Let's Have a Housewarming Today
"Right this way, please."
The staff member left the window and started across the corridor. I hurried after him, and by then Doa had already covered her face with a hat and mask from who knows where.
Wow... a single mask hides half her face. I'd heard that celebrities with small faces could get away with just a mask, but seeing it up close was a different experience entirely. I had always simply thought she was pretty, yet with half her face hidden, I realized anew just how small Doa's face really was.
"Doa, you're coming with me?"
"You're going to leave me behind and go alone? You want me to walk out there?" Doa pointed out the window. Among the pickets printed with my face, papers bearing Doa's name had been appearing one by one. If I went out through that crowd now, the fans would probably reach me before the reporters did.
"Ah, no. Of course not. I was planning to take you with me from the start."
"Hmmm... I'll let it slide just this once. Let's go."
We took the staff-only elevator down into the basement, where a long corridor greeted us, its lights burning sparsely along the ceiling. Following the employee past a supply storeroom and a machine room, we walked for quite a while before arriving at the underground parking garage on the far side of the building. A black van was waiting there for us, engine already running.
"Hunter Baek Seorin arranged this before the press release went out. For the time being, please use this route whenever you visit the Association."
From the outside, she seemed hot-tempered, the type to swing a sword first and ask questions later, yet in matters like this a surprising attentiveness kept showing through. Come to think of it, from plotting a route that avoided the reporters to quietly looking after us, she was remarkably thorough when it came to taking care of people. I thanked the staff member and climbed into the back seat with Doa.
Even as the car pulled out of the underground garage, the commotion erupting from the main entrance showed no sign of dying down.
"Don't those people have jobs to go to?"
"Right? It's not even the weekend. It's a weekday."
They can't still be out there tomorrow, right? I had to come back to the Association for training tomorrow, after all. Just as the thought of facing that scene again began to sour my mood, my phone chimed softly.
Hunter activity settlement payment has been deposited.
"Oh!! It's here!"
The moment I tapped the notification, my account balance had already changed. With taxes and various deductions taken out beforehand, the amount that came in was a little over 380 million won. The money I had only ever seen on yesterday's settlement statement was actually sitting in my bank account.
So it lands just like that. No matter how many times I checked, the 300 million in my account stayed right where it was. This much had to be enough to buy at least some kind of house, didn't it? I was not a particularly greedy person. A couple of bedrooms, a decent living room, and a view of the Han River out the window would have been plenty.
Right. I'm a hunter now, and if I'm going to live somewhere anyway, it might as well be somewhere with a Han River view. Either way, it was goodbye to the basement studio that reeked of mold. I opened a real estate app in high spirits, and Doa, beside me, had already leaned over to peer at the screen.
"House hunting?"
"Yeah. Now that the money's actually in, I figured I'd just find a place right away."
"Where are you thinking of moving?"
"Somewhere with a view of the Han River."
"Oh? Really?" Doa's eyes widened a touch, and interest bloomed across her face almost instantly. "Then can I come along to look?"
"You want to tag along to house viewings?"
"Sure. It sounds fun to look together, doesn't it? Two pairs of eyes are better than one, too."
Well, she wasn't wrong. Having one more person along meant another opinion to lean on, which was probably for the best.
"Then let's go together."
"Sounds good."
Doa leaned toward me as if she had been waiting for exactly that. "Where to?"
"Hold on, let me make a call first." I scrolled a little further down the app and dialed the agency sitting at the very top of the search results.
"Welcome. You're the one who called earlier, correct?"
"Yes. I phoned about wanting to see houses with a Han River view."
The real estate agent came out to the door to greet us and led us to seats inside. He brought out tea and fruit, then spread open a thick binder of listings gathered exclusively from homes with good Han River views. Even when Doa took off her hat and mask, the agent showed no particular reaction. Her return had only been announced that day, and the articles had run nothing but photos from five years ago, so it was only natural he didn't recognize her. Instead, the mere fact that a young man and woman had come to look at houses together was enough for him to draw his own conclusions about us.
"Are the two of you looking for a newlywed home to share?"
"I'm sorry, what?"
The agent glanced back and forth between Doa and me with a warmly approving smile. "You two suit each other so well. And your wife is a real beauty."
Doa's face flushed crimson in an instant. Normally she would have denied it on the spot, but for some reason she only fiddled with her teacup and kept her mouth shut.
"Ah, no, that's not it." Left with no choice, I corrected the misunderstanding myself. "She's just an acquaintance. Just an acquaintance."
"Really? Ah, forgive me, that was rude of me." The agent apologized at once. Me, daring to be the lover of an S-rank hunter. If I had corrected him even a moment later and Doa's feelings were hurt, it could have turned into a genuine disaster.
That was what I thought, anyway. But when I turned to look beside me, Doa was glaring at me with both cheeks puffed out round and full.
"Hnnngh..." Strange noises and all. One glance was enough to tell she was in a foul mood.
"...What? Did I do something wrong?"
"Hmph. No, you didn't! Hunter Yoon Jaemin." Doa whipped her head away. I had cleared up the misunderstanding perfectly, so for the life of me I couldn't see what the problem was. It felt awkward to keep pressing the matter in front of the agent, so I turned my eyes to the listing laid out before us.
"Will you be focusing on new construction?"
"A new build would be best. And a high floor, if possible."
"Oh my, my. You really are lucky today. A listing that matches your criteria perfectly just came in this very morning."
Ten minutes by car brought us to a high-rise apartment complex that gleamed even from a distance. The moment I stepped inside, my mouth fell open, and not without reason. The entryway alone looked larger than the basement room I had been living in, and beyond the floor-to-ceiling glass that filled one entire side of the living room, the Han River unrolled in a wide, exhilarating sweep. Even the buildings on the far bank came into view without the slightest obstruction.
This is the one. I was already sketching out where the furniture would go. The sofa would sit by the window, and the spare room would make a perfect home gym. As for exercise equipment, I had money now; I could simply buy it piece by piece.
"Do you like it?"
"Yes. It's better than I expected." I had heard somewhere that letting on how much you loved a place made it hard to haggle the price down, so I played it cool and looked around the living room once more. "How much is it?"
"The current asking price is 14.5 billion won. Among the units in the same building with the same layout, that's quite a favorable figure."
"...How much?"
"14.5 billion won. Ah, of course, that's only the asking price. If I speak to the owner on your behalf, I can likely bring it down by 100 to 200 million won or so."
I had heard that a down payment on a purchase usually ran about ten percent of the price, which meant 1.45 billion won on a 14.5 billion won apartment. ... Even emptying my entire account would not have covered half of it.
"It wasn't this bad five years ago, was it...?" Doa's mouth had fallen slightly open as well.
"Oh, come on, Seoul housing prices have only gotten more out of control. Especially these permanent Han River view apartments—even people with money in hand can't find listings."
"Is it really that extreme?"
"Of course. I'm showing you this only because you're a hunter. This is not a property I show to just anyone."
The agent went on at length about why Seoul's housing prices had climbed so high. Summed up, it all came down to safety in the end. He said that when Gates first appeared, the common wisdom held that crowded major cities would be the most dangerous places to be. But once the truth came out, it proved to be the exact opposite. Gates appeared without discrimination, whether deep in the mountains or in the heart of downtown. If they could spawn anywhere at all, then a place where they were spotted quickly and hunters could be deployed immediately was far safer by comparison.
Seoul, where the Association headquarters and the major guilds were clustered, was different from the very start in response speed. The faintest anomaly triggered a report within moments, and even when a high-rank Gate did appear, hunters stationed nearby were thrown at it fast. Sparsely populated regions, by contrast, were slow at the detection stage alone, and there had been no shortage of cases where a Gate went berserk before support personnel even arrived. As those incidents piled up, people began flooding into the major cities instead, and around the Han River in particular—where transit and defensive infrastructure were superb and the high-rank hunters made their homes—prices carried what was known as the Safety Premium.
Still, isn't 14.5 billion going a bit too far? I tore my eyes from the living room view and eased into a change of subject. "Th-then, could we perhaps see somewhere a little cheaper?"
"Of course. What range did you have in mind?"
"Let's look at a few other places first and go from there."
Still beaming, the agent ushered us toward the next listing. The second apartment was more than twenty years old, but you could indeed see the Han River between the living room windows—to be precise, he said, the thin blue strip wedged between two buildings across the way was the river. "This one is 6.8 billion won."
"...Is there anything a bit cheaper?"
The third place offered no view of the Han River whatsoever. The agent insisted that if you pressed yourself against the very edge of the master bedroom window and craned your head to the right, on a clear day you could just make out the rooftops of the buildings across the river. ...Calling that a "Han River view" took a certain lack of conscience, didn't it? "3.47 billion won."
"Let's try another one."
Somewhere along the drive to the fourth property, the agent's chatter visibly thinned. The "Hunter" honorific he had attached so dutifully to every sentence had quietly vanished as well. "Um, sir? Sorry to ask this so late, but what exactly is your budget?" Doa, pretending to study the scenery, raised a hand to cover her mouth. In the reflection on the window, I could see her shoulders trembling little by little.
"In cash, about 380 million won."
"And a loan?"
"I'd have to take out whatever I can get."
"Might I ask what your hunter activity income looks like?"
"I only registered yesterday, so I'm not sure what shows up on paper yet."
"..." My eyes met the agent's in the rearview mirror. The eyes that had been curved into a friendly crescent until moments ago had gone perfectly flat. "Then I don't believe a loan would amount to much..."
"But I'm a hunter. How could it not work out?"
"That may have been true once, but with housing prices in such an uproar lately, the banks have gotten strict. It likely won't happen." The agent quietly slid aside the Han River area listings he had left on the passenger seat. "How about we look at rentals instead of purchases?"
"...Yes. Let's do that."
The moment my answer left my mouth, the agent spun the wheel. The last property was a tired old villa in a residential district more than thirty minutes by car from the Han River, a three-story building with no elevator. We climbed to the top floor, the third, but when I opened the window, the wall of the villa across the way filled the view where the river should have been.
Hmm... Apparently, coming straight from all those expensive places had raised my standards higher than I had realized. For a moment I thought back on the basement studio I was living in now—the room steeped in damp and mold, where the window frame turned soggy with every rain, pitch dark in the middle of the day unless the lights were on, its window opening onto nothing but the ankles of passersby. ...Looking at it again, this place was practically paradise.
Still, it had two whole bedrooms, and the living room was far larger than my current home. The wallpaper and flooring were brand-new, without a trace of mold to be found. Better yet, it came fully equipped with a refrigerator, a washing machine, and even a bed, so once the contract was signed, I could move in that very day.
"A deposit of 50 million won and 1.4 million won in monthly rent." Compared to those insane Han River view apartments, the price was remarkably reasonable.
"Oppa, this place is actually nice."
"Right?"
"Though you can't see the Han River."
"I can go look at the Han River myself."
As it happened, the subway station was a five-minute walk away, and half an hour on the train would put me right at the river. By any strict measure, this was practically Han River living. There's no need to buy some in-between place and tie up every last won I own. The more I turned it over, the more sensible this option seemed. The ink on my brand-new hunter license had barely dried anyway. If I earned like this a few more times, the day would come when I really could buy a home overlooking the Han River. Framing it as simply renting for a while until then, it was more than good enough.
"I'll take it."
At my words, the smile finally returned to the agent's face, which had been frozen stiff for some time.
After closing on the contract, I rolled the key I had received across my palm. Just that morning I had been planning to live in a Han River view apartment; a few hours later, I was holding a villa rental agreement instead. Even so, it was far better than the place I lived now, and as a temporary arrangement until I saved up more, it was hardly a bad choice.
"Congratulations on the new place, Oppa."
"Thanks."
"Next time, definitely somewhere with a Han River view."
"...I'll make sure of it."
"Pfft! I-I'll head back now, then!" Unable to hold in her laughter to the very end, Doa pressed her lips tight together and headed back to the hospital where her father lay.
"..." And so I was left alone in my new home.
"I'll move my things over slowly." My old place still had time left on its lease, after all. I could bring everything over piece by piece. I threw myself onto the bed that had come with the unit.
About two hours had passed since I had drifted off when my phone began buzzing, one message after another.
Apparently word had traveled in the short time since. I was about to correct her that it was a rental, but a new message arrived first.
Today? It was true the place was livable immediately. But who on earth threw a housewarming the very day they signed the lease? The refrigerator was empty, and I had not so much as touched the belongings still sitting at my old apartment. I should just say no. The moment I moved to type that reply, a new notification arrived.
...So I never had a choice to begin with.