The Goddess Wants a Hamburger
Granted, one does not normally require a spacesuit to buy a phone.
There was, however, a perfectly sound explanation for why I had strapped myself into one — and the throng of humanity seething directly in front of me was all the proof anyone could ask for.
Having slipped past the street advertisements with movements straight out of The Usual Suspects, we secured the phone and made straight for the plaza. Hayeon had worn a puzzled expression the whole way, but the reason I would go strolling through a crowded city with a presumptive monster-lure in tow — necessity or no — was precisely this.
By then she seemed to have caught on as well; I could see an amethyst glint flashing behind her sunglasses.
To any outside observer, she could have passed for a professional fashion model without breaking a sweat. Beneath a statue whose subject no one could hope to identify, even her one-legged stance was the very picture of grace. Long, slender legs sheathed in sleek long boots of a streamlined design; a crisp white blouse paired with a tight skirt — clean, if a touch plain — until the addition of a vividly colored long coat brought the whole ensemble to a near-criminal perfection.
Over the coat, her hair spilled like flowers in full bloom — a majestic wine-red.
If the ink-black dress she usually wore embodied an elegance worthy of the name "goddess," today's outfit outdid it in sheer flamboyance.
Not that any of it could remotely be mistaken for professional attire.
We're doomed.
Then again, the only professional on this scene was me; the other party was, quite literally, an amateur — a goddess who had never once done this sort of thing in her entire existence.
And regardless, this was a woman who adored pointless attention. What exactly did she plan to do, already drawing this much of it?
Hmph. Even were you to say otherwise, what could one possibly do? That the children of man should hold this one in awe is... the most natural thing in the world—
Her mouth, mid-flourish, clunked to a stop.
My own steps, pushing through the crowd, had no choice but to halt as well. Yet look around as I might, nothing seemed amiss. No suspicious characters. Nothing.
When it came to reading danger, I beat this woman by a few hundredfold, if nothing else.
She, however, clearly begged to differ. Arms crossed — then a hand to her forehead — then a cover over her eyes — and finally several rounds of fidgeting with her own lips. Only then did she open her mouth, haltingly.
"No, what on earth... wh-what is that?"
"What's what?"
Had she finally lost her mind? Subdue her? Subdue her?
I hissed a low shh, shh through my teeth — and Hayeon's voice reached me, dripping with mortification. "Ssaem, no, I mean. Your clothes. The clothes."
"Clothes? What about my clothes?"
"No, I mean... what even is this?"
Naturally, that told me absolutely nothing, but I hunched my shoulders anyway, unable to resist Hayeon as she tugged at the part of my outfit I couldn't decide whether to call a collar or molded synthetic resin.
"It's a NASA spacesuit. Cost me a fortune to get my hands on. Well — buried in that place every single day, I suppose you wouldn't know one when you saw it."
The goddess didn't answer. She merely screwed her eyes shut, wearing the expression of a woman about to pass out.
Dubious behavior, granted — but trading places wasn't exactly an option, all things considered. One glance around made it clearer still: the crowd this woman had assembled for no discernible reason had meanwhile swelled into a human sea.
Hm? This is because of me? Do you truly mean to say so?
And her attempts to dodge responsibility even now were the cherry on top. Honestly — who here was the god? At this rate, I was liable to attain Buddhahood first, I swear.
Be that as it may, escaping the crowd devoured a fair chunk of time. It did, however, let me put the suit through its paces. While pushing through, I clipped shoulders with this woman more times than I could count — situations that would normally have had my weapon drawn on the spot — and every one of them ended with nothing worse than a calm mid-air somersault.
Worth every last penny of the steep price I'd gritted my teeth to pay.
"You, too, must have endured great hardship to reach this place, girl. Truly, most admirable. Wheresoever you go, great enterprise shall follow. You have this one's heartfelt blessing."
"There were plenty of people like you, unnie, so it was better than I expected. Ah — I'm Ja Hayeon. And you are? You seem to know Ssaem..."
"Hm. Tia. So shall you call this one. I permit it."
While I was nodding along, quietly pleased with the suit's performance, the two of them had somehow gotten around to introductions without me. She was evidently attempting to keep her identity under wraps as some manner of "classified information," but with a speech pattern like that, playing along was going to take real effort.
Damn it all. Seriously.
"Oh, shut UP already — you're getting on my nerves!"
In the end, she too had to cough up her frustration, tossing aside a persona that had never suited her in the first place.
To look at her now, you would never guess this was the goddess enthroned atop the Association's highest echelons — a Constellation descended to earth.
Only after working through that whole tantrum did she — the goddess Tiamat — slowly sweep back her hair. Gone were the savage horns of her usual form; her long, tapering locks swayed along with the movement of her fingers.
Of course, the near-total secrecy surrounding her existence didn't mean she was out wandering the streets for no particular reason. She had graced us with her presence, strictly speaking, because this business required her assistance.
The Avatar.
One of the powers belonging to the beings collectively known as Constellations.
It sends down to earth a "facet of the gods" — in plain terms, a clone of oneself.
Apparently a fairly common ability, as such things went, but one trait rendered it all but worthless to her peers: the strength a clone could be granted rose and fell in proportion to its distance from the true body.
The power radiating from the clone standing before me sat, compared to her usual self, a solid step or more below. In other words — roughly on par with an A+ rank monster. And that was with her actual body inside the same city. For a Constellation unable to descend to earth, an avatar would barely buy the output of a talentless E-rank hunter.
That testimony came from Tiamat herself, so it deserved the customary grain of salt — but Constellations capable of crossing a gate and manifesting on the surface were few and far between, and those who had truly escaped into this world were a pinch of that handful. In practice, one might as well call it her singular gift.
Clone or no — if it shared and operated her senses, and carried her consciousness into the bargain, wasn't that a spare body in everything but name?
Either way, I did not appreciate the spectacle of a goddess maxing out the Association's corporate card on this little costume. Conversely, one could also say her presence had genuinely thinned — seeing as how, unlike the old days, it stopped at leaving me with the urge to vomit.
"So — Ssaem? What on earth is going on here?"
With matters roughly sorted, that was Hayeon's question. Fair enough; from where she stood, it had to be baffling. She had stepped out to buy a phone and promptly found herself face to face with a woman whose head appeared to be on backwards.
But I was in no position to judge. I moved to rake my bangs in resignation — and was defeated by the helmet.
In the end, I came clean.
"Sorry. Can't give you the details, but she's a gate investigation expert."
The Hunter Association had gone to full alert the moment the incident report landed. Understandable — everything in it tore up every piece of received wisdom about gates. An S-rank monster bursting out of an E-rank gate was enough to make eyes pop from their sockets; that it might have been an act of terror timed to the practicum was worse still.
By providence, Choi Seungjun's breakneck containment meant the only people who witnessed me carving up that monster were the two who'd been inside the gate at the time — and Choi Seungjun himself.
But this was not a problem you solved by stapling mouths shut. They just barely kept the juicy front-pager — Terrorist Attack Strikes Academy on Opening Day — out of print; but after every relevant ministry had been turned inside out and a row of desks sent packing, the Association's upper echelons distilled a single conclusion: investigate — something, anything.
Where the hell had that monster crawled out of, what the hell had happened — dig until you hit bedrock.
In short: no leads? Smother the problem in manpower. The somewhat "traditional" solution.
And as one cog in that machine, the woman — an expert on gates and monsters by any measure you liked — had been dispatched.
Well, she is their kin. Naturally she'd know her stuff.
Of course, "dispatch" hardly meant the Association could snap its fingers at her. Her power was complication enough, but above all, she was the only being in this country capable of producing hunters artificially. Literally — among the Constellations said to have granted humanity its blessing since the gates first opened, she stood among the vanishing few who had manifested upon the surface.
The chairman of a mere Association — a man without even lifetime tenure — was hardly positioned to request anything of her. Obviously.
Nine times out of ten, this "dispatch" had been her own idea. From the Association's chair, risking her — an asset — in some gate mishap was unthinkable; they would sooner keep her half-entombed under the rubric of "care befitting a Constellation." Never in a thousand years would they volunteer for gate duty.
Given she spends her days killing time in the executive floors anyway.
Bored, was she?
The problem was that I had been hand-picked as her escort. I could understand it, granted. Whether the Constellation's true identity was a monster was a matter even the world's heads of state might not know for certain — setting aside the one day I called it purely off gut.
Beyond that, her existence was classified through and through. Which left precisely one job description: a hunter who knew what she was, and had the mettle to guard her. Even I doubted a second candidate existed. All the more once you factored in that I also had to give a firsthand account of the day that monster surfaced.
Call it a rare point where the Association's interests and the goddess's aligned.
Not that alignment made it one iota less infuriating.
Anyone else would have done. But her, of all people...
Having choked down my urge to someday shave the chairman's head bald and laid out the whole situation, I was answered by a quiet sigh from Hayeon — her manner a complicated braid of understanding and letdown.
"Well, it did feel off from the moment you suddenly said, 'Let's go buy a phone.'"
"I'm... sorry..."
Put that way, I had nothing to say either.
Apparently Hayeon had been looking forward to this shopping trip quite a bit. And the truth, ta-da! — we had actually come out for a gate investigation!
Having dredged up memories that were sour to begin with, I could have sprouted a second mouth and still come up short on apologies.
"For what it's worth, the phone was because I figured I'd need one, what with all the gate-hopping..."
It was a thing to reflect on, truly. I had been giddy at the prospect of picking gates apart under the banner of an investigation — but Hayeon, understandably, couldn't exactly share the mood.
"Hm. This one shall apologize as well. It seems this one has gone and interrupted your little tryst."
"You fucking bitch!!"
The bomb went off so abruptly that I shouted before I knew it.
That this rotten excuse for a deity would reach for a word like "date" surprised me not at all. What actually mattered was that the woman was attempting my social execution. The other party was an active high school student — ten years my junior! An age where "little sister" would raise fewer eyebrows, and she goes and drops that like some auntie from the neighborhood.
And no matter how desperately Hunter Academy needed hands, it remained, at the end of the day, a state-led project. The day rumors of teacher-student paid dating took flight, somebody on the faculty lost their head — instantly, no appeal.
And if that head happened to be mine? Then no more monster-slaying. Period.
My lately absurd, overflowing access to slaughter existed solely because I held a teaching post at Hunter Academy. The Association's guarantee rested upon it — that was why I could flit in and out of gates like this. Fall back to civilian status, and I'd be right back in a shoebox of a room, starving for the hunt exactly as I had been until recently.
Even if I clawed my way to some ordinary certification, no institution on earth hires the man fired over a sugar-dating scandal.
And in that world, Hayeon bled too. Strictly speaking, someone other than me would take up her protection — but three A-rank monsters and one S-rank monster within a single short window was far beyond what garden-variety hunters could absorb.
For me, it would merely mean the death of my monster-butchering dreams; worst case, I could always hurl myself into a gate. Hayeon was different. Hers would be a genuinely life-threatening situation.
The completion, one might say, of a world where everybody bleeds.
I fixed the goddess with my customary murderous glare, but the woman herself merely sighed on, apparently oblivious to the tonnage of what she had just said.
"That wretch is truly fucking rude. Allow this one to apologize in his stead."
"You don't get to speak for me, you crazy lizard."
"You son of a bitch!"
Honestly — what incurably vulgar speech. What happened when the child watched and learned from this?
It was anyone's guess how a goddess of ancient Mesopotamia had come to wield Korean profanity with such fluency. As ever: not a goddess. A monster, through and through.
That brawl — which seemed fated to run until I had butchered the Constellation-species monster calling herself a goddess — was finally brought to a close by Hayeon, who spoke up with the air of someone utterly spent.
"No, I'm quite all right. I'm the one who should be understanding..."
"See that? A girl years younger than you is the one being gracious? Reflect a little, hm? How disgraceful!! Kim Tia!!"
"You madman!!"
Thanks to that demented lizard — who, old as she was, wouldn't rest easy until she'd heard a high schooler call her "unnie" — we only got properly underway a good ten minutes later.
Truthfully, none of it required the time. Call it an investigation and it sounds grand; in practice, sizing up a single gate took under a minute. For me, one look settled it — and the self-proclaimed goddess, who intuits mana phenomena most mana-engineering researchers couldn't explain to save their lives, was no different. And to eyes like ours, not one of the gates showed the telltales: no frantic recent expansion, no shadow of that demon spawn.
My heart wanted to flip every gate inside out under the pretext of inspection — but that would hardly be fair to Hayeon, I judged, and let it go.
After making the rounds of some three gates, lunch hour found us. Honestly, the commuting ate more clock than the checking. I was idly weighing what to eat when Ms. Kim Tia — cover story: Association-dispatched overseas agent — deigned to speak:
"I find myself wishing to taste this thing called a 'hamburger.'"
"Then let's eat literally anything except the hamburger."
But my pitiful last stand was trampled flat by Hayeon, who nodded along with the feeble air of someone who had stopped caring.
Thus, with no way out, we made for the nearest McDonald's. The fast-food titan that had once conquered the world now wore its glory in rags. Undersea gates and their kin had severed the chain from its headquarters, and it had devolved into a thoroughly localized, Galapagos-island of a brand.
Thanks to which, most Korean branches now turned out a flavor where K fit better than M — though mercifully, this one still moved hamburgers.
A mercy, that I no longer had to field marketing campaigns asking customers to try their hamburger wrapped in kimchi — but watching the goddess hum to herself, pleased beyond all reason, I felt the irritation climbing my spine. When, precisely, had she ever eaten a hamburger? And who, in the first place, goes around holding forth about hamburgers in front of a goddess?
The problem lay elsewhere.
Thanks to the suit's flawless sensor blackout, the automatic door refused to register our existence, and Hayeon — bouncing on her toes to trip it — stepped through with me. Like any new city rebuilt upon a dead city's bones, the interior was immaculate. Automatic door aside, the tidiness — as though no one had ever so much as imagined a monster assault — made an impression.
"Welcome...?"
The employee's greeting died on her lips as she looked up. Well, naturally — towing around Tiamat, rotten or otherwise still a goddess, with Hayeon in tow besides, was always going to pull every eye in the building.
But I froze too.
Because the person delivering that greeting — dressed in a McDonald's uniform worn apron-style — was none other than Hwang Yoonha.