The F-Grade Old Geezer in the Civil Affairs Office (1)
There was a peculiar smell that rose when you poured hot water into a paper cup.
Sweet, yet bitter; the scent of cheap artificial sweetener.
Maxing Mocha Gold.
The only legal drug that comforted my worn-out soul.
I carefully set the steaming paper cup on my lap.
Then I gripped the wheels of my old wheelchair with both hands.
Creak, creak.
Every time the wheels rolled, an unpleasant metal-on-metal screech rang down the hallway.
I really should oil it, but I kept putting it off because it was a pain.
A young section chief passing by saw me and shook his head.
"Chief Kang, these days they make decent magical engineering wheelchairs. Why not buy one? You’d even get a government subsidy."
"Too much trouble."
"Pardon?"
"Charging the mana on those things is a hassle. If you forget to plug it in before bed, you can’t move an inch in the morning. It’s easier just to roll myself."
At my answer, the young section chief wore a look that said he couldn’t begin to understand me and went on his way.
Well, I supposed kids these days couldn’t understand.
Everything was standardized by the System now, and in a world where mana could solve everything with the press of a button, that made sense.
I wheeled myself over to my desk in the corner of the civil affairs office.
My face reflected in the small mirror taped beside the monitor.
Twenty-nine, or maybe thirty-nine.
No matter how generously you looked at it, the man in the mirror could only be mistaken for someone just barely into his early twenties.
But my real age was thirty-nine.
Meaning I’d be forty next year.
This abnormal youth wasn’t because I was blessed with a baby face.
It was a side effect of mana saturation.
For 1st Generation Hunters like me—men who had absorbed mana with their bare bodies back in the days before the System’s safety features—we’d been soaked through with it.
The price was that our nerves and skeletons rotted away, leaving us crippled, while at the same time our aging all but stopped in this strange bargain.
In simple terms, I had traded the ability to walk for the inability to grow old.
Even my white hair wasn’t really from age.
It was a scar from the time my entire body’s mana circuits had burned out at once, like soot after a fire.
On the face of it, I looked like a fresh-faced young man, but in this business—where your prime was as brutally short as a pro gamer’s—thirty-nine was already old enough to have retired long ago.
Whether by experience or by age, I was a walking fossil in this ecosystem, more than worthy of being called an old man.
Pretty face, white hair, and a wheelchair.
Because of that bizarre combination, people either looked at me with pity or treated me like some washed-up old geezer.
I liked that look.
Because nobody expected anything from me.
I took a sip of the warm instant coffee.
The sweetness of the sugar spread from my tongue through my whole body, and just then, from the far side of the office, a ruckus broke out.
"Don’t you know who I am? I’m A-grade Hunter Im Taejun! I’m with Gaon Guild!"
A shrill, arrogant voice.
When I looked toward the entrance, I saw a man in a flashy magical combat suit hammering the counter with his fist.
His chest was plastered with gaudy sponsor logos, and a personal broadcast drone hovered behind him, livestreaming the whole scene.
A typical star hunter, the kind you saw everywhere these days.
"I’m sorry, Hunter-nim, but under regulations, this gate assignment can’t be finalized until it’s coordinated with the other guilds…"
On the other side of the counter, a young female clerk had gone pale and looked ready to cry.
She was a rookie civil affairs officer who’d only just joined this year.
"Coordinated? My livestream has over five hundred thousand concurrent viewers right now! Do you know how much the ad penalties are? Are you going to pay for that?"
Im Taejun shouted with veins standing out in his neck.
The lens on the recording drone behind him swiveled busily around.
The chat window was probably already flooding with live comments cursing the Association.
What a wonderful age.
Hunters—people who were supposed to hunt monsters—had become clowns who staked their lives on view counts and merchandise sales.
Thinking back to the Grand Hall incident in Seoul, when we’d been bleeding and climbing over the corpses of our comrades day after day, I almost laughed out loud.
Back then, there had been no status window.
No skill cooldowns. No mana values.
We didn’t have the luxury of calculating such things.
If the monster in front of you was about to tear out your throat, you had to survive by snapping its teeth and gouging out its eyes with your fingers if that was what it took.
But now things were different.
Under the System’s blessing, hunters moved only within carefully guaranteed gimmicks and matchups.
They fought only within the stats and cooldowns assigned to them by their status windows, and called it “efficient modern combat.”
To them, people like us from the first generation were nothing but the height of inefficiency—an idiot generation that had flailed around with nothing but our bodies and ended up disabled for our trouble.
"Hurry up and stamp it already! Don’t test my patience!"
A bluish surge of mana began pouring from Im Taejun’s body.
The atmosphere inside the civil affairs office sank like a stone.
The mana pressure of an A-grade Hunter.
The ordinary clerk was so overwhelmed she could barely breathe, trembling all over.
The other staff members nearby quietly shrank back, trying not to get involved.
They knew better than to get on the wrong side of a star hunter from a major guild.
Not a good situation.
If that clerk fainted, today’s paperwork would be delayed.
If the paperwork was delayed, my quitting time would be delayed too.
And that was something I could not tolerate.
I let out a soft breath to cool the coffee, then started rolling my wheelchair forward.
Creak, creak.
The harsh metal sound of the old chair rang sharply through the suddenly quiet office.
Im Taejun’s enraged gaze turned toward me.
"What’s with the old man?"
He frowned.
After seeing my white hair and wheelchair, he snorted like I was beneath his notice.
I stopped my chair in front of him.
Then, carefully wrapping my hands around the paper cup on my lap, I spoke in a lazy voice.
"Hunter Im Taejun."
"Huh? Who the hell are you?"
"It’d be a problem if you released mana here. This could fall under destruction of public property and obstruction of Association business."
My tone was utterly businesslike, with not a shred of soul in it.
Im Taejun let out a disbelieving laugh.
"Ha! Who do you think you are, you old geezer in a wheelchair? You don’t even know who I am? I’m from Gaon Guild…"
"A-grade Hunter Im Taejun, ranked 142nd. I know. You’re also the one who gets the most subsidy and gate assignment privileges from the Association each month."
I took another sip of coffee.
It had cooled to the perfect temperature.
"But here’s the thing, Hunter-nim. Those assignment privileges only hold as long as the Association approves them. If you keep throwing a tantrum here and rack up warnings for misconduct, your gate assignment ranking next month will get pushed back. Will that be all right?"
Im Taejun’s face went red, then pale, then red again.
His drone was still hovering behind him, probably zooming in on both of us.
For a star hunter, being lectured like this by some wheelchair-bound nobody who worked as a section chief had to be humiliating.
"You little punk… acting all high and mighty just because you haven’t even lost your baby fat yet. You think you can boss me around?"
Grinding his teeth, Im Taejun took a step toward me.
The mana pouring off his body had grown even stronger than before.
The floor tiles were trembling faintly.
"Who do you think you’re lecturing? A cripple like you can’t even touch me."
The moment he reached out to threaten me, I let out a tiny sigh inside.
Kids these days really did love showing off their strength too easily.
Without even understanding how weak and unstable that strength actually was.
I twitched the fingers of my right hand resting on the wheelchair armrest.
No flashy effect. No system alert.
I simply scattered a tiny fraction of the mana flowing through my body into the air.
I had no mana core.
Instead, every cell and nerve in my body was a mana circuit.
Breathing, my heartbeat itself, all of it was mana flow.
The moment my mana merged with the mana in the surrounding air, the space around Im Taejun froze solid.
Not physically frozen—the flow of mana itself had been forcibly stopped.
"Ghk…!?"
A short cry burst from Im Taejun’s mouth.
The blue mana he’d been spewing out withered away in an instant.
No—that wasn’t enough to describe it.
The mana he’d pushed outside his body began rushing back toward his mana core at a terrifying speed, as if trying to swallow him whole.
Mana backlash.
For hunters, it was more terrifying than cardiac arrest.
"Kh—huck! Ngh…!"
Im Taejun’s face turned ashen in an instant.
He clutched his throat and dropped to his knees with a thud.
His whole body shook violently, and he gasped wordlessly, unable to breathe.
The status window’s cooldowns and any defense skills he might have had were utterly useless.
The System he trusted so completely couldn’t even recognize this invisible pressure.
Only the terror remained—the fear that some unfathomably huge force was crushing his mana core with its bare hands.
The people in the civil affairs office had no idea what was happening.
To them, it just looked like Im Taejun had suddenly had a seizure and collapsed on his own.
"Oh dear, Hunter Im Taejun, are you feeling unwell?"
I looked down at him with a concerned expression.
Of course, my fingers were still resting lightly on the armrest.
"Looks like a sudden mana spasm. You must have been overdoing it with all that streaming lately. Taking care of your body is part of being a hunter, too. How unfortunate."
"Y-you… ngh…."
Im Taejun looked up at me.
His pupils trembled with fear.
Instinctively, he understood.
That white-haired man in the wheelchair, with his dead-fish eyes, was a monster who could kill him whenever he pleased.
"Should I get you some medicine? Or maybe call 119?"
I asked in a very kind voice.
At the same time, I loosened the pressure in my finger.
Only then did the suffocating lock on his mana flow break, and Im Taejun sucked in air in a panic.
"Haaah! Huh, huh, hoo…!"
He braced himself on the floor with both hands, breathing raggedly.
He was drenched in cold sweat from head to toe.
His personal broadcast drone was still live, transmitting his pathetic state to the world.
There was no need to see the chat to know it was probably exploding.
And then—
"What’s going on?"
A clear, cold voice came from the civil affairs office entrance.
The moment I heard that voice, the air inside the office seemed to drop by several degrees.
Everyone’s gaze turned there at once.
I looked too.
A woman stood at the entrance.
Her straight black hair flowed over her shoulders, and her gray-blue eyes contrasted with her pale skin, giving her an intelligent, almost icy air.
With every step she took, faint mana like frost dust drifted around her.
The face of Baekho Guild’s leading S-grade Hunter, the largest guild in South Korea.
Pale Winter, Yu Seoa.
Her gaze passed over Im Taejun sprawled on the floor and settled on me.
More precisely, on my white hair, the old paper cup on my lap, and the wheelchair I was sitting in.
Her gray-blue eyes trembled slightly.
Pity, reverence, and some unknown sense of obligation.
It was the expression she always wore whenever she looked at a 1st Generation Hunter.
"Chief Kang Taehyun."
She called my name.
There wasn’t the slightest trace of arrogance in her voice, nothing of the haughty pride typical of a star S-grade Hunter.
Rather, it was filled with deep respect.
I let out a sigh of annoyance inside and drank the rest of my coffee.
Ah. It had gone lukewarm.
The taste was ruined.
A very bad feeling was settling over me.
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