An interesting continuation of the story, with some neat character and less than stellar moments from Sung Jinwoo in terms of dealing with female characters. Coming from the manhwa and anime adaptations, it's still interesting to see how much was removed/changed/expanded.

One thing that makes this rating kind of bounce between a 3 and a 4 is the treatment of female characters and the sometimes truly strange plot beats. The story isn't exactly the worst in the former area: Jinwoo can at times be kind of patronizing to women, particularly the female healer in the A-rank dungeon. The story is weirdly focused on how she brings her purse with her in the dungeon, which is incredibly stupid. This is a truly unnecessary detail and I'm not sure why it's here, when all these characters are meant to be experienced and intelligent. Cha Haein also kind of has moments of the same intelligence disease, and some bizarre design choices: she's interested in Sung Jinwoo because he has protagonist energy and that's how that works. On top of this, she senses mana by her noise, and Sung Jinwoo, for some reason, smells nice. This is despite the fact she discovers this after he's been working in a mine for some hours, and should be quite sweaty. To each their own kink, maybe his sweat just smells really nice to her or he doesn't sweat after mining, but it's kind of strange all the same. Jinwoo does at least respect her a bit, at least to the point he thinks she's stronger than Choi Jongin. All in all, it's not the worst way to design a female character, it's just weird, on top of how the whole pick-axe situation is handled, again treating her like she's an idiot.

Jinwoo is also just generally clueless about interacting with people, which can make for entertaining and bizarre interactions that are usually pretty weirdly interpreted by other people. Sometimes he just truly doesn't care and has better things to do (which makes his encounters with Jongin and Baek hilarious), and sometimes he just doesn't understand personal boundaries (like with Esil). This might be down to his lack of socialization: he seemingly has been working to support his family and nearly dying in the doing straight out of high school, though I guess he just never interacted with his coworkers before he became a hunter? But it's also just sometimes strange, like how he interacts with Esil and the female Hunters hunter. He's kind of one-track minded, and fiercely protective of people he cares about, so some of it makes sense. It's just off-putting at times.

As a power fantasy, the story is generally fun and exhilarating, and there are a lot of actually cute moments where Jinwoo is fond of his minions, and excited for them. That being said, the plot where Go Gunhee offers a successor position to Jinwoo with no knowledge whatsoever of Jinwoo's qualifications - other than his physical capability - is truly bizarre. Yes, he's a protagonist in an action-adventure RPG, so of course he's going to be offered positions of power by strange authority figures, even without their knowing anything other than he's physically strong. But we're meant to believe Go Gunhee is intelligent and good at what he does... and he just jumps into it. This is solved in the manhwa (and seemingly also in the anime) by expanding Woo Jinchul's character so that he spends a lot more time closely following Sung Jinwoo, and likely informs Go Gunhee of more of Jinwoo's life and antics in advance, giving Go Gunhee more of a reason to offer the keys to the kingdom to him. But in the webnovel it's just kind of silly.

The webnovel also goes a lot more into the thoughts of Go Gunhee, Choi Jongin, Baek Yoonho, Goto Ryuji, and Matsumoto Shigeo than the manhwa does, and the actions of Japan are a lot more sinister, with plans to essentially turn Korea into a biddable servant of Japan, not just to kill off the S-rank hunters to leave them vulnerable. It's an interesting plot, and I'm wondering if the anime will follow the manhwa route and mellow it down a bit, or add its own twist, given the anime is being made by a Japanese company for a primarily Japanese audience.

The power fantasy is still largely entertaining, when women aren't involved, and he's not being kind of dickish to Jinho, Jinwoo is a pretty fun character. Still interesting to see how the story goes. The writing at least in the translation can be hit or miss, but it flows pretty decently. If you like this and want more, I would recommend giving the manhwa and anime a shot, since they expand on a lot of the cast in fun ways and make the story flow better, and most of my criticisms in re: Jinwoo's character aren't present there. ( )