The Light She Couldn't Have
Honestly, the results were hard to believe. I read through the skill window again and again. Elemental Mastery had no fewer than six Branch Skills. Fire, water, earth, wind, light, darkness — I could command them all. That alone was the equivalent of walking around with six separate abilities.
What seized my attention were Light Control and Darkness Control. For the record, abilities of the same name existed in the real world. The power to command light and darkness was famous — for better, and for worse.
Light Control was renowned for its staggering versatility. Offense, defense, support — it excelled in every direction you pointed it. Considering that Natural-type abilities usually leaned hard into a single specialty, that alone was an enormous advantage. It was powerful, and far rarer than other Natural-type abilities besides. There were probably fewer than a quarter as many Light Control users as there were people like Sujin with Water Control.
Darkness Control was every bit as famous — just in a considerably uglier direction. Among Natural-type abilities, it was the one most brutally specialized for attack, and it had become something of a calling card for the Demonic. The clan master of the Rosicrucian Order, one of the more notorious Demonic clans, wielded it. Users were as scarce as those of Light Control, but hunters who awakened to this particular ability had a nasty habit of going Demonic. Some people described it as being "consumed by the darkness." A pretentious, skin-crawlingly asinine way of putting it.
The infamy was well earned, but so was the power. Line up every ability in existence — not just the Natural-types — and Darkness Control still landed in the top handful for raw destructive force. If Light Control was the all-rounder, Darkness Control was a purebred attack dog. And I had both. It was a little late to be realizing it, but I was starting to scare myself. Of course, whether my skills and the real-world abilities actually functioned the same way was still an open question.
"Alright. That should take care of the Hunter registration problem. Hmm. Darkness Control is way too conspicuous and inconvenient, so I'll just say I awakened Light Control and leave it at that."
I had a feeling the Association was going to shower me with support. I'd sunk twenty thousand credits into this and wrung every last drop of value out of them. Thanks to the credits I'd received as a reward, I'd pulled two skills and only spent ten thousand.
"Good. That's enough for today. Time to sleep."
A faint hunger gnawed at me, but exhaustion won out. The moment I hit the mattress, consciousness vanished as if I'd downed a sleeping pill. Please, I thought, don't let this have been some fever dream. Please don't let the world be that cruel. I might be a bastard, but getting hit with that kind of karmic payback already would be excessive.
However cruel the world might be, it wasn't quite as cruel as I'd imagined. I checked the status windows the instant I opened my eyes. Arrayed along the right side of my vision were buttons for everything from the status screen on down. Last night had not been a dream.
"Yaaawn... What time is it?"
I'd definitely gotten in after three in the morning, and yet the clock read 6:00 a.m. I'd slept all of three hours. My body, however, felt as rested as if I'd gotten a full eight. Was that an effect of raising my stats? Come to think of it, I had a pile of bonus points sitting unused. I'd need to allocate those too. Becoming a Dungeon Hunter on mediocre stats was going to be a tall order.
"Ah. Right. The plan. The plan."
I hurried to boot up my laptop. The grand design I'd prepared for getting Sujin into bed was saved as a notepad file on the desktop. I opened it and reviewed the plan one more time.
If anyone ever laid eyes on this document, I would be socially dead. The thought sent a shiver through me that was, I had to admit, strangely pleasant. Ugh. Even I can tell that's perverted.
The most basic condition for taking Sujin was getting her to ingest the Succubus's Gift. There was also the option of pumping my stats and physically forcing myself on her, but I had no appetite for that, and it was socially radioactive besides. Even as a hunter with insufficient mana, her baseline physical ability would be well above an ordinary person's. Unexpected variables could crop up.
"If I invite her to a meal, I'll naturally get a chance to slip her the Succubus's Gift."
The old me would have struggled just to strike up a conversation with her, let alone ask her to dinner. Not anymore. Because now, I was a hunter.
Sujin left for work at 7:30 a.m. Being a full-time writer had its perks — you picked up a neighbor's daily routine without even trying. Sit in your apartment hammering at a laptop long enough and you learned exactly when the person next door headed out the door. Doubly so in a rundown villa where the soundproofing was a polite fiction.
I timed it deliberately, waiting just inside my own front door to match her departure. The sound of Sujin's door opening rang out at 7:30 on the second, without a sliver of error. Punctual to that degree was almost unnerving. I opened my own door in the same instant.
"Ah. Sujin."
"Jaeseong? Good morning. It's a lovely morning."
Today, to my surprise, she remembered my name. Had last night's conversation — this morning's, technically — left an impression? The sense that I'd become someone a little closer to her was a good feeling. We were going to get a lot closer than that.
"Good morning. I actually had something I wanted to talk to you about, so I was hoping to catch you. What a coincidence."
"Ah... I'm sorry, but I'm on my way to work. If it isn't urgent, could we talk another time?"
Her reaction was exactly what I'd expected. I nodded and delivered the line I'd prepared.
"The truth is, I awakened last night. I was hoping I could get some advice from a senior hunter. If you're busy now, would you have a moment this evening?"
"You awakened!? Really!? Congratulations!"
Her eyes went as round as a rabbit's, then curved into a warm, genuine smile. She was happier for me than I'd even accounted for. Watching her clap her hands and offer her congratulations with such unguarded sincerity, I felt a twinge of guilt. Did she have any idea that all of this was just bait so I could fuck her?
"Haha. I was sure awakening and I were complete strangers, but I guess not. Ah — you said you were heading to work, right? Please, go ahead. I can't very well hold up a busy person for my own sake."
"Ah... Yes. I have time this evening, so let's meet then. Hehe. I say 'senior,' but I don't actually know all that much. I'll help however I can, though."
She said it with the kindest expression in the world. And she really was a good person. Which only made the prospect of making her mine all the more delicious.
"Um... I hope this isn't rude, but may I ask what ability you awakened?"
It was almost the same question I'd asked her last night. The difference was that I'd already known her ability when I asked, and she had no idea what mine actually was. I smiled and gave her the answer I'd prepared.
"It seems to be an ability that controls light. I'm not sure if that's a good one or not."
The instant she heard my answer, a faint crack ran through her expression. Not surprise. Not joy. For the briefest moment, the emotion that settled on her face was jealousy. Looking at it, I thought, ah. She's human too.
The jealousy occupying Sujin's face vanished in less than a second. Anyone without a sharp eye for people would have missed the shift entirely. A new line appeared in my mental notes on Sujin: Excellent at managing her expression.
"It's a wonderful ability. Jaeseong, you might even... become a Dungeon Hunter."
There was real sincerity in her voice. The congratulations were genuine. But so, I suspected, was the jealousy. This was turning out to be more entertaining than I'd expected.
Work wouldn't stay in her hands. Shin Sujin's thoughts kept circling back to what the man next door had said, and she made two mistakes she wouldn't normally have made. She'd managed to cover them before anyone noticed, which was a mercy.
"I'll be heading out."
Shin Sujin. She worked at Sejin Logistics, one of the major conglomerates. Her job was managing monster byproducts. Calling it inventory management made it sound like she was a warehouse clerk, but that wasn't it at all. A great many monster byproducts were lethally dangerous to ordinary people — materials that were difficult to even handle unless you were a hunter — and yet their utility was so vast it was no exaggeration to say they held modern society up. Managing them was important work.
She was only a Rank 10 hunter, but a position at a giant like Sejin Logistics meant her salary was nothing to sneeze at. With performance bonuses included, her annual pay ran a little over two hundred million won. Fold in the hunter pension on top of that, and she was earning in her first years in the workforce what an ordinary person could work for decades and never touch.
Money she had in abundance. What she didn't have was anything to fill the hollow space inside her chest. Living as a hunter with an office job felt, to her, profoundly empty. She had watched her mother and father work as Dungeon Hunters for as long as she could remember. Her older brother and sister, four years her senior, had followed their parents into the profession.
She had awakened on her seventeenth birthday, and of course she'd believed she would become a Dungeon Hunter just like her siblings. The wall reality threw up in front of her was far higher than she'd ever imagined.
"I'm sorry. But with this level of mana, clearing a dungeon would be extremely difficult. To register as a Dungeon Hunter, you would need to possess at least three times this amount."
She hadn't qualified. Like so many other hunters who drank from that same cup of failure, she had washed out of the mana-capacity test and never become a Dungeon Hunter. Her brother and sister had passed as if it were nothing. She'd assumed she would too.
After failing, she had searched desperately for training methods that could increase her mana, studied them with a kind of fever, and poured more than half of every day into practice in the hope of becoming a Dungeon Hunter. It took her six months to accept her own innate insufficiency. No matter how hard she trained, her mana refused to grow. She had never been a vessel large enough to hold a Dungeon Hunter in the first place.
"Jaeseong... was it? With Light Control, unless his mana is catastrophically low, a Dungeon Hunter license is as good as guaranteed."
The mana threshold required to become a Dungeon Hunter varied by ability. Light Control, with its absurd versatility, was the kind of ability that qualified you as a Dungeon Hunter just by existing. As far as she knew, not a single hunter who possessed it had ever been barred for insufficient mana.
"That's something worth celebrating. Hehe. Maybe I should pick up one of this café's cakes. I was so happy when I first awakened. A day like this deserves cake."
Without meaning to, she stopped in front of the cake display at a café. Her own reflection stared back at her from the glass, superimposed over the cakes. The face of a woman picking out a cake to celebrate someone else's good fortune looked, somehow, terribly sad.
She shook her head, scattering the thoughts. There was nothing less becoming than jealousy. Pick a delicious cake, and congratulate him happily. She chose the same kind of cake she had eaten on her seventeenth birthday. It was her favorite.