The All-Time Best Talent was F-Class Purification - Chapter 112
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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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112
Chapter 112 – An Elite Talent Awakened as an F-Rank Purifier
It must have looked like suicide. But I had absolute certainty.
That lightning was not natural electricity. It was the destructive mana that Dominion and Blue Tower cherished so dearly—highly toxic core energy compressed to its absolute limit and transformed into the shape of a thunderbolt.
If that were true, it could never escape the domain of my purification.
I spread both arms wide and detonated the pure white mana surging from my dantian across my entire body. My mana core, already pushed to its limit from blocking the massive energy at the Core Crater of the Underwater City moments before, screamed in protest, but I forced it to comply.
A wave of pure white purification exploded outward from my entire body.
The cyan lightning bolts that had been spreading in all directions, ready to engulf Seo Eun-ha and Park Jae-jung, twisted their trajectories as if pulled by a powerful magnet, converging madly toward a single point—me.
I had become a lightning rod.
Crack—!
“Gahhhhh!”
The moment tens of thousands of volts of lightning struck directly into my body, I unleashed a bestial scream without thinking.
The pressure suit erupted in terrible sparks and tore apart, while the helmet’s visor fractured in a spiderweb pattern. Core energy in the form of electrical discharge invaded my bloodstream and savagely lacerated my organs and nerves. A searing, burning pain washed over me in waves from my fingertips to my shoulders. My vision flickered white and returned. I felt my feet lose their grip on the floor as I was pushed backward.
‘Hold on.’
Even as my organs twisted in agony, I forced my eyes wide open and seized the wave of purification. The lightning pouring into my body collided with my purifying light and began to oxidize into white.
Sizzzzzzz—
My purification was devouring the lightning, but its speed couldn’t completely keep pace with the incoming torrent. With each passing moment, residual current that went unpurified spread through my nerves, causing convulsions from fingertips to toes. My vision tinged red. The warning alarm from my overloading core echoed deep within my mind. I held my breath and endured. If I couldn’t expel this, the next moment was beyond my control.
Kang Tae-man’s lightning lost its ferocious killing power the moment it passed through my body, reverting to harmless mana that dispersed into the seawater. A throbbing vibration resonated through my core. If I took even one more wide-area lightning strike like this, my heart would burst before I could even purify it.
But in this moment, I had endured.
“Lee… Lee Tae-hyun! You madman!”
Behind me, Seo Eun-ha cried out in shock as she evaded the lightning. Thanks to me throwing my entire body into absorbing the bolt, she and Park Jae-jung remained unscathed, but my condition was catastrophic. The dark blue pressure suit was melting away in places, exposing bare flesh, and dark red blood was backing up and pooling inside my gill mask.
“Ho. You absorbed that? Your body has quite a peculiar nature.”
Beyond the flashing lightning, Kang Tae-man smiled with interest.
“But how long can you keep taking my lightning in seawater? Two times? Three? I’ll fry you until you’re charcoal.”
Zzzzzing—!
An even larger and deeper cyan lightning bolt began to condense in both his hands.
‘Damn it.’
I staggered, spitting out seawater mixed with blood. My core’s overload was crossing the critical threshold. If I absorbed one more wide-area lightning strike with my bare body, it would be over.
That was when it happened.
Seo Eun-ha, pressed close behind me, stared at the floor and pointed the tip of her staff downward. Her eyes held the look of someone calculating something. Not Kang Tae-man, not the incoming lightning—she was looking at the seawater beneath our feet.
“Tae-hyun. Hold your breath.”
An ice-cold voice came through the communication channel.
“Electricity conducts well in salt water. But what about pure steam?”
From the tip of Seo Eun-ha’s staff erupted an overwhelming heat like a submarine volcano exploding. That heat was not directed at Kang Tae-man. It was aimed at all the seawater within a ten-meter radius surrounding us three.
Bubble bubble bubble—
Boom! Bang!
The seawater around us collided with the extreme heat and boiled violently, defying even the oppressive water pressure of the deep sea. The salt-laden seawater completely vaporized, and a massive air pocket of hot pure steam formed at the bottom of the deep sea.
As the seawater evaporated and moisture disappeared, the medium that had served as a conductor vanished completely.
“What…?”
The moment Kang Tae-man’s second wave of lightning struck our steam barrier, the lightning bolts, blocked by the steam with its extremely low conductivity, lost their way like something sinking into a swamp and scattered in random directions. The wide-area lightning had been neutralized.
“Now! Push forward!”
Inside the steam dome where the water had vanished. With the water’s resistance gone, my body—awakened as A-rank—and Park Jae-jung’s densified frame recovered the perfect speed we’d possessed on Ground Level.
The strangeness of moving so lightly from the sea floor was overwhelmed by the fighting spirit blazing deep within my dantian, and every muscle in my body ignited like an active volcano.
Whoosh—!
I kicked off the sea floor and burst through the steam toward Kang Tae-man. Park Jae-jung, moving in perfect synchronization with me, lowered his massive frame and charged simultaneously, covering my left blind spot.
“Ha! Cheap tricks!”
Kang Tae-man’s eyes dilated with fury. When his wide-area attack was blocked, he immediately compressed the lightning in both hands, forging two cyan lightning blades. True to his nature as a being that transcended the S-rank framework, he was a monster who had reached the pinnacle not only in magical combat but in close-quarters fighting as well.
“Die!”
Kang Tae-man pierced through the steam curtain and swung his lightning blade toward my throat. My dynamic vision caught that horrific speed, but before my body could respond, his blade tip was already at the critical moment of contact.
Crash—!
“Roooaaar!”
Park Jae-jung wedged himself in front of me with a thunderous roar, shoving his charred Gigas Shield—its center pierced clean through—directly into the path of Kang Tae-man’s lightning blade.
Screeeech—
The cyan lightning blade ground against the surface of the S-rank beast bone, producing a horrific screech. Under Kang Tae-man’s tremendous strength, Park Jae-jung’s feet scraped across the sea floor as he was pushed back, but his densified body held firm against the onslaught.
And in that moment, Park Jae-jung’s eyes flashed with brilliance.
“Got you.”
Kang Tae-man’s pupils wavered. It wasn’t mere bewilderment. It was a sensation he’d never experienced since Cataclysm Day—the unfamiliarity of a situation unfolding beyond his control. One second. That instant would have been more than sufficient for Kang Tae-man. But for me, it stretched far longer.
Scrape—!
Kang Tae-man’s lightning blade slid across the shield’s surface, then plunged deep into the hole that had been torn open by the earlier lightning strike. A variable born from turning the damaged shield against him—temporarily binding his weapon. In hindsight, Park Jae-jung had been calculating this from the moment the shield was first pierced.
“…Damn!”
Kang Tae-man’s pupils trembled.
In that single second as Kang Tae-man strained to free his blade, I—hidden behind Park Jae-jung’s back—launched skyward and drove my shadow fang downward.
“Insolent rat!”
But a monster was still a monster. Kang Tae-man relinquished his right blade trapped in the hole without hesitation, immediately raising his left lightning blade to thrust toward my heart as I descended. As if pain meant nothing to him.
The reflexes of a monster who had survived and reigned since Cataclysm Day calculated the killing blow even with one arm bound. At this rate, my heart would be pierced before my dagger reached his throat.
I didn’t think of evading.
Instead, I thrust my empty left hand roughly toward his incoming lightning blade and seized the cyan edge bare-handed with an iron grip.
Sizzzzzzle—!
The pressure suit glove on my left hand evaporated in an instant. The smell of burning flesh seeped through my gill mask. My finger joints lost sensation one by one. Pain that burned down to the bone spread through my entire arm.
But this wasn’t the objective.
The objective was to create a perfect conductor connecting our bodies.
“What… what are you doing!”
Kang Tae-man flinched and hesitated, shaken by the madness of me seizing his lightning blade bare-handed.
Through my burning left hand, I reversed the vast purification mana I’d accumulated in my core—mana generated by neutralizing contamination energy during the Core Crater purification—and sent it surging back through Kang Tae-man’s blade.
Blaaaast—!
Pure white light poured down the lightning blade and flooded into Kang Tae-man’s left arm.
The leadership of Blue Tower, who had lived their entire lives on contaminated core energy. Into the murky, destructive mana vessels flowing through his body crashed a tsunami of perfectly refined pure white mana.
It wasn’t merely oil and water failing to mix. It was an annihilation reaction—like antimatter colliding.
“Gaaaaaahhhhhhh—!”
For the first time, a scream devoid of composure tore from Kang Tae-man’s mouth. As the pure white mana collided with his contaminated mana core, the veins in his left arm swelled grotesquely like worms, then burst open, spraying blood as his skin shattered into fragments.
It was excruciating pain—the kind that would have shattered most—but one who had survived the Cataclysm Day did not crumble before agony. Even as screams tore from his throat, he clung to reason, twisting his body to cradle his shattered left arm while desperately calculating the trajectory of Lee Tae-hyun’s counterattack.
But it was already too late.
“You… filthy vermin… what have you done to me—!”
As his defense collapsed entirely under the convulsions of pain, I poured every ounce of strength into the Shadow Fang gripped in my remaining right hand and drove the blade without hesitation toward the exposed vulnerability of his throat.
Skreeeeeee—!
The mithril blade tore through the collar of his silver uniform, carving deep furrows across Kang Tae-man’s thick trapezius and neck. From the monster’s throat, ringed by tens of thousands of volts, dark crimson blood cascaded into the steam in a torrent.
“Gack…!”
I too was reaching my limit. My charred left hand could barely move a single finger, and my Dantian burned like an unquenched furnace from absorbing lightning twice over.
With each breath, I could smell the burning from deep within my lungs. I felt my legs weakening, but I knew that if I collapsed now, it would be the end. The monster before me was still breathing.
Kang Tae-man staggered backward, clutching his throat—the moment when lightning from the heavens, which seemed invulnerable, bled from teeth that had crawled up from the sewers.
I hung my left hand, burned down to the bone, at my side and smiled coldly at him through the blood I spat.
“How does it feel, Director? Having that filthy energy you injected into the Lower District purified and returned to you?”
In the roiling steam, the eyes of two bloodied beings collided with fierce intensity in the void.
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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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