Awakening

I'm a hikikomori.

If there's anything that sets me apart from your average shut-in NEET, it's that I'm a B-rank Awakened.

The self-deprecating post I'd thrown up on the community as a joke came back with exactly the kind of comments I'd expected — ones that scraped my insides raw.

Every single one of them was right.

Awakening was basically a lottery. Once you Awakened, the government paid you support money to become a Hunter, and once you were a Hunter, pulling in a hundred million won a month was nothing. Everyone admired Hunters. Everyone wanted to be one.

So if you asked me what my problem was, why I still wouldn't do it, my answer was my head. More precisely — my Mental Strength.

It was common knowledge that Awakening massively boosted both physical ability and Mental Strength. But not for me. My body had come up decent enough — my Mental Strength, though, never climbed past ordinary civilian levels.

Corpses made me want to throw up. Monster blood made me nauseous. For a Hunter, it was the worst talent imaginable. And in the end, that was what caught up with me.

"S-Senior… why are you trying to kill me?"

"What? What the hell are you talking about?"

"You just tried to kill me, you bastard!"

I'd just passed the two-year mark as a Hunter. I'd been carefully avoiding every dungeon that was supposed to wear down your mind, scraping by — until a Break erupted in my assigned district. Forced onto the scene of a dungeon Break, I ran straight into a monster that used mental attacks.

"U-Uwaaah! Stay away from me! I'll kill all of you!"

"Shit, that guy's lost it! Knock him out!"

I snapped completely and tried to attack my own teammates. What I walked away with was a deep distrust of people and full-blown monster PTSD. I was committed to a psychiatric hospital almost immediately.

After a long hospital stay, I finally decided to cut myself off from the world. I bought land on the outskirts of Seoul and built a house. Disaster-ready calorie bars and drinking water stocked for five years of lockdown. Essential supplements and piles of first-aid meds. An air circulation system, a wastewater purifier, solar panels — and outer walls rated to withstand even an A-rank monster. My own private fortress.

If anything stronger than A-rank shows up, it won't mean a thing.

My thoroughly wrecked brain only ever imagined the worst, and it left me trembling. One S-rank, and those walls would shatter into dust and tear me to pieces. Or maybe a person would get in…

"Meds… I need to take my meds."

The bad thoughts were starting again. I scrambled for the pill bottle and swallowed them down with water. Come on, kick in already…

Beep. Beep.

Right then, my phone went off. There was only ever one reason my phone rang.

"…A Gate alert."

And even then, only when a Gate of national-disaster scale opened. Even a minor disaster notification would leave me so anxious I couldn't sleep a wink, just shivering through the night. So if the alarm was going off now, it meant a national emergency.

I snatched up the phone, checked it — and immediately sank into despair.

"Th-That's impossible."

An S-rank Gate might open once a year, if that. An A-rank once a month was already a lot. Words like extinction, apocalypse, catastrophe skated through my mind — and I lost it completely.

Then, in a move I still don't understand, I shoved every pill in the bottle into my mouth. There was no meaning to it. I'd just done it, blank and panicking, without knowing why.

The pills stuck in my throat; I forced them down with water, then staggered to the warehouse where the supplies were stacked and checked everything like a madman. Dried food, drinking water, the wastewater system, the rechargeable batteries — all fine. In theory, I could hold out here for two years.

"Urgh — m-my heart…"

But my body collapsed first. Too late, the proper dosage flickered through my head. Two pills a day. Anything more was dangerous. I was sure that was what they'd said.

An ordinary person would have dropped dead on the floor then and there. But I was a B-rank Awakened, after a fashion. I crawled across the ground and frantically searched for the life-support capsule.

It was the most expensive machine in the house — and the best outcome was never having to use it. Once you climbed in, it forcibly kept you alive for a long time and slowly healed you. State-of-the-art tech that ran on the mana generated when Gates opened. The pinnacle of modern engineering. I opened the capsule and climbed inside.

My heart hurt like it was about to burst, and my fingertips, by contrast, were freezing cold. I was dying. I was sure of it.

"Ha… haha!"

It was so absurd I almost laughed. I'd thrashed so hard just to avoid dying to a monster… and now I was going to die from downing a fistful of pills in pure panic.

"I don't want to die. I don't want to die…"

Pssshhh…

Air hissed out of the device, and a new gas flowed in. Tubes already embedded in my body started pumping something into me.

My strength is draining.

The heartbeat that had been hammering a moment ago slowed to a shocking crawl, and my body went cold.

If… if I really was going to die…

At least I wanted to die to a monster.

If I was going to die, better to die to the thing I'd actually been terrified of. At the very least, I wanted to die knowing my delusions hadn't been for nothing.

"……."

And so I died.

…Except I clearly had died.

"…Huh?"

I remembered the unnatural cut-off of thought, the instant every sense was shut off at once. I'd figured even a life-support capsule couldn't save someone who'd taken more than twenty times the proper dose.

"What the hell is this."

Inside the dark capsule, I stared at my face reflected in the glass. It was the face of an absurdly cute little girl. And before that — my voice was gorgeous. Not so much beautiful as clear and ringing, like a jade bead rolling across stone.

"Ugh. I'm hungry."

I barely had time to question any of it before a crushing hunger hit me, and I shoved the lid up. My thoughts wouldn't turn over at all. I didn't even have the energy to wonder. So when I tried to climb out and the lid stuck strangely, I had to put everything I had into it.

"The lights… are out?"

Had the power gone and shut the capsule down? I walked slowly toward the warehouse first. Eat a calorie bar, then think. The whole way I had to keep hitching up pants that kept sliding down. My stride was tiny, my eye level was ridiculously low, and everything felt wrong — but I kept walking.

"Ugh, what's going on?"

The warehouse reeked of stale dust. I didn't clean much, sure, but it had never been this bad. Frowning, I opened a box of calorie bars.

"…Huh?"

They were gone. No calorie bars. I frantically tore into the other boxes.

"Everything's… gone?!"

No water. No food. With trembling hands I dropped the last box.

"This can't be! There's nothing!"

I screamed without meaning to — and from beyond the warehouse door, a voice came back.

"Who's there!"

A rough man's voice. I understood the situation at once. While I'd been in the capsule, this bastard had occupied my house. The house I'd poured every last won into building. My house.

"Hoo…"

I took a deep breath first. Maybe it was the overdose from before, but before fear could even rise, the combat protocols I'd learned as a Hunter surfaced instead.

Against humanoid monsters, go for the head first.

I immediately grabbed the sledgehammer hanging on the wall and climbed up onto the speed-rack storage shelf. The sledgehammer felt weirdly heavy, but I could just barely lift it — and that was enough.

"You son of a—! Who the hell— urk!"

CRACK!

I leapt down from the shelf and drove the sledgehammer straight into his skull. The man's head caved in deeply, and he collapsed on the spot. The heavily bearded man died just like that.

"How dare you mess with my house…!"

The swing had thrown me onto the floor with him; I staggered upright and rifled through his clothes. And luckily — from inside his jacket — I found one of the disaster calorie bars I'd stocked myself. Plus a half-empty bottle of water.

I wolfed all of it down. Afterward, though, there wasn't much satisfaction. It hadn't even been the kind of hunger one bar should fix — and it vanished in an instant.

Had I not actually been hungry in the first place?

"…But why am I in this body?"

Only once my stomach was full did the questions surface. In the steel plate propped in the corner of the warehouse, I saw myself: a little girl. Maybe 150 centimeters tall. White, fine hair falling to her waist, and eyes a low-saturation violet.

Even my mind was off. I'd just killed a person, and I felt nothing. Normally I wouldn't have even thought of killing anyone — I'd have been huddled in a corner, shaking.

"Hmm… well, no point looking a gift horse in the mouth."

Anyway! I still needed to figure out why my body had changed.

"This is like something out of a novel. Do I just say 'status window'?"

Of course not. When Awakened first appeared, plenty of people had said the same thing, and not one of them had ever gotten a status window.

But as if to mock me, letters rose before my eyes.

"Eh."

A blank, stupid sound slipped out of me before I could stop it.

"What?! Mythic-rank?"

Fwoosh…

Before I could even finish being shocked, blue smoke began rising from the dead man. And with it, another system window floated up.

"Uh — Skeleton?"

I had no idea which was better, so I picked the one that seemed less scary. At once, blue light washed over the man, and his flesh melted away.

Undead didn't exist in reality. Necromancers neither. Awakened? That just meant throwing around psychokinetic force or getting absurdly strong. But what I was looking at was nothing like that. It was the kind of bizarre scene you'd only see in a webtoon or a fantasy novel.

Before long, a ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠pure white skeleton of bare bone slowly rose to its feet. It looked at me, dropped to one knee, and clacked its jaw.

—Clack-clack-clack!

"…It's a real skeleton!"

And that was how I — after two years and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠seven months of being dead — became a small, cute necromancer.