When the Coin Mooned
BOOM!
"Damn it!"
A man was locked in a one-on-one death match with a colossal dragon. The beast soared and wheeled through the air, striking at him from every direction.
Where the hell are the other hunters? And the Association—sending me alone against a thing like this? You've got to be kidding me!
The man swore inwardly. He wasn't usually the type to curse, but he hadn't expected the monster to be this much of a headache.
Not that I can't take it down by myself, of course.
With that thought, he slipped the monster's next attack. His movement—how to even put it into words? Study the evasion routes closely enough and they were almost mechanical in their precision. You couldn't move like that unless you already knew exactly where the opponent was going to strike. His path through the air ran as naturally as water downhill, and there was not a single unnatural hitch in any part of the motion. He dodged everything. Blocked everything. It was the work of someone who had stepped into the realm of the miraculous.
KRAAAAAAH!!!
A torrent of searing flame erupted from the dragon's maw—fire fierce enough to incinerate anything it touched. For an ordinary human, it would have been a death sentence. But the man's response was almost insultingly simple. He crossed both arms into an X, then drove them straight up in front of his face.
A man, blocking a blast of dragonfire with his bare arms. Amazingly, those arms were unmarked—not a burn, not even a scratch. Come to think of it, for all his complaining, he hadn't taken a single decisive hit. He'd been stopping every attack cleanly.
He turned his head and spat.
There was no pain anywhere in the way he carried himself. No suffering at all.
Still, this is fine. A monster of this caliber is just about right for testing whether things are going the way I planned.
He slipped into the mouth of an alley among the surrounding high-rises and touched the earpiece fitted in his ear.
"You said nobody else is coming today, right? Not a single person?"
A woman's voice came through the receiver. If you had to describe it, it had the crisp, clean snap of a cold soda.
"Ah, yes! The other affiliated high-rank hunters are tied up with other missions, so they said they had no choice but to send only you this time, Jisu…"
"Yeah, well. Got it."
She hadn't even finished speaking before the dragon somehow spotted Jisu hiding among the buildings and dove from the sky at terrifying speed. His dodge was close to an art form—an evasion so natural it looked as if the two of them had rehearsed it. For Jisu, locked in this solo struggle with the dragon, every one of its attacks was readable. At least for now.
Yes. At least in this moment.
Nobody could say how the future might change. But right now, he could read it all.
After that, Jisu kept slipping the dragon's attacks, or occasionally just tanking them with his bare body. He wasn't wearing so much as a scrap of armor, yet he casually stopped every strike from the enormous monster as if it were nothing. The strange part was that he kept doing nothing but dodge. He was evading everything beautifully, and he had a body tough enough to eat dragonfire without a scratch—yet Jisu just kept enduring and weaving, never throwing a single attack of his own. As if he were waiting for something.
About time to check.
There should have been a meaningful change by now.
"Check it for me again, would you? How's it looking?"
"Ah, yes! One moment!"
Following Jisu's order, the woman muttered under her breath as she seemed to look something up. What Jisu wanted confirmed was, for him in this moment, the single most important piece of information in the world.
"Um, so… the two coins you mentioned were Stella Watch and Bitcoin Meso, right?"
Coin data.
"Yes! That's them! You remembered correctly!"
"Um, hang on! I'll tell you in a second! I'm still getting used to this site's UI…"
Right here on the battlefield, Jisu was pulling real-time coin prices through his earpiece.
Coin prices.
Coins!
The very same coins that had appeared in the world starting with Bitcoin and captivated countless people. Cryptocurrency. In the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a new era's currency built on blockchain—something some people claimed would one day replace paper money. That mysterious something that would reform the state's grip on currency through decentralization!
And "something" was quite literally the right word. Cryptocurrency. True to its name, there was nothing you could actually put your hands on. Was there a better word to describe it than "something"?
Anyway—decentralization or whatever—it wasn't exactly the kind of thing that belonged in this situation. A hunter, in the middle of fighting a giant dragon, suddenly asking how the coin market was doing. To anyone who didn't know the circumstances, it would have looked like a thoroughly unhinged, otherworldly scene. The real-time intel he was extracting from a desperate battlefield was… coin prices?
But for him—at least for Jisu—it was different. Coin prices. Coins themselves. They were a scripture that lit the road ahead. A seeker's revelation that showed him everything: what he had to do, how he ought to fight. Bitcoin!
Price action: RANGING
No significant movement detected
Good. Nothing better than holding a sideways trend. My ability operates most stably when the market's ranging.
"And Stella?"
Jisu asked, then set himself to dodge again. The dragon was coiling to strike once more. A hair-trigger moment—and then the news he'd been waiting for reached his ear.
"Stella Watch is…"
He swallowed.
A moment of tension. A raving market with no closing bell, where prices swung wildly twenty-four hours a day. Even Jisu, as he was in this moment, couldn't hide the tightness in his chest.
How much time passed?
The woman's bright voice came through.
Yes! It went up!
Hearing the woman's voice—as if she couldn't quite believe it herself—Jisu finally clenched his bare fist and turned it toward the dragon diving in to kill him.
THUD!
Jisu's fist smashed square into the dragon's face. The rough, coarse texture of its hide against his knuckles. The instant his fist connected with its head, the world seemed to freeze.
Direct impact — dragon's skull
KRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
The dragon—which had looked so overwhelmingly powerful, a beast the size of a house, far larger than Jisu—let out a scream the likes of which you'd never hear in a lifetime, and went flying backward with no resistance at all. The sight of a massive dragon being hurled away like a rag doll was a spectacle in itself.
BOOOOOOM!
The sound of the monster slamming into the building behind it filled the sky. A blow of that magnitude, and it would go down easy before long. In fact, after taking that one hit and getting knocked flying, it was in no condition to attack again—completely incapacitated. Safe to call it a successful kill, right?
"And you weren't even all that!"
Jisu left the sprawled dragon behind him and smiled a smile of deep, private satisfaction.
It mooned. It actually mooned!
The coin he'd picked and chosen—its price had gone up. In this moment, there was nothing in the world Jisu feared.
If I'd known it was going to do this, I should've just gone all-in without being scared!
All-in. Yeah. What if Jisu had bought Stella with everything he had? Then…
No. If I've got time to think about that, I should clean up first.
Jisu walked slowly toward the fallen dragon. It didn't look like it had any stamina left to counterattack.
With that, Jisu drew his foot back and—
BOOM!
—kicked the dragon hard in the side.
KRAAAAAAH!
The dragon went tumbling sideways again, rolling helplessly. Before long, a mysterious yellow sphere—something words couldn't quite describe—sank into Jisu's body. Proof that the monster's life had ended.
At the same time, the voice of the woman who'd been feeding him information came through.
"Great work! As expected of you, Jisu. The Association is going to be thrilled when we report this! I think you'll even be able to make a few more demands?"
"That so?"
"Of course! You did it all by yourself!"
Jisu took his hand off the earpiece.
I was right. I'm sure of it. After this much cross-checking, there's no room left to doubt.
Jisu clenched his fist and thought—
I… this time, I can do it. I will.