What Happens When You Turn Off the Status Window (1)
The blare of the emergency siren was the kind of sound that left your ears ringing no matter how many times you heard it.
The Association lobby had become a complete madhouse.
The modern hunters, who usually strode about with their magic suits’ collars stiffly raised and their shoulders held high, were now scrambling in place the moment the Gate burst open, punching helplessly at their smartphone screens.
"Hey! Why is this happening? Why won’t the Gate information update in the Association network app?"
"We didn’t even get a disaster alert text! We need the Gate rank before we can decide whether to go in or not!"
"The standby mana density readings aren’t showing up. Isn’t this a system error? Hey, call guild headquarters and tell them to cancel the raid!"
Their voices were a jumble of confusion, irritation, and a thin layer of fear.
What a pitiful sight.
Even with the Gate torn open right before their eyes and the omen of catastrophe already spilling out in a tide of blood-red mist, they were rooted to the spot simply because the System’s data hadn’t appeared in front of them yet.
The enemy’s size, its attributes, the most efficient countermeasures—none of them could move until the System handed them the answer. That helplessness was pathetic enough, but what really made it unbearable was how natural they thought it was.
For them, the System was a weapon and a shield, and at the same time, the most potent drug ever devised to paralyze the brain of a creature that ought to think for itself.
If any of our first-generation hunters, the ones who’d lived through the hell of the early days before the System was established—when Gates burst open and people fought with nothing but their own bodies—were to see this, they’d click their tongues so hard their jaws might fall off.
Back then, when a Gate opened, you didn’t launch an app. You grabbed the nearest steel pipe or shovel handle and ran at the monsters while screaming your throat raw.
You sharpened all five senses just to survive, and in the crushing pain of broken bones, you learned to read an enemy’s killing intent.
But now these so-called young geniuses had been reduced to puppets who believed only in the guide rails printed across a transparent holographic window.
"Move aside! Everyone, move!"
Just then, Im Taejun of the Gaon Guild, who had been making a scene in the complaints office earlier, charged across the lobby with his subordinates in tow.
Behind him, his personal broadcasting drone hovered along faithfully, livestreaming the whole disaster.
"Viewers, this is Im Taejun of the Gaon Guild! A sudden outbreak has just occurred at Intersection Park near Association headquarters. It looks like there’s been a temporary delay in the System network, but I and Gaon Guild’s elite team will enter the scene immediately and rescue innocent civilians! Please be sure to hit like and send your support!"
And even in that life-or-death chaos, he was still winking at the camera and making sure the sponsor logos stayed in frame.
It was so absurd I almost laughed.
You could feel the lightness of modern hunters all the way through the screen, as if they thought a battlefield was just another piece of spicy streaming content.
Im Taejun brushed past me with a sidelong glance, taking in my wheelchair in the corner of the lobby.
It was obvious what he was thinking: he wanted to wipe away the humiliation he’d suffered in the complaints office by playing hero for the camera.
"Senior, you need to come."
Yu Seoa gripped the wheelchair handle tightly and spoke in a low but urgent voice.
"Why would I? I’m just a powerless civil servant, remember? Can’t you see Gaon Guild’s great ace sprinting off all excited over there? Let them earn their keep."
"It’s a Variant. Not a normal pack of hounds. It’s beyond what they can handle."
Her blue-gray eyes trembled faintly.
That wasn’t just fear.
It was the instinctive warning signal of an S-grade hunter who had smelled a real disaster—one the System itself hadn’t bothered to announce.
I let out a long sigh and looked down at my pitiful, precious paper cup of mix coffee.
Dust had fallen from the ceiling and turned the surface cloudy white.
Just like that, my peaceful afternoon break had been completely ruined.
"Fine, let’s go. We’re not getting out of here anyway with every road blocked. There goes my poor coffee."
I waved a hand as if it were all too much trouble, then took hold of the wheelchair wheel.
Yu Seoa didn’t care that I’d refused; she planted her feet and started pushing with enough force to make the chair roll.
Together we forced our way through the crowd of confused hunters filling the lobby and stepped outside.
The instant we passed through the Association’s front gate, a choking stench of sulfur mixed with the coppery reek of blood surged deep into my lungs.
The sky above the park had been twisted out of shape.
Dark red cracks spread in every direction as if someone had slashed the air apart with a giant blade, and through those fractures a sinister, viscous mana poured down like a waterfall.
The desperate screams of fleeing civilians and the shouts of hunters collided, filling every corner with a soundscape straight out of hell.
"Aaah! Get away! Get away from me!"
"What are the hunters doing? Stop those monsters already!"
By the time we reached the park’s center, Gaon Guild’s members and several field-response hunters were already locked in battle with the monsters.
At a glance, the creatures looked like low-tier beasts resembling wolves—Laser Hounds, if you went by their appearance.
But they were nothing like the common sense the hunters, numbed by the System, expected.
Their hides were rotten and decayed, bone showing through in places, and from those cracked gaps blackish-red tendrils wriggled in a grotesque mass, grinding the asphalt underfoot.
"W-Why isn’t my healing attribute working? If I burn it, the wound should be charred shut!"
"Why does this thing have physical resistance? The guidebook says Laser Hounds are weak to blunt weapons!"
The hunters from Gaon Guild screamed.
They were fighting according to the strictly regulated, rule-bound combat the System had taught them. Since the label said Laser Hound, of course the plan was to scorch it with fire magic and hold a shield line against its straight-line charge.
But the mutated hounds didn’t even flinch in the flames.
Instead, they absorbed the heat through the tendrils covering their bodies and swelled to nearly twice their original size.
Swish.
A blood-red tentacle snapped out from behind one of the monsters and pierced the tanker's chest without mercy.
"Ghk!"
"The tank got pierced! Healer! What are the healers doing?"
"Cooldown! The skill cooldown still has seven seconds left! Hang on a little longer!"
Even with their comrade bleeding out before their eyes, the healers only stood there with trembling hands.
Trapped inside the limits the System had imposed through cooldowns, they couldn’t even think to improvise and use mana directly to stop the bleeding.
Their eyes weren’t on the fallen comrade’s wound—they were fixed on the cold digital countdown blinking before them.
That was the terrible limitation of greenhouse flowers that had never fought a real battle.
"Out of the way! Everyone, move! I’m going in!"
Im Taejun raised his sword and unleashed his mana.
A sharp blue light burst from his body.
It was a heavy, dense surge of mana worthy of an A-grade hunter.
"A lousy mutated hound thinks it can cause trouble here? Hyper Slash!"
With a shout, he swung his sword in a wide arc through the air.
The System’s attack enhancement function activated, and the crescent blade of sword light that flew from his hand shot straight and clean for the hound’s neck.
It was the perfect trajectory, exactly as specified in the System guide.
Thwack!
The blade of mana struck the back of the hound’s neck dead on.
Under normal circumstances, that force should have crushed its cervical bones and killed it instantly.
But even with half its neck hanging grotesquely loose, the mutated beast still spewed red blood and hurled itself at Im Taejun.
"Wh-What?! Why isn’t it dead? Why is the damage calculation like this? Why isn’t the status effect stun activating?!"
Im Taejun’s eyes went wide in disbelief.
Under the System’s design, any beast that suffered a fatal wound was supposed to enter a 1.5-second physical stun.
But a formula fit for a game meant nothing to a Variant moving outside the System’s rules.
From the severed stump of its neck, the creature thrust out long, spikelike tendrils and aimed them at Im Taejun’s brow.
"Hunter Im Taejun! Watch out!"
Yu Seoa shouted sharply and thrust out her hand.
Whoooosh.
The chill that burst from her fingertips froze the surrounding air and forged a massive cluster of ice spears.
The spears shot forward at blinding speed, piercing through the hound’s entire body and pinning it to the ground before it could reach Im Taejun.
That was the overwhelming destruction of S-grade ice magic.
BOOM.
The frozen hound shattered to pieces and rolled across the open ground.
Im Taejun sat there on the pavement, coughing up spit and gasping hard for breath.
His filming drone was broadcasting this disgraceful, pathetic image of a hero in real time to everyone back home.
I was willing to bet the livestream chat had already collapsed into mockery and despair.
"Yu, Yu Seoa Hunter..."
Yu Seoa didn’t even glance at him. She simply came to a quiet stop beside my wheelchair.
The hunters around us erupted in cheers the moment they saw an S-grade hunter like Yu Seoa, as though a savior had finally arrived.
They looked relieved, as if this nightmare was finally over.
But deep creases had formed on Yu Seoa’s lovely brow.
Swish, swish, swish...
The red mist blanketing the entire park sank lower, heavier, and thicker.
And from the center of that mist, a bizarre, colossal shadow slowly rose—something no guild bestiary had ever recorded before.
A gigantic monster, easily more than five meters tall.
It was a wolf-like creature in a twisted, warped shape, with three heads and a body covered in bone-like scales and writhing blood-colored tendrils.
"Cerberus...? No, that kind of mutated entity isn’t in the System database!"
"The mana reading is... S-grade! What the hell, why would an S-grade Variant appear right in the middle of the city?!"
The surrounding hunters screamed themselves half-insane.
Their System windows kept flashing the same red phrase over and over: Unmeasurable Target.
No perfect answer sheet.
To them, that was as good as a death sentence.
"Grrrrr..."
The monster’s three heads all howled at the sky at once.
Even the destructive force of that sound alone ripped up the park’s towering trees by the roots and shook the ground as though an earthquake had hit.
It was the full, unrestrained pressure of killing intent from an S-grade beast.
Yu Seoa clenched her teeth and drove her cold mana to its limit.
Behind her shoulders, white walls of ice burst upward and froze solid.
"Senior..."
She called to me in a low voice.
It was a voice filled with fear and helplessness.
Even she, as an S-grade hunter, was afraid of fighting in a situation like this without the System’s guidelines.
I leaned back into the leather seat of my wheelchair and flicked the crushed paper cup toward the trash can.
The cup sailed in a neat parabola and landed cleanly, and I opened my mouth lazily while watching it score the basket.
"Seoa."
"Yes, Senior."
"Do you want to catch that big bastard?"
"...Yes. If we don’t stop it here, then not only the people behind us but the entire city will be turned into a sea of blood."
In her blue-gray eyes, I could faintly see the same noble spirit the first-generation hunters had carried when they’d thrown their lives on the line to hold back the Gates.
Not a bad look.
At the very least, she was fundamentally different from clowns like Im Taejun.
I tapped my numb leg lightly with the back of a massage stick.
"Then turn off that transparent little box fluttering in front of your eyes."
"Pardon? You mean to turn off the System window...?"
"I mean stop looking at the status window. Don’t cage your senses inside silly little numbers like how many seconds of cooldown are left or how much mana something costs. If all you want is a machine to hand you the answer, then you might as well lie on the floor and piss yourself like Im Taejun over there."
My voice was low, but even amid the hurricane of shrieking killing intent, it drove straight into Yu Seoa’s ears.
"Look at the enemy. Not the mechanical information the System filters for you—the real living thing standing right in front of you, breathing and trampling the earth."
I pointed with the end of the massage stick at the feet of the giant beast.
"See how the ankle joint on the second leg from the right is bent just slightly inward? During the mutation process, the skeleton couldn’t keep up with the speed of cellular expansion and twisted out of alignment. The only moment its center will break is the instant it puts that leg down."
"But the System guide says its chest is the weak point..."
"I told you. Turn off the status window."
I met Yu Seoa square in the eyes with a pair of cold, fishlike pupils.
"Don’t calculate with your head. Feel it with your whole body. Sense how the air trembles when it moves, and let your nerves tell you the path that killing intent is pouring toward you. Then strike the gap."
Yu Seoa swallowed hard.
She was chewing over the meaning of my ruthless, unkind advice on instinct alone.
And then, as if she had finally made up her mind, she closed her eyes for a brief moment and opened them again.
The bright blue System hologram floating over her blue-gray irises...
vanished without a trace.
At that instant, she rejected every blessing the System had ever given her and stood before catastrophe with nothing but her own body.
And in that moment, the nature of the mana surrounding Yu Seoa changed completely.
It was no longer the pretty, standardized, machine-like mana she had used until now.
Instead, a rough, raw presence surged up around her entire body—a primal, first-generation survival force meant for nothing but ripping out an enemy’s throat.
"Go."
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