A Hunter With Nowhere Left to Go (2)
Yejin showed up at the reception desk early the next morning, cradling a box of Mocha Gold.
Not the Gold Label. The Original.
Exactly as ordered.
Doing precisely what she was told was a solid quality, for starters. People who got greedy and tried to do more than they were asked were common enough. People who simply brought back exactly what they'd been told to get were surprisingly rare.
Yu Seoha had bought the Gold Label her first time too, and gotten an earful for it.
Yejin set the box neatly on the desk, clasped both hands, and waited for my next words. Even that posture was steeped in desperation.
I took her down to the Closed Training Room.
An abandoned, dusty room in the basement of the Association that nobody used anymore. It had originally been for rookie hunter aptitude tests, but now it just collected dust. In the system age, aptitude came up in a window, so rooms like this had long since outlived their purpose.
Yejin looked wound tight. Her sword bag was strapped on firm, as if she meant to fight a mutant any second. I could guess what she'd been imagining all night—secret martial arts, brutal physical drills, the usual gallery bait. Her eyes even held a grim resolve: the kind that said she was ready to grind herself into the floor today.
"Unpack the sword. We're not using it today."
"...What?"
"Sit. On the floor there."
Yejin sat on the cold floor with a bewildered look. She'd clearly been expecting some profound secret technique. What I'd told her to do was just sit.
I parked the wheelchair in front of her and poured a Mocha Gold.
"Close your eyes."
"My eyes?"
"Close them, and don't do anything. Just stay still."
Yejin closed her eyes. Her shoulders, rigid with tension, kept twitching as if she felt she had to be doing something.
"Relax. You're not fighting. Just listen."
"Listen to... what?"
"Every sound this room makes. All of them."
Yejin's brow furrowed. She stayed still a long while, then spoke with her eyes still shut.
"...I don't hear anything."
I figured as much.
"It's not that there's no sound. You just can't hear it. This room is full of sound."
I took a sip of Mocha Gold.
System hunters don't use their ears. Enemy positions, weak points—the windows show them everything. So they never once catch, with their own senses, the subtle sounds they've spent a lifetime letting wash past them.
When you think about it, it's only natural. With the answer key floating right in front of your face, who bothers to prick up their ears? The system made hunters comfortable, and that comfort dulled their senses.
Normally that isn't a problem. As long as the answer key holds.
But the moment it vanishes—like with a mutant—a hunter left with nothing but dulled senses dies on the spot. That gate where Yejin lost her teammates must have been exactly like that.
So the first job was to open those blocked ears. Catching pebbles would come much later.
"The fluorescent light," I said. "The one on the ceiling. There's a faint hum. A soft bzzzz. Can you hear it?"
Yejin scowled and concentrated. After a long stretch, she shook her head.
"...I don't know."
"The ventilation. Spinning in that corner. The sound of air leaking."
"..."
"Water droplets. Somewhere, drip, drip. Sounds like a leaking pipe."
"Footsteps in the corridor. Far off, someone should be walking around."
Yejin couldn't hear any of it. The harder she tried to focus, the less she heard. She was straining her ears so hard to listen well that the strain itself was drowning everything out. Her face grew steadily more rigid. The anxiety that she had to hear was only sealing her ears tighter.
"I really can't hear anything. Maybe there's something wrong with my ears..."
"Your ears are fine. Your mind is just too loud. The thought that you have to do well is the noisiest noise of all."
It's always like that at first. Yu Seoha and Jin Seojun both went through this stage on day one. But those two had so much talent they locked onto the sounds within half a day and moved on to catching pebbles the same afternoon.
Yejin was different. Even after an hour, she still couldn't catch a single fluorescent-light hum.
"Am I... just really bad at this?"
Yejin opened her eyes and asked. Her voice was deflated. All the disappointment she'd been holding in poured into that one sentence.
"Hunter Yu Seoha and Hunter Jin Seojun must have gotten it right away."
"They're the weird ones," I answered flatly. "Is a person who can close their eyes and pick up a fluorescent light's vibration in half a day normal? Those two are monsters. You're normal. And of course a normal person can't do it on day one."
Having two monsters like that among the disciples I'd taught was rare good fortune, honestly. Normally everyone was like Yejin—wandering a long time and climbing one step at a time.
Yejin looked blank for a moment. She clearly hadn't expected comfort. Well—in a system world, being unable meant being left behind. This girl might have been hearing "it's okay to fail" for the first time in her life.
"Close them again. This time, don't try to hear well. Just let it wash over you. Don't try to catch the sound. Let the sound come in on its own."
Yejin closed her eyes again. This time she eased some of the tension from her shoulders. With the urge to perform set aside, her expression grew a little freer.
Beside her, I slowly stirred my Mocha Gold. The spoon tapping the paper cup rang clearly through the quiet room.
Noon came. I wheeled myself to the snack shop for a moment and brought back two triangle kimbap and a fresh cup of Mocha Gold. Even on the way there, I could hear the corridor staff murmuring about the old man in the wheelchair again. I ignored it and rolled past.
"Eat something. You can't hear when you're hungry."
Yejin opened her eyes. After half a day with them shut, they looked bleary.
"Thank you."
She said it, but even while eating the triangle kimbap her ears stayed pricked. Mid-meal, she was still straining toward every surrounding sound. She couldn't rest even when resting. That desperation ran so thick it actually worried me a little.
After lunch, we started again.
Another hour passed. Yejin was still swinging and missing. She mistook the ventilation for the fluorescent light, her own heartbeat for water droplets. Once she even took the sound of me stirring my Mocha Gold for some mysterious noise coming off the ceiling.
"There—I hear that! It sounds like some kind of machine running."
"That's my spoon."
Yejin's face went red. But she didn't fall apart. She was frustrated at failing, but she didn't collapse. If anything, the more she failed, the more stubbornly she clung on. She asked to try one more time, asked for a little more time.
That tenacity caught my eye.
Yu Seoha and Jin Seojun had gotten it so fast they never had to cling like this. If something wasn't working, they could rest a bit and it would work the next day. They didn't really know what it meant to be unable. They'd never suffered long through the pain of failure, because they succeeded so quickly.
But Yejin couldn't do it. And because she couldn't, she latched on and wouldn't let go until she could. She cut her rest short, ate lunch fast, and even seemed to resent the time it took to use the bathroom.
The stairs those talented ones had skipped in a single leap, this girl was climbing one by one, scraping her way up with her fingernails.
For now it would look frustrating. Compared to the two geniuses, she'd seem hopelessly behind. The world usually applauds the fast ones. Yu Seoha, who caught pebbles on day one, and Yejin, who couldn't even catch a fluorescent-light hum on day one—set them side by side, and people would praise Yu Seoha without hesitation.
But I know. The stairs of someone who climbs them one by one are sturdier than those of someone who leaps them in a single bound. When crisis hits and the ground gives way beneath your feet, the ones who hold on to the end are always the ones who built it that stubbornly.
Tenacity born of desperation. That was something talent couldn't buy.
Suddenly I thought of the old days. I'd been like this at first too. Twenty years ago, in the days before the system. My seniors had sat me in a dark room the same way and told me to listen. I'd wandered for days too. On a battlefield full of nothing but shellfire, picking out the subtle sounds in the gaps had been harder than dying. Back then, one senior had waited beside me just as I was now—in silence. Without scolding, without rushing.
The reason I held on then wasn't talent either. It was desperation. If I couldn't hear, I would die. So I clung on for dear life.
Looking at Yejin, I saw the me of those days overlapping. But there was a difference too. I'd clung on because death was right in front of me and I had no choice. For Yejin, death wasn't right in front of her yet. And still she sat here of her own will. She was clinging by choice, not by force. That might have been an even more vicious kind of desperation.
Around the time the sun began to sink, Yejin—eyes still closed—suddenly flinched.
"...Oh."
Her fingers trembled faintly. Her breath seemed to catch for a moment. Afraid of missing something, she couldn't even open her eyes; she just froze.
"Just now... I heard it."
"Heard what."
"Over—over there. The ceiling. A bzzzz sound. Has it been there the whole time?"
The fluorescent light. The sound she hadn't been able to catch all day—Yejin had finally, clearly recognized it for the first time.
It wasn't grand. One fluorescent-light hum. That was all. Strictly speaking, it was nothing special. A scrap of noise a system hunter wouldn't even glance at. No rank, no score, no reward—just the sound of a fluorescent light.
But Yejin's face lit up as if she'd taken down a mutant.
"I heard it. I really heard it. It was there the whole time, and I just couldn't hear it."
"Yeah. It was there the whole time."
I finished off my cold Mocha Gold.
"The world has always been full of sound. The system was just covering your ears. Today, for the first time, you punched a hole through those blocked ears."
Yejin opened her eyes. Moisture gathered in them. Almost crying over a single fluorescent-light hum might look ridiculous to some people. But for this girl, it was the moment a door that had been shut her whole life cracked open by a single finger's width for the first time.
"I'll try again. Until I find the ventilation and the water droplets too."
"That's enough for today. Get greedy and you'll burn out."
"But still..."
"There's tomorrow. The one thing you heard today is enough. Because that was the beginning."
Slowly. One step at a time. There was no need to rush.
"That's all for today. Come back tomorrow."
"...Yes!!"
Yejin sprang to her feet and bowed deeply. Her face was completely different from when she'd come in—bright and excited. Even as she left through the door, she kept glancing up at the ceiling, as if checking whether she could still hear that fluorescent-light hum.