The Rookie NewTuber
Seo Hyoju couldn't believe it.
"...He's avoiding me?"
She had burned 35 billion won at the auction. She'd judged the item worth that much, and more than that, it was something she absolutely needed, so she hadn't felt the price was a waste. Even so, she couldn't deny it: with a meeting with the seller in mind, she had poured an even greater sum into that figure of 35 billion. Anyone capable of obtaining a hide like that was worth paying, if only to buy a connection. And if the seller was who she thought he was, the investment would have been all the sounder.
He had refused.
"Ha..."
Out of nowhere, the man who had made her laugh came back to her. She was half-convinced it was him, but until she saw him with her own eyes, she couldn't be sure. Reaching out first felt awkward, though. What was she even supposed to say? The plan had been to meet him as the auction's buyer, greet him as if by chance, thank him for selling her such a fine item, and suggest they have dinner sometime—spin the thread of a connection out from there. Getting shut out at the door before she'd taken a single step inside made contacting him suddenly complicated.
She would have to try something else.
She searched for Kim Sujeong's social media and went in. Seo Hyoju had no particular reason to look the girl up, but she remembered, amusingly enough, that Kim Sujeong had bragged that day about following her. Plenty of the people following Seo Hyoju were named Kim Sujeong, but recalling the shout on the way out—"Unnie, my ID is...!"—she found the account quickly.
Kim Sujeong's socials had a decent following of their own. Young. Personable. A hunter, and pretty besides. Most of the photos were taken in dungeons, and there wasn't much showing off or vanity in them. Then, after a long quiet stretch among posts like those, a new feed had gone up today. A single video. A clip carrying a link to NewTube.
"..."
Had the account been hacked? The ad copy was so cheap the thought came unbidden. But the thumbnail—five goblings' necks splitting in the same instant, and a familiar man settling his sword with effortless style—was framed so perfectly that Seo Hyoju couldn't not click.
She admitted it. If you could look at that and not press play, you had no business calling yourself a hunter.
She followed the link. The channel looked brand-new: SSS+ Rank Farmer Hunter, five subscribers, and exactly one video uploaded. The title was Leap Slash.
The three-minute video ended quickly. NewTube's autoplay countdown ran out and another video started, and still Seo Hyoju didn't turn it off. She was staring, spellbound.
"...Wow."
That was cool. Hunters were superhumans, closer to people with powers than to ordinary people, but hunters who actually fought that beautifully were rare. Of course, putting on a performance like that in a low-level dungeon wasn't difficult once you reached Seo Hyoju's level—but only if you assumed a hunter rank and level like hers to begin with. Which meant the man in the video was a hunter on her level.
"Mr. Kim Suhyun, do you actually have something?"
Seeing SSS+ Rank Hunter plastered across it in letters the size of a front gate, she figured that even if he wasn't truly SSS+, he might at least be S-rank. Clever. Write plain old S-rank Hunter, and people would think, What kind of S-rank is that? B or A at best, right? Slap an absurd grade like SSS+ on it, though, and even after you knocked it down a few pegs, you still landed somewhere around S.
She was starting to wish she hadn't watched. The suspicion she'd been nursing—surely not?—had hardened into certainty. A faint anxiety stirred. Maybe she was overreacting.
But her grandfather had always told her:
Even before she awakened as a hunter, she had trusted her gut and succeeded, overturning every verdict of reckless ambition until people had no choice but to acknowledge her. This time was no different.
Geumbit Guild and Geumbit Group needed a turning point. They were doing well in Korea—second in the business world, third among the guilds, a proper conglomerate—but the top seat was always being taken from them, always a step behind Hansu Group. To flip that, Geumbit Guild had to become number one first. And for that, they needed hunters.
"I have to catch him."
An S-rank hunter, at minimum. And not just any S-rank. An S-rank capable of clearing a dungeon that could yield A-rank hides—the value of that didn't need putting into words.
On a video that still had only eleven views, Seo Hyoju left a comment from her main NewTube account.
"Pfft."
Even as she typed it, Seo Hyoju didn't understand why she'd written it that way. She'd just wanted to. Why? Maybe because she remembered laughing, back at the apartment, at that sudden unprompted self-own. Had some private sense of closeness formed without her noticing? It might have been a moment's whim, but she didn't delete it. She left the channel.
She was curious. Could he still turn her down after this? Auction participant number 69 hadn't known it was her, so the refusal was one thing. But a rookie NewTuber, faced with a proposal from Seo Hyoju, a major NewTuber...
She thought that, and yet, face flushed, she couldn't bring herself to open the NewTube channel on her phone again until she got home.
Login was coming up soon, so I hadn't spared NewTube a second thought. Kim Sujeong was no different.
"Ugh. There's way too much to take."
This time we had far too much to carry. The first goal was to bring the solar panels, hook up power, and run a small refrigerator off them. Once that was done, the tablet and everything else that charged off electricity wouldn't need a mountain of power banks every trip. Easier. We could drink something cold, and freeze meat to keep for a long while. So that absolutely had to come along. After that, as always, she packed food to eat once we got there.
That part was easy by now. We hadn't even finished what we'd taken last time, and most of what she packed was simple to cook, so a single box held quite a lot. She set a little aside for Ruru, too. And the armor was finished, so she'd picked it up. It fell short of A+ rank gear, but the options were more than enough to wear for now. Add a few accessories she'd worn out her shoes tracking down over several days, and she figured she could finally stand somewhere and say, without shame, that she was armed like a proper hunter.
"Wow, oppa. I used to walk around dressed like a maggot, and look at me now. I actually look like a hunter."
"We're leaving at six tomorrow morning, so set an alarm."
"Yeah. Ugh. Do you even realize I've become a genuinely disciplined person since I joined Farming Company? You know that unless it was a dungeon day, I used to stay up all night and get up in the afternoon, right?... You don't, do you. Anyway, see you tomorrow."
Farm life seemed to suit Kim Sujeong well enough. Delighted at the thought of seeing Ruru tomorrow, she hurried off to bed.
I lay down too, meaning to sleep. I was nervous, and I was looking forward to it. Every time I logged out and logged back in—whether in reality or in the Rift Dimension—I went through tremendous change and growth. People didn't get addicted to the feel of growth in a game, didn't lose their minds over it, for nothing. Growth and progress you could see pickled a person in endless dopamine and made them forget what exhaustion even was.
A fight with an ogre. An S- rank monster. I can win, right?
I was thinking that, drifting toward sleep, when Kim Sujeong suddenly opened the door and came in.
"Oppa. Huge! This is huge!"
"What."
"Our NewTube. It blew up!"
On the phone she held out was the NewTube channel we'd made yesterday morning: SSS+ Rank Farmer Hunter. I'd watched Mom and Dad subscribe, and Sujeong, and even Lee Jihyun, and when that still wasn't enough my parents had called around the extended family until it hit twenty-something, maybe thirty-something.
"What. Thirty thousand?"
Why had the subscriber count hit thirty thousand in a single day?
"Did you see the comment Hyoju-unnie left?"
"Who's Hyoju."
"Seo Hyoju! Geumbit Guild!"
"Ah."
I scrolled down the video. The comment with the most likes sat at the top.
"...? This isn't a fake?"
"I thought so too, so I checked, and it's the real one."
"Someone else must've written it."
"Unnie said so herself on a livestream. She said she really wrote it."
"Why?"
"Hyoju-unnie's always gone around saying her ideal type is a handsome, strong hunter. So maybe that's why?"
"What."
So it was just bait.
"Still, thanks to her, subscribers went way up. We got advertised!"
"Good for us."
A lot of subscribers was a good thing, but I wasn't as giddy about it as Sujeong. More like, well, what was coming had finally come. Honestly, it might have been because I'd vaguely assumed that with an SSS+ rank ability, I'd succeed even without particularly trying.
"Just go to sleep."
"...Ugh, you're no fun. When we get back later, at least message unnie and say thanks. I don't even know why she did it. But how did she find us? The channel was made yesterday. Gasp! Don't tell me she saw my socials?"
"You think she's got nothing better to do? It probably just popped up on the algorithm."
The rookie NewTuber's debut left the man himself unmoved. It was, all the same, quite the success.