Chapter 2: The Night-Shift Clerk Worth a Billion Won
"Tear this place apart right now! I'm certain the connection came from an IP in this area!"
SLAM!
The old glass door of the convenience store burst open with enough force to shatter, and a hoarse bellow came pouring in with it.
Conditioned by pure survival instinct, I threw myself beneath the counter and clamped both hands over my mouth.
Curled up small, unable to even breathe audibly, I listened as heavy combat boots ground across the floor directly above me.
The bastards who'd been ransacking the PC bang across the street had finally crawled their way to the place where I worked.
"Ugh, there's not even a part-timer in here! Yo, quit wasting time, let's just go kill some monsters."
"Are you insane? There's a billion won on the line and you're worried about monsters? We find that guy and our whole lives flip upside down!"
"Still, you'd think a so-called legendary hunter wouldn't be hiding in some shabby neighborhood convenience store."
"Nah, real masters always hole up in places like this. Have you never read a murim novel?"
The pressure radiating off them was nothing an ordinary neighborhood thug could have produced.
Dripping with killing intent as they were, they had to be active awakened hunters — C-Rank at the very minimum.
They swept the energy drinks off the shelves in one armful, never bothering with a barcode scan, and flung a few bills at the register in passing.
The sound of stiff paper scattering across the counter rang out like a thunderclap.
"Yo, check the stockroom too! He could be holed up in the back for all we know!"
Click. Click.
The sound of the stockroom door handle being rattled violently, right behind my back, slammed into my ears.
My heart was hammering so wildly it felt ready to leap straight out of my throat.
Please, just leave. Please.
Offering up a prayer several hundred times over, I curled my body into a ball in the dusty pit beneath the counter.
By sheer luck, I'd locked the stockroom door tight the moment my shift started.
"It's locked. Not worth breaking in and getting flagged by the Association. Not a damn mouse in here either."
"Damn it, where the hell is he hiding? They said the IP trace put him within a five-hundred-meter radius of this spot."
"Let's tear through the other PC bangs and motels nearby. There are still a few places we haven't turned over."
"Move fast. If some other guild's goons find him first, that billion goes up in smoke."
The clamor of boots faded into the distance, and with a parting stream of curses the glass door slammed shut.
Silence returned, but for a long while I couldn't bring myself to move.
I held my breath for a good five minutes more before finally forcing my trembling legs straight and hauling myself up.
The inside of my uniform vest was already soaked through with cold sweat.
My legs buckled and I sank to the floor, scrubbing my face dry again and again with both palms.
Han Seo-yoon.
Guild Master of 'Baekya', South Korea's number one guild, and by universal acclaim the strongest S-Rank hunter in the nation.
The woman who graced the evening news with that glacial expression of hers had suddenly posted an outrageous offer.
'One billion won from my personal fortune to whoever secures the identity of Hunsu-duneun-nom.'
The fallout from that godforsaken announcement was strangling the life out of my reality.
Crouched in the corner behind the counter, I fished my smartphone out of my uniform pocket.
The instant my shaking fingers unlocked the screen, the browser opened on its own.
I hit refresh, and the feed scrolled upward in a frenzy as new posts came pouring down like a waterfall.
I'm dead. Genuinely, completely dead.
Legendary hunter my ass.
My reality was a Non-Awakened night-shift clerk earning 9,860 won an hour, surviving on expired disposal lunchboxes.
I was an ordinary little citizen who'd never so much as held a grudge against Baekya Guild — hell, who'd never received so much as a single autograph from the lowliest hunter on their roster.
And now hyenas dreaming of reversing their fortunes were combing every PC bang and commercial building in the district.
What happened if they actually pulled my IP and came crashing into this convenience store?
It was obvious. I'd get caught by those blind, bounty-crazed hunter wannabes, beaten within an inch of my life just like a few minutes ago, and dragged straight in front of Baekya's Guild Master.
No — worse. If they learned what I really was, they might not even bother dragging me anywhere.
How deflated would they be, discovering that their idol, their legendary hermit master, was actually a guy scanning instant-ramen barcodes behind a register?
Beyond mere deflation — they might decide the whole thing was a nationwide con job and bury me at the guild level, just to make it go away.
As the thoughts chased each other in circles, my skull felt ready to crack open.
Overhead, the dying fluorescent tube buzzed and flickered its pallid light in stuttering bursts.
Behind me, the beverage cooler's motor droned on, endlessly exhaling its low hum.
The smell of the cheap air freshener unique to three-in-the-morning convenience stores mingled with the dust and needled at my lungs.
The air conditioning was blasting, yet my shirt clung stickily to my skin; my breathing turned ragged, and the world seemed to spin at the edges of my vision.
There was exactly one culprit behind this insane situation.
Hovering faintly over my exhausted reflection in the smartphone screen: a blue system window.
Eye of the Spectator.
When I first awakened, I'd believed, just like everyone else, that I was destined to become an S-Rank hunter — spitting fire and carving through monsters.
But face to face with an actual monster, it was dead weight, no different from a pair of ordinary naked eyes.
A half-baked curse that could only read a target's status window and weaknesses by passing through an intermediary — a monitor, a TV, some kind of screen.
Thanks to it, I'd flunked the hunter exam outright and been reduced to guarding this cramped little counter.
It was just a stupid tin-can ability. So why was the price of carelessly wiggling my fingers while watching Yurina's stream yesterday so damn heavy?
Yurina — the pink twin-tailed mage hunter who boasted three million subscribers.
She'd taken a hit from the mutant Basilisk's tail and was seconds from dying, so I'd simply typed out the weakness floating on my monitor into the comments.
'The gap in the scales under its left armpit. That's the reverse scale. Hit it.'
A few lines of backseat advice I'd thrown out hoping to save one human life — and now those same lines looked ready to take mine.
In the end, Yurina survived by the skin of her teeth and the Basilisk was put down, but I'd become the most expensive wanted man on the planet.
One comment I'd written, and S-Rank hunters went into a frenzy, the entire internet flipped upside down, and a billion-won bounty got slapped on my head.
I knew full well that regret was already too late.
But maybe there was still a chance to contain the damage.
Gritting my teeth, I opened the gallery's settings menu.
Red lettering at the very bottom of the screen.
'Delete Account Permanently.'
My thumb trembled violently above the button.
Press it, and every trace of 'Hunsu-duneun-nom' — every post, every scrape of history — would vanish from the internet.
A long tail gets stepped on, as they say.
If I erased everything now and hid perfectly in the real world, surely I could slip out from under the gazes of those maniacal hunters.
Sure, it stung to abandon all the strategy guides I'd written over the years. But they were cheap next to the billion-won price tag on my head.
My life was a mudflat of nine-thousand-won-an-hour shifts; it had nothing to do with a billion won anyway.
No miracle was going to drop a billion won into my lap behind this register.
If anything, I'd count myself lucky not to die in the street branded as a fraud.
I squeezed my eyes shut and was just about to press my finger down onto the screen —
Chime.
The doorbell's bright jingle tore a razor slash through the dead silence of the night.
My heart plunged and hit the floor with it.
This was nothing like the pack of thuggish hunters that had come swarming in minutes ago.
Someone had slid inside without so much as a footstep.
A primal chill rolled up my spine, as if the air in the store had frozen solid in an instant.
The pressure prickled across my skin — the sensation of some enormous predator stepping into a cramped cage.
I couldn't make myself lift my head.
If what stood beyond that door was an S-Rank hunter blinded by the bounty, then the moment our eyes met, it would be over.
Instead of poking my head over the counter, I held my breath and turned my eyes to the CCTV monitor hanging from the ceiling.
A four-way split screen showing the store's interior.
In one of the quadrants, an uninvited guest stood by the entrance, blurred through the grain of black-and-white static.
A neat silver bob cut.
She wore sharp-angled spectacles and an immaculate black suit without a single crease.
One hand holding a softly glowing tablet, she swept the store with a frigid gaze.
No matter how you looked at it, this was not a woman who'd wandered in past midnight for a cup of ramen.
A gait that erased every trace of footfall, a posture without the slightest slack.
That was no ordinary civilian.
At minimum an awakened hunter — and a high-rank one at that.
Just as I stared at the motionless woman on the CCTV feed —
Zap.
With a sensation like the back of my retinas burning away, my unique ability activated.
It triggered because I hadn't seen her with my own eyes — only through the intermediary of a 'CCTV screen'.
Her status window popped up before me, entirely without my consent.
My finger, still hovering over the account deletion button, went completely rigid.
The blue text floating over the monitor was cruelly gouging into my eyes.