Just an Ordinary Mutant
"A perfectly fine plane just vanishing over South Korean airspace? Does that even make sense?"
Those charged with keeping the nation's order, and those who had given themselves over to the dark—both sides were hunting that plane.
"But what disappeared… truly disappeared…"
The First Air Defense Brigade, responsible for the skies over Seoul, had hauled in junior officers by the armful so the brigade commander could tear into them. From their perspective, though, the whole thing was genuinely unfair. They had reported that it vanished because it had vanished—what else were they supposed to do?
Nearly identical scenes were playing out across the Air Force, the police, and every intelligence guild that mattered.
Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency Headquarters.
"You're telling me every CCTV was tampered with?"
"Yes, sir. After the plane disappeared, we checked the surrounding cameras. All of them were looping footage from an hour earlier. This is absolutely not a simple malfunction. It's a hack—no question."
"Aren't CCTV systems closed-circuit? How do you hack something that isn't even connected to the internet?"
"That's what we're wondering too, sir."
"You're not messing with me, are you?"
"No, sir!"
The outline of the incident was this: more than twenty test subjects had been rescued from an abandoned hospital where the Yiseong Guild had been conducting secret human experiments; roughly fifty core members of the guild, including the guild master, had been murdered; and a list of police officers and National Assembly members who had colluded with the guild to bury its crimes had been dumped onto the internet.
Public trust in Hunters dipped slightly as a result, and a massive prosecutorial investigation into everyone connected to the case got underway.
And yet the person who had caused the whole affair could not be found at all.
In twenty-first-century Seoul, South Korea.
It was enough to make a ghost weep.
"The operative is first-rate. The hacker is even better? Just what kind of secret organization pulled this off?"
A short-haired woman in a form-fitting black riding suit muttered the words with open irritation. Plenty of people were looking for answers. None of them were finding any.
Meanwhile, Kim Bada climbed the Tower without missing a single day.
A day later, the third floor opened.
Among Hunters, the third floor was known as the Monster Wave floor. A wave meant packs of monsters pouring out in continuous succession. The starting point was a narrow cave; from deep inside, goblin packs would come surging forth. Defeat five or more waves and the clear condition was met. You could face as many as fifteen. An escape gate sat right at the entrance, so you could quit whenever you liked—but clearing the floor meant getting properly used to a real fight.
"Alex. Don't attack until I give the order."
"Understood."
Kim Bada floated the PA-01 above her head and waited for the goblin pack to appear. When the first wave came crashing toward her, she spoke to them.
"Where are you all rushing off to in such a hurry? Got somewhere important to be?"
The goblins recoiled in shock and asked back,
"Human, speak can?"
"Of course humans can speak."
"Monster, chasing. Danger. Run."
They seemed so astonished that conversation was even possible that they didn't treat her as an enemy.
"A monster is chasing you?"
You're the monsters, though.
Kim Bada didn't press further. Instead of attacking her, the goblins simply fled out of the cave.
"Weird. This is weird. This is really weird."
She muttered to herself—but she was no longer in a position to monologue alone. Simona asked,
"What is it that you find strange, Mother?"
"The Tower's been around for a while now. There are plenty of veterans. Some of them re-explored the lower floors after becoming high-floor Hunters."
It was one of the most basic things in gaming: going back to explore early areas you had been too weak to fully check out at low level. And yet there was no trace anywhere on the internet of anyone discovering a hidden element in the first-floor goblin cave.
"There must be high-floor Hunters who've cleared the third floor again, too. People like that could have pushed through the waves and explored deeper inside. But even so, there's no record of a third-floor hidden being discovered either."
No—hardly any of the Tower's secrets had been shared at all. People knew far too little about it.
"So I came up with a hypothesis. What if the Tower's hidden elements can only be discovered on your first entry?"
It was common enough in games: cases where you leveled up a ton, came back, and could no longer access the hidden content. Secrets available only on the first playthrough—only while your stats were still low.
"Then that means I, as the first and only Awakener, get to monopolize all of them."
Kim Bada reached her conclusion and walked deeper into the cave.
The second wave appeared. She asked the goblin pack,
"What kind of monster is chasing you?"
"Big, huge snake!"
"Same species? You look human."
If goblins had been a single species, there would have been no confusion. But goblins had a much larger higher-tier species: hobgoblins. Rather than needlessly agitating the wave, Kim Bada lied.
"I'm a mutant hobgoblin."
"Strange one. Run away."
If she hunted zero waves and time ran out, the climb would fail. She would only be able to enter again the next day—wasting a whole day. Even so, Kim Bada decided not to hunt the goblins. She was far too curious about what would happen if she encountered the hidden with zero kills.
Long ago, she had been an immersive player who loved hidden elements in games. Back when her parents were still alive and her family was whole. That pure version of him who had carelessly enjoyed games could never return—but she still loved hiddens.
"So this is the giant snake."
After she had passed all fifteen waves, in the deepest part of the cave, Kim Bada met the giant snake.
"You wouldn't happen to speak Goblin Language, would you?"
"Shak! Shashak!"
A white snake flicked its enormous tongue. Moonlight poured through a hole in the cave ceiling and made its scales gleam. Dozens of meters long. A massive body that could swallow Bada whole in a single bite if it opened its jaws wide. Conversation did not seem likely.
"Alex. Destroy it."
"Roger that."
The PA-01 flew in and fired mana rounds.
Ting!
Whether the scales had anti-magic properties or were simply tough, they bounced the bullets right off. The snake targeted Kim Bada before Alex, who was shooting at it. Why, she didn't know—whether beast instinct told it that Bada was the true body, or whether it simply deprioritized a flying enemy as more troublesome.
"Willis!"
Bada pulled out the PA-03 Paper Carrier and tied herself to the rope.
"Get us out through the hole in the ceiling!"
Four propellers spun hard, lifting her body toward the cave ceiling. The snake desperately pursued her but was just a beat too late. Against an opponent that could fly, that single beat was the condition for certain victory.
"The cave can collapse now for all I care—hit it with a missile!"
Toy-like bullet rounds were done. Time for something flashy. A missile launched from beneath the Paper Crow Alex was piloting.
KWAANG!
Whether its anti-magic was insufficient or its scale strength fell short—either way, more than half the snake's body was blasted into a tattered mess.
"That's a missile that can smash through rock, and it's still ridiculously tough?"
The wound looked deep, but the snake did not seem inclined to die on the spot. Bada ordered the next attack.
"One more missile."
"We may run short on mana."
"I've got Blue Potion."
Since mana was a far more precious resource, Blue Potions should have been much more expensive than Red Potions, right? But on Earth, there were no humans who could manipulate mana. In other words, Blue Potions were trash—something only Kim Bada could use, valuable only to her.
She pulled out a Blue Potion and drank it, and Alex fired off another blistering missile.
KWAGWAGWANG!
This time it separated the snake's head from its body. Even so the head thrashed about, still alive—but without the muscles to crawl across the ground, it was no threat to them.
"So what's the hidden with this snake corpse supposed to be? What's it good for?"
Kim Bada ordered her two currently deployed aircraft—Alex and Willis—to examine the snake's corpse. Even after a thorough mana analysis, all they could determine was that the snake had left behind a lot of meat and hide.
"The hide I can understand, but there's way too much meat."
The Aircraft Carrier Kim Bada's total cargo capacity was one ton. Last time she had packed it full of potion-crafting herbs, so she only had about nine hundred kilograms of free space left. Storing all the snake meat was absolutely impossible.
Given the anti-magic properties of the hide—or its durability—it's clearly a valuable material.
The way Alex's Paper Crow had bounced those mana rounds off. If that defensive power could be transferred into armor, wouldn't it become a precious resource?
"But for a hidden, isn't this kind of underwhelming? If it's a sacred beast, shouldn't it at least spit out an inner core or something?"
As Kim Bada was grumbling, the goblins who had fled outside the cave climbed up the walls and approached them.
"The hobgoblin shaman defeated the monster!"
"Our hero! Hero!"
"Thank you!"
She never expected her lie about being a mutant hobgoblin to play out like this. The goblins mistook Kim Bada for a somewhat unusually shaped hobgoblin shaman and revered her as the hero who had slain the monster.
"Accept our bows!"
"Become our chieftain!"
"Huh?"
Bada thought about it. Playing along with the roleplay for a bit might not be so bad.
"I grant you all the meat! Dress the hide and offer it to me!"