Sung Il-Hwan

A rugged figure, Il-Hwan combined muscle with gray eyes, unkempt black hair, and a touch of stubble; calling on his power or losing his temper set those eyes burning a bright yellow. Despite ten years lost inside the dungeons, he had aged so little that Hwang Dongsoo remarked he looked well short of his real age. As a fugitive he dressed in a frayed brown cloak thrown over a torn white shirt, both hands wrapped in bandages, with loose black pants and matching boots. The man pictured before his disappearance had been far tidier, a brown jacket worn above a plain black undershirt.

Nothing mattered to Il-Hwan more than his family, and he extended zero patience toward anyone who endangered them or blocked his mission. Hwang Dongsoo discovered as much when Il-Hwan reduced him to a bloody wreck for trying to kill Jinwoo over a trivial grudge. Yet for all that ferocity, mercy and selflessness ran just as deep: he stepped in to shield innocents trapped in his battle with Hwang, and let the man walk away alive when a killing blow would have been simple.

Il-Hwan spent his early years as a firefighter, courting and marrying Park Kyung-Hye before they welcomed two cherished children, Jinwoo and Jinah. The arrival of magic beasts pulled him away from firefighting and into Hunter work, where he rose to become one of the country's first S-Rank fighters; no ranking system existed yet, so his strength went officially unacknowledged. A decade before the main story, a raid sealed him inside a dungeon and his family mourned him as dead. Starvation nearly claimed him before the Rulers intervened, gifting him their power and binding him to a single charge: end the Shadow Monarch about to be born. Stranded with no road home, he agreed.

When Ashborn took Jinwoo as his host, the Rulers released Il-Hwan, who emerged inside a dungeon on American ground. A-Rank Hunters there read him as a monster and attacked, yet he batted their blows aside and laid every one of them out. Authorities at the Federal Bureau of Hunters then took him into custody, and because his English was poor and no human had ever surfaced from a dungeon, they feared a magic beast carrying borrowed human memories and summoned Hwang Dongsoo to question him. Hwang's hostility and grudge against Jinwoo wrecked the interrogation; Il-Hwan beat him with ease and the resulting blast flattened Bureau headquarters. Deciding solo work suited him better, he warned Hwang to stay clear of Korea and vanished.

He later baited Sillad to America by leaving traces of his power, but the Monarch's greater strength drove him back, and he slipped from the clash unhurt. Word that his quarry had appeared at a Tokyo S-Rank Gate sent him to Japan, where he learned to his dismay that the Shadow Monarch was his own boy and could not raise a hand against him. As the Rulers warmed to Jinwoo and embraced him as an ally, they swapped Il-Hwan's task to shielding the young man against the Monarchs, which he gladly took on. His mana lingering at Christopher Reed's wrecked home soon cast him as the chief suspect, and a red notice during the International Guild Conference let Jinwoo learn at last that the father he mourned was alive.

Three Monarchs later struck Seoul hunting Jinwoo, and Il-Hwan reached the city to see his son cut down by Rakan after felling Querehsha. When the surviving pair moved in for the kill, Jinwoo's black heart stirred back to life, and Il-Hwan intervened, driving his foot into Rakan and hurling him into Sillad so both tore through buildings. Two against one, he stalled them until Rakan fled, though Sillad's ice storm tore off his left arm and a colossal ice meteor loomed over him and Jinwoo. Beru smashed the meteor as Jinwoo returned from death wielding the Shadow Monarch's full power, and Il-Hwan pulled back. Realizing he had burned through too much strength, his body coming apart, he braced for the end until Jinwoo found him. In his final moments he laid out the truth of the dungeon and the Rulers, held his son close, asked forgiveness for falling short as a father, and broke apart into drifting shards of light.

Once the Cup of Reincarnation spun a new timeline with no magic beasts, Il-Hwan stayed a firefighter and never became a Hunter, providing for his family as before. He recovered his original-timeline memories afterward but had the Rulers strip them away so he could keep an ordinary life. Across Ragnarok, Jinwoo's departure to battle the Itarim revived those memories once more, and as the only one who understood his son's absence, Il-Hwan steadied the family with promises of his return; his apparent detachment, however, drove a wedge between him and his grandson Suho, who mistook it for indifference.

Serving as a Ruler's vessel placed Il-Hwan among the planet's mightiest Hunters, arguably second only to Jinwoo, though a body unfit for the borrowed power failed him after he pushed too hard against Sillad and Rakan. The light novel shows him brushing off the Outer Gods' pull on his body where other National Level Hunters could not, hinting at mana reserves vast even before he became a vessel. Through immense strength he mauled Hwang Dongsoo badly enough to demand months of recovery, booted Rakan across several buildings, and punched a dagger up through his jaw. His immense speed allowed simultaneous dodging and counters against Sillad and Rakan and deflection of Sillad's icicle volleys. Rounding him out were Stealth for slipping from sight both physically and magically, Ruler's Authority for telekinesis, and Spiritual Body Manifestation.