First Commute at 140 in Two Gangnam Apartments
"Whew..."
It was the hour when the warm morning sun first began to spill across the world. I stood at the roadside, a faint edge of nerves running through me, waiting for my first day of work.
Are had told me she would come pick me up herself at the appointed time if I just waited here. Standing there, I found myself freshly aware of how different the basic treatment was from that hunter guild of mine — the kind that tossed you an address and barked at you to find your own way there on time.
But honestly, what set my heart racing more than that was something else entirely.
A drive alone with a beauty who looks just like Noona. If that's a stroke of luck, then... I guess it is?
We had only just met, and our connection was strictly professional — work-related, nothing more. Even so, I was developing a real fondness for the young woman named Lee Are. Of course, the root of that fondness was something painfully simple: she had a face that looked far too much like Suyoung Noona's.
Getting this easily swayed just because someone looks like her... I really am a simple man, aren't I?
I was turning that thought over with a faint bitterness when—
Screech!
A sports car came to a stop right in front of me. The moment I saw it, my eyes went wide on pure reflex.
No way... Come on. Even so, it can't be that...
The second I laid eyes on it, I automatically decided it couldn't be her car. Not for any complicated reason — I simply knew exactly what model this was.
A Lamborghini Veneno... the one that goes for over five billion won. You've got to be kidding me. Two Gangnam apartments are rolling down the road.
Back when I was pulling five million a month, I'd considered myself decently paid — at least on the salary front. But from where I stood, still firmly in the lower-middle class, this was a monster priced so high I couldn't even dream of looking at it.
I was still standing there, quietly stunned, when the window began to lower. And inside—
Shattering every last doubt I had, a woman in sunglasses who looked just like Noona came into view. Or rather — Lee Are.
"Hello. I've come to pick you up."
"Huh?... Ah— y-yes. Th-thank you."
At her words, I found myself treating the door with exaggerated care, opening it with both hands and shutting it with a ginger, almost reverent touch.
"I'm sorry. I meant to arrive sooner, but there was a bit of traffic along the way."
"Ah— no, it's fine. I only just stepped out myself."
Her polite tone left me more flustered than anything. From where I stood, the mere fact that she had driven something this rare just to come get me was already more than I could process.
Come to think of it... it's been a long time since I sat in the passenger seat. Driving was always my job.
I thought back to those days — stuck behind the wheel like a chauffeur, those women riding shotgun, raining complaints on me the whole way — and looking at Are with her hands on the wheel, I felt something close to a strange, quiet emotion.
"Well then, shall we go? It's a fair distance, and we're already running a little late, so I'll pick up the pace a bit."
"Yes, please do."
Are spoke in a voice that managed to be both careful and soft at once. Listening to her, I couldn't help a small smile. Honestly, sunglasses aside, she looked right now like a young woman who'd only just taken the wheel for the first time — visibly tense. Her hands trembled lightly on the steering wheel, and she fumbled a little with the gear shift. The car was absurdly expensive, but driving skill was clearly a separate matter — or so the sight of her made me think.
Well... there's barely any traffic up ahead, so she'll probably hit forty or fifty. Once we get on the highway, maybe eighty...
I was fastening my seatbelt with that thought when—
VROOOOOM!!!!!
"?!?"
A sensation like being thrown onto a roller coaster hit me all at once. Blood rushed to my head; my breath caught in my throat.
Wh-what is this? Why is it this fast?
Are had floored it without warning. One glance at the dashboard told me we were already blowing past ninety, and I realized then that the picture I'd painted in my head was about to look nothing like reality.
Even if the roads weren't terrible, this was still a national highway with plenty of other cars. Traffic lights. Pedestrians. Vehicles puttering along at fifty or sixty. One wrong move and we'd be in an accident.
No, no — foreign sports car or not, is it really okay to drive like this on a regular road? Sure, there might not be speed cameras, but this feels pretty dangerous... or does it?
But as the minutes passed and we slipped onto the highway without a single hitch, the worry I'd been carrying began to ease. We were past one-forty now, and still Are wove between the other cars with the fluid ease of someone performing a familiar routine. Purely on driving skill, she was better than me — and for a moment I just sat there, blank-faced.
She looked thoroughly at home behind the wheel like this. That odd tension I'd sensed from her at the start had been nothing but a false alarm.
Even so, separate from the relief, I was starting to realize I needed to revise my image of Lee Are a little.
She's got a surprisingly fiery side to her, doesn't she? Looks aside, she's really nothing like Noona in a lot of ways.
When I thought about it, Noona ran a small café and lived a quiet life with her daughter. Are, on the other hand, was a hunter who made combat her livelihood — a Black Hunter who'd left the military for personal reasons. And given the price of the car she was driving, it wasn't hard to figure out that after being separated from Suyoung Noona as a child, she'd been adopted into a very wealthy family.
They'd grown up in fundamentally different worlds. That the two sisters would differ considerably on the inside was only natural.
Once the initial shock of the drive had worn off and a little more time had passed, I carefully put a question to her.
"By the way — there are a few things I'd like to ask, if that's all right?"
"Of course. Please ask me anything."
There was a subtle tension in her voice as she answered. It didn't seem to be about the driving, but between the way she'd been when I first got in and the way she was now, I still couldn't pin down what was causing that lingering edge.
I set aside the parts I couldn't figure out for the moment and carefully asked the question I'd actually wanted to ask.
"We'll be meeting them soon enough, of course — but before that, I'd like to hear a little about the other hunters I'll be working with. Not for any particular reason. Just as colleagues I'll be working alongside from now on. Would that be all right?"
"Colleagues..."
At that word, the tension on her face seemed to ease just a fraction. Then, a faint smile touching her lips, she spoke again without taking her eyes off the road.
"As I mentioned before, there are roughly thirty of us in total. Of those, the ones who can be called the core are three people, myself included. All of them worked as A-class hunters in the hunter guilds before becoming Black Hunters."
"I see... A-class."
One rank below S-class, but still well above the average hunter in combat power. From my experience, though, A-class hunters always fell a little short when you tried to deploy them solo the way you could with S-class. Unlike S-class hunters, who could cut a swath through a swarm of Abysses on their own, A-class hunters had hard limits on what they could do.
And looking at it from inside the military, that was only natural. There was a law on the books: S-class hunters — the nation's strongest combat assets — were, in principle, barred from discharge. You could work around it with loopholes or keep them on the roster in name only, but you could never change the fact that they belonged to the military. An S-class who fully left the army to become a Black Hunter simply couldn't exist.
That was exactly why someone like Na Jiseon — anger-management issues and all — was still stuck in the military calling herself an S-class hunter.
Which meant that Are, currently driving beside me, and the other two — A-class or not — were among the absolute best Black Hunters out there. And for someone like me, who would be building strategy around them, that was a fact I always had to keep in mind.
With our overall strength down this much compared to before, operations are going to be a little more awkward... then again, in some ways, at least they'll actually listen — which is already better than those damn women...
I was about to ask for more detail on the other two when—
"We're here. That's it, right there."
"Ah... so that's—"
A massive building on the outskirts of the city came into view. Unlike a hunter guild, it had none of the feel of a military base about it. If you didn't know better, you could have mistaken it for any ordinary company headquarters.
"That is Dreamouth — the Black Hunter corporation. The place where you and I will be working together from now on, Jinhyun-ssi."