From Monster to Guardian
As soon as Park Jihun's group stepped outside, the reporters clustered in front of the department store unleashed a barrage of questions on the hunters who had exited ahead of them.
"What role did Hunter Park Jihun play?!"
"How did the monsters... I mean, the familiars fight?"
"I heard a familiar saved a person! Is that true?!"
"......"
The questions had nothing to do with the damage inside the department store, what kind of monster had appeared, or how the civilians had been rescued. Every single one was about Park Jihun.
"...He fought well."
"The familiars fought well too."
The hunters looked visibly annoyed. After pouring everything into stopping the gate overload, they were being completely ignored while the reporters only cared about Hunter Park Jihun. Their half-hearted answers made that crystal clear.
Of course, in their minds Park Jihun really had fought amazingly. A level of power that simply couldn't belong to an F-rank. One man commanding his own army. They finally understood why both the Association and every major guild were tripping over themselves to praise him.
But that was beside the point. They had prevented the gate from running out of control and kept civilian casualties almost nonexistent. Every hunter present deserved to be hailed as a hero. Yet the media only chased buzz, swarming around Park Jihun alone. It was impossible not to feel sour about it.
"Ah?! It's Hunter Park Jihun!!"
Right then, one reporter spotted him and the entire pack rushed over like a tidal wave.
"Hunter Park Jihun! You stopped the gate overload this time—what are your thoughts?!"
"Did you get another new familiar?!"
"They say a familiar saved people! Is that true?!"
"Hunter Park Jihun! Just one comment, please!"
Questions slammed into him from every direction at once. On top of that, the reporters were screaming at the top of their lungs to be heard first. The noise was deafening. Both Briana and Kar flinched, covering their ears and frowning.
"No, it wasn't me who stopped the gate overload. It was Hunter Shin Jiyeon and the other hunters here..."
"So you're saying you did nothing at all?!"
"You claim familiars saved those people—does that mean the familiars handled all the rescues?!"
Whenever Jihun tried to speak, the reporters cut him off and hurled only the most provocative questions.
"No... I didn't order them to do it. They moved on their own..."
"The familiars moved on their own?"
"Are you saying they acted without their master's orders?! Does that mean you can't control them?!"
Every answer only made things worse. Jihun decided it was better to stay silent, shaking his head and clamping his mouth shut. He tried to push through the crowd to head home, but the reporters kept charging at him like madmen.
"Hunter Park Jihun!"
"Hunter Park Jihun!!"
It seemed that because the Association had controlled the press when his taming skill first became known, the media hadn't been able to cover him properly. Now they were determined to milk the "Tamer" angle for everything it was worth from beginning to end.
...Ah, fuck. Seriously.
"Excuse me! Could you please make some room?!"
Jihun's patience finally snapped. As Shin Jiyeon tried to push the reporters aside to clear a path, Kar suddenly shouted in a very irritated voice.
"Krrang! Kutir! Tisuka!"
"M-Master! Miss Kar says it's far too noisy here and she's getting angry!"
Briana translated the words so naturally and fluently it was as if she were simply speaking her own mind. Unfortunately, the overlapping roar of the reporters had died down at that exact moment. Her adorable, clear voice and elegant, intellectual secretary tone landed perfectly in everyone's ears.
"......"
A stunned silence fell. The reporters, Jihun, and even Shin Jiyeon all turned to stare at Briana. The journalists wore expressions that asked if they'd really just heard what they thought they heard. Jihun and Shin Jiyeon both looked like they were thinking, Oh no... of all places...
"...Ah."
Briana glanced at the reporters, realized her mistake, and quickly clapped both hands over her mouth.
The very next second, the dam broke.
The Bucheon department store gate overload incident became famous in an instant. It was one of the very few gate overloads to occur in Korea, and it had happened in a crowded urban area of the capital region, so it was bound to blow up. But the real reason the department store incident became such a hot topic was something else entirely—two specific videos.
The first video was an interview with one of the female employees who had been rescued from the department store.
"The familiar of that Tamer hunter... saved me. But it wasn't because her master ordered it. The familiars saved my life of their own judgment. People might curse them as monsters... but Lady Kar and Lady Briana are my lifesavers."
The sincerity in the woman's tearful words was unmistakable.
After watching the video, people began thinking about a lot of things. Everyone had been praising the world's one and only Tamer, but deep down they still viewed the beings traveling with him as monsters and kept their distance. They worried about when those creatures might turn on them. It was only natural. Ordinary humans didn't have the power to survive a monster's attack the way hunters did.
But the moment they saw the female employee's interview, people's perceptions slowly began to shift. A monster that had saved human lives. According to her, the familiars hadn't been following orders—they had made the decision themselves. If that was true, didn't that make them something other than humanity's enemies? Weren't they more like well-trained allies than wild monsters?
It made sense. After all, they had been tamed by the man everyone was calling the "Tamer" in a frenzy of national pride. Thanks to the employee's interview, the way people thought about Kar and Briana started to change little by little.
That was when the second video began to spread.
It was footage of the reporters bombarding Hunter Park Jihun with questions.
At first, people were cursing the reporters for their sensational questions. But toward the end of the clip...
"Krrang! Kutir! Tisuka!"
"M-Master! Miss Kar is saying it's far too noisy here and she's getting angry!"
Kar was frowning in clear annoyance while making sounds no one could understand, and Briana was smoothly translating every word into natural Korean for Jihun.
From that point on, viewers lost their minds.
Briana's fluent, elegant Korean threw everyone into complete chaos. When paired with the female employee's earlier interview, the same question rose in everyone's minds: They can communicate and they save people... are these really monsters?
Extremely powerful, yet they protect humans. Capable of speaking Korean. Someone left a comment that perfectly summed it up.
Countless people liked the comment in agreement. Other than their appearance and origin, they were no different from the hunters who protected them.
After some time passed, the tone in the communities changed completely.
Once people stopped seeing Kar and Briana as monsters and started viewing them as "familiars" or a special kind of "hunter" who protected civilians, actual fan communities began to form.
Some fans of Shin Jiyeon even popped up here and there.
Comments about Hunter Park Jihun appeared from time to time, but they were quickly buried under the flood of photos and posts about Shin Jiyeon, Kar, and Briana.
What people didn't know was that, just as those buried comments said, Park Jihun was currently spending a very happy night surrounded by the three beautiful women they kept praising.