The Evaluation (1)
I took a half-day off in the afternoon and headed to Gangnam. When I suddenly announced I was taking the afternoon off, I got chewed out so thoroughly I nearly burst—but what could I do? They could suddenly make me work overtime until dawn, but I couldn't suddenly take a half day?
“Ah, damn it...”
And yet I couldn't work up the courage to go inside. My embarrassing history had to be truly embarrassing, after all. I hesitated outside for a while, pacing, then finally forced my feet forward. I wasn't the Kim Se-gyun of a month ago anymore. The New Neo Mark Two Kim Se-gyun, maybe.
“I, uh, I'm here for my evaluation.”
“Sure, your ID, please... Hm?”
Of all people, the receptionist was the same one.
“Aren't you the guy who threw a fit here a month ago?”
“Ah, that was...”
“Give me your ID.”
She snatched the ID I was awkwardly holding out, her brow furrowing deep.
“Yep. Kim Se-gyun. That's him.”
“I'm sorry about last time. I came without really understanding my own skill.”
“This isn't a place for jokes. Leave.”
“...You're telling me to leave?”
“You're here to mess around again. Leave before I call the police.”
“No, I'm serious this time.”
“Oh, for god's sake. I said leave.”
While I was locked in this standoff at the desk, someone behind me grabbed my shoulder and hauled me away.
“Now why would a grown man carry on like this? This isn't a playground, you know.”
The strength behind that grip was something I couldn't hope to resist—I was practically dragged out on my heels. This bastard was a Hunter. I couldn't get a proper look at his face in the chaos of being dragged, but I could see the sword hanging at his hip even as we moved.
“W-wait a second! Let go! Let go, please!”
“If I let go, will you leave quietly?”
“Just let go first!”
“Tch. Still hasn't come to his senses.”
“No, I'll prove it right here. I just have to show you my ability, right? Trust me just once, I'm begging you!”
I shouted with every ounce of genuine frustration welling up from my gut, and whether it got through or not, the dragging footsteps finally stopped dead.
“Prove it? Prove what, exactly?”
“My ability. If I show it to you right here, will you let me take the evaluation?”
“......”
The man gripping my shoulder was silent for a while, as if deliberating. Then he shrugged and released me.
“Fine. Show me. But if it doesn't pan out, you give up cleanly and walk out. Understood?”
“Your scabbard.”
“Sorry?”
“Look at your scabbard.”
The man glanced down at the scabbard at his hip, and his eyes went wide as saucers. Where the sheath should have been wrapping his sword, the scabbard had crumbled to pieces and was flaking away in a shower of fragments, leaving nothing behind but the bare blade.
“This... when did this...?”
The bacteria I'd released from my pocket at will had disassembled the scabbard in an instant.
“I could've broken down the sword too, but I didn't feel like paying for it.”
The scabbard wasn't all that expensive, but a proper Hunter's sword cost beyond imagining. I couldn't very well demolish that just to demonstrate an ability.
“Haha...”
The Hunter, who had nearly lost his beloved blade in the span of a breath, stared at his sword for a long moment before turning to me with an awkward smile and extending his hand.
“My apologies. I took you for your average troublemaker—turns out you were a genuine Awakened. I'm Ryu Hyun-soo.”
Ryu Hyun-soo? That name sounded awfully familiar. Racking my memory, I took his outstretched hand and asked,
“You'll keep your word, right?”
“Of course. This man's a real Awakened. Send him to the exam hall.”
At his words, the receptionist's entire attitude transformed.
“I, um... I'm sorry.”
If word got out that she'd snubbed and ejected a genuine Awakened, a disciplinary write-up was all but guaranteed. And since she was a public official, a formal complaint from me would make the consequences even more certain. The fact that the target of her contempt was a man who'd thrown a tantrum and been thrown out a month ago didn't help her case at all. Either way, the outcome was the same: she'd ejected an Awakened. Still, there was no need to get into a staring contest with a civil servant.
“No, the fault's mine. I wasn't in a good place last time and did something stupid.”
“Oh, no, not at all. Just give me your application form and I'll process it right away.”
I handed over the form I'd filled out in advance. For class, I'd written Mage instead of Necromancer. If I wrote Necromancer, they'd send me to the Tier-5 exam hall, where I couldn't use Undead Rise, and I'd fail again. And I couldn't exactly demonstrate reviving bacteria there, could I?
“Mage. Combat-oriented, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Proceed to the Tier-1 exam hall.”
I was heading for the exam hall when a sudden curiosity made me turn back.
“Ah, can I ask you one thing?”
“Wh-what is it?”
“That Ryu Hyun-soo guy. He's a Hunter, right?”
“...You don't know who Ryu Hyun-soo is?”
“Is he famous? My memory's a bit fuzzy these days.”
“You don't know Zephyros Ryu Hyun-soo?”
Zephyros Ryu Hyun-soo? No way...
“You mean Zephyros, the 1st-generation Awakened?”
“Who else would I mean?”
“Wow, I was a huge fan of his when I was a kid. No wonder he looked familiar. I've just been so busy with real life, I had no idea what he was up to.”
Zephyros Ryu Hyun-soo was a swordsman who wielded the Cheongpung Sword Art, and in the early days of the Age of Awakening ten years ago, he'd been one of those vying for the title of Korea's top ranker.
“I didn't recognize him because he retired two years ago. What's someone like that doing here?”
“He's a scout. After retiring, he became a scout at the dungeon development company where he holds shares. He comes here often, too.”
Where would be the best place to find freshly Awakened rookies? The evaluation center, obviously. That was why, alongside the new Awakened, the people most numerous at the evaluation center were scouts.
“So he's a scout now...”
It was the age of gates and dungeons, after all. Companies, associations, guilds—the names varied wildly, but organizations formed for the purpose of dungeon development were everywhere. And the scouts of those organizations were, at this very moment, watching the exam hall results with gleaming, hawkish eyes.
The place they clustered most thickly was the Tier-1 exam hall. When I arrived in front of it, scouts I hadn't seen at the reception desk were swarming everywhere.
“There weren't nearly this many scouts at the Tier-5 hall.”
I was muttering to myself as I queued up for the evaluation when—
“That's because Necromancers tend to be weak at team play.”
A familiar voice came from behind me. Zephyros Ryu Hyun-soo, the man I'd briefly tangled with earlier, had somehow appeared there.
“Zephyros!”
“Haha, you shouldn't call a retired Hunter by his dungeon name.”
“In my heart, you'll be Zephyros forever.”
“Funny way to show it, not recognizing me.”
“I-I'm ashamed. I really was a fan as a kid. Real life just got in the way. I didn't know what you'd been up to.”
After I'd gotten a job, I hadn't even had the spare time to watch dungeon videos. Work all day, collapse the moment I got home, sleep the entire weekend away.
“Ah, about the scabbard—I'm sorry. I can compensate you within reason...”
“Don't mention it. If we're being pedantic, the fault's mine for grabbing the wrong man. Shall we call it even?”
“I'd appreciate that.”
“Haha. Anyway, picking up where I left off—Necromancers are cultivated at the national level, and it's a class with a strong solo-play tendency rather than party play, so they're not the fresh Awakened that companies actively target. They go after Necromancers with some experience and levels under their belt instead. One well-raised Necromancer can output the power of a party or more, you see.”
“Ah, I see.”
“Come to think of it, I only gave you my name, didn't I?”
“Ah, I'm Kim Se-gyun.”
Zephyros Ryu Hyun-soo pulled a single business card from his pocket and handed it over.
Checking the phone number on the back left me with a strange feeling. To think I now had the personal number of Zephyros, my childhood idol. I hadn't even properly entered the Hunter industry yet, but it felt like I'd genuinely stepped into the real thing.
“Well then, Se-gyun, good luck with your evaluation. If there's ever anything I can help with, don't hesitate to reach out.”
“Thank you.”
By the time my conversation with Zephyros ended, my turn had nearly arrived. Stepping into the Tier-1 exam hall, the atmosphere was completely different from the Tier-5 hall. A soldier with a rifle slung over his shoulder handed me a document.
“Please fill out the consent form.”
Skimming it, I found the usual boilerplate about the facility bearing no responsibility for death or injury. I already knew all this from searching online, so I signed briskly and handed it back.
“A brief explanation before you enter. This is a Tier-1 gate. It's composed of relatively harmless, non-aggressive monsters, and while the Evaluator will enter with you, it is still a gate—so bear in mind that sudden threats may appear at any time.”
The Tier-1 evaluation consisted of clearing a Tier-1 gate. A gate in the middle of Gangnam felt a little surreal, but then again, the evaluation centers had presumably been built where the gates were in the first place. These were the lowest-difficulty gates, sometimes called tutorial gates, made up of dungeons that were almost entirely harmless. Even so, bad luck could break your nose from a simple fall. Plenty of Hunters had died in Tier-1 gates through sheer carelessness.
“When you're ready, form a party with the Evaluator there and enter the gate.”
“Yes. Requesting party.”
“Accepted.”
The Evaluator accepted the party invite with a face full of exhaustion, yawning all the while. He entered the gate first, and I followed him in.
Entering Tier-1 Gate: Field of Three-Eyed Rabbits
“Whew.”
The inside of the first gate I'd ever entered was, astonishingly, a green meadow where rabbits frolicked. A peaceful scene completely at odds with every preconception I had about dungeons. I'd read so many reviews of the Gangnam Evaluation Center's tutorial dungeon that it didn't exactly shock me.
“The evaluation will be killing ten Three-Eyed Rabbits as quickly as possible. The time limit is ten minutes. Exceed ten minutes and you fail.”
They looked like ordinary rabbits, but they were monsters in name, at least. If you failed to kill one cleanly in a single strike and it started fighting back, things supposedly got messy.
“When does the count start?”
“Whenever you wish. Haaahm...”
So that's how it was? Unnoticed by anyone, a bacterial colony began creeping out of the pet bottle in my pocket. Then the colony scattered in all directions. Gathered in the hundreds of millions, they were just barely visible to the naked eye—but I was the Necromancer Who Rules the Microscopic World, after all. Once dispersed into smaller units, the bacteria became utterly invisible. And so, riding the gentle breeze, the scattered bacteria settled onto the heads of the Three-Eyed Rabbits. Invisible, the rabbits had no way of knowing that an assassin of death had climbed aboard their skulls. The rabbits calmly hopped about, nibbling grass. Before long, I confirmed that the bacteria had spread sufficiently across all ten rabbits and opened my mouth.
“I'll begin now.”
Before the Evaluator could even start his timer at my signal—
Pssssss!
The heads of all ten rabbits were disassembled and vanished on the spot.
“It's done.”
A mere one second from the declaration of start to the declaration of end. The dumbfounded Evaluator rubbed his eyes and looked at the meadow again.
“Just now...”
“Yes.”
As I recalled the hundred million assassins of the Micro-Domain back into my pocket, I declared to the Evaluator:
“It's done.”