What's Wrong With the Newbie? (1)
“...Student. Wake up.”
Guilt. Kang-jun lifted a hand to cast a shadow over his eyes against the blinding sunlight piercing his pupils. Slowly, he raised his upper body. His rough breathing tore in and out of his throat several times.
He had already endured this dozens of times, yet the sensation of his neck and body feeling as though they had been split open still hadn’t become familiar. His body was intact, but the wounds still burned with the same fiery heat. ...It felt as if he had swallowed the filth itself, not just stepped in it. That was how profoundly dirty it felt.
This made the fourth beginning. As a decade passed and his memories grew hazy, the moment he saw this auntie, they came flooding back. One or two times would be fine, but repeating the exact same thing four times was now so absurd that forgetting it felt wrong. This damn... He barely swallowed the curses rising to the back of his throat.
Suppressing his anger, the surrounding situation gradually came into focus. In the courtyard, the many people there kept stealing glances at the handsome man among them.
They had all suddenly awakened in a place no one understood, and since no one knew each other’s backgrounds, this awkward tension was only natural. Their possessions were completely gone, and the clothes on their bodies weren’t what they had been wearing before. Most were frozen in terror. Of course they wouldn’t be surprised—something like this had happened to them, just like in movies or novels.
Then, amid the crowd that had fallen into chaos, a man strode forward with a truly fierce gaze. From Kang-jun’s memories, he was the supervisor of this tutorial.
Hmm. The man cleared his throat and began speaking. His voice, previously a low murmur, was now perfectly audible.
“First, I welcome everyone who has arrived here. I am the supervisor, Jax, and I am the overall director of the 224th batch tutorial. ...And I am also someone from Earth, just like you.”
Just to lighten the mood, he forced a smile, but it had no effect. His vicious expression had done the heavy lifting.
“No clapping? There should be someone willing to.”
A few half-hearted claps echoed faintly and then died down. Supervisor Jax swept his gaze over the new recruits and began the real talk.
“Everyone has already heard the details from your homeroom teacher, but this place isn’t Earth. You’ve all come here to revive this fallen world.”
“We don’t choose that kind of thing! Send us back home right now!”
Someone shouted it out loud. Jax gave a curt laugh.
“You probably already heard that this is impossible. ...Of course, there is a way. You have to save this world. Then you can return to where you originally came from.”
“Why should we have to do that?”
“If you don’t want to, don’t. If that’s your mindset anyway, you probably won’t survive. In that case, I recommend you end your life here. It’s the fastest and most effective way to escape this hell.”
Complaints flooded in. They hadn’t expected to be told outright to die.
“I’ll say this clearly: this world is no easy place. The chance that killing you will hurt more than surviving is high. No— it will always be that way. Especially if you lack talent, it will be even harder. So be ready to endure with sheer grit. ...But don’t worry about that. Even if you have no talent, if you have grit, we can force it into you.”
The supervisor smiled darkly. He snapped his fingers. The instructors who received the signal walked forward. A mix of races was present: humans, orcs, goblins, fairies, lizardmen... The new recruits looked at them with wonder.
“This is the Earth-only zone, but to prepare for what’s ahead, we’ve incorporated instructors from various races. We did this based on the supervisors’ opinion that experiencing many different things would be more helpful for education.”
The new recruits’ gazes were particularly drawn to the fairy. She was truly breathtaking, enough to make one dizzy.
“From now on, you will receive one month of training. After the tutorial ends, you will be assigned to one of the four dungeons. No one knows where you’ll go. Since it’s decided randomly, I will help you survive any situation you face. ...Anyway, I’ll explain no more here. There will be more details later.”
Supervisor Jax turned and left. Then the instructors took over. They gathered the new recruits, who were seated in a huddle, and randomly paired them into groups of ten—men and women alike—creating teams like Team 1, Team 2, and so on.
“You! For a second there I thought you were about to pass out. You’re in Team 4.”
“Understood.”
“Your homeroom instructor is Aurelpa, and from now on he will be responsible for guiding you.”
The homeroom instructor for Team 4 was a lizardman. He occasionally stuck out his long, bright-red tongue from between his fangs. ...From what Kang-jun could tell, he had already completed his first Awakening. In a dungeon he might not even be able to show his face, but in the tutorial he would be more than sufficient.
‘...Is this real? Do I really have to do this again?’
As Kang-jun lined up and walked, he began to feel with his own skin that the decade of hardship had vanished. Just to be sure, he pinched his thigh. It wasn’t a dream. ...The third playthrough he had suffered through with all that nonsense was truly over. This fourth one, even worse, had begun.
The suppressed rage he had been holding back suddenly threatened to boil over. His chest was filled with resentment. That damn protagonist... I want to kill him. I poured every single medicine and even cut my sleep while training, and this is how he repays me!
‘...No, it’s all my karma, dammit. I’m the bastard who created that guy in the first place. Yeah, I really am a bastard.’
So, while cursing himself internally, Kang-jun made a firm vow that in this playthrough he would never help that protagonist. He would handle his own filth himself.... Even though the protagonist buffs had been decent, he had been thinking of carrying that guy’s dick around like before, but who would have guessed he’d be getting the biggest slap in the face?
Anyway, this was a rotten smut novel. Whether the protagonist lived or died, if Kang-jun survived to the end and finished the story, that was all that mattered. He could just slap a bad-ending label on it. After all, the readers weren’t here to cheer for that unlucky protagonist.
‘Fine. Whatever you ate, I’ll take it all now. You damn bastard.’
Kang-jun took several deep breaths to calm himself. Anyway, the water was already spilled. No matter how much he raged or regretted it here, he couldn’t go back. Having endured countless hardships and trials, he already knew well that quick acceptance was best for his own well-being.
It was said that revenge for a gentleman took ten years, but he would set that aside for now. The protagonist’s anger could wait. He didn’t have time to be blinded by it. He had to focus only on climbing back onto the proper track as fast as possible.
In the third playthrough, it had taken nearly ten years to reach the Demon King’s doorstep. This time, he would aim to shorten that even further. Still, since it was his third time replaying, he had plenty of experience and know-how.
Kang-jun quietly opened the status window that the new recruits still didn’t know existed. The thing that had once been dazzlingly bright was now shabby and pathetic, like a filthy dog.
- Name: Lee Kang-jun (224th Batch)
- Age: 28
- Gender: Male
- Title (2/4)
= Endurer (S): Every 10 years, all stats rise (+3)
= Consumer of God’s Envy (S): All stats rise (+1)
- Equipment
= None
- Stats (1st Class)
= Physical Strength: 5(+3)(+1) / 20
= Agility: 5(+3)(+1) / 20
= Intelligence: 6(+3)(+1) / 20
= Constitution: 4(+3)(+1) / 20
= Luck: 4(+3)(+1) / 20
- Traits (1/6)
= Totally Pain-Free (C/S): Weak resistance to all physical and magical attacks. Resistance increases the more exposed to attacks.
A sigh escaped him. He had vowed, but actually seeing it made his vision dizzy.
The stats that had completed the third Awakening were at rock bottom, and the six traits that had filled the slots were reduced to just one. Even the bonus was only split in two.
Kang-jun wondered when he would grow this again, but the three times of experience gave him some confidence that the fourth would be easier. ...If not, he would go mad.
He bit his lip and opened the shop window. At that moment, something caught his attention.
- Owned Coupons: 100
Whoa, there was no way he had 100. He wondered what was going on. Hadn’t everything reset to zero upon death, including coupons?
Kang-jun quickly opened the chat window just in case.
- Initial capital. Hang in there, you’ll be fine! (100 coupons given!)
- Yo, don’t give coupons right from the start. It’ll get boring.
- Ah, the early game pain is so fun.
Oh, gods. The only thing he could trust was the usual. Others would give one coupon just to gloat about watching him suffer. And these perverts who loved that would throw ten at a time if they liked a woman....
So he remembered vividly how he had boasted about earning coupons, showing off all sorts of tricks. Especially the third playthrough had been a day without a moment of rest. He had taken on every mission possible while putting everything into leveling up the protagonist. ...Well, since the novel’s base was that genre, the overflowing sex-devil characters were inevitable anyway.
Anyway, 100 coupons were like a ray of light for him. This was the first time starting with 100 of them.
Of course, this shop window was a system only applicable to Kang-jun the novel author. Coupons weren’t even elements outside the novel. Not just characters, but even the gods in the story couldn’t touch this area.
‘Good. Let’s start over carefully.’
Because he had been forcibly cut off from the protagonist, his mind was completely blank, but when he pressed the power button again, it started spinning up once more. Before entering the dungeon, he decided to lay out his plans.
While he was lost in thought, Team 4 arrived at the dorm. Dammit. Kang-jun felt like he had returned to the training center after discharge. ...He intellectually understood that it was an unavoidable process, but his heart refused to accept it. As a human, not a machine, the emotion was unavoidable.
“Fill the beds from the window side in order.”
“Um... Is it okay if men and women share the same beds?”
A woman asked worriedly. Aurelpa laughed when he heard the question.
“Of course. Men and women differ only in their genitals. From now on you will learn and realize it, but in this world, evaluating someone based on stats is almost always the case. Not gender. So it would be better to discard such outdated concepts quickly.”
“But...”
“Enough! Stop questioning this. I already warned you.”
Under the lizardman’s threat, the woman fell silent. The dissatisfaction didn’t vanish, but she had no choice. She was the weakling who had to obey orders.
So the ten of them sat on the assigned beds. Aurelpa scanned the seated group once and simply told them to wait a moment before leaving the dorm. For a while, an awkward silence filled the air. Everyone kept their mouths shut and rolled their eyes.
Soon enough, cutting through the heavy atmosphere, someone appeared. It wasn’t the lizardman instructor. A European woman stepped forward. The moment she appeared, she thrust her large breasts forward and began speaking.
“Nice to meet you. Starting today, I will be your chaperone, assisting all of you while staying beside the homeroom teacher for a month. Call me Chaperone.”
Of course, there was no applause. She also seemed to have expected no such welcome, so she didn’t care.
Her figure was slightly tall and slim, and her face was quite pretty. Kang-jun vaguely remembered seeing her in his mind’s album. However, the album had so many pages that he couldn’t remember where. He gave up and closed it.
“My sole duty is to make sure you can do your part. As I heard earlier, this world is never easy. Remember that if you don’t try and just slack off, you can never survive. If you listen well to only the homeroom teacher’s words, you should be able to handle one person’s worth in the dungeon.”
Of course, from the perspective of someone who knew, her talk wasn’t worth much coming from someone who hadn’t even completed their first Awakening. But to the clueless new recruits, even this chaperone looked like heaven itself.
“The homeroom teacher will follow the rules of this world. The strong will be treated accordingly, and the weak will be handled even more harshly. So you’d better steel your hearts.”
...Thus, the fourth-playthrough tutorial began in earnest.