SSS-Class Sui**de Hunter - Chapter 2

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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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02. But Then, You Die (1)
1
Skill.
A word that has moved countless Hunters to tears.
The conditions for awakening a Skill differ from person to person.
-I struck a training dummy ten thousand times in the practice grounds. Then it just appeared on its own.
-One day I suddenly heard the voice of a god!
-Magic? I went into the tower and it just… happened.
There were Hunters with both character and grit, yet cursed with a complete absence of talent—forever scraping the bottom. Conversely, there were Hunters with deplorable personalities who fed themselves entirely on raw talent.
Yeom Je, Ranking 1, was the textbook example of the latter.
If life were a game, Yeom Je’s would surely be one of those talent-fest titles where you get whatever you want just by reaching for it. My life, on the other hand? A perfectly ordinary luck-dependent dumpster fire.
A perfectly ordinary luck-dependent dumpster fire, that’s all.
“Bleeeaagh!”
How long had I wandered aimlessly after stumbling out of the Tavern?
In an empty Alley, I finally lost the contents of my stomach.
“If you’re going to be unlucky, then be all the way unlucky.”
When is the most despairing moment in gaming?
Anyone who’s played a paid mobile game would know.
It’s not when you pull and pull but never get a five-star. It’s when a five-star finally drops—and it’s the most garbage five-star imaginable. Worse than a three-star.
My five-star wasn’t even fit to shine the shoes of a one-star.
+
[I Want to Be Like You]
Rank: S+
Effect: Activates automatically upon your death. You copy one Skill from the enemy who killed you and make it your own. You cannot copy the same opponent twice. Which Skill is copied is determined at random.
※But then, you die!
+
“Damn. Hell….”
Yeah. My life really was a luck-dependent dumpster fire.
Normally, when you awakened a Skill, you were supposed to report it to the Hunter Management Bureau. But I hadn’t reported it. The shame was suffocating. I couldn’t bear to show anyone this was my Skill.
-Hello, Hunter. How did you happen to awaken your Skill?
-I was envious of Ranking 1.
-Pardon?
-I was so jealous I thought I’d go mad, and apparently my Skill appeared as if to say “here, eat this instead.” Turns out I’m a spectacularly petty, jealous human being. Ha.
There was no way I could say something like that!
So all I could do was drink myself senseless and stumble about in remote Alleys.
‘…where am I?’
But even that, I couldn’t manage properly. Somewhere along the way, I’d wandered into a completely unfamiliar Alley. I couldn’t remember where this was or how I’d gotten here.
Was I really going to end up sleeping on an Alley floor?
‘Ah, how pitiful.’
It was the moment I swallowed back my tears.
A faint scream drifted down from deeper in the Alley.
“…please, help! Why are you suddenly…!”
The drunken haze scattered in an instant. Too vivid to be a hallucination born of Makgeolli—a voice that came from genuine terror, someone whose life was truly in jeopardy.
‘What?’
I muffled my footsteps. My breathing died away instinctively. One step, then another. I crept quietly toward where the scream had come from. As I drew closer, the voices grew sharper, more distinct.
This was…
“Y-you, Yeom Je. Why are you suddenly doing this to me…?”
“…it’s pointless. There’s no one around here anyway….”
This was the second stupid thing I’d done today.
The first mistake was obvious: drinking so much my mental circuit breaker had blown. I’d never experienced Complete Drunkenness in my entire life—until today. But when I finally got a Skill and it turned out to be S-rank garbage, I’d raged so hard I’d guzzled Makgeolli like water.
The second mistake was not running away the moment I heard that scream.
“I poisoned your cup beforehand.”
“P-poison? What are you talking about, Yeom Je? Since when…?”
“Nice act. If anyone saw this, they’d really think you didn’t know anything.”
In a dead-end Alley.
There, where no streetlamp reached and darkness pooled thick, stood a man and a woman. Though perhaps it was wrong to say they simply “stood”—the man was threatening the woman, and the woman was being threatened.
“Basilisk Gastric Fluid. Originally the poison you’d slipped into my drink. If I didn’t have my Skill, things would’ve gotten ugly. So, why the pale face? Saint Isabelle?”
“Could it be… Immunity to All Poisons? No, that’s impossible. You shouldn’t have a Skill like that.”
“I don’t.”
The man’s laughter echoed low through the darkness.
“But I do have a Skill that’s better than Immunity to All Poisons.”
And then I recognized the man. No matter how dark the alley was, there was no way I could fail to recognize that silhouette—the ponytail tied back, catching the faint light as it swayed. I’d seen that exact same profile on television just last night.
‘It really is Yeom Je!’
The number-one ranked Hunter. The hero of this age. The idol lifted up by the masses. And precisely because of that, the one envied and resented by all—and in particular, the hero who drew my envy most keenly.
And moreover.
‘That woman is Saint Isabelle?’
I clamped a hand over my mouth to stifle my breathing. Saint Isabelle. The ninth-ranked Hunter on the world Ranking, selected by the Hunter Management Bureau—the very woman who’d sparked scandal by supposedly dating Yeom Je recently. The breathtakingly beautiful woman I’d only ever seen in videos and photos on the internet stood right there in that alley.
“But the games end here. If you’ve laid a hand on me, you’ll pay the price.”
And she wasn’t just standing there—she was being threatened.
“Wait, please, Yeom Je. You’ve got this all wrong. I only wanted to team up with you and clear the Tower together!”
“I thought so too. But I was wrong.”
“Give me a chance! Think about it—if we formed a team, we could easily clear forty floors, maybe even fifty in a year! Yes! No one in humanity has conquered it yet, but the two of us—”
“I thought so too. But no.”
I went rigid.
‘These two… they weren’t actually dating?’
The internet had been full of it. The broadcasts had covered the love affair between the two heroes. But what unfolded before my eyes now held no trace of romance whatsoever. Even as a joke, it was hard to call this a couple’s quarrel.
Murderous intent.
All I could see was someone bent on killing and someone desperate not to die.
“Please, let’s talk this out! We can clear up the misunderstanding through dialogue.”
“Dialogue? Ah, dialogue. Fine. Very gentlemanly of me.”
Yeom Je seized Saint Isabelle by the throat.
“Gack—!”
“But the rules of this conversation, I make them.”
She thrashed. Was she suffocating? The more she struggled, the more my own breath caught, watching from the darkness. God, no. This couldn’t be happening right here, right now.
“I ask the questions. You just answer. Actually, no need to speak at all. If my question is right, nod your head. If it’s wrong, shake it. That’s all.”
“Agh, gasping—! Choke—”
“If you answer my questions with sincerity, I’ll let you live. I’ll even give you an Antidote as a bonus. But if you ignore my gentlemanly consideration even once… well, you don’t need me to spell it out, do you? You went to Oxford, didn’t you? Put that sharp mind to work.”
Saint Isabelle clawed frantically at the arm gripping her throat. Thud! Thud! But nothing changed. There was no way a Healer, however accomplished, could overcome Yeom Je through force.
“Actually, I only have one thing I’m curious about.”
“Ggh, choke… gasping—”
“Who ordered you to kill me? That’s all you need to answer. Was it the Black Dragon’s Witch?”
She stiffened. Her thrashing stopped.
“Think carefully before you answer. I may not have Immunity to All Poisons, but I do have Lie Detection. If I catch you lying, I’ll burn you down to the bone.”
“….”
Saint Isabelle seemed to hesitate for a moment. The alley was pitch black. I couldn’t see her face, but I could feel her silence. And then, under Yeom Je’s gaze, she slowly nodded.
“Just as I thought.”
A small laugh escaped.
“Go to hell, Saint Isabelle.”
Flame erupted.
It consumed the dead-end alley. From Yeom Je’s grip around her throat, across her entire body, fire swallowed her whole. Saint Isabelle convulsed, thrashing for her life. But no matter how she writhed, Yeom Je didn’t budge an inch.
He simply stared at her, burning, his expression blank.
“Mm.”
Even in the roaring inferno, Yeom Je remained unmoved. With cold composure, he never once loosened his grip on her throat. She flailed both arms, raking her nails across his wrist, drawing blood, and finally reached toward the night sky—but then her hand fell.
It went limp.
She stopped moving.
‘This is insane…’
She died right in front of me. A hero of mankind.
Perhaps it was wrong to simply say she ‘died.’ No. Saint Isabelle didn’t die an ordinary death. She was murdered. By Yeom Je—who was treated with the same reverence as a hero of humanity.
‘He’s a madman.’
Saint Isabelle had already become charred cinders. Yet the flames didn’t stop. Yeom Je didn’t stop. He burned her and burned her until her flesh and bone had all melted away into ash and coal.
All the while, his face remained utterly expressionless.
‘He’s not in his right mind.’
I stepped backward.
‘I have to run. Now.’
And then I made my third and final mistake of the night.
Crunch—
A small sound. Not a can. Just the noise of glass being stepped on—Glass Shards, perhaps from a bottle of soju someone had smashed, or just stray debris tumbling through the wind. I didn’t know. Didn’t need to know.
There was only one fact that truly mattered to me now.
I had just made a catastrophically stupid mistake.
“…Hm.”
And Yeom Je was not a hunter who would overlook another person’s mistake.
“I’ve dealt with all the rats nearby, but it looks like one more is still scurrying around.”
“Ugh!”
The moment our eyes met, I bolted.
I didn’t look back. I ran. Those eyes belonged to a murderer. Not someone who’d killed one or two people, but someone who’d slaughtered dozens—or far more. A demon’s eyes. And that demon was trying to kill me.
“Ha, cute little thing?”
The instant Yeom Je sneered, heat seared through my ankle. The next moment, I was rolling across the ground. At first, I couldn’t understand why I’d fallen.
Not until I saw my feet lying on the pavement.
“Hie—ahhh—!”
My feet were severed. Both of them—right foot and left foot—cut clean off, shoes and all.
The famous brand logo on the side of my sneakers seemed impossibly white against the blood.
“Please—please save me! Mercy, please!”
“Why did you run, then? You scared the life out of me.”
Yeom Je bent down. He’d picked up my feet. He held them and toyed with them as if he were casually tossing and catching a baseball. Toss. Catch.
“Hey, you watching?”
“N-no, I didn’t see anything!”
Yeom Je drew closer.
“Didn’t see what?”
“I don’t know anything! Please. I swear. I don’t know—”
“Don’t know what?”
“Please… Yeom Je, please… let me live. I won’t say a word. Wherever I go, I won’t say anything—”
A shadow fell over my head.
Yeom Je crouched down, staring at me.
“So you’re saying you saw that I’m Yeom Je, and you know that I’m Yeom Je. That means you saw everything. You know everything.”
“Please—”
“You’re making me sad, buddy. Why pretend you don’t know when you clearly do?”
Yeom Je turned my feet over in his hands.
“Tell me. Who sent you? Is it the Black Dragon’s Witch again?”
“I… I really don’t… don’t know anything…”
“You don’t know anything, but you were standing over there watching me and Saint Isabelle? Quiet as a mouse? Come on. Your credibility is overflowing. If I were any more of a fool, I’d actually believe you.”
Yeom Je smiled thinly.
“But I’m not a fool, you bastard.”
Flames erupted before my eyes. Whoosh! The fire that bloomed from Yeom Je’s hand consumed my feet. Everything burned away. The brand logo, the sneakers I’d worn for so long, the feet that had been part of my body even longer than that.
All of it vanished.
“Next time it’s your head. Answer straight.”
My mind went blank.
This monster… was insane.
A madman. No answer would work on a madman. He believed his own thoughts were all correct, that he was always right. A psychopath who’d kill innocent people without hesitation.
How could someone ranked number one be like this?
Had people really admired such a person?
Had we—had I—actually considered someone like this even remotely heroic? Praised him for being honest, for having a refreshing temperament? This madman?
“You’re… lying…”
“What?”
“The Lie Detection Skill… you have the Lie Detection Skill, don’t you?”
I pressed forward desperately.
“You told Saint Isabelle. That you can tell when someone’s lying. So test my words.
“…”
“With that Skill, you’ll see I’m telling the truth. Yeom Je, I just… I really did just pass by by chance. Please believe me!”
Yeom Je’s expression shifted.
“That’s a lie, though.”
SSS-Class Hunter: I Live Only When I’m Dying (Serialized)
Author | Shin No-ah
Publisher | Kim Joo-hyung
Publishing House | J Plus Media Co., Ltd.
Marketing | Han Jae-hyuk
Address | 204, 288 Digital-ro, Guro-gu, Seoul (Guro-dong, Daelung Posttower 1st)
Email | [email protected]
Website | www.jayplemedia.com
© Shin No-ah 2019
※This work is published by J Plus 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 the permission of the publisher and author.
Violation of these terms 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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