The All-Time Best Talent was F-Class Purification - Chapter 100
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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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100
Chapter 100 – An Elite Talent Awakened as an F-Rank Purifier
Thump, thump, thump, thump.
Rhythmic vibrations traveled through the thick concrete walls at regular intervals—the sound of military boots. Dozens of armed soldiers descending the staircase in perfect synchronization, not a single footfall out of step.
The abandoned depths of the Lowest Level of Black Market. This dark, damp underground corridor, where only massive rat swarms and contaminated insects typically crawled, now hosted the Steel Alliance’s regular forces—the very symbol of Neo Seoul’s order. And shadowing them would be the remnants of the Blue Tower’s Cleaners.
I slowly drew Shadow Fang from my waist. The cool blade, honed from mithril alloy, gleamed with a blue sheen as it caught the bunker’s dim lighting.
“Dr. Junk. And Su-jin.”
I spoke without turning around.
“Both of you retreat to the innermost section of this bunker, behind the hatch where the drainage pipes run. No matter what sounds you hear, don’t come out.”
“Got it. The data backup is complete, so I’m putting my life in your hands.”
Dr. Junk extracted the silver memory chip from the monitor and tucked it deep into his pocket as he spoke. Han Su-jin nodded with a pale face, then helped Dr. Junk into the darkness of a corner. A faint glow leaked from the ring on Han Su-jin’s finger, slowly replenishing her mana.
“Eun-ha. How much mana do you have?”
“About half. I can’t unleash grand spells recklessly, but I have more than enough firepower to incinerate those tin cans.”
Seo Eun-ha tapped the Red Queen’s Breath staff lightly against the floor as she answered. The flames burning in her eyes shone with a keenness that had completely incinerated the despair from twelve hours ago.
And beside me, standing directly in front of the bunker’s entrance, was the massive man.
Park Jae-jung quietly raised his Gigass Shield, his other self.
Uuuuoooong.
The shield resonated with a majestic hum in response to its master’s overwhelming mana. His body, rebuilt after breaking through his limits, was so explosively muscular that even through the protective suit, the expansion was palpable. I could see it.
In each movement as Jae-jung slowly raised the shield, there was a weighty concentration—adapting to this unfamiliar sensation of power while accepting it as his own.
It would be a weight he’d never felt before. A sensation of his own body yet not quite his own.
But Park Jae-jung didn’t doubt it. He simply remained quiet, lowering his stance while staring ahead.
“Guild Master.”
Park Jae-jung called out in a low, measured voice.
“Those are regular forces of the Steel Alliance. In principle, they’re peacekeeping troops that should remain neutral. There may be corrupted soldiers taking bribes from the Blue Tower mixed in, but if we slaughter all of them, we’ll make all of Neo Seoul our enemy.”
His cold judgment. The gaze of a veteran who wouldn’t lose his reason to the heat of battle. To topple the massive mountains of Dominion and the Blue Tower from within, I couldn’t become a mindless slaughterer without cause.
“I know. We only need to kill the Cleaner rats hiding in the back.”
I rotated my wrist holding the dagger lightly and lifted the corners of my mouth.
“As for the Steel Alliance soldiers leading the charge, we’ll just destroy their armor and turn them into scrap metal. Like always, Jae-jung, you break through the front.”
“Understood.”
Park Jae-jung pulled his chin back and lowered his stance further.
Whirrr—beep beep!
At that moment, a red laser scanner flashed outside the bunker’s thick steel door. They’d reached the entrance.
[Internal biometric signatures confirmed. Target count: five. Authorization granted for explosive entry.]
A mechanical voice flowed through the speaker. Unlike Dominion’s soldiers or the Blue Tower’s Cleaners, this was different. No negotiation, no warning—pure military-style ruthless suppression tactics.
“Here they come.”
The moment my words finished, shaped charges attached to the heavy steel door detonated.
Kwaaaaang—!
With a sound that shattered eardrums, the ten-centimeter-thick steel door crumpled inward like tissue paper and was torn away. The acrid smell of explosives and a tsunami of concrete dust rushed into the bunker.
“Breach! Kill them all!”
At the Commander’s hand signal, Steel Alliance special forces in silver-gray powered armor poured through the smoke, their mana rifles’ muzzles about to unleash fire in unison.
“Out of the way.”
Park Jae-jung pushed off the floor and lunged forward.
His massive frame charged with the speed and weight of a beast. Before they could even pull the trigger, Park Jae-jung had already closed the distance to the front line.
“Iron Fortress”
Boom!
A golden-tinged blue barrier of mana erupted from the Gigass Shield, completely sealing off the bunker’s narrow entrance.
Rat-a-tat-tat!
Dozens of mana bullets fired too late slammed into the barrier, but couldn’t even scratch it before ricocheting into empty air. This wasn’t the shield I remembered from my C-rank days—the one I’d endured with bones grinding in agony.
“What… what is this barrier!”
“Push through! If it won’t break, blow it apart!”
The Steel Alliance members panicked and raised their grenade launchers. But Park Jae-jung didn’t give them a second chance.
“Excuse me.”
Park Jae-jung’s veins bulged in the arm holding the shield as he drove the barrier itself toward them.
“Guardian Smash”
Crash!
An impact wave exploded outward like a massive dump truck slamming head-on. Five soldiers in powered armor at the front were launched into the air with the sickening sound of metal crumpling.
“Gahhhhh!”
“Cough!”
The hydraulic cylinders of their suits ruptured, and they crashed into the narrow corridor walls outside the bunker, losing consciousness. A single charge. That alone was enough to completely shatter the enemy formation.
‘As expected. We’re operating on a completely different level now.’
I slipped through the smoke along the path Park Jae-jung had carved open. My target was the Blue Tower Cleaners positioned behind the fallen Steel Alliance members, quietly preparing their poison needles while observing the situation.
“It’s Lee Tae-hyun! Target approaching!”
Three Cleaners in black masks swiftly swung their mana blades at me. Fast and sharp trajectories. But before my A-rank dynamic vision and my nervous system—endlessly evolving as it absorbed contamination—their movements seemed as slow as flailing underwater.
Their positions, centers of gravity, the direction of their blade tips. The calculation finished in under a second. The middle one was the feint. The two on the sides were the real attack.
I twisted my upper body slightly to deflect the first blade, then gripped my dagger in reverse and drove it into the seams of the Cleaner’s armor.
Click.
“Ugh…!”
The Cleaner gasped, but my attack didn’t end with the thrust. Through the dagger’s tip, I explosively channeled mana from my Dantian. The wave of purification flowed through the armor’s internal circuits, burning the Cleaner’s power suit’s energy core white-hot.
Sizzle.
Whoosh!
The unpowered suit instantly became dozens of kilograms of scrap metal. The Cleaner collapsed under their own weight.
‘The abilities that emerged after Cataclysm Day. Those born from the Core—I can sever them with purification.’
It was something I’d confirmed when forcibly disabling Mad Dog’s skill. Whether it was a skill or the mana-driven system of a powered suit, if its source was contaminated energy, it burned equally under the light of purification.
“You bastard!”
The second Cleaner beside him tried to fire a mana bullet in rage, but Seo Eun-ha’s magic arrived first.
“Flame Bind”
Whoosh!
A rope of flames cut through the air and coiled around the Cleaner’s ankle like a serpent. As he lost his balance and fell, Han Ae-ri—who had been waiting silently in the darkness—burst out like a shadow.
Slice.
Han Ae-ri’s curved dagger cut across the fallen Cleaner’s throat with perfect precision. Before blood could even spray, she had already circled behind the third Cleaner and drove her blade into the back of his knee, forcing him to kneel.
“Krraaaaaagh!”
In an instant, the corridor before the bunker transformed into absolute chaos.
It was only a fleeting moment, but I felt it—the precise timing of Seo Eun-ha’s binding spell, the angle at which Han Ae-ri charged in. We hadn’t coordinated it beforehand. It simply happened. After twelve hours of combat, we were reading each other’s next moves without uttering a single word.
Is this what a team truly is?
The Steel Alliance Commander staggered backward in disbelief. To their eyes, we must have appeared like remnants of a defeated force—drained of mana after days of flight and battle, bodies riddled with wounds, standing at the precipice of annihilation.
But what now thrashed before them was no defeated remnant.
They were predators who had shattered their limits and crawled up from the depths of hell itself.
“Maintain formation! Request reinforcements—cough!”
The Commander tried to shout into his communication device, but I was already upon him, my hand clamping down over his mana-infused communicator.
Sizzzzzzle.
The purification wave melted the device’s circuitry in an instant. The Commander stared up at me with eyes wide with shock.
“If you don’t wish to die here, I suggest you go to sleep quietly.”
I struck the pommel of my dagger hard against his temple. With a dull thud, his eyes rolled back and he collapsed to the floor.
Three minutes from the start of combat.
The roughly thirty vanguard soldiers who had descended to pressure us lay sprawled across the corridor floor, completely neutralized without a single casualty among our ranks. The Steel Alliance troops were bound unconscious, and the remnants of Cleaners hiding behind them had been quietly eliminated by Han Ae-ri’s hand.
“Situation concluded.”
As I sheathed my dagger after wiping it clean, Park Jae-jung lowered his shield and exhaled heavily. Seo Eun-ha approached as well, twirling her staff with satisfaction.
“This was kind of anticlimactic, honestly. I was nervous when I heard Steel Alliance, but they’re nothing special.”
Seo Eun-ha tapped a fallen soldier with her foot as she spoke.
“They’re not weak. We’ve simply grown stronger.”
I gazed toward the dark staircase beyond the corridor, leading upward to the Upper District.
This is merely the beginning. Soon their main force will descend to investigate the vanguard that has gone silent. But we will no longer hide in this damp underground, waiting for them to come down to us.
“Dr. Junk. Su-jin. You can come out now.”
At my call, the two emerged cautiously from deeper within the bunker. Upon seeing the fallen soldiers, Dr. Junk drew a sharp breath and shook his head.
“These insane monsters… actually wiped out an entire regular military unit in three minutes.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
I picked up the tactical tablet that had fallen from the Steel Alliance Commander’s grasp. There was no need to hack it—the screen he’d left open displayed the current perimeter defenses of Neo Seoul and the deployment positions of the Blue Tower’s leadership.
I slowly traced my finger across the screen.
The spacing of guard positions, patrol patterns, the density of mana detection networks by sector. It was an encirclement constructed by the Steel Alliance under the Blue Tower’s orders. From their perspective, it would have been a perfect net—blocking all exits and slowly strangling those trapped within.
The problem was that those who wove this net were operating under the assumption we were still buried underground.
‘They would never expect us to ascend to Ground Level.’
I handed the tablet to Dr. Junk.
“Can you analyze this?”
“Of course. Decrypting something like this is child’s play.”
Dr. Junk accepted the tablet with his mechanical prosthetic arm, his eyes narrowing. His pupils began moving rapidly across the screen. Though his prosthetic was damaged, those eyes that read data remained sharp and alive.
As silence stretched out, I slowly surveyed the Steel Alliance soldiers scattered across the corridor floor.
Were they truly enemies? Not entirely. There would be corrupt individuals among them taking Blue Tower’s money, but most were simply soldiers following orders—ordinary people who had donned the Steel Alliance’s reinforced suits to survive in a world that had collapsed since Cataclysm Day.
I was glad we hadn’t killed them.
The ones who truly deserved to be cut down were waiting above.
“I’ve got a rough understanding of it.”
Dr. Junk set down his tablet and spoke.
“The surface perimeter is thick, but there are gaps between sectors. The Steel Alliance poured all their forces into the Underground, which thinned out parts of the outer surface. They got cocky and exposed their weakness.”
“So there’s a window of opportunity to move?”
“Now is that window. Once the vanguard goes silent, they’ll enter reorganization mode, but until then, we have a brief opening.”
That was all I needed to hear.
I slid my dagger back into my belt and turned to face my comrades.
Until now, we had been their prey. We wandered through the Contaminated Lower District, breathed in toxic gas, and watched our allies fall. We fled, we hid, we endured. There were times when that was all we could do.
But from this moment forward, the tables would turn.
“Park Jae-jung. Seo Eun-ha. And Han Ae-ri.”
I looked at each of my comrades in turn. Park Jae-jung nodded silently, Seo Eun-ha leaned her staff against her shoulder with a slight smirk, Han Ae-ri met my gaze quietly while cleaning her dagger, and Han Han-sujin’s eyes burned with resolve. Not a trace of hesitation flickered in any of their gazes.
“We’re going to climb straight into their heart, seize the executives who hold Blue Tower’s leash, and cut them down one by one from the top.”
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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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