What Happens When You Turn Off the Status Window (2)
Yu Seoa’s body became a streak of silver light as she split the ground beneath her feet.
Her opening move wasn’t bad.
It was just too straight.
That was exactly the mistake people made when they first turned the System off.
Even if your mind decided to trust your senses, your body still remembered the straight-line habits drilled into it over more than ten years.
The central head of the beast read that line perfectly.
All three jaws sprang open at once, and a bundle of blood-red tentacles swept across her path like a net.
"Hunter Yu Seoa!"
Someone screamed.
In the old days, that would have been one death right there.
There was no friendly window flashing dodge timing anymore, no database feeding you the enemy’s pattern in advance.
And yet Yu Seoa didn’t die.
What had I just said?
I told her to feel it with her skin.
The tip of her foot twisted strangely in midair.
It wasn’t a calculated dodge.
It was the reaction of a beast, triggered by the shiver that ran up her spine.
A tentacle tore past, ripping a long line through the fabric at her side.
Her skin was untouched.
Not bad.
I leaned back in my wheelchair and tapped my shoulder with the backscratcher.
Yu Seoa landed and dropped her stance low.
The ice wall that had surged up over her shoulders shattered and scattered to the ground.
It wasn’t the neat hexagonal crystal she used to make under the System’s protection.
This was rough, ugly ice with jagged edges and cracks running through it.
"The defensive crystal is breaking, senior! My mana output is all over the place..."
"Of course it is. You’re shaping it yourself now instead of letting the System smooth it out for you."
I answered in a voice edged with a yawn.
"Forget about making it pretty. Ugly’s fine if it’s sturdy. Craggy ice bites better anyway."
Yu Seoa’s blue-gray eyes trembled.
Then she bit her lip and gathered the broken shards of ice again.
She didn’t try to smooth them out.
She left them raw, twisted, jagged like saw teeth.
Good.
She’d crossed a line.
The giant dog-headed bastard with three heads lifted its middle one again.
Deep in its throat, a dark crimson beam began to condense.
It was living up to the name Laser Hound.
The hunters from Gaon Guild scattered with screams.
"It’s an area breath attack! Move!"
"Raise the shield! Put up a defense skill!"
One tank reflexively hoisted his shield.
That was the textbook response the System taught you.
Deploy a barrier attuned to the beam, absorb the damage, and endure.
That textbook was toilet paper in front of a variant.
The beam punched through the shield like tofu.
The tank, shield and all, was hurled backward, rolling across the ground.
Luckily his armor was thick enough to keep him from dying on the spot, but he was frothing at the mouth and completely out of his mind.
"You insane—"
Im Taejun scooted backward on his ass.
The swagger he’d had a moment ago was gone without a trace.
His camera drone was still hovering behind him.
The lens kept trying to refocus as it streamed this scene of utter chaos.
The hundreds of thousands watching on the other side of that tiny screen were probably sweating bullets by now.
Watching in real time as heroics turned into a slaughterhouse.
I didn’t need to look to know how the chat was moving.
I was always part of the scenery.
The white-haired old man sitting in the corner, the one people forgot first the moment danger hit.
Honestly, that was more comfortable for me.
No one was ever going to point a camera at me.
Yu Seoa, in that split second before the beam struck, dropped her gaze not to the enemy’s mouth, but to the ground beneath its feet.
To the place I’d pointed out earlier.
The twisted ankle joint on the second leg from the right.
She kicked off the ground.
She didn’t try to take the beam head-on.
Instead she slipped outside its path and, at the same time, hurled one of those ugly ice spears straight at the creature’s ankle.
Crunch.
The jagged ice drove precisely into the gap in the twisted joint.
The massive body lurched.
All three heads screamed at once.
The beam veered off into empty space and turned a distant row of street trees into ash.
"I hit it..."
Yu Seoa murmured under her breath.
Even she seemed unable to believe it.
The System guide had almost certainly marked the bastard’s weak point at the center of its chest.
Instead of following that, she’d smashed the joint in a leg no one could even see clearly.
The hunters around them gaped.
"Just now... how did she do that? Not the chest, but the leg...?"
"Is that because she’s S-grade? Maybe she can see weak points we can’t."
They were drawing the wrong conclusion again.
Because it was easier on the mind to believe it was rank, talent, something innate.
What Yu Seoa had done wasn’t talent.
She had simply opened her eyes.
She had only taken off the blindfold the System had wrapped around them.
The proof came immediately.
A man who looked to be one of Gaon Guild’s subleaders stared at Yu Seoa’s strike with a flash in his eyes.
"The legs! The weak point is the legs! Everyone, go for the ankles!"
He readjusted his grip on his sword and charged toward the same leg of the beast.
It was a decent decision.
At the very least, he knew how to think.
The problem was that his eyes were still stuck on the System window.
The red targeting line that showed where a hit would land.
The recommended angle for sword aura.
The expected damage number.
He couldn’t see what Yu Seoa had seen.
He couldn’t read the subtle flow of how the ankle bent inward at certain moments, how the beast shifted its weight from one foot to another, and he swung only by coordinates, nothing more.
The beast twisted its leg just enough to mock those coordinates.
The sword aura cut through empty air, and a tentacle stabbed into the subleader’s side.
"Ghk!"
He coughed up blood and toppled over.
They’d aimed for the same leg, but one of them shattered the weak point while the other had his side torn open.
The difference wasn’t the weight of the sword.
It was the eye.
The problem was, even if one leg went down, that massive thing wasn’t dead yet.
Staggering as it was, the beast supported itself on the remaining three legs.
Then the two heads on either side of the center one simultaneously opened their jaws toward the wavering Yu Seoa.
The distance was too close, and she had already burned through almost all her mana on that last strike.
This was real combat outside the System.
One good move paid back immediately with fangs.
Yu Seoa hurried to raise another wall of ice.
Too late.
The two jaws were about to tear into both her shoulders.
I clicked my tongue softly.
That’s annoying.
If I didn’t step in here, my promising disciple candidate was going to end up with both shoulders ripped open and rolling across the floor.
Then there’d be more paperwork, a funeral would get scheduled, and the Association would be buzzing all month.
When the place was buzzing, my civil complaints work got delayed.
When my civil complaints work got delayed, my quitting time got pushed back again.
I couldn’t allow that.
I twitched my wrist and tapped the tip of the backscratcher against the floor from where it rested on the wheelchair armrest.
The Twig of the World Tree, a mythic-grade branch of the world tree, lightly tapped the cracked pavement in front of the Association.
That was all.
No flash of light, no thunderclap, no System alert.
Only the space between Yu Seoa and the beast thickened for an instant.
The mana I had scattered through the air gathered into that narrow gap and became an invisible wall.
It was the kind of wall that had once made my old title worth something.
Bang!
Both side heads slammed straight into it.
The body had already lost its balance from the ruined leg.
Forced to swallow the recoil of its own charge, the beast toppled sideways with a crunching sound.
The twisted ankle couldn’t bear its own weight any longer and snapped completely.
Before Yu Seoa’s eyes, a gap opened as if by miracle.
The creature’s exposed nape.
The spinal connection where all three heads converged.
She didn’t waste time asking why the opening had appeared.
Before her mind could even doubt it, her body moved first.
Drawing together every last scrap of mana, she brought forth a single ice spear—ugly, crude, and harder than anything she’d made before.
"This ends here."
The silver-white streak kicked off the earth once more.
This time it wasn’t straight.
She read the enemy’s breath, let its killing intent flow past her, and curved in like a beast.
The spear pierced the center of the creature’s nape.
Frost burst outward along the wound like an explosion.
The beast’s massive body froze from the inside out, and all three heads locked up at once.
Crack, crackle.
The blood-red tentacles stopped, frozen in place like specimens trapped in ice.
And then—
Rumble.
The creature, more than five meters tall, collapsed as a single enormous block of ice.
Silence fell over the park.
The red mist gradually thinned, and the torn rift in the sky began to mend itself slowly.
The first to recover were the citizens who had stopped running.
"W-we won..."
"Pale Winter got it! Yu Seoa took down that monster!"
Cheers exploded everywhere.
The surviving hunters from Gaon Guild even clapped with dazed faces.
Yu Seoa dropped to one knee, breathing hard.
Her whole body was slick with cold sweat, and her fingertips trembled from the rough way she’d forged her mana.
But her blue-gray eyes were clearer than they had ever been.
She slowly turned her head.
Not toward the cheering crowd, not toward the cameras, not toward Im Taejun sitting on the ground.
Toward the white-haired old man on the wheelchair, lazily scratching his back with a backscratcher.
When our eyes met, I quietly looked away.
I figured I should head her off before she tried to kneel too.
"You did well. Now go write your report. I need to get off work."
"Senior."
Yu Seoa stood.
Staggering a little, but walking straight.
She came to stand in front of me and, in front of the crowd watching us all, bowed properly this time.
"Please take me as your disciple."
Ah.
So this headache-inducing moment had finally arrived.
In front of dozens of hunters, in front of hundreds of thousands of viewers.
The S-grade face of one of Korea’s top guilds was bowing to a wheelchair-bound civil complaints clerk, asking to be taken in as a disciple.
The camera drone quietly turned, beginning to close in on my face.
I let out a long sigh and tapped my numbed knee with the backscratcher.
"I already said no. Too much trouble."
"I’ll buy you coffee every day. Officially unlisted grain from an imperial farm."
"...Where am I supposed to clock in starting today?"
Laughter burst out from the crowd.
Only then did Yu Seoa show a faint smile.
It wasn’t the look she’d worn in the civil complaints office, when she’d first regarded me with pity.
It wasn’t the face of someone overwhelmed by debt and gratitude, either.
It was the clear-eyed expression of someone who knew exactly what she had just crossed over.
"I’ll see you at the front gate of the Association tomorrow morning at seven."
"Eight. I like sleeping in."
"I’ll bring coffee at seven-thirty."
"...Do whatever you want."
Meanwhile, Im Taejun, still slumped on the ground, went white all over again.
He knew.
He knew that old man had nearly killed him by forcing his own mana backward with a single finger.
What he had seen and what everyone else had seen were completely different things.
All that was left now was for Im Taejun to be the only one treated like the crazy one.
I reached for my wheelchair wheels to tidy up the scene.
Today had been long.
Way too long to justify with the price of a lukewarm packet of instant coffee.
But then a familiar notification sound started ringing out in quick succession from someone’s phone.
At first one device.
Then ten.
Then, all at once, every phone left in the park began vibrating.
It looked like one viewer watching Im Taejun’s channel had paused the footage and then rewound it at half speed.
A blurry frame near the corner of the screen just before the giant beast toppled over.
The 0.3-second shot of the white-haired old man seated in a wheelchair, tapping the floor lightly with the tip of the backscratcher.
A screenshot with a red circle drawn around that moment was already climbing the live best posts on Hunter Gallery.