Hunters Seeking Wheelchair Inspiration (2)
“Baekjeong” changed the mood of the city in just a few days.
On the subway ride home from work, people kept pulling up the article on their phones.
At restaurants during lunch, office workers argued over it with their spoons still in hand.
“They’re saying that wheelchair old man is really Baekjeong. Isn’t that proof the guilds have been lying for twenty years?”
“Come on, that’s just another conspiracy theory. Like something that could actually happen.”
“But I heard a bunch of guild executives went after him and got beaten. There’s definitely something going on.”
“Beat them? How would some old guy in a wheelchair beat anybody? It’s all media spin.”
“Then why can’t the guilds shut that media spin down? Because they don’t have the power to, right?”
It was always the person defending the guilds who ended up speechless.
Some people were thrilled at the return of a hero. Some were furious that the guilds had lied. And some were indifferent, dismissing it all as more recycled bait for attention.
What was certain was this: everyone was talking about the name.
In bars around the university district, people even started betting on whether Baekjeong was real or fake.
Some elementary school kid brought in a drawing of a wheelchair-bound hero and proudly showed it off, while some old man clicked his tongue and muttered that people from the old days were still better than those guild punks running around now.
For the first time in twenty years, the word “hero,” a word the guilds had monopolized, was starting to wear another face.
The media wasn’t about to sit still either.
Other outlets raced to reprint Eye of Truth’s exclusive, and special features on Baekjeong stacked up one after another.
Broadcast stations hunted down survivors of the Grand Hall Incident for interviews, and current affairs shows slapped on provocative titles like The Erased Hero.
Streamers fired up broadcasts with names like Rewatching the Grand Hall and The Mystery of the First Generation, and talked through the night.
One streamer in particular said something that, for some reason, caught on fast.
If the guilds were denying it that desperately, maybe it meant it was true after all.
Rumor had it Reporter Seo Jingyeong was still digging for more information on top of everything else.
While the whole world seethed over the story, the people most shaken by it were someone else entirely.
The hunters in the field.
Ye Jin, a C-grade hunter from Eunha Guild, hardly slept for days.
She was twenty-two, small in stature, with a sharp, tidy impression and features clear enough that they showed up now and then in the guild’s promotional videos.
Only now, a heavy shadow of sleeplessness had settled over that face.
Eunha wasn’t a big guild.
It was a backwater mid-sized outfit, nowhere near one of the five guilds that had marched into the association director’s office the other day with their executives in tow.
Life as a hunter in a small guild was rough.
You got stuck taking on the dangerous gates the bigger guilds had passed up for a pittance, system training lagged far behind what the corporate guilds could provide, and when something went wrong, there was no support worth the name.
Even so, Ye Jin had believed in the System.
It was only natural.
The world of hunters she knew ran on the numbers and recommended strategies the System displayed.
Enemy weaknesses, skill cooldowns, safety ratings.
The blue window told you everything, and the hunter who could read that window best was the strongest hunter of all.
Ye Jin read it faster and more accurately than most.
That was the result of her clawing her way to make up for the handicap of coming from a small guild.
Then, a month ago, she had nearly died.
It had been an ordinary D-grade gate.
The System had said it was safe, and it was supposed to be a hunt where all you had to do was follow the recommended strategy.
That day too, Ye Jin had been reading the enemy’s position and weaknesses from the System window, swinging her sword exactly by the book.
But a mutant had slipped into the middle of it.
The System never raised a warning, not even at the end.
While the word safe remained coldly displayed on the screen, that mutant tore apart two of Ye Jin’s teammates.
At first, she didn’t even understand what was happening.
The System was telling her there was no threat, while the screams of her teammates burst out right in front of her.
Her head shouted safe, and her eyes saw death.
And trapped inside that contradiction, Ye Jin simply froze.
Ye Jin survived.
But not because she fought well.
It was because the senior beside her shoved her out of the way and took the mutant’s claws into his own back instead.
That senior was in the hospital now, and nobody could say whether he’d ever be able to return to hunting.
Whenever Ye Jin thought of him—of a man from a small guild who probably couldn’t even count on decent medical support—her chest felt like it was being crushed.
After that day, her hands trembled every time she looked at a System window.
Those blue letters she had trusted all her life, the ones she’d believed held the answer, had told a lie while her teammate was being torn apart.
That betrayal refused to leave her head.
Every night, she had the same dream.
A System window declaring the area safe, and in front of it, a teammate slowly being ripped apart.
She always woke drenched in cold sweat.
And then the Baekjeong article broke.
Possessed, Ye Jin searched for every related video she could find.
The first one she played was Jin Seojun from Baekho Guild.
The same kind of mutant.
A ambush-type that didn’t trigger System alarms.
The very gate where Im Taejun of Gaon had been toyed with for an hour before his elite team collapsed completely.
And yet Jin Seojun had gone in blindfolded.
Ye Jin held her breath at that scene.
He had shut off the System and, using nothing but his senses, read the mutant’s attack half a beat early and slipped past it.
He was catching a foe that didn’t trigger alarms without relying on alarms at all.
Ye Jin knew that mutant.
It was the same kind that had nearly killed her.
An ambusher that moved only in the blind spots of the System, reaching for your throat from behind the word safe.
She had frozen in front of one.
But Jin Seojun had slipped the attack blindfolded and struck back.
If only Ye Jin had known how to fight like that on that day.
If only she had known how to read an enemy with her own skin, no matter how much the System lied.
Then maybe her two teammates wouldn’t have died.
Maybe the senior wouldn’t have had to take the claws on his back.
At that thought, Ye Jin stopped the video and sat there blankly for a long time.
Eventually she opened the next one.
It was Yu Seoa’s fire-dungeon clip.
When a massive ice formation didn’t work, she used a single ice spike no bigger than a fingernail to pierce the mutant’s weak point.
Not the place the System had labeled as a weakness, but one exact point she had found with her own senses.
Ye Jin watched that clip dozens of times.
The more she watched, the less it looked like genius and the more it seemed like a technique anybody could learn.
At last, she put the two videos side by side.
In the same mutant gate, there was the clip of Gaon’s elite team collapsing with Im Taejun at the center of it, and the clip of Baekho’s Jin Seojun finishing the same kind of enemy in three exchanges while blindfolded.
Im Taejun was the star hunter Ye Jin had once admired.
Flashy skills, perfect System use, overwhelming stats.
The ideal hunter the System era had produced.
To a small-guild hunter like Ye Jin, a top ace from a major guild like Im Taejun was a star she could never reach in her lifetime.
Capital. Scale. Support.
Within the System meta, strength was ultimately decided by money and backing.
And yet that same Im Taejun became powerless as a newborn the moment the System lied.
By contrast, Jin Seojun played with that mutant after turning the System off.
Ye Jin’s entire standard for strength, the one she had believed in all her life, was overturned between those two videos.
Being good at handling the System wasn’t what made someone strong.
What made someone truly strong was surviving even when the System disappeared.
And that kind of strength wasn’t something money or size could buy.
It was a territory you could reach only through senses and effort.
Ye Jin’s heart pounded.
Inside the System meta, a small-guild hunter could never beat a major guild ace.
The other side had the money, the support, the good gates—everything.
But if she stepped outside the System—
If she entered that realm where capital and size didn’t matter—
Then even a small-guild hunter could grow strong with nothing but her own body.
For Ye Jin, that wasn’t just curiosity.
It was the only ladder she had ever seen that might lead upward.
The two hunters shared one thing in common.
They knew how to fight even after shutting the System off.
They didn’t die when the answer sheet disappeared.
And both of them had the same teacher.
The wheelchair old man in the Hunter Association Civil Affairs Office.
The very man the gallery called Baekjeong.
After thinking it over for days, Ye Jin finally opened up to a guild acquaintance.
“I think I’m going to go ask that old man to teach me.”
The acquaintance stared at her, dumbfounded.
“Have you lost it? Why would some nobody from a no-name guild like us even be accepted? He’s the guy teaching Baekho S-grade and A-grade hunters. Someone like you, a C-grade, wouldn’t even get a business card handed to you.”
“I’ll cling to him until he does.”
“And what if he’s fake? Nobody even knows if he’s really Baekjeong. If you go to the wrong person, you’ll just get called a cultist.”
“Whether he’s Baekjeong or not doesn’t matter. His disciples don’t die in front of mutants. The videos prove that much.”
“That’s because they’re already S-grade and A-grade.”
“No, it’s not.”
Ye Jin shook her head firmly.
“Jin Seojun was just a regular academy top student with A-grade talent until a month ago. He was just as dependent on the System as the rest of us. Then suddenly he starts beating mutants blindfolded. In a month. If that were just talent, it wouldn’t make sense. Someone taught him.”
Her acquaintance fell silent.
“I did everything the System told me to do. I followed the windows, followed the textbook. And still, a month ago, I lost two teammates.”
“……”
“The System said it was safe. Right until the end. But people still died. So what was the point of that education?”
Ye Jin’s voice trembled.
“That old man’s disciples don’t die even when the System lies. That’s what I want to learn. So next time, I won’t have to watch someone else take the hit for me.”
After a long pause, her acquaintance asked quietly, “...Do you really think that old man will accept you? Isn’t he just a civil affairs clerk? He’s not even in a position to take disciples.”
“I don’t know. But if I don’t go, I think I’ll regret it for the rest of my life. I’m scared I’ll just freeze again, like I did that day.”
Her acquaintance couldn’t stop her anymore.
All he could think was that it was, at least, a relief Ye Jin hadn’t been with her on that gate a month ago.
That night, Ye Jin took out something she had tucked deep in her desk drawer.
It was the hunter badge the senior had been wearing when he ended up in the hospital.
She stared at it for a long time.
Next time, I’ll block it.
I won’t hide behind someone else’s back.
Repeating those words to herself, Ye Jin saved the route to the association on her map.
Ye Jin wasn’t the only one.
Hunters in the field who had similar feelings were increasing one by one.
The more often a hunter had been bitten by a mutant, the more they had felt the System’s limits in their own body.
To them, that wheelchair old man’s method no longer sounded like somebody else’s story.
Some hunters started asking around for the location of the Hunter Association Civil Affairs Office. Others directly contacted Jin Seojun from Baekho and begged him to introduce them to his teacher.
Posts about how to learn under that old man started appearing seriously in the hunter communities.
There was even a hunter with ten years of experience.
He had stepped back from active duty after losing three juniors to a mutant, but after watching Jin Seojun’s clip, he picked up his sword again.
It was said that even at nearly sixty, he had started from scratch, saying that if he was late, he would still learn how to fight outside the System now.
Even veteran hunters on the verge of retirement were beginning to stir.
A gnawing unease spread among them: the possibility that the first-generation method they had mocked all their lives might actually be the only answer in this age of mutants.
That unease slowly rose from the bottom of the industry.
At first, the people in the business laughed.
Fight without the System? That was madness, like climbing a cliff without safety gear.
Try to imitate the obsolete methods of the first generation, and you’d die a stupid death.
But mutants were increasing.
As the number of mutants the System couldn’t identify kept growing, that mad-sounding idea began to sound more and more like the only real answer.
Every week, somewhere, news came in that a hunter who had relied on the System alone had died or been crippled by a mutant.
Every time, people remembered the same thing.
That old man’s disciples had survived the very same kinds of mutants.
Once could be coincidence.
Twice could be luck.
But Yu Seoa and Jin Seojun had both produced the same result under the same teacher.
If coincidence happened twice, then it wasn’t coincidence anymore. It was a method.
That was how the crack began.
Right in the middle of an industry that ran on flashy skills and System meta, a pebble thrown by one wheelchair old man had started to ripple the water.
At first it had been a gallery meme, then a news item, and now it was turning into a serious concern among hunters in the field.
For the guilds that raised star hunters like idols and sold merchandise off them, it was the nightmare they feared most.
The System meta itself was their cash cow, and the moment it was proven that a method denying that meta actually worked in the field—
That wasn’t mere embarrassment. It meant the foundations of the industry were starting to shake.
That was why the guilds were so desperate to drag Kang Taehyun down while still not daring to touch him openly.
If they couldn’t stop that one old man, then the cracks would spread through the System empire they had built.
And at the center of all that noise was one person.
That day too, he was in the corner of the Hunter Association Civil Affairs Office, brewing himself an iced mocha gold.
Kang Taehyun had no idea that hunters were starting to seek him out as a teacher, or that the industry was being shaken by him alone.
Even if he had known, he would have found it annoying.
Teaching two disciples already made him want to die from the effort every time he had to get up, so the number increasing could only be a disaster from his point of view.
Even tossing pebbles for two people was enough to make his arm ache. If he had to think about throwing pebbles for ten, his shoulders hurt just imagining it.
So he simply looked out the window at the sun tilting toward evening and wondered whether he could go home on time today.
At the same time, somewhere else in the city, Ye Jin was checking the subway route to the association.
And somewhere else again, another hunter who had been bitten by a mutant was editing and re-editing a message to send to Jin Seojun of Baekho.
The ripple caused by one pebble was already spreading slowly toward Kang Taehyun’s civil affairs office.
Only the person who had thrown it had no idea at all.
The world called Kang Taehyun a legend, a hero, a threat.
But he called himself nothing more than an old civil affairs clerk who liked instant coffee.
And at that very moment, a girl in a worn hunter jumper was climbing the subway stairs toward the Hunter Association Civil Affairs Office.
A sword bag hung from her shoulder, and her eyes held the light of someone standing at the edge of a cliff.
Toward that civil affairs office where an utterly clueless Kang Taehyun was sipping cold coffee, one desperate set of footsteps kept drawing nearer.
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