In the pitch-black boss room, the hot, foul breath of death slammed against Haruki's face.
He lay on the ground, in the mud and his own blood. As the massive Alpha Wolf's jaws opened for one final bite, time seemed to freeze for Haruki. His heartbeat pounded in his ears like a war drum, but his mind was strangely clearer than it had ever been. The fear was gone. In its place, the cold, calculating mathematics of survival took over.
Haruki's eyes, in a world turned grayscale thanks to Weak Tissue Analysis, focused on a single thing: that tiny, moving red dot beneath the wolf's jaw.
Everything he had learned in the worm dungeon was now coming together in his mind. He looked at the wolf's wildly heaving chest. Breathing rhythm... two inhalations per second. Then he focused on the tension in the wolf's shoulder muscles. Neck movement... it will descend downward at a forty-five-degree angle.
In the exact split second the monster growled and brought its jaws down toward Haruki's neck, the red dot stabilized for a moment.
Haruki snapped his right wrist.
He wasn't like a struggling victim trying to save his own life, but rather a master surgeon deciding the fate of the patient on the table with a single strike of a scalpel. The incredibly thin needle pinched between his fingers silently tore through the air, dragging its invisible thread behind it.
Right as the wolf's massive teeth grazed past Haruki's nose, the needle pierced that red dot beneath its jaw—the main nerve ganglion on the monster's jugular—at a flawless angle.
The predatory fire in the Alpha Wolf's eyes instantly extinguished. Its colossal body was immediately paralyzed by the fatal biological shock it received. As the wolf collapsed onto Haruki, its body turned into a cloud of black ash and scattered before it even hit the ground.
The pitch-black darkness of the room was washed in neon blue and blood-red lights, illuminated by a succession of popping system messages.
[ALPHA WOLF ELIMINATED][DUNGEON CLEARED]
[LEVEL UP: 12 -> 13]
[EMERGENCY QUEST COMPLETED]Reward: Suture (Active Skill - Level 1)
Haruki took a deep, wheezing breath beneath the rain of monster ash. He could barely open his eyes. He had succeeded. But his body was on the verge of total collapse. The claw strike the wolf had just delivered to his left shoulder had split his flesh down to the bone; the fractures in his ribs pierced his lungs with every breath, and he was suffering from heavy blood loss.
As his vision began to darken at the edges, he reached out to the hovering panel with trembling fingers.
"Skill... Suture... Activate," he whispered in a hoarse voice.
When a normal Healer cured someone, a warm, golden light would descend from the air, and wounds would close magically. However, Haruki's class wasn't a healer. He was an Anatomist. And the System's healing was savagely scientific rather than magical.
The transparent thread attached to the end of the needle in his right hand suddenly took on a bright, electric-blue color. The needle lifted from between Haruki's fingers as if it had a mind of its own and headed straight for his mangled left shoulder.
The pain was horrific. Haruki gritted his teeth, forcing himself not to scream.
The needle entered one end of the open wound and exited the other, threading the mana string through skin, muscle, and tissue. With his Weak Tissue Analysis eyes, Haruki watched his own surgery live. The magical thread wasn't just stitching the wound from the outside; it was binding torn muscle fibers together, knotting severed capillaries to one another with millimeter precision, and forcibly fusing the shredded tissues.
Every time the blue thread pulled taut, his cells regenerated at an incredible speed, his flesh fusing together. This wasn't a miracle; this was the high-speed, brutal reconstruction of human anatomy.
Within seconds, the needle finished its work and returned to Haruki's palm. There was no trace left of that massive, fatal wound on his left shoulder. Only a thin suture mark, glowing a pale blue, remained on his skin. His broken ribs had mended, and his bleeding had completely stopped.
Haruki slowly sat up from the ground. He took a deep breath. There was no pain in his lungs. The fresh power and renewed energy brought by his new level (13) coursed through his veins.
As he looked at the pool of blood on the floor, a flash of realization struck his mind.
It had let the Nine-Tailed Fox tear him apart... it had given him the needle and thrown him into that impossible worm dungeon... and now it had locked him in a room unarmed with a Level 30 Alpha Wolf.
Haruki smiled to himself in the dark room. Within that smile lay pain, madness, and enlightenment. The System wasn't trying to kill him. It wasn't punishing him, either.
The System was forging him like a sword. It was burning away his weaknesses, pushing him beyond his limits. The System was forcing him to improve, to evolve. The old, weak Haruki who acted as bait had already died in that hospital room. The System was building the perfect hunter capable of surviving in a world of predators.
"So this is what you want," Haruki whispered, twirling the needle between his fingers. "Then let's play by the rules of the game."
Ignoring the mud and dried blood on him, he walked toward the massive iron doors of the Boss room. Leaving the darkness inside behind, he placed both hands on the cold iron and pushed.
The heavy hinges opened with a horrific creak that shattered the dungeon's silence. The dim green light of the corridor seeped inside.
Haruki stepped out the door.
In the corridor stood Liam and his crew, who hadn't left yet. They were likely waiting to hear Haruki's screams or for the System to give a sign that the dungeon was cleared.
At the sound of the iron doors opening, all four of them turned their heads in that direction simultaneously.
The sly, mocking expression on Liam's face evaporated in a second. His eyes widened as if they would pop out of his skull, and his jaw dropped slightly. The blood drained from his face, leaving his skin as pale as chalk. Standing before him wasn't a mangled corpse; it was Haruki, standing tall, his wounds closed, carrying a freezing chill of death in his eyes.
Liam took a step back, his voice tumbling past his lips with a tremble:
"...Impossible."
Haruki tilted his head slightly to the side. The darkness in his eyes was even deeper than the Boss room he had just walked out of. As he slowly slipped the needle between his fingers into his pocket, a thin, ruthless smile appeared on his lips.
"You look disappointed, Liam."