Episode 3: It's Like a Game

Jinwoo comes to in a hospital bed, his body restored and his severed left leg whole, half-believing the temple was just a dream. Inspectors Woo Jinchul and Kang Taeshik arrive to say he lay unconscious three days, found alone, with no trace of the statues his fellow survivors had described. They wonder whether a second awakening might have struck, something that could raise his class from E-rank toward A or even S, and have him touch a mana meter. Hopeful, Jinwoo asks his new rank, only for the device to read a flat 10. On their way out Taeshik mutters that even E-ranks usually pass 70, leaving him barely a civilian. Puzzled that no one mentioned a System message, Jinwoo remembers being rescued earlier by the quest known as Courage of the Weak.

Jinah bursts in, sick with worry, scolding him to take care and even threatening to leave school for work so he can quit hunting. Haunted by how his self-sacrifice nearly orphaned her, Jinwoo discreetly tests whether the message hovering in front of him registers for her too. Once he confirms only he can see it, he casually asks how to clear unread notifications, likening it to a game, and she suggests an inbox before slipping out to meet Song-Yi.

By himself, Jinwoo digs into the System's strange prompts, which describe its role in a player's growth and threaten penalties for ignoring it. A daily quest demands 100 push-ups, sit-ups, and squats plus a 10km run, each rep precisely counted. Doubting its reality, he waves it off and lies down. Driving back, Jinchul phones Go Gunhee to flag a likely error in the assessment; Gunhee counts their luck in dodging a dungeon break and agrees to file the matter as a special case for later study.

At the Hunters Guild, Choi Jong-In assigns the upcoming B-rank raid to Cha Hae-In. Doubting her leadership, she is told the mission mainly tests new recruits and that her presence alone will help them. Choi reflects that his guild ranks among Korea's top five yet lacks weight abroad, stressing collective growth. Out in the city, residents grumble as a gate suddenly tears open across a road, irritated that no hunters have arrived.

Sound asleep and blind to the dismissed quest's clock, Jinwoo is shaken awake by a tremor he mistakes for a quake, only to land in a sprawling desert penalty zone, ordered to last four hours while a giant centipede stalks him. As nurses notice his empty room and begin searching, he scrapes through the chase and is later found drained. The following day he tells his sister he is heading out and leaves in a tracksuit.

Lee Joohee, still rattled by the Double Dungeon, refuses a raid call but hears Jinwoo has woken and finds him jogging outside under the nurses' watch. Clearing more quests, he begins understanding the rewards, then earns a special prize: a key to an instance dungeon at Hapjeong Subway Station. A broadcast reports the Hunters Guild will take the road gate. A visit to his mother Park Kyung-Hye, comatose in her bed, stirs memories of her Eternal Sleep diagnosis, his early construction days, his awakening, and the hunters who once pushed him aside and denied him reward shares for his weakness. He dumps all his points into Strength.

Finally resolved, Jinwoo slots the key into a subway door, triggers the dungeon, and finds the exit gone, sealed in a separate dimension. Roaming an abandoned hallway, he meets a pair of goblins. With no healer and frozen by dread, he confronts his bleak odds, and as he pauses to catch his breath, a steel-fanged raikan surges out behind him, closing in at frightening speed.

This episode opens the first talk of second awakenings, the rare event that lets a hunter break past their current rank. It brings in Woo Jinchul and Kang Taeshik and unveils the System's daily quests along with its penalty zones. Jinwoo also makes his debut descent into an instance dungeon. He learns the System shows only to him, ignores his first daily quest and pays for it with a penalty zone, and channels every new ability point into Strength before walking through the Hapjeong key door.

Named It's Like a Game, this episode covers Chapters 11 through 13 and runs from the Reawakening Arc into the Instant Dungeon Arc. The script came from Shingo Irie with Takayuki Kikuchi directing at A-1 Pictures; it aired January 20th, 2024 in Japan and February 3rd, 2024 in English. A trivia note records that in the source comic an unnamed man, not Kang Taeshik, joined Woo Jinchul at the hospital to verify the reawakening. Fresh items here include The Preparation To Become Powerful and Survival, plus the instance dungeon key.