Discharge Notice
The 28th Hunter Guild.
A hunter unit totaling two hundred members, including four top-tier S-class hunters and a large number of A- through B-class hunters besides. Though founded later than most other guilds, it had recently racked up brilliant achievements and was rapidly proving its strength—a promising outfit with a bright future.
And deep inside that hunter guild’s living quarters lay an officers’ office so lavish it might have been mistaken for a royal palace.
There, buried under the mountain of documents piled in front of me, my mind automatically began spitting curses.
Fuck…
Lee Jinhyun, adjutant of the 28th Hunter Guild.
That was my job title, and the reason I was stuck here doing this goddamn hard labor.
As adjutant, my real work was to grasp the ever-changing traits of the Abysses that evolved day by day, craft strategies suited to them, analyze the overall situation, and issue the right orders to the right hunters at the right time.
That was the role I was originally meant to fill here. Having done the same work in the military, I had carried it out to the best of my ability, feeling a certain sense of mission and pride in protecting humanity.
But… the problem lay in all the other duties that had clung to me like sticky gum the moment I, a soldier, was seconded as adjutant to a hunter guild.
Namely…
“Jinhyun, go make me a cup of coffee, would you? And I’m telling you again—if you show up with instant like last time, I’m throwing it straight in your face, so pay attention. Oh, and I’m craving something spicy for dinner tonight, so tteokbokki, please. The stuff you make is pretty good.”
“...Haa…”
At the casually delivered, utterly unhinged joke and the dinner order, I let out a sigh and glanced at her.
Long blue hair, a mature and striking face, and a glamorous figure—an S-class hunter.
Choi Yujin.
Known as the Reaper of the Battlefield, she sat on the sofa in the officers’ office doing her nails and speaking to me in the most arrogant voice imaginable. I had no choice but to stop what I was doing, rise from my seat, and walk toward the coffee pot.
Yet before I could even finish making the coffee as she had asked, another voice floated over from behind me.
“Hey, Adjutant. I went hard carving up Abysses today and my shoulders are killing me. Come massage them. I’m specially granting a lowly ugly bastard like you the privilege of laying hands on this noble body of mine, so do it with a grateful heart and put some real effort into it!”
The bitch ordering me around as if she were some queen.
Compared to Choi Yujin she had a relatively petite build and red hair tied in twin-tails. Setting every other prejudice aside and looking only at her face, she gave off a faintly cute impression—a beauty.
An S-class hunter who had arbitrarily slapped the moniker “Blade of Demon Destruction” on herself.
Seo Jiyun.
She issued the command while watching me forced to make coffee even as my work piled up. I answered her in the most polite tone I could manage.
“Um… I’m a bit buried in work right now, so maybe a little later…”
“Work? Is that crap more important right now? Or is me relieving my fatigue more important? You’ve got one minute. Get over here. Act up and I’ll put needle holes through your palm while I’m at it.”
This is more important, you know? This is work that has to do with your life and every other guild member’s!
The urge to snap at someone who was making me pull an all-nighter preparing for the next operation rose all the way to my throat, but in the end I had no choice but to swallow it.
If the other party were someone you could actually reason with, maybe. Three years of experience had taught me thoroughly that this bitch was a complete lunatic with whom conversation was impossible.
On top of that, while Choi Yujin at least stopped at moderate jokes, this Seo Jiyun psycho would actually smile while putting holes through your palm if you did something that rubbed her the wrong way. She had the personality of a full-blown psychopath.
Arguing for no good reason would only leave me suffering in the end.
So after delivering the coffee, I had no choice but to approach Seo Jiyun to give her the massage.
“Mmm… hnn, good… right there, right there… a little harder… haaah, our adjutant may be useless at everything else, but his massages are the best… hnn!”
Seo Jiyun receiving the massage while letting out completely unnecessary, lewd moans.
Someone else might envy a situation where you got to freely feel up a beauty’s body and listen to those sounds…
From my perspective right now, all I wanted was to quit this bullshit this instant and get back to my desk.
If this keeps up, another all-nighter tonight… damn it… I haven’t even finished half the operation plan yet…
Feeling a vicious mental exhaustion, I was inwardly lamenting the fact that I was stuck massaging this lunatic when an irritated voice mixed with annoyance reached my ears.
“Hey, Lee Jinhyun! What did I tell you? I said do the underwear laundry ahead of time! Do you have any idea how annoying it is walking around in a bra that reeks of blood?”
“Haa…”
A voice as loud and grating as a baby bird squawking from its nest.
A sigh automatically escaped my lips, and right after that the door opened and another familiar lunatic walked in.
“Hey! Can’t you hear me? You little shit, when your noona is talking you better get your ass out here right now!”
Orange ponytail, face full of irritation.
S-class hunter Na Jiseon stormed in, seething as if she had just boiled a train’s steam whistle.
But… I already knew perfectly well that the source of her rage wasn’t anything like laundry.
That bitch… looks like she lost another ranked match.
Na Jiseon, born with anger-management issues.
Gaming was her hobby; whenever there were no missions she sat in front of a computer nonstop… yet her computers rarely lasted more than a month.
The reason was simple.
If a game didn’t go her way she couldn’t hold back the rage and would smash the monitor or the tower in a single blow.
And if that still wasn’t enough, the sparks flew to the people around her—specifically me—and I had felt my life threatened more than a few times, just like those shattered computers.
Today, however, another lunatic stood in front of me blocking this anger-management case.
Seo Jiyun, who had been thoroughly enjoying her massage, spoke in a cold voice to the rage-filled woman standing before her.
“Hey, mind shutting up for a bit? Can’t you see this unnie is getting a massage?”
“Unnie my ass. Hey, Lee Jinhyun! Stop massaging that bitch and come do the laundry first! I’m already pissed enough, so don’t get on my nerves!”
“Oi, you looking to die? This bitch is hopeless. I’ve been going easy on her for a while and now she’s crawling all over me?”
With those words Seo Jiyun shoved me aside and began radiating killing intent.
Na Jiseon’s fury flared even hotter; she looked ready to throw down any second.
“Fine, come at me. Today I’m carving you up for real.”
“Bring it! Die by my hand today, you twin-tailed bitch!”
And so began yet another dogfight between the lunatic and the anger-management case.
Neither had drawn a weapon, but they grabbed each other’s hair and launched into a full-blown, deranged brawl.
Meanwhile the only relatively normal one, Choi Yujin, simply sipped the coffee I had made and watched the spectacle unfold.
In a way you could call it fighting fire with fire—lunatic versus lunatic—but…
The problem was that once everything was over, the person left cleaning up was always me.
Reordering smashed items, clearing the wreckage, and if either of these bitches got hurt in the fight I even had to write a statement of responsibility for negligence.
Like this.
On the battlefield they beat Abysses like dogs.
Here they held me like a rat—hunters in name only, twin bitches.
These were the true faces of the so-called saviors of humanity, the idols of the masses.
And so today, once again, I had to spend a day of suffering, pushed to my physical and mental limits between them.
On top of that, even after it was over I still couldn’t rest; I had to return straight to my desk and finish the backlog of work.
Haa… seriously… I want to quit.
The same grinding life of hardship that had repeated almost every single day for the past four years since I took this post.
Basic duties, of course, plus every petty errand the S-class hunter bitches demanded, plus managing their schedules tied to idol work.
I had carried every last one of those burdens on my back for a full three years, and more than a few times the thought of quitting had circled through my head.
Yet the reasons I kept doing this shit that was harder than hell itself were two:
One, the pay wasn’t bad—five million won a month, matching the difficulty of the job.
And the other… for better or worse I was still a soldier, so even if I requested retirement—no, discharge—the process was never easy.
This was wartime; every single person was precious.
To apply for discharge under these conditions required complicated procedures and a legitimate reason. If that process were discovered and I happened to get on the wrong side of those twin bitches, something I absolutely did not want to imagine would happen.
“Haa… stop thinking useless thoughts and just work…”
With another sigh I turned my exhausted eyes back to the documents, swearing to myself that once this operation was over I would definitely take leave and get some rest.
“Wh-what did you just say?”
I asked again, face blank with shock.
And looking at me, that bitch spoke in a cold voice completely unlike her usual tone.
“Didn’t hear me? Discharge, Lee Jinhyun. In other words, you’re fired. Starting tomorrow you don’t need to show up at the guild anymore.”
The first moment I heard those words, I briefly thought she was joking with me again.
Golden hair, brown eyes—a beauty, and the guild master of the 28th Hunter Guild.
S-class hunter Lee Sena.
She held the high post of guild master purely on raw combat power, and she was the one who had turned me—technically the second-in-command as adjutant—into a servant or toy for the officer-class hunters.
Moreover, she dumped every task she was supposed to handle onto me, while pushing through things she had no business touching solely on the authority of the guild master. She was the worst kind of leader, incompetence and tyranny coexisting, and together with Choi Yujin she loved nothing more than pulling pointless pranks to torment me—a bitch whose personality had been washed down the drain with her rice.
Yet when I looked at the single sheet of paper she held out in front of me, I couldn’t speak for a while.
A discharge notice stamped with the hunter guild master’s seal.
Seeing my name written beneath it, my mind went completely blank for a moment.
The instant the guild master’s official seal was affixed, the notice gained actual legal force.
Once it became a legally protected document, reversing it was nearly impossible.
Considering that, I finally realized this was absolutely no joke.
“W-why… at least tell me the reason. Why are you suddenly kicking me out like this?!”
I shouted, packing as much bewilderment into my voice as I could.
Looking at me, she answered in her characteristic icy tone.
“As you know, our 28th Guild just got promoted. That means from now on we’ll be receiving far broader support from higher up while we work.”
“Th-that… what does that have to do with me having to leave? If the guild got promoted, shouldn’t that mean better treatment instead? So why…”
I asked in a trembling voice.
To that, the bitch…
looked at me with the attitude of someone discarding useless trash and said,
“Unfortunately, the scale of support we’re about to receive is completely different from anything before. Guild member schedules, detailed itineraries, even tactics—everything you’ve been handling half-assedly with your own hands until now will from this point on be carried out smoothly with the assistance of official national managers. In other words, we no longer need to rely on your utterly worthless support.”
“Th-that means… don’t tell me…”
I made an expression of pure disbelief at her words.
Lee Sena sent me a look as if she were staring at a bug and continued,
“Meaning, what we need right now are only personnel capable of actual combat. I’ve explained this much, so you should understand the situation perfectly by now, right?”
With that she looked straight into my eyes.
Then from her mouth came the final, definitive kill shot.
“You’re no longer needed in our guild.”
“…”
“Still, as a final courtesy I’ve put a generous severance package in, so you shouldn’t have trouble living for a while. You’ve worked hard doing things beyond your ability. From now on, make sure you never appear in front of me again.”
After delivering those cold final words, Lee Sena turned her back and walked away from me.
And so… after hearing what she said, I stood in place for a while with a look of utter despair on my face.
No—I made sure to stand there.
Then, a short while later,
once her figure had completely vanished from sight and I realized there was no one left to watch me,
from my mouth…
“Aaaaaah!!! I’m finally discharged!!!!”
a cry of pure joy burst out automatically.