Poor Hero
I hated poverty.
Then again, why would I have been the only one? Under the sky of capitalism, everyone wanted to be rich.
Someone once said you should live with gratitude for what you’re given.
What a load of crap. All I’d been given in childhood was poverty so severe it had teeth.
I was eight years old.
My father took my younger brother and me to the stationery shop in front of the school.
“Go on! Pick whatever you want!”
It was unexpected. My father was the kind of man who flinched at a 100 won coin.
Still, it was obvious this wasn’t the sort of chance that came around every day.
It was Children’s Day, after all.
My brother let out a shout of delight and ran straight for the dinosaur toys.
I stood there quietly and swept my eyes over the shop.
My heart was racing just as hard as his.
A basketball? A toy gun? A little car?
No. That one.
What caught my eye was a figurine modeled after a comic-book hero.
A hero in a purple mask and a leather jacket.
I didn’t know why, but I felt strangely drawn to him.
“This one! Please buy me this one!”
My father carried my brother’s pterodactyl and the figurine I’d chosen up to the counter.
“How much is it?”
He exchanged a few words with the shop owner.
The longer the conversation dragged on, the more unease crept into me, but still—today was Children’s Day.
I distracted myself by looking at the other toys nearby.
Only after a long while did my father come back holding the figurine.
Then he smiled with a tenderness that looked almost saintly and said, “Yongki. This one’s out.”
Of course it was.
I wasn’t especially disappointed.
My father had broken his promises more times than I could count.
“Why not? Is it expensive?”
“No. It’s Chinese. Probably a counterfeit. If it were American or Japanese, I’d buy it without hesitation, but…”
He rambled on with excuses, but I’d already guessed the real reason.
We didn’t have enough money.
“Then I’ll take this.”
I grabbed one of the dinosaur plushies nearby at random and handed it to him.
After paying, my father put the toy in my hand and squeezed it tight.
The smile tugging at his mouth trembled pitifully.
As we left the stationery shop with a long sigh, the first Gate in history opened and monsters burst out.
People screamed. The area in front of the school became a scene from hell.
My father grabbed my hand.
“Choi Yongki! Come here! Run!”
It was a desperate moment, but my eyes were fixed on the figurine displayed beyond the glass.
I was ten years old.
Across the world, a select few humans awakened.
Some of them used the powerful strength and special abilities granted to them to fight against the monsters.
People called them hunters.
Hunters of higher ranks swept up wealth and fame.
As the price of basic necessities skyrocketed, life grew even harder for those who had not been chosen.
I clung to a sliver of hope.
If I became a hunter?
Wouldn’t that let me escape this loathsome swamp of poverty?
Naturally, no one in our family awakened.
My father said he was going on an overseas business trip and left my brother and me with my paternal grandmother.
The moment I stepped into the basement room at the end of a dark, narrow stairwell, I understood.
Ah. Poverty is hereditary.
Wallpaper stained with mold, a flickering fluorescent light, the stale reek of poverty seeping into every corner.
It all felt familiar because it was so much like the place we’d lived before.
“I’ll make a lot of money and come back in a year! You trust your father, right? Mom! Please take care of the kids!”
My grandmother, bent-backed and holding a broom she’d been using to sweep the floor, stared at me fixedly.
“Goddamn it. You look just like your father.”
I didn’t hate my grandmother’s foul mouth, even when it came laced with insults about my dead father.
For all her grumbling, she took care of my brother and me with incredible thrift.
“Come eat.”
There was always a bowl of pale beef-and-radish soup on the table with rice.
Soup, they called it, but there was no beef in it.
The only things floating in it were some scrap of fat from who-knew-where and bits of radish so overcooked they’d nearly collapsed, but it was still better than going hungry.
The truth was, I hadn’t understood any of it until then.
I thought everyone was poor like us.
But once I started school, and as the grades advanced, the differences began to stand out in ugly little details.
While my brother and I wore frayed clothes and walked more than forty minutes to school, someone else would be dropped off in front of the gate in a foreign car driven by their parents.
When I visited a friend’s house, my mouth fell open.
The entrance, where the shoe cabinet stood, was separated from the living room, and a huge TV dominated the wall.
Even the bathroom was larger than my grandmother’s entire house.
I felt strange all the way home.
Looking at how heavy my steps were, I guess I was a little depressed.
I spotted my grandmother picking up waste paper in the distance.
“Grandma!”
I rolled up my sleeves and helped her collect it.
She stared at me with her deep, wrinkled eyes.
“Are you not even ashamed to have this old woman as your grandma?”
“What’s there to be ashamed of? The one I should be ashamed of is my dad, that lying bastard who can’t open his mouth without spitting nonsense.”
The father who promised to come pick us up in a year, of course, never kept his word.
“Yongki, what are you gonna be when you grow up?”
“Rich.”
I answered without hesitation.
“Grandma. Just wait a little. I’ll make so damn much money I’ll buy us a house fit for a palace.”
“Hey, you little shit. What kind of word is that in front of an elder? I ought to smack the hell out of you!”
When she smacked me on the back, I jolted upright, and the gloom in my chest cleared all at once.
My grandmother, who had been in the middle of hitting me, stopped.
“Listen here, Yongki. Promise your grandma one thing.”
“What promise?”
“It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor. Just live by what you believe is right. Got it?”
I had no idea what brought that on, but the seriousness in her face made me nod without a word.
I was seventeen.
High school had now divided into academic, vocational, and hunter-specialized tracks.
There were departments for Gate response teams, equipment development, and hunter training construction crews.
It was a vocational academy built to support Awakeners.
I wanted to start earning money as soon as possible, so I chose that path without a second thought.
My younger brother, as if struck by middle-school syndrome despite being in elementary school, gradually started going off the rails.
When he was little, he’d helped Grandma clean and do the dishes, but then he began skipping school.
After I landed a few blows on him, he ran away from home entirely and sometimes didn’t come back for days.
At night, I closed my eyes in our tiny one-room basement apartment, where cold air still whistled through the gaps.
Grandma would groan through the night in pain, as if something ached all over her body.
I turned twenty.
I could have gone to college, but I gave it up early.
I couldn’t afford the tuition.
Tuition, my ass.
We didn’t even have money for daily living expenses.
Grandma had grown weaker and spent more and more days lying motionless in bed.
As the eldest son, I had to support the family.
Convenience store work, loading and unloading packages, construction labor, wiping monster blood from corpses, factory shifts—whatever came my way, I took it.
When I was twenty-three, the military dragged me in.
Dragged was the right word.
After monsters appeared, the conditions for military exemption became far stricter.
The fact that I’d maintained a steady monthly income by working in a factory actually worked against me; I no longer qualified for exemption on the grounds of financial hardship.
I enlisted, leaving behind an eighteen-year-old delinquent brother and a frail old woman.
When I was a private first class, my brother came to visit me alone.
The visitation room was noisy with families meeting sons and couples falling in love over the same benches.
“Where’s Grandma?”
My brother only kept crying, tears streaming down his face without end.
He said it was cancer.
The doctor showed me a picture of a cancer mass bigger than the fist in Grandma’s belly.
He blamed me, asking why I’d left it until it had gotten this bad.
A week before my discharge, Grandma died.
Almost no one came to the funeral.
Not even my father.
It felt like only my brother and I were left in the world.
I didn’t cry on the way home, after the burial, or even while returning to the house.
While sorting through Grandma’s belongings, I found a letter in a drawer.
- My dear Yongki.
The moment I saw that crooked handwriting, the world before me blurred.
At the very end, it said this:
- Live on bravely. With your brother.
Along with the letter was ten million won in cash.
It was money she had saved from the wages I’d sent her bit by bit throughout my military service.
That was when the dam inside me finally broke.
I cried like an explosion had gone off in my chest.
The next day, I knew something important in my life had been given up.
Something like the modest dream I’d kept hidden in my heart.
Someday, when I had some breathing room, I wanted to help kids who had it as hard as I had.
I knew better than anyone how brutal it was to grow up in a broken home.
Was even that a luxury I couldn’t afford?
My brother, who was about to take the college entrance exam, made a shocking declaration.
“Hyung. I’m dropping out.”
After Grandma died, I made a promise.
I would live bravely, just as she’d told me.
“Shut up and go to college.”
My brother was smart enough that it would’ve been a waste for him to give it up.
I couldn’t let him live the rough, blunt life I’d lived.
Grandma’s death wasn’t all bad.
My brother seemed to take it hard, but he pulled himself together and studied, eventually entering a prestigious medical school.
I wanted to ask why medical school of all things, but I didn’t.
I figured it probably had something to do with Grandma.
Maybe he wanted to save people who couldn’t afford treatment, or those dying from incurable illnesses.
I went back to the factory.
It was a third-tier subcontractor for a major corporation that made hunter equipment.
From the year after my discharge, from age twenty-five to thirty-five.
Ten years without a single break.
During that time, my life changed little by little.
I paid my brother’s tuition and moved us into a two-room rental.
My brother and I could finally use separate rooms.
He graduated from medical school and obtained his national medical license.
Everything seemed to be going smoothly.
But for some reason, at some point, my brother stopped talking to me.
I came home too exhausted after work to do anything but collapse into bed, and he shut himself in his room whenever he got home.
We lived like that for years, and then my brother got married.
As he left the house, he asked us to throw away all his belongings.
After that, contact with him naturally faded away.
One day, when I was forty-two—
a woman came to see me and told me my brother was dead.
She said she was his wife.
“He was killed by a villain.”
She kept rubbing her belly with trembling hands, as if she might be pregnant.
There were limits to what public power alone could do to suppress villains.
My brother’s wife miscarried under the strain.
I spent every last bit of money I had on a private hunter.
“Leave it to me, sir. I’ll bring back the bastards’ heads.”
He swore he’d handle it, then vanished after taking the money.
A bitter laugh escaped me.
Heh. Grandma, I was trying to live bravely, but life sure as hell doesn’t make it easy.
When my heart hurt too much, I emptied my mind and stopped thinking.
Like a dead man trapped in the hell of Mugan, I worked, and worked, and worked.
One year, two years, five years, ten years…
Before I knew it, I was in my fifties.
My face was full of wrinkles, and the factory I’d worked at had gone bankrupt and closed down.
What was the result of nearly thirty years without rest?
At last, I escaped poverty.
The balance in my bank account had swelled with compound interest to more than one billion won.
“Cough.”
When I coughed, blood splattered into the sink.
The doctor said, “It’s cancer.”
Ignorant as I’d been, I hadn’t known.
Not only poverty, but disease could be passed down, too.
I had enough money for treatment, but I refused hospitalization and left the hospital.
A sea of fire fell from the sky.
A hole split open through the clear clouds, and countless monsters poured out.
Was I hallucinating?
The bodies of hunters piled up on the once-peaceful ground.
When I lifted my head, I saw a humanoid figure with horns sprouting from its head amid the black flames.
Sensing that something about it was far from ordinary, people tried to put distance between themselves and that shape, one after another, with no regard for who they might shove aside.
Countless people brushed past me.
Then a strange voice boomed through the air, loud enough to rip at my eardrums.
“You miserable worms. Disappear.”
When he gestured, the ground collapsed.
A few people who had been screaming for their lives vanished beneath it in an instant, their cries cut off by the earth swallowing them whole.
Every monster rampaging nearby had a mouth stained bright red around the edges.
One winged monster with sharp teeth, something like a pterodactyl, clamped its jaws around my waist.
I struggled, but it was useless.
My intestines spilled out as I became the monster’s meal.
Ah. So this is how I die.
I’d always wondered.
When humans face death, what do they think of?
Fear? Regret? Remorse?
So this was the end at last.
What I felt was relief.
And what flashed through my mind like a dying light while I was being crushed in the monster’s jaws was the figurine.
The hero in the purple mask.
Now I understood why I’d been so drawn to him.
Unlike other heroes, he had no dependable comrades.
No money, no fame, no family.
He simply stood alone and fought his enemies in silence.
Even at the moment of his death, he never compromised with evil.
Even though he was poor, he always carried himself with dignity, and I envied him for it.
Looking back, poverty had been an excuse.
I’d spent my whole life resenting my father and working myself to the bone in penance for failing to protect Grandma and my brother.
As I fell endlessly into the darkness, I made a vow.
If there was another life after this—
like Grandma said—
I would live without being cowed by poverty, and I would stand tall, holding fast to my beliefs.
Better still, I’d go out myself and beat the hell out of the forces of evil without having to depend on some con artist.
Like some childish but absurdly hopeful comic-book hero.
Then, from the fading edge of consciousness, I heard an unfamiliar voice.
- Awakening.
- Talent: Purchase.
: You can buy the abilities of the object of your admiration.
Then a hazy hallucination appeared.
[[ HERO SKILL SHOP ]]
1. Super Kid Series.
1)
: 1,000,000 won per use.
2)
: 5,000,000 won per day.
…….
* * *
“Hey, you little shit!”
I jolted awake at the feeling of someone slapping my back.
“How many times do I have to call you? How long are you gonna keep sleeping? Come eat!”
When I turned my head, a table was set in front of me.
A bowl of beef-and-radish soup with nothing but fat, and a serving of rice.
My brother’s grumbling voice came from beside me.
“Again? I’m sick of this!”
It was the same half-basement, one-room apartment with black mold spreading across the wall.
When I sat up and looked into the little vanity mirror, my face reflected back at me.
Not the face of a man in his late fifties.
A healthy young man’s face.
Was I dreaming?
Or was this place, where an endlessly unhappy life repeated itself, actually hell?
Before I could even understand what had happened to me, I blinked and a blue window appeared.
[ Awakener’s Balance ]
: ￦1,078,565,998