The heavy marble doors slammed shut, plunging the raid party into absolute darkness. A second later, a row of floating blue torches ignited along the walls, revealing a massive, cathedral-like library. Obsidian shelves stretched infinitely upward into a ceiling made of swirling grey fog.
Every single book on the shelves was identical: perfectly white, with no titles.
"Form up," Choi Sang-min ordered, his voice echoing in the vast silence. "Yoon-ah, watch the flank. Park, cast a wide-area light spell. I want to see the corners of this room."
Silence.
"Park?" Sang-min barked, turning around. "I gave you a direct—"
Mage Park Do-hyun was staring at his own hands, his glowing monocle hanging by a thread off his ear. His face was chalk-white.
"Boss," Park whispered, his voice trembling. "What is... what is the incantation for a Tier-2 Light spell?"
Sang-min frowned. "What kind of stupid question is that? Just open your UI and auto-cast it."
"I... I can't find the UI," Park stuttered, dropping to his knees. He grabbed his head. "The node sequences... they're gone. Wait. Where did I learn my fire magic? Who taught me?"
"Stop messing around, Park," Yoon-ah said, stepping forward. But as she raised her bow, her hands started to shake. She looked at the polished composite weapon as if she had never seen it before. "Boss... why am I holding this stick with a string on it?"
"Are you all losing your minds?!" Sang-min roared, his golden armor clanking as he drew his massive broadsword. But as he gripped the hilt, his $100\%$ Compliance bar flickered violently. He blinked, rubbing his temple. "We are the... the Heavenly... what is the name of our Guild?"
From the back of the group, Jinsu watched with cold, violet-tinged eyes. His Processing [70] immediately identified the environmental hazard.
It's a Read-Only Zone, Jinsu realized. The System is a software overlay on reality. This room is a core hard drive. It's actively stripping away any 'unauthorized data'—which includes every skill, stat, and fabricated memory the System ever gave them.
"Kang..." Bae whispered, grabbing Jinsu's arm with a desperate, crushing grip. The old porter was crying. "Kang, my daughter. I can see her face, but... I can't remember her name. Why is her name just a blank space in my head?"
Jinsu looked at Bae. The old man wasn't a bad person; he was just caught in the matrix.
"Focus on my voice, Bae," Jinsu said. He didn't stutter. His tone was suddenly deep, solid, and commanding. "The field is eating your digital data. You have to anchor yourself to something physical. Something real."
"Real?" Bae sobbed. "What's real?!"
"The smell of the dirt in the slums," Jinsu said quickly. "The taste of the cheap noodles at the shop we ate at last week. The burn of the cheap soju. Focus on the physical."
"Noodles," Bae repeated, his breathing slowing down. "Salty... terrible service..."
Suddenly, the grey fog at the ceiling parted.
A mechanical screech echoed through the hall, a sound like tearing metal and dial-up static. A massive entity descended from the fog. It wasn't a beast. It was a hovering, multi-armed construct made entirely of razor-sharp pages of code and rusted server racks. Its face was a single, glowing red eye that swept a scanner beam across the hunters.
[ENTITY IDENTIFIED: THE ARCHIVIST]
Jinsu's eyes flared as the raw data spilled into his vision.
[SYSTEM WINDOW: THE ARCHIVIST (SENTINEL)]
RANK: S- (Logic-Type)
MANA CAPACITY: 12,500,000 / 12,500,000
CORE LOGIC: Purge non-essential data.
THREAT LEVEL: LETHAL.
"Twelve and a half million mana," Jinsu murmured. "It's not a monster. It's an antivirus program."
The Archivist's red eye locked onto Choi Sang-min.
"UNAUTHORIZED... SOFTWARE... DETECTED," the Archivist boomed, its voice overlapping in a thousand robotic whispers. "COMMENCING... FORMAT."
One of its massive arms, made of compressed, razor-sharp paper, lashed out faster than a bullet.
"GET BACK!" Sang-min screamed. Muscle memory took over. He raised his broadsword and tried to activate his signature S-Rank defensive skill. "Golden Aegis!"
Nothing happened. No light. No shield. No System assistance.
SHCKK.
The paper-arm sheared cleanly through Sang-min's legendary golden shoulder plate, slicing deep into his collarbone. Blood sprayed across the pristine white floor.
"AAGHH!" Sang-min collapsed to his knees, his sword clattering to the marble. He clutched his bleeding shoulder, his face twisted in pure terror. "My shield! Where is my shield?! SYSTEM! I AM COMPLIANT! GIVE ME MY SKILL!"
"COMPLIANCE... IS... IRRELEVANT... IN... THE... ROOT," the Archivist droned.
"Boss!" Park screamed. He pointed his hands at the Archivist, desperately trying to force out a spell. "Burn! Burn!"
A pathetic, single spark of static fizzled from Park's fingers before his mana pool was forcefully drained to zero by the room's suppression field.
The Archivist raised two arms high into the air, aiming directly for Sang-min's neck. The S-Rank hero threw his hands up over his face, sobbing. "No! I'm a National Hunter! I can't die in a library!"
He's going to die, Jinsu calculated. If he dies, I lose my meat-shield for the exit.
Jinsu exhaled, his breath pluming into a mist of violet static. The time for hiding was over.
"Void-Step."
Jinsu vanished.
A microsecond before the Archivist's blades decapitated the Guild Master, the air above Sang-min fractured. Jinsu appeared out of thin air, his back to the S-Rank.
He didn't draw a weapon. He simply reached up and caught the descending, razor-sharp paper blades with his bare, left hand.
BOOM.
A shockwave of violet and red energy exploded outward, knocking Park and Yoon-ah off their feet. The Archivist's massive twelve-million-mana strike was dead-stopped inches from Jinsu's palm. The violet static crawling up Jinsu's arm hissed violently as it ate away at the edges of the boss's weapons.
"You talk too much for a search engine," Jinsu rasped.
Sang-min lowered his arms, looking up through the blood pouring into his eyes. His jaw fell open. The lowly, stuttering porter was standing over him, holding back a god-tier monster with one hand.
"Kang...?" Sang-min choked out. "What... what is that purple light? Why do you have magic?!"
"Stay down, Sang-min," Jinsu said, not looking back. His voice was freezing cold, devoid of any respect. "You're just an obstacle right now."
The Archivist's red eye frantically scanned Jinsu.
"ERROR. ENTITY... NOT... FOUND. COMPLIANCE: 0.00%. MANA: 0. SUBJECT: VIRUS."
"I'm not a virus," Jinsu said, his right hand falling to the matte-black hilt at his waist. "I'm the one who empties the recycle bin."
Jinsu drew The Eraser's Edge.
The blade didn't just glow; it tore a hole in the visual space of the room, radiating a screaming violet static that sucked the light out of the blue torches.
The Archivist roared, pulling its arms back. All six of its limbs began to glow with a blinding red light as it funneled its entire twelve-million mana pool into a single execution strike.
"PURGING... VIRUS!"
"Let's see who has higher priority," Jinsu countered, his eyes burning like twin supernovas. "Processing: Overclock—100%!"
The world froze. To Jinsu, the Archivist's lightning-fast strike slowed to a crawl. He saw the red, glowing Logic-Lines connecting the Sentinel's limbs to its central core.
He moved.
One strike severed the right arms, turning the coded paper into grey ash.
Two strikes shattered the left arms, the violet blade ignoring the physical resistance entirely.
With a final, brutal step forward, Jinsu drove his left hand directly into the Archivist's massive red eye.
"Absolute Arrest: TOTAL SIPHON!"
The Archivist let out a deafening, digital scream. The $12.5$ million mana inside its core was violently ripped out, flowing down Jinsu's arm like a rushing river of raw data.
[WARNING: MASSIVE DATA INFLUX]
[Nihil Engine Sync: 15.2% ➔ 22.8%]
[Stability: 45.1% ➔ 68.4%]
[Processing Level Up: 75!]
"The... Architect... returns..." the Archivist whispered, its voice finally sounding human, just before its entire body collapsed into a massive pile of lifeless white salt.
The suppression field vanished instantly.
Sang-min, Park, and Yoon-ah all gasped simultaneously, clutching their chests as their System connections re-established and their memories slammed back into their heads.
"My spells!" Park cried, kissing his hands. "I remember! I'm an A-Rank!"
Jinsu stood over the mountain of salt, his chest heaving as his body finished absorbing the monstrous amount of data. Slowly, the violet light faded from his eyes. He sheathed The Eraser's Edge and let his shoulders slump back down.
Sang-min pushed himself up from the floor, his eyes locked on Jinsu. The S-Rank hero was shaking—not from the pain of his bleeding shoulder, but from a profound, existential terror.
"Kang Han-eol," Sang-min whispered, taking a step back. "What... what the hell did you just do? That thing had over ten million mana! You caught its blade bare-handed!"
"I... I don't know, sir!" Jinsu stammered flawlessly, his voice raising an octave in panicked pitch. "When it swung at me, my F-Rank structural skill glitched out! It hit me and just... short-circuited! I think I acted as a grounding wire!"
Sang-min stared at him. He looked at the salt. He looked at Jinsu's pathetic, slumped posture.
"A grounding wire..." Park said, desperate to rationalize what he had just seen. "Boss, he might be right! The System is truncating! A zero-mana entity taking a hit from a logic-based program might have caused an integer overflow! It killed itself trying to read him!"
Sang-min didn't look convinced. He stared at Jinsu for a long, heavy moment. Then, slowly, his arrogant scowl returned. He needed to be the hero again.
"An integer overflow," Sang-min scoffed, standing up straight despite his wound. "Of course. Dumb luck from a trash-tier porter. But it served its purpose."
Sang-min pointed his good arm toward the back of the hall.
Where the Archivist had been floating, a single stone pedestal now stood. The blue torches illuminated a heavy, silver-bound book resting on top of it.
"The Hidden Boss loot," Sang-min grinned, greed masking his fear. "Park. Go grab it. We're getting out of here."
"Wait, Boss," Park hesitated, looking at his shaking hands. "My mana capacity is still recovering from the suppression. That artifact is emanating raw, pre-optimization energy. If I touch it without a full aura, it will burn my hands to the bone."
Sang-min cursed. "Yoon-ah?"
"I'm at thirty percent, sir," the archer whimpered.
"I'll take it, sir," Jinsu said quietly, stepping out of the shadows.
Sang-min narrowed his eyes. "You?"
"Yes, sir," Jinsu replied, walking toward the pedestal, a dark, hidden smirk playing on his lips where they couldn't see. "After all... I have no mana to burn. Remember?"
Sang-min's eyes narrowed, but he was too weak to move. He watched as the porter's bare hand reached into the swirling golden pressure surrounding the artifact. He expected to see skin char and bone shatter.
Instead, there was a silent hum.
As Jinsu's fingers closed around the silver-bound diary, the "Read-Only" field of the Archive pulsed. A massive, red warning box—larger than any the Hunters had ever seen—erupted in the middle of the hall, flickering with heavy static.
[WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED DATA ACCESS]
[ACCESSOR MANA CAPACITY: 0.00 / 0.00]
[ERROR: FIREWALL CANNOT INTERFACE WITH NON-SYSTEM ENTITY]
The book didn't burn him. It felt cold. Heavy. Real.
[ITEM ACQUIRED: THE FIRST CHAIRMAN'S DIARY]
[TYPE: ANALOG ARTIFACT / ROOT-KEY]
[USER RECOGNIZED: THE ANOMALY]
Jinsu lifted the book. The golden light died down, turning into a dull, leaden silver. He turned back toward the group, no longer slouching. His spine was straight, his gaze piercing.
"He... he's holding it," Yoon-ah whispered, her bow slipping from her numb fingers.
"Stop!" Sang-min commanded, his voice cracking. "That is Guild property! If you open that, it's a Grade-A felony! I'll have you executed before we even hit the surface!"
Jinsu stopped. He looked at the S-Rank—not as a superior, but as a scientist looks at a specimen in a jar.
"You're worried about a felony, Sang-min?" Jinsu asked, a small, dark smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. "You should be worried about the expiration date on your soul."
Jinsu flipped the cover open.
[PROCESSING [75]: ANALOG DATA TRANSLATION COMMENCING]
"Listen closely, 'Heroes'," Jinsu said, his voice dropping to a low, chilling register. "I'm going to read you your death warrants."