Something Has Changed (2)
Lee Jun stared down at the reward on the second floor.
His stomach was churning. His head, too, felt like it was spinning.
“What in the world….”
What was it? What on earth was it? What kind of impossible thing was happening here?
Something had been off from the very beginning. No — everything was off. The mere fact that this phenomenon had occurred at all was absurd in itself.
“Did I… really regress?”
Regression. In his fixation on the single chance he'd been handed, one thing had slipped right past him.
How, exactly, had I regressed in the first place?
Before the question of why even came up, he was already stuck at how. There was a bottomless pile of things he simply could not understand.
“…Ha.”
Lee Jun looked down at the two badges in his hand.
Iron plates, each engraved with a different sigil. They belonged to Kyle Rodrigo and Pablo Cervantes — his former comrades.
The common ground was simple enough: he had spent a year at their side as a fellow member of Arcana, and all three of them had been Initial Awakeners. And… both of them were dead. He had never managed to find Kyle's plate in the end, but Pablo's was another matter entirely. Her seal should still be buried inside her grave, even now.
“What the hell is any of this….”
His mind was a jumbled mess, as though someone had taken a whisk to the inside of his skull. But he had no time for this. Midnight was coming. He had to get out of the Ant Nest before the respawn.
“…Right. There's always been variables. And every time, there's only one thing to do.”
Push forward anyway. And at the same time… think. The current plan could be scrapped at any moment, which meant a second and third plan always had to be waiting in the wings. Always. That was his role as a strategist.
This was a step beyond what most people called planning — the realm of design, so to speak. He had pulled back from the front lines of combat and honed exactly this skill, day after day. If a single variable could shake him, then everything he had built would collapse in one stroke.
“Whew….”
He steadied his breathing. Gradually his head cleared, and the confusion receded.
Right. That'll do for now. Get outside first… and think it through slowly.
With his grip on himself restored, Lee Jun turned and left the third floor. Then the second. Then the first. At last he emerged from the Ant Nest and pulled his phone from his Pocket.
11:54 p.m. Cutting it far too close. Nearly an hour had gone into finding the door to the third floor alone; if he'd been even a little slower locating the second floor's exit, he would have run out the clock entirely.
“Haah… what the hell is going on.”
Now that the tension had drained away, his head began to ache. Lee Jun lay down where he stood, inside the abandoned building. Through the gaping hole in the ceiling, the night sky spread above him. A moon hung there — not quite full, not quite half, an ambiguous thing that looked, rather fittingly, like his current situation.
“…….”
There was nothing he could understand right now. But he had to understand it. It was emotional, yes — but it was also, ultimately, essential to a stable future. If any unease about the regression remained, it might one day split open into a great crack. An unresolved wrongness was a time bomb with an unknown fuse.
The changes that had just occurred were deeply strange. Of course, the events of the previous timeline could change — they were bound to. Even a simulation run under perfectly identical conditions would produce different results if you looped it enough times. And now, with a regressor named Lee Jun thrown into the mix, there was no chance things would flow the same way.
But this was a different matter entirely.
The decisions Lee Jun had made were certainly significant enough to reshape this timeline. Even so, there were limits. Him stepping down as Vice-Chairman and retiring affected, at most, Korea — and charitably speaking, the international landscape. Nothing close to the scale required to change a dungeon's reward.
And yet it had changed — in a genuinely bizarre direction, no less.
“…Tsk.”
At the very least, his own reasoning could not account for it. And there was nowhere he could take this to talk it out. To do that, he'd have to explain the regression first.
Lee Jun idly imagined bringing this up with the Association Chairman or the Director of the Technology Bureau.
“…….”
Rejected. They'd tear into him for hours about how his brain had finally broken. And it was better not to say anything useless for the management business anyway. Nobody would believe him regardless — he'd just go from has-been to dementia patient in a single sentence. A one-man company whose CEO had lost his mind — that would really bring the clients flocking.
“Haah….”
He had expected things to start diverging. He just hadn't expected it to happen this fast. Still, as long as it didn't touch the outside world… it was fine. He'd look into this more later; for now, he'd do what needed doing.
Lee Jun rose and headed out of the abandoned building, walking unhurriedly. Tonfa in hand, he stepped out into the open field.
“Whew….”
It had been a while for this, too. In the distance, a massive figure came into view — the Ogre Laborer, boss monster of Seoul Dungeon. Lee Jun kicked off lightly and charged at it.
Hunters were a deeply envied profession. The money was good — even if it was called a livelihood stipend — and once you climbed the ranks, fame and prestige came trailing after. These days the broadcasting industry poured more energy into hunters than into ordinary celebrities: the endorsements, the variety shows, the dramas, the films.
There were those who reveled in it, and those who looked on with distaste. After all, when hunters started living like celebrities and drifted further from active duty, they eventually strayed from their true purpose — protecting people.
Either way, one thing never changed: hunters were envied. And hunters were always exposed to danger. Anyone who failed to get picked up by a proper guild found it hard to enjoy the lifestyle people imagined for them.
But most people didn't much care about that. The hardships of hunters went largely unseen, while the lives of those at the very top were broadcast constantly. And so everyone dove into this arena dreaming only of the image they saw in the media.
“…Urk.”
Every hunter here was exactly that. And so was I.
“E-excuse me… i-is anyone looking for a party member?”
No matter how loudly she called out, no party materialized. Standing like this at the dungeon's entrance was, after all, a declaration that she'd been passed over everywhere else.
And usually, hunters like this banded together with others just like them — the leftovers, lumping together with the leftovers.
“Haah… At this rate, I'll never even lay eyes on the boss….”
Choi Jeong-hyeon sighed. She was a rookie hunter, five months past her awakening. With middling talent and a combat class in the notoriously oversaturated warrior line, she hadn't made it into a proper guild — or even a mid-sized one. And so she found herself grinding through Seoul Dungeon over and over, armed with nothing but a cheap greatsword and a body that was still, for the moment, in one piece.
“The big-guild kids get systematic support and power-level as fast as they can… How long am I supposed to be stuck doing this?”
Super-rookies like Park Heon-woo of Taesan or Seolwon's Shin Ha-eun had reached B-Class within three months of official registration. The possibility hunters had been gossiping about for ages — B-Class in three months — had actually been proven real. With established hunting methods and years of accumulated research behind them, hunters' growth had kicked into an even higher gear.
The ceiling hadn't moved, of course — but that was irrelevant to ordinary hunters like Choi Jeong-hyeon anyway.
“Tsk… damn it.”
What was the point of talking about A-Class or S-Class when she couldn't even scrape together a party? And so, once again, Choi Jeong-hyeon headed into the dungeon alongside low-rank hunters in the same boat: three warriors, one archer, one mage. Four combat-class and one magic-class — a disastrous balance.
Not that it was surprising. Tanks among the combat classes, and healers among the support classes, were snapped up by the guilds first. The people who couldn't find footing anywhere simply survived by gouging at the dungeon in parties like this, a broken combination held together with spit and stubbornness.
They found their spot and settled in to hunt. And that spot was usually within a five-hundred-meter radius of the boss monster. Any party capable of taking the boss was likely among the strongest in the dungeon. Sure, the boss rotated daily, and on an unlucky day it could wander elsewhere — but that was a once-in-a-blue-moon case. Most parties could handle Seoul Dungeon's boss with room to spare, so this area was about as safe as it got.
With that same reasoning in mind, they made for the spawn point of the boss — the Ogre Laborer — and…
“What? Why are there so many people….”
An abnormally large crowd had gathered. This almost never happened. Had there been an accident?
Puzzled by a scene she had never witnessed before, she pushed and elbowed her way through the press of bodies. What waited on the other side of the dense crowd was bizarre.
The fallen boss monster — and surrounding it, scattered in a circle… rectangular pieces of paper.
“Business… cards?”
Looking closer, they really were business cards. Blood from the monster's corpse had smeared the lettering, but from the fragments she could make out, they seemed to be cards all right.
But who on earth? And why…?
The moment that thought crossed her mind—
Ring-ring-ring-ring— ring-ring-ring-ring—
An alarm sound cut through the air, seizing the attention of every soul present. At the same instant, strange mechanical devices began to rise out of the ground at various points across the paper-strewn circle.
Every hunter there tensed and fidgeted with their weapons. It was weird, wasn't it? Clearly obvious? This wasn't some demon-summoning ritual, but leaving contraptions like that planted around a corpse was bound to look suspicious.
“…What are those things?”
The machines jutting up from the ground looked ordinary enough. The situation was anything but ordinary, granted — but the devices themselves were. Where had she seen those before…?
And just then, someone said the word she'd been groping for.
“Money guns?”
SHFFFFFFFFFF—
“Wh-what?!”
“Are — are those monsters too?!”
“Everyone, fall back for now!”
The sudden eruption of business cards sent the gathered hunters scattering in a panic. Yet despite the sudden movement of a packed crowd, not a single person tripped or got hurt. Well — they were hunters, after all.
And soon enough, they mobilized to find whoever was behind it. Someone would dredge up the culprit of this bizarre stunt soon enough — dug out, doxxed, and dragged through the mud, as one does. For now, a moment of silence in advance for an unknown perpetrator.
Because this boss kill belonged to Seolwon Guild.
“Who'd pull a pointless prank like this….”
Some organization, maybe — or could it be an individual? Either way, it had nothing to do with her or the boss she'd never get. She simply watched the outlandish display and let out a brief, amused snort.
“Hmm….”
Cards rained down from the sky. And by some twist of chance, one of them settled lightly onto her outstretched hand. Across its face, bold letters had been printed:
Power demands responsibility.
And responsibility demands compensation.
She lifted her head and looked around again. From the mechanical devices planted around the boss's corpse, business cards kept spewing forth — like fountains.
“…….”
Well, one thing was certain.
Whoever had dreamed this up was a complete lunatic.