Little Human
"Does it hurt a lot?"
Even at my question, the colossal presence made no answer for a long while.
Milky mist drifted slowly between us as those narrow, slitted eyes swept back and forth between my face and the outstretched hand I'd offered. There was wariness in that gaze, but underneath it ran something even stronger — sheer bafflement at this small human who, having heard his warning, had not run away.
Up close, the wounds were far worse than I'd imagined. The black, hardened scales were cracked in places, and the gashes around his face and eyes were deep enough to make me wince just looking at them. Fresh blood still seeped slowly from beneath the dried crust, and each time that enormous body drew breath, I could see the wounds pulling open again.
It was honestly a wonder he was alive at all, hurt like that.
"That is not for you to concern yourself with."
The answer, when it finally came, was as cold as ever.
I flinched at the low, rumbling voice, but this time I didn't back away. Instead I studied his wounds more closely.
"Still, you're bleeding and all...."
"What a meddlesome creature you are."
"It's not meddling — how could anyone be fine in that state?"
The enormous eyes turned slowly toward me.
"How many times must I say it before you understand? If you do not wish to die, leave this place."
Vicious words, no doubt about it.
Under any normal circumstances, I would have fled without looking back. With the body I had now, fighting that thing was out of the question — if it got angry and swung its head even once, I'd go flying straight into a tree.
And yet, from the very creature saying all this, I could hardly feel any killing intent at all.
What lay beneath the depths of that voice was exhaustion.
His eyelids were drooping lower and lower, as if even dealing with me was more than he could manage, and his breathing had been irregular ever since I first found him. More than anything, if he'd been able to move, he would have chased me off long ago — the fact that he hadn't moved so much as a muscle beyond his head and eyes all this time bothered me.
I hesitated a moment, then asked carefully.
"Can you not... move?"
"......."
No answer came.
"So you can't move."
"Little Human."
The voice dropped a shade lower.
"Hold your tongue."
"......What a nasty temper."
The moment that mutter slipped out of me, his eyes narrowed to slits.
Did he hear that?
I averted my gaze as if nothing had happened.
But as I turned my head, the grass growing around us caught my eye. At first it all looked like identical weeds, but examining them more closely, a few of the leaves had a strangely familiar shape.
Leaves split into rounded lobes.
Stems tinged with a faint blue at the tips.
Small white flowers sprouting sparsely between them.
...Hold on.
I had seen these somewhere in my memory.
I got up and approached the thickets. I felt a puzzled gaze on my back, but ignored it as I crouched down and carefully touched one of the leaves.
I hadn't spent all my game time just fishing.
To be precise, fishing was what I'd done the most on this character, but I'd tried my hand at nearly every life-skill activity the game offered. Among them was one where you gathered herbs, grew them in a garden plot, or processed the harvest into ingredients for simple healing potions to sell.
"Is this it... or not?"
Feeling my way through the memory, I plucked a leaf and held it up to my nose.
The faintly bitter scent rising from it confirmed it — this was unmistakably an herb.
In the game, it had been a low-grade herb, easy to find in the starting regions. Making a proper potion required other ingredients and alchemical equipment, but the item description had noted that crushing the raw leaves and applying them to a wound could stem bleeding to some degree.
Who knew all that miscellaneous flavor text I'd skimmed and forgotten in-game would end up being useful like this.
"Just wait here a moment."
I said this to the great beast, then began searching the surrounding grass.
"What are you doing? I distinctly told you to leave—"
"One sec — ah, found it."
I cut him off and plucked a handful of leaves.
Since I probably shouldn't just grab everything that looked vaguely similar, I went through them one by one, checking each against the features I remembered. Some I rejected because the scent was off; others had subtly different vein patterns. After quite a while of combing through the thickets, I'd gathered a respectable pile of herbs in both hands.
The problem came next.
"...How am I supposed to crush these?"
There was obviously no alchemical apparatus lying around.
Glancing about, I spotted a flat stone the size of my palm and a smaller, rounder one beside it. I rinsed both at the water's edge to scrub off most of the dirt, laid the herbs on the broad stone, and gripped the smaller rock in my hand.
Then I brought it down.
Thwack.
"......."
The herbs shot off sideways.
"No, wait."
I picked them up again.
This time I gathered them in a cage of my fingers so they couldn't escape, then carefully pounded down.
Thwack. Thwack.
After a few repetitions, the leaves crushed together and a rich, grassy smell rose up. Green juice seeped out little by little, wetting the surface of the stone, and as I kept grinding, a rough but salve-like paste began to form.
"Woohoo! There we go!"
Looking at the finished product, I had to admit it didn't exactly inspire confidence.
Still, better than nothing.
Carrying the stone in both hands, I approached the enormous creature once more. He had apparently been watching my every move, because he now stared at me and the green lump resting on the rock with an expression of pure incredulity.
"...What is that supposed to be."
"Herbs."
The great eyes closed for a moment.
Somehow, he looked like he was exercising tremendous patience.
Ignoring whatever he was feeling, I moved in closer to his face. As I searched his wounds for a spot I could actually reach, the long gash near his eyes naturally drew my attention.
"Close your eyes."
"...Little Human. Surely you do not intend to smear that on me?"
I looked down at the green lump of herbs on the stone, then back up at him.
"Yep."
When I answered with the expression of someone wondering why he'd even ask something so obvious, the beast said nothing for a while.
Without waiting for permission, I dabbed a little of the paste onto my fingertips. The enormous eye glared at me for an instant, but strangely, it wasn't nearly as frightening as before.
"It might sting a little."
"Do not. This is a pointless exercise."
"Yeah, yeah — just close your eyes."
In the end, he gave up first, and his eyelid slowly lowered.
As carefully as I could, I spread the herbs around the wound.
The scales under my fingertips were rock-hard, but around the cracked edges the heat rose so fiercely it almost burned. Taking care not to touch the gash itself, I smoothed the crushed herbs into a thin layer — and by the time I was done, everything I'd prepared had been used up covering just one small cut near his eye.
"......."
I looked up at him.
It struck me all over again just how absurdly huge he was.
All that time I'd spent finding and preparing those herbs, and on that mountainous body it had covered barely a claw's worth of surface.
What was worse, even after applying the paste, there was no sign whatsoever that his condition had improved.
Of course not.
A few leaves of common low-grade herbs from the beginner zones were never going to heal wounds like these.
The creature — who knew this better than anyone — opened his eye and spoke.
"You see?"
I silently stared down at the now-empty stone.
"Nothing you do will change anything. So stop."
"...Just wait a second."
"What are you—"
I was already running back to the thickets.
Find the herbs.
Pluck them.
Lay them on the stone and grind them down again.
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
A little faster than the first time.
Carrying the fresh paste back, I applied it to the wound beneath his eye this time. The moment it ran out, I was back in the grass again.
Find the herbs, grind them with the stone, spread them on the wound.
I repeated the process over and over.
"Did I not tell you to stop?"
His voice reached me, but I didn't answer.
I knew perfectly well this wasn't real treatment. The wounds showed no visible sign of healing, and his ragged breathing hadn't improved one bit.
Still, I figured even a little less bleeding had to help.
I brought the stone down again.
I'd lost count of how many times.
By now my small palm was stinging from gripping and swinging the stone over and over, and red marks had bloomed across my knuckles.
I didn't stop.
"Little Human."
"Just — hang on, just a little more...."
The stone slipped.
When I checked my palm, the skin had worn through in places, oozing a clear fluid. It hurt, but it wasn't enough to stop me.
I gripped the stone again.
"Just a little more and it'll be—"
And just as I was raising it to pound down once more—
Thump.
"Waaugh!"
Something enormous pressed in from the side, and I toppled straight over.
Flat on my rear, I looked up in bewilderment. The massive head had somehow drawn near and was right in front of me, and he was regarding me with eyes utterly different from moments before.
"What was that for?! I was almost done!"
"That is what I wish to ask you. Look at your hands."
Only then did I look back down at my palms.
A mess.
My fingers were stained green with herb juice, my palms scraped raw and red from the stone, and the fluid was seeping through it all.
I quietly tucked my hands behind my back.
"It's fine. This much is nothing."
"It is not nothing."
The enormous eyes had gone still.
I tried to get up again, but his head blocked my way.
This time he didn't shove me back, didn't threaten me.
He simply looked at me, quietly.
"Why?"
The irritation and coldness of moments before had drained from his voice, and I blinked at the change.
"Why what?"
"What you were just doing."
The colossal being glanced briefly at the crude paste smeared around his own eye, then looked down at me again.
"You know as well as I that those herbs cannot heal me. What reason is there to continue until your own hands are ruined?"
I fell silent.
It wasn't as though I'd had some grand reason.
I wasn't after a reward, and I hadn't known what he was when I approached. Quite the opposite — until just a little while ago, I'd been trembling in fear of being eaten by some unidentified monster.
It was simply that—
There was an injured creature in front of me.
And there was one method I knew of that might possibly help.
So I tried it.
I looked down at my juice-stained, wrecked palms, then shrugged.
"Because it's something I can do right now."
"......."
"I can't make you all better, but maybe you'd bleed a little less. It's better than doing nothing at all."
The colossal being's eyes widened — just a fraction.
"That is all?"
"That's all. What more would there be?"
I shot back, as if the question itself were strange.
A brief silence settled between us.
In that forest where even the wind had gone still, only the milky mist drifted slowly around us, and the colossal being stared at me as though he had discovered something truly beyond his understanding.
Then a very low sound reached my ears.
"Hm...."
At first I thought it was a sigh.
But it wasn't.
"Hmhm...."
He was laughing.
"Wh-why are you laughing?"
"Nothing. You are, truly, a most peculiar human."
"What do you mean 'nothing' — you just laughed!"
When a monster I'd been half-convinced would kill me suddenly started chuckling, it was somehow even more unsettling. I scooted backward on my rear as discreetly as I could, and at the sight of it, amusement rippled across his eyes once more.
After a moment, he asked.
"Little Human. What is your name?"
"My name?"
I opened my mouth to answer right away — then stopped.
The name I'd carried for twenty-eight years rose naturally to my mind.
And yet, strangely, it wouldn't come out.
The hands I looked down on were not the hands of the person who had lived under that name, and neither was the face reflected in the water's surface. In a situation where I didn't even know if I could return to my old world, speaking my former name felt as though I'd truly be losing something.
Then another name surfaced in my mind.
The name I'd picked without much thought when I first started the game.
A name I'd gazed at countless times floating above that little character's head on the screen — and now that I had become the character myself, perhaps the two syllables that fit me most naturally of all.
"...Suryeon."
Saying it aloud gave me an odd feeling.
I said it once more, this time with a little more certainty.
"My name is Suryeon."
"Suryeon...."
He repeated the two syllables slowly.
Then, for some reason, his eyes crinkled as though satisfied.
"A fine name."
My face inexplicably went warm, and I looked away.
"And you?"
"Me?"
"It's not fair that only I keep getting called Little Human. At least tell me your name."
He gazed at me for a moment, then slowly closed his eyes.
In that instant, the air around us changed.
The mist that had filled the forest began swirling slowly around his colossal form, and round ripples spread across the once-calm water one after another — though nothing had touched its surface.
I swallowed without meaning to.
His eyes opened again.
"I am one of the guardian gods of the North."
The low voice seeped through the entire forest.
"The one called Hyunmoo."
"...Hyunmoo?"
At first, I only dazedly echoed the name.
Then, a few seconds later, a sentence I'd read long ago surfaced from somewhere deep in my memory.
Ryu Origin was full of legends and rumors. Among them, the scarcest in information by far was the tale of four divine beasts said to exist somewhere in the world — the Four Guardian Beasts.
The Azure Dragon. The White Tiger. The Vermilion Bird. And the Black Tortoise, Hyunmoo.
They were mentioned now and then in in-game books and NPC dialogue, but almost no player had ever actually met one, and the community was full of nothing but speculation about hidden events.
I'd looked into it a few times myself before writing it off as unimplemented lore and losing interest.
But—
I slowly looked up at the colossal being before me.
"...They were real?"
"What, exactly?"
"N-nothing. Never mind."
Insane. A hidden NPC.
And not just any hidden NPC — one of the Four Guardian Beasts, whose very existence had never even been properly confirmed.
And I had just been telling a being like that that he had a nasty temper, and to sit still and shut up.
...I'm not about to die here, am I?
A cold sweat broke out, far too late.
But Hyunmoo, seemingly oblivious to my thoughts, studied me for a moment before saying something entirely unexpected.
"Suryeon."
For the first time, he called me by my name instead of Little Human.
My head came up before I knew it.
"Will you not form a contract with me?"
"...What?"
It was so far outside anything I'd expected that a dumb sound was all I could manage.
Hyunmoo closed his eyes slowly, then opened them again. The amusement from before had faded, but the wariness that had been there when we first met was gone from those eyes as well.
"As you can see, I am not whole at present. To heal my wounds, I must sleep for a long time, and during that time my true body cannot remain here."
"Then where do you go?"
"I return to my domain. A place where humans cannot easily set foot."
Hyunmoo's gaze fell upon my hands.
"Yet before I sleep, I find myself wishing to leave behind a single bond."
"...With me?"
"Yes."
Hyunmoo's enormous head lowered slowly.
"To form a bond with one of the guardian gods is no light matter. I cannot give you all of my power, but for as long as the contract endures, you will be able to borrow a portion of it."
The first thing that came to mind at those words was the sight of myself, just a short while ago, worrying I might die to a mere slime.
The power of a guardian god.
It would be a lie to say I wasn't tempted.
But there was one thing I didn't understand.
"Why me?"
Hyunmoo's eyes found mine.
"I'm weak."
That wasn't modesty — it was simply fact.
"I can't fight at all, and even what I did for you just now was honestly useless."
When I pointed at the herb paste I'd smeared on him, Hyunmoo's gaze drifted toward it.
A moment later, he laughed — a low rumble.
"That is precisely why it must be you."
"...Huh?"
"Many have sought me out in pursuit of power, and I have seen countless humans bow their heads the moment they learned what I am. But never before have I seen one who did not even know what I was — one who demanded nothing in return, who forgot even her own hands were being ruined as she repeated such a pointless gesture."
Hyunmoo laughed again, clearly this time.
And that enormous brow lowered slowly until it hung before me.
"The choice is yours, Suryeon."
I looked up at Hyunmoo.
If this world really was Ryu Origin, I knew, more or less, what was coming. The Seven Calamities would appear, and countless people would die in the process.
And I would live through it all as a fisher with no power at all.
In this tiny body, no less.
My deliberation was shorter than I expected.
"...I'll do it."
The moment my answer fell, Hyunmoo's eyes crinkled quietly.
"Good."
His enormous brow brushed against mine, feather-light.
And that was the moment.
CRASH—!
The sound of a wave came from nowhere.
The forest before my eyes hadn't vanished, and yet every sound in the world receded as if I had been plunged, all at once, into deep water — and from beneath my feet, a blue-green light began spreading outward like ripples on a sea.
"Wha...?"
I tried to recoil in shock, but my body wouldn't move.
The presence I'd braced myself to feel as cold turned, the instant it touched my skin, inexplicably warm — rising slowly from my toes, passing through my chest, and seeping all the way to the crown of my head.
No status window appeared. No notification.
And yet I knew.
This wasn't knowledge that could be put into words — it was the sensation of something being carved into a place far deeper than that.
The being before me and I had been connected.
An invisible thread stretched taut between two entirely different lives, and at its far end, something vast and deep as an ocean had turned its gaze upon me — if only for an instant.
It was a power so overwhelming I could scarcely breathe.
And yet it did not crush me.
Instead, it wrapped once through my body as if confirming my existence, then quietly settled.
And soon, Hyunmoo's brow drew back.
"...Is that it?"
"It is."
I looked down at my hands.
Nothing seemed to have changed.
"I don't really feel any stronger."
"Did you expect me to hand over the whole of my power?"
"Tch."
I was pouting and lifting my head when I finally noticed something strange.
Hyunmoo's body was fading.
From the edges of that colossal carapace to the last black scale, he was turning translucent, little by little — as if dissolving into the mist.
"Huh?"
I took a step forward before I could stop myself.
"Wait. Your body—"
"Did I not tell you? I must sleep in order to heal."
It felt strange.
Until just a little while ago, I'd thought of him as a terrifying, foul-tempered monster — and now that he was disappearing, some part of me ached with emptiness.
I watched Hyunmoo grow fainter and fainter, then asked carefully.
"Um."
"Speak."
"Will we... meet again?"
Hyunmoo was silent for a moment.
Then his massive head moved one last time, giving my forehead the gentlest of nudges.
This time, I didn't fall over.
It was a touch so careful it bore no comparison to when he'd first shoved me back to stop me.
"What a foolish thing to ask."
His fading eyes regarded me.
"So long as you are my contractor, we are certain to meet again — someday."
"...You promise?"
"Do not make a guardian god say a thing twice."
Hyunmoo's eyes narrowed.
A low laugh spread through the mist.
"Until then — do not die, Suryeon."
With those final words, Hyunmoo's form blurred completely away.
The colossal carapace, the black scales, the great eyes that had looked down on me — all of it melted into the mist as if it had never been. And when even the last faint outline scattered, nothing remained in the place where, until moments ago, something like an entire mountain had lain coiled.
I stared at that spot for a long while.
"...He's gone."
It was strangely quiet.
Then something else struck me, and I lifted my head.
"Huh?"
The space that had been hidden behind Hyunmoo's massive body lay wide open before me.
And beyond the forest, where the mist was slowly beginning to lift, familiar rooftops were emerging one by one.
A small wall of timber and stone. Wooden buildings.
Thin threads of smoke rising beyond them.
A landscape I'd passed through countless times in the game.
"...Ryukel?"
My eyes went wide.
It was a town.
And it had been far, far closer than I'd thought.
"Are you kidding me...."
I looked back and forth between the place where Hyunmoo had vanished and the town below.
"It was invisible because of *you*?"
A hollow laugh escaped me.
All that time I'd wandered the forest convinced I was hopelessly lost, and my destination had been right under my nose.
Still, at least now I knew exactly where I needed to go.
I gathered the basket and fishing rod I'd left in the grass. Then, a few steps in, I stopped and looked back.
There was nothing there.
Hyunmoo and his enormous body were gone, and only the stones I'd used to grind the herbs and the crushed green leaves remained, proof that none of it had been a dream.
I gazed at the spot for a moment, then bowed my head.
"...See you next time."
There was no answer.
But somehow, I had a feeling we really would meet again.
Straightening up, I set off toward Ryukel in the distance. Behind me, the lingering mist was slowly clearing, and one by one, birdsong was returning to the forest that had been silent for so long.
Less than a single day had passed since I'd fallen into this world.
No status window had appeared, and I'd found no way back to my old life. Everything I owned amounted to a fishing rod, a basket, and one fish I couldn't even bring myself to eat — and as for who I was now, I was just an Angler, doubtful I could handle even a single slime in a real fight.
And yet in that brief span of time, I'd met a Guardian Beast whose existence I hadn't even known was real, mangled my palms grinding herbs, and gone and formed a contract with that very beast.
I had no idea where in my life things had gone this crooked.
But one thing was certain.
Looking out at Ryukel's distant rooftops, I slung the fishing rod over my shoulder.
At the very least — I wasn't alone anymore.