Judgment (2)
While the Gate Evaluator stood dumbfounded, stammering in disbelief, messages began to scroll up before my eyes.
All monsters in the Tier-1 gate, Field of Three-Eyed Rabbits, have been eradicated.
The dungeon has been cleared. You will be ejected from the dungeon in 60 seconds.
"All the monsters...?"
Gates came in several varieties. There were standard gates shared by multiple parties, and there were gates that reset their entire interior dungeon every time someone entered. The latter were called instance dungeons — instanced gates, for short. This place, the Tier-1 gate at the Gangnam evaluation grounds, was exactly that kind. An instanced gate was only judged cleared when every monster inside it was dead.
Which meant I had just wiped out every monster in this gate. Hmm, now that I thought about it... I'd told Segyun to kill the rabbits, but I never specified how many. I figured he'd taken down ten or so, but apparently the infection had spread before I knew it, and he'd swept up every rabbit in the entire field.
So this was the terror of biological weapons. I was just resolving to set proper parameters next time when a swirl of light wrapped around me and ejected me from the dungeon. More messages appeared in the same instant.
A guardian summon ticket, huh. I couldn't even tell whether that was good or bad.
Your Class Master, the Constellation Avicenna, is intervening in your reward!
The reward has been replaced with: Bloodgold Golem, crafted by Avicenna.
"Huh?"
Class Master? Rewards could get replaced? I wanted to check what kind of reward it was, but I had no choice but to put that off — because beyond the fading light, every single person inside the evaluation grounds had turned their eyes toward me. And the dominant emotion in those eyes was one thing: sheer shock.
A woman trailed after Ryu Hyun-soo as he strolled over with a smirk plastered on his face.
"Sunbae, what happened back there? You look pleased with yourself."
"Something did happen."
Ryu Hyun-soo patted his waist, where nothing remained but the bare sword itself, its sheath gone.
"Where'd you sell your sheath?"
"I staked it on the new era!"
"That's a line from a manga, sunbae. That's why I keep telling you to quit reading manga."
Segyun wouldn't know this, but Ryu Hyun-soo's hobby was reading manga and watching anime. He scratched his head and answered.
"Ahem. There was some fuss up front earlier."
As Ryu Hyun-soo gave a brief account of what had just happened, the woman's eyes went wide as saucers.
"You're telling me he disassembled your sheath without you even noticing?"
"Yep. And by a rookie who'd just shown up for his evaluation. Wild, right?"
Even pushing his aura to its absolute limit, it would have been impossible to disassemble something that cleanly, without a trace. What was more absurd was that despite that level of power, he hadn't sensed any mana flowing at all. If the kid had pulled some trick, his senses should have caught it — but he'd noticed nothing.
Ryu Hyun-soo stared holes into the back of Kim Se-gyun, who was preparing to enter the gate, and spoke.
"Anyway, I'd say he's the most promising rookie I've seen in ages."
"Then let's buy the dip right now! Let me check what contract fee we can flex..."
As she pulled out her phone to check something, Ryu Hyun-soo lightly caught her wrist to stop her and shook his head.
"I don't like approaching it that way."
"What way is 'that way'?"
"Too capitalistic? Where's the romance, the romance."
"Everyone who chased that romance is dead, sunbae. You're the only one left in the industry. Do you know how many rookies you lost by going on about romance?"
"If I lose them, you'll catch them and package them up nicely, won't you? Besides... he was a fan of mine. How do you just barge in with contract talk out of nowhere?"
"Why do you think the company gave you shares and put you in the Chief Scouter seat, sunbae?"
Her surgical counterstrike drew a wry smile from Ryu Hyun-soo.
"Fair point. This job really is a racket."
"He's entering the rookie gate now. How long do you think it'll take?"
"I heard he's a mage."
"Then three minutes, easy?"
"Five. A mage that fast would be SSS-rank."
"You seem pretty confident."
Mages were, by nature, late bloomers as a class. Unlike warrior types, who could flex real power from the start. A talented warrior rookie could clear ten monsters in a minute or two, but for a mage, five minutes was already considered fast.
And how much time had passed? It hadn't even been three minutes since he'd entered.
"Huh?"
A golden swirl of light appeared at the gate's entrance.
"Wh-what is that? A clear judgment?"
The two of them stared in astonishment. A murmur rippled through the surrounding crowd. A light like that never appeared when someone simply exited a gate. It only appeared when a gate was fully cleared and the occupant was forcibly ejected.
"Did anyone else go into the gate?"
"N-no, sir. The only one who entered was the examinee, Kim Se-gyun."
"Then what's this clear judgment about?"
"I have no idea."
The flustered chatter of Gangnam Center officials carried over. Only two people could answer their questions — and the Gate Evaluator and Kim Se-gyun were now walking out through the golden light.
"Evaluator! Evaluator!"
The Evaluator, mouth agape and frozen in a daze, finally snapped back to his senses at the crowd's shouts.
"Yes? Yes...!"
He might be working as a mere evaluator now, but he was a retired hunter who had once climbed to a fairly high tier in the hunter industry. Seeing him wear an expression of utter disbelief only pushed the crowd's curiosity to its peak.
"What on earth happened in there? Did you make the clear judgment, Evaluator?"
"N-no, sir. The examinee..."
Murmur, murmur. Clearing ten monsters in that amount of time would have earned anyone recognition as a top-tier rookie. But a full clear judgment? That had never happened before.
Some might dismiss it as nothing more than a Tier-1 dungeon. Truthfully, the evaluations at these centers were closer to a formality — a pass/fail stamp on hunter qualifications. Even so, as a rookie's debut stage, they carried considerable weight.
"Th-the evaluation record?"
"The ten-kill record was one second... the clear record was... a little under twenty seconds, I believe."
Normally, once the ten-kill record was set, nothing after it was tallied. The test was simply to kill ten monsters, and clearing the dungeon earned no extra reward. But the clear had happened naturally before he'd even finished his ten kills and exited. So it wasn't a precisely measured clear time — but nearly everyone here was a hunter or a former hunter. They could roughly estimate the real clear time.
"Add the entry delay and the auto-ejection delay after clearing... you'd have to say it took barely thirty seconds from entry. And that's not even counting prep time..."
It was Ryu Hyun-soo's assessment, heard from a distance. His junior clenched her fist and declared.
"Don't try to stop me. Even if you do, I'm going in for contact."
"I wasn't planning to stop you..."
Ryu Hyun-soo jerked his chin at the surrounding scouts, whose eyes gleamed with greed as if they'd spotted a gold bar lying on the ground, and shrugged.
"Buying the dip seems to have already sailed, though?"
Naturally, I passed. I received my hunter license in one smooth sweep and stepped out of the evaluation grounds — and a sea of people surged toward me.
"This is RJ Management! If you come with us...!"
"Starfish Management here! Please take our card!"
Hunter management agencies. Companies, too.
"This is the Daehyun Group Resource Development Office!"
"We're from Segyun Group!"
Even guilds.
"New Wind Guild here! At our guild, we..."
"Phoenix Guild Korean Branch — number one in America!"
One of them was even foreign. Countless scouts were showing interest in me. No — "interest" was far too weak a word. They were in a frenzy.
At some point, my hand was full of business cards. Just as it became hard to accept any more, someone approached me from behind.
"Ah, sorry about that. You've got no hands left."
"Use this."
A familiar voice.
"... Zephyros?"
"It's Ryu Hyun-soo now, I told you. Haha."
What Mr. Ryu Hyun-soo handed me with a grin was a small pouch that could be worn at the waist.
"Th-thank you. I'll borrow it and return it."
"Just keep it. The warehouse is stacked with those — we had them printed up as souvenirs for company visits. See the RHS logo?"
"Oh, so it is."
"Want a tip?"
"A tip?"
"Never pick a company by searching the internet. The internet these days is a viral paradise. I've seen plenty of rookies get burned by it while scouting — signing with all the wrong places."
"Ah...!"
That stung a little. My plan had been to look up every one of those card-giving companies online the moment I got home.
"Kids these days decide everything through the internet. You can call it old-man wisdom, but back in our day, we met with every single company face-to-face, did on-site inspections, and only then made our choice."
"Thank you."
"If you're grateful, want to join our company?"
"I'm sorry? Uh, that is..."
Uh oh. What do I do? Of course, Zephyros's company wouldn't be a bad place, but...
"Puhaha! Just kidding, kidding! Where'd you sell what I just said? When that happens, this is what you say."
"Wh-what do I say?"
He turned to face me, a mischievous smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, and said quietly.
"How much did you research yourself before coming here?"
"... I'm sorry?"
"Knowing how to sell yourself well is also a hunter's virtue. Someone with 200 worth of ability taking 150, or someone with 100 worth of ability taking 150 — in this industry, the evaluations come out about the same. I'm living like this because I was bad at it. I hope you don't live that way, Se-gyun."
Tap, tap. Then he gave my shoulder a light pat and, brushing past me, murmured under his breath.
"Of course, the best thing is not to be a replaceable part you can swap out, but an irreplaceable existence. Like the world top rankers. Then you never have to do sales pitches like this again."
World top rankers. The strongest of hunters — their name alone was their price, worthy of being called one-person global corporations. This guy. Was he seriously telling me, a man who'd just entered the hunter world, to become a world top ranker?
It was far too grand a piece of advice. And yet.
Somehow, I found myself wanting to make that grandness real.