Chapter 0-7. Surely You Can Recruit in a Dungeon? (2)
Lee Jun thought back on his ultimate reason for coming here.
Had he come looking for a hunter to recruit into the agency?
No — here, he needed to be looking at a far more distant goal.
Raising strong hunters.
But what made a hunter stronger?
He wasn't about to philosophize over the definition of the word "strong."
A stronger hunter simply meant a more capable one.
And if his own two hands could make someone more capable than they'd been before — wasn't that, in the end, the same as achieving his purpose?
Which was why he reasoned it out like this.
Lee Jun had spent a brief moment passing along all sorts of tips to that thief girl. She didn't look like a complete lost cause, so even that much should leave her a good deal better off than before.
In that case, could he call the basic goal... well, maybe not a perfect ten, but at least a five out of ten?
"......"
Yeah, he knew perfectly well this was all rationalization.
He just wanted an excuse — any excuse — to avoid the situation in front of him.
That was how much those two stressed him out.
"Recruiting... will just have to wait."
Lee Jun muttered under his breath with a click of his tongue.
Nothing good would come of trying to work while dragging this much aggro around.
Clearly he'd have to come back once this whole mess blew over.
Whether that took a month or several, he had no idea...
Damn it. Looks like I'll need to find another route.
Once the thought landed, Lee Jun glanced to his side.
The thief girl was still watching the little comedy between Lee Hyeon-ah and Han Jeong-hwan, her face utterly blank.
For someone watching her superior make a fool of herself, she seemed remarkably unbothered.
He couldn't tell whether that was indifference or resignation, but one thing was certain.
This was probably a regular occurrence.
From what he'd seen, the woman pulled this act out in public all the time — heaven only knew what she was like behind closed doors.
If it weren't for a major guild's salary, her subordinates would have all walked out ages ago.
Lee Jun felt a brief pang of sympathy for the plight of the middle manager.
He'd been there himself once, after all.
Back when he was squeezed between the Association and the government, suffering for it...
Come to think of it, though, retiring outright and never having to look at that circus again — his current life did seem better.
"...Tsk."
But that was that.
Sympathy, pity — those were luxuries for a man with time on his hands.
I'm the one in a bind right now. Sympathy can go freeze to death somewhere.
For now, everything had to serve his own interests, and nothing else.
Just as he was thinking that —
The thief girl turned her head, as if she'd felt his gaze on her.
She held his eyes for a moment, then looked forward again.
Then, perfectly composed, she spoke.
Apparently trying not to seem suspicious without cause.
"Might you need some help?"
"......"
"I'm looking to make a deal. Would you care to hear it?"
Her offer came quietly, in a voice with hardly any inflection to it.
Lee Jun spent a moment trying to gauge her angle.
What on earth was this about?
Why now, of all times?
"I'd love to give you ample time to consider it, but you don't exactly seem to be in a position to spare any."
"...What is it you want?"
"Something simple."
What followed was, without question, an offer he had never seen coming.
"This management agency you're planning to build. I want in."
What?
"...I'm sorry, what?"
Lee Jun floundered at an answer that hadn't existed in his head a second ago.
What is this now, on top of everything else?
Hearing something absurd for the second time in a single day had apparently broken something, because now he was doubting his own ears.
But his daze lasted only a moment.
Soon enough, his mind was grinding away again — this time with a new option on the table.
His original plan had been to use this thief girl to slip out of the situation.
No matter how strong those two hunters were, with their attention that thoroughly elsewhere, they wouldn't notice even a B-Class hunter's stealth.
So he'd intended to strike a bargain and borrow the power of the thief's stealth-type skills... but with this, he could likely drive an even easier bargain.
The only problem was that he had no idea what this woman's motive was.
Seolwon-affiliated, and a department head at that — her future was, for all intents and purposes, guaranteed.
Well... though he had no clue what an "Information Bureau" actually did.
Now that I think about it... maybe her position wasn't all that secure after all.
Even pulling on his memories of the future, there had never been an official Information Bureau in Seolwon.
Which naturally meant he had no idea who this "Information Bureau Chief" was, either.
A post that existed off the books was one that could vanish without warning.
From her side, then, striking a deal like this might not be strange at all.
But that was her situation.
His situation was another matter entirely.
"If I take you in, what exactly do I get out of it?"
"Everything within my power to give."
"How wonderfully abstract."
Lee Jun had no way of knowing the full extent of this woman's abilities.
Only rough guesses.
Still, the fact that Lee Hyeon-ah had personally called her capable was worth noting.
He couldn't stand Lee Hyeon-ah, but he gave her credit for one thing: her eye for people.
Even so, his reservations remained.
The company didn't have so much as a skeleton yet — there was no need to bring in management-level staff this early.
Lee Jun, as he stood now, had no particular reason to take risks.
No — scratch that. By his own accounting, he wasn't supposed to take risks at all.
Not because things were going so well he didn't need one, but because a single botched gamble now would deal him a catastrophic blow.
Which meant he had to bet on sure things.
That was the common-sense answer.
The trouble was, a world spawning monsters and gates was, no matter how you sliced it, nothing close to common sense — and Lee Jun had never once lived a common-sense life in such a world anyway.
So for now, he'd just probe a little.
"Honestly? I can get out of here without any help at all."
That was the truth.
After all... he could simply walk out the front door.
Those two had neither reason nor ability to stop him by force.
Do that in a crowd this size, and everyone could imagine exactly what kind of stories would end up on the internet.
"I'm aware."
"Then what benefit do I have that justifies taking you on?"
When Lee Jun had first announced his plans to build a management agency, he'd gone on record condemning the guilds' practice of cherry-picking promising talent.
And now the very first hunter he took on would be someone he'd poached from another guild.
Even framed as ordinary employment, it wasn't something that could simply slide.
The other guilds who already looked at him sideways would tear into him without mercy.
That was his point: was there any reason to accept that risk — all of those risks — just to bring in this one woman?
"......"
She would know all of that, too, of course.
Which was why she appeared to be thinking it over.
And then, at last, she opened her mouth again.
"Weren't you the one looking for someone without merits?"
"......"
She wasn't... wrong.
If he'd wanted merit, he'd have gone and courted proven talent instead.
He wouldn't be putting on this whole circus hunting for a rookie.
Right.
Come to think of it, Lee Jun had never been the sort of man who measured things like that.
He'd been so buried in the fact of his regression that he'd forgotten for a while — but he'd been like this even before he went back.
Not merit... just whatever pulled at him.
He'd make choices that made no sense, and then somehow turn them into results.
In other words, he was a romantic at heart.
And this woman was probably talking about exactly that side of him.
But that was then. Things were different now.
They had to be different.
He'd left the Association in order to walk a different path, and a different path was the only one he could take.
If he himself never changed, then all he was doing was repeating the last playthrough, wasn't it?
So this time... differently from before...
"No, Senior. The path you've led us down was always the right one. It's because of you that I could climb all the way to this seat."
"...Damn it."
Why was she surfacing in his head all of a sudden?
Back then, Lee Jun had said with certainty that he regretted nothing.
But the human heart is a sly thing — change the circumstances, and the heart changes right along with them.
With the regression and everything else crashing down on him all at once... it seemed he'd gone and forgotten the most important thing.
Conviction.
Conviction in himself.
The thing Lee Jun had always lacked... and the thing everyone around him had always supplied in its place.
Lee Jun stopped talking for a moment, then asked again.
"Why go out of your way to do this?"
"I'm an opportunist. An opportunity happened to come along, so I'm taking it."
She was calm.
From the moment she'd made the offer to right now — completely so.
It had to be an impulsive decision, yet she showed no trace of it.
Apparently she'd been planning to leave Seolwon for a long time.
Lee Jun never had any conviction of his own.
And yet, at the same time, he always found the strength to push a decision through.
It was a strength that came from outside, not within.
This time, it was those detached yet earnest eyes of hers that shoved Lee Jun's back.
"...Fine. Let's do it. The contract, I mean."
Yes.
Let me trust myself.
In the past and in the future, everyone had given him their faith.
They'd extended trust even to a nobody who had never shown them a thing.
Everyone but me believed in me — so it's about time I believed in my own decisions too.
"I don't have a single contracted hunter yet, so there's nothing to manage. You'll have plenty of breathing room. We'll hammer out the details — salary and the like — as we go."
And with that resolution freshly made, he heard something unexpected for the third time that day.
"I forgot to mention. I intend to become the agency's contracted hunter. Not an employee."
"......?"
What is it now?
Time flowed on and on.
Or, well — that was rather too grandiose a way to put it.
Only two days had passed, after all.
But regardless, Lee Jun welcomed the very first hunter of the management agency he'd been looking forward to.
"...I understand this is your private residence."
"We don't have an office building yet, so this is it. Inconvenient as it may be, bear with it."
So said the fresh recruit, two battered travel bags in hand, as she eyed the two-story building. Her luggage amounted to exactly that — two bags.
Her expressions never changed much at the best of times, but even she seemed faintly, minutely dumbfounded by this.
"And for the record, I didn't expect it to happen this fast either. What kind of person writes her resignation letter and bolts on the spot?"
And what kind of person, having left that spot, has no home and lives in the guild building?
A department head at a major guild — what kind of life had this woman been leading?
"Work kept me too busy to manage it. Besides, my place was destroyed by a gate recently."
"......"
He'd assumed her facial expressions were merely subdued — turns out her basic sense of daily life was warped in some way too.
...Is this woman going to be all right?
"Haah... well, fine. We'll draft the contract in due time. There are plenty of spare rooms, so take whichever one on the second floor suits you."
Saying that, Lee Jun lifted both travel bags out of her hands.
The left one wasn't particularly heavy, so it was mostly clothes, by the look of it; the right one must be where she kept her equipment.
You'd never guess she was a thief from how she carried herself, but she had quite the arsenal.
Daggers, throwing weapons... all manner of gear for dungeon scouting and trap disarming, plus sedatives, antidotes, and the like.
Frankly, as money-pit professions went, she was practically in mage or tank territory.
The problem was that no amount of spending on a thief ever delivered a tank's armor upgrades or a mage's damage ceiling.
The money just... went.
Possibly the single worst profession in existence for input-to-output ratio... Was this really going to work out?
He was busy worrying about exactly that, bags in hand, about to head inside —
— when a calm voice came from behind him.
"...It's Seo Yoon."
"Sorry?"
"My name. I don't believe I've told you yet. Seo Yoon."
"...Ah."
Now that she mentioned it, he still hadn't known her name.
A fresh wave of realization at just how little attention he'd paid her, and a small stab of guilt with it.
"Ahem. And I'm Lee Jun."
"I know."
"......"
I suppose... I'll just have to get used to those deadpan reactions of hers.
In any case, one thing led to another —
Wednesday, July 9th, 2025.
Roughly one week after his regression.
S-Class Hunter Management — officially open for business.