012. The Pacifist
"I never thought I'd end up using one of these."
Kanghyuk muttered, staring at the virtual simulation pod standing before him.
"The hunter who invented this thing must be making an absolute fortune, huh? If I had a trait like that, money would roll in while I just sat there. Must be nice."
"A guy's allowed to grumble, isn't he? So what's the plan now? Should I go replace the top record? Or aim for the fastest clear time?"
Mission: Do not attack. Endure.
📍 Objective: Survive the virtual simulator without launching a single attack
⚠ Penalty: Any attack you make reflects its damage back onto you. Every blow you take delivers real, physical pain.
"So now you're not even handing out rewards anymore, you damn constellation!"
The shameless quest from his shameless constellation made Kanghyuk's blood boil — but nothing about it changed.
"And besides, the simulator can throw anything up to D-Grade at me, right? How am I supposed to just endure without ever attacking?"
"And virtual simulations aren't supposed to hurt in the first place! Why on earth do I have to feel actual pain?!"
"It's not YOUR body getting wrecked, is it! Unbelievable!"
Kanghyuk was dumbfounded, but he knew all too well that the constellation wasn't going to budge an inch.
"Starting from F-Grade and going all the way up to D-Grade? Every single one?"
"Ugh, come ON!"
"Constellation, isn't this quest of yours a little too brutal?"
"They say the best defense is a good offense, but the world doesn't bend to my will. If the man can't even defend, how's he supposed to attack? It's not like I'm telling him to trade lives with the monsters."
"Still, isn't it too hard?"
I shook my head as I answered.
"This is the last of it."
"The last training?"
"No. The last chance he'll ever get to train with his life not on the line."
Ping couldn't find a single word to say.
"From here on out, every mistake means a serious injury or death. Gates and dungeons are no joke."
"That's true, but..."
"And why do you keep taking his side, anyway?"
"I'm on YOUR side, Constellation."
Ping answered with a face of pure shamelessness.
"You're always whining about how poor he is and what a wicked constellation I am."
"But Kanghyuk IS you, Constellation. And since I'm on your side, taking Kanghyuk's side means I'm taking your side!"
"I mean... that's not wrong. But somehow it doesn't feel right either."
"The little things are better left alone."
"Haaah. Such is my lot in life."
With a long sigh, Kanghyuk stepped into the virtual simulation pod.
"F-Grade."
For now, he decided to work through it one careful step at a time, starting from the very bottom.
Before he knew it, the world around him had transformed into a forest.
"So this is what they meant about it using some kind of dimensional trait?"
Kanghyuk suddenly remembered the barrier he'd forgotten all about.
"Constellation. You wouldn't happen to know any good barrier-related stocks, would you?"
"So what you're saying is, if I got rich I'd slack off on my training? If you don't know, just say you don't. Drop the proverbs."
Splurt—
Just then, the slime perched in the tree above spat out a jet of liquid. Kanghyuk swung Breaker on pure reflex, then frantically tried to stop himself mid-swing — but he couldn't halt it completely, and the weapon clipped the slime.
"Hurk—!"
He had just been given an indirect taste of the pain a blow from Breaker carries. Only the graze kept it at this level; had he landed a clean hit, he would have sampled agony akin to death itself.
"Damn it. That rotten excuse for a constellation. What kind of penalty is this?"
From that moment on, Kanghyuk dodged every incoming attack — or caught it on Breaker.
When people hear the word slime, they picture a water balloon that pops with a squish under a single stomp. But a slime was, in the end, still a monster. For an ordinary person, facing one was next to impossible.
"Since when are slimes this fast?!"
He'd experienced goblins last time, and he'd written slimes off entirely — they were the first thing that came to mind at the very mention of F-Grade's weakest.
"Where the hell is it even shooting from?!"
The slime's liquid burst from anywhere and everywhere on its body, which made it that much harder to predict.
"I can't kill them, so they just keep multiplying!"
In the end, Kanghyuk had no choice but to run, blocking or evading the slimes' attacks on the move.
"Getting hit HURTS, you know! What do you mean, practice?!"
"Damn it. He's right, so I can't even argue."
Kanghyuk thought of the lizardman swordsman — of that moment when a single misstep could have cost him his life.
"Then I just have to do it properly. Properly—"
Stance corrected, Kanghyuk backpedaled to keep from being surrounded, but he never once turned his back. He had to watch his surroundings even while dodging the slimes, and he had to lure them onto ground that hindered their movement — only then could he stop their attacks from converging on him all at once.
"How am I supposed to keep this up for four hours?!"
The constellation, true to form, said nothing.
"Uuungh... I'm seriously going to die."
Kanghyuk was soaked through with sweat. This wasn't a matter of casually swinging Breaker around — he had to track every single slime attack too, so the mental strain was just as brutal as the physical.
"Whoa... he couldn't kill a single F-Grade monster?"
"Is that guy even a real hunter? Did he just spend the whole time running away?"
The simulation record displayed nothing but the number of monsters a user had killed — and with zero on his tally, the people around him began to sneer.
"Time to hurry off and get the rest of my training done."
But Kanghyuk was so absorbed in the training still ahead of him that he had no attention to spare for the murmuring around him.
"I had no idea slimes attacked in such a colorful variety of ways."
"Right? First time I've seen it too."
"Constellation, you've never done this training yourself, have you?"
"How was I ever supposed to afford something that expensive? I was too busy trying to put food on the table."
"So you're ordering him through training you've never even tried?"
"It was something I'd only ever worked out in my head, but now that I've had him test it — it works great, doesn't it? His movements have gotten far more natural. They said the simulation was just like the real thing, and they weren't kidding. Slimes really do pull off every strange attack imaginable."
Ping was struck speechless and stayed quiet for a long while.
"Constellation, you are seriously twisted."
"What's wrong with me? Where else are you going to find someone this devoted to self-improvement?"
"Doesn't Kanghyuk do literally all of it?"
"Exactly. Self. Improvement."
"Ugh, I seriously cannot win with you!"
Trembling, Ping started pounding my back again.
"I'm not slacking off either!"
BAM—BAM—BAM—
And it wasn't a lie. Hammering away at my Core had become second nature by now.
"Goblins today, is it?"
Kanghyuk thought back to the day he'd first met the constellation.
"If those goblin bastards had gone chasing after other people that day, I never would've ended up with a constellation like this."
"If you had a conscience, you'd put a hand over your chest and think that over nice and slow."
Kanghyuk opened his mouth again right away.
"I already know perfectly well you don't have one, so stop flashing messages just to fan the flames!"
The instant the words left his mouth, goblins came springing out.
"These things really are a bunch of lunatics."
Kanghyuk found himself thinking of the monkeys he'd watched at the zoo as a kid. The sight of them hanging from a rope, spinning their whole bodies round and round, then flinging themselves from place to place on pure elastic momentum had been quite a shock back then.
"What are you, parkour athletes?"
The goblins' assault was three-dimensional. Using every object around them to scramble his line of sight, they menaced Kanghyuk with the daggers in their hands.
"That's right — if being short meant being weak, you wouldn't be monsters at all."
It was a completely different feel from yesterday's slimes. With slimes, the game had been reading and evading ranged attacks; with goblins, he had to predict their zigzagging, lightning-quick changes of direction and block or dodge each one.
"If I were wearing the Arachne Suit, I wouldn't be hurting like this! If you're going to make me feel pain, at least fake it like the hits landed OVER the suit!"
"AAARGH! Just shut UP already!"
Kanghyuk and the constellation tempered themselves in their own separate corners today, as always.
Kobolds made masterful use of tools — and they went for the lower body with a vicious, unrelenting focus. To cover a packmate scrambling onto Kanghyuk's back, one would steal his gaze; another would clang its pickaxe against the ground to split his attention.
Horned Rabbits were living missiles. They would coil into stillness, biding their moment, then fire off a single devastating blow on the explosive thrust of their powerful hind legs.
Giant Rats carried venom — a single graze was enough, and from there the poison crept outward, dulling his body a little more with every passing second. Their sheer numbers were a threat all their own.
"I wrote off F-Grade monsters, but every last one of them has a killer move, huh?"
"I get that it's helping, but how long am I supposed to keep doing this?"
"How is anyone supposed to manage that within a year?! At that level I'd have to be a C-Rank Hunter already, wouldn't I?!"
"One of these days, I swear I'm paying back every last bit of this!"
"Just shut UP for once!"
And so Kanghyuk carried on with his training.
"Wow. I thought this was sheer madness at first, but I guess you really can adapt to anything. Tomorrow I can move up to E-Grade."
As Kanghyuk set off toward his next session, a cluster of guys stepped into his path.
"Hey. Pigeon."
"Pigeon? Are you talking to me?"
"Yeah. Pigeon."
"Why am I a pigeon?"
One of them planted a hand on Kanghyuk's shoulder.
"You use the simulator every single day, but you're so scared of monsters you spend the whole session running for your life, so your kill count is always zero. The living symbol of peace. The Pacifist. That's you, isn't it, you pigeon bastard."
Kanghyuk knew it in his bones: a chance to blow off steam had just come knocking.
"Whoa. First time anyone's ever pulled this on me. What is this, some kind of delinquent cosplay?"
"You wanna die?"
Several of them twisted their faces into ugly threats, but Kanghyuk felt fantastic.
"Wow. Guys. I have honestly been under SO much stress lately. So let me thank you in advance. Thank you so much. Truly!"
"What the hell is this guy saying?"
"Now, now — let's not do this here. Everyone, to the sparring grounds!"
The pack of thugs eyed the delighted look on Kanghyuk's face and sensed something was deeply off — but with Kanghyuk strolling out in front so naturally, they found themselves trailing after him in a line toward the sparring grounds.
"One at a time? Or all at once?"
"What? This bastard? We cut you some slack and you don't even know your place!"
One of them, worked up into a fury, came charging in with sparks crackling across his entire body.
"Ooh. You've got a nice trait there, huh? Very cool. Very cool."
"Is this guy out of his mind?"
Watching the fist sail past right before his eyes, Kanghyuk leisurely slid a foot between the man's legs. Then, foot anchored firm, he gave the man's chest a light push with his shoulder.
THUD!
"Gahk—!"
His center of gravity shattered, the thug lit up like an electric ray and face-planted into the ground.
"Whoa. That stung a little?"
Sparks danced across his body, but the pain wasn't even enough to wring a scoff out of Kanghyuk.
"Isn't there anyone here even slightly sturdy? You're all so flimsy I can't hit you for real."
The caliber of the students attending Hunter Academy was painfully obvious. And the caliber of guys like these — who ignored their own training to wander around hunting for someone to bully — was lower still.
"GRAAAAGH!"
Stung by the taunt, one of the thugs came barreling in, his entire body hardened into stone.
"Ooh, NOW we're talking. That should be satisfying to hit. Shame you're way too slow."
Kanghyuk eased aside just enough to slip past the incoming hand, caught the man by the face, and drove it straight down into the ground.
KRAK—
"You boys have never actually experienced what a monster is like, have you? Well, today I'll show you. Behold! The Pacifist — monster."
He was having the time of his life. Kanghyuk's face shone with the same unguarded glee as a child tearing into a Christmas present.