The All-Time Best Talent was F-Class Purification - Chapter 102
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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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102
Chapter 102 – An Elite Talent Awakened as an F-Rank Purifier
“Eun-ha.”
I whispered in a voice barely audible, meant only for her ears.
“The barrier surrounding that place—it’s composed purely of one hundred percent mana, correct? There aren’t any electromagnetic detection sensors mixed in, are there?”
“Huh? Oh. Wait, let me check.”
Seo Eun-ha narrowed her eyes and read the fluctuations of the barrier. An S-rank mage’s perception could detect mana more accurately than any machine ever could.
“You’re right. Pure mana. It looks like a typical magical engineering barrier—mana extracted from a massive core mana stone, solidified into a dome shape. The electronic sensors would be beyond the alloy barrier, not here.”
“That’s a relief. If it’s core mana, this is my specialty.”
I slowly peeled off my wet gloves and extended my bare hands.
“Everyone, stay close behind me.”
I crawled through the rain until I reached the translucent membrane of the barrier. Close enough to touch if I extended my arm. Each time the turret’s barrel swept across our position, a chill ran down my spine.
I took a deep breath and gently placed my bare hand against the barrier’s surface.
Zzzziiing—
A tingling sensation, like high-voltage current flowing through my fingertips, transmitted through my hand. The barrier itself was reacting to external contact. I couldn’t simply push all my purification mana at once—that would shatter this massive barrier.
Among the countless properties the barrier possessed, I needed to quietly wash away only the corrupted purpose of its external intrusion detection and repulsion in an extremely localized area.
I narrowed my purification output to its finest point, targeting just a single thread of mana as if erasing a single dot on a map with a brushstroke.
Chiiiiik.
The blue membrane where my hand touched began to silently dissolve, releasing white vapor. The barrier’s system would still be sending signals to Ryu Jin-hwan’s brain that everything was functioning perfectly, but before me, a circular opening large enough for an adult to pass through was quietly forming. Thirty seconds. One minute.
“Wow, something like this was actually possible….”
Han Su-jin covered her mouth in astonishment. Seo Eun-ha wore a similarly surprised expression.
“Hurry. I can’t keep this open for long.”
At my urging, my teammates slipped through the opening one by one. As I entered last and withdrew my hand, the punctured barrier sealed itself with a sticky adhesion, returning to its original state.
We’d passed the first checkpoint.
But the real obstacle was just beginning.
Before us rose a ten-meter-high ash-gray special alloy barrier, its surface perfectly smooth. A sheer vertical cliff face without a single handhold or crevice. Above it, mana turrets rotated at regular intervals, their red lenses gleaming.
I began counting the turret’s rotation cycle with my eyes. Three seconds moving, two seconds stationary. Then three seconds moving again, two seconds stationary. The pattern was consistent.
“Aeri.”
I called out to Han Ae-ri, and she quietly moved to my side.
“As a slasher, go up first and scout the path from above. We’ll follow once we see what you find.”
Han Ae-ri nodded silently. She drew two curved daggers and waited for the moment when the turret’s gaze rotated away before pressing herself flat against the wall.
Her curved daggers lodged soundlessly into the microscopic seams of the smooth alloy barrier—gaps so thin a single hair could barely fit. She alternated plunging both blades like ice climbing, beginning to scale the wall like a spider.
Whenever the turret began to turn in her direction, Han Ae-ri held her breath and merged perfectly into the barrier’s deep shadows.
It was a slasher’s instinct—erasing presence, becoming shadow, transforming existence itself into air. Han Ae-ri performed it not as a technique but as naturally as breathing.
In less than a minute, Han Ae-ri reached the top of the ten-meter barrier. From above, she surveyed the courtyard below, her eyes tracing the optimal path. Then, after a moment, she raised her thumb. The turret’s blind spots, landing points, movement routes—it was a signal sufficient for me to understand.
I mentally reconstructed the path and speed Han Ae-ri had taken. The turret’s cycle, the timing of the blind spots, the distance from landing to the containers where we could hide.
The calculation was complete.
“When I signal and that third turret rotates away, we all climb simultaneously.”
Park Jae-jung looked up at the barrier once, then asked in a low, serious voice.
“Are we running?”
“Yes. It’s only about 10 meters—we can clear it easily.”
Seo Eun-ha rotated her wrist lightly and let out a soft chuckle.
“Well, that’s true enough.”
“As for Park Jae-jung…”
I turned to look at him and spoke seriously.
“Please refrain from jumping. If you leap with that strength of yours, the floor might collapse. Could you climb up quietly by gripping the wall with your hands instead?”
Park Jae-jung hesitated for a moment, then nodded expressionlessly. Seo Eun-ha covered her mouth, stifling her laughter. Han Su-jin watched Park Jae-jung nod seriously while being pelted by rain, then averted her gaze.
“Three, two, one. Now.”
The moment the turret I’d gestured to swiveled in the opposite direction, Seo Eun-ha, Han Su-jin, and I kicked off the ground simultaneously. Explosive mana erupted through our legs, launching our bodies vertically upward.
Watching Han Su-jin plant both hands on the top of the Alloy Barrier and vault up effortlessly, I was freshly reminded of what S-rank physical prowess truly meant. If she weren’t exhausted from mana depletion, her baseline physical abilities would be formidable indeed.
Park Jae-jung drove both hands into the barrier’s surface and climbed up silently. The handprints gouged deep into the alloy wall, yet he suppressed every sound perfectly. As I followed and climbed, those impressions came into view.
‘Right. I was wise to tell him not to jump.’
The moment I reached the top of the Alloy Barrier, I found myself holding my breath for the same reason Han Ae-ri would have.
The Blue Tower Courtyard.
It was far too vast to be called the backyard of an ordinary large building. An overwhelmingly expansive logistics loading dock—as if two soccer fields had been merged into one. Dozens of floodlights pierced the eyes like midday sun, illuminating the rain in harsh white, while containers filled with mana stones and unidentifiable biological samples traveled ceaselessly on conveyor belts across the floor.
Armed security guards and bulky four-legged combat robots patrolled between them, their mechanical footsteps producing an unsettling sound. In one corner, Lower District laborers bound with mana shackles were being driven to night-shift unloading work beneath the lash—a pitiful sight.
My teeth clenched. By day, they proclaimed the city’s order and truth before knowledge. By night, they did this. The conviction that I must expose that data to the world hardened further.
But what truly held our feet most firmly in place was something else entirely.
Whirrrrr— whirrrr—
Dozens of surveillance cameras monitoring the interior of the Alloy Barrier. These were no simple lens cameras. They were top-tier thermal imaging optical hybrid CCTVs capable of overcoming even the temperature differential of the pouring cold acid rain and seeing through to the skeletal structure of living organisms. They swept across the top of the barrier in a crisscross pattern like a spider’s web, allowing not a single blind spot.
If we descended from the barrier or lingered even one more second, those red lenses would lock onto us, and we’d become riddled with bullets in an instant.
“The camera is turning this way.”
Park Jae-jung wiped the rain from his face and spoke urgently.
The nearest camera’s lens was slowly rotating toward the section where we clung.
“Eun-ha.”
I whispered rapidly, looking at Seo Eun-ha hanging beside me.
“It’s raining right now, and directly below us is a massive mana engine in a transport vehicle heated to hundreds of degrees Celsius. Could you use that heat to completely blind the camera’s vision?”
The corner of Seo Eun-ha’s mouth lifted slightly. Her crimson eyes gleamed like a predator that had found its prey.
“Who do you think you’re talking to? I’m not just a mage—I’m one who commands the very flames themselves.”
Seo Eun-ha removed her wet gloves and stretched both hands downward.
No flames erupted. But the air near the transport vehicle’s massive mana engine room began to distort grotesquely. Seo Eun-ha had compressed the hundreds of degrees of waste heat the engine expelled into a single point, pushing it to its absolute limit. Then she detonated that compressed mass of heat into the empty air.
Fwoooosh—!
There was no visual explosion, but from the perspective of a machine detecting heat, it was as if the sun had detonated right before its sensors.
“Beeeep—! Warning! Thermal sensor overload! Whiteout detected!”
A loud mechanical alarm blared from the security room speaker. Had the thermal imaging camera’s sensors shut down their own power to protect their circuits from the abnormal extreme heat?
The power indicator on the camera went dark, then began flickering. It wasn’t broken—it seemed to have entered reboot mode. The optical lens was also completely obscured by the thick veil of steam created when the rainwater and extreme heat collided head-on.
“Bonus.”
Seo Eun-ha flicked her fingers lightly, and the body heat enveloping all five of us synchronized perfectly with the temperature of the pouring acid rain.
Even after the machine finished rebooting and resumed operation, we would become invisible—indistinguishable from the rainwater itself. As far as I knew, only Seo Eun-ha could execute thermal control with this level of precision.
“Now. Let’s jump down.”
At my signal, they threw themselves beneath the Alloy Barrier without hesitation.
We landed silently on the Logistics Warehouse floor, piercing through the thick veil of steam, then immediately slipped into the narrow gap behind the nearest Container Stacks.
“Hey! Why isn’t the camera working! Switch to manual!”
“The steam’s blocking the view! Did the engine coolant rupture?!”
While the security guards shouted in panic into their radios, we had seamlessly infiltrated the heart of enemy territory—a space spanning two soccer fields.
Flattened beneath the container’s shadow, catching our breath and rapidly assessing our conditions: Park Jae-jung knelt with his shield pressed tight against his body, his eyes tracking the patrol routes of the security robots.
Han Su-jin’s face was pale, but she maintained steady mana breathing. Seo Eun-ha’s eyes already gleamed with the intensity of searching for the next valve control point. Han Ae-ri clung to the container’s edge as if she had always been Shadow itself, securing her line of sight.
We were all alive.
“How do we find the passage to the Main Server Room in this vast space?”
Han Su-jin asked, surveying the complex Logistics Warehouse beyond the container.
“Eun-ha.”
I called out to Seo Eun-ha again. She had already closed her eyes, pressing her hand against the wall. Her senses pierced through the sound of rain and mechanical noise, beginning to map the invisible temperature flowing across the massive Blue Tower Organization’s exterior wall.
Within this colossal fortress lay tens of thousands of servers and the core handling Ryu Jin-hwan’s ultra-parallel computation. To cool such tremendous heat generation, they would operate a massive water-cooled cooling system—which meant there had to be an exhaust vent somewhere releasing enormous hot air.
“Found it.”
Seo Eun-ha opened her eyes and gestured with her chin toward the Building’s East Exterior Wall below. A Ventilation Shaft wreathed in thick steam hummed, half-obscured beyond the Container Stacks.
Beyond that direction awaited the true heart—the paranoia of Ryu Jin-hwan made manifest.
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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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