083. The Weight of the Shield (1)
083. The Weight of the Shield (1)
After the party launch ceremony ended.
Lee Yu-ri bolted straight for the dorms and buried her face in her bed.
She'd tried her damnedest not to show it in front of everyone.
"......Ah."
But now that she was alone.
She clenched her teeth against the tide of humiliation crashing over her.
"So fucking embarrassing."
Pahng—! Pahng—!
She kicked her legs as she flopped face-down, making the bed bounce.
"......If 'getting him a gift is a good idea' meant this, they could've told me specifically from the start......."
Two days ago,
Shin Se-hee had suddenly sent her a message.
She'd said it would be a good idea to prepare a gift for Jin Yu-ha in advance.
So Lee Yu-ri had mistaken today for his birthday.
And because she'd wanted to be the first of the party members to wish him a happy birthday, she'd called him out first thing in the morning.
"But it wasn't his birthday. It was just a gift exchange......."
Lee Yu-ri flipped onto her back on the bed.
"I mean, it's not like...... whether it was his birthday or not really mattered."
It was just a way to return his kindness.
When it came to gratitude toward Jin Yu-ha, she'd been confident that she was second to none among the party members.
But.
After the equipment distribution was over.
The party members each gave Jin Yu-ha the gifts they'd prepared.
Shin Se-hee gave him a building ownership certificate with his name on it.
Kang Do-hee gave him a top-of-the-line sword maintenance kit.
Im Ga-eul, having also mistaken it for his birthday, prepared a cake.
Sure, Shin Se-hee's gift had been on a wildly different scale.
But the other gifts carried considerable value as well.
The sword maintenance kit Kang Do-hee gave him was the same ultra-premium whatever-kit favored by the Sword Emperor, Korea's second-ranked hunter.
The cake Im Ga-eul brought was supposedly so backlogged with reservations that if you ordered now, you wouldn't get it for five months.
It had been possible only because her family ran that bakery.
'......I thought unni was in the same boat as me. That was a total betrayal.'
Anyway, everyone handed Jin Yu-ha a decent gift.
But she had been empty-handed.
Of course, Jin Yu-ha had told her, looking incredibly pleased, that he'd already received his gift from her beforehand.......
"Why did I go and give him crap like that......."
Lee Yu-ri bit her lip hard.
After agonizing for ages over what to give him, she'd woken up at dawn and handwritten it on a sheet of A4 paper,
then rushed to a bookstore in the morning to get it laminated—a wish coupon.
Worse, it was a scrap of paper that had gotten crinkled up pathetically in her hand while bickering with Jin Yu-ha.
She stretched her hand toward the ceiling.
The geometric tattoo engraved on the back of her hand caught her eye.
"If you just keep giving me stuff like this all the time....... What the hell am I supposed to do......."
Now, the debt she owed Jin Yu-ha was growing even bigger than her family's debts.
"In Camela Forest, you looked after me and my little sister, and then you saved my life....... Fine, the Subspace Tattoo and the disaster kit were things you handed out as party leader, but the shield is just too much. You bastard......."
Honestly, when Jin Yu-ha handed her the shield earlier,
she'd almost exhausted herself fighting the urge to refuse it then and there.
Was she saying she didn't like the gift?
No way in hell.
It was purely her pride.
A petty feeling that surged up because she felt she hadn't done anything for him compared to the others.
It wasn't like she didn't understand why he'd gifted her the shield.
As the one now responsible for the party members' safety, he'd gotten her decent equipment.
And besides, the shield he'd handed her.
It was a dream shield that made what she'd always imagined a reality.
Why else would a Tank—whose primary role is to stand at the vanguard and block enemy attacks—have made 'evasion' her go-to weapon?
It was because of repair costs.
In the end, it came down to money again.
When she first became a hunter and started running dungeons, Lee Yu-ri had also used a shield to soak up enemy attacks like any other Tank.
But in a situation where she already had to tighten her belt, the money needed to fix a battered shield started feeling like too much to waste.
The result was that she'd honed the technique of 'evasion.'
And in those circumstances, a shield that used ambient Mana to repair its own durability.
Not to mention the ability to see enemy attacks from behind—it was no exaggeration to call it the shield she'd always dreamed of.
Haaah—
A sigh laden with complicated feelings slipped out without her realizing.
"......I'm seriously losing it. So how much does this insane shield even cost?"
Lee Yu-ri scratched her head furiously, then pulled out her phone and tapped on the search bar.
"I'm pretty sure the shield's name was Cross Shield or something......?"
When she searched [ Cross Shield ] on a hunter-exclusive shopping site,
a photo of a shield popped up at the very top.
It was the same cross shape as the one she'd received.
And at the spectacle of '0's displayed next to it, Lee Yu-ri's eyes bulged.
"What the hell?"
A price so steep it instantly pulled a curse out of her.
She was so shocked that Lee Yu-ri shot upright from where she was lying down.
"Wh-what the hell did he give me!!!"
Curious if what he'd given Kang Do-hee and Im Ga-eul was in a similar price range, she looked those up too.
"Kang Do-hee's shoes are five million....... Ga-eul unni's gloves are in the thirty-million-won range......."
Of course, shoes costing five million or a secondary weapon going for thirty million was still staggering.......
"The unit is completely different! Why am I the only one in the hundred-millions......!"
An extra weight was added to the pressure she was already feeling.
A weight bearing the name of a hundred million won, no less.
"And for all that, I......."
「☆ Once-a-Month Lee Yu-ri Free Pass ☆」
As she remembered that utterly shoddy scrap of paper, Lee Yu-ri's face turned bright red.
"Seriously, the drawing's garbage but you had to draw stars on it too. You stupid Gukbap bitch....... Just stick to being a gukbap-head......."
Waaaaaah—!!!
Lee Yu-ri covered her face with both hands and screamed.
A muffled sound filled the room.
Haah.......
"Being broke fucking sucks."
Lee Yu-ri spat it out dejectedly and clicked her tongue.
"I can't take this anymore......."
At this rate, the embarrassment would clearly keep her wide awake all night without a wink of sleep.
Not to mention they had to enter a dungeon first thing tomorrow.
After being handed a shield more expensive than her own body,
was she going to top it off by failing to manage her condition......?
"Bullshit."
That was something she absolutely could not let happen.
*
[ Authorizing entry for Cadet Lee Yu-ri. ]
Lee Yu-ri left her room and headed to the personal training facility used by Velvet Academy cadets.
She figured that if she worked up a good sweat, she might be able to clear her head and get some sleep.
'Come to think of it, they said the monsters we're dealing with tomorrow use projectiles.'
Jin Yu-ha had given them a heads-up that the dungeon was a B-Rank Gate called 「Thorn Grasslands」.
Monsters resembling porcupines that shoot paralysis-inducing thorns from their backs.
Black Hedgehogs.
A place where B-Rank monsters appeared, he'd said.
"......Up until coming here, you were just some girl who hunted goblins. You've really come a long way, Lee Yu-ri."
But she knew full well that it wasn't because her abilities had grown dramatically or anything.
The selection was surely tailored to the level of the party's Damage Dealers, Kang Do-hee and Jin Yu-ha.
As she was mulling over the monsters she'd be facing tomorrow,
an emotionless voice echoed from above.
[ Would you like to record your status window? ]
"Yeah."
Lee Yu-ri nodded and called up her status window.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Name ─ Lee Yu-ri
Gender ─ Female (20)
Stats
Strength ─ 30 Spirit ─ 64
Mana ─ 35 Endurance ─ 55
Speed ─ 67 Charm ─ 50
Specialization ─ Shield Technique A+
Title ─ Dirt Spoon (土匙)
─ Gukbap
Skills ─ [ Shield's Echo ], [ Sacrificial Shield ]
Trait ─ [ Willpower ]
Exclusive Weapon ─ Cross Shield
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Truthfully, she thought it wasn't a bad status window.
She wondered if it was okay for her Speed to be higher than her Endurance as a Tank,
but it wasn't exactly low, and she'd always been an evasion-based Tank anyway.
"......Hoo."
Lee Yu-ri let out a low breath after finishing the status window recording.
[ Anti-Ranged Tank Training will begin. Please select a level. ]
Unlike a Damage Dealer's training, the goal of a Tank's training against ranged enemies wasn't to eliminate them.
It was simply to block.
A method of holding the front line as much as possible so that no attacks got through to those behind her.
"Hmm, for now....... Let's warm up with LEVEL 5."
Lee Yu-ri pulled the Cross Shield out of her subspace.
She strapped it onto her arm and clicked the switch.
A translucent barrier unfolded.
[ LEVEL 5. Goblin Archers. 10 units. ]
Soon, ten goblins armed with crude bows and arrows appeared vividly before her eyes.
She hadn't seen goblins in a while.
Suddenly, Lee Yu-ri remembered the day she first met Jin Yu-ha, and the corner of her mouth turned up.
"......Funny. It's kind of nice to see you bastards again."
Ding—!
Along with the sound of a bell ringing,
the goblins started shooting arrows at her.
WHOOSH—!
Arrows flew toward her.
"......This would be more fun if I were training with Jin Yu-ha, just the two of us."
Goblins and arrows—if Jin Yu-ha were here,
wouldn't it be fun to summon even more goblins and fight together?
'Tch, who am I kidding? I'm the bitch who gave him a Free Pass as a gift.'
It was just as she was raising her shield to block the enemy arrows.
"Yeah, I think so too."
A voice that by all rights shouldn't have been heard came from right beside her, once again.
Just like back then.
Lee Yu-ri turned her head with a dazed expression.
"Did you call me?"
Swish—
He cut down the arrows flying toward her with his sword.
"You did this last time too. Gukbap, why do you always get distracted the moment I show up? That's dangerous. The arrows are coming right at you."
Jin Yu-ha was standing right beside her, with the same expression he'd worn back then.