"You're leaving the team?!"
Choi Jong-In and the others stared at Esil like they'd misheard.
They'd barely set foot on the island, and Esil—one of their own—was already announcing she was breaking off on her own.
"Yes. I'm leaving the team."
There wasn't a flicker of hesitation on her face. Calm and expressionless, she repeated it—making it clear this wasn't a joke or a slip of the tongue.
"But… why?" Lim Tae-Gyu demanded, his expression darkening. "You're not trying to run, are you? At a time like this?"
The cameraman with them looked stuck. All of South Korea was watching this operation—does he cut the feed, or keep rolling?
Faced with the accusation, Esil answered evenly.
"This is Shishō's instruction."
"Your Shishō?"
Everyone froze—except Cha Hae-In, who reacted first.
"Wait. Miss Esil—do you mean Miss Scáthach told you to do this?"
"Yes." Esil nodded once.
"Then at least tell us why." Cha Hae-In's brow tightened. "What did Miss Scáthach send you to this island to do?"
Esil hesitated, as if weighing how much she was allowed to say.
"Shishō said that once I land, I have to go straight to the sector assigned to Japan's healers." Esil met Cha Hae-In's eyes head-on, and what she said next widened every pair of eyes. "If I don't… Japan's ten S-Rank Hunters might be wiped out."
...
"…Uh… are you Miss Esil?"
Akari Shimizu—still shaking—touched her throat. If Esil had arrived even a moment later, that black ant would've punched straight through her neck.
Tatsumi Fujishima and Kenzo Tanaka hadn't come as close to dying as Akari had, but they looked just as bad.
Their lips trembled uncontrollably. Cold sweat gathered at their temples and slid down in thin trails, and their breathing had turned shallow—ragged, uneven, barely under control.
You've got to be kidding.
That pressure… can a monster even have something like that?
"Haa…" Esil kept her gaze locked on the black ant and let out a slow breath. "Looks like I made it…"
"Kekekekekek—!"
The black ant screeched—sharp enough to make eardrums ache. The air itself shuddered; even pebbles on the ground rattled from the vibration.
Its body blurred. One instant it was in front of her, and the next it was behind her like a ghost—gleaming claws scything down with enough force to shred steel.
BOOM!
Savage power slammed into the earth, spiderwebbing cracks across the ground. The gust from the impact was so violent Akari and the others had to squeeze their eyes shut.
Esil slid a half-step to the side—light, controlled, like she was moving around an invisible current. Her footwork was tight and deliberate. She let the killing blow pass, then turned her waist and snapped the spear forward.
She hadn't even finished turning when a reverse-thrust struck first—spearpoint flashing toward the monster's heart in a cold, straight line.
The black ant jerked back from the strike. Fresh out of the egg, it didn't understand technique—didn't understand how a human could stab from the "wrong" direction like that.
"Too shallow…" Esil's eyes narrowed at its chest. A faint mark—barely more than a scratch—was all she'd left behind. "That exoskeleton's too hard. I'm not doing enough damage. And if I take even one clean hit from those claws… I'll lose my ability to fight back."
…This was bad.
In speed, power, and defense, she was outmatched across the board—crushed by raw stats.
And yet Esil didn't lose her composure. She could still think. Still measure. Still adjust.
To Akari and the others, it was incomprehensible.
"Why…" Tatsumi Fujishima whispered, voice shaking, saying what all three of them were thinking. "Why… can she still raise her weapon?"
Facing something like that—why wasn't Esil terrified? Why wasn't she drowning in despair?
All Esil could think was—
No matter how horrifying this ant was, could it really be worse than Scáthach? The "hag" people joked about to her face?
As for despair, Scáthach's answer was always the same: "If you have time to despair, you have time you aren't using. Your head is full of useless thoughts. Work until you don't have room for them, and you won't feel despair at all."
Only the living had the right—and the leisure—to indulge in stray thoughts. In a fight, you thought about one thing: how to survive. Everything else got thrown away.
Right now, Esil felt like she'd stepped into the eye of a storm.
The black ant became an afterimage too fast for the naked eye—a windless hurricane tearing through a sealed space. Razor claws struck from every angle, the shriek of torn air braiding into a deadly rhythm. The barrage was so dense it felt like a net, sealing off every route of escape.
If the black ant was a storm that crushed everything in its path, then Esil was the still point inside it.
She understood the enemy was faster. Chasing it would get her killed. The smartest choice was to stay grounded and respond—let it come, and punish what she could read.
This kind of situation wasn't new. Under Scáthach's harsh training, she'd faced pressure like this countless times. Each clash sent brutal force vibrating down the spear shaft until her hands went numb, but compared to Scáthach's spear, this monster's movement was easier to parse. Violent, yes—yet like any beast, it had habits. Patterns.
Again and again she was driven back, but every time she reset before the next strike arrived—stance, breath, angle—and endured through the hurricane.
The instincts burned into her muscle memory by endless near-death training surfaced cleanly now. Esil never met the claws head-on. Instead, she used leverage and timing—touching, redirecting, slipping—guiding brute force away into the surroundings rather than absorbing it. Each time the spearpoint kissed a claw, it was the lightest contact before she slid off-line again, staying just outside the line where she'd die.
Of course, a deadlock like this couldn't last forever.
The gap was too large. Sooner or later, she'd run out of strength and fall. It was only a matter of time.
But that was just noise.
No stray thoughts. No counting seconds. If she lasted one second longer, that was enough.
Even if the black ant wasn't intelligent, it could tell the woman in front of it was a tough bite—something it couldn't finish quickly.
So it shifted its attention to Akari and the others, standing there like statues.
It had only just been born. It hadn't grown yet—and growth needed nourishment.
The black ant was king among ant monsters, born strong. And through predation, it could take what it ate—wisdom, traits, abilities. In theory, it had almost limitless room to evolve.
"Kekekekekek—!!"
Esil's expression changed. The sudden drop in that icy killing intent told her immediately what it had decided.
"You three! Move—now! Get out of here!"
Even with Esil's warning, how could these Japanese Hunters—already terrified—outrun a black ant that moved like lightning?
The instant its gaze settled on them, the pressure behind that look crushed them. Visions flashed in their minds: being torn apart, bodies pulverized, breath snuffed out—
That kind of unreasonable violence could snap a spirit in a heartbeat.
This was what disappointed Scáthach most about the humans of this world. They gained power too quickly, but they never trained their minds to match it. Their hearts were fragile—one taste of despair, and they broke.
Esil lunged to intercept, but a heavy claw strike knocked her back several steps. Before she could recover, the creature became a bolt of black lightning, ripping through the air with a shriek as it shot straight at Akari and the others. Its wake twisted the air; its afterimage lingered like a curtain of death dropping over the panicked Hunters.
And yet—just as its claws were about to tear into them—
The black ant stopped dead.
Because it sensed another presence closing in—powerful, focused, and already locked onto it.
"I felt a strong surge of mana here, so I came to take a look."
Goto Ryuji stepped out of the forest's shadows at an unhurried pace. Aura shimmered around him, dense enough to make the air tremble. His hand rested on his sword hilt, knuckles pale—ready to draw at any moment.
"An ant…" he said, voice low and cold. "You're making quite an entrance."
His gaze cut straight into the monster.
It wasn't only Goto Ryuji who sensed the black ant's mana. The Korean Hunters fighting the Ant Queen felt it too. They realized there was something on this island far more dangerous than the Queen. Cha Hae-In was already pushing harder, trying to finish the Queen as fast as possible so she could rush to Esil's side.
The Ant Queen was still weakened from giving birth. Even with her guard up, she couldn't stand against Cha Hae-In and the others. In Cha Hae-In's hands, the Queen could barely fight back. Her defeat was only a matter of time.
...
"The warriors are fighting with everything they have—for their country, for honor. They'd even throw away their lives."
With a faint smile, Scáthach withdrew her gaze and looked instead at the figure before her.
It looked like a woman—yet her body carried countless insect traits. The mana pressure she radiated was darkness given shape. Compared to her, the black ant pressing Esil and Goto Ryuji felt like a firefly before the moon.
Centipedes, ants, flies, bees—tens of thousands of insect monsters churned in a roiling vortex around her. Wings beat; legs skittered—an orchestra that crawled up the spine. She stood without speaking, and the entire swarm bowed as if in pilgrimage.
This was the majesty of an absolute sovereign.
Through [Clairvoyance], Scáthach had seen everything on Jeju Island.
[Clairvoyance A] could glimpse the near future. She'd seen the black ant's birth. She'd foreseen its first target would be Akari and the others—which was why she ordered Esil to go the moment she landed.
And she still didn't know why the black ant went for Akari first instead of seeking out Goto Ryuji—the strongest mana among the Japanese. Did it understand—straight out of the egg—the logic of "kill the healer first" in a team fight?
At the same time, Scáthach's [Clairvoyance] had shown her something beyond the black ant—
Something Cha Hae-In and the others could never handle. Even Sung Jinwoo, as he was now, couldn't beat it. He was still too green.
The Monarch who ruled all insect-type monsters in this world—
Querehsha, the Monarch of Plagues.
There was no other choice. Scáthach tightened her grip on her spear and stepped in personally.
Querehsha, for her part, was baffled.
She had opened a Gate to Earth—only to find, on the other side, not Earth but a gray wasteland steeped in death. And there, a purple-haired human woman stood waiting, smiling, as if she'd expected her all along.
Querehsha loathed this place. The thick stench of death in the air reminded her of an old colleague—the Shadow Monarch. Her feelings toward him were tangled: admiration, and fear.
"Who are you?" Querehsha looked down at Scáthach, her tone lofty. "Why do I sense such dense death on you… and what is your relationship with the Shadow Monarch?"
"Starting off this hostile—are you sure that's smart?" Scáthach's lips curved. "And you're awfully interested in the Shadow Monarch. That surprises me. What—are you Ashborn's old flame? I've never heard him mention you."
HUM—
Green mana surged up like a tide from an abyss, shaking the air until it wailed. Dark ripples spread through space, visible to the naked eye; even light bent under the pressure, as if the world itself flinched.
The surrounding swarm writhed. Sensing their Monarch's fury, the insects erupted into a piercing buzz—the whole tide boiling with wrath.
"Insignificant human…" Querehsha's voice dripped with contempt. "You dare speak to me like that?"
More insect traits surfaced across her body. Transparent wings unfurled from her back. A metallic sheen spread as exoskeleton plated her skin. Her hands sharpened into bone-claws—and then four more arms unfolded.
"I'll butcher you!"
---
T/N: rip baddie :pray: