The First Meeting with Her
The old man muttered through gritted teeth. "Damn it."
Even as he spoke, his hand kept moving under the desk. No need to look to know what was down there. A gun, probably. This was the kind of shop where customers sometimes vanished without a trace.
This got annoying.
I had planned to sell the mana stone and slip out quietly. But this old-timer clearly saw me as easy prey. A young girl showing up alone with a suspicious item? He was probably thinking of scamming me or burying me outright. Well, it wasn't exactly rare. Everyone underestimated me. It had been the same back when I was still a guy—skinny from poor eating, pale from never going outside. At a glance, I looked like I wouldn't even qualify for D-class, let alone S-class. But honestly, that was the most convenient part. People left me alone, which made it easy to stay quiet and browse the galleries in peace.
Still, when they crossed the line and started looking down on me like this, a proper lesson was in order.
A single star was already floating at my fingertip. This time it was HIP 57050. A seventh-magnitude red dwarf invisible to the naked eye. Still, it possessed about thirty-six percent of the sun's mass. I drew on its heat.
Astral Glyph Magic
The overflowing rays of light from my fingertips descended. I condensed that light into a single point.
With a sharp hiss, the drawer handle melted and dripped down like taffy.
Astral Glyph Magic proficiency has increased.
The old man froze solid like a statue. Good. Time to resume negotiations.
*****
Lee Hwabaek had spent forty years rolling around in the underworld. Just from a single glance at a young girl who came in alone, he could size her up. Malnourished frame, wrists with no sign of a hunter's calluses. He examined the mana stone she had placed on the desk. The mana meter barely even registered it. Either she was lying, or she had picked it up somewhere.
Placing his hand on the knife under the desk was practically a habit. Rough her up a bit, and if she kept talking back, clean up the mess like always. It wasn't as if this shop hadn't made a few "customers" disappear before.
That was when the handle melted like candle wax. The back of his hand burned. After forty years, a chill ran down his spine. It felt like a blade pressed against his nape. When he looked up, the young face beneath the hood was staring at him expressionlessly. No threat, no anger. That was what made it terrifying. Those were the eyes of someone calmly deciding how to dispose of him—the exact same eyes he had shown to dozens of his own victims.
The power dynamic had flipped. He wasn't the one holding the knife. He was the mark.
For a few seconds, fear gripped him. In that time, Lee Hwabaek truly saw the girl for the first time.
*****
The old man slowly withdrew his hand from under the desk. It was empty. He didn't even dare reach for a weapon.
"The, the mana stone... I'll give you two thousand at market price. No, two thousand five hundred. I'm not trying to rip you off."
Rip me off? After he'd been planning to bury me just moments ago? Still, two thousand five hundred was acceptable. To think I'd be touching this much money in my lifetime.
With a trembling hand, the old man pointed at the light embedded in the stone.
"This thing... don't just carry it around anywhere."
"Why?"
"There's an underground guild called Manwol that looks for items like this... but don't go there. No one comes out alive."
It wasn't a threat. His eyes showed genuine warning.
Yeah, I'm absolutely never going there in my lifetime.
The old man thrust a thick bundle of cash at me, then hurriedly added a bottle of Bbakkas that had been sitting on the counter.
"Here. And don't come back... Do you at least eat properly?"
"Drink this and... get out of here quickly."
I accepted it and pulled my hood lower.
What is this? He gave me extra money and even a drink. What a nice old man.
When I stepped outside, the eastern edge of the sky was just beginning to brighten.
...Ah. I was screwed.
I hurried my steps and opened the gallery.
This guy was a veteran with an old nickname. He'd been around since the early days of the gallery. Once he latched onto something, he couldn't let it go. If I left him alone, my peaceful NEET life would crumble. The underground guild called Manwol that the old man had warned me about might even try to kidnap me.
The thought sent a chill down my spine. I quickly fired off a Discord message.
She was the type who answered in short bursts. Actually, calling her a guy wasn't right. She was a girl. Her real identity was Kim Suhyun. Yes, the Kim Suhyun from the Kim Suhyun Minor Gallery. Back when she got drunk and started whining on Discord, the truth came out. She had cried about not wanting to do hunter work. That was how I naturally learned who she was.
She agreed so easily. What was going on?
Even in my original body I would have hesitated, but with this changed body, it was completely out of the question.
I fired back more excuses. That I actually weighed 120 kilograms and going outside was difficult. That I had become ugly recently. That I hadn't showered in a week and was basically a walking biological weapon.
She replied that it was fine, that as an S-class she had a poison resistance skill, that she would buy me chicken, and that she would wipe out all the suspicious posts in the gallery.
Buying chicken and cleaning up the gallery? Honestly, I was pretty tempted. Getting my identity exposed now that I was a girl would be troublesome, but if I just pulled my hood down low, met for five minutes, and left, it should be okay, right?
The moment I reluctantly typed out a compromise—
Before I could finish typing, the electronic door lock on my studio apartment rang out unexpectedly.
Beep-beep-beep-beep—click~
The sound of the lock disengaging on its own.
"Hiii! Is this StarPicker??"
The door swung wide open and an impossibly radiant silver-haired beauty stepped inside. It was Kim Suhyun, South Korea's S-class hunter—the one I had only ever seen on TV news or in gallery memes.
This was my first meeting with GloomyDepressedGirlLover.
*****
"Uh..."
I lay face-down on the bed, mouth opening and closing uselessly. The sun had risen and drained every ounce of strength from my body. To make things worse, she had just picked my door lock like it was nothing. And how on earth did she know my address? The information network of an S-class was truly terrifying. Had she used her Hunter Association privileges to get a master key?
Kim Suhyun stood there holding chicken boxes in both hands, smiling brightly as she looked around the room. Then her eyes landed on me—collapsed in the middle of the bed, drenched in sweat—and she froze.
"Huh...?"
Her gaze locked onto me. My frail limbs that looked like they would snap from malnutrition. Skin so pale it was almost translucent. Messy golden-blond hair spread across the sheets. And the way I was groaning like I might stop breathing at any moment now that the sun was up.
Kim Suhyun's eyes began to shake violently, as if an earthquake had struck them.
"You're... not StarPicker, are you...?"
Her eyes then fell on my phone screen. The Discord chat I had been using moments ago. She looked back and forth between the screen and me several times before her face filled with shock.
"No... who are you? Where did StarPicker go? And why is someone this cute... I mean, why is a kid who looks like she's about to die any second in here?"
All playfulness vanished from her face. In its place was pure shock and the serious, focused gaze unique to S-class hunters. I could almost hear her brain short-circuiting in the wrong direction.
Her eyes reddened with burst blood vessels.
"That bastard... he dared to kidnap a kid like this and force her to chat with me?!?!"
"Huh...?"
Completely ignoring my confusion at this wild leap in logic, Kim Suhyun set the chicken boxes down with a heavy thud and clenched her fists.
"Hey!! You damn NEET!! Where are you hiding?!"
...I am StarPicker, so I have no idea who she's looking for. I wanted to explain, but it was morning and my voice wouldn't come out.
Somebody save me...