The Regressed EX-Class Martial God Decided to Become a Thousand-Star Hunter - Chapter 24

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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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Chapter 24
Episode 24.
『You have entered the Dungeon: Occupied Marquis’ Fortress.』
『This Dungeon contains one Rule.』
『Upon entry, all participants lose one of their Five Senses at random.』
『This effect persists until the Dungeon is cleared.』
* * *
A B-Rank Dungeon.
Occupied Marquis’ Fortress.
This is why the Hunter Community had ranked it as the eleventh-worst Dungeon in existence.
The Rule.
Higher-ranked Dungeons grow increasingly common with such mechanisms, and there are ways to circumvent them—though not reliably.
But at the B-Rank level, they’re still a rarity.
More than anything, Hunters entering a Dungeon of this caliber have no means of avoiding it.
They must endure the Rule with nothing but their own bodies and fight on.
Which is why Kim Han-yul genuinely hoped.
‘Please, please, please… taste or smell, fine, even touch is fine. Just not hearing, anything but sight—anything but sight!’
Had her fervent prayer been answered?
That familiar pull after stepping into the Dungeon, something drawing her forward.
The moment Kim Han-yul opened her eyes, she cried out without thinking.
“Yes!”
She could see.
And she heard her own voice echo back.
Touch?
The moment she clenched her fist, she felt it.
Then what had vanished?
The answer came quickly.
‘I can’t smell anything.’
It was as good as winning the lottery.
Occupied Marquis’ Fortress.
The primary monsters in this Dungeon were Orcs.
The starting point lay deep within the Underground Prison.
Smell was one of the more inconvenient obstacles here.
And so the removal of that sense was hardly a misfortune—it was the very stroke of luck all Dungeon entrants prayed for.
Kim Han-yul had claimed that luck on her first entry.
‘They say the first strike sets the tone.’
So what?
Given Ju Do-gyeom’s temperament, she doubted he’d loop through the same Dungeon repeatedly, and besides, a win was a win.
She turned her head and spoke.
“I got lucky with smell. Team Leader, you got…—!?”
Her question died in her throat.
The Team Leader standing right beside her.
She caught sight of Ju Do-gyeom’s eyes—pupils pitch-black, glazed over as though veiled in faint mist.
Her mouth fell open involuntarily.
“Don’t tell me…”
Ju Do-gyeom nodded calmly and answered without hesitation.
“I lost my sight.”
Kim Han-yul’s face drained of color in an instant.
* * *
A world turned pitch-black.
Ju Do-gyeom felt no alarm.
In this era, so few Dungeons were bound by Rules that people called the Occupied Marquis’ Fortress barely better than the worst of the worst—but in the future, the vast majority of Dungeons would bear such burdens.
And more, every Calamity-class monster he had fought to the bitter end wore multiple such Rules like domains wrapped around them.
A single Rule?
Not even warping all sensation, just the loss of sight alone?
It was laughable.
Of course, that was merely the perspective of a returnee like Ju Do-gyeom.
For Kim Han-yul—

“This is bad. Team Leader, this is seriously bad. If you lose your sight like this… it can’t work. It really can’t. I have an Emergency Return Scroll I’ve been saving for the team. Let’s use it now. We can come back later—that’s the smarter move.”
Emergency Return Scroll.
A one-time magical item that lets you return to Earth without completing the Dungeon’s conquest rules.
The price for personal use runs in the hundreds of millions.
If it applies to the entire party, you’re easily looking at billions.
For Ju Do-gyeom at this point, one might argue it’s not an enormous sum, but there’s no denying it’s an expensive item.
And they rarely come on the market.
But setting all that aside—there’s no immediate need to use it anyway.
Having reasoned this through, Ju Do-gyeom answered.
“Settle down, Kim Han-yul. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“Nothing to worry about? How can there be nothing to worry about! I may be called a Super Rookie, but I’m nowhere near the team leader’s level, right? The most important person on our team has just gone blind—how am I supposed to calm down…!”
Ju Do-gyeom paid no attention to Kim Han-yul’s protests and moved forward.
The world had gone pitch-black, but there was no problem.
In fact.
It was better.
Wasn’t there a saying about it?
When a person loses one of the five senses, the others develop to an extreme degree in compensation.
It was true.
And this had proven incredibly useful for several martial disciplines.
『Skill, Wave Perception Energy Technique (3-Star) promoted.』
A martial art that explores the surroundings through sound.
The moment he activated the Wave Perception Energy Technique, he perceived everything—the terrain, the structures around him, and even Kim Han-yul, who was pacing and grumbling in place.
The iron bars that imprisoned them before his eyes were equally clear.
Ju Do-gyeom gripped those bars and pulled them wide apart on both sides.
There was no special magic or force binding them, so it wasn’t difficult.
Then, without a word, he stepped outside and walked through the moldy Underground Corridor toward the stairs.
Kim Han-yul, following behind, spoke.
“Wait. What are you doing, team leader? Can you see? You’re acting like you can see right now…”
“I can’t see. But that’s sufficient.”
“What does that even mean?”
Ju Do-gyeom did not answer.
Instead, he simply sharpened his senses more and more as he walked forward.
『Skill, Five Senses Integration Energy Technique (4-Star) promoted.』
‘This is far better than training with a blindfold on my eyes.’
Indeed, there was a world of difference between choosing not to use something you could use
and being unable to use it at all.
Thinking this way as he climbed the stairs,
Kim Han-yul had grown quiet.
More precisely, she had begun muttering softly to herself, organizing her thoughts.
“A special skill? The kind that doesn’t need eyesight? What kind of skill is that? He’s still D-Rank, isn’t he? But if he has one, he should have mentioned it from the start, really…”
“Stop muttering. You would’ve insisted on turning back even if I’d told you.”
“…”
Kim Han-yul’s eyes widened sharply, then she nodded.
“Fair point. Honestly, even now I just want to say let’s go back…”
“Don’t worry. There will be no problems.”
“…I’ll trust you.”
Originally, Kim Han-yul wasn’t the type to fuss to this extent.
Rather, she leaned toward the daring.
Otherwise, why would she have challenged the corpse giant that all her seniors had warned against?
It was simply that by her own standards, Ju Do-gyeom was taking things too far.
‘A D-Rank Hunter with that much raw power, and detection-type skills on top of it?’
She’d never even heard of such a thing.
Moreover, there was that item that had turned her head.
Eve’s Gift—what on earth was it?
‘Where did he even get something like that?’
It was something unheard of, unseen—a treasure to summoner-type Hunters if they ever encountered it.
‘I think I’m starting to understand him a little, but then…’
He remained utterly incomprehensible.
Ju Do-gyeom.
His sight had been stolen away, his black eyes now obscured as if by mist, yet when she looked carefully, that distinctive calmness of his remained unchanged—and she found herself staring directly into those eyes.
“That’s rather unsettling. Is there any reason you need to look at me like that?”
“……!! Can you even see something like this? Or… feel it?”
“You don’t even have to try feeling it. Something that obvious is plain as day…….”
Ju Do-gyeom fell silent.
Kim Han-yul naturally stopped speaking as well.
Not far away.
“Hee-ik-!”
The distinctive snort of an Orc reached their ears.
At the end of the stairs.
From beyond the closed wooden door.
Ju Do-gyeom drew out an Axe.
Kim Han-yul questioned him with a look.
‘This space is too narrow to swing that thing, isn’t it?’
The answer came simply enough.
Ju Do-gyeom, drawing closer to the exit ahead, plunged the Axe he held in one hand straight into the wall as though embedding it, and then——
Whoosh-!
——he split the stone-piled wall, the closed wooden door, and the bodies of the two Orcs standing beyond it in a single, long line.
Without any great roar or visible destruction, as naturally as it could be.
Like cutting through tofu.
The only sound came a moment later.
Thud-!
The severed wooden door and the dead Orcs collapsing to the ground.
As Kim Han-yul’s mind filled with countless question marks at the sight of that impossible spectacle,
Ju Do-gyeom, nodding quietly to himself, was thinking.
‘I can use Killing Intent Perception even without seeing.’
It must be because the ability operated in the sensory realm rather than through actual sight.
Thanks to that, his first experiment of drawing a line by connecting points from the wall surface through to beyond it seemed to have gone satisfactorily well.
Satisfied, Ju Do-gyeom continued walking forward.
Kim Han-yul, following behind, couldn’t help but ask.
“Team leader…… are you actually a monster?”
“Is that what it looks like?”
“……Just kidding. I’m joking. Don’t look so serious.”
“I wasn’t looking serious, and besides, I can’t see right now anyway.”
“Right…….”
“Hmm…….”
She’d asked the question and let out a murmur, but
it was a familiar story all the same.
Even in a distant future ahead, there were quite a few who called Ju Do-gyeom a monster.
‘I’ll have to get used to it.’
Ju Do-gyeom nodded to himself calmly.
* * *
Escaping the Underground Prison was a kind of Tutorial.
Which is to say, it was about adapting to the vanished Five Senses.
There were only five Orcs to encounter on the way out.
If the commotion grew and the fight dragged on, reinforcements would arrive, but under ordinary circumstances, that never happened.
Was this also the system’s consideration?
There was no way to know.
In any case, thanks to that, the two of them escaped the Underground Prison without difficulty.
‘Though strictly speaking, the team leader just sliced through everything by himself.’
It had been shocking the first time she saw it.
By the second and third time, she still couldn’t believe her eyes.
Axe technique that made light of spatial constraints, slicing through the surroundings like tofu.
Or should it even be called Axe technique?
‘He isn’t even using Qi…….’
The thing was, Qi itself was no different from a secret technique of close combat that required most stat benchmarks to reach at least S+ Rank before they could be used.
How could someone at merely D Rank like Ju Do-gyeom be using something like that?
‘……But that’s what makes it even more remarkable.’
By the time she finished pondering, they had completely left the Underground Prison.
Ju Do-gyeom did not go outside.
Instead, he continued climbing the stairs connected to the outer Castle Wall pillar, which had been built to serve as a watchtower, until he reached the top.
Kim Han-yul naturally followed behind him.
And so what they encountered was this.
Burnt-out, collapsed buildings, and between them, hundreds upon hundreds of Orcs—easily that many, perhaps more—feasting and drinking in savage celebration.
It was, quite literally, the sight of an occupied fortress.
Kim Han-yul felt the ground tilt beneath her without warning.
“So what you’re saying is… the strategy for this Dungeon is to get past all that and take down the Orc Warlord in the Inner Castle?”
“That’s right.”
“…With a team leader who’s just lost his sight.”
“Correct.”
There was no flaw in the plan.
And yet she couldn’t help but feel it again—that creeping dread.
Ranked eleventh worst Dungeon by the Hunter Community.
‘And that wasn’t just talk.’
The Five Senses Loss Rule alone was enough to make her dizzy.
To push through all those Orcs, reach the Inner Castle, fight stronger Orc warriors and shamans, and bring down the Orc Warlord himself?
Was this really a B-Rank Dungeon?
Shouldn’t it be classified as at least B+ or even A-Rank—something only Hunters of that caliber could attempt?
It was nothing like the Zombie Burst, where you just had to carve through mindless hordes.
Zombies fell easily enough to simple attacks; Orcs, even the weakest among them, could slaughter dozens of zombies without effort, and they had actual intelligence. The fact that Ju Do-gyeom could cut through them so easily said more about him than it did about them.
Besides, you could clear the Zombie Burst without taking down the Corpse Giant, but the Occupied Marquis’ Fortress required the Orc Warlord dead.
‘And unlike the Zombie Burst, this isn’t an Open World Dungeon—it’s an Instance. Just the two of us have to clear it.’
The thought settled over her like a weight.
‘God, I wish I had an Emergency Return Scroll.’
But she didn’t say it aloud.
They’d come this far already, and she’d whined enough for one day.
Now it was time to hear the plan.
“So, what’s the strategy? Don’t tell me you’re just going to charge through all of them and take the Warlord’s head?”
Ju Do-gyeom’s clouded eyes turned toward Kim Han-yul.
Her face went slack with alarm.
“You’re… you’re not serious?”
Ju Do-gyeom let out a soft laugh before he spoke.
“Of course not. I’m joking.”
“…Team leader, if you weren’t my team leader, you’d have a bullet in you right now. Understand?”
“Ha-ha!”
“Don’t laugh!”
She snapped it out, but something about it felt strange.
‘And here he is, capable of laughing like that.’
Why did he insist on putting on such a stiff front?
It made no sense.
Kim Han-yul crossed her arms, exasperated, and asked again.
“So what’s the actual plan?”

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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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