Tutorial
The name alone was ominous enough. Wild Hunter was a dark fantasy open-world RPG of truly sadistic difficulty — the kind of perverse, brain-melting challenge that made you seriously question whether the developers were wired correctly.
Getting your skull punched through dozens of times during the tutorial was just the opening act. Step on some nameless poisonous herb while walking the field and you died of paralysis. Get chewed on by a stray dog by the roadside and you bled out.
And the best part of all was the hardcore roguelike system.
Die once and your character was gone. Deleted. Just like that.
That seductive world was more than enough to grind countless gamers' lives into dust.
I was one of those ghosts.
Maybe I should try a Swordsman build this time.
Wasn't it appealing? A swordsman — every man's romance. The kind of Swordsman who could absorb any swordsmanship just by watching it once.
I spent about an hour building that character.
That was the last thing I ever did.
"Ooooooh—!!"
"He has descended! The savior is here at last!"
"As the Great Light wills it!"
A sudden roar of voices. Cheers and hymns of praise crashing in right behind it. And somewhere in the middle of all that noise, someone's raw cursing and shouting mixed in...
Eeeeeee....
Dohyeon grimaced against the tinnitus and the racket, forcing his eyelids up. His vision was wretchedly blurred. And something was wrong. Where the blue glow of a monitor should have been, other things stood crowded in its place.
???
He squeezed his eyes shut and snapped them open again. This had to be a hallucination. Close your eyes, open them, and real reality would be waiting. That was what he figured.
The scenery did not change.
If anything, his vision sharpened, and Dohyeon could finally make out the world around him.
This is...
Pure white marble filling every direction. A magnificent domed ceiling. Murals depicting the battlefields of myth. And below them, an unidentified crowd packing the floor. The heavy scent of frankincense and burning candles clung to his nose. A strange sensation washed through him, as if gravity had vanished and his body were floating...
The tutorial?
No doubt about it. This was the tutorial area of Wild Hunter. The place you saw the instant you finished creating your character.
Dohyeon's lips began to tremble of their own accord.
"What the fuck."
The curse slipped out before he could stop it. And then the dissonance hit. The shape of the pronunciation was... different. That sound had not been ssibal. The voice that had left his vocal cords was not Korean at all.
And yet inside his head, the meaning slotted into place as naturally as if it had been Korean all along.
What did you even call this? Cognitive dissonance? A vicious sense of wrongness was just starting to take over his entire body when—
"Get the hell off me, all of you! You uncivilized bastards!"
Dohyeon's gaze snapped toward the source of the voice.
What he found there was a blaze of brilliant blond hair. A Western man of dazzlingly handsome features, as if he had stepped straight out of a Renaissance masterpiece. A pretty-boy gigolo with a movie star's face. On top of that, he was wearing a suit — a tailored one, from the look of it. And out of that mouth, at a machine-gun clip, came vulgarities that did not match the face in the slightest.
"Don't you know who I am? I am the twenty-eighth descendant of the Marseille ducal family — Raymond Philippe de Marseille! You dare abduct a civilian from the heart of Paris?! Call a lawyer this instant! Contact the embassy!"
His face looked flushed with rage. He was even swinging his fists at empty air, pitching a full-blown tantrum.
"Hah! You dare pull a hidden-camera prank on this nobleman? Do you have any idea how much tax I pay?! You uncivilized—"
And then Dohyeon's eyes and the blond man's met in midair.
The blond, still panting through his teeth, tilted his head. Those blue eyes raked Dohyeon from top to bottom, and then he frowned. Contempt sat openly in his gaze.
"What are you."
He lifted his chin and snorted.
"A monkey? What's an Asian monkey doing here?"
"Hah... you little son of a bitch."
Looks like I need to teach him a thing or two about our proud Confucian culture.
Three days had passed since then.
Beyond the window hung two moons and a sky of geometric constellations. A landscape that was familiar and unfamiliar all at once. It was a night sky you could only see in Wild Hunter.
Possession... yeah. That was what this had to be.
But why did he still look exactly the way he had back on Earth?
Status window.
And there was no status window, either! If you were going to drop someone into another world, the least you could do was give them a status window.
Status. Ventana de Estado. Fenêtre d'état. Statusfenster. Окно статуса...
Fuck. He could clown around in every language on Earth and a status window still would not show up.
The one silver lining... was that the Swordsman talent he had picked during character creation was still there. He could tell instinctively from the way the longsword at his hip settled into his grip, snapping into his hand like it belonged there.
What had happened to him and Raymond was the most worn-out setup in the book. The Demon King had revived, a rift between dimensions had opened, and people from another world had been summoned as heroes to save a crumbling one — the classic web-novel beat. Everything he had pieced together over the last three days lined up with that cliché almost perfectly.
The problem was that, unlike himself — a perfectly normal, reasonable human being — this so-called "hero" was not right in the head.
"Hey."
Dohyeon looked at Raymond and opened his mouth. This attention whore had a habit of tacking on "twenty-eighth descendant of the Marseille ducal family, Raymond Philippe de Marseille" every single time he spoke.
"So. Your class is Mage?"
Raymond did not answer. He just fidgeted with the handle of his teacup, the poor innocent thing.
Dohyeon let out a short sigh.
"Twenty-eighth descendant of the Marseille ducal family, Raymond Philippe de Marseille. I'm asking if your class is Mage."
A flinch. Raymond's shoulder jumped hard all over again.
"...That's right. Monkey."
"Ah, for fuck's sake..."
The reason Raymond kept flinching was simple. Day two of the summoning. Dohyeon had rearranged his jaw.
And so the two of them sat there in that awkward, ugly atmosphere, silently cursing each other out, when—
Creeeeak....
Dohyeon and Raymond both turned toward the doorway at the same time.
Through the gap in the door, a woman in ornate, pure-white priestly robes carefully showed herself. The highest-ranking cleric in charge of this temple. A cliché Saintess in the flesh, you could say. Her looks were a cliché Saintess's too. You could think of her as carrying around a pair of enormous holy-power pouches. She was even glancing between the two of them, carefully reading the room.
"Um... well."
She opened her mouth in a voice that barely crawled out of her throat.
"I was thinking perhaps you might meet the next hero..."
Dohyeon and Raymond stared at each other's faces.
On the first day they had both thrown a fit, but three days had a way of making you come to terms with reality. Both of them had already struck that private bargain — it was about time to accept this insane situation for what it was.
"Haaah..."
Dohyeon scratched the back of his head and stood up.
"Hoo..."
Raymond got up as well, brushing imaginary dust from his clothes. Dohyeon spoke.
"Yeah. Lead the way. Let's see what kind of bastard showed up this time. Gotta admit, I'm curious."
An awkward, stiff smile spread across the Saintess's lips. Cold sweat rolled down her face as she neatly folded her hands together.
"Um... the truth is, the hero has already been summoned."
She fidgeted, letting the sentence trail off.
"He's currently... locked in the Temple Dungeon."
Raymond's blue eyes lit up with interest. Born with a superiority complex and no shortage of misogynist tendencies, he began to clap elegantly in the Saintess's direction. She looked faintly put off... though Raymond did not seem to notice.
"Oh! Well done, my dear. Clearly another one of these brutish Asian monkeys has been summoned. Locking savages like that behind iron bars is simply common sense..."
Dohyeon more or less made him shut up, then sank into thought.
They summoned him and immediately beat him down and threw him in a cell? Why?
A reasonable question surfaced.
Trying to establish dominance from the jump? Break his mind and brainwash him?
Dohyeon looked at the Saintess's face, idly fingering the sword at his hip.
Seems possible enough.
He clicked his tongue. She hurriedly spilled her words, as if making an excuse.
"Th-that's not it! The moment the hero saw me...!"
"The moment he saw you?"
"He pointed at my head and suddenly flew into a rage, demanding to know why I wasn't wearing a hijab... and the instant he was summoned he grabbed me by the collar...!"
Tears welled along the rims of the Saintess's eyes.
"He started smashing the temple's sacred statues, screaming about idolatry, and went on a rampage. So..."
"Yeah... you've been through it."
"Y-yes..."
It was so absurd he could not even manage a hollow laugh.
"...So after the racist, we get a Jihadist? This shit is not gonna be easy."
"Is the twenty-eighth descendant of the Marseille ducal family, Raymond Philippe de Marseille, being called a racist? It is not racism. It is simply superiority. Remember that, monkey."
Hah. He was getting dizzy just listening to this.