The All-Time Best Talent was F-Class Purification - Chapter 97

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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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97
Chapter 97 – An Elite Talent Awakened as an F-Rank Purifier
Whirrrr… uuuwhirrrr….
The old ventilation fan in the Underground Drainage Pump Room churned with mechanical regularity, its rhythm the only sound echoing through the cramped bunker. The stench of damp concrete, rusted iron, and the metallic tang of blood and sweat mingled together, pressing down on us with suffocating weight.
Above ground, the Steel Alliance’s helicopters were undoubtedly tearing through Neo Kuro Market with ruthless precision. But this sealed-off section, buried far deeper than even the Lowest Level of Black Market, was utterly severed from the world above—a lightless abyss unto itself.
“Haah….”
I leaned my head against the cold concrete wall and exhaled a long, heavy breath. As the adrenaline drained away, every bone in my body screamed in protest. The mana depletion had left me with a vicious headache that throbbed at my temples, and my arms—torn from parrying the Cleaners’ mana blades—trembled so violently that even lifting a finger felt impossible.
Han Ae-ri, crouched beside me, was in no better condition. She clutched two daggers crusted with dried blood to her chest, drifting in and out of consciousness. For a D-Rank body to have pushed so far beyond its limits was a miracle in itself.
“Damn it… the painkillers won’t go in anymore.”
Dr. Junk muttered irritably from the corner of the bunker. At his grumbling, my gaze—and Seo Eun-ha’s vacant stare—shifted toward the Operating Table.
There lay Park Jae-jung, our party’s towering shield.
“Ugh… hnngh….”
Even unconscious, he continued to sweat profusely, his body wracked with anguished groans. His lower half was devastating to behold. The two legs that had taken the Mana Golem’s full-force strike head-on would have lost all structural integrity without the emergency mana engineering support braces Dr. Junk had hastily applied.
The bones were shattered beyond recognition, muscles and blood vessels torn to shreds. His left shoulder was grotesquely swollen, darkened by pooled dead blood.
He’d become like this to save us. That fact pressed down on my chest like a stone.
For twelve hours, I’d relied on that single shield. Every time a golem’s fist came crashing down, every time bullets rained upon us, Park Jae-jung never once looked back. He simply endured. Breaking. Coughing blood. And now he lay like this. I had no words. Gratitude felt hollow. Apologies felt hollow. Everything felt impossibly light in this moment.
“Su-jin. There’s… no other way?”
Seo Eun-ha asked, her voice hoarse. Han Su-jin, kneeling beside the Operating Table, slowly shook her head. Her eyes were already swollen from tears.
“My basic healing… it accelerates cellular regeneration. But Park Jae-jung’s bones have lost their structure entirely. If I pour mana into him now, the flesh will just fuse together grotesquely. For the bones to set naturally in this state, he’d need to lie here for months at minimum.”
Months. In peacetime, that would merely be a long hospital stay. But for us, it was a death sentence. A bounty of 26 billion. The relentless pursuit of Blue Tower and Dominion. The complete blockade of the Steel Alliance. The food and water stockpiled in this bunker looked barely enough to last a week.
“Then what do we do? We can’t exactly carry this giant and run….”
Seo Eun-ha washed her face with trembling hands, despair written across her features.
Dr. Junk, rummaging through his blood-stained coat, added his own grim assessment.
“I could perform surgery to replace his legs with mechanical prosthetics. But I’d have to amputate everything from the pelvis down. He’d have to give up being a Hunter.”
A mechanical cyborg. For Park Jae-jung, a tank who wielded mana as a core function, that would be a sentence worse than death.
Han Su-jin said nothing for a long time. She simply held Park Jae-jung’s hand between both of hers, staring at his heaving chest. Her lips parted and closed several times without sound. Tears rolled down her cheeks, but she didn’t wipe them away. After a long silence, it happened.
Clink.
A small sound broke the quiet. Han Su-jin was withdrawing something from her pocket—a softly gleaming platinum ring. The mana storage ring I had crafted for her to supplement her insufficient mana reserves.
As she gazed down at that ring, the despair in Han Su-jin’s eyes slowly transformed into something else—a steely, unwavering resolve. We all knew what that look meant. Seo Eun-ha reacted first.
“You’re not….”
Seo Eun-ha’s voice trembled as she spoke to Han Su-jin.
“No. Su-jin, are you insane? Absolutely not.”
“Eun-ha….”
“Do you think I don’t know your skill?! We all watched what happens to your body every time you use Substitution!”
Seo Eun-ha staggered forward and grabbed Han Su-jin’s shoulders, shaking her. We all vividly remembered that day in Zone 99’s slums—how she’d healed the Injured Man’s broken legs, only to have her own legs twist grotesquely as she screamed. It had been a simple fracture then. Even that had nearly cost her consciousness.
“This time is different! This is damage from a golem! S-Rank level catastrophic force! If you absorb that, your legs won’t just break. You could go into shock and die instantly!”
Seo Eun-ha’s voice echoed through the bunker. Han Ae-ri, startled awake from her doze, opened her eyes groggily. Even Dr. Junk let out an exasperated breath.
“The girl’s right. It’s the same principle as energy conservation. You’re transferring destructive force from one vessel to another? You think that tiny body of yours can withstand the impact force from a four-meter steel giant? The moment you absorb it, your bones will shatter and you’ll die.”
Even Dr. Junk’s cold logic didn’t shake Han Su-jin. With tears glistening in her eyes, she gently caressed Park Jae-jung’s ashen face.
“I know. I’m scared too.”
Her voice trembled, yet it carried an unmistakable resolve.
“But… I don’t want to just watch another colleague collapse in front of me like what happened with Seung-ryong. I’m an S-rank Healer, after all.”
She turned to face me. In her eyes lay the promise I had extended to her in that foul-smelling Medical Clinic in Zone 99.
[You bring the wounds, and I will erase them. A promise that you’ll never suffer alone again.]
“Guild Master.”
She gripped the ring tightly as she spoke.
“If we fill this ring with highly concentrated mana and detonate it all at once, couldn’t we handle the Substitution skill? Guild Master, that promise you made back then… you’ll keep it, won’t you?”
Every gaze in the bunker snapped toward me. Seo Eun-ha’s. The newly awakened Han Ae-ri’s.
I closed my eyes for a moment, bearing the weight of those stares.
Substitution—a skill that transfers all damage taken by the target directly onto oneself. The first time I witnessed it in Zone 99, I watched that small frame crumble under the weight of another’s agony. My hands had trembled then too.
Park Jae-jung’s current state was incomparable to that moment. The instant that destructive energy transferred to Han Su-jin’s body, her heart would give out.
But simultaneously, a method to prevent it crystallized in my mind.
‘Synchronization. Purification. Timing.’
Calculations raced through my head. By fully linking Han Su-jin’s mana circuits with mine, I could incinerate the destructive energy in real-time the moment it pierced through her body. Theoretically, it was possible.
But if even the slightest thing went wrong? We could both die.
I forced strength into my unsteady legs and slowly rose from my seat. My muscles screamed as if tearing, but I walked toward the operating table.
“Of course I will.”
I met Han Su-jin’s gaze directly.
“I promised to clean you completely, leaving not a single trace of contamination in your body.”
“Tae-hyun! But Su-jin’s body won’t be able to endure it!”
Seo Eun-ha cried out in frustration.
“Yes. You’re right, Eun-ha. If Su-jin bears it alone, her heart will stop at the first impact when the destructive energy transfers over.”
I glanced toward Dr. Junk and continued.
“But in those few seconds while the wound transfers to Su-jin’s body and tries to shatter her bones, if I purify and incinerate that destructive energy in real-time, things change.”
My proposal left the bunker in deathly silence. The cigarette fell from Dr. Junk’s lips.
“You… crazy bastards. So the healer acts as a conduit absorbing the damage, and you’ll defuse the bomb in real-time at the other end?”
Dr. Junk clutched his head.
Dr. Junk stared at me intently for a while, then began tapping his temples with his fingers. After a long moment, he muttered to himself.
“Real-time purification of destructive energy while in mana circuit synchronization… theoretically possible. But if the circuit connection depth is shallow, the energy won’t disperse—it’ll concentrate on one side.”
He finally let out a hollow laugh.
“I’ll maintain a complete synchronization state, linking Su-jin’s mana circuits with mine, so both the pain and the impact are halved, and I’ll wash away everything that comes through.”
“Easy to say, but what if the timing’s off even slightly? The healer’s body gets torn in half, your mana circuits get damaged too? And what about that massive thing? You could all die together!”
“That’s why it absolutely cannot go wrong.”
I accepted Dr. Junk’s warning calmly and looked back at Han Su-jin. A surgery at the cliff’s edge—one that required absolute faith in each other alone.
“Can you do this?”
Han Su-jin stared down at her own hands for a moment. They were trembling. But then she clenched both fists and nodded with resolute eyes.
“I can. Because I trust you, Guild Master.”
A brief silence fell.
Seo Eun-ha bit her lip and closed her eyes. She didn’t try to stop me further. She understood there was no stopping this.
Han Ae-ri said nothing, only watching Park Jae-jung on the operating table. Her hand gripped the dagger’s hilt tightly, then slowly released it. Her eyes, moving between the unconscious Park Jae-jung who could only groan and Han Su-jin with her fists clenched beside him, held far more than words ever could.
I collapsed back onto the cold floor with a heavy thud.
“Alright. But not right now. Both Su-jin and I are completely depleted.”
I closed my eyes and surveyed the state of my mana circuits. They weren’t merely empty—the circuits themselves had contracted from overheating. Attempting synchronization in this condition could trigger a dangerous backflow. At minimum, the circuits needed to cool completely, and my mana reserves had to be fully replenished.
Han Su-jin was in the same predicament. Substitution skills consumed mana at a catastrophic rate. Even drawing on the compressed mana stored within her ring, a practitioner whose base mana was depleted couldn’t sustain the technique.
“Exactly twelve hours from now. Sleep like the dead and recover your mana to one hundred percent. Doctor, bring out every high-grade mana potion and supplement you have that Su-jin and I can use.”
“…You’re all insane.”
Dr. Junk clicked his tongue in disapproval even as he dragged the medical kit closer, grumbling while he retrieved potions and supplements one by one and handed them over.
Seo Eun-ha accepted hers but held it in her hand without drinking, eyes closed for a long moment, while Han Ae-ri leaned her back against the wall, cradling her dagger, and closed her eyes first.
Han Su-jin never left Park Jae-jung’s side, holding his hand as she lowered herself to the floor. Dr. Junk sat alone before a terminal, beginning to examine the chip data. He would be the only one in this bunker keeping his eyes open.
I accepted the potion and drank it slowly. The bitter taste traced down my throat. Even as I closed my eyes, the sequence of the surgery kept cycling through my mind.
Synchronization link → Substitution activation → Destructive energy infusion → Purification.
The timing had to be felt instinctively. In that moment when Su-jin’s circuits and mine moved as one, there could be no tremor, not even the slightest. It would be a lie to say I wasn’t afraid. But the decision was already made, and everything else could be considered after twelve hours had passed.

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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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