C-Class Hunter — Lee Hanna (1)
The word married gave Taejin pause.
Ugh… so I'd be going after someone who already has a husband?
Of course he would. That was exactly what it meant — laying hands on another man's wife. Morally, it was a mess. Legally, it could get even messier. His hesitation was only natural. Taejin had never been the type who got off on stealing married women. Not that he had anything against married women in general — just… well. He rubbed his chin and fretted over it for a while.
"Ugh…"
He turned it over and over, but no clean answer came. If she'd been his only option, maybe he would have forced the issue. She wasn't.
The pool isn't huge, but it's not empty either.
In the end, he decided to take a little more time and find a different target. Controlling people's hearts already made him a piece of trash — that much he owned — but he still wanted to keep from crossing that last line.
And then there was the other thing.
Come to think of it, she's the type who shows up at the housewives' association, the apartment residents' meetings, half the building's social circles…
Lee Hanna had more influence than he'd first realized. With so much about the app still unknown to him, Taejin resolved to look for someone else.
That resolution did not last long.
What changed his mind was a parking dispute.
The Hunter Apartment sat on an enormous lot — and for good reason. After the Gate Catastrophe, and after the disaster-class monster assault that people still called the greatest calamity in modern Korean history, Seoul real estate had cratered. The developers had scooped up the dirt-cheap land and raised this gleaming complex right in the heart of the city. Seoul was recovering now, land prices climbing steeply again, but that was neither here nor there.
The point was the size. The parking was generous: underground and surface lots with room for two cars per household. The problem was that almost no Hunter owned only one car. These people loved luxury. Some of them kept five vehicles or more — and among them was the kind of man who had eaten his social awareness for breakfast.
"What do you mean I can't park here? I bought this spot."
"W-well, the residents' meeting decided on a maximum of three cars per household…"
"Ha. Why the hell should I listen to a bunch of ordinary people?"
"I-if you could just try to cooperate as much as possible…"
"Shut up and get out of the way. I've got places to be."
Taejin had no choice but to step aside. What else could he do? He wasn't a Hunter. He wasn't even Awakened. Picking a fight with walking weapons of mass destruction was a fast way to find out what your insides looked like.
So he backed off, watching the man who had plastered the underground garage wall with his own cars — and then it clicked.
Wait. Isn't that Lee Hanna's husband?
Bae Jinsu. Taejin clicked his tongue.
Tch. The wife seemed decent enough. The husband, though…
For a second the thought flickered — maybe a guy like this deserved to get his wife stolen — but it was already fading when—
"Jesus. This security guard just won't shut up."
Bae Jinsu's voice carried from somewhere near the building entrance. He was punching in the door code before heading up to his unit, and he was making no effort to keep it down.
"Ha. He's just jealous, the bastard. Living like a parasite off the scraps they pay him here."
Something in Taejin's head went cold.
"Well, his parents were the same level of trash, so what do you expect? Heh."
The open mockery made it clear.
That son of a bitch is doing this on purpose.
The man had taken being blocked for a few seconds as a personal insult and was trash-talking him out loud for anyone to hear.
"Ha."
Whatever resolve Taejin had been clinging to — leave the wife alone, she's living decently enough with her husband — evaporated on the spot.
Fine. Let this parasite show you exactly how he sucks blood.
Taejin walked up from the underground garage with a face that gave nothing away and dropped onto the sofa in the security office.
"Haa…"
The other guards were either busy elsewhere or on night shift. The office was empty. He wanted to unload a string of filthy curses, but someone might overhear, so he swallowed them and opened the Security Guard App instead.
I was going to walk away. You brought this on yourself.
Honestly, the insults aimed at him personally he could have let slide. After a month under Lee Jihye — that absolute bitch from hell — he had built up a certain immunity to humiliation. It still pissed him off, but revenge was on a clock, and he could have ignored it for the sake of the bigger picture.
Dragging his parents into it, though. That crossed the line.
So the man who had been trying to keep a boundary threw the whole map out the window. What was the point of holding a line when the other guy treated restraint like an invitation to walk all over you?
Sexual Processing Duty — accepted.
With that thought, Taejin immediately accepted Lee Hanna's Sexual Processing Duty — Bae Jinsu's wife.
He expected the phone to ring any second. It didn't.
"Huh? Why isn't she calling?"
Minutes passed with no call. Frowning, he checked the app again — and found something he hadn't expected.
You have accepted Lee Hanna's Sexual Processing Duty.
For married targets, Sexual Processing is available in two versions.
One keeps the partner unaware. The other makes them aware. Which do you choose?
So for married people, the system split the options. Taejin's first impulse was obvious — pick the second one, make the bastard feel every second of it — but he forced himself to think.
Easy. Be rational. Screwing her is fine. Anything past that is not.
His brain was not yet fully ruled by his lower half. Even with the app's restraints in place, a man who found out might still flip and come swinging. No matter how angry he was, getting himself killed made the whole thing pointless.
So he made the smart choice.
Of course—
Once I'm stronger, I'm picking the second option without blinking.
This was only a decision born of insufficient power. His expression hardened. He still had a long way to go.
Lee Hanna, thirty years old.
Four years earlier, still young, she had married a colleague she got along with. Now she was starting to regret it — and the reason was simple.
"Honey, you're home? Dinner is—"
"Ah, I'm eating later with President Jung."
"…What about tonight, then?"
"Yeah, I'll grab something myself. Don't worry about it."
Her husband, Bae Jinsu, had begun letting the real him show after the wedding — or more precisely, the part of him he had always kept half-hidden.
Haa. He isn't even bothering to hide it anymore.
It was his appetite for women. Bae Jinsu was a womanizer of the purest strain. She hadn't decided that just because he cheated. She had decided it because he was cheating with three women at once.
Three. Simultaneously.
She had done her own quiet digging. One was a clerk at the Hunter Bureau. One was a junior in her twenties from the industry. One was a colleague he had fought beside. The junior and the colleague were people Hanna herself knew.
These days, with the government desperate to grow the Hunter population, half-open concubinage was more or less winked at. Courts rarely treated a Hunter spouse's affairs as grounds for serious punishment anymore. The thinking was simple: if it means more Hunters, look the other way.
Even so, there were limits. No matter how the times had changed, a man who flaunted his affairs while his wife sat at home was not normal. Hanna's dilemma was real. Aside from the constant womanizing and the nights out, he brought home good money. On paper, he almost looked like a decent husband.
No. There's one more problem, isn't there.
She and her husband had been sexless for roughly two years. That was why they had no children. Even while dating they had never been especially physical; after the wedding there had been a brief spark, then the interest drained away, and then nothing. If he loved women that much, shouldn't his own wife come first? Why sneak out night after night to work his hips somewhere else?
She couldn't understand it. All it left her with was mounting lust and mounting stress — and a mood that had nowhere good to go.
"Haa…"
Which made the next thought inevitable.
Maybe I should just have an affair of my own.
And the apartment even offered a "service" for exactly that.
Sexual Processing Service…
She swallowed.
It didn't sound so bad.