F-Class Hunter Seo Jin-ho (1)
I'm a hunter by trade.
When people hear the word hunter, they tend to picture superhumans gifted with monstrous strength or uncanny abilities, striking heroic poses as they rescue imperiled citizens from rampaging monsters and villains—
Regrettably, my abilities sat quite far removed from that flattering image.
If you expected me to embody the heroic hunter that the children of this era idolize and dream of becoming, then I must apologize in advance for failing to live up to it.
But—
even someone like me, when I look back on the day I first awakened as a hunter, remembers being as overjoyed as any awakened ever was, like I'd been handed the whole world.
I lost my father in early childhood, and by the time I was old enough to know better, my mother's illness had deepened until she could no longer rise from her sickbed.
Suddenly the head of a household, I threw myself into the job market the moment I entered my final year of high school.
Then came a certain day when I was twenty-two—specifically, a night shift at the factory.
I was hanging off the press machine, grinding through the same simple motion for the umpteenth time, when a pure white light flashed out of nowhere and the world before my eyes blazed bright.
Huh?! What the—?
When I pried open the eyes I'd squeezed shut, everything around me looked sharper and richer, as if someone had cranked up a monitor's resolution.
Huh?
Vitality surged through my whole body, and all five senses felt keener than ever. My vision opened up, my senses stood on end, and it felt as though my understanding of every last thing in the world had deepened.
What on earth is happening to me?
Confronted with an experience unlike anything in my life, I did what anyone would do and searched it on my phone.
According to the results, my symptoms appeared to be connected to hunter awakening.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump. My heart pounded fast.
Is this for real?
My factory wages left nothing once my mother's hospital bills were paid, so I had always lived under the constant weight of poverty.
"So the day has finally come when even a rat hole gets its share of sunlight!"
In a weary life that felt like trudging through a tunnel with no end in sight, hunter awakening was a single beam of light cast down before me.
Dawn had broken at last.
The moment my shift ended, I crammed my work clothes into my locker, bolted to the factory entrance, and hailed a taxi—I was headed straight for the Hunter Association to get my rank assessed.
"Heh heh."
I couldn't hold back the laughter leaking out of me in the moving cab. The driver eyed me through the rearview mirror like I was a lunatic, but I couldn't have cared less.
The world beyond the window looked beautiful, as if someone had slapped a filter of euphoria over it. Rose-tinted happiness seemed to shimmer like heat haze, so I reached out a hand and mimed snatching it from the air.
B-Class? Or maybe even A-Class? Fufu.
The Hunter Association building I arrived at was tall enough that its peak vanished from view. They said the Association occupied the entire skyscraper looming over Teheran-ro.
Inside, an assessment officer guided me down into the basement. The underground measurement room was packed with cutting-edge equipment, and I spent about an hour there undergoing test after test.
While I sat in the lobby lounge waiting for my results, my mother and Ji-ah crossed my mind out of nowhere. Ji-ah was my only little sister, starting middle school this year.
Now all that's left is for our family to be happy. And I'm going to make that happen!
I rubbed at my reddening eyes for no particular reason.
But that pink-tinted hope browned before long, like an apple sliced open hours ago.
Hunter Rank Assessment Result: F-Class
Freg.
The hunter industry's slang for F-Class gives you a fair glimpse of just how low their standing runs.
In most cases, those who awakened only to measure F-Class never even registered as hunters, simply carrying on with life as civilians.
And I'm one of those F-Classes?
An anecdote floated up from somewhere in my memory—some guy who went on a blind date boasting he was a hunter, then took a slap across the face the moment it came out that he was F-Class.
In a world where merely awakening as a hunter earned you congratulations as if you'd passed the bar exam, F-Class alone was the chicken bone of that blind spot—utterly useless, yet impossible to discard.
And to me, right now, that fact—
—struck me as absurdly funny, like a carefully scripted black comedy.
"Hahaha..."
Feeling hollowed out, I must have sat there staring into nothing for quite some time.
Only after a good while had passed, and my head had settled like the aftermath of a typhoon sweeping through, did the road ahead come faintly into view.
I slowly curled my fingers into a fist, then squeezed. My grip, still unfamiliar in its strength, drove my nails into my palm, and a bead of blood welled at each tip.
"So what if I'm F-Class? If I stay as careful as I can and prepare for everything, there's no problem at all."
I murmured the words as if talking myself into them.
Then I called to mind the information I'd gathered on my phone while waiting for the results.
My income is going to double what it is now.
Hunters received bonuses on top of their base pay, scaled according to the byproducts they hauled out of dungeons.
According to a blog called A B-Class Hunter's Daily Life, even an F-Class could pocket a hefty settlement if they ever hit the jackpot on magic stones.
Though the blogger did append a footnote at the end of the post: "Of course, on the premise that you survive the dungeon and make it back alive."
If Mom saw this, she'd surely try to stop me...
If you—lying in that hospital bed now—could still stand healthy at my side and offer counsel, you would no doubt have talked me out of this choice, urging me toward safer work even if it paid less.
But my mother could do nothing now, and my heart had already been set in motion.
I rose from my seat and shouted.
"That's it! I'm becoming a hunter!"
From that day on, I spent ten years crawling through the absolute bottom of the hunter industry, living like a dog. For someone who'd tossed his pride away long ago in the name of survival, the dog comparison fit me perfectly.
On the border between life and death, things like principles and dignity were pure luxury.
Didn't a press release from the H Daily just last week put the survival rate of third-year F-Class hunters at around 48.3 percent? And I had endured ten full years in those abysmal conditions. Even by my own reckoning, I'd held out admirably.
And so it was, on a certain day about a year ago, that I had the encounter that would shake my life to its very foundations.
It was an evening when a fine drizzle fell from a sky choked with dark clouds. I finished a dungeon raid as usual, returned my equipment to the Hunter Association, and pushed open the door of the bar I always frequented.
Creeeak.
Inside, tough, hard-bitten patrons sat clustered in their own spots, drinking.
This place, located near the Hunter Association building, was a watering hole favored by hunters, and the menacing men in sight—every face carved with at least a scar or two—were mostly unaffiliated mercenary hunters like me.
I ordered my usual drink from the owner, along with a simple plate of snacks. After wrapping up a dungeon run, coming here alone to nurse a drink was my routine.
But then, an event that would never ordinarily disturb my mundane routine occurred: I sensed someone stepping into the empty seat beside me.
What the—who is that?
Instead of the unpleasant reek of men's sweat, a sweet, cloying fragrance swept straight into my nostrils.
My head turned of its own accord, and there stood a woman of breathtaking beauty who looked barely into her early twenties. Her face was as fresh and delicate as an ink painting on white paper, and her clothes made no effort to hide the ample swell of her chest or the creamy expanse of her thighs.
Her presence alone lit up the dingy bar interior in an instant, as if a dozen bright lamps had been switched on at once.
"You would be Hunter Seo Jin-ho, yes?"
A voice sweeter than the bouquet of any liquor poured into my ear and tickled my eardrum.
As if spellbound, I nodded—while at the same time, since none of my acquaintances looked anything like this peerless beauty, I asked with a note of puzzlement.
"That is correct, but... who might you be?"
She was different from every other low-ranked hunter in this place. And I don't just mean her face. The dignity she radiated, the aura she carried—it all seemed to declare, from the very root, that she was cut from different cloth than the rest of them.
She was here, and yet she remained an alien presence that refused to blend into her surroundings.
"My name is Kwon Hye-ri. It's lovely to meet you."
As she extended a slender, jade-like hand, that sweet scent wafted over me once more.
"Ah!"
Startled, I shot to my feet—and clatter!—the chair toppled over backward.
Kwon Hye-ri. The A-Class hunter that not a soul in this country could fail to recognize.
She was a celebrity I should have placed in a heartbeat, but never in my wildest dreams did I expect to run into her in a shabby bar like this, so it took me a beat longer to realize who she was.
In those few seconds, my dilated pupils swept over her beautiful figure in far more meticulous detail than before.
First of all, she was quite tall. My height wasn't short for a man, and yet I still had to tilt my chin up slightly to look at her.
The buttons of her crop shirt strained to hold back her ample chest, looking ready to burst with the slightest pressure, and a crisp vertical line carved down from her cleavage split the exposed, snow-white plane of her abs.
Her thick thighs, taut with springy resilience, and her wide hips made her already-short skirt look practically child-sized.
It was a body befitting a top-ranked hunter—meticulously maintained, overflowing with healthy vitality.
Her features, taken one by one, weren't particularly ornate, yet viewed as a whole she possessed a bewitching charm that pulled you in whether you willed it or not.
In a word, every inch of her body was a sight to behold. You could say she looked exactly the part—the figure of a siren, a creature of temptation sculpted from pure estrogen to lure men to their ruin.
While I stood entranced, admiring her body, I briefly forgot the hand she was holding out.
Oh no!
Only after wiping both hands against my clothes a few times, as though they'd touched something filthy, did I carefully take her hand in mine.
"The honor is mine. I'm Seo Jin-ho."
Her hand was cold as thin ice yet moist, and impossibly soft. The moment her skin touched mine, a jolt of pleasure shot through my entire body, and blood came rushing down to my groin at a frightening speed.
In an instant my cock swelled, hoisting the front of my pants upward. I could even feel a bead of pre-cum leak out, dampening my underwear.
No! What the hell is this?!
Jolted by my body's bizarre reaction, I scrambled to school my expression so my panic wouldn't show. Then, so the tent pitching out the front of my pants wouldn't make me look like a pervert, I slipped a hand into my pocket and rearranged myself.
Kwon Hye-ri, meanwhile, watched me with a painted-on smile resting at her lips, and said:
"Shall we sit down and talk for a while?"
"Yes. Of course."
Once she was seated, she glanced around the bar's interior once before speaking.
"It's been quite some time since I've visited a bar with this sort of atmosphere."
"It may not look like much, but quite a few hunters count themselves regulars here."
While I sipped at my glass, Kwon Hye-ri ordered the same drink as mine. Then I noticed how quiet our surroundings had grown. Perhaps curious as to why Kwon Hye-ri had come all this way looking for a low-ranked hunter, the other patrons had stopped their conversations and were watching us.
I opened my mouth and broke the silence.
"Now then—what brings you to me?"