The First Mistake
It had already been two weeks since that fucking status window popped up. And in those two weeks, my life had gone straight to hell. First of all, my only lifeline—my Barrier skill—had completely vanished.
The Barrier is in its pregnancy period.
The Barrier cannot be used during the pregnancy period.
These insane messages kept appearing, completely locking me out of activating the skill at all. I still had no idea what the hell this “pregnancy period” bullshit even meant, but the biggest problem was that I couldn’t use my Barrier anymore.
I’d never taken the skill into a dungeon even once. Instead, I’d been milking it for all it was worth in everyday life. The restaurant I’d worked at until recently was the perfect example. I could freely shape my Barrier into any form I wanted. I pulled off all kinds of ridiculous stunts—floating food through the air without lifting a finger to serve tables, stacking heavy crates of ingredients on top of the Barrier to carry them effortlessly. Thanks to those insane tricks, the place gained a reputation as the weirdest restaurant near the university. Customers flooded in, and the owner beamed as he paid me a fat fourteen thousand won an hour.
I’d been using my pathetic F-rank ability pretty damn efficiently. But the second the skill got sealed, everything ended.
When I told the owner that something had come up and I wouldn’t be able to use my skill for a while, his face hardened in an instant.
“Then… let’s just drop your pay to minimum wage. Can’t be helped, right?”
It felt like he was snatching back what he’d given me, but I was in no position to argue. Even though it pissed me off, I swallowed it and kept working for peanuts. On the third day of that humiliation, a massive disaster hit.
The pretty part-timer who’d quit earlier for personal reasons had come back. A gloomy thirty-year-old skill-less bum versus a beautiful female college student in her early twenties. The owner’s scales didn’t take long to tip. That very day, he sliced me out of the job like a knife.
Ah, fuck. It was truly fucked.
As a result, I’d become a complete jobless loser again, stuck back inside this gloomy studio apartment.
“Shit… how the hell am I supposed to pay rent this month? Hell, I don’t even have money for food today…”
I was lying spread-eagled on the bed, letting out a deep sigh and tearing at my hair when it happened.
-Beep
The mechanical sound of the door lock opening shattered the silence, ringing through the quiet room.
What the hell? No one should be coming here.
My heart sank. Thinking a thief might have broken in, I froze rigid on the bed and slowly turned only my head toward the entrance. The person who opened the door and stepped inside was far beyond anything I’d imagined.
Glossy black hair cascading all the way to her waist, porcelain-white skin like a doll, and cold, sharp eyes—a supreme-grade beauty. It was my non-blood-related little sister, Kang Harin.
As she walked into the room radiating a chilling aura, I stared in blank shock and muttered in a dazed voice.
“…What? Why are you here at this hour?”
“Whether I’m here at this hour or not, why the fuck would you care?”
Her brow furrowed at my grumpy reply.
“What?!”
“And why the hell are you here? You never even call on normal days, you bitch.”
At my irritated tone, Harin’s eyes flickered with momentary confusion. But she quickly lifted her chin with that trademark arrogant expression.
“Mom told me to bring you some side dishes, okay?”
Mom told her to bring side dishes?
It made no sense. The person who hadn’t called for months suddenly bringing food? And let’s not forget it was Mom who had dumped the deposit on me and exiled me to this cramped studio in the first place.
But as a broke, jobless bastard living in this shitty reality, the first thought that came to mind wasn’t suspicion—it was relief.
Thank fuck. All I had left to eat was water.
Feeling secretly relieved that I’d get a meal, I glanced down at her hands. Something was off.
“But why are both your hands empty?”
To my puzzled question, Harin shamelessly answered.
“I forgot the container.”
“……”
I doubted my ears. Staring at the idiot just standing there, I exploded.
“Fuck, you came all the way here to bring side dishes and forgot the actual side dishes?!”
It was so absurd I let out a hollow laugh.
“You forgot? Are you brain-dead? If there’s no food, then why the hell did you even come?”
At my aggressive barrage, Harin’s pretty brows twisted into something ugly. She crossed her arms and shot back in a sneering tone.
“The brain-dead one is you, Kang Hajun. A thirty-year-old loser who only jumps between part-time jobs and lives like a pathetic NEET.”
“Fuck, what?!”
The precise strike of reality stung my chest like a needle. The absurdity and rising fury shot straight to my head. As I opened my mouth to fight back, Harin cut me off first, scanning me up and down.
“But why are you home at this hour? Shouldn’t you be busy serving tables right now?”
“……I quit. It didn’t suit me.”
I tried to answer as casually as possible to protect what little pride I had left. But I couldn’t fool that bitch’s eyes. The corner of her mouth twisted upward.
“You mean you got fired?”
“You fucking bitch, I swear…!”
Her provocative tone made me snap completely.
“Did you come here just to pick a fight with me? Huh?! Does it make you that fucking happy? But seriously, why the hell did you come?!”
As I roared loud enough to shake the entire room, Harin let out a deep sigh and took one step closer.
“Haah… I came because I figured I should give you something while I was here anyway.”
Harin pulled out a leather wallet and took out several crisp fifty-thousand-won bills. At a glance, the bundle looked like hundreds of thousands of won. She tapped the bills with her finger and gave me a condescending, arrogant smile.
“Hey. I was originally planning to leave about four hundred thousand won on the table… but since you’re home?”
Harin waved the wad of cash in front of my eyes.
“Bark like a dog for me. Maybe I’ll feel generous and give you extra?”
The moment I heard those words, something inside my head snapped with an audible crack.
My skill was sealed, I’d been fired from my part-time job, and I was already on the verge of a mental breakdown with no way to survive. And now this non-blood-related sister shows up, treating me like a dog with a handful of cash and stomping all over my pride.
The last thread of reason completely broke.
And the action that followed became the most fatal first mistake I would make that day.
The room rang with my scream. Harin’s arrogant smile froze solid in an instant. She stared at me blankly, clearly caught off guard by my violent outburst.
Objectively, if you only looked at Kang Harin’s face, she was a flawless, top-tier beauty. But the moment your eyes dropped lower, her score crashed through the floor. Just like I’d shouted, her chest was a literal washboard. No—calling it a washboard was an insult to washboards. It was a perfect cliff with zero distinction between front and back. No joke, my own male pecs were definitely several times bigger than her chest.
From the beginning, that pathetic body of hers had been her one and only lifelong complex—her absolute reverse scale. Back in school, if I teased her about it even once, she’d get bloodshot eyes and throw a tantrum.
With my reason gone, I had blatantly stabbed right into that forbidden territory. And once my mouth started running, it wouldn’t stop.
“You made some money and now you think you’re all that? Did you come here to stuff that cash into your nonexistent tits?! Who the hell do you think you’re calling a dog with a body that can’t even tell front from back, you bitch! You’ve got two or three backs stacked on top of each other!”
“……What did you just say?”
Harin’s voice sank dangerously low. Her once-pale face flushed bright red in an instant, then began to tremble. Her eyes burned with murderous flames.
“This… this what, what the hell did you say?!”
Boom—!
With one stomp from Harin, the studio floor shook as if it would split apart. She hurled her wallet to the ground and charged straight at me.
“Who are you calling flat?! Who has two backs?! This bastard’s lost his mind!!! You think today’s your fucking funeral!!!”
Her fist slammed into my face almost simultaneously.
Thud—!
“Ugh?!”
She wasn’t a civilian—she was a C-rank physical reinforcement hunter. If my Barrier had been available, I might have been able to endure it somehow. But right now my Barrier was on strike, claiming it was in its “pregnancy period.”
With zero resistance or defense, I had to take the full raw impact with my body.
“Die! Die! Just die already, you son of a bitch!!!”
Thud! Crack!
Dull sounds of impact filled the narrow room. Harin had completely lost her mind. She dragged me off the bed and started beating the absolute shit out of me. Slaps across the face, merciless kicks smashing into my solar plexus and sides—it all poured down like a storm.
“Ack! Aaaack! Stop, fuck! Harin! Sister Harin!! I was wrong… kuhak!”
At first I tried to resist and shout back, but the gap between an F-rank hunter and a C-rank hunter was as wide as the Andromeda galaxy. I couldn’t even scream properly. I curled up and took the beating like a rag doll. My face quickly turned into a bloody mess. The pain of my ribs cracking made it impossible to breathe.
Harin was rampaging like she genuinely wanted to kill me.
By the time several pieces of furniture lay shattered, the brutal assault finally stopped.
“Haah… haah… whew…”
Harin breathed raggedly, brushing her hair back. Still not satisfied, she panted and looked down at me with cruel eyes. I lay sprawled on the floor, unable to move a single finger.
I barely cracked open my swollen eyes and looked up at her. My entire body throbbed with pain, forcing tears from my eyes.
“Haah… Thirty years old and the only thing alive is your mouth…”
Harin let out a scornful sigh and picked up her bag and wallet from the floor. She opened the wallet and pulled out the entire stack of fifty-thousand-won bills inside.
Rustle, rustle—!
She roughly scattered the money over my head. Yellow fifty-thousand-won notes rained down like a shower onto the white floor.
“Consider it a gift, you fuck. I’ll throw in allowance and compensation for the beating. I didn’t count, but it should be around eight hundred thousand won, you pathetic bastard.”
As I stared coldly at the money scattered across the floor, Harin spat the words at me and turned away.
“Don’t ever show your face in front of me again, you worthless piece of shit.”
Slam—!
The door slammed shut with enough force to break it, and the lock clicked. Once again, terrible silence filled the room.
“……Ugh, ow……”
I groaned and blankly stared at the fifty-thousand-won bills rolling across the floor. I couldn’t even tell whether the liquid running down my cheek was blood or tears.
In the room that now reeked of blood and dust, an indescribable emptiness and crushing regret washed over me like a tidal wave.
“Haha… this is really fucking pathetic, damn it…”
Thirty years old, teasing my sister about her flat chest, getting beaten to a pulp, then feeling relieved while looking at the compensation money scattered on the floor. A lament for my own miserable life came out naturally.
My pride had hit rock bottom and kept going, drilling straight through the floor. Yet my hands were already crawling across the ground, desperately picking up the fallen bills one by one to survive.
“Yeah… with eight hundred thousand won… I can pay this month’s rent and eat chicken until I burst… that fucking bitch…”
As I counted the money, I laughed hollowly inside a pit of utter misery.