The All-Time Best Talent was F-Class Purification - Chapter 93

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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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93
Chapter 93 – An Elite Talent Awakened as an F-Rank Purifier
Rat-a-tat-tat-tat!
Clang! Screeeech-bang-bang!
The ear-splitting screech and deafening roar of metal friction and rupture filled the container. An unrelenting barrage of armor-piercing rounds and shrapnel fragments. Not magic—pure explosive force and the kinetic energy of lead projectiles.
“Ugh…!”
A stifled groan escaped between Park Jae-jung’s clenched teeth as he held the entrance. His massive frame was pushed back incrementally with each volley, but the Gigas Shield merely shrieked under the assault—it did not break. The alloy reinforced with beast bone easily deflected armor-piercing rounds.
The problem was the cumulative impact. The raw physical force of thousands of bullets striking the shield transferred directly into Park Jae-jung’s bones and muscles.
His forearms swelled grotesquely, blood vessels rupturing beneath the skin, leaving deep purple bruises.
“Jae-jung! Hold on! Area Heal!”
Han Su-jin poured healing magic from behind, her face drained of color. The agonizing cycle repeated—torn muscle fibers knitting back together, fractured bones forcibly fused.
“Haa… huff… damn it!”
Seo Eun-ha was reaching her limit as well. Gripping her staff with both hands, she maintained a Wind Shield directed toward the container’s ventilation shaft, continuously pushing back the thick emerald neurotoxin gas seeping in from outside.
But perfect containment was impossible. The poison gas seeped through microscopic gaps, pooling heavily across the container floor.
“Cough! Hack!”
Han Ae-ri, crouched on the floor, coughed up blood. D-Rank physiology. She was the first to react to the toxin. Her pupils trembled, foam gathering at the corners of her mouth.
“Ae-ri!”
I dropped to my knees beside her, pressing my hand to her neck. Live ammunition—I couldn’t purify metal slugs. But that neurotoxin gas? Artificially synthesized chemicals. Impurities and toxins—my specialty.
“Purify.”
Pure white mana flowed from my fingertips, spreading through Han Ae-ri’s veins. I forcibly decomposed and incinerated the chemical toxins that had infiltrated her lungs and bloodstream.
“Gasp!”
Han Ae-ri drew a deep breath, her convulsions ceasing. I laid her down, then placed my hands on the shoulders of the stumbling Seo Eun-ha and Han Su-jin in turn, drawing out the poison.
“Tae-hyun… are you okay on mana? We can’t keep doing this…”
Seo Eun-ha asked between ragged breaths. My mana circuits still had reserves thanks to absorbing the Cleaners’ mana siege cannon earlier.
But surviving eleven hours like this was madness. We were hiding behind a shield while I functioned as an air purifier and antidote, slowly withering away.
“Damn it! These rat bastards!”
At that moment, Dr. Junk at the workbench slammed his desk irritably.
“What’s wrong!”
“It’s not just the gunfire outside! Blue Tower Headquarters’ hackers are inserting logic bombs every three minutes!”
His monitor flickered endlessly with red warning notifications.
“Every time they breach a firewall, the helmet core temperature rises! If we just keep defending like this, the system will lock down or the helmet will melt entirely!”
Physical pressure, chemical pressure, and cyber pressure. A textbook example of three-dimensional siege warfare deployed by a massive guild. The disparity in resources and capital was simply beyond what a small party like Moonglade could withstand.
05:30 AM. Six hours had passed since Dr. Junk began his work. Six hours remained. We were only halfway there.
Then it happened.
Click.
As if by illusion, the gunfire outside ceased. Only our ragged breathing and the sound of Dr. Junk’s keyboard filled the container.
“…Are they changing magazines?”
Park Jae-jung whispered low, peering past his shield. I shook my head. With over thirty elite Cleaners, they wouldn’t run out of ammunition simultaneously. They’d stopped rotating fire, which meant they’d realized the barrage was futile and were switching tactics.
Lying flat against the floor, I peered through the warped shutter gap. In the bluish darkness of approaching dawn, the Cleaners were withdrawing beyond shield range, regrouping their formation.
And from their center, a massive armored vehicle glided silently forward. Its top hatch opened, revealing an enormous piece of equipment.
“Dr. Junk.”
I called out in a voice cold as ice.
“What is that equipment out there? The one with a massive drill-like front and ultra-high-temperature orange plasma spewing from the end?”
Dr. Junk’s typing froze abruptly. He turned his head slowly. His eyes behind the goggles widened with terror.
“Insane… they brought a plasma breaching cutter….”
“What is that?”
When Seo Eun-ha asked, Dr. Junk swallowed hard.
“It’s a siege weapon used to pierce S-rank monster hides or titanium bunker doors. Instead of bullets or mana rounds, it melts everything it touches instantly with ultra-high heat. If they drive that into the container entrance….”
His words hadn’t even finished.
Uuuuuuuung—!
The massive plasma cutter mounted on the armored vehicle began rotating, emitting a bone-chilling roar. Orange flashes were melting the surrounding scrap metal in real-time, turning it red-hot.
“The shield and everything else will melt away! We’ll be roasted alive in here!”
Park Jae-jung clenched his teeth.
“I’ll hold out somehow….”
“That won’t work. This temperature isn’t something physical durability can withstand.”
I couldn’t accept his words. The problem wasn’t that the Gigas Shield would melt—it was that I couldn’t let Park Jae-jung burn to death from the radiant heat behind it. The enemy had a simple, crude plan: seal us in and melt the entire container open.
“We can’t just defend anymore.”
I pulled out a short blade—Shadow’s Fang—from my pocket and gripped it in reverse.
“I’m going out.”
“What?! Are you insane? You’ll be riddled with bullets the moment you step out!”
Seo Eun-ha grabbed my arm in shock.
“That’s right, Guild Master! There are over thirty of them now. A frontal charge without concealment is suicide!”
Park Jae-jung tried to stop me too, but my thoughts were different. I had realized something while watching the Cleaners attack.
“Those bastards move like machines following a manual to the letter.”
I pointed to the gap in the shutter.
“When magic is blocked, they use live rounds. When bullets are blocked, they use poison gas. When that’s blocked, now they’ve brought a plasma torch. It’s a textbook siege with no variables.”
I turned to Seo Eun-ha.
“Eun-ha. How much mana do you have left?”
“I drained all my mana potions too, so I could cast one large spell… but wouldn’t I get caught in concentrated fire if I went outside?”
“You don’t need to go outside. You can cast from here.”
I closed my eyes and felt the flow of mana filling my body—the enormous amount of pure white mana I had absorbed from those bastards.
“I’ll open a path. Or more precisely, I’ll blind them.”
I positioned myself right behind Park Jae-jung’s back.
“Jae-jung. When I give the signal, raise the shield up just one meter. Only for a moment. About one second.”
Park Jae-jung met my gaze, nodded silently, and lowered his stance. He drew mana to its limit in both hands.
The orange heat from the plasma cutter began heating the container shutter. The temperature inside rose sharply, and sweat poured down like rain. The armored vehicle approached the entrance with the heavy sound of its caterpillar tracks.
“Now!”
Flash!
At my shout, Park Jae-jung bellowed and thrust the shield upward. A gap of roughly one meter opened below the container entrance.
I stretched both hands toward that opening.
“Holy Flame.”
I compressed the vast reservoir of corrupted mana I’d absorbed into a single point of pure white fire and detonated it. This wasn’t a killing flame meant to incinerate my enemies. It was simply the act of exploding an overwhelming light itself—bright enough to blind.
Fwoooosh—!
A flash of light erupted across the junkyard shrouded in pre-dawn darkness, as if the sun itself had risen. An absolute, soundless white radiance.
“Aaaaagh!”
“My eyes! The visual sensors are fried!”
A direct hit. The Blue Tower Cleaners wore tactical visors capable of thermal detection and night vision in darkness. I’d forced the raw power of mana directly into their mechanical eyes, pupils dilated to maximum in the dark.
The more advanced the equipment, the more vulnerable it becomes to out-of-spec overload. The Cleaners’ visors sparked and went dead, and they screamed, clutching at their eyes. The approaching armored vehicle’s optical sensors burned out as well, and it skidded to an abrupt halt.
“Eun-ha!”
Seo Eun-ha thrust her staff forward.
“Hurricane!”
Through the gaps in the open barrier, a massive whirlwind erupted outward. The disoriented Cleaners, caught in the powerful gust, were swept up into the air along with garbage heaps, their formation shattered.
“Park Jae-jung, close it!”
Crash—!
Park Jae-jung drove the barrier down again, sealing the entrance completely. Three seconds of counterattack. But the result was decisive. From outside came only the confused shouts of Cleaners whose sensors had burned out; the bombardment did not resume.
“Haa… haa….”
I slid down the wall, my back against it. The sudden expenditure of mana left me dizzy. My constricted breathing finally opened up, but the truth was I’d consumed nearly half my mana reserves.
Silence filled the container. Park Jae-jung leaned his back against the barrier, gazing upward as he steadied his breathing. Han Su-jin, exhausted herself, channeled healing magic into Park Jae-jung’s arm. Han Ae-ri kept her eyes closed, suppressing her ragged breathing.
‘I can’t let my guard down here.’
I had no idea how long it would take them to prepare their next move. The sweeter this brief respite felt, the heavier what came next would be.
Dr. Junk glanced at me from beyond the monitor, then let out a snort of laughter.
“Crazy bastard. Burning out external visual sensors with an overload. That’s not in any tactical manual.”
“At least we bought some time because of it.”
“Yeah. A very little bit.”
Dr. Junk’s fingers flew across the keyboard again. He was systematically dismantling their firewalls one by one, exploiting the gap created by their compromised external command system.
Seo Eun-ha drained a mana potion and exhaled roughly. After a long silence, she set the empty bottle on the ground and opened her mouth.
“But Tae-hyun. I’ve noticed something strange since earlier.”
She furrowed her brow and gestured toward the outside of the shutter with her chin.
“No matter how unofficial this disposal unit is, aren’t those Cleaners way too weak? I mean, I understand they have good equipment, but this is the Blue Tower, one of Neo Seoul’s Three Major Guilds. They’re supposed to be the pinnacle of magical engineering.”
Park Jae-jung and Han Su-jin both nodded in agreement.
“Exactly. If their most classified helmet is about to be stolen, shouldn’t the Blue Tower Guild Master or at least one or two S-Rank executive mages come directly? If even one S-Rank mage showed up and dropped a meteor on us, we’d all be dead.”
“They can’t come.”
Before I could answer, Dr. Junk interjected irritably, tapping the keyboard.
“Those bastards at the top of Blue Tower—they’re cowards who hide behind the elegant facade of ‘knowledge’ while doing dirty work. If an S-Rank executive appeared right here in the middle of the Lower District Black Market and caused a scene? They’d immediately trigger the Steel Alliance’s radar network in the Upper District.”
I added to Dr. Junk’s explanation.
“Exactly. If it became public that Blue Tower provided technology for Kang Chang-gyung’s illegal biomedical experiments, the guild would be finished. That’s why they can never deploy official forces or named Hunters. They can only send these ghost units—the Cleaners—who can be disavowed at any time.”
“I see. A thoroughly concealed operation, then….”
Park Jae-jung nodded heavily.
“But even so.”
Han Ae-ri wiped blood from a dagger she’d drawn and asked.
“How did you even know to come to this specific container? There are plenty of repair workers in the Black Market.”
Dr. Junk’s shoulders stiffened at the question. His fingers paused briefly over the keyboard.
“…Well, those Blue Tower bastards must have been monitoring the Black Market Communication Network. They’re the type who see everything that happens in this underworld.”
He was evading. There was more to it.
“Dr. Junk.”
I looked at him directly.
“There’s another reason you found this container so precisely, isn’t there?”
Silence hung in the air. Dr. Junk stared at the monitor, his jaw clenched. Then, finally, he exhaled a deep sigh and leaned back against his chair.
“…It’s because of my coding habits.”
“Your coding habits?”
“Yeah. The main security core of this helmet—I originally designed it based on a prototype from my days as the lead researcher at Blue Tower. The moment I accessed it to tear down the firewall, Blue Tower Headquarters’ main server recognized my unique hacking algorithm pattern.”
He clicked his tongue bitterly.
“Those hypocritical bastards threw me out but kept using my technology anyway. And the second my access log appeared, they would’ve known. The only person who could unlock this helmet’s security—Dr. Junk—had started working.”
His voice carried both self-mockery and rage. Being exposed by his own technology wasn’t merely a tactical blunder; it was touching an old wound.
That’s why the Cleaners had been so desperate to drag out that massive siege cannon and destroy this container. Preventing Dr. Junk from extracting the data took priority over Lee Tae-hyun’s or Mun Glade’s lives.
Beep—
[Firewall Level 2 Breached. Accessing final core.]
“Good, I’ve stripped away all the outer layers. Now I just need to extract the core….”
Color was returning to Dr. Junk’s face.
Boom-boom-boom-boom—!
Suddenly the entire container began shaking violently as if an earthquake had struck. Park Jae-jung’s Gigas Shield, which he’d been holding steady, trembled. The weight of this vibration traveling through the floor was on an entirely different scale from the thirty Cleaners from before.
“What now! What is it this time!”
Seo Eun-ha lost her footing and stumbled.
“Guild Master! Outside… it looks like reinforcements have arrived!”
Park Jae-jung shouted urgently while peering through the shutter gap, and I quickly dropped to the floor to check through the opening.
Behind the Cleaners, who were flailing about with their visual sensors burned out, massive silhouettes were advancing through the Black Market’s Scrap Metal Heap with the heavy sound of machinery.
They were not human.

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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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