Copying Runes to Become the World's Strongest - Chapter 12

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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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Chapter 12
“Uuugh… .”
Inside the Tyrant’s Cave.
A man opened his eyes.
“What…?”
A blood stench stabbed at the tip of his nose.
A searing pain throbbed at the back of his head.
Sensing something was wrong, the man tried to push himself up.
“Gah!”
But his body refused to obey.
Only then did he realize his hands and legs were bound with rope.
The rope was tied tight to a heavy boulder sitting in the corner.
“What, what is this now?”
The man looked around.
It was a cave.
But it was no ordinary cave.
Scattered clothing lay everywhere, and blood was splattered all around them.
Between them, human bones peeked through.
“Aaaargh!”
The man jolted in terror.
It was a sight that made his skin crawl.
“Where is this place? Why am I in a place like this?”
The man carefully retraced his memories.
“I was definitely hunting with the party…”
One moment I was there, and the next I opened my eyes here.
Did a monster ambush me from behind?
“If that were the case, I wouldn’t be tied up like this.”
The man thought of the three people who had been hunting alongside him.
It had to be their doing.
“Why on earth…?”
He had no idea.
He couldn’t even guess a reason.
It wasn’t as if he had good gear worth stealing.
All he could tell was that this would not end well.
A dark premonition that he was going to die here crept over him.
“Haah… Becoming a Hunter was a mistake…”
If only I had never awakened.
No, if only I had never seen that man on the grassland that day.
If only my heart hadn’t fluttered at the sight of him.
I could still be out on the grassland with my friends, chasing our dreams and laughing away the hunt.
“Damn it… why did he have to show up right in front of me…?”
The corners of Baek Jejung’s eyes grew hot.
Fat tears spilled down his cheeks, one after another.
“Dad, Mom…”
His father, a Hunter himself, had strongly opposed his becoming one.
What kind of Hunter could someone with such meager abilities ever be, he’d said.
Out of spite, Jejung had claimed he wasn’t really going to take it seriously, but he changed his mind, and now this mess had come of it.
“I should have at least called them before coming…”
Just then.
“Alright, wait right here! I’ll go take a look!”
A voice rang out from beyond the cave’s entrance up ahead.
“S-someone?”
Baek Jejung shouted in a hurry.
“Hey! Help me, please!”
Soon, a figure stepped into the cave. With the sunlight at their back, his face was hard to make out.
Jejung’s face brightened, and he raised his voice even louder.
“Over here! I’m in the back!”
Lying flat on the ground, he barely managed to lift his head.
Hope had been rising across his face, but then a shadow fell over it, and with it came despair.
A face he knew.
It was Kim Seokdae, the leader of the party they had been hunting with.
“When did you wake up?”
“W-what’s wrong with you! What do you want from me!”
Thwack!
Kim Seokdae kicked Baek Jejung, clearly irritated.
“Shut up! We’ve got another guest, and you’re making all this racket. If the guest runs off, are you going to take responsibility?”
“Ugh…”
“Tch. Don’t hold it against me. This is your own fault for being careless.”
Kim Seokdae drew a dagger.
Baek Jejung trembled in agony, yet forced the words out of his throat.
“Run! These bastards are criminals!!”
From Kim Seokdae’s words, there’s someone else outside.
That person was surely in the same position he was.
Desperate to save at least one person, he shouted.
“I know.”
“!”
Kim Seokdae spun around sharply.
Hyeonjun was already standing behind him.
‘H-when did he get all the way here…’
He hadn’t felt the faintest stir of presence.
But that wasn’t what mattered.
“You idiots! What are you doing out there?!”
A warrior and an archer came charging in.
For some reason, an arrow was lodged in the warrior’s shoulder.
“That guy’s fucking fast!”
“What?”
The archer beside him shouted, just as rattled.
“H-he dodged the arrow right in front of me!”
“What kind of bullshit is that!”
An F-Rank dodging arrows.
It was a ridiculous story.
“Well, well. So this is your little workshop, huh?”
Kim Seokdae turned his gaze on Hyeonjun.
Hyeonjun was leisurely surveying the cave. Then he smiled, perfectly at ease.
“How many people have you killed in here, anyway?”
Traces of death filled the cave.
Even if some had fallen to the tyrant, the number was far too high.
It had to be the product of Rune Killing.
“…Pfft. Hahahaha!”
Kim Seokdae stared at Hyeonjun blankly for a moment, then burst out laughing.
“I thought you were some clueless guy, but you know everything, don’t you?”
“I know a lot, actually. Especially when it comes to this sort of thing.”
“And yet you still walked in here? Don’t you know what kind of spot you’re in?”
“Do I look to you like a cow or pig that walked into the slaughterhouse on its own?”
“Hahaha! This guy’s funny. If you know that much, why are you putting on such a show?”
Perhaps it was Kim Seokdae’s reaction that did it.
A smug grin crept across the warrior’s face, which had been grim until now.
“Maybe you’re stronger than us, but you won’t stand a chance against him.”
“Heh-heh-heh.”
Kim Seokdae chuckled low in his throat.
He had absorbed over three hundred runes alone.
On top of that, he had maxed out Strength, Agility, and Stamina, the Stats closely tied to his awakened Trait.
No matter how fast or how strong the opponent was, if they were a Hunter of the same Rank, he was confident he could win.
“Keep the back covered. Make sure this guy can’t run.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t get caught twice.”
The warrior raised his sword.
The archer, looking noticeably lighter now, nocked an arrow to his bowstring.
“….”
The cave fell silent.
Not one of them moved first.
In the storm-before-the-storm silence, ready to break at any moment, Baek Jejung watched it all unfold, his face gone ashen.
‘It’s… over…’
Three against one.
It was a fight with no chance of winning.
The outcome was obvious.
That man was going to be butchered by Kim Seokdae’s sharp dagger.
And that would soon be his own future, too.
‘I even shouted at him not to come. So why on earth…’
Did he not hear me?
Should I have shouted louder?
If I had, at least one of them could have been saved.
‘Or maybe not. Maybe those bastards wouldn’t have let him go.’
Just as his thoughts grew more and more tangled,
Swish!
A razor-edged whistle of air cut through the silence.
Kim Seokdae closed the distance to Hyeonjun in a flash and thrust his dagger forward.
Hyeonjun dodged the attack by the narrowest of margins.
‘Much faster than I expected.’
An attack more nimble than any warrior’s punch.
He wasn’t an opponent to underestimate.
‘But he’s not exactly a difficult one, either.’
Not with my current condition.
I was confident I could take down a few more of these guys, even if they came at me all at once.
“You’re lucky. Dodging that.”
“Lucky?”
“Try dodging this one, then.”
Kim Seokdae stepped in abruptly and swung his arm in a sudden ambush.
Hyeonjun leaned his waist slightly backward.
A cold, glinting blade slid past right in front of his eyes.
The attack didn’t stop; it kept flowing.
Swish!
A swing, then a thrust.
A sharp strike boring in at his side, with a timing that left no room to escape.
‘No need to dodge this one.’
Hyeonjun twisted his upper body and reached out his hand.
Thwack!
His palm struck the wrist of Kim Seokdae, who was gripping the dagger.
It wasn’t a powerful blow, but the impact was so precise that it delivered a considerable shock.
“Gah!”
With his attack blocked, Kim Seokdae clutched his wrist and staggered backward.
Hyeonjun didn’t let the opening slip.
He stretched out a long leg, closing the distance, then twisted at the waist and threw a punch.
Crack!
A devastating blow landed squarely on Kim Seokdae’s side.
The flowing sequence left neither the warrior nor the archer any time to respond.
“Urk!”
Even through his armor, the damage came through plainly.
With a strangled cry, Kim Seokdae’s upper body folded sharply, and he collapsed to the ground.
“W-what…”
The warrior couldn’t finish his sentence.
He didn’t know exactly how many Runes Kim Seokdae had, but it was clear they far outnumbered his own.
At the very least, more than three hundred.
They had assumed no one at his level could match him.
‘That’s how it should be…’
To take him down so neatly and cleanly.
There was no way to describe this fight except as overwhelming.
‘N-no, this can’t be happening.’
The warrior tightened his grip on his sword.
The result had completely defied his expectations, leaving him confused, but he knew with absolute clarity what he had to do.
“Aaaah!”
He swung his sword with all his strength at Hyeonjun’s back as Hyeonjun faced forward.
The moment he thought he’d landed the hit—
Whoosh!
My opponent’s upper body dropped sharply downward.
The strike he’d thrown with desperate resolve cut through empty air, pointlessly.
“Wh… wha—!”
Before he could even grasp what was happening, a heavy blow slammed into his jaw.
Thud.
The warrior, caught by an uppercut to the chin, was flung upward and then crashed back down onto the ground.
He rolled his eyes back and went out cold.
“Who swings a sword from there? If you’d gone in with a straight thrust, you’d have had a much better chance.”
Hyeonjun had been keeping even the area behind him within his awareness.
It wasn’t that he could see it—but with his senses sharpened to the edge, there wasn’t a single blind spot.
‘I only absorbed ten more Rune of Agility, and already it feels completely different from yesterday.’
So this is the power of E-Rank Runes.
At the same time, he couldn’t help wondering whether these people were weaker than the monsters.
“Ha, haa…”
At the harsh breathing, Hyeonjun turned his head.
His eyes met those of an archer holding a bow.
The archer was still aiming at Hyeonjun, but the bowstring had gone limp.
“E-eek!”
The archer hurriedly let go of the string he’d been drawing back.
The arrow traced a sharp, erratic arc and dropped with a plop right in front of him.
“Eeeeeek!”
The archer spun around and ran.
Hyeonjun was left speechless.
“If you’re going to be this scared, why bother doing something so wicked? It was obvious this would happen.”
Shaking his head in disbelief, Hyeonjun picked up the warrior’s buckler from the ground.
Then, with a light flick of the wrist, he sent the buckler flying as if throwing a frisbee.
Thwack!
The buckler sliced through the air like a fierce boomerang and struck the back of the archer’s head.
“Gah!”
The archer pitched forward and rolled roughly across the ground.
He lay sprawled there in a rather pitiful heap, not moving at all, as if he’d passed out.
“S-shit…”
Hyeonjun glanced back over his shoulder.
Kim Seokdae, having recovered somewhat from the pain, staggered as he pushed himself up.
“Why are you getting up? You’re just going to fall down again, so stay lying there.”
“It’s not over yet, you bastard…”
Kim Seokdae spun his dagger around and gripped it in a reverse grip.
Seeing that fighting stance, Hyeonjun burst out laughing.
“Still haven’t come to your senses, huh?”
“Shut up!”
Kim Seokdae charged in.
His speed was far slower than before.
Hyeonjun dodged each of those attacks with ease, the way one might humor a little child.
He could have ended it at any moment, but he chose not to.
It wasn’t merely that he meant to mock and toy with him.
Kim Seokdae’s motions of slashing and thrusting with the dagger.
While evading the attacks, Hyeonjun studied those movements closely and committed them to memory.
‘So you can attack like this, too.’
Kim Seokdae, who must have used a dagger far more than Hyeonjun had.
A fight like this was a teaching aid that was hard to come by.
‘There seem to be some inefficient movements mixed in here.’
For some reason, that was what he felt.
Was it because he’d watched so many battle videos of other Hunters?
Naturally, a direction for correcting that inefficiency flooded his mind in a chaotic rush.
‘Reduce the size of the movements, adjust the stride, and don’t put too much force into the feet.’
Whish!
Whoosh!
‘If I stab like that, the wrist will go out in no time. Better to time it and loosen the force. What matters isn’t how hard you stab, but exactly where you aim…’
The thoughts kept coming, one after another.
So much that even Hyeonjun himself was taken aback.
‘Did I actually know this much?’
Just as a strange feeling crept over him.
Kim Seokdae’s attack came to a halt.
“Haah, haah…”
Kim Seokdae was breathing hard, ragged gusts tearing out of him.
He’d pushed too hard, and it looked like his stamina had run dry.
“Already done?”
Hyeonjun clicked his tongue, his face full of regret.
“You, how many runes do you even have… How is it that not a single hit has reached you…?”
Hyeonjun grinned.
“E-Rank, actually.”
“…What?”
That was Kim Seokdae’s last word.
Hyeonjun’s fist slammed into his face.
With a heavy thud of impact, he ended up in the same state as the other two.

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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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