How to Tame an S-Rank and an A-Rank (2)
Docheol was the kind of man who had no intention of hearing anyone say no.
That hadn’t changed in twenty years. Not then, and not now.
The next morning, I found myself in the back seat of Baekho Guild’s black magical van, whether I liked it or not.
A box of Mocha Gold rested on my knees.
Advance payment, he said.
“This doesn’t mean the contract is signed.”
“You already finished a box.”
“...Got proof?”
“Twelve empty wrappers in the trash under your desk. From just yesterday.”
I shut my mouth.
The observational powers of first-generation hunters were absurdly accurate at times like this.
“I’m just an administrative clerk with no authority over approvals. Anything to do with mutants is the association response team’s problem, or the guild’s.”
“The response team couldn’t handle it, so they came to you.”
“Then it’s already gone to hell. That’s just how the world works.”
Docheol glanced at me in the rearview mirror.
“Still all talk, I see.”
“You need your mouth to stay alive. My legs aren’t moving.”
The van left the city center and stopped at a gate on the outskirts.
A D-grade gate.
Under System classification, it was the kind of gate even rookies could clear like they were out on a picnic.
In front of it, a group of Baekho Guild’s elite newcomers stood in a rigid line, all of them wearing grim expressions.
Every one of them had excellent posture and dense mana.
They were on a completely different level from publicity hunters like Im Taejun.
In other words, these were the next-generation elites—carefully selected from the top of the academy and raised by the guild from the ground up.
And yet those kids were standing in front of a single D-grade gate with faces like the sky had fallen.
“This one D-grade gate, our kids have gone in three times and retreated all three times.”
Docheol dragged his prosthetic leg and pointed at the gate.
“No one was wiped out, but every time they came crawling back out with a pile of injuries. The System says it’s a normal D-grade, and the boss matches the guide exactly. But they keep getting beaten.”
“So you want me to go in? In a wheelchair?”
“I just need your eyes.”
I sighed and got out of the van.
At that very moment, one of the lined-up rookies let out a derisive snort.
He was a handsome young man in a stiff magical coat.
One of those faces that looked like it ought to have an academy valedictorian medal pinned to his chest.
“Vice-Guild Leader. With all due respect, how is an association clerk supposed to help with gate clearing?”
“Jin Seojun.”
Docheol called his name in a low voice, but the young man didn’t back down.
“You really believe that old-man-with-a-spatula nonsense spreading around the galleries? You’re seriously going to let someone in a wheelchair take a look at what we couldn’t clear? Honestly, that’s insulting.”
Jin Seojun, the Baekho Guild’s next ace, an A-grade hunter.
His attitude was arrogant, but his posture never wavered.
At the very least, he wasn’t some clown like Im Taejun.
Which meant he was genuinely talented inside the System.
That made it even more amusing.
The more talented someone was, the harder they crashed when the System lied to them.
“I’m not going in.”
I said.
“Pardon?”
“I’m not entering a dungeon. If I wheel into a mine tunnel and lose a wheel, who’s going to take responsibility for that?”
Jin Seojun’s mouth twisted.
Like I’d just proven his point for him.
I took one packet from the Mocha Gold box on my knees and stirred it into hot water from my thermos.
Then I sat in a folding chair by the gate and took a leisurely sip.
“Play the clearing footage. The part where they retreated at the end.”
Jin Seojun reluctantly worked the bracelet terminal on his wrist.
A holographic video appeared in the air.
It showed the rookie team sweeping through the tunnel and neatly cutting down mutated kobolds.
By the System’s judgment, every kill flashed gray and toppled over.
Their coordination was excellent.
Their formation was textbook-perfect, and their skill chains were clean.
These kids really did fight well inside the System.
Before long, they reached the boss room.
They brought down a large kobold chieftain with a coordinated assault.
Big letters appeared in the air.
Dungeon Cleared.
The rookie team breathed a sigh of relief and turned back toward the entrance.
That was where I stopped the video.
“That’s as far as you saw.”
“...Yes. The clear message appeared, and then on the way back to the entrance, they were ambushed from behind. We definitely killed everything.”
“And who told you you killed everything?”
“The System...”
“Right. The System said that.”
I took another sip of coffee.
“Those things you thought you killed? They weren’t dead.”
Jin Seojun’s brows drew together.
“What are you talking about? Their HP definitely dropped to zero. The kill confirmation came through properly too.”
“They learned how to play dead in a way that matches the System’s judgment. A mutation. They lay low with their HP gauge showing zero, and the moment you turn your backs, they get up and bite your throats out.”
“A creature with zero HP being alive is a contradiction. That would mean denying the System itself...”
“Who decided the System can’t lie?”
I pointed at the video.
One of the kobolds lying there, faded gray like a corpse.
The tip of its tail was twitching, just barely.
Dead bodies don’t move like that.
“There. That tail. Why would a dead thing’s tail move?”
Jin Seojun leaned so far into the screen it looked like he might press his nose against it.
Only then did the color drain from his face.
“If you go in again, the same thing will happen. You kill the boss, the clear message appears, and then they hit you from behind on the way back to the entrance.”
Jin Seojun let out a hollow laugh.
“A creature with zero HP being alive—that’s a direct denial of the System itself. That’s impossible.”
“Then go in and prove it. When the clear message appears, don’t run straight for the entrance. Turn around once. Is that really so hard?”
Jin Seojun bit his lip.
His pride stung, he strode into the gate with his subordinates in tow.
I leaned back in the chair and opened a second packet.
Yu Seoa, standing beside me, spoke quietly.
Seen up close, his face was clearly around my age. But the air he gave off was that of a veteran who’d been through decades of hell. In this line of work, where a hunter’s lifespan was shorter than a pro gamer’s and most people retired after four or five years, someone with that kind of presence could get away with being called an old man.
“Senior, you didn’t even go in. How did you know? You only watched the footage once.”
“The tail moved.”
“...You saw that? I watched it five times and missed it.”
“You’ve only collected two pebbles so far. Of course you can’t see much.”
Yu Seoa fell silent.
Then she took the terminal from me and replayed the footage from the beginning.
“You could have told Hunter Jin Seojun directly. That he shouldn’t go in.”
“Why would I do that?”
“If he’d understood it the first time, no one would’ve gotten hurt.”
I took another sip of coffee.
“No one believes a thing just because you say it a hundred times. A grumpy old man’s lecture isn’t going to break ten years of faith the System built into them. They have to get bit in the back once before they finally open their eyes.”
“...Aren’t you a little too unfriendly?”
“Unfriendly is fastest. Besides, I don’t have the energy to be kind.”
Yu Seoa snorted with laughter.
Then she began staring hard at the kobold’s twitching tail.
Good posture.
About thirty minutes later, the gate flashed and Jin Seojun’s rookie team poured out again in a rush.
This time, there were even more injured than before.
With deep claw marks across his shoulder, Jin Seojun looked as white as a sheet.
His coat hem was shredded to pieces.
“It said cleared... It definitely said cleared.”
He spoke haltingly.
“We killed the boss and the clear message appeared, so just like you said, I turned around. But the guys who were lying there gray and dead... they were literally dead-looking corpses, and one of them was staring right at me.”
Jin Seojun’s hand trembled.
“The moment I hesitated, six of them stood up at once. The zero-HP ones. The ones that had definitely been confirmed as killed...”
He couldn’t finish and sank to the ground.
That was the first time in his life the blue letters he’d trusted as absolute truth betrayed him head-on.
Docheol shot me a sidelong glance.
Half of that look said, I figured as much, and the other half said, There it is again.
Twenty years ago, I’d been good at this too.
Finding the invisible flaw before anyone else could see it.
Only back then, I used it to save people, and now I used it to earn coffee money.
I had no intention of getting up.
Instead, I jabbed my chin toward Yu Seoa.
“Seoa. Go finish it.”
“Me?”
“There are probably a few more of those dead-playing bastards left in there. Don’t look at the System windows. Use your own eyes, and make sure they’re really dead before you come back out. Ignore the clear message if you have to.”
Yu Seoa stood.
Jin Seojun looked up at her in a daze.
He seemed unable to understand why Baekho’s headline ace would head into a gate without complaint after a single word from some administrative old man.
“Just remember one thing.”
I added to her back.
“Those things are waiting for the one moment you let your guard down. The instant the clear message appears is the most dangerous time. That’s when hunters usually relax.”
Right before Yu Seoa entered the gate, she shut off her System window herself.
Then her back vanished into the gate’s blue light.
I sank into the folding chair and closed my eyes.
I couldn’t see what was happening inside the gate.
But if I followed the texture of mana moving through the air, I could vaguely tell what was going on in there.
A cold, rough stream of mana swept through the tunnel.
That was Yu Seoa.
Every time that mana paused, one faint twitch of life would go still with a soft, final stop.
Six times.
It stopped exactly six times.
Among the corpses the System had painted gray, she was picking out the six that still had breath left in them.
Not with her eyes, but with her skin.
At this point, she’d earned about three pebbles.
Fifteen minutes later.
Yu Seoa came out looking perfectly fine, with not a single drop of black blood on her clothes.
“There were six more. All of them showed zero HP, and all of them were alive.”
She reported it calmly.
“The clear message was already up when I went in. If I’d trusted that alone, I would’ve left my back exposed too.”
The rookie team was speechless.
They had gone into that gate three times and come out bleeding all three times, while Yu Seoa had walked in with the System turned off and come back out without a scratch.
“Senior.”
Yu Seoa turned to me.
“These mutants were deliberately deceiving the System’s judgment, weren’t they? How can an animal learn something like that?”
“How should I know?”
I shrugged.
“But think about it. Hunters have been hunting in the same pattern for over ten years. The clear message appears, they relax, they turn their backs. Every single time, the same thing. After getting beaten millions of times like that, even the other side starts to learn. When humans get lazy, monsters get cunning.”
It wasn’t a serious analysis.
More like idle chatter that happened to come to me while I was drinking coffee.
But judging by the way Docheol’s expression stiffened a little, it hadn’t been complete nonsense.
Jin Seojun asked in a trembling voice, “How... how can you ignore the clear message? That’s everything a hunter is.”
Yu Seoa looked down at him.
Only a few days ago, she’d been the one asking the same question.
“It isn’t everything. It’s just a reference.”
Jin Seojun’s pupils shook.
I finished my now-cold coffee and yawned.
It hadn’t even been that hard, and somehow the day had gotten longer for no reason.
Then an alert sounded repeatedly from someone’s terminal behind the rookie team.
Baekho Guild’s official broadcast drone, which had been filming the gate entrance, had been streaming the whole thing.
My phone was still quiet.
Instead, Docheol came over with a satisfied expression and dropped another box of Mocha Gold onto my knees.
“Performance bonus. Next gate is the day after tomorrow.”
“I said I’m not doing it.”
“This one’s a little higher in mutant rank. It’s a C-grade gate, but the System keeps wavering between labeling it B-grade and D-grade.”
“Then I’m even less interested. I’m on municipal complaints duty the day after tomorrow.”
“That duty’s already been removed. I mentioned it to the association on Baekho’s behalf, and they pulled you out right away.”
I fell silent.
The association, now basically a subcontractor afraid of the guild’s mood, would happily swap out an employee’s duty shift with a single word from Baekho’s vice-guild leader.
This old man still had the same talent for sealing off every possible escape route before people could run.
He had done this exact thing when planning operations twenty years ago too.
“Jin Seojun.”
At Docheol’s call, the boy who had been sitting on the ground sprang to his feet.
Then he came over to me and bowed deeply, right there in front of the crowd.
“M-Mr. Kang. Please teach me too. How to ignore the clear message.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I’ll serve you loyally for life.”
“Not that.”
I looked down at the three boxes of Mocha Gold stacked on my knees.
Then I looked at Yu Seoa standing beside me, and at Jin Seojun, who had bent his waist again.
The thought of throwing pebbles at the two of them was already making my shoulders ache.
“...One more box of Mocha Gold. And you two go pick up the pebbles yourselves.”
Yu Seoa and Jin Seojun bowed at the same time.
I had gained a second disciple.
And peace had become that much farther away.
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