Corporate Slave Life
It was noisy.
The lobby in front of the Tower's 1st Floor gate was, as always, brimming with a mix of excitement and unease.
The clatter of armor, the clink of specially refined potion bottles, and the shouts of humble hunter parties swearing themselves to success—all of it merged into one great wall of noise that filled the space.
And right in the middle of it all, I stood apart in a new suit that had just come back from the tailor.
It never fit right, so I'd left it hanging. But it was the only thing I had to wear on short notice.
Between constant overtime and weekend shifts, I hadn't even had time to buy clothes. So there I was, stepping into the lobby wearing the spare suit I never wore to the office, utility knife at my side.
“...Wow. What is that? Some new concept nutuber?”
“Maybe he's here doing research.”
“Not with that gear...”
As I got ready, snippets of conversation drifted over from ahead. It was only natural.
There's such a thing as dressing and equipping yourself appropriately for the place and the situation. But here? A man in a business suit, carrying a utility knife that looked, for all the world, like a box cutter?
From the perspective of a normal hunter party, I must have looked like a dungeon nutuber armed with some incomprehensibly eccentric concept. That would be the sane assumption.
Good thing I'm wearing a mask, at least.
I'd put it on in case the non-compete clause became an issue, or in case I ran into someone from the company and things turned ugly. Having my face covered made me feel a little better about it.
Well... then again. I couldn't really blame them. If I'd been in their shoes, I probably would have looked at me like a monkey in a zoo too.
Leaving that commotion behind, I waded out of the crowd and stopped in front of a quiet corner kiosk: the Hunter ID Registration Kiosk.
[Please enter your desired ID.]
A cold mechanical chime sounded, and a keyboard rose up over the pristine white touchscreen.
...An ID, huh.
My fingers, frozen midair for a moment, began to move slowly.
Tap-tap. Tada-dak.
Corporate Slave Life
— This ID is available.
Of course it was.
The moment I finished typing it in, a hollow laugh escaped me before I could stop it. Was there a single word in this world that captured the last ten years of my life more precisely than that?
As I forced the corners of my mouth—devoid of any real humor—upward, a translucent ID window materialized before my eyes.
Corporate Slave Life
[Grade: F (Uncertified)]
There was no turning back now.
A dungeon, for the first time in ages. With a deep breath, I stepped through the blue membrane of the 1st Floor gate.
In an instant, every sound of the real world faded away as if it had been a lie.
The din of the rowdy waiting room, the smell of potions wafting through desperate voices—all of it vanished, replaced by the rich scent of soil and fresh grass.
A vast expanse of forest and meadow, as if primordial nature itself had been transplanted whole. This was the Tower's 1st Floor.
Each floor of the Tower connected to different dimensions on a periodic cycle through Phase Shift, but this floor alone was the exception.
The only 'tutorial' zone in existence—with its phase locked in place by the Hunter Management Bureau, at enormous expense, for the training and safety of rookie hunters.
Which is supposedly why the monsters here are the weakest in the entire Tower, and the dungeons come free of their usual variables, but...
That was a story told strictly from the omniscient perspective of professional hunters.
It was only weak to them—to people backed by corporate-scale capital, with tight-knit support teams, full armor, safety nets, and superhuman physical abilities. From an ordinary person's standpoint, walking in here barehanded had to be about the same as running into a brown bear on the street with nothing but your bare skin.
If anything, the real problem lay elsewhere: precisely because it was considered safe, the 1st Floor was far too crowded with people.
My ridiculous getup drew every eye in the vicinity at once.
“Wow... so people like that actually exist. He just came in, right?”
“Must've just awakened. A nutuber? Judging by the look of him, I can guess what he's thinking. It's just the 1st Floor, it'll be fine. That's the thought, isn't it.”
I could feel their pitying glances all the way over here.
“Even so, isn't that a bit much? A suit and a mask. And his weapon is... a utility knife? That thing?”
“Leave it. He'll come to his senses after he loses a limb or two.”
As the sneering whispers continued, the woman leading them frowned and rebuked them in a low voice.
“That's enough. Cut the chatter and focus on training. If you've got time to gawk at someone else, you've got time for one more swing of your sword.”
“...Yes, ma'am!”
At her frosty tone, the apprentice hunters shut their mouths.
Kim Han-na, rookie hunter training team leader at Mir, the giant of the hunter industry.
She too swept her sharp gaze over me for a moment, but soon turned her head away as if I were of no interest.
...Well.
It was a perfectly natural reaction.
Even back when I'd watched through monitors as an operator, anyone dressed like that would have registered as a dead man walking.
But there's no need to let it bother me.
I hadn't come here to put on a show for them, after all. I'd simply come to field-test the 'ability' on today's agenda—and to measure the extent of my own talent.
That was when it happened.
The undergrowth shook violently, and out popped a rabbit with a sharp horn mounted on its head.
A Horn Rabbit.
Despite its small frame, it carried a vicious horn that could skewer an adult man's abdomen without breaking a sweat.
More than anything, its speed was laughable—so fast that even seasoned veterans would give up on dodging and commit to blocking instead.
Its danger level sat exactly at the point where an ordinary person was guaranteed to die, and even those who came prepared, leaders included, could find their lives at risk if they got careless.
Maybe that was the Bureau's real intention in locking this phase to the 1st Floor.
To show a cold dose of reality to the ones who came swaggering into the Tower on corporate sponsorships and layers of gilded hype, talking about their awakened talents and how special they were—and to give them a chance to quit being hunters before it killed them.
Noticing that I'd crossed paths with one of these 'Horn Rabbits,' Kim Han-na happened to glance my way.
If I had to read that look, it probably meant something like: It would leave a bad taste in my mouth to watch this lunatic who came in without a single piece of armor get splattered across the grass, so I'll at least keep the rescue team on standby...
A faint smile.
Her eyes and those of the apprentice hunters all turned toward me.
And before them all, my first hunt began.
People say the 'Tower' is dangerous.
An endless climb of variables. Native creatures that could lunge out from anywhere. The moment you let your guard down, your life was snuffed out, and every plan you'd built collapsed like a sandcastle.
...But I didn't see it that way.
If Team Leader Park Jin-chul heard me say this, he'd fly into a rage about me disrespecting the Field Exploration Team, but...
If anything, I thought the whole world was effectively one-eyed.
Because the world inside my field of vision was a little different from theirs.
In-haaah...
After my awakening, whatever I wanted to see, I could see.
The flow of the wind. The light trembling of the grass, and the movements of the tiny insects hiding within it. The entire world surrounding me.
The currents of mana and colorless gases that by nature could never be seen. All the information in my field of view woven together with them, reaching even into blind spots beyond my sightline.
The fine twitch of individual muscles. Preliminary movements. The flick of eyes, the tremor of breath. And the future movements and trajectories those drew out, all the way down the line.
All of creation—rendered before me.
The instant the Horn Rabbit moved, the vibrant world before my eyes sank into gray.
And within it, I could see it.
The thing I had watched so often through my monitor as an operator—the thing I wanted to see now, the thing my gaze had always sought.
Only one thing stood sharp and vivid in the colorless world.
A single red solid line, stretching from the tip of the creature's horn straight toward my heart. A trajectory like precognition of the path to come.
The sign of grave injury, or of death. A trajectory of cause and consequence—
And how could anyone not dodge a line that blazed so plainly before their eyes?
Unless they were blind.
Whoosh.
Mid-stride, I twisted my upper body slightly and changed my path.
Shk—. The red solid line grazed a few strands of my hair and sliced through empty air.
“Kik?!”
Perhaps the dodge had been unexpected. The Horn Rabbit slammed to a halt, its body wrenching sideways.
But it quickly dug its hind legs into the ground and launched upward again, tracing a rising arc from below.
Another solid line—the one that would have skewered my jaw.
But... it was easy, as I'd expected.
This wasn't dodging a bullet already in flight. I read the timing in the shift of its muscles, the angle of its aim, the telltale movements of its wind-up—everything.
By the time I had simply taken a single step to the side, all that remained was the hollow whump of something slicing through nothing, ringing through the air around me.
And at the same moment, a thought occurred to me.
Just as some animals see the world in black and white while humans live amid a riot of color—perhaps the world I saw was simply a different world from the one they saw.
Well, I can understand it intellectually, but... a world where that line, glowing blood-red all alone out there, isn't visible—where people wander through it obliviously, get hurt, and die—
No. Even I found it hard to truly imagine.
Confronting the red solid line with my whole body—something I'd only ever watched from behind a monitor for years—I found myself drifting into a strange reverie.
But perhaps I'd spent too long savoring the sensation.
Rustle, rustle—
The undergrowth around me began to shake, one after another.
This is...
It wasn't just one.
Within the gray of my vision, red solid lines now rose from every direction, closing in on me like a spider's web.
Four in total.
No, five. Another one was bursting out from behind.
And at this point... even a veteran hunter would probably struggle to escape.
But I simply began to stride through them with the most ordinary of movements.
The way a child plays hopscotch at a crosswalk, stepping only on the white stripes. All I had to do was avoid the red lines that bloomed for an instant and vanished.
It was simply that easy.
Kim Han-na's eyes narrowed.
Even the apprentice hunters had fallen silent, staring fixedly at the scene unfolding before them.
“He's... dodging all of them?”
Five Horn Rabbits.
And each one charging in from a different direction, all at once.
Yet the masked man never lost track of a single movement—he slipped aside as though he had known the paths in advance.
Was this what evasion looked like when it became an art form?
...No. At that level, it's not evasion anymore.
Before the Horn Rabbits' feet even left the ground, the man had already moved.
He wasn't perceiving danger and reacting to it. He moved as though he'd been standing in a place the danger could never reach from the very beginning.
A chill raced down her spine.
A ranker... at minimum A-rank or above. Then what's with the getup? Is he someone famous deliberately hiding his identity?
Just as that conviction was about to harden—
Swish—.
This time, it was the man who swung his utility knife.
But for some reason, the blade's arc looked clumsy.
A stiffness like a novice swinging a blade for the very first time. The force, the angle, the timing—all of it wrong.
And yet the edge scraped precisely along the Horn Rabbit's flank, drawing a spray of dark, viscous blood.
...
“Team Leader. He's not killing them.”
When an apprentice muttered this, Kim Han-na found herself momentarily at a loss for an answer.
Clumsy...? No. Impossible. It's not clumsiness. He's deliberately choosing not to kill...
He could kill them, and he didn't.
The blade veered exquisitely around every vital point.
Painful spots only—never fatal ones.
As if—
...as if he had some personal grudge to settle with Horn Rabbits.
Then it came back to her: the string of incidents from years past, apprentice hunters dying to Horn Rabbits.
Tragedies so common they were scrubbed from memory.
Without meaning to, she found herself looking at the apprentices she was training right now. Good kids, the lot of them—who would be skewered by a Horn Rabbit in a heartbeat if left on their own.
Could it be... someone dear to him died or was maimed by a Horn Rabbit?
And so he hid his identity and committed this strange act of mercy?
...She didn't know.
But one thing was certain.
Earlier, the whispers had called him a nutuber, an attention-seeker. But the confidence to enter the Tower with no safety nets at all. The overwhelming skill radiating from his every movement. And even the principle behind his strange conduct—
That man was a hunter of the rarest caliber, one whose face the world would almost never be permitted to see.