Solo Leveling- Ragnarok-Chapter 369

Suho’s movements were nothing short of a living disaster. He had started leveling up again from scratch, but the force that moved his body now was the deeply-ingrained history of struggle, etched into his very bones through countless brushes with death.

Before leveling up, Suho had moved like an intricate machine, striking each fanatic’s vital point with the most efficient path possible. Now, Suho was a storm, standing at the eye, tearing through his enemies. Wherever he passed, streams of black blood burst like fountains. Monsters wearing the mask of humanity fell one after another. The more death piled up in this world, the frequency of flickering, like static interference on a screen, began to increase. The peaceful campus scenery and the grotesque, mucus-covered cavern of the Outer Gods began to flash back and forth without pause.

“Excellent! You’re doing wonderfully!” Kandiaru shouted in a voice filled with joy. “Kill more! The more of them you kill, the more experience you gain. And with each point of it, the laws sustaining this world begin to rupture! Like that, right there!”

Suho watched in shock. As the two flashing worlds overlapped again, the back of the head of a hunter Suho had just brought down split in half.

“At last, the once-solid laws are beginning to break!” Kandiaru declared.

From within, a grotesque, thorny tendril burst out and whipped at Suho like a lash. Kandiaru seemed to have expected this. He opened his mouth wide and swallowed the tentacle before it could reach him. That became a kind of signal.

All around them, the bodies of the fanatics who had been wearing human skin began to rupture and tear apart uncontrollably, each accompanied by growls and snarls. Like insects shedding their husks, the malformed, hideous forms of the true monsters began bursting out from inside. They attacked Suho with an aggression far more erratic and terrifying than when they had worn human form. By this point, however, Suho had already grown strong enough to face them.

As he devoured the tendrils with loud crunches, Kandiaru continued his explanation.

“If this were Earth, they’d call it contamination or corruption. But no matter the method, the result is the same. A dimensional breach, or gate!”

Before Kandiaru had even finished, the world itself began to tremble, sky and earth alike. In this hastily created realm of the Itarim, dimensional rifts had begun forming all around, caused by the intensity of the ongoing battle.

“And then comes a dungeon break!” Kandiaru cried.

From within each of those gates, alien beings came pouring out, as though they had been waiting for this very moment. It was the Great Cataclysm all over again, a perfect re-enactment of the apocalypse that had once arrived on Earth.

“But there’s just one difference this time!”

Indeed, there was a single, significant change from back then—the one who was behind it. Kandiaru let out a deeply satisfied, maniacal laugh as he watched the results of his grand design unfold.

“Behold! I’ve designed it so that instead of the usual monsters, entirely different beings can attack this world!”

“Chaaaarge!”

Suho stared in disbelief. Kandiaru’s plan had been flawless. What emerged from the gates were not magic beasts. Though they looked different, each one was an unkillable warrior, riding the body of someone who had received Sung Jinwoo’s name. It was all of humanity itself.

“Commence battle!”

“Attaaack!”

From the gates erupted billions of players, shouting as they charged forward in unison. The false peace of this world had already been shattered. The enemies had returned to their original, monstrous forms. There was no need to distinguish who was the enemy. Everything in sight was a target, so they attacked with abandon, just like the magic beasts once had when they invaded Earth. They even retained the effects of a double experience point buff.

“Kill them all! They’re all worth experience!”

“No way I’m missing out on a double XP event!”

They were players who had trained in the Tower of Tribulation and been given Jinwoo’s name. To them, this bizarre war zone was the ultimate hunting ground. The fear of death had long since transformed into the thrill of leveling up. From the perspective of humanity, who had always been helpless against invaders, they were now experiencing what it was like to be the invaders themselves stepping into a world of monsters.

Sung Suho, who had broken the rules of the world before anyone else, raised his voice.

“Let’s do this!”

The billions roared in response, and humanity entered the main phase of the game Solo Leveling: Ragnarok. This was no longer a lonely game with only Suho as a player. It had become a team strategy game, one where they invaded an alien dimension together. Humans overwhelmed the monsters on the surface, and as the fighting intensified, the world’s fractures only widened.

Then, in the end, came the final phase of any dungeon break—the boss monsters.

There was a low growl.

“Master!”

“We’re here!”

These were beings on an entirely different scale from the players who had arrived earlier—the Monarchs who had inherited the primordial darkness. They forcefully widened the narrow dimensional tears and began to appear one by one.

“Kieeeek!”

Right at that moment, Beru’s shriek echoed across the battlefield. Suho’s Monarchs all raised their heads at the sound. High above, Beru was single-handedly decimating wave after wave of the endless ashen angels.

“It looks a lot more fun up there than down here.”

“I’ll take the ground, then!”

The Monarchs’ eyes gleamed as they each unleashed their powers. Gray used Roar of the Battlefield, raising the morale of their allies. Sirka planted Nightmare Trees, conjuring catastrophic blizzards. Arsha released her Void Insects, directing the chaos and turning the tide of battle in their favor.

“Army of hell! Gather before me!”

Esil then summoned Hell’s Army. The demon ships, including Álfheimr, broke through the Itarim’s restrictions and soared into the sky. There, they joined Beru in the aerial battle against the swarm of ashen angels. However, the real catastrophe had yet to arrive—the most formidable of all the Monarchs.

“Hahaha!”

As the breaches expanded further, the Monarch of Domination, Thomas Andre, broke through and appeared, side by side with the Monarch of Tribulation, Ammut.

“Where are you Itarim hiding?!”

The moment they appeared, they gave Suho a quick glance to confirm he was unharmed, then immediately began hunting down the stronger enemies.

“Come out, now! You call yourselves gods, yet you hide behind these pitiful weaklings!”

Thomas Andre’s thunderous roar sent a tremor through the earth. No reply came. Instead, a new wave of monsters, stronger and greater in number, surged toward them. Thomas immediately raised his massive fist, smiling like a mischievous child.

“If you’re going to keep hiding, then I’ll make sure you crawl out here on your own!”

With just a casual swing of his arm, all the monsters charging at him were swept away and scattered.

“You’ll show yourself eventually if I tear down all your hiding places!”

It was then that the King of Giants slammed his fist straight down into the ground beneath his feet. In that instant, the earth turned upside down. It was a punch thrown without the slightest regard for consequences, and with that single strike, everything in sight began to crumble and crack apart.

An earthquake of unimaginable force erupted. And as the humans fought desperately across the battlefield, one common thought crossed their minds.

Thank god that giant’s on our side, and not theirs... Thomas, that old lunatic!

“Hahaha!”

Thomas had always been a madman. Even before becoming a hunter, he had earned the nickname “Devil of the UFC,” or more accurately, “Demon of the Ring.” If he hadn’t channeled that obscene strength into sports, he likely would have become a violent criminal long ago. Now that he had the weapon known as primordial darkness in his hands, his actions were either a divine blessing or an absolute nightmare, depending on whom you asked.

“Hahaha! I love that this isn’t Earth!”

With that, the delinquent, the Monarch of Domination, began to dominate in the truest sense of the word. He ignored the small fry entirely and moved with the sheer force of someone ready to split not just the land, but the entire planet itself.

The earth rumbled in response.

“Hahaha!”

He swung his two massive fists wildly, pounding the ground over and over.

“This... this guy’s insane!”

“Someone stop him!”

“He’s gonna take us out with him!”

The players around him panicked, shocked and terrified, but who could possibly stop a mad giant like that? Even Kandiaru stood slack-jawed at the absurdity of it all. He recovered in little more than a moment. Soon enough, he nodded.

“It’s brutish, but it’s certainly effective,” he commented.

Thomas’ unhinged antics had sped things up. With every blow that shattered the earth, the world began to flicker even faster. Half the angels who had been fighting Beru veered off course and flew toward Thomas in an attempt to stop him. Ammut stood alone in their path, blocking the oncoming flood of holy, violent, angelic beings.

A deep growl rumbled from his throat. “You want to get in the way, do you? Then we should do even more.”

Ammut approved of everything Thomas was doing. Thomas had been the first to climb the Tower of Tribulation, Ammut’s own creation, overcoming every trial and proudly claiming the primordial darkness. From Ammut’s perspective, Thomas was his most beloved pupil.

“I will stop them,” he declared.

He unleashed the full extent of the Iron Body Technique. At the release of his power, the ashen beings surging toward them like a tidal wave were swept away. Then, finally, with a sharp, crackling sound, the laws that had upheld the Itarim’s world collapsed.

Shards of the broken sky rained down like shattered glass. What lay beyond was a ceiling covered in vein-like membranes, with a land coated in mucus. The curtain of false peace had been ripped away, revealing the grotesque truth beneath. The humans’ battle cries grew louder.

Thanks to the wild destruction of the King of Giants, no monsters remained on the surface. The presence of the Void Insects ensured that the players remained protected throughout the chaos. A copy of Arsha had accompanied each and every one of them, allowing them to focus solely on the hunt, even as the ground quaked and split beneath their feet.

“Now, all that’s left is the heavens,” Suho said, looking up amid all of this and glaring at the creatures that packed the sky.

Even now, their numbers continued to multiply without end. For every angel Beru slaughtered, the Itarim simply created more. However, that back-and-forth was about to end. Now that the battle on the surface had ended in victory, they could now board the demon ships and take the fight into the sky. That was when the Itarim, unable to merely watch any longer, descended in person.

“Enough.”

One word was all it took. Every being that had been rampaging across the battlefield froze in place.