A New Family Member! # 2
It was still the small hours of dawn, before the nymphs had even woken.
Though summer mornings came early in this neighborhood, the whole village stirred not to the sunrise but to a resonant hoo-hoo of owl song. Four o'clock in the morning. Oinoi, who normally slept from ten at night until seven in the morning, blinked awake at the cry echoing through the streets.
Shff, shff—
Rubbing her sleepy eyes, Oinoi shuffled out to the living room in her pajamas, and there she spotted Kalinoi, already settled in the yard, giving her wings a great flap-flap.
"The owl of Goddess Athena cries only at night, but the Tiger Owl, it seems, is capable of weeping even in the morning…!"
And so another day's morning arrived, in that particular fashion.
"What kind of owl is that big?"
"It's basically a fighter jet. A fighter jet."
Today, the village elders came by one after another to stand in front of the yard and gawk at Kalinoi. Thanks to the otherworldly menagerie of Dog-Squirrels, Honey Ants, and Ghost Spiders, the locals' expectations had been steadily climbing, and even to those jaded eyes, the sheer presence of a Tiger Owl this enormous must have been something to behold.
The professor—the woman who could fairly be called both the village head and doctor of this Dog-Squirrel Pallet Town—watched the Tiger Owl from a respectful distance and spoke up.
"Got some leftover meat if you want it? Back when I was a kid, we still had owls like this living around here. They'd snatch a whole cat right up in their talons and just fly off with it!"
The professor handed over a black plastic bag packed full of meat. It was raw pork belly, and honestly, it looked like it would grill up nicely.
Shff—
I approached the Tiger Owl Kalinoi slowly and held out a plate of the pork belly.
━…….
Kalinoi made no sound at all—just stared at the plate. According to Oinoi, the surest way to win an owl's trust was to offer it meat, or so she'd said. So I offered. And Kalinoi, without so much as a glance, wrenched her head clean away.
Watching this display, the professor remarked, "Quite the little snob, aren't you. If she hasn't eaten since yesterday she must be starving. Hmm, maybe she'd go for this, though? I've got some premium Korean beef someone gave me recently—"
It was the fabled 1++ marbled grade, the finest cut among Korean beef.
The moment it came out and hit the barbecue grill set up outside, the Tiger Owl's head snapped toward us with a sharp whip. She waddled over on her two legs, ate only the cooked meat off the plate, then waddled right back to reopen the distance between us.
Taking this all in, the professor—village head, wildlife doctor of Pallet Town, and academic all at once—delivered her verdict. "That is a very refined palate. If it isn't expensive, top-quality meat, she won't even look at it. Raw meat's out of the question too, I'd wager."
He had a point.
For all her elegant bearing, Kalinoi was a Tiger Owl with elegant, aristocratic tastes to match. Well—she wasn't really an owl to begin with; she was a nymph, so it only followed. Presumably even back when her body was whole and sound, she'd been a picky, high-class diner.
"And here Oinoi and I are still making do with cereal for breakfast."
Hmm. Could I expense her food bill somehow? Who would I even bill it to? Seo Yerim? Cha Yura? No idea!
Anyway.
Telos, arriving bright and early, built Kalinoi a private residence of her own on the rooftop of the well house—a plush, luxurious abode of downy feathers spread over a red carpet, soft as a cloud. Ahn Youngeun, the supervising manager of the construction and Seo Yerim's secretary, gazed up at Kalinoi and gushed.
"She is one absolutely enormous owl! She used to be a nymph, right? Then does she understand what I'm saying? Can I pet her? Wow, I've genuinely never seen an owl this big in my life!"
Kalinoi proved popular, perhaps because of her dignified figure and her quiet, demure streak. That said, being a ferocious bird of prey, no one dared touch her carelessly—and even when someone did reach out a hand, she'd simply spread her wings and flap-flap away some ten meters, so getting close wasn't easy in the first place.
Time slipped by, and by around lunchtime—
Vrrrooom.
An old truck slid into the neighborhood and parked in front of our yard. Out climbed Coris and Lee Jina.
"This Coris has arrived, that is what has happened…! This Coris declares that this slushy, packed full of icy little crystals, is thoroughly delicious…! This Coris wishes to share some with Kalinoi as well…!"
Coris raised the fruit-packed slushy high above her head with both hands toward the owl perched on the rooftop. Beside her, Lee Jina—dressed light in a thin cotton tee and jeans—craned her neck up at the rooftop and whistled.
"I heard the gist from Coris, but seeing it in person? The presence is no joke. If you graded it like a monster, it'd be at least A-rank, right?"
Jina wasn't wrong.
Even among the otherworldly beasts I'd met, the Tiger Owl Kalinoi was on the especially powerful end of the spectrum. Keongkeongi, Kwang-kwangi, and Ang-ang-i would all have a hard time going up against her.
"If you tame that thing, wouldn't she be your ultimate move, Haildo? Bring her along to rifts and fight alongside her—that'd be seriously incredible. Whoa—."
Jina couldn't hold back her awe at the sight of such a magnificent creature. I murmured to her, "I do want to get close to her, sure, but dragging her off to fight in rifts feels a bit cruel, doesn't it? It's not like she chose to become this."
"You think? C'mon, be honest—you've imagined it too."
She had me there.
I had imagined it—storming into a T-rank rift, or even a B-to-A-rank one, alongside the Tiger Owl Kalinoi. It would draw everyone's eyes without fail. My nickname would inevitably change from "Dog-Squirrel Launcher Haildo" to "Tiger Owl's Perch Haildo."
Sliiip—
Lee Jina narrowed her long, slitted eyes, gazing up at the rooftop. "Taming her won't be easy, though. I can feel fear. Strong wariness too, and anger. All these emotions are swirling around inside that Tiger Owl."
Jina, whose yellow hair flashed as loud as a delinquent's, had a constitution unusually sensitive to the emotions of living things. It came from the perception-type mana she possessed. She read the Tiger Owl's state with pinpoint speed and accuracy, then reached her conclusion: taming would be difficult.
Which was precisely why I'd called her here.
"You know those candies you gave me? Traffic Light Candies. I tamed Kwang-kwangi with one of the yellow ones."
━Kwang-kwang…!
Pat—
Hearing her name called, apparently, Kwang-kwangi—who had been napping in the shade of the golden apple tree—stirred upright, then crawled up from my leg into my palm.
━Hio-ong…!
"Kwang-kwangi here was originally wary of people too, scared of them, even. But she got tamed right away after eating your candy. Couldn't it work on Kalinoi too?"
"It's not some miracle cure, okay? The 'weird candies' I make don't create emotions—they amplify the ones that are already there. Sure, they can raise affinity, but—"
Chatter, chatter—
Jina explained exactly how her candies worked. The candy didn't make something from nothing, she said; it made much from something.
"So what you're saying is, the candy works best on animals that already feel some fondness toward me—it deepens what's there. You can't suddenly turn a hostile creature friendly?"
"Right. Exactly. Same goes for the other colors. Blue makes a calm heart even calmer, and red cranks up whatever fighting spirit's already there."
So that was how it worked.
Now that I'd heard it, it all made sense. "Kwang-kwangi, so you wanted to be friends with me from the very beginning, huh. That's why the yellow candy brought you even closer to me."
Shff, shff—
I stroked Kwang-kwangi's back with my finger.
━Hio-ong…!
Kwang-kwangi seemed delighted, and began to hum a little tune to herself. Watching this, Jina smirked—equal parts amazed and dumbfounded. "A spider, singing. What won't I see in this life. Honestly though, even without the candy, you'd probably win that owl over eventually all on your own, Haildo. Might take a while, is all."
Probably so.
And I intended to keep working at it, day after day.
Meanwhile, it seemed Oinoi and Coris had been trying their own approaches for Kalinoi's sake.
Shff—
Oinoi came out into the yard with her hands full of garlic.
"Kalinoi, you must eat the garlic…! It is plainly certain that after one hundred days of garlic, you shall be able to return to human form…!"
"This Coris has gathered mugwort, that is what she has done…!"
The nymphs climbed all the way up to the rooftop and held garlic and mugwort out to the owl's beak. Naturally, the owl cared little for garlic and mugwort, and simply swept the nymphs aside with a lazy whoosh of her wing.
Lee Jina, watching the whole spectacle, asked, "Wait—you're feeding her garlic and mugwort?"
"You know the story of Ungnyeo, right? Oinoi and the nymphs seem to believe that, like the bear-woman who became human, the Tiger Owl will turn back into a person if she eats garlic and mugwort long enough."
I had no idea whether it would actually work. But I hoped it would.
At that, Jina gave a thoughtful hmm. "Here's just something I heard through the grapevine. There's an Anomaly Rift someone I know found, and apparently a strange plant grows inside it. Feed it to the owl, and it might loosen up her feelings a little."
"Yeah?"
Talk of the special vegetation that grew inside rifts was always fascinating to me. All manner of plants and creatures carried all manner of effects.
"So which rift is it, where do you have to go to get in? What rank is it?"
"It's about C-rank, but supposedly it's a pain in a lot of ways. So anyway—I was thinking of entering that rift by tomorrow or so? I wanted to get some gear fitted before then, actually. Whaddya say—."
Scratch, scratch.
Jina scratched her cheek as if a mosquito had bitten the bridge of her nose.
The Awakener Shop.
Just as the name promised, it was a place that sold everything an Awakener could conceivably use. The huge multi-level complex stood in Myeongdong, Seoul, and before Oinoi had drifted into my life, I'd had a long relationship with the place—every won I earned went straight back into its registers. Back then, as a perm-Rank D hunter, my motto was something like, If my rank won't rise, at least my gear will, and I'd bought mountains of equipment accordingly.
"Wow, this is no joke."
Jina marveled. The sprawling mega-complex, packed end to end with every kind of merchandise, had a genuinely overwhelming quality to it. From the look of her, this was Jina's first time in the Awakener Shop.
"It goes from the budget stalls over there all the way up to the luxury wing where A-ranks and S-ranks do their shopping. See that? Seo Yerim's face plastered huge across the billboard? That's the luxury wing."
"Yeah, that place has nothing to do with the likes of us."
True enough. That was a wing reserved for at minimum A-rank Awakeners. I'd heard a single pair of Superconductor Leather Gloves went for several billion won.
"So—what are you buying, and on what budget?"
I asked my novice-shopping companion. You had to decide what you were after before you could shop your budget well. Plan properly, and nothing goes sideways and your success rate climbs. Viewed that way, shopping and conquering a rift had a surprising amount in common.
"Me? I was planning to look for a new weapon first. Melee, ideally. A melee weapon lets you put your 'feelings' into every swing, in all sorts of ways."
I didn't fully grasp what she meant by swinging a weapon with your feelings loaded into it, but for buying fine weapons, I knew exactly the right place. As it happened, I was in the market to welcome a new 'family member' myself.
The shop we headed for sat in the basement level of the complex—a place thick with the smells of oil, gunpowder, and scorched metal. A woman with an eyepatch over one eye greeted us.
"Yo, Haildo. Still not dead, huh. Limbs look fully intact too. How many years has it been since you even showed your face at a 1st-Gen class reunion?"
The woman in the military cap had hands and legs that rattled noisily with every movement, each clamped in clanking mechanical assemblies—closer to cyborg than human. As Jina's slitted eyes widened at this astonishing specimen, I made the quick introductions.
"This is Kim Dan, my classmate from my 1st-Gen academy days. And this is Lee Jina, my C-rank cohort."
"Nice to meet you. It's Kim Dan—'Dan' as in the character for forge."
Chunk—
Kim Dan thrust her mechanical arm forward. As Jina awkwardly took the offered hand, I got straight to business.
"Give Jina here a Weapon Aptitude Test. And I'm thinking of adopting a new firearm into the family. A shotgun, for starters—."
Firearms.
My encounter with Cassie had left me the wound of heartbreak—and, at the same time, room to grow further. The way Cassie had said a shotgun suited me, it seemed, hadn't been an offhand remark after all.
Jina, though, tilted her head in puzzlement. "Weapon Aptitude Test? What's that?"