Chapter 78: Feeding the Wolf

Jin told them the plan in sixty seconds flat because that was all the plan deserved.

"Tunnels go south through the old drainage system. Sung-joon mapped three routes last week—two are probably passable, one's a coin flip. You take the non-combatants down through the sub-basement and push south until you hit the Yongsan interchange. From there, scatter to the backup rally points." He pointed at the map, tracing lines he'd drawn in red marker that now looked like arteries on a dissection chart. "Min-ji leads medical. Sung-joon leads logistics. Baek Yuri takes rear guard."

"And you?" Sung-joon asked, though his expression said he already knew.

"I go out the front door."

The silence that followed had a physical quality. Thirty people in a freezing basement, most of them barely awake, all of them staring at the guy with the impossible negative level who'd just volunteered to walk into a kill squad alone.

"That's not a plan," Min-ji said. "That's a suicide note with extra steps."

"It's a diversion. They're here for me—my level reads on any scanner within two hundred meters. The second I step outside, every Iron Wolf on that perimeter locks onto my signal. They converge on me, you get a window to move through the tunnels." Jin pulled on his jacket. The leather was cracked, stained with Grey-Class monster blood from his hunt earlier. Good. He'd need the residual energy. "I hold them as long as I can. You get everyone out."

"Hold them how? There are at least six out there, probably more. Hwang Do-yun runs squads of ten to twelve. Even with your—" Min-ji caught herself, recalculated. "Even with Pain Drinker, the damage conversion has throughput limits. If they coordinate fire, they can exceed your absorption rate."

"Then I'll have to make sure they don't coordinate." Jin checked the cheap watch on his wrist. 12:47 AM. Dawn was roughly five hours out, but the Iron Wolves wouldn't wait that long now. The scouts had been in position for over an hour. They were waiting for the full team to assemble.

Which meant he needed to hit them before they were ready.

"You're going out now?" Sung-joon's tablet lowered. His inventory sense was pinging—Jin could tell by the way the man's eyes unfocused slightly, tracking the location and condition of every person he'd catalogued in the building. "They're not in assault formation yet. If you engage the scouts, you tip off the main force."

"If I wait for the main force to form up, I'm fighting twelve instead of six. I'll take the scouts while they're scattered and buy you time to move."

"The math doesn't work, Jin."

"The math never works." Jin zipped his jacket. The cold was eating at him—every minute of standing still drained a fraction of the energy he'd built up hunting Grey-Class earlier. He could feel it: a sluggishness in his joints, a fog at the edges of his vision. Like being slowly poisoned by peace. "Move in fifteen minutes. That's all the head start I can guarantee."

He was halfway to the stairs when a hand caught his sleeve.

Won-shik. The older man's grip was calloused and firm. He didn't say anything about Jae-min. Didn't say anything about the mole. Just held Jin's arm for a moment with an expression that communicated something between a blessing and a warning, then let go.

Jin climbed the stairs.

---

The alley behind the warehouse smelled like garbage and wet concrete. Two AM in Mapo-gu, and the only light came from a broken streetlamp fifty meters east that flickered orange in a rhythm that suggested a short in the wiring rather than anything supernatural.

Jin stepped out the loading dock's side door and stood in the open.

For three seconds, nothing happened. Wind through the alley. A distant siren, somewhere south toward the river. The ambient hum of a city that never fully slept.

Then a voice from the shadows to his left: "Inverse hell, he actually came outside."

The scout was young—mid-twenties, Level 63, with the augmented vision that a lot of E-Rank hunters favored. His partner, crouched behind a dumpster fifteen meters away, was older and carried a reinforced baton that glowed faintly with some kind of damage enchantment.

Neither of them attacked.

That was the thing about the Iron Wolves. They were hunters, not soldiers. They were used to defectives who ran, who hid, who begged. They weren't used to someone walking toward them.

"Evening," Jin said. "Cold enough for you?"

The younger scout touched his earpiece. Calling it in. Smart. But slow.

Jin closed the distance in four strides and drove his forehead into the scout's nose.

The impact was a bright spike of pain that bloomed behind Jin's eyes and rang through his skull like a bell. Beautiful. The fog cleared. His muscles warmed. Pain Drinker engaged automatically, converting the self-inflicted damage into a rush of energy that washed through his body like caffeine injected straight into the bloodstream.

The scout went down with a broken nose. His partner lunged—the enchanted baton cracking across Jin's ribs with a force that would have shattered a normal person's bones.

Jin staggered. Caught himself. Breathed.

The baton hit had been excellent. Deep bruising, maybe a hairline fracture, and the enchantment added a burning component that sent secondary pain signals racing up his spine. Pain Drinker gorged on it, converting the entire package into restored HP and a physical high that bordered on euphoria.

"Thanks," Jin said to the baton-wielder. "I needed that."

The man swung again. Jin didn't dodge—he stepped into it, letting the baton crack against his shoulder. More pain. More conversion. More energy flooding through muscles that had been sluggish ten seconds ago.

**[DAMAGE RECEIVED: 187 HP]**

**[PAIN DRINKER ACTIVATED]**

**[HP CONVERTED: +280 HP]**

**[CURRENT HP: 3,127/2,847 (OVERFLOW)]**

Overflow. More HP than his max, the excess buzzing under his skin like static electricity. It wouldn't last—overflow decayed in minutes—but while it held, Jin felt more alive than he had in days. Weeks, maybe.

He grabbed the baton mid-swing, wrenched it from the hunter's grip, and used it to sweep the man's legs. The hunter hit the ground hard. Jin brought the baton down on his knee with a crack that was pure physics, nothing personal, except it was personal because these people hunted defectives for sport and Dae-sung was still missing and three of Jin's people were dead.

The knee broke. The hunter screamed.

Jin dropped the baton and turned toward the next set of scouts—two more, south side, already moving from their positions toward the noise.

Fifteen minutes. He'd promised Sung-joon fifteen minutes.

He had to make every hit count.

---

The south-side pair were better trained.

They came at him from both angles—one high, one low—with the kind of coordination that suggested practice against live targets. The high attacker used wind-blade projections, crescent-shaped arcs of compressed air that sliced through the space where Jin's throat had been a moment earlier.

That one, he dodged. Wind blades cut clean and fast, but the pain was too brief for Pain Drinker to get much from it. Shallow cuts were junk food—a spike of sensation that faded before the conversion could fully engage.

What he wanted was the low attacker. A woman, Level 58, who fought with her fists and wore gauntlets that crackled with electrical discharge. Each punch was a localized lightning strike, and lightning was slow, rolling, sustained agony—the kind that Pain Drinker could feast on.

Jin caught her first punch on his forearm.

Electricity tore through him. Every muscle in his arm locked, then released. His teeth slammed together hard enough to chip enamel. The current traveled up his shoulder, across his chest, and for one instant his heart stuttered—

Then Pain Drinker kicked in and the agony became fuel. The conversion was so intense that Jin's vision actually sharpened, colors becoming more saturated, the world snapping into focus like a camera finding its subject.

The woman saw his face and stopped punching.

That was the moment—the one that happened in every fight, without fail, when the people trying to hurt him realized that hurting him was the problem. The expression on her face cycled from aggression through confusion to something close to horror in about a second and a half.

"What the fuck are you?" she whispered.

"Defective," Jin said, and hit her in the solar plexus with a straight right that used the overflow HP to compensate for his low physical stats. She folded. Not unconscious—he didn't hit hard enough for that—but down.

The wind-blade user adjusted, throwing tighter arcs that were harder to avoid. One caught Jin's thigh, opening a shallow cut that stung but didn't satisfy. Another nicked his ear. A third hit the wall behind him and exploded a chunk of brick into dust.

Jin charged through the barrage. Two blades hit him in the chest—deeper this time, pain flaring white-hot as the compressed air tore into muscle. Pain Drinker converted it, but the ratio was worse with cutting damage. Heal rate barely exceeded damage rate. He was gaining ground, but bleeding faster than he was regenerating.

He reached the wind user and took him down with a tackle that lacked finesse but had momentum. They hit the ground together, rolled, and Jin ended up on top, driving an elbow into the man's jaw.

The jaw didn't break. Level 63 hunters had reinforced bone density from System-enhanced stats. But the impact was enough to ring his bell, and Jin scrambled off before the man could recover.

Four scouts down. Four to go, plus whatever reinforcements were in that van.

The alley was a mess—blood (his and theirs), broken brick, the residual ozone smell from the lightning gauntlets. Jin stood in the middle of it, overflow HP ticking down but still above his maximum, his jacket sliced in three places and smoking slightly from electrical discharge.

He was grinning. He couldn't help it. The combat high was a drug, and he'd been going through withdrawal.

Then the van doors opened.

---

Hwang Do-yun stepped out like a man arriving at a restaurant where he had a reservation.

He was shorter than Jin expected. Five-six, maybe five-seven, with a compact build that suggested speed over power. His hunter badge—Level 87, E-Rank (Senior)—glowed orange on his jacket, and his hands were already wreathed in the pale blue flame that was his signature. Not real fire, technically. Mana-based thermal projection. The distinction mattered to nobody except the people it burned.

"Jin Seong-ho." Do-yun said the name like he was reading it off a menu. Behind him, six more Iron Wolves spilled from the van, fanning out with practiced efficiency. Ten total now, plus the four Jin had downed. Twelve-man squad, just like Sung-joon had predicted. "The Negative Level Hero. The Defective King. Whatever they're calling you this week."

"I prefer Inverse Disaster, personally. Has a ring to it."

Do-yun smiled. It was the smile of a cat that had cornered a mouse and was in no hurry. "You know what's funny? You're worth more to me alive. The Association bounty for your capture is three times the standard termination fee. Something about wanting to study the anomaly."

"Flattering."

"But I've been hunting defectives for six years now, and I've learned something." Do-yun's blue flames brightened, the temperature in the alley climbing perceptibly. "The ones who think they're special are the ones who make mistakes. You think your little trick makes you invincible? I've read your file. Pain Drinker. Inverse Constitution. You eat damage and shit healing." He tilted his head. "Cute. But there's a limit, isn't there? A threshold where the damage comes in faster than you can convert it?"

Jin didn't answer, which was itself an answer.

"I thought so." Do-yun gestured, and his squad moved.

They came at Jin from all directions. Not one at a time, not in the messy way the scouts had engaged. Six hunters attacking simultaneously, each one targeting a different part of his body, each one using their specific ability at maximum output.

A blade user opened Jin's left arm from elbow to wrist. A strength-type drove a fist into his kidney. Someone with a piercing ability punched a needle of condensed mana through his right shoulder. A gravity manipulator—low-level, maybe 2x normal gravity—pressed him toward the ground.

And Do-yun's flames hit him in the chest.

Jin had thought about fire. Had wondered what it would feel like through Pain Drinker's conversion. The answer was: overwhelming.

The flames were agony of a depth and constancy that eclipsed everything else. Not a spike of pain—a wall of it. Continuous, escalating, the kind of sustained damage that Pain Drinker was designed to feast on. The conversion rate should have been massive—

And it was. For about three seconds.

Then the other five attacks hit simultaneously, and Jin discovered what Min-ji had warned about. Throughput limits. Pain Drinker could convert a lot of damage, but not infinite damage, and not from six sources at once. The ability choked on the volume, conversion stalling as it tried to process blade wounds and blunt trauma and piercing damage and thermal burns and gravity stress all at the same time.

His HP plummeted.

The world became a kaleidoscope of pain—real pain, unconverted, the kind he'd almost forgotten existed. His arm was bleeding freely. His shoulder screamed where the mana needle had gone through. The gravity was crushing his joints, driving him to one knee.

And the fire. The fire was the worst. Not because it burned—it did—but because Pain Drinker kept half-converting it, creating cycles of agony-relief-agony that tore through his nervous system like a saw.

"There it is," Do-yun said from somewhere behind the wall of flame. "The limit. Everyone has one, Seong-ho. Even the freaks."

Jin's knee hit concrete. His vision was going—not dark, but oversaturated, like staring into a screen with the brightness maxed. Blood in his mouth from biting through his lip. The scar on his chest burned with a phantom pain that had nothing to do with Fire and everything to do with the day the System had broken him.

*Get up. Get up. Get up.*

He got up.

Not because he was strong. Not because Pain Drinker suddenly found another gear. But because somewhere below him, in a basement that smelled like kimchi and mold, thirty people were counting down from fifteen minutes, and he hadn't given them enough time yet.

Jin surged through the flame wall. The burns were catastrophic—skin blackening across his chest and arms, nerve endings dying in real time—and Pain Drinker caught maybe sixty percent of it, which was enough to keep him standing but not enough to stop the screaming.

He didn't scream. He'd learned that screaming gave hunters satisfaction, and satisfaction made them confident, and confident hunters were harder to surprise.

He drove his shoulder into the nearest attacker—the blade user, who didn't expect a human torch to close the distance—and took them both to the ground. The blade user's weapon went skittering. Jin grabbed it, the metal searing against his burned hands, and swung it into the gravity manipulator's ankle.

The gravity field dropped. Jin breathed.

Four seconds of relative freedom. He used two of them to roll away from the pile, one to drag in a breath that tasted like copper and charcoal, and one to check if he could still see clearly.

He could. Barely.

Do-yun stood twenty meters away, flames dancing on his palms, watching Jin with the focused attention of a man reassessing a threat level.

"Durable," he said. "I'll give you that."

"Flattered." Jin spat blood. "Your fire's nice. Good conversion ratio. You should do birthday parties."

Do-yun's flames flared. "Hit him again. All at once. Don't stop until he's down."

They hit him again.

Jin took it. Stood in the center of six coordinated attacks and let Pain Drinker work at whatever fraction of capacity it could manage, because every second he absorbed was a second the Forgotten moved through those tunnels.

His HP dropped. Stabilized. Dropped again.

He could feel the edge approaching—the point where damage would exceed his body's ability to survive regardless of Pain Drinker's conversion rate. The point where inverse constitution met the hard wall of biology.

Nine minutes. He'd given them nine minutes. Maybe it was enough.

Then Hwang Do-yun walked through his own squad's attack, flames coating his body like armor, and grabbed Jin by the throat.

The contact was thermal hell. Jin's neck blistered instantly, the skin cooking under Do-yun's palm, and Pain Drinker screamed through its conversion at rates that turned the agony into a sickening roller-coaster of suffering and relief.

"I almost forgot," Do-yun said, holding Jin at arm's length, blue flames reflected in eyes that held nothing resembling mercy. "I wanted to thank you. For making this so easy."

Jin couldn't speak. The hand on his throat was crushing his windpipe and scorching it simultaneously.

"Your security is shit, by the way. One scared kid with a phone, that's all it took." Do-yun leaned closer. The heat was unbearable. "Your little friend Jae-min says hello."

Jin's hands, burned and bleeding, closed around Do-yun's wrist. Not to pull free. Not to fight.

Just to hold on. Because as long as Do-yun was here, talking, gloating, enjoying himself—he wasn't chasing the people in the tunnels.

Nine minutes and counting.