Huntcation
President Yu Myeonghak wore the face of a man who had just bitten into a mouthful of shit.
"Not a single hunter said they'd come back to Korea?"
"No, sir."
At the Chief of Civil Affairs' report, the President let out a hollow laugh.
"Not even one?"
"We tracked down nearly every one of the three hundred hunters on record with the Ministry of National Defense and begged them to work for Korea one more time. Not a single person said they would stay."
Not one. They had promised economic returns and support packages that would rival Stray Dog's own, and still not a single hunter was willing to remain.
"Did you try the families?"
"We sent people to immediate relatives and extended family alike. Still no one willing to stay. Quite a few family fights broke out during the persuasion process. The resentment toward Korea runs that deep."
"Lee Yeonghak!! That bastard poisoned the well! How can there not be a single person willing to stay in their own country?!"
The President exploded, but there was still no way to stop the ones who wanted to leave. After a long stretch of fretting and grinding his teeth, he looked at the Chief of Civil Affairs.
"Is there no other option? What does the newly appointed Minister of National Defense have to say? Has he come up with any kind of plan?"
"He did carefully float the idea of taking the hunters' families hostage, the way China does."
Yu Myeonghak shook his head at that.
"Do you not remember the public opinion when we briefly detained hunter families during the Suwon Rift incident? We can't go any further than that. And if we want to persuade the United States, we need a hunter system that can sustain itself long-term — not coercive measures! Within two months!"
"What about conscripting female hunters? As Your Excellency knows, there are plenty of awakeners on the women's side as well."
Yu Myeonghak let out a long, heavy sigh.
"Female awakeners are far too low-level. In nearly ten years, not a single female hunter was ever deployed to the field for a raid. The few who did participate mostly took part in siege-style operations."
"That's true. Most of them are hovering around Level 100."
"The highest levels are in the four-to-five-hundred range. You gather people like that and send them out — you think they can hold the line?"
For ten years — back when monster raids inside Eldorado yielded no profit of any kind — women had aggressively avoided a job that offered them nothing in return while demanding they risk their lives. As a result, there was no one among the female awakeners who could be called high-level.
"But if we simply fill the numbers and send them, wouldn't that at least let us secure Daejeon and the gate, Your Excellency?"
President Yu Myeonghak carefully raised his head and looked at the Chief. It was true that there were no skilled female awakeners. True — but wasn't the fire currently burning on their feet more urgent?
Two months.
Within two months, they needed to fill a hundred awakeners and send them in order to reclaim Daejeon and the gate. And Kim Seongho had never specified whether those hundred awakeners had to be men or women, high-level or low.
So why not gather even substandard female awakeners, send them over, get Daejeon back first — and then, step by step, re-conscript or persuade male awakeners to work for Korea and build a proper system?
Yu Myeonghak began to think it through.
"Women's groups and civic organizations will raise hell. The Minister of Gender Equality will go berserk."
"Of course they will. But looking at the long-term gains, it's a hurdle we have to clear."
"Right. And if we spin the media so it looks like women are replacing men in a gate industry men have been monopolizing, we might actually get a surprising amount of support."
"And since Stray Dog is providing fire support, if we emphasize that it won't be that dangerous, the effect will be even better."
After that, the two men fell into a stretch of silence.
This is insane.
This is completely insane.
Both of them knew full well how abysmal Korean female hunters were. Both of them knew those women had no capacity to hold a stronghold in the first place. And yet the conviction that putting out the fire on their feet came first filled both their heads completely.
They had to reclaim Daejeon and the gate — absurdly lost because of the Suwon Rift incident — if they were going to sketch any future for the Republic of Korea. Room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductors, advances in medical technology across the board — the utility of Elixir only grew by the day.
They could not sit there sucking their thumbs while other nations advanced.
"Put out a recruitment notice for female awakeners. Send people to the women who were awakeners among the female military personnel as well. Tell them we'll give women support packages no less generous than the men's."
"Of course, sir."
"And keep working on the male hunters. Focus on high-level, skilled veterans who already mustered out. Keep feeding the press how critical hunters are. No means off the table, you hear me? Female hunters won't last long anyway. We need to recruit men as fast as possible before those women collapse."
"Of course, sir. Leave it to me. I'll take a more aggressive approach to persuasion."
The moment the Chief of Civil Affairs left the office, Yu Myeonghak lit a cigarette.
"Goddamn it."
It was a choice with no alternative.
But the anxiety coiling in his gut was equally unavoidable.
"One month. No… just hold out for a week. I'll bring in proper male hunters in that time."
Yu Myeonghak prayed.
Please, let a hundred female hunters assemble.
And please, let those female hunters hold on — even for a little while.
The women were accumulating grievances.
The core of the complaint was that male hunters were being showered with excessive support. The solutions the women put forward came in three flavors.
Option one: just let the women do it too.
Option two: just conscript them again like the old days and work the hunters like draft animals.
Option three: female recruitment was fine, but maybe ease the requirements a little.
Those were the three.
In any case, the resentment over men alone getting the good deal was steadily building — when the news broke.
The presidential press conference announcing female hunter recruitment went public. Women's opinions on it began to split.
One camp cheered them on to join.
And then—
There were the worried ones, too.
But as time passed, the view that they should go ahead and participate steadily became the mainstream.
Being a hunter — isn't that doable? That opinion steadily became the dominant current.
And in fairness, they had every reason not to know.
How many hunter deaths had been covered up.
That even the cases which did surface only flared briefly before dying out, so no one ever learned the real truth of what had happened.
And that they simply did not want to watch women alone get left behind in this gate-industry era the news kept shouting about — all of it drove them to raise their voices and say they should try being hunters.
If anyone bothered to dig even a little—
—how dangerous the work actually was.
—how thoroughly unqualified they themselves were.
—that Stray Dog would not, in fact, handle everything for them. All of this was discoverable. But they made no effort to dig into any of it.
To them, the herd's opinion mattered more than common sense. On subjects they had never cared about, their ignorance was staggering. And in real time, they were rebuilding the very prejudice — women are incompetent — that countless capable women had spent blood and sweat shattering in their own fields.
Even web-novel villains written this stupid and this ignorant would get the author flamed for authorial convenience. But sometimes reality left fiction in the dust. These women sincerely began to believe that hunter work was a huntcation, and that they could handle it with ease.
And setting everything else aside, there was also the simple fact that they could not stand watching men alone make bank and thrive.
Once the majority opinion in female-dominated communities flowed that way, any sensible argument was naturally buried. The consensus that women should become hunters swelled among women themselves.
And the first thing the women did with that swelling consensus was this:
They demanded that the hunter recruitment standards be lowered to fit women.
And a few days later—
Signatures: 100,000+
A petition went up on the Blue House website.
It crossed a hundred thousand signatures in no time at all.