Leveling Up Alone

“He wasn’t that crazy when I first met him…” Han-Yeol grumbled under his breath.

Han-Yeol pulled out his sword while the clown was busy delivering his monologue. He felt like listening to the clown for another second was going to drive him mad, so it was now time to silence him.

The clown burst into laughter that sounded closer to hysteria, but Han-Yeol did not feel like partaking in the clown’s madness as he quickly swung his sword and sent a sword energy wave flying to the clown.

“I think it was clear that a clown is not something you can kill so easily.”

Normally, the clown would have been struck by the sword energy and been cut into pieces, leaving his remains scattered all over the ground.

However, the clown simply popped like a balloon the moment the sword energy hit him and disappeared. In other words, the person had either used a skill to place a decoy at the last second, or it was a decoy to begin with.

Han-Yeol thought the clown had run away with his tail tucked between his legs, but it seemed that the situation was far from over. The clown was definitely nowhere in sight, but its annoying, sinister laughter reverberated throughout their surroundings.ʀᴇᴀᴅ ʟᴀᴛᴇsᴛ ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀs ᴀᴛ ɴo(v)elFɪre.ɴet

“What an annoying fella…” Han-Yeol grumbled.

The clown made one last statement and cackled to his heart’s content while he gathered his sinister mana spread all over the place before finally vanishing. Unsurprisingly, the Illusion Barrier started to crumble the moment the clown retrieved his mana.

“Watch where you’re driving, woman!”

“Hey! What did I do?! You bumped into me!”

“Who in the world uses their turn signal like that?!”

“Wow! What do you want me to do? It’s normal for me to use my turn signal while changing lanes, right?!”

The Palmun main road near the Blue House instantly grew rowdy from the traffic. These cars had not been here a while ago due to the Illusion Barrier, but they instantly returned the moment the barrier disappeared.

The clown massacred the Hunters, and the entire place was littered with their corpses. Chaos would definitely ensue if the barrier disappeared and the public saw the bloody scene.

“What?! Where…?” Han-Yeol exclaimed and looked around.

“There’s not a single body in sight, Han-Yeol,” Tayarana added while looking surprised too.

Then, people started flocking toward them after the barrier disappeared, and Han-Yeol’s party appeared from thin air.

“Hmm…” Mariam grimaced. She used her skill to hide the party from the eyes of the public.

Stewart raised a brow after seeing the skill and said, “Oh? That’s a very handy skill you have there.”

Telepathic abilities were rare even in the demon world, so it was rare for even a demon to witness such a skill.

“It is not as impressive as your Mass Flight skill, Stewart-nim,” Mariam replied.

“Why, thank you for the compliment.”

“My pleasure.”

Both of them seemed to be getting along quite well. Well, it was not surprising that they would get along as they tended to look down on others, and it seemed like they had somehow managed to connect through that.

Han-Yeol’s party was hovering in the air thanks to Stewart’s skill called Mass Flight.

“Hmm… But where did the bodies go?” Han-Yeol wondered.

“It seems only living things can cross through the Illusion Barrier,” Stewart replied.

“Oh, is that it?”

“I believe that is the most plausible explanation, and I can’t think of another way to explain it. Those fifty Hunters taking refuge in that barrier is proof of that,” Stewart added while pointing at a building.

“Oh…” Han-Yeol finally understood after looking at the building.

The fifty Hunters in the building were there just like Han-Yeol and his party, while only the dead bodies had disappeared. These fifty Hunters should have disappeared along with the bodies if the clown had indeed done something.

He could feel his head hurting once again. Only fifty of the Hunters who participated in the protest returned alive, and this was definitely going to become a huge issue. If there was a silver lining in all of this, then it would be the fact that his Gurkhas were safe as they had left the scene to evacuate the civilians and were not caught up in the Illusion Barrier.

“What do you plan to do now?” Stewart asked. His role was to advise Han-Yeol on things and not solve his problems, so he simply asked to help him start thinking.

Han-Yeol pondered for a moment before he replied, “I’m going to pin all of this on Woo Han-Jong.”

“A wise decision, Han-Yeol-nim.”

***

Han-Yeol made his appearance thirty hours after he disappeared in front of the Blue House, but the Hunters with him were nowhere to be seen. Only fifty of the Hunters who participated in the protest survived, and all of them made the same statement regarding the incident.

Their statements had a lot of holes that numerous experts criticized, but the criticisms failed to gain any traction as only the fifty surviving Hunters knew what really happened that day.

Han-Yeol walked into the Blue House a week later with the fifty surviving Hunters, and that scene was broadcast throughout the entire nation.

“Hurray for our country!”

“Hurry for Lee Han-Yeol!”

The government’s approval rating plummeted to zero percent after they were revealed to be Woo Han-Jong’s puppets, and almost every single person in the country went to the streets to protest.

Who in their right mind would simply accept that the president they voted into office was actually a puppet and the one pulling the strings from behind was some old man?

The people earnestly hoped that Han-Yeol would bring about change that would cleanse the nation of all corruption and make it a better place.

The acting president and his cabinet members were arrested for trying to use force against the people. Ironically, none of them doubted Woo Han-Jong could lose to Han-Yeol, so they did not bother going into the bunker. Instead, they set up tables and champagnes to celebrate their victory against Han-Yeol, which made it easier for them to be arrested.

Not only that, even the Hunters’ Association was cleansed as warrants of arrest for the association’s directors were issued. Also, numerous managers involved in the corruption within the association were arrested as well, and only those who were clearly innocent were spared from the purge.

Those who were spared set up an emergency cabinet to vote for the dismissal of Woo Jin-Cheon as chairman before he was handed over to the police.

Unfortunately, Woo Jin-Cheon’s instincts far transcended anyone else’s, so he had already made a run for it before he could be arrested. Nobody knew where he was, and his family was also unaware of his whereabouts.

The police launched a nationwide manhunt to arrest the ex-chairman of the Hunters’ Association, Woo Jin-Cheon.

***

A room on the second floor of a motel tucked away in a remote corner of Jeollanam-do reeked with the stench of alcohol.

“Damn it!”

A man was downing bottle after bottle of soju as if he were drinking water. He threw a bottle to the side, and the bottle was smashed into pieces. Then, he picked up another bottle and chugged it down.

The motel room stank with the smell of sweat and liquor, as its windows had not been opened for days.

However, nobody dared to say anything to him. Around twenty people were staying in this motel, but every single one of them was no longer of this world. The patrons of this motel were people in hiding, such as adulterers and con artists, so it would take a long time for them to be reported missing and for the police to come snooping around.

“Damn it! I’m Woo Jin-Cheon! I’m the chairman!”

He punched the wall angrily, and the cement wall collapsed from the impact. He continued smashing every wall he came across to vent his anger, but the anger raging inside of him could not be quelled so easily.

Venting his anger would not change anything. If it did anything, then it was only going to cause a commotion that would make it easier for the Hunters tracking him to find him.

It was only a matter of time before he would be found no matter where he hid, as the Hunters specializing in tracking would find him as long as he was still in the country. It went without saying that Woo Jin-Cheon was very familiar with how efficient these Hunters were when it came to tracking someone down.

In fact, the Hunters were already certain that Woo Jin-Cheon was hiding somewhere in Jeollanam-do.

Surprisingly, Woo Jin-Cheon was not completely finished yet. He was always the cautious type, so he had purchased dozens of real estate in China under another name and hidden tons of high-quality mana stones in a basement in one of the estates.

He prepared all of this just in case things went south, and not even his grandfather, Woo Han-Jong, was aware of this emergency measure he had prepared.