Han Sohee (1)
"An intruder, huh..."
Taejin stared at the line on the Security Guard App, turning it over in his mind. People might assume all he ever did with the app was screw around nonstop — and, well, they wouldn't be entirely wrong — but he'd actually poked and prodded at the thing quite a bit, trying to figure out how it worked. One of the things he'd uncovered along the way was this: the Security tab.
Security did exactly what it said on the tin. It flagged anyone who'd entered the apartment complex with the potential to cause harm. He still didn't fully understand the principle behind it. Getting a real handle on that would take a lot of trial and error, and the last time the security feature had properly activated was when Cha Dohui's fans had broken in a few times. After that, the app would occasionally note that an intruder was present — but it never said they'd come with malicious intent.
In other words, this time it was the real deal. The same breed of fanatic or lunatic as Cha Dohui's fan club.
Probably not Cha Dohui herself...
She was buried in outside work right now. Most of her fan club wasn't even around anymore, either. A handful of stragglers left behind? Anyone like that was already sitting in a cell.
So if it wasn't Cha Dohui, maybe someone had come after another celebrity living in the complex. That was his best guess — but he had no solid answer yet. Taejin let out a long breath. Looks like his workload had just gone up.
"Hyung-nim, I'll take the evening and night patrols for a while."
"Huh? All of a sudden? I mean, sure, that'd be great, but..."
"I've been having trouble sleeping at night lately. Figure I might as well walk the rounds and pick up the night differential."
"If that's the reason, then fine by me."
And that was how he ended up patrolling on a completely ridiculous excuse. Someone might ask why he didn't just sit still and do nothing — but after what had happened a few months ago, how could he?
The intruder incident from a few months back made it impossible for Taejin to just sit this one out.
A lot of people would find this baffling. How does a mere apartment security guard make that kind of money? Wait — shouldn't he be making even less?
Unfortunately, the Gate era had sent the minimum wage into freefall. Not just a drop — the situation was so bad that half-exploiting people barely raised an eyebrow. After the Gate crisis wrecked cities and logistics networks, the government had to choose between saving corporations and saving citizens. They went with the logic that if companies survived, the people would too, and rolled out aggressively pro-business policies. They slashed the minimum wage and stripped away every regulation that got in companies' way.
That alone would have been enough — but then came the massive waves of refugees pouring down from North Korea and Manchuria, plus people fleeing Japan when it nearly collapsed into a Warring States free-for-all. Wages sank even further. Korean corporations pivoted hard into Hunter-friendly industries and raked in enormous profits, but the wealth gap ballooned as a result. Thanks to all that, the roughly three million won a month Taejin earned was enough to feed a whole family.
The idea that a simple apartment security guard pulled in that much was, frankly, absurd. Which is why the job tended to come bundled with all sorts of extra duties.
So why not just hire Hunters as security guards? They were stronger, after all. Well — true enough. But there were several reasons against it.
First: put a Hunter on security detail and their ego balloons. Think of it as a constant power struggle. They start out content as a guard, then the moment the work rubs them the wrong way, they quit — or start agitating for a raise. If it were a regular person, you could crush that easily. Same-rank Awakened? Suddenly it's a headache. You have to hear them out, negotiate, and you absolutely have to pay the extra allowances. Regular people? You can skip a few line items and they can't do a thing about it. Rather than deal with that kind of tedious dick-measuring, management preferred to hire ordinary people first.
On top of that, if an Awakened or Hunter got killed or injured on the job as a security guard, things got complicated. In a Hunter-centric world, a Hunter dying or getting hurt meant explanations, investigations, and medical bills. A regular person? Who cares. Sure, a civilian dying was still a nuisance — but nowhere near as much as a Hunter.
And finally — could a regular guard even do the job? Surprisingly, the consensus was that there wasn't much difference between a Hunter and a normal security guard. People assume the gap in physical ability makes a huge difference, but it really doesn't. Hunters have sharper senses than ordinary people, sure, but not sharp enough to reliably spot and identify an intruder. If you actually wanted that, you'd need a detection-type Awakened — and those people made several times more money running Gates than they ever would as apartment security.
What about subduing someone? Hunters were overwhelmingly better at that, no question. But like he said — if a Hunter got hurt or killed, it was a problem. So hiring regular people and working them hard was simply better value. Three million a month? You could cover that easily just by collecting a little from each resident in a complex like this, and there was never a shortage of applicants.
Anyway — why was he going on about all this? No real reason, honestly. Just that walking night patrols had him thinking back to the red pill his senior guards had once fed him. The thoroughly unromantic reality behind the Hunter apartments everyone fantasized about. More precisely, a reality that applied to most industries — not just this one.
I first heard that story not long after I'd properly met Sohee, didn't I?
And right before he'd heard it, something else had happened, too.
This was only a few days after I'd started working at the Hunter apartment. I still hadn't settled into the job. The work itself was hard enough at first, but the complex was also crawling with problem residents, so I was taking a beating mentally as much as physically.
"Tch... hah... life tastes like shit..."
I was chain-smoking my way through it when I ran into Seoyoung noona. More precisely—
"Man, payday's still forever away..."
"You work security here?"
"Ah — yes, ma'am."
"Oh. Then we'll be seeing a lot of each other. Here — light?"
"Thank you."
Not only was I completely broke just days into the job — I'd burned through my lighter, too. Seoyoung noona was the one who offered me a light in that pitiful state. She had an easygoing personality and a pretty face, and after a few exchanges I found myself getting along with her right away. Our personalities just clicked better than I'd expected.
A few more days of chatting with her went by, and then—
"Oh, right. There's someone I want to introduce you to."
"Me?"
"She's got pretty bad social anxiety. Could use someone to talk to."
"Ah — if that's the case, sure."
Out of nowhere she said she wanted to introduce me to someone. I nodded and told her to go ahead, and she actually brought a person over. That was when I met her.
"Ah — h-hello."
A woman who looked, at a glance, like she was not doing well at all: Han Sohee. My eyes went straight to those overwhelming breasts for a split second before I yanked my gaze up and greeted her properly.
"Hello."
For the record, the first impression was extremely awkward. We'd only met through a mutual acquaintance, after all. A few conversations later, though, things loosened up a bit, and we ended up exchanging greetings whenever we ran into each other.
"Is it because you didn't recognize Sohee? You two got close fast."
We were just casually saying hello and going about our days when I happened to run into Seoyoung noona at the smoking area, and she dropped that on me out of nowhere.
"Huh? Is there something special about Sohee?"
I asked that completely sincerely. To my eyes, Sohee was just a kind person with an extremely large chest — a Healer, basically aristocracy of the highest order. What else could there be?
Seoyoung looked at me, then—
"Pfft — now I get why she opened up to you so fast."
—gave me a light smile and explained.
The Sohee she described had once been called a Saintess — the woman who'd saved countless lives during the Pohang Great Disaster, when a catastrophe-class monster nearly wiped the Republic of Korea off the map a second time.
How does a mere B-class become a Saintess? Well — for one thing, no official Saintess had been selected yet. What does that mean? To put it more carefully: a Saintess doesn't just appear out of the Vatican or somewhere similar. Across the entire world, Healers who meet certain conditions are granted the right to face a trial. Nobody actually knows what those conditions are. Everyone's just guessing.
Pass the trial, and you receive a skill called Light — a skill that lets you use the true power of a Saintess, but only once. The catch is that using it is itself part of the trial. If you activate Light, your qualification as a Saintess vanishes on the spot. In other words: save the people right in front of you, or become a Saintess later and save even more? That was the choice.
Sohee had possessed that skill — Light — and during the Pohang Great Disaster, she chose the people in front of her and used it. That was how she came to be called the Saintess who prevented countless deaths in the catastrophe that struck Pohang.
"Well, that's the story on Sohee so far. What do you think?"
"Uh... well. I think she's an incredible person?"
"Hmm... is that so?"
"Yes. I mean — she made a choice I don't think I could make."
"Heh. Fair enough."
That was what Taejin said out loud. Inside, though, he was thinking something else.
For someone like that, she looked pretty rough...
For someone carrying the title of Saintess, she herself had looked far too worn down. And the truth was, her condition back then really hadn't been good at all.