3-Second Clear

On the open ground of the Tower's 0th floor, a crowd of hunters had packed together in front of the dungeon entrance.

"Still not out yet..."

A full hour had passed since the rankings updated, and not a single sighting of Kim Doha had surfaced. A human who'd just usurped the world's number one spot should have spawned photos, videos, something — but no matter how many times people refreshed, the gallery stayed dead silent.

"We know for sure they're Korean, at least..."

"You think? Could be an overseas Korean. Set the name to Korean but cleared some other country's Tower..."

"Oh, come on. Then someone would've posted a sighting in the gallery."

"What the hell does someone who cleared Hard Mode in three seconds even look like?"

At that hunter's question, a murmur rippled across the plaza. People began tossing out guesses about Kim Doha's appearance.

"Has to be a mountain of muscle, right? To grind five goblins into paste in three seconds, you'd need insane strength...!"

"Face is probably covered in scars too. Definitely a special-forces veteran."

"Could be an awakening side effect that warped the body. Maybe four arms...!"

The longer the talk went on, the uglier the mental images got.

"He's coming out!"

The rift shuddered violently, and the plaza went silent in an instant. Dozens of people held their breath at once, eyes locked on the gate.

What walked out of the dungeon looked nothing like what they'd been expecting.

A little girl — small enough that she barely reached the chests of the hunters around her.

Hat jammed low over a face mask, hugging a shield nearly as big as her own body.

Instead of intimidation, the overall impression was... cuteness.

"..."

Not one of them could find their voice at the sight.

The moment she stepped through the gate, Doha's very first thought was that she wanted to crawl right back inside and hide.

There are... so many people!

Every gaze crammed into the plaza was fixed on her. It felt like being scanned from the back of her head down to her toes, prickling the whole way.

...What do I do.

Her feet stopped.

There were more people on this patch of ground right now than Doha had met in the entire five years since awakening. Combined.

"What's with that kid...?"

It was someone's mutter that broke the stillness.

"Wouldn't Kim Doha have gotten out before the crowds showed up? No way a tiny thing like that went into Hard Mode."

"Only one person entered floor 0 earlier. So that means that kid is...?"

"That's her?"

Eyes swept over Doha from head to toe. A single strand of silver hair slipping out from under her hood. Arms trembling like a leaf.

World number one. Hard Mode, cleared in three seconds.

Nothing matched the image they'd conjured up.

When Doha failed to react, the crowd started pressing closer.

"Excuse me! Are you Hunter Kim Doha?"

"What were you doing in there for an hour?"

"Just give us one comment, please!"

Behind her, the dungeon. In front, a wall made of people.

Doha's throat seized up, and not a single word came out.

Grrowl—

The space behind her folded in on itself, and a black snout poked out.

"Eep...!"

The snout clamped onto her collar and hauled Doha straight through the gap.

"Ah! She's gone!"

"A space-type Awakened?"

"What? Isn't that like a totally broken ability? So that kid really WAS Kim Doha?"

"Nah, no way. She's still just a 0th-floor climber. Nowhere near the level to shred monsters."

While everyone else was reeling, a low voice muttered briefly from the back of the crowd.

"Just as I thought..."

A middle-aged man in plain clothes nodded to himself with the most solemn expression imaginable.

"They do warn you in murim to beware of women and children."

That single remark sent the plaza into an uproar all over again.

"...Wait. Hold on. Could it be?"

"Korea's S-Rank number one is a woman too — Chairwoman Lee Seoa."

"Then beneath that innocent face there's a monster hiding...?!"

"She's doing it on purpose, isn't she? Lower everyone's guard."

"Daengdaengi, I owe you my life..."

Doha sat slumped on the living room carpet, half-buried in Daengdaengi's fur.

I can feel my heart rate coming down a little...

One more minute standing in front of that crowd and she might very well have bitten her own tongue off. Daengdaengi could honestly be called the savior who'd prevented Doha's social death.

Lick.

"Hehe, that tickles."

Doha handed her worn-out companion today's share of magic stones, then went off to wash up.

The moment she sank into the bathtub, her stiff body began to loosen in the warm water. A sigh escaped her all on its own as the tension melted away. Out of habit, her fingers drifted toward the gallery icon in the corner of her status window — and hesitated.

It's gotta be on fire right now...?

She hadn't just shaved a few seconds off the existing floor 0 record. She'd cut it down to three.

Normally she'd have been delighted, thinking something like hehehe, attention is soooo nice~ — but this time, a creeping sense of unease was winning out.

There were people waiting in front of the floor 0 dungeon, for crying out loud...!

Still, duty called — she couldn't abandon the gallery, not as its head moderator. Doha pulled up the screen with her fingertip.

"...The world has gone insane."

Safe in the knowledge that the status-window community couldn't be IP-traced, people were diligently dumping every desire they had. Doha used both hands to clear the troll posts away with practiced ease.

Delete. Ban. Delete. Ban.

A five-year veteran moderator's hands did not hesitate.

Then, all of a sudden, her fingers stopped on one post.

[Why Doha-ham Is So Lovable]

As if in a trance, she clicked on a post containing her own name.

"..."

Doha deleted the post on the spot and dunked her head under the bathwater.

Glub. Glub.

Out of breath, she surfaced, wet silver hair plastered flat across her face.

Wait. Why are these people writing posts assuming I'm a man?

A sudden curiosity bloomed, and she opened the gallery again. Scrolling back through the older posts, she found them wall-to-wall with threads asserting that Doha was a two-meter mountain of muscle, ex-special forces.

Having confirmed that human imagination truly has no limits, Doha gave up on the gallery and checked her skill levels instead — the ones she'd gained on floor 0.

Any other class would have had stat gains to check too, but with combat, defense, scouting, and mobility all delegated entirely to Daengdaengi, Doha had no need. The real achievement was that she could now tame a new monster in addition to Daengdaengi.

And it said I can do simple communication now too...

Contrary to her hopes, Daengdaengi did not suddenly start speaking in a human voice.

I'll need to test it a bit more before I get the hang of this... Huh? What's this?

Staring hard at her status window, Doha discovered a brand-new entry.

"Status window, you are a GOD!!"

Doha shot up out of the bathtub and bounced around the bathroom.

She had wanted to run a strategy-stream of her own. But every guide stream out there belonged to professional raid teams equipped with proper filming gear that could survive inside a dungeon — gear far too expensive for a bottom-tier streamer like Doha to ever get her hands on.

"With this, I can totally land that hundred-million-hit content!"

She immediately tried to extract footage of the tutorial floor 0 fight, but —

"Why!!"

Come to think of it, it made perfect sense. The status window — the System — was not built on any human-made internet infrastructure. Footage recorded with its help would naturally only be uploadable there.

So posting it on my channel would be dangerous, huh...

Cooled-off brain cells reminded Doha of the crowd that had surrounded her at the dungeon entrance. If some shadowy hacker dug up her personal information and exposed it...

Weirdos would hound her without end, and they'd come crawling out of every corner to find her.

In a way, it might actually be a blessing that the footage could only go up on a ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠gallery with strict anonymity guaranteed.

Maybe I should just post it to the gallery anyway...

Her enthusiasm thoroughly deflated, Doha played back the recorded combat footage.

"Hmm... no hidden dungeon, huh? It's just me fighting goblins."

Her face and voice didn't appear, and Daengdaengi had dispatched the goblins so quickly that it was hard to make out who was even fighting. All the screen showed was a black blur sweeping away five goblins in the blink of an eye.

Doha took a look around the disaster zone the gallery had become.

Everyone was still too busy dragging Lee Seoa off her second-place perch to notice anything else.

Why do these people do this? They're hunters who make good money...

Five years as the hunter gallery's resident eraser had taught Doha a whole arsenal of suppression techniques. Ban-bombing... handing it to the gallery management AI would be simple, sure, but wasn't that a little heartless?

Then a more efficient approach came to her.

When there's an issue, you bury it under a bigger issue. Simple.

She whipped up a post and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠hit upload.

Just as Doha intended, the Lee Seoa gossip quieted right down.

In exchange, though...

Muscle-brained S-Rank Main Mod faction versus pervert-who-ground-five-years-into-the-tutorial Main Mod faction. The gallery caught fire all over again — just pointed in a different direction.

The gallery old-timers who'd once glimpsed Doha's reflection in a drinking glass fought back with evidence, but every one of their posts was automatically sniped by the fortress of blocking filters Doha — hypersensitive about identity leaks — had put in place.

While Doha slept soundly buried in Daengdaengi's fur, and the gallery burned over its next hot topic, a group of hunters infiltrated the neighborhood where she lived.

"This the place?"

"Positive. The press is being controlled, but the rumors are already moving through the black market."

"Then spin up the mana-trace detector already."

They were hunting for something under cover of the dark night.

The spot where the Awakened finally stopped was exactly where Daengdaengi had knocked down the criminal Awakened. The snapped utility pole, not yet replaced, lay sprawled across the ground — easy to find.

A man in a robe activated an artifact. A disc spun above his palm, tracing lines of blue light.

"Huh? Boss, this thing keeps cutting out halfway?"

"What? How does that even make sense? This gear can track a target flying into the sky."

"I-It's true!"

"Make sense, damn it! I'm already pissed off enough with Cheolmin missing!"

The sword-carrying man's fist flew at the robed figure.

"Gyah! Boss, come on! You know spatial relocation is the one thing this artifact can't detect!"

At that, the man scratched his head.

"Tch... My bad."

"Ugh, hitting me with actual mana in it is going too far!"

"Hey, if I'd hit you for real, your head would've popped ages ago!"

The robed man grumbled as he picked himself up off the ground.

"What do we do now?"

"Do? What else — we comb the CCTV footage, that's what."

At his order, the robed man approached the camera mounted outside the convenience store.

It hung high atop the utility pole, but he simply floated up into the air and, with practiced ease, transferred the stored footage into his artifact.

"Got it!"

"Grab a few more, then we head back to the hideout."

Having secured the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠CCTV footage, the group slipped away swiftly into the darkness.

And in that footage, from two days earlier, was the image of Doha clutching an envelope to her chest, scurrying home in quick little steps.