Prologue: Hunters Are a Weird Profession
Hunters are, by nature, a somewhat strange profession.
It wasn't that the world had ended.
It had simply gotten a little weird.
The sky split open. Dungeons sprouted in building basements. Goblins popped out next to convenience-store refrigerators. A stretch of Subway Line 2 turned into a labyrinth for three whole days. That sort of thing.
At first, everyone lost their minds.
The military rolled out. News anchors teared up on air. Doomsday prophets had a field day on the internet.
And then, a month later—
People went back to work.
They were scared. Of rent.
More than the apocalypse.
Dungeons appeared, and with them monsters. Monsters brought magic stones. Magic stones brought money.
And once there was money, a profession was born.
Hunter.
The name had a certain ring to it. Hearing it, you'd picture some romantic sword-slinging hero cutting monsters down left and right.
Reality was different.
Hunters were closer to freelancers.
You bought your own gear. Medical bills were mostly on you. Join the wrong party and you died. Fall behind on guild fees and you couldn't even buy a dungeon entry pass.
People still became hunters.
The reason was simple.
When things went well, you made money.
Awakened could enter dungeons. Enter a dungeon and you could mine magic stones. Mine magic stones and a regular office worker's salary started looking like a joke.
Of course, that was when things went well.
And when they didn't?
A single funeral wreath stamped with a guild logo showed up at the ceremony.
End of story.
Awakened get a status window.
That, too, was treated like some monumental discovery at first. Divine revelation. The next stage of human evolution. Interdimensional systems. People said all kinds of things.
But as time passed, folks just started treating it like another piece of office equipment.
[Rank]
[Stats]
[Skills]
[Quests]
[Titles]
Stuff like that, more or less.
Status windows differed from person to person. One guy breathed fire. Another healed people. Another appraised pebbles for more than they were worth in gold.
A good skill, and your life opened up.
A garbage skill?
You became a porter.
Every dungeon needed porters. Potions, food, gathering tools, spare weapons, monster byproducts, magic stone storage crates. The strong hunters didn't want to haul that stuff themselves.
So the F-classes did.
F-class hunters.
They still got to call themselves hunters, but in practice they were dungeon temp workers. Join the fight and you got in the way. Run and you got chewed out. Get hurt and you were a liability. Die and you became a report.
I was one of those F-classes.
Name: Han Yu-jin.
Age: twenty-three.
Two years since awakening.
Even when a restaurant got my order wrong, I was the type to wonder first whether I'd said it wrong myself.
I had no skills.
Saying "none" is a little unfair. I had one.
Organizing Belongings Lv.1
Slightly increases the speed at which you find items in your bag while inside a dungeon.
A skill that let me find things in my bag a little faster in a dungeon.
When it first popped up, even I thought it might be something special. Right up until the instructor at the awakening training center looked at my status window and went silent for three full seconds.
After that, I accepted reality.
I wasn't a hero.
I wasn't chosen.
I was just a guy who was decent at opening a potion bag.
That said, I wasn't completely broke. Dungeon porter work paid a decent day rate for how dangerous it was. Lucky enough to land a good party and you even got a free meal. Unlucky enough to land a bad one and you got an earful instead.
On the days I got fed, I'd stand at the register fiddling with my wallet for no reason—even though I had nothing to pay with. Just so I wouldn't look quite so much like a bum.
Mostly, luck ran bad.
In this world, rank was practically social class.
S-classes shot commercials.
A-classes appeared on broadcasts.
B-classes got scouted by guilds.
C-classes picked their parties.
D-classes at least got treated like people.
E-classes were awkward.
And F-classes?
They were remembered more by the weight of their packs than by their names.
The guild boards were the same way.
Up top hung the flashy commissions. A-class and above preferred. Magic stone settlement bonuses. Broadcast accompaniment preferred. Presentable-looking Awakened preferred.
And below that, tucked in a corner, hung the F-class scraps.
Porter wanted.
Meals not provided.
Injuries not covered.
Standard compensation upon death.
The print was small. The terms were smaller. Sometimes the ink was so faded you could barely read them.
I still looked at those papers.
Because nothing else was calling for me.
Even so, I hung on.
Rent had to be paid. Letting the phone bill slide was a pain. And I wasn't ready to give up the luxury of cracking an egg into my cup ramen.
It didn't have to be grand. Reasons for living rarely are.
The problem was the status window.
Normally, a status window makes a person stronger. At the very least, it hands you the possibility.
Mine stayed quiet for two years.
Aside from the occasional notice that my Organizing Belongings proficiency had gone up by one percent, it did absolutely nothing.
So I figured my life would turn out about the same. Start F-class. Scrape by as F-class. Vanish quietly someday in an unlucky dungeon.
Not especially cool. Extremely common.
And then this damned status window finally decided to get to work—right when I was about to die.
In a very, very strange direction.
I found out later that some status windows run on tracks you can't exactly talk about with other people.
The reason was simple.
Because they're humiliating.
And mine was one of those.
My status window knew how to make a person stronger.
The problem was that its methods were pure trash.
The kind of thing that floats those in front of your face and then tosses you quests like it's doing you a favor.
That was my status window.
If I'd known from the start, would I have run?
Probably not.
I was about to die. It wasn't a situation where I had a lot to give up. People like me are especially quick about that sort of thing. Even on a normal day, I was the kind of guy who'd lose a staring contest with a middle-schooler over the last triangle kimbap in the convenience store and just hand it over.
Pride.
Dignity.
Plans for the future.
And, sometimes, even gender.
This isn't a story about saving the world.
It's just the story of one F-class hunter who tried to survive a dungeon—and got bent in a very strange direction.
I started the job to make a living.
By the time I came to my senses, I was a woman.
And the status window called it an opportunity.
Hidden growth conditions have been met.
From the moment that sentence appeared, my life was truly screwed.
Or—
Maybe that was the moment it finally started rolling.