.】
The system acknowledged the multiple enemies and prompted him to choose which one to hit.
Siul easily deduced the situation from the fact that his party consisted of seven members besides himself.
‘So the others are pinned down by enemies too, just like me.’
If those enemies were the same type as the one he was facing, this was genuinely dire.
A creature with a Danger Rating of 9 could dispatch a B-Rank party member without hesitation.
‘I need to hurry!’
Urgency gripped him, and Siul clenched the Hidden Roulette’s grip even harder.
He then aimed at the nearest target and pulled the trigger.
Bang—!
The Doomed Hunter Survives On
Author |
Kutsumattsu
Publisher |
Samyang C&C Corp.
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Editorial Department
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Samyang C&C Corp. – Dream Books
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G720:N+A063-20260731071
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@dreambookss
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Without written permission from Samyang C&C Corp. – Dream Books, this book’s contents may not be used in any form or by any means.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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