Solo Leveling Episode 10 Review

Time to Flee the Country

Solo Leveling Episode 10 was a pretty good episode. There was some cool dungeon-clearing action, which is what I’m watching the series for. But, there’s still not nearly enough of that kind of content. The majority of this series is dialogue. And, it’s not interesting enough for that.

Speaking of dialogue, at the start of the episode, Jinchul gives Jinwoo a warning. The S-Rank Hunter Dongsu Hwang is out for blood. Nobody can be sure of what happened to Dongsuk Hwang in the dungeon. But, that doesn’t matter. Dongsu wants revenge simply because his brother died and Jinwoo survived.

So, what’s Jinchul’s recommendation? That Jinwoo takes his family and flees the country. But, I fail to see how this would protect Jinwoo in any way. From what we know, Dongsu isn’t even in Korea right now. And, even if he was, it doesn’t look like fleeing would do Jinwoo any good.

According to Jinchul, S-Rank Hunters are above the law because they’re too strong. If Dongsu murdered Jinwoo, there would be nothing the government could do about it. He’s too powerful (physically) to be arrested. So, governments around the world kind of let S-Rank Hunters do whatever they want.

Now, if Jinwoo fled Korea, how would that protect him? The Korean government can’t keep him safe from Dongsu. So, I doubt any other government could either. What, is he going to flee to the US or some European country? What’s stopping Dongsu from following him?

I’m only bringing this up because I wanted to point out how illogical this suggestion is. The best reason I can come up with for why Jinchul said this is that he doesn’t want it to become his problem. If Dongsu’s going to murder Jinwoo, at least do it out of Jinchul’s jurisdiction.

C-Rank Dungeons and Job-Changing

If this entire episode was about Jinwoo and Jinho clearing dungeons, I would have said it was a good episode. Not just pretty good. Good. This was — by far — the best part of the episode. But, as I already mentioned, there wasn’t enough of it.

Why do I think this content is so good, though? There’s more to it than me thinking an action series should focus on the action. The dungeon content is the most interesting content of the series. Even if we ignore the action portion — the dungeons are more interesting than the real world.

In this episode, in particular, I liked seeing how Jinwoo and Jinho worked together. Jinho’s job was to mine all the materials. And, while he was doing that Jinwoo was protecting him. Then, once Jinho’s job was done, Jinwoo could defeat the boss to close the gate.

Something else I found interesting was that nobody from the strike team tried to interfere. I understand that most of them were happy to get paid for sitting around. But, I’m surprised that Jinah’s friend went along with that. I was sure she’d do something stupid.

She still probably will do something in a later episode. But, I was expecting her to enter one of the gates after Jinwoo and Jinho. Then, since she’s only E-Rank, they’d have to save her. That seemed like such an obvious thing to happen. And, that’s why I’m still predicting that it will.

But, that might not happen in the next episode. Jinwoo unlocked a job-change quest, so he’s taking the day off from clearing dungeons. Does Jinwoo have a current “job” other than Hunter? What do you think his new job is going to be after this quest?

White Tiger Recruitment

Jinwoo and Jinho’s plan to rush a bunch of C-Rank dungeons seems to have backfired, to an extent. Other guilds took notice of their new guild buying up the rights to C-Rank dungeons for high prices. And, that led one of them, the White Tigers, to look into it.

Upon investigating a bit, Ahn Sangmin of the White Tigers realized that something was wrong. Not only is this guild buying these dungeons above market price. But, their strike team is made up entirely of E and D-Rank Hunters. They shouldn’t be strong enough to clear these dungeons.

Ahn then noticed Jinwoo’s name on the strike team roster and things clicked. He’s familiar with Jinwoo because of all the crazy things Jinwoo’s recently survived. And, he suspects that Jinwoo has had a second awakening. So, there’s only one thing to do. Recruit Jinwoo to the White Tiger guild.

As we saw, Jinwoo threatened Ahn for investigating him. He even managed to offload some C-Rank dungeons onto Ahn for way above their value. But, here’s the thing. This doesn’t make Jinwoo look good. It makes Ahn look very, very bad at his job.

Okay, so you could argue that Ahn agreed to Jinwoo’s price because he got cornered. Jinwoo gave him an ultimatum. He had to buy the dungeons at Jinwoo’s price or miss out on all C-Rank dungeons in the near future. However, he should have known from the start that Jinwoo was bluffing.

Apparently, there were a lot of C-Rank dungeons for sale at far below what Jinwoo was asking. So, why did Ahn go into this meeting thinking that Jinwoo’s guild had access to all of them? He believed this before even talking to Jinwoo. Why? Did he never think to check?

Final Thoughts

What do you think of Solo Leveling Episode 10? Do you think fleeing the country would do anything to protect Jinwoo from Dongsu? Were you surprised that Jinah’s friend didn’t enter a dungeon after Jinwoo and Jinho? And, do you think Jinwoo will ever join the White Tiger Guild?

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My review of Episode 11 is available now.