Chapter 30
Chapter 30
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Translator: True Detective
Chapter: 2
Chapter Title: My First-Ever Family
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I finally had a family.
For the time being, I decided to keep that fact under wraps.
And with good reason. Just being a male hunter was already enough to draw eyes. If word got out that I was raising a monster on top of that?
Sure, taming one came with all sorts of conditions, but the moment it became possible, my already sky-high value would shoot even higher. No doubt about it.
And if that happened, even if I wasn't standing in a dungeon, I could end up getting "kidnapped" by hunters who'd lost all reason.
If it were just me in danger, that'd be one thing...
In a world where monsters had no such thing as human rights, a human like me might get by somehow if caught—but not a slime. It wouldn't survive unscathed.
Stories of tamed monster familiars being used for sexual relief and then discarded popped up all the time in hunter manuals.
I looked down at the blue slime girl currently nestled in my arms, clinging to me just like an elementary school kid hugging her dad.
"Master! I love it!"
"Haa..."
"Huh? Master, why the sigh? Do you... not like me?"
"It's not that I don't like you..."
I just don't have the strength to protect you yet.
That said, tossing her aside wasn't an option either. This monster's human-like form was basically a cheat code in itself.
"M-Master! Don't abandon me! I'll be good!"
With the innocence of a little girl.
Seeing my troubled expression, the slime started bawling, tears like dewdrops rolling down her face.
And somehow, she looked so human doing it.
My conscience hurts too much!
Sure, I'd lived two lifetimes as a total loner with no parents or family to speak of.
But it felt like I'd made my own daughter cry for real. I hurriedly dropped to one knee, bringing myself to eye level with the slime girl, and apologized with all my heart.
"Sorry if I worried you. And I won't abandon you, so no need to cry."
"H-Hueeng... D-Don't abandon me... Without you, Master... I got nowhere else to go..."
"!!"
Of course. This was Earth, a place that didn't allow monsters to exist.
A tamed familiar abandoned by its master... I wasn't dumb enough not to know their fate.
Even failed taming attempts got "disposed of" immediately, and that was commonplace among trainer hunters, or so I'd read.
And even if you succeeded and released it back into a dungeon? It was illegal from the start, and even if you snuck it back in successfully...
Tamed monsters have all their wild instincts stripped away. Send it back, and it'll just get eaten by other monsters or hunted by hunters.
In other words, the only place for this slime girl was right by my side.
...Unless I sold her off to some fat, cackling old lady with a chicken coop, dooming her to a life as a shape-shifting dildo.
No way... I can't let that happen! Never!
I didn't hate dungeons enough to kill a monster that posed no threat anymore.
And I wasn't cold-blooded enough to abandon a girl who had no one else to rely on.
Put simply, there'd only ever been one real choice.
"Haa..."
"...!!"
I'll raise her.
And let's think positive.
Trainer hunters slaved away for years—sometimes centuries—to tame familiars they could keep as pets.
Those things started at tens of millions in Korean won at minimum.
And I'd basically scored one for free.
Once I framed it that way, my capitalist brain kicked into gear, spinning up positive vibes.
And it's a slime! A dungeon upper-floor monster! I get to party with her for life, for free!
The cold sweat dried up quick.
A happy smile crept across my face.
"Heh... hehehehe...!"
Laugh it off.
They say the ones who laugh in tough times are the elites.
And I was elite for real.
'Male-only,' sure, but who in the hunter world tops me?
Yeah, I'm the greatest human hunter among all the males!
"Hahahahaha! Hahahahahaha!"
Meanwhile.
"M-Master..."
"Yeah?"
I was in the middle of hypnotizing myself like that.
"H-Here. Take this."
"...?"
"So... please... snff! Don't abandon me!"
Where'd she even get this?
The slime girl suddenly shoved a blue liquid monster blob the size of my head right in my face.
Did she get worried as my familiar, seeing me just grinning like an idiot?
I'm feeling better now, though...
Unlike me, the slime girl was sobbing harder than ever, her whole face a blurry mess of tears.
"Th-This! It's my treasure... for you, Master..."
"Treasure? This... blue liquid blob?"
"Y-Yeah! It's all I have... B-But! It'll grow more from my body later, so just wait a bit! Okay?"
"...What?"
From her body?
What the hell does that mean?
I stared at her, wondering where she'd even gotten a slime blob that big.
"...By the way, where's your clothes?"
"Th-This! This is my clothes!"
"Huh?"
"And that's everything I own!"
Looking closer, the outfit she'd been wearing was made from her own slime from the start.
With all the slime gathered into that one blob, the slime girl was buck naked now.
She was that desperate, huh?
What kind of era is this?
Begging naked in 21st-century South Korea.
From someone who looked like a kid, no less.
As a citizen of the land of propriety and decorum... no, as a fellow human being, I couldn't just stand by.
So.
"You brat! Even an unmarried virgin can't go stripping like that!"
"M-Mar... riage?"
Well, the women in this world were mostly crazed sluts who'd get turned on by stripping in front of men.
Still, this kid was mine to take responsibility for.
I didn't want her growing up like the women I'd met so far.
So first, to scold the naughty girl, I gave her plump little butt a light smack!
Smack.
"Eek?! It h-hurts!"
"You did wrong, so it has to hurt."
"I-It does?"
"Yeah. That way, you'll remember the pain next time and won't do it on purpose."
No matter how tough it got, bad behavior needed correcting.
With the slime girl reflecting now, I pulled her into a tight hug to soothe the fear she'd felt about being abandoned.
"From now on, no stripping like that, even if it's hard. Got it?"
"If I do that... you won't abandon me, Master?"
"Of course not! I already told you—I never planned to in the first place."
"...!"
She got it. The slime blob in her arms reshaped back into clothes.
And soon, relieved sobs echoed through the entire hospital room.
Takes me back...
Not a past life, but this one.
After two rounds as an orphanage kid, I'd been so fed up that in kindergarten, I tried to end it all.
Back then, someone scolded me for the first time for my dark thoughts—just like I did to the slime girl today—while wrapping me in gentle care.
That was our orphanage director.
The benefactor who'd taught me the warmth of family for the first time across both lives.
"By the way, do you have a name?"
"N-Name? What's that?"
"Uh, well, like a name we call you by..."
"You're Master! And I'm a familiar!"
"......"
But we couldn't go through life calling each other that.
Since it was like this anyway.
"No, from today, your name is 'Lime.'"
"La... Lime?"
"Yeah. Lime."
I decided to name her myself.
"Two letters, easy to remember. Right?"
I'd taken the last two syllables from "slime" to make it simple and memorable.
For a second, I worried it was too basic and she'd hate it.
But.
"Li-Lime! My name's Lime!"
The slime girl bounced around the room, shouting her name joyfully.
As Lime dove back into my arms with a beaming smile, that warm, squishy sensation made me grin too.
"Born without a family... and now I've got one."
Humanity's troublesome neighbors.
Hunters protected people from monsters. As I'd explained before, they were heroes representing all humankind.
The Hunter Association marketed that image hard, drawing investors from ancient times to the modern era to fund their facilities.
But no such thing as "perfect" exists—especially not in a group where raw power ruled supreme. Rotten elements always seeped in.
And in hunter society, where that rot could fester for centuries under the guise of monster extermination, trash committing crimes was everywhere.
Of course, by the 20th century, when "human rights" took hold, that scum mostly got weeded out.
"...A male hunter?"
"One actually showed up?"
"Hahaha! A male hunter...!"
"The last one died of overwork sixty years ago. First in the 21st century, right?"
This was a female-superior world.
Male civilians barely got a taste of "real action" before fizzling out. So news of a genuine SSS-class big catch after so long?
"Dungeon usage rates have spiked lately."
"D-Does that mean... it's because of our Yongchan?! Eonnyeon unnie?"
"Seems like it, Deokja..."
Two women sat across from each other in the Velvet Room.
S-rank hunters—only a hundred in the entire world.
Im Eonnyeon and Kim Deokja, Korea's pride, were plotting emergency measures against the cheeky brats eyeing their prime genes.