"My death is longer than your life."
Kim Gongja is a Korean orphan who has entered the Tower, a mysterious multi-dimensional structure that appeared on Earth one day. Made up of 100 RPG Mechanics 'Verse Pocket Dimension "floors" filled with all manner of traps and monsters, the Tower quickly became the holy land of the abandoned and destitute, promising a new world of fame, wealth, and power for the "Hunters" who climb it. If you're lucky enough of course, which Kim Gongja has not been. Stuck on the lowest floors for his over decade long stay there, Gongja dreams of acquiring an S-Rank skill from the Tower's seemingly random Superpower Lottery just like the famous "Flame Emperor" Yoo Soo-Ha, the top hunter of Earth for the past 10 years.
Kim Gongja thinks his luck might just have turned around when the Tower finally gives him an S-Rank skill. Only to find his skill is [I Want to Become Just like You!], which allows Gongja to copy one skill from anyone... who kills him. To make matters worse, Gongja soon gets the chance to test that skill, as he stumbles on the Flame Emperor murdering a fellow Hunter, and Yoo Soo-Ha decides to burn Gongja alive to get rid of any witnesses of his crimes, which he confesses he in fact does rather regularly...
By some miracle however, the skill Gongja manages to copy from Yoo Soo-Ha is [Returner’s Clockwork Watch], a skill that allows the user to Mental Time Travel 24 hours into the past every time they die... and is the perfect Required Secondary Powers for his own skill. Alive but incensed that the idolized Flame Emperor is a psychotic murderer who no one can stop thanks to his 24 hour Time Travel skill, Kim Gongja hatches a plan to use [Returner’s Clockwork Watch] to travel over 10 years into the past and kill Yoo Soo-Ha before he gets the skill himself, putting an end to the Flame Emperor's killing spree before it even starts. All Kim Gongja has to do to get there is commit suicide... over 4000 times...
SSS-Class Suicide Hunter (SSS급 자살헌터) is a November 2018 to May 2020 Korean Web Serial Novel by Shin Noah, following Kim Gongja as he becomes the titular SSS-Class Suicide Hunter, dying time and time again by his own hand and those of others in order to become the new greatest hunter of Earth and climb to the top of the mysterious Tower, all while his increasing stable of death related skills lead Kim Gongja to grow from a disgruntled internet troll to a man who would willingly take the death and suffering of entire worlds onto his shoulders.
The novel also has a February 2021 Comic-Book Adaptation with art by Kim Mintaka.
SSS-Class Suicide Hunter provides examples of:
- The Ageless: Mastering Supernatural Martial Arts to the body reconstruction level means you've transcended flesh and won't be dying of old age. The Murim world Kim Gongja visits still considered this level to theoretical, but others in other worlds have achieved it.
- A God Is You: The challenge of floors 31-40 is for the top hunter(s) to play a constellation, guiding their chosen race to domination at key points through the ages. The top ranking hunter has the option of playing on their own, but if they allow it, the next top ranking hunters can also participate, with one hunter being knocked out per floor until one race is dominant over the others. In the original timeline, Flame Emperor played by himself, turning his elves into an Axe-Crazy Proud Warrior Race worshipping the god of fire. In the new timeline, Sword Saint allows his companions to pick their own races.
- Alternate Universe: All of the "floors" of the Tower are entirely real universes, but were copied by the Tower from some separate, original universe.
- Apocalypse How: Planetary. The Murim world visited for floor 22 is both frozen and infested with zombies. There are only two apparent survivors with everyone else apparently having been killed by the zombies or starving because food can no longer be grown. The cast decides that giving this world a satisfying ending really can't be anything but giving the two survivors peaceful deaths: There is no population left to rebuild and no resources to rebuild with. While there seems to be no human survivors, there do appear to be some animals around, though not many.
- In the Webcomic, Floors 22-29 would be various worlds where this happened and the method to progress is to stop it or find a more proper ending for the world.
- Batman Gambit: On Floor 20 Kim resurrects the Flame Emperor and just lets him be himself without any filter. His ranting convincing everyone present that Kim is in fact a Emissary for the Goddess herself for slaying such a wretch.
- The revelation that the Tower has active administrators hints that Kim was set up to be killed by the Flame Emperor so they could give the skill to someone a lot more competent. Or at least interesting.
- Blessed with Suck: Kim Gongja's skills all look fantastic at first glance, but they all come with hidden drawbacks that make them worth less than the card they're printed on. For example, the first skill the tower gave him allows for Power Copying, but it only activates on his death.
- Boring, but Practical: Later on, the [Corner Librarian] tells Kim Gongja that one way to clear [The Chronicles Of The Heavenly Demon] was to simply find a cave and wait it out. In ten days, the Murim Lord would become a zombie. Which causes the Heavenly Demon, in her grief of losing her one chance to die honorably, goes mad and uses up all her inner ki, killing her. This strategy would have worked and counted as a proper ending if only the hunters of another Tower attempting it weren’t ambushed by zombies.
- Both Sides Have a Point: The Righteous Sect opposes the Demonic Sect because the latter group frequently murders those in positions of power, but the ones they're killing are people who abused the common man. But they implicitly went overboard sometimes.
- Broken Pedestal: The goblin race used to worship Kim Gongja as their white lion god Kekerkker until Kim Gongja’s first apostle Gorke met him in a dream. Not only did Kim Gongja beat him until he learned aura, he also forced the poor terrified goblin to ride on his back while they fought the snail army. From that point onwards, Gorke realizes the god they worship is not a god and is more like a demon. Gorke on his dying bed tells his race not to worship Kekerkker, calling him a bad friend who helps in an emergency but whom you absolutely don’t want to associate with the rest of the time.
- Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: It is entirely possible for mortals to kill gods. However, this can carry consequences, especially if the god in question was a world's guardian deity, in which case you have made its world more fragile. Depending on how the god died, it may well leave behind a Dying Curse, such as in the Murim World or the 50th floor.
- Captured Super-Entity: Some groups have managed to capture Constellations and basically use them as power sources.
- Cast from Lifespan: Seeing they’re unable to use Ki anymore thanks to the zombie cure surgery, both the Heavenly Demon and the Murim Lord use their inner ki, essentially their lifespans, to power themselves for one last fight. The Murim Lord loses and ends up crippled while the victorious Heavenly Demon passes away.
- Chekhov's Gun: Kim Gongja refuses to discard [Goblin High Society], a skill that only lets the user talk like goblin royalty, for a more useful skill. Kim Gongja always explains the skill will soar one day and it’s not until they reach the 31st floor does the Sword Emperor finally find out why Kim Gongja kept such a skill. Because on the 31st-40th floors, the top seven Hunters become like Constellations to seven races, with Kim Gongja’s chosen race being goblins. The skill allows him to gain their respect and admiration much faster than without, making the floors easier to conquer.
- Crapsack World: There are reports that the world outside the tower is a mess, with war and and terrorism rampant, but inside the tower is worse. An entire city full of people are trapped inside and can not leave, which they don't find out until they're inside, law and order is basically non-existent, the most powerful hunters suffer from With Great Power Comes Great Insanity, though the lower ranked hunters don't fare much better from the sheer weight of desperation they live under, worried that either a monster or their fellow hunters might make them snacks, and there's only one woman who can trade with the outside world, so she sets a monopoly and can sell her stuff for whatever price she wants!
- Damned by Faint Praise: When Crusader says they'd be better off leaving children with Venomous Snake than Heretic Questioner, Snake doesn't interpret that as a compliment.
- Death Seeker: The Heavenly Demon and Murim Lord are still fighting even in an apocalyptic world because they don't want to die to the zombie infection or commit suicide. They want to die knowing that their last member wasn't wiped out by disease but rather a powerful enemy.
- Divided We Fall: Subverted. The first meeting with the last survivors of the Murim world implies the two opposing groups were too busy fighting each other to deal with the zombie apocalypse, but it's quickly made clear that this is a bad assumption: The two sides did stop fighting to try to deal with the contagion despite repeated urges from followers on both sides to break the ceasefire, but there was simply nothing they could do and the world ended anyway. The last survivors are only fighting now to have as meaningful of deaths as they can.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: It's never stated, but the Heavenly Demon's choice to forgo pursuing the peak of martial arts is very reminiscent of the Bodhisattva, a figure in Buddhism representing someone who could have chosen to become a Buddha but selflessly chose to stay behind to guide others instead.
- Dying Curse: The Yellow Dragon is the source of the zombie plague: Not only was it murdered by the Constellation Killer, it was killed in a way that did not let it rest in peace, causing a curse to doom the world it originally protected.
- Face Death with Dignity: The last choice the inhabitants of the Murim world can make is to go out on their own terms. Rather than dying to a zombie plague, they'd rather have a grand fight to the death.
- Fighting a Shadow: Some types of Constellations, especially Nature Spirits, are very very big, metaphysically or otherwise. Met some dragon being referred to as a constellation? Odds are it is only a tiny piece of the constellation, being used as an avatar to interact with its lessers. While it could potentially be used as a conduit for more creative methods to kill the constellation, killing the avatar itself is just an inconvenience.
- First Time Feeling: Heretic Questioner is a Psychopathic Man Child. When completing a floor quest requires him to possess the female lead, it also causes him to experience her emotions, feeling things like regret and jealousy for the first time with him not sure how to process them.
- Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse
- According to the Sword Emperor, the fact that the Demon Cult has sympathetic motivations and goals does not excuse their actions. They are still evil and this should never be forgotten. Since we don't actually know what they were doing, we pretty much have to either take his word for it or accept that it's just his opinion.
- The Demon King of Autumn Rain did not actually start the fight. The human kingdoms burned down a village filled with what seemed to be some kind of strange cult at best and a village full of monsters at worst and killed everyone inside. In retaliation, the Demon King (who was a "saintess" back then) decided to just destroy everything. Kim Gongja gets why she's upset, but notes that she's a hypocrite: The human kingdoms genuinely thought it was a village full of monsters, so they basically didn't know any better. Just like how the Demon King killed and ate the woman she appears to be because she was simply an animal back then and didn't know any better.
- Friendly Enemy: The Heavenly Demon and Murim Lord have no real grievance with each other anymore. They're fighting to the death simply to go out in a way they can accept rather than dying to a disease. After being cured, they go out with a final fight to the death where the Heavenly Demon is considered the victor, though she gives herself fatal injuries in the process.
- God Was My Copilot: Turns out the sword the Kim picked up as a symbol to rally Floors 11-20 behind him? That's one of the fragments of the Local Goddess.
- Go Mad from the Isolation: The Heavenly Demon can keep going for at least another year while the Murim Lord only has about a week or so left when Gong-ja's party gets to them. However, if he dies, she will lose her last reason to live, snap and unleash all the power she's been restraining.
- Greed: The Count only cares about how she can profit from a situation. She passes on this trait to the elves she’s in charge of on the 31st-40th floors, turning them into a money loving race that keeps track of every coin they spend raising their children until they’re adults, at which point they force them to get a job to pay them back and sometimes even with interest.
- Hearing Voices: Copying the skills of the Master Swordsman known as the Sword Saint gives Kim Gongja a copy of the ghost that's haunting the guy. Of course, only he can see or hear said ghost...
- Irony: The Heavenly Demon, often considered to have been born from winter itself and suiting this frozen world better than anyone, hates the season so much that she is seriously trying to destroy it with martial arts.
- Kill the God: The Constellation Killer, for unknown reasons, views it as his duty to go around killing the Constellations. He doesn't seem to bear them any personal ill will and the characters guess he might have a good reason for what he's doing. However, they consider it not worth the price as his killing of the Murim world's dragon caused a zombie apocalypse. He also betrayed his long time partner, the Goddess of Protection, though he simply broke her power apart rather than kill her as a mercy.
- Lack of Empathy: What the Heavenly Demon considers most unforgivable about the Righteous Sect is that they too understand what it is to feel pain or grief and commiserate with each other, but they never seem to extend it to downtrodden common man or the people of the demonic sect.
- Lonely at the Top: The Heavenly Demon was far more talented than anyone else in her world. Even when she voluntarily chose to protect and nurture her people rather than pursue her own development, she still wound up so far above the next strongest person that she had no real peers. She dragged out the conclusion of her apparent last fight with him and as a result, under normal circumstances, he would have eventually died from being unable to keep his infection at bay.
- Long-Lived: Cultivators have a lifespan longer than a normal human, or at least they can. The Murim Lord is notably even older than he seems while the Heavenly Demon seems to be a youngish woman. However, one has to progress to a certain level considered theoretical in their world to become The Ageless, and even then, no one lives forever.
- Lost in Character: The Immersion Rate is the most dangerous aspect of the apocalypse [The Tale of Sormwyn Academy]. The higher the immersion rate goes, the more you become the character you’re playing as. And when it reaches 100%, you become the character and lose your original self entirely until you leave the world somehow.
- Lotus-Eater Machine: Whenever Gongja is killed by someone new, he "experiences the trauma" of the ones who killed him prior to choosing one of their skills. The penalty and intensity for this goes up as he becomes stronger, ranging from not viewing anything, to watching a brief overview of his killer's situation, to experiencing some of the thoughts and emotions of their trauma. Past a certain point the penalty becomes a full-on Lotus-Eater Machine where Gongja is inserted wholesale into the scenario and his efforts to maintain his own mind become just as important as his work to clear each Tower Level.
- Magikarp Power: Goblins start out as adaptable, but weak in every field. Give them the chance to evolve however, and they become extremely powerful.
- The Man Behind the Man: The Count planned on turning her Elf race into the secret rulers of the world but they were content making money and so gave up on ruling the world from the shadows, instead becoming a vassal race to the goblins. This frustrates the Count, who expected them to be more greedy and power hungry rather than happy just getting their honey.
- Might Makes Right: Kim Gongja accidentally turned his goblin society into a society of muscleheads who chooses their leaders based on strength. This mindset would have gotten them destroyed by the other races once their strongest warrior Uburka passed away because they would force this ideology onto the other six races. It takes Kim Gongja beating Uburka in his dream to make them learn they can’t just force other races into doing what they want without getting something in return.
- Morality Chain: Or rather a sanity chain. The Murim Lord’s presence and their match is all that’s keeping the Heavenly Demon from going insane from the sheer despair of being one of the last survivors in a zombie apocalypse. Things don’t go well for the team when the Murim Lord loses his battle against zombification…
- Moral Myopia: Petra Formerly the Demon Lord of the Autumn Rain suffered badly from this. Kim rips through her excuses when she has no choice but to listen to him.
- Narnia Time: Even without factoring in things like regression, the time between unconnected worlds is not equal. From Earth's perspective, Constellation Killer's Earth identity has been dead for a few decades. Constellation Killer has been traversing worlds for centuries.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Combined with Hoist by His Own Petard. When Yoo Sooha murdered Kim Gongja, he unwittingly activated the latter's tower granted skill, which allowed Gongja to copy his Resurrective Immortality, which also comes with the "drawback" of resetting the world back 24 hours before his death. Gongja uses the "drawback" to go back in time to before Sooha became immortal and killed him.
- No Body Left Behind: Both the dead dragon and the Heavenly Demon have their bodies break apart into light after the cursed sword is pulled from the former's corpse. However, the Heavenly Demon instead leaves behind a single peony flower.
- Not Quite the Right Thing
- An old hermit fisher was bitten by a zombie and decided the best thing he could do would be to lay down in his boat and die surrounded by water as the zombies apparently do not enter water willingly. Unfortunately, he didn't account for the fact that his boat might capsize and that his dead body could wash up on shore. As a result, when his body did finally exited the river, it happened to be when a bunch of starving children were nearby.
- Petra as the saintess could cure pretty much any wound or disease if simply left alone with the sufferer. However, she did this by basically eating them and spitting out a copy that was a real thinking person just like the original. She genuinely considered this to be healing and for her creations to be humans, but other humans apparently figured out some weird shit was going down in that village and decided to wipe it out.
- More comically, the Count decided to become the patron of the elves and influenced them to be greedy moneygrubbers so they'd control the world through the economy and take over. This worked, but only to the point of making them obsessed with money and then being satisfied: Elves aren't naturally ambitious, so once they achieved that goal they didn't care about being anything more than parasites on the hobgoblin hegemony.
- Our Elves Are Different:
- In Flame Emperor's deleted timeline, he established a Proud Warrior Race of Axe-Crazy elves worshipping the "God of Fire".
- In the new timeline, the Countess takes management of the elves and establishes a culture of money grubbers. These elves keep receipts of every expense spent on their children and expect their children to pay them back with interest, minus the family discount of course. The idea was that they would use their control over the economy to Takeover The World and become the world's shadow rulers. Instead, they lost interest and became parasites on the goblin economy. The Countess failed to account for the fact that elves are not a naturally ambitious race, so once they were able to become the economic center of the world they stopped caring about increasing their own power and instead became a race of parasites dependent on the dominant goblin civilization.
- Our Goblins Are Different: A race of short and green ugly creatures. The barbarians of their race are treated as fodder for Level Grinding, but it is possible for them to be civilized. They start out weak, but highly adaptable, and have extremely powerful Evolutionary Levels.
- Our Gods Are Different: They are usually referred to as Constellations, and they are usually referred to by their nicknames. Some are seemingly born as gods, others originate as a Deity of Human Origin. There are multiple ways for a mortal to ascend, though the most conventional way would probably be the Spirit Cultivation Genre. A constellation can potentially be Depowered, weakening them or even losing their divinity completely. While constellations receive a number of intrinsic benefits, such as being The Ageless, and at higher Divine Ranks, Super-Intelligence, they are not necessarily stronger than mortals. Most worlds have a guardian deity responsible for managing and protecting it, which is one reason Constellation Killer's actions have inadvertently ruined so many worlds. Constellations usually interact with their followers as a Third-Person Person. The strongest deities known are the Pillars, the ones who manage the Tower.
- Powered by a Forsaken Child: One of the damaged worlds in the Corner Librarian's library is connected by a Portal Book called "Me and Our Scapegoat". The book details a society that learns how to harness immense amounts of energy from the screams of an innocent child. Society collapses when they run out of innocent children to torture. Kim Gongja makes a special note to destroy their civilization as soon as possible. His ultimate solution is... To turn all the people of that world into living undead, replacing one hell with good intentions with a slightly better hell with good intentions.
- The Power of the Sun: The zombies become dormant when exposed to sunlight and sluggish under strong moonlight, which is just reflected sunlight.
- Pre-Insanity Reveal: Kim Gongja decides to see who Constellation Killer was before he went mad, and turns it into the subject of the 29th floor.
- The Problem with Fighting Death: A lot of constellations are Jerkass Gods, and some would argue that even the well intentioned ones shouldn't be interfering with mortals. However, killing the guardian constellation of a world will, at best, make that world more fragile, if not outright doom it, which is why whatever his intentions, Constellation Killer is causing a lot more harm than good. His actions have left countless shattered worlds in his wake, with him not bothering to observe the long-term consequences of his actions. When Kim Gongja confronts him with his mistakes, he acknowledges and apologizes for the specific errors that destroyed those worlds, but being a Tautological Templar, refuses to even consider that the act of killing all constellations itself might be wrong.
- Protagonist-Centered Morality: What's good and what's evil is entirely dependent on what Kim Gonja says it is, and he's more than a little nuts.
- Quit Your Whining: Used on the Heavenly Demon twice. The second time is a lot more impactful than the second.
- First, during their final confrontation, the Murim Alliance leader tells her that all she does is blame everything on tragedies that befell her people while causing widespread chaos in their attempts to get revenge or justice. She counters by saying that of course he would say that, he only ever showed empathy for the people at the top like himself. She believes he doesn't care about the victims of the system he advocates. This argument ends inconclusively.
- Second, during her duel via words with the Sword Emperor. He notes that despite tragedy being balanced out by all the blessings in life, all she ever focuses on or talks about is the victims. When she says that a dead child carries far more weight than a laughing child since death cannot be taken back, he agrees, but clarifies that he means she is a failure as a teacher because Gong-ja is not ready for this lesson as he has not experienced the joys in life yet and cannot contextualize them being taken away.
- Rage Against the Heavens: Demonic Arts revolve around hating the world and shaping your energy into a weapon to oppose it.
- Rage Breaking Point: The Murim Lord running out of energy and fully turning into a zombie causes what’s left of the Heavenly Demon’s sanity to run out. Kim Gongja’s current run ends because the Heavenly Demon kills them all in her grief.
- Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Even most constellations are reset with Kim Gongja's skill, but there are a few exceptions. The most powerful beings in charge of the Tower, the Pillars, of course, remember. And while the Corner Librarian cannot do so directly, his books are able to record Kim Gongja's actions even when he resets time. The Tower itself will also remember and will remember to inflict punishment if you broke its rules badly enough before resetting.
- Save Scumming: This was the Flame Emperor's sole key to success, and now is Kim's as well.
- Scry vs. Scry: When Kim Gongja first received his Power Copying skill, the gods of the Tower expected him to either run away from Flame Emperor or fight him in a convoluted and drawn out way due to their mutual regression skills. They were surprised when he went back to before Flame Emperor even gained the skill.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong:
- Combined with Save Scumming, this is Kim's modus operandi. Used on a much larger scale on Floors 11-20 when Kim manages to retcon the very existence of the Demon Lord of the Autumn Rain by preventing the tragedy that created it.
- On Floors 21-30, the hunters get to vote on which out of many destroyed worlds they get to visit. In the cases of some worlds, they visit the world's corpse to give the survivors a narratively satisfying ending, but in others, they are sent in before the world's fated end and are given a chance to save it.
- Sequence Breaking: No really. Kim actually breaks the plot progression of Floors 11-20 so badly that the Tower has to actually adapt the quest.
- Shapeshifter Guilt Trip: When Kim Gongja starts beating up dream demons, they figure out that the beatings will be less severe if they use the face of his orphanage's director.
- Shoot the Dog
- One local official, left in charge after everyone above him died, cut rations to the elderly and children because they would be of no use when it came to fighting off zombies. To keep the people from revolting against this order, he stopped eating entirely.
- Earth's instance of the Tower has had significant problems with cultists, forcing them to establish an entire organization dedicated to finding and killing anyone with strong enough religious views that they're willing to stir up trouble, often even before they've done anything. A What If? scenario involving a Heroic Counterpart to the Flame Emperor shows why: Even seemingly quiet groups can be terrorists waiting for their chance or, worse, agent provocateurs sent by Earth governments to destabilize the Tower.
- Social Darwinism: The strong hunters prey on the weak.
- Sole Survivor: In the end, only the Murim Lord is left alive in his world. He takes in the Venomous Snake as his disciple.
- Spirit Cultivation Genre: The nature of the Heavenly Demon's world. The same rules apply to the Tower at large, albeit with cultural differences and using aura in place of ki.
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: More like Suspiciously Specific Example, but when Bae talks about how Demonic Cultivation techniques work it sounds exactly like he's describing what happened to him as a child.
- Super Power Lottery: In two ways. If The Tower is moved (or repulsed) by someone's inherent nature, it will give him or her a fitting skill. In the case of Kim Gongja, it takes note of his burning envy to give him a skill that he needs to die to use. In addition, Gongja's skill makes a copy of a random skill of the guy who kills him.
- Thread of Prophecy, Severed: All of the worlds the Corner Librarian provides access to have narratively unsatisfying endings, but that is not the only criteria by which these worlds are chosen. All of them are worlds that were interrupted and damaged in some fundamental way. For example, a huge number of them fell apart because Constellation Killer "liberated" those worlds from their own guardian deities without any care for the consequences, leaving them vulnerable to Cosmic Flaws.
- Too Dumb to Live:
- A bunch of hunters decide that a constellation (basically a god) is a floor boss. Despite the fact that they have already seen his power level and been warned against it, they attack him anyways. The resulting Curbstomp Battle is described as a mass suicide, with them all dying gruesome deaths. It's not entirely unwarranted - the Demon King of Autumn Rain was also technically a constellation - but in this case the individual in question was at worst quirky.
- Subverted. The 22nd floor is a Murim cultivation type world where warriors fight off demon cultivators and so on, but it got hit with a zombie plague several years back and then froze over, leaving only two survivors: A random woman and an old man, the leaders from each sect. They are still fighting even though the world has all but ended and they cannot use any energy while doing comical things like pretending the frozen zombies around them are warriors under their control. However, before long it's revealed that while the world was gearing up for a big war between the two sides, both of them immediately halted the fighting with even the Heavenly Demon leading the demon sect opening up free hospices and refusing to strike while the enemy was weakened. It just didn't matter because the spread couldn't be halted nor the infected cured, meaning the two survivors are simply choosing to die on their own terms: They consider it better to say they fought to the death against their old enemy and thus ended the world rather than have the last survivors die to a filthy disease.
- Top God: The Six Pillars, the most powerful of all Constellations and the Powers That Be in charge of the Tower.
- Training from Hell: Kim Gongja takes full advantage of the dream world he can manipulate to his desires to train his second and third apostles, the hobgoblin Uburka and the elf Ssonia, in the ways of the Demonic Sect. The first technique, a technique based on the pain of severe starvation, alone is enough to make them both cry to be killed and released from their suffering.
- Translator Microbes: The Tower automatically translates different languages for hunters, meaning that multinational teams of hunters and even hunters from different universes can communicate just fine.
- Vampire Refugee: The only survivors of the zombie apocalypse on the 22nd floor are actually both infected have been for years. However, both were extremely powerful warriors and have been using their energy to first stop the disease from reaching the brain by blocking the spinal cord and then artificially keeping their bodies going with telekinesis. The ten day time limit for this world to be fixed is how long it will take for the Murim Lord to finally run out of energy and turn into a zombie, which leads to the Heavenly Demon losing her mind.
- Was Once a Man: The Tower's dirty little secret regarding Boss monsters. The 10th level boss is a gestalt of a bunch of starving orphan kids that were rounded up by a complete and total psycho who pretended to be a kind philanthropist to the public but secretly held a deep-seated irrational hatred for orphans and starving kids and would take the orphans he rounded up and a bunch of equally psychotic henchmen torture them for the "crime" of being hungry and unable to feed themselves, until an accidental fire burned down his mansion, including the secret basement where these starving kids were chained down, unable to escape. Gonja and Bae-hong were sickened and horrified when they were Forced to Watch the crime happen, helpless to do anything, as even going back in time wouldn't have helped.
- Wham Line: Requesting Permission from Zaraqua. This line kicks off the revelation that the Tower is actively administered by someone.
- What the Hell, Hero?: During the duel via words between the Sword Emperor and the Heavenly Demon, he criticizes her teaching technique for being unbalanced. She treats her student like a proper bitter demonic cult disciple when he's really just a young, dumb kid who has never experienced joy nor despair. He isn't emotionally ready for what she has to teach because he can't contextualize it..
- Wimp Fight: Kim Gongja and the others are shocked when they first meet the Heavenly Demon and the Murim Lord, both martial arts masters ready to fight to the death to end the feud between their clans for good, and watch as they fight with twigs instead of weapons. And when the twigs snap, they fight like children, pulling each others’ hair and trying to poke the other’s eyes out. This is the first hint to Kim Gongja that something is wrong with the two that prevents them from using their martial arts skills.
- With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: As a hunter levels up, their existence becomes more defined and more prideful, causing their nature to become more and more imbalanced. It is said that there are no normal people among the hunters, and with rare exceptions, the most powerful hunters tend to be the most psychotic.
- Worthy Opponent: The Heavenly Demon and the Murim Alliance Lord have respect for each other as individuals and warriors even though their positions are irreconcilably opposed. They can accept any kind of ugly or honorable death so long as it comes in some form they can respect. However, it's downplayed: They both know she's far stronger than he is, so she's always holding back since he's the closest she can get to a real fight. This leaves him full of regret that he can't be her peer while she in turn treats him almost akin to a toy. She can fight him, but she can't go all out because she'll just win easily and then have no one else that even comes close to rivaling her. There is honor and some measure of worth in their contests, but the Heavenly Demon cannot be satisfied with such a pointless ending.
