Stories of Everyday Life (4)
The moment the post went up on Instagram, views and likes exploded in an instant.
Baek Sowol didn’t run an Instagram account herself. She had merely created one—for spying purposes.
She had made accounts for every famous hunter. Plenty of hunters skipped YouTube or streaming, but among the well-known ones, almost none went without social media.
The few exceptions were certain mages… and the chairman of Hermes? Those people were rolling in so much money they didn’t need any of it.
The Instagram posts themselves were completely ordinary. But the speed of the likes and the volume of comments were on an entirely different level.
Even though the gallery was one of the bigger communities around, Instagram was clearly another dimension altogether.
…
..
.
.
.
.
The atmosphere was definitely different from the gallery. Maybe because of the higher ratio of real-name accounts.
If this had been the gallery, there would’ve been a solid round of insults by now, but there wasn’t a single trace of that.
Even though insult and defamation charges had been removed from criminal law, people were still watching their words. More precisely, those charges had been scrapped due to a lack of administrative capacity.
Of course you could still sue civilly, so it was better not to push it.
“Nothing weird showing up so far.”
“Well, my face and real name are already completely exposed, and I’m in one of the Four Major Guilds. Plus Instagram’s been cooperating really well lately. They just expanded their servers in Korea not long ago.”
“…Weren’t those guys an American company? Why Korea…?”
“You didn’t know? These days a lot of companies have been setting up branches in Japan or Korea.”
Related articles had been popping up more and more often lately. More and more overseas conglomerates establishing branch offices in Korea and Japan.
The reason? I wasn’t an economics major, so I had no idea. Something good must have happened, I supposed.
“People keep asking who Sowol is.”
“If they don’t read the articles they wouldn’t know. Even if they did, her face was never fully public, so it’s easy to miss.”
“I almost never show my face openly anyway, so a lot of people probably just don’t recognize me.”
Instagram and the gallery did share some users, but that was only about thirty percent. The remaining seventy percent stuck to just one platform.
And the place where my face had been floating around was the gallery side, so it made sense people wouldn’t know.
Real-name verified platforms were always going to be stricter.
For reference, portrait rights only existed in civil law. And for the same reason as insult charges, they were almost never enforced.
Still, no one liked getting cursed out online, so apparently my face had never gone up on Instagram.
“What the—posts about it are popping up on my stream board. People asking if you’re not showing up.”
“What do you mean?”
“Before you got carted off, we did that stream together, remember? Then the whole incident blew up and my viewers were really worried about you. Even after the break ended they kept asking what happened to you.”
“Really?”
“Of course. It was an incident I was directly tangled up in, after all.”
The photos of me that had gone up online had ignited hard.
People who recognized me, people asking about me, and folks flooding in from every other corner of the internet were all piled into the same comment sections.
“…Whoa. There are actual reporters in here? They’re DMing me.”
“Reporters?”
“A lot of people are curious about you. Plus there’s been a shortage of article material lately.”
The lack of article material was thanks to Hermes giving advance notice. They’d assigned bodyguards, so the C-rank clear gates would wrap up quickly, and after that I could challenge B-rank, so they said they’d manage the hype as much as possible.
With bodyguards, they claimed I’d rack up enough achievements to challenge B-rank hunter in about a month.
Of course they couldn’t suppress anything truly massive, so they’d added that I should finish as fast as possible.
B-rank and above can’t be climbed on achievements alone, though…
From B-rank onward you had to take the promotion exam. At my level it wasn’t particularly hard, but still.
I wanted to earn the B-rank badge with pure mana control alone, without using magic. That would give me a little more advantage, wouldn’t it?
“So, Sowol. When are you planning to go public?”
“Yeah. When are you gonna announce you’re a mage?”
After that the topic naturally shifted to when I would reveal myself. I had said before that I would gradually go public about being a mage.
“B-rank. Once I get the B-rank badge, that’s when I’ll announce it.”
A B-rank hunter was a solid mid-tier. On the CSAT scale it was like a grade 2 or 3 back when 9 was the lowest. Definitely upper-tier talent.
Was I at that level already? If I used magic I was confident I was top-tier even among B-ranks.
I had reached C-rank without a unique ability. If a unique ability stacked on top of that, I figured B-rank was realistic.
“Ah, right. And Unnie… I have a hunter-related appointment, so… I need to head that way around five… is that okay?”
“Hm? What appointment? What kind of appointment?”
“I had a meetup planned with people I only knew online. Since I was in the hospital I missed the messages, and it turns out the date got set for today. But with Yaeseo Unnie’s suspension lifted and everything, I felt bad skipping, so… yeah.”
“Ahh. Got it. Well, nothing you can do about that.”
“We’ll just meet again next time anyway. Though from the way that group talks, who knows when the next one will even be.”
“Right…? If we miss this one it might be months before another chance…”
“Then you have to go meet them. Five o’clock? We’ve still got plenty of time.”
Thankfully both of them reacted like it was fine. I didn’t even need to mention I was going to meet a mage.
Of course I still hesitated. Was it okay to let those people meet Han Yaeseo and Lee Jihyeon?
Lee Jihyeon probably wouldn’t care much, but Han Yaeseo might take a shock.
Hmm. What should I do.
While I was briefly worrying about it—
“Sowol? So where is it? Unnie can give you a ride.”
“…What?”
“Wherever you’re going, looking at how you’re heading out, it’s gotta be nearby. Thirty minutes max, right?”
“Well… yeah?”
“I brought my car. We can keep hanging out and just head that way. Then we split up right there and done.”
“Ah…!”
Oh right. Lee Jihyeon had a car. Han Yaeseo had plenty of money but no license, so she couldn’t drive, but Lee Jihyeon had both license and car.
I could drive too, of course. I’d gotten my license back when I was Heo Donghyun. It was just that Baek Sowol didn’t have a license, so I couldn’t get behind the wheel.
The muscle memory would still be there, though.
“Who are you meeting?”
“Hunter-side people. Just people I got to know online.”
“Ohhh reaaally…?”
Lee Jihyeon’s eyes turned into the ones she got when she was about to mess around. A familiar look. Whenever she made that face she always tried to throw something reckless into the mix.
“Then Yaeseo, want to go help prop up our cute little maknae’s pride?”
“Eh? Jihyeon Unnie, what did you just say?”
“What. If they’re hunter-side you probably know them. If she brags about being close with you, that alone should boost our maknae’s standing, right? We just drop her off real quick.”
“Ooooh.”
Oh? They were volunteering to meet them on their own.
Since I was meeting a mage, I had been thinking it would be nice if they built some connections on that side and wanted to introduce them once, but they were offering to come along themselves, so it was convenient.
Originally I had planned to just exchange contact info at the meetup and introduce them later.
“Sounds good!”
When things worked out this smoothly, that was just fine.
But… Yaeseo Unnie. Sorry, but that’s impossible.
The other party is a mage. No matter how you look at it, their position is higher than yours.
Still, I’m doing this because it should help you… you’ll understand, right? A mage connection is more than worth it.
“Anyway, let’s set that aside and just enjoy ourselves.”
That was hours away. Right now it was better to simply have fun.
Besides, what was there to overthink? I hadn’t done anything wrong. We could just hang out and then go meet those people. That was all.
“So, Guild Master. Think the rookie mage is actually coming?”
“Who knows. Whether they show or not.”
“They said it’s a girl—do you think that’s true, old man?”
“Don’t ask me. Honestly you kids half-don’t believe it either.”
“If the mage part is true then yeah, probably a girl. There’s also the chance they’re not a mage at all.”
“But looking at everything they’ve done, they have to be a mage, okay? There’s no other explanation.”
“We dunno~.”
The meeting place was a café. A space that was just right for a modest gathering of people.
Considering some of them were meeting for the first time after only knowing each other online, it was probably the natural choice.
“They left a comment saying they’d come. So they probably will.”
“Yeah, well, possible.”
Kang Suhyeon (ILoveMagic), Guild Master of Chulhyul Guild; An Sujin (ThreeYearSupporterPoet); Lim Jeonghwan (Hermes42); and Yu Ari (AriAriRang) were waiting for Baek Sowol.
Whether she would actually show was anyone’s guess. This was their first real meeting, after all.
The gallery’s anonymous nature meant people sometimes just ditched their accounts and vanished, so it had happened before.
And right then, conversation drifted in from far away.
“Ugh, no parking spots. What a pain.”
“Still, we should at least see what kind of people she’s meeting before we go. Sowol, the world’s a scary place, okay?”
“Right. And we’ve got to prop up our maknae’s pride a little.”
Women’s voices carrying from a distance.
Everyone present was an Awakened, so they could pick up the conversation from far off and make their guesses.
“You said she was meeting some women, right?”
“Yeah. Looks like that might be them.”
Once they became certain that the fixed nick MagicMagic was arriving, their curiosity shifted slightly.
From whether she would come… to who exactly she was, and what she looked like.
And the same went for Baek Sowol’s side.
Just what kind of people were they? What kind of meeting was waiting for her?
“So Unnie’s gonna help boost Sowol’s standing a bit. Someone at my level knows a lot of people in the hunter industry.”
While chatting like that, Baek Sowol, Lee Jihyeon, and Han Yaeseo arrived at the café that was the meeting place.
“…Guild Master Kang Suhyeon…?”
The moment they saw Kang Suhyeon, Lee Jihyeon and Han Yaeseo froze solid right where they stood.