Specters of the Undeveloped Zone

A short rest was enough to get our stamina back, and we were on our feet again. This time we headed for the Undeveloped Area. We'd already swept the Cargo Loading Dock clean of skeletons, and those things would need time to respawn.

How monsters actually come into being inside a dungeon is still a mystery humanity hasn't cracked. They do breed among themselves, but those numbers fall laughably short of what Dungeon Hunters slaughter on a daily basis. That's why the world's leading scholars seem convinced that dungeons possess some special power that generates monsters. The details, of course, remain wrapped in fog. Not that I put much stock in those academic bastards — they talk a lot of nonsense.

The Undeveloped Area wasn't far from the Cargo Loading Dock. We followed a concrete road, broken in patches, until an unfinished warehouse complex came into view. Heavy machinery lay abandoned wherever it had been left. A wide pit had been gouged out of the earth, and two skeletons were wandering the rim.

"There's a specter up ahead."

Sujin swept her light forward as she spoke. A white curtain swayed in empty air. It wasn't fabric caught on the wind — it was a specter, a soul-type monster.

It wore the look of a cute little ghost mascot that girls would go wild for, but the real thing was a monster that punched through human hearts. It could phase through terrain and fly, which made it a pain to deal with, though it wasn't particularly dangerous. Its physical power was weak; you wouldn't get hit unless you ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠were being careless. Same story as the skeletons.

The thing slipped through objects at will, but it had to materialize to attack. Otherwise it couldn't deal damage — obvious enough.

To hunt a specter, you had to counter its strikes properly. Sit back and pepper it with ranged fire from ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a distance and it simply wouldn't die. In a way, it was a counter to ranged dealers. Then again, specters themselves were trash mobs that could kill tanks too, so that particular impression never quite stuck.

"I'll take it!"

Yeonji knew all of that. She dropped into a low crouch, then exploded off the ground and shot forward like a bullet. Soaring toward the specter drifting in midair, she let her nails lengthen and threw a righteous iron fist at the thing as it lunged for her — her ability had turned the punch steel-hard.

The specter's claws crumpled against Yeonji's iron fist with a sharp hiss. Then, with a sound like air rushing out of a punctured ball, it vanished into smoke. A simple execution.

"Well done, Yeonji."

She squirmed at the praise, twisting her whole body with pleasure. The glow didn't last. Two more specters materialized in front of us. They weren't difficult enemies, but it was irritating to have them interrupt when we had other work to do. Still, they weren't the kind of trash you could ignore, so we dealt with them.

"Come to think of it, specters are dark-attribute monsters, right? With your Light Control, you should be able to wipe them out no problem."

Yeonji looked over at me as she said it.

"Hm? That so?"

She wasn't wrong. Light Control was effective against dark-attribute monsters. Monster ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠attributes didn't follow any clean, official standard — they were assigned by weighing a handful of factors — but the one thing dark-attribute monsters had in common was a weakness to light-attribute abilities. I loosed a Holy Arrow at the specter hanging in the air.

An attack that should have passed right through it… connected. The sacred arrow punched through the specter, and the body simply came apart. Oho. I'd known, roughly, that Light Control was the dark-attribute weakness, but I hadn't expected it to be this easy. Study as hard as you like — you never know everything. From now on, anything that looked even remotely unholy was getting a test shot.

"That's ridiculously simple."

Yeonji watched me hunt, sounding almost disappointed. It was a lot less flashy than her method. Fine by me. If this was all it took, the specters that kept pestering us were going to be a non-issue.

Wait. Would Light Control work on skeletons too? Curiosity is for testing, not sitting on. I put a Holy Arrow into a skeleton wandering the Undeveloped Area. No extra bite. Just ordinary, run-of-the-mill damage.

"I heard skeletons come in all kinds of attributes. Most of them are earth, though."

Sujin settled the question for me. That walking corpse — a thing that spat in the face of the natural order — wasn't even dark-attribute? What an outrageously forced setting.

Then again, attributes themselves were an arbitrary box humans had invented, so of course the labels wouldn't always match reality. We got back to work, cutting down specters and skeletons and making money.

The survey of Siseong Industrial Complex went smoothly. Day one brought in around fifteen million won. Day two, nearly twenty million. My inventory was doing the heavy lifting — ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠we were raking it in.

Day three, though, we barely saw a monster, and walked out with a miserable eight million. Some days the dungeon pays. Some days it doesn't. And just like that, our expedition calendar arrived at the final day.

"I hope today at least matches day one."

Unfortunately there wasn't a decent hotel anywhere nearby, so we'd rented a van and been commuting from home. Watching hundreds of thousands of won evaporate in transit costs every day made my chest hurt. All the more reason to hope the take was good.

"The specters are greeting us right from the entrance today."

Sujin wasn't exaggerating. The moment we stepped into the dungeon, a pack of them was waiting. Five, give or take. Specters, though, died to a single shot from me. Having Light Control was a blessing.

We put the specters down and headed for the Cargo Loading Dock, clocking in like it was a regular job. Unfortunately, another party had already claimed the spot. Hunting grounds inside a dungeon were strictly first come, first served. There'd been a clan, once, that stationed members one by one in a beginner dungeon and charged turf fees — the Association smashed them flat overnight.

Pull a cheap stunt like that and of course you make enemies. For hunters, the Association wielded more influence than the government. Hunters didn't pay those enormous membership dues for nothing. Anyway, someone had beaten us there, so we had no choice but to move on.

"Want to try the Undeveloped Area? Think anyone's there too?"

"I doubt it. I looked around at the entrance — there didn't seem to be that many people. At most it's us and that other party."

We headed for the Undeveloped Area. As expected, it was nothing but monsters. Specters spawned here constantly, which was mildly infuriating. We hunted for about two hours. Ten skeletons crossed our path, and we put every one of them down without breaking a sweat.

"We've only been at it two hours and that's already ten. Feels like we might match day two!"

Yeonji was delighted by the pace.

"Mm. True enough — but the loading dock's taken, so I wonder if we'll actually make that much. Even if more spawn here, we're looking at another ten, which is barely ten million won."

To think I'd started saying barely ten million won. My sense of money had warped a little, but that was par for the course as a Dungeon Hunter. The bigger the paycheck, the bigger the expenses. Just outfitting yourself for dungeon work ate a fortune, and once your rank climbed, you started talking hundreds of millions without blinking. That was a ways off for us, of course.

By the time you hit Rank 3, you were using gear that didn't have a price. One-of-a-kind equipment forged from the remains of named monsters. Someday we'd be wearing that kind of thing too.

Our first real goal was paying off the debt. We needed to clear the loan we'd taken out for the Party House, and fast. Even tens of millions a day wouldn't be enough.

Four days, call it fifty million. Subtract expenses and the cost of the next expedition and you'd have maybe forty million left. Peel off taxes and you're looking at twenty million — five million a day. Our combined debt was three hundred million, so that was what, seven percent paid down? Sixty-two days of grinding ought to do it.

Paying off three hundred million in a little over two months. An ordinary person would foam at the mouth hearing that. Of course, we'd need rest in between, there'd be variables we couldn't plan for, and the loan was accruing interest — realistically, maybe three times that long.

Still, half a year. Fifty million a month in repayments. You could see exactly why a first-tier bank would hand a hunter a hundred million won with no collateral at all.

Granted, we'd gotten an unusually good roll. A three-person party with tank, DPS, and healer fully covered — you couldn't design a better money-making combination. Beginner parties pulling numbers like ours were rare anywhere in the world. And in the Dungeon Hunter business, splitting the take was its own problem.

Every party handled payouts differently, but there was a general custom. A basic framework existed, and from there the people who performed better took more, the ones who didn't took less. Splitting everything equally the way we did was supposedly something you only saw in parties where the members were genuinely close.

In a typical five-person party, thirty to forty percent of the take went to operating costs. The rest was divided among the members — tank and healer each claiming around thirty percent of that remainder, with the three dealers splitting about ten percent apiece. In other words, a tank or a healer made roughly three times what a dealer did. The party leader got a little extra on top.

From a dealer's seat, it was enough to make you weep blood, but it was just the market. Dealers were everywhere. Healers and tanks were scarce. Dungeon Hunters were already an absurdly rare resource, and then rarity stratified again inside that pool. Funny how the world works. Always does.

If I'd been an ordinary dealer hunter, paying off a hundred million would have taken me a year of running myself ragged. Even then, it would have been fast.

"Specters again. These ghosts never get tired of showing up."

Sujin scowled up at the empty air. They were easy enough to put down, but interrupting a rest was still annoying.

"There really are a lot of them today."

"Yeonji's right. This is a little weird."

Neither of them bothered to hide their unease.

"Yeah. It is."

The feeling was off. The disaster at the Rounded Nest had started with omens like this. Dungeons shifted by the hour — you never let your guard down. Specters were small fry no matter how many of them there were, but there was no guarantee it would stop at specters.

"What should we do? Should we just head back?"

Sujin's face was tight with worry.

It was a real question. Leave now and today was a bust. We'd already lost one hunting ground to another party and hadn't gotten a proper run in.

The spike in specters was strange, but strange didn't automatically mean catastrophe. Maybe the population had just ticked up by chance. Maybe we were simply running into them more than usual today. Unlike Solari World, where I had a strategy guide, this world didn't let you read the future off a single omen.

"Wouldn't it be a waste to just leave?"

Yeonji said it, and I agreed. Walking away right now would sting. We could manage one more hunt, couldn't we?

"One more hunt, then we go. If anything even smells dangerous, we leave immediately."

That seemed like the most reasonable call. Yeonji was on board, and Sujin didn't look like she had any real objection. An hour, at most, and we'd be done.

We hunted specters while we waited for the skeletons to respawn. Once the last specter went down, skeletons began to trickle through the Undeveloped Area as if they'd been waiting just offstage.

"Back to work."

With Yeonji the tank at the front, the skeleton hunt started up again. All three of us were used to it now — a kill took less than five minutes. These scrawny bags of bones were our livelihood. Their expensive remains would sell high, and that money would put food on our table. After about an hour, the skeletons stopped coming.

"Shall we head back? Losing the loading dock still stings a little."

If we'd had that too, today would have been a record. As it stood, the projected take was around twelve million won.

"Heh. Another expedition wrapped up without a hitch. I'm going to sleep all day once we get home."

The inverted schedule of dungeon work had fatigue stacking up in her body; Sujin, rarely enough, was talking about actually sleeping rather than sex. I wasn't planning on letting her.