SSS-Class Sui**de Hunter - Chapter 13

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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 13. Do You Have a Skill Too? (1)
1
Grrrooooaaarrr!
The Orc roared.
Perhaps it wasn’t a roar at all, merely a brief snarl — but to me, it sounded like an endless wail. A full fifty seconds! For nearly a minute, the creature’s howl echoed relentlessly in my ears.
“Agh, hnngh…!”
Pain as if my skull might split.
“Listen, focus,” Baehureung said sharply.
In the dragging slowness of time, the spirit’s voice cut through clear and hard.
“Don’t flinch from trash mobs like this Orc. It’s brutishly strong, sure, but its attack patterns are simple. If you can predict where it’ll strike, dodging is easy—and so is a counterattack. Honestly, it’s child’s play.”
“That’s… easy for you to s-say…!”
“Here it comes.”
Whoosh!
The Orc swung its club. No—it was swinging, ponderous and inexorable, the cudgel bearing down on my skull with terrible certainty. If I stood still, my head would be crushed in less than twenty seconds.
“Damn it, move!”
I threw myself sideways with every ounce of strength. Yet my body wouldn’t obey my will.
‘Too slow!’
Just one step. A single step would have let me slip clear, but that one step dragged with agonizing letharness. Frustration clawed at my chest. I felt ready to scream.
I could dodge it—I knew exactly where the blow was coming from!
“You can make it. Don’t give up,” Baehureung murmured.
The spirit’s voice was low, almost gentle.
“Focus your Aura on your legs. Strengthen your Leg Strength. Feel it like you’re channeling the flow pooled in your heart down into your right foot—now!”
Damn this.
‘A ghost with a working mouth and nothing else.’
I had felt Aura for the first time in my life. But how was I supposed to concentrate it in my legs? Easier said than done.
Yet I had no choice. I had to try, somehow. Even without a fear of death, I had no desire to have my skull caved in by an Orc’s club.
‘Move, damn you.’
The flow of my heart. Thinner than blood, it felt somehow cool and pristine—like a clear mountain stream. I focused on that refreshing sensation, trying to direct it toward my right leg.
Quiver.
My effort yielded something: the Aura stirred faintly from my heart—
“Harder than expected, isn’t it?” Baehureung observed.
It was.
“That’s because the pathways for Aura don’t exist in your body yet. No roads built. Think of your body as a mountain trail, overgrown and unused. Before you can claim to wield Aura at all, you’d need to clear it down to highway standards.”
“Ngh, mmph…!”
Even as Baehureung rambled on, I kept pushing my focus into my right leg. If my heart was a clogged faucet, my leg was a cup placed beneath it—one drop at a time, the Aura trickling from the broken tap.
“The only reason you can feel Aura now is because you drank an Elixir. Normally, it’d be impossible. Tsk. That woman’s hygiene is atrocious, but her skill is genuine, I’ll grant her that.”
Whoooosh!
The club cut through the air with terrible force. It grazed past my body so close I gasped—and as it passed, a small whirlwind erupted in its wake. The wind scattered against my skin, fragmenting. Another half-second of delay and my entire body would have been pulped.
“How… how did I…?”
The relief of dodging the blow lasted only a moment.
“Grrr… ungh…?”
The Orc’s nostrils flared. It didn’t like this—the fact that a weak creature like me had dared to evade its attack. The beast quickly hefted its club again.
-Krrrraaagh!
This time, a vicious horizontal sweep aimed at my waist.
There was no time to rest.
I forced my Aura into my upper body.
“Hmm? What are you doing?” Baehureung asked.
“If I can carve out that mountain trail… make it a highway…!”
Still impossibly difficult. My heart remained a locked valve. The water showed no sign of flowing freely. My throat was parched with thirst, yet the Aura produced only a trickle, barely a single drop seeping out.
‘Infuriating as it is, Baehureung was right.’
A mountain trail, overgrown and desolate, abandoned to weeds.
The description fit me perfectly.
And yet I found myself wondering.
What if I could transcend this level?
What if I could break free?
“What will I b-become…!”
A low chuckle.
Baehureung laughed softly.
“You. When Marcus killed you, you couldn’t do anything. Your throat was sliced right through, wasn’t it?”
It was.
I recalled the crescent moon hanging in the night sky.
Baehureung’s words burrowed into my mind.
-That’s just about the level of a tree-lined avenue, you see.
“…….”
A tree-lined avenue.
A strike as beautiful as that—merely the level of a tree-lined avenue.
-Marcus still has a long way to go. You don’t even need to speak. Zombie, I’m not tormenting you because I’m a garbage human for no reason—I torment you because you deserve it. Hehehehe.
Click.
My teeth clenched.
-Hmm?
Spite kindled in me.
“Hah……!”
I threw my upper body forward. Whoooosh! The Orc’s club swept through the air above my waist. Close—too close. I’d barely dodged the second strike after the first.
But I had no intention of allowing a third.
-Grrr?
I concentrated force into my knees.
-Watch this.
I pooled my Aura directly into the soles of my feet, bending them like a spring as much as I could manage. Five seconds, three, one. When I felt the Aura gathering—clumsily, but gathering—I launched myself upward with everything I had.
I raised my blade.
Target: the Orc’s throat.
-What?
The Monster stared down at me in bewilderment. I reflected in its pupils, and so did the tip of my sword. My blade grew larger and larger in its gaze. In that fraction of a moment, my sword pierced its throat, and the Orc’s face twisted in agony.
-Krraaaaahhh!
Beneath the evening sky, a scream rippled across the vast Hunting Ground.
I thought it was finished.
-Don’t drop your guard until the end!
Baehureung shouted.
-Orc flesh is thick! Focus your Aura at the tip! No, that’s too hard. Just pour it all in like you’re smashing it down!
I did exactly that.
-Kraaaaahhh!
The Orc’s screams grew fiercer. I wrung out every last drop of Aura flowing from my heart and poured it all into the blade. With each droplet of Aura soaking into the tip, the Monster’s cries deepened in their agony.
-Krro, gahhh… Grrrr……!
Splash!
Blood sprayed. The Orc’s blood covered my face in slow motion. I didn’t flinch. I didn’t even blink. Instead, I thrashed to cram every last drop of Aura onto the blade’s edge.
“Die, you……!”
For a single, brief moment.
I felt the tip pierce clean through the Orc’s neck.
-Grrrrr… rr…….
The Orc staggered.
Even its stumbling seemed to take an age. The Orc fell backward slowly. Thud! Since I never let go of the hilt, I pitched forward with the Monster as it fell.
“Hah… Ugh, hack……! Wheeze……!”
I stood over the Orc’s corpse, breathing heavily.
But breathing was not the only thing that was difficult.
Throb. A heartbeat too late, searing pain crashed through my entire body. The world tilted. Without exaggeration, it felt like my limbs were being torn apart.
“Ungh……?”
-Hurt? Of course it hurts. Yeah. It’s gonna hurt like hell.
Baehureung flitted about me, needling.
-You used Aura without even properly opening your channels yet. Your pathetic body has no business withstanding that! Serves you right.
“I, you… piece……!”
-Ah. But that last part, the way you bent your Aura like a spring—that was good. Well done on that. I’ll give you credit. You have to use Aura creatively, after all. People often misunderstand, but the smarter the person, the better they fight.
I couldn’t care about any of that right now.
“Hee, huff……! Ugh……!”
This pain!
Bones grinding, blood vessels rupturing. My only concern was how to dull this piercing agony. Normally pain would numb with time, but with the Elixir’s effects stretching time endlessly, there was no such mercy. It just hurt. It kept hurting.
I thought I might actually die.
-Does it hurt like you’re dying?
“If you watch, you won’t… know…….”
-Well then, if you actually die, you’ll be fine.
What?
-Forcing Aura open without proper channels leaves a person crippled. It’s something no potion can heal. A permanent wound. So you just crippled yourself to catch a single Orc.
“What… the….”
-I told you, zombie. If you didn’t have the Regression Skill, I wouldn’t recommend training like this either. Even Marcus takes Elixirs, but he just sits in lotus position—he doesn’t throw himself at monsters like some kind of barbarian.
This infuriating ghost.
-But you come back when you die, don’t you? That’s the dream! No matter how brutal the training gets, your body stays intact. Man, I’m jealous. So jealous. I wish I had the Regression Skill like you do!
Wow.
How can someone be so irritating?
Does this guy have passive skills like Smug Commentary or Zero Manners or something? Otherwise there’s no explaining how his personality could be this garbage.
-Zombie, but if you kill yourself, your Kill Count goes up too, right?
“Yeah… I know……”
-No point racking up more Kill Count here. It’s risky if Marcus notices.
Boom.
An ominous sound thundered from behind me. I’d heard it before—and not long ago either. When I turned around, my dread proved justified. Standing there, drooling, was a Monster that looked exactly like the Orc I’d dropped earlier.
“Hell… damn……”
The Monster was identical, but my condition was not. True to Baehureung’s assessment, my body was currently crippled. Every inch of me screamed with pain—I couldn’t move a single finger.
-You’ll be fine! Plenty of Hunters go their whole lives without grasping Aura, but you picked it up on your first shot after just one Elixir. Keep this pace and a hundred deaths should be more than enough, yeah? Even a thousand-mile journey starts with a single step. Even a hundred deaths start with one.
Baehureung laughed.
-Come on, zombie, you got this! Let’s go for death number one!
The Orc’s club began to descend. Slowly. Aiming straight for the crown of my head.
I stared up at the club bearing down on me and opened my mouth.
“Dammit… you… son… of a…”
Crunch!
Have you ever felt your nose break, your skull shatter, and your brain burst in sequence?
I doubt it. Lucky you. It feels like absolute hell.
The only mercy was that the moment my brain burst, I heard a voice.
[You have died.]
The world reset to normal.
More precisely, my sense of time returned.
‘Damn….’
A pitch-black space.
The place where I linger after death and before Regression.
It was a place I’d grown somewhat used to—until someone I didn’t want to grow used to materialized, floating there.
-Huh?
It was Baehureung.
-What the hell is this?
‘It’s just a space where I stay for a moment after death. I picked up Skill Cards here when Yeom Je and Geom Seong killed me before. For now I’m calling it Myeong Gye.’
-Damn, that’s wild.
Baehureung peered around the dark void.
-But zombie, why are you here too?
‘How should I know? Probably because you’re stuck in me.’
I sighed.
‘In a moment I’ll hear a voice saying “Regressing to 24 hours ago,” and then I’ll go back. As for whether you regress with me or not… I’m curious about that too, honestly.’
I was about to say I was curious when—
[Skill condition met through death.]
[Randomly copying skill from Monster Orc.]
‘…What?’
-Huh?
Both Baehureung and I froze. We turned to look at each other. Baehureung’s face was the picture of bewilderment—I imagined mine looked much the same.
[Forming Skill Card.]
Two cards of the same color rose up from the darkness.
I stared at them and muttered blankly.
‘…Monsters have skills too?’
And Baehureung shouted.
-What is this! That’s total bullshit!
SSS-Rank Hunter Who Only Lives by Dying (Ongoing Serialization)
Author │ Shin Noah
Publisher │ Kim Ju-hyung
Published by │ J Plus Media Co., Ltd.
Marketing │ Han Jae-hyuk
Address │ 204, 288 Digital-ro, Guro-gu, Seoul (Guro-dong, Daelung Post Tower 1st)
Email │ [email protected]
Homepage │ www.jayplemedia.com
© Sin Noah 2019
※ This work is published by Jay P. Media Co., Ltd. in accordance with a contract with the copyright holder, and the content may not be used in any form or by any means without permission from the company and the author.
Violation of this may result in criminal and civil legal liability.

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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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