The morning after he found out that I had become a new S-rank Hunter, Jeong Dajeong thrust his phone toward me with dark circles under his eyes. “There actually are ways to refuse mandatory service: refusal for religious reasons, proving you have a physical defect, or proving there’s a legitimate personal reason you can’t serve. I got exempted from the military, so why wouldn’t you be able to?”
“You were exempt because you were an orphan and had family to support. I don’t have anyone I need to support.”
“Oh, then I’ll quit my job and be unemployed! Then wouldn’t you have to support me?”
“Why would I support a perfectly healthy man in his mid-twenties? Go to work. Aren’t you heading in?”
“Is going to work really the problem right now?!”
Up until the day before yesterday he’d been saying all sorts of things about wanting to quit his job, and now he was spouting nonsense like this.
I let out a deep sigh. Since yesterday, Jeong Dajeong had been like this nonstop. “The regular military and Hunters are different. You think the government would pass up the chance to use an S-rank Hunter for free? And for Hunters, the only time you can refuse mandatory service is if there was an error in the assessment.”
“Yeah, but it could be an error! How are you an S-rank Hunter?!” Jeong Dajeong screamed, his face shadowed by deep dark circles. “You always got an F on your PE performance evaluations!”
“Didn’t you watch the video? I took down that ant monster in one hit—”
“Then it must be edited! No—no, even if it isn’t, just insist it’s edited! Ask the lady boss to commit perjury or something!”
“Enough.” I kicked Jeong Dajeong’s back repeatedly, starting first thing in the morning. “Stop thinking about useless stuff and just go to work. Go.”
“At a time like this, is work really the issue?!”
“Then what is the issue?”
“My little sister might be in danger of dying, and you’re asking if work matters?!”
I blinked. “Yesterday you said the person who became an S-rank Hunter was lucky.”
“Ah, I misspoke. I must’ve been out of my mind. Who would want to push someone into mortal danger just to make money?! Especially family!”
There are plenty of people like that. Well, Jeong Dajeong isn’t one of them. If he were, my new life would’ve been much easier.
I kicked him harder and shoved him out through the front door. “Just go to work already.”
“Stay home today, okay? I’ll take a half day and come back!”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Bang! The old metal front door finally slammed shut.
I let out a sigh. He’d stayed up all night searching for cases of people refusing Hunter mandatory service, and the dark circles under his eyes made me worry he’d get chewed out by his boss at work. Still, it was a relief he hadn’t insisted on taking the day off. After all, I actually had quite a lot to do today myself.
First of all, the Hunter Management Agency had contacted me yesterday. Since my potential ability had been judged as S-rank in the test, I now had an obligation to serve as a Hunter, and they told me to come to the Central Administration Office for proper registration. They offered to send a car if I didn’t have transportation, but I declined. The Central Administration Office was in Gwanghwamun, and it wasn’t difficult to get there by public transit.
Then, unexpectedly, someone volunteered to come pick me up.
…Well, maybe it wasn’t that unexpected after all. I only realized why he’d sent me a text saying we’d meet tomorrow after he contacted me again.
“Hi, Daon.”
At the appointed time, there was a knock at the front door.
It was Yu Hanul. Standing in front of the entrance to the crumbling multi-family house, his shoulders stuck out above the wall, he looked like a toy soldier standing alone atop a ruined castle. His white hair glimmered under the sunlight. To think that the hero who had once cut off my head was now waiting in front of my house to give me a ride.
To me, it was a rather dazzling sight.
“Aren’t you bringing a car?”
“Yeah, it’s parked down the alley. Are you feeling okay? You look fine, but I was worried because the injuries were pretty bad.”
“When I went to the Hunter-exclusive ER, they poured potions on me right away.”
“Injuries don’t always mean just physical ones. After a first dungeon clear, psychological aftereffects often linger for a long time. And in your case, one arm was almost completely burned, and you had bruises all over your body, plus wounds from poison.”
“When you put it that way, it does sound pretty serious.”
Well, if I really had been a minor with no combat experience, I probably would’ve been bedridden for a month. Physical pain definitely leaves a shock on the mind as well.
“Yeah, it was serious. Serious enough that even a stranger like me was worried.”
“Enough to keep texting me even when I didn’t reply?”
“Well, there might be certain reasons why my messages could feel like a burden?”
“Certain reasons?”
“Because I’m too famous, or too handsome… hmm, I know it’s not the latter, so could you not glare at me like that?”
So he knew I felt burdened, and he still even made plans to pick me up? That, in its own way, was surprising.
Yu Hanul laughed awkwardly and scratched his cheek. “The Hunter Management Agency is… how should I put it. The Central Office, especially, has a pretty oppressive atmosphere. I’ve been a Hunter since I was young, so when I see someone in that kind of situation, I feel like helping out.”
Hearing that from a man who’d been a hero in his previous life, I tilted my head. “Are you a sucker?” A person who blindly gives others the kindness they once wanted for themselves, how has someone like that not gone extinct in modern society?
“I don’t think I’m a sucker… haha.”
“Don’t laugh like that. I’ll get attached.”
“Isn’t getting attached a good thing?”
No. From a demon’s perspective, there’s nothing more useless than attachment. Just look at me. I’d spent nineteen years seeing his face, and now here I was obsessing over Jeong Dajeong because of it.
If it turns out Yu Hanul is in league with the ones who attacked me, then there really won’t be a single person in this world I can trust.
Either way, I couldn’t let my guard down. Even if he had nothing to do with the enemy targeting me now, once he learned my true nature, he might decide that for the sake of more people, it would be better to eliminate me quickly.
Just like someone had done once in my previous life.
“The car’s parked below. Let’s go.”
Despite probably being one of the highest earners in the country right now, the car Yu Hanul had brought was an ordinary, almost laughably plain compact car, painted a bright color that road bullies would likely look down on. The windows, however, were heavily tinted.
When I asked why he’d chosen a car like this, Yu Hanul smiled as he took the wheel. “This is really a secret.”
“I like secrets.”
“Hmm, then I’ll tell you.” He whispered in a quiet, low voice. It made my ear itch, “When you take a brightly colored compact car like this out on the road, people pick fights constantly. Even if you keep to the speed limit, they honk. If you obey traffic signals, they honk. If you let someone go first when merging, they roll down their windows and shout abuse even when it’s clearly their fault. They all do the same things. If it gets worse, they get out of their cars and pound on your window, telling you to get out.”
“And then?”
“What do you think their faces look like when I get out?”
They’d think they were screwed.
Just looking at Yu Hanul as a person, he had to be well over 190 centimeters tall, with a build so large that even his main weapon, a longsword, would look small in his hands. Even an ordinary man with that physique getting out of a car would make people’s guts shrink, and this was Yu Hanul. Was there a single person in Korea who didn’t know his face? A smile naturally spread across my lips. Just imagining it was fun.
They’d assumed someone weaker than themselves was driving and tried to threaten them physically, only for the person who stepped out to be the strongest Hunter in the country.
You’ve got a pretty interesting hobby, Yu Hanul.
With my heart pounding, I asked, “So what do you do after that?”
“I either get an apology, or I handle it by the book.”
All the anticipation I’d built up fizzled out. I sighed and slumped back into the seat. “That’s boring.”
As a dopamine-soaked modern human and a demon in my previous life, I’d hoped for something more entertaining, but it seemed that wasn’t the case.
Yu Hanul laughed sheepishly. “Well, at least people who meet me once probably won’t pick fights with compact cars on the road after that, right?”
“They might take it out on a different compact car instead. If they were the kind of people who could fix their temper over something like that, they wouldn’t have acted that way in the first place.”
Humans, as animals, naturally act intimidating when they judge the other party to be weaker than themselves. No matter how impressive an experience may be, it’s hard to change innate nature with a single short-term encounter. And if the experience is being cowed by a stronger person, they might become psychologically intimidated around similar targets, but genuinely reforming them is even harder. Humans aren’t machines you can just fix.
“Is that so? I’d like to think otherwise.” Yu Hanul didn’t explicitly agree or disagree with what I said, just let out a soft chuckle.
I found his reaction rather interesting.
Usually, when I say things like that, most people judge the current “Jeong Daon” by appearances and brush it off as edgy teenage nonsense, or they scold me with something like, “How dare you talk back to an adult.” Yu Hanul did neither.
Or perhaps he was simply ignoring the unfamiliar and impertinent minor he’d met the other day, in the form of what one might call respect.
Still… that does make him something of a rare breed.
For a man who has achieved this level of social and material success, it’s genuinely difficult not to be arrogant. That’s especially true in a society like Korea.
It’s not for nothing that people online go on about Yu Hanul’s “god-tier personality” and the like. A young man who’s over 190 centimeters tall, well built, and has a gentle disposition, one almost wonders if such a person can even exist.
Of course, calling his temperament “gentle” doesn’t quite fit someone who’s crushed hundreds of monsters, but still.
“Once you register as a Hunter, you’ll have to undergo training. Come to think of it, Daon, are you aiming to become a mage?”
“Probably. Look at this arm. Do you think I can wield a sword?”
When I raised my soft, boneless arm that had not a trace of muscle, Yu Hanul smiled with an awkward expression. “Well, that’s because you haven’t trained yet. Still, I’ve seen your combat footage, so I know you’ve got genius-level talent for magic. Even so, it’s a bit of a shame.”
“A shame? What is?”
“I was hoping you might come over to the physical combat side with me. Of course, if you weren’t in the magic category, that would be even more surprising. With talent like that, it’s only natural.”
I narrowed my eyes slightly and glanced at Yu Hanul’s profile. Naturally, by now he would have already seen the video of me that had spread all over the internet.
Genius-level talent…
Was that really something that could be summed up that lightly?
An ordinary person might not notice, but any fellow Hunter who saw it would have no choice but to realize that that magic was beyond the level of mere “genius.” Even if the monsters were low-tier, magic with enough firepower to utterly overwhelm them like that was rare. Some knowledge isn’t grasped innately but acquired through experience and time. The magic I’d devised was one such thing.
Of course, since Yu Hanul was a swordsman, he might not know much about mages… but even so, he should at least know that what he saw wasn’t something possible within the bounds of common sense. And yet, he didn’t press the issue.
I thought he’d at least point out that something was suspicious, even if he didn’t turn hostile right away.
That was why I’d assumed Yu Hanul had deliberately come to pick me up. When he rescued me, I’d been so battered that he couldn’t suspect anything. But after seeing footage of me using magic, it seemed only natural that he would harbor doubts about me. Honestly, what he was doing for me felt excessive to be called ordinary kindness, at least, far too much to bestow on a girl he’d only met for the first time the day before yesterday. I thought he was approaching me because he suspected something…
But as if mocking my suspicion, Yu Hanul continued speaking in a carefree tone, as though he’d discovered some remarkable junior. “Either way, Daon, I think you’ll do well even if you become a mage instead of a swordsman.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Huh? Isn’t it obvious? No matter how much training they get, some people can’t overcome their fear when they face a monster and end up pushing others into danger so they can run away. But you put the weak first even when others were ignoring the elderly and infirm, and you held out until you’d exhausted every last bit of your mana just to protect civilians. People like that are rare.”
…It’s definitely something I did, but hearing it put that way makes my skin crawl. If I could, I’d argue that I was forced into it by the system. Just imagining how the demons who know me would laugh if they heard this is enough. I especially never want Lilith to find out.
When I made no effort to hide my displeasure, Yu Hanul smiled. “Of course, that wasn’t appropriate behavior for a Hunter who’s just awakened. If I’d been even a little later, you’d be dead. You always have to put your own life first. That’s reality. An S-rank Hunter is treated as a more valuable resource than ordinary civilians, after all.”
“Are you praising me, or are you trying to scold me for doing something stupid?”
“I’m saying you seem to have the most important talent a Hunter can be born with.”
As I listened, I found myself genuinely curious. What did Yu Hanul, one of the top Hunters in Korea, consider to be the most important talent for a Hunter?
“What is it? The talent to survive?”
“No. Something more important than survival.”
“Is there anything more important to a human than survival?”
“For a Hunter, there is.” Yu Hanul said it almost like a song, “A keen sense of reality, and a moral compass that runs counter to it.”
In the end, it meant having the courage to charge forward even knowing it might lead to death.
How troublesome. I clicked my tongue.
Yu Hanul—this guy lives a pretty hard life too. People like that tend to die young.
“Our ways of thinking are too different to keep riding in the same car. Should I get out here?”
“It’s actually about time to get off. We’re almost there.”
Yu Hanul parked in a compact-car-only space and spoke without wiping the smile from his face. “Come on. Let’s go.”