Kim Chul

Built large and heavily muscled, Chul wears his bluish-gray hair shaved into a buzz cut and bears a scar on the right side above his upper lip. For battle he dons a gray suit of armor trimmed with a furred collar and a white tassel of cloth, layered over a plain black undershirt, and his helmet takes the shape of a beast's head. A sizeable shield rides one arm, a long battle axe or hammer the other, with a longsword fixed to his left hip. Two decades on in the revised timeline, age has left him bald and middle-aged.

Conceit defines Chul, who once styled himself the "Great Kim Chul." He looked down on lower-ranked hunters, telling them outright to their faces that they were dead weight, and showed no empathy. He abandoned weaker members amid the Red Gate Incident and felt little guilt once Yetis annihilated his squad through his own recklessness. Too vain and stubborn to admit fault even after deaths, he pinned the blame on circumstance rather than his failed planning. Watching his squad slaughtered, layered onto that denial, tipped him into madness; he attacked Jinwoo's group merely for surviving, an error that ended his life. Jinwoo judged him a dunce too, a trait he kept as a shadow soldier and once more after his human rebirth.

In the Red Gate Arc, a White Tiger Guild training run named Chul raid leader, and he resented Ahn Sangmin letting E-Rank outsiders join. Once the party crossed the gate, its entrance sealed behind them, stranding the group on a frozen waste and marking it as a red gate. Chul divided the party by rank, taking the strong squad to clear the boss while Jinwoo's weaker group stayed behind. His poor leadership left his own squad starving and frostbitten, so when a pack of Yetis appeared the beasts butchered all but Chul, who fled in terror. Coming upon the weaker hunters alive and well-supplied by Jinwoo and the System, the unstable Chul assumed they had hidden resources and lashed out, until Jinwoo slapped him into a tree and knocked him cold. He woke fully deranged and struck Jinwoo from behind during the Baruka fight, only for Igris to impale him. Cursing Jinwoo with his final breath, he was revived as the shadow soldier Iron.

After the Rulers wielded the Cup of Reincarnation on Jinwoo's behalf, the shadow soldier Iron ceased to exist, and Kim Chul returned to life with no memory of being a hunter, taking up high school track. Meeting Jinwoo again at a track contest, he felt a baffling urge to kneel and confronted him in anger, prompting Jinwoo to hypnotize him into letting go and living better. Decades on in the Ragnarok timeline, Chul reclaimed his powers and joined the Korean Hunters Association instead of the White Tiger Guild, recruited by Woo Jinchul. He grew into a model hunter admired by Han Jaehyuk and was posted as manager at the quiet Yangpyeong branch, placed there secretly by Jinchul to guard Jinwoo's parents. He left the Association in time, then fell in with the Outer God Cult and became a servant of the Itarim. Near Yangpyeong, within the Black Market, he took up the role of their priest, spreading Stardust and Star Pieces. While leading a sermon inside the Outer Gods' temple, he welcomed a supposed demon noble called Vulcan, in truth Sung Suho, boasted of climbing from A-Rank to S-Rank with Star Pieces, and guided Vulcan into the main chapel, a place that proved to be none other than the Cartenon Temple. Sealing the room, he declared that any who defied the Temple's commandments would not be spared. In the ensuing battle Suho was compelled to slay him, raising Chul once more into the shadow ranks.