I Awakened as a Clack Job

"Does everyone really want to awaken that ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠badly?"

I muttered under my breath, scrolling through the posts flooding the community boards.

It had already been twenty years since the Tower appeared in the world.

The Awakened who had once been called heroes in the early days of the Great Cataclysm had long since become symbols of wealth and power. Somewhere along the way, they started getting compared to lottery winners — the object of every ordinary person's envy.

Even a low rank meant you broke even. A high rank meant your whole life flipped overnight. That was the pitch. No wonder "Hunter" sat at number one on elementary school kids' dream-job lists.

Of course, I still didn't get it.

I bit into the piece of chicken sitting beside me and thought it over.

Isn't it way too brutal?

Sure, even low-rank Hunters made decent money — but at the end of the day, most of them were field workers. Climbing the Tower, clearing Gates, running all over the place. And that wasn't even the end of it. You had to risk your life killing monsters. Bad luck meant losing an arm or a leg, and that wasn't rare. From what I knew, the mortality rate was pretty high too.

It was not a job you could look at through rose-colored glasses. And yet everyone only saw the good parts and drooled over it. It felt exactly like watching people who only ever saw the YouTubers and stock-market winners and thought, hey, maybe I could be next, before diving in headfirst with zero plan.

Is that what this is? That whole "I'm different" main-character energy?

I mean, that kind of protagonist mindset was fine in theory — but that was that, and this was this. Looking at a handful of success stories and then lighting incense and praying like a maniac didn't seem like a solid life plan to me.

Unless it was a click-job. Then maybe.

Healers. Alchemists. Also known as Healer Dragons and Alchemy Dragons — the kinds of classes where you never set foot in the field and still raked in money with nothing but a few clicks. If someone was praying to awaken as one of those, I could understand it.

It's all luck, though.

There was a reason they stuck "Dragon" on the title. They were rare. Scarce. If they'd been common, people would've just called them heal-bots or click-monkeys. That was my take, anyway.

Not that any of it had anything to do with me — a guy who hadn't even awakened. For a convenience-store part-timer who dragged himself out of bed before dawn just to scrape together a little extra cash, this was all a fairy tale from a country far, far away.

I chewed the chicken still in my mouth, then let myself sink sideways onto the couch.

"Ah, whatever~."

Honestly, it wasn't like I had zero desire to awaken. Hell, maybe I wanted it more than anyone. Think about it. Even a low-rank awakening meant never worrying about money for the rest of your life. Who wouldn't want that? I was just throwing a tantrum because no amount of praying had ever made it happen.

And since field work was a hard pass, I desperately wanted a click-job if I was going to awaken at all.

"Please. When I open my eyes tomorrow, let me have awakened as a click-job."

I prayed the same prayer I always did, and drifted off to sleep.

Maybe my pronunciation had been the problem.

The next morning, I found myself blinking at the reflection of a little girl staring back at me from the mirror.

"…What the fuck."

I cracked my eyes open and glared at the mirror.

At the same time, the blue-eyed girl in the glass half-lidded her eyes and glared right back.

A staring contest stretched on for a while. After a long, hard look at the blue-eyed girl, I finally exhaled a long sigh, as if admitting defeat.

"…Haaaaaa."

Yeah. It was about time I accepted it.

It had already been three days since I'd woken up as a little girl. Only now could I admit that the girl in the mirror was me. That didn't mean I could fully accept it, though.

"…How is this even possible."

I muttered the complaint under my breath and looked at the girl in the mirror again. Little by little, her features started to register.

Long black hair. Blue eyes. An appearance that looked like she'd just entered middle school — except with the kind of beauty that would probably make a string of boys cry someday. Because I had no girls' clothes, the oversized white T-shirt I'd thrown on slipped off one shoulder ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the moment I so much as shifted.

I tugged the shirt back up, poked at a soft cheek, and said quietly,

"…Seriously. There's not a single trace of my original face left."

I used to be the kind of manly man who'd answer "Korean melon" without hesitation if you asked my favorite fruit. Looking at me now, if I said "Shine Muscat," nobody would bat an eye.

"…Ugh."

A wave of cognitive dissonance rolled over me. If I kept staring, I was going to start denying reality all over again — so I pulled the hair from both sides of my face forward and hid behind it. For some reason, doing that made the anxious knot in my chest loosen.

…This is weirdly cozy.

How do I put it? Like the world was being gently blocked out, wrapping me up soft and safe. An unexplainable sense of comfort settled in.

I sat there for a moment, hunting for a little inner peace, then carefully ran my fingers through my hair.

…Also, this is kind of amazing.

Given that I'd spent three days barely washing while I tried to process everything, the hair should've been greasy and rank by now. Instead it was still soft as silk. No smell — if anything, it almost seemed to carry a fresh fruity scent.

I brought a lock to my nose and sniffed carefully.

Sniff sniff.

Blueberry…?

Or maybe a little raspberry. Drawn in by that strangely addictive scent, I kept smelling my own hair for a second too long before—

"…Hah!"

—I snapped out of it and jerked my face away, a weird guilt and self-loathing crashing over me at once.

…What the hell am I doing.

The calm I'd barely managed to find tangled itself back into a mess. I pulled my knees up and buried my face in them.

I don't know how long I sat like that. Eventually a feeling hit me: this couldn't go on. At this rate I'd spend another four days moping in the exact same spot. I needed to shove my thoughts somewhere else — so I spoke the one thing every Awakened could call up, the very thing that had done this to me.

"Status window."

A soft fwaat—!! rang out, and a blue window bloomed in front of my eyes.

A clean, tidy status window. My eyes locked onto one particular word written there.

…Necromancer Princess.

That was probably the reason I'd ended up like this. The reason I'd become a little girl overnight almost certainly came down to awakening this class. No — definitely. The word "Princess" was sitting right there in bold.

Honestly, I was extremely pissed about why this had happened to me. But fretting over something that had already happened wasn't going to change a thing. I needed to dig into my current situation a little more. Only then could I decide how I was going to live from here on out. Three days of denial felt like more than enough.

Necromancer Princess… so a necromancer-type class?

Judging purely by the vibe of the name, yeah, that tracked. I stared at the status window a moment longer, then couldn't help letting out a small sigh. I knew exactly how necromancer-type classes were treated.

"…Haa. Of all things."

If there were classes people called nobility, it stood to reason there were classes on the opposite end. Necromancer-types were one of the ones treated like a total dud. An absolute garbage ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠class. Plenty of reasons for that, but the biggest one?

They're weak.

Among combat classes, you genuinely couldn't find anything weaker in the early game. All you could do was raise a few pathetic little bones. Beyond that? Nothing. Sure, if you climbed the Tower, leveled up, and picked up skills, you could eventually pull your own weight — but compared to other classes that started strong right out of the gate, it barely meant anything. The class itself had almost no built-in merit. And since it dealt with corpses, people avoided you on principle. That was another reason.

Haa. I asked for a click-job. When the hell did I ask for a class where the skills go clack-clack?! Was ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠it my pronunciation? Was my pronunciation the problem?!

Unless God had genuinely misheard my Korean, this shouldn't have been possible. I seriously started considering Korean pronunciation correction classes.

I clutched my head and ranted internally for a bit, then—

"Huu…."

—let out a long breath and gave my head a light shake.

"Let's calm down a little."

If I kept drowning in these thoughts, I wasn't going to get anywhere. I steeled myself and slowly checked the status window again.

…Also, what does that even mean?

EX-Class. A rank I'd never heard of even once. As far as I knew, ranks only went from F-Class to S-Class.

I tilted my head — then my eyes flew wide open.

No way. Is that what I think it is?! A rank above S-Class?!

There had been a rumor once. That S-Class couldn't possibly be the end. That there had to be something above it. But since it had never appeared even once, people treated it as pure nonsense.

"…Gulp."

And I might be looking at it right now.

No. Don't get your hopes up.

I shook my head and brushed the thought away. Nothing was confirmed yet. No point getting hyped only to be disappointed later. For all I knew, it could be a rank below F.

"Let's check the skills first."

I swallowed and carefully shifted my gaze to the skill list.

I thought this earlier too, but there really are a lot of them.

Because the class was EX-Class? The skill count was ridiculous. I'd always heard most people only got one or two.

"…Huu."

I let out a slow breath and started checking them one by one from the top — and before long, my eyes went round.

"…Huh?"

Isn't this broken?