The True Worth of the Cherry Tomato
Kim Jinsu pushed his stiff, aching body up off the bed. He rolled his neck and swung his arms. Nothing wrong with his condition.
He was a D-Rank Hunter, one of the ranks that made up most of the hunters in South Korea. A-Rank Hunters and B-Rank Hunters were suns he could not even look at. Half a year ago he had been wounded while assaulting a Gate and had been convalescing ever since. The injury had been fatal. The doctor told him that if not for a hunter's stubborn hold on life, he might already have left this world.
When the doctor added that an ordinary person with a wound like that would have died on the spot, or failed to last even three minutes, the chill that crawled up the back of his neck told him exactly how bad it had been.
Today he had to clear a D-Rank Gate. While he lay in bed the state covered most of the medical bills, but he still had to shoulder a share of them himself.
And above all, the mortgage on the house was not yet paid off. Some people quit being hunters after an injury this severe, or after a long convalescence, broken by PTSD. Fortunately, he was mentally tough. Even a wound that demanded half a year of recovery had not stopped him.
The truth was that Kim Jinsu feared the bank hounding him for debt more than he feared a Gate packed with snarling monsters. Monsters, you could just beat down and be done with them. There was no way to knock a bank flat. If anyone was going to get knocked flat, it was him. The guards on a bank's payroll were not your ordinary civilians.
Hunters stronger than he was would come through his front door and demand he pay what he owed. Then he would have no way to stop them, and nothing to do but meekly cough the money back up.
And because the injury had come from his own carelessness, he could at least be certain it would never happen again. It had been the wound of a short career.
Once he was up, he confirmed that time still remained before the rendezvous and started packing. Gates had existed long enough that a clear followed a more or less fixed route. Civil servants explained the danger rating inside and everything you needed to prepare, so all he had to do was get his things together.
"Hmm... will this do?"
The moment you entered a Gate you were roughing it for days, so he began gathering odds and ends of daily necessities. Hunters carried bags built like military rucksacks, tough and rigid, because a Gate clear demanded a great many things.
Most important of all, he was laying in food. This was eating in the field, so anything that required cooking was off the table. Like the combat rations a soldier ate, he had to choose food that was already prepared. He still had a fair stock of what he had bought before the injury. The expiration dates were closing in, and he needed to eat through it quickly.
He tossed in roughly ten meals of the usual fare. That alone would carry him three or four days. The tradeoff was that none of it tasted like much. Food that had already been cooked never tasted especially good. It was just all right.
With a pack as large as a soldier's on his back, Kim Jinsu arrived at the site where the Gate shimmered and rippled. Several people were already gathered. A civil servant stood beside it with a blank face. Unless a Gate was C-Rank or higher, there was little tension in the air. The monsters that came out of one like this were all of a kind.
The scene put him in mind of a day-labor office: gather a few strangers with nothing in common and send them wherever hands were needed. In a sense, that was exactly it. A low-rank hunter's work was the same as any grunt's. He just got paid a little more.
"You're Mr. Jinsu?"
"Ah. Yes, that's me."
The civil servant came over and began confirming identities. Four hunters, it seemed, would be going in today. Once he had checked Kim Jinsu, he checked the others as well. After the round of introductions, Kim Jinsu stepped into the Gate with his nerves drawn reasonably tight.
It was his first Gate in half a year, and it felt like the first time he had ever gone through one. He had been this tense back then, and now that he was faced with it again, the feeling was exactly the same. Still, he had some experience behind him, and he shook the tension off soon enough.
"All right, we rest here and eat!"
Kim Chunsik, picked as leader for the day, was the one who said it. He was a hunter in his fifties, an eternal D-Rank. Even so, the earnings were good enough that he drove an imported car, or so he claimed.
"Yes!"
Kim Jinsu lowered his tired body to the ground and took a brief rest. It was a Gate that mostly spawned goblins, so it had not been particularly hard, but combat still stacked fatigue in the body whether you wanted it to or not.
"Mm..."
Strange, how being inside a Gate made you crave food from the outside. You could not eat that sort of thing in here, though. If you wanted a meal you could actually cook, you probably had to be C-Rank at least. Kim Jinsu rummaged through his pack and pulled out an instant meal, something in the neighborhood of combat rations. His appetite was poor, so he meant to eat kimchi fried rice.
He turned his head, took in his companions, and a question formed. It was time to eat, yet the others had not so much as brought food out. They were simply leaned against their packs, bodies tipped back to rest. However much of a nuisance eating was, miss this window and you would be starving clean through until evening...
Wearing a look of pure incomprehension, Kim Jinsu asked Kim Chunsik, who was resting beside him. The older man was gazing up at the sky and smoking.
"Excuse me, sir. You're not eating?"
Asked with a face that said he could not make sense of any of it, Kim Jinsu got a puzzled look in return, and Kim Chunsik put the question back to him.
"Hm? Jinsu, you don't know about the Starlight Cherry Tomato?"
A cherry tomato? He could not begin to imagine how many hundreds it would take to fill him up. When Kim Jinsu's face went blank with confusion, Kim Chunsik stared at him the way a man stares at a caveman.
"Hah... I wondered, what with you just getting out of the hospital. But that really is the face of a man who doesn't know."
As he spoke, Kim Chunsik drew a Starlight Cherry Tomato from his pocket. Kim Jinsu looked at a cherry tomato that seemed perfectly ordinary from every angle.
"This is... just a cherry tomato, isn't it?"
To look at it, it was no different from a common one. Eat a few of these and they would not so much as send word to his stomach.
Kim Chunsik regarded him and clicked his tongue. In a way, was this not a young man even slower to take in new information than he himself was, and he the far older of the two?
"Just eat one. Then you'll see what a Starlight Cherry Tomato can really do."
Kim Jinsu took the tomato he was offered and put it in his mouth. A few chews, and it melted like ice cream, slipping smooth down his throat.
"It is tasty, I'll give it that."
The flavor was in a different league from any other cherry tomato. Watching that reaction, though, Kim Chunsik looked as if he could barely keep from laughing. Kim Jinsu did not understand the older man's expression—until the fullness arrived, and he had no choice but to set a hand on his stomach. He had eaten a single cherry tomato, and his belly felt as comfortably full as if he had put away a solid meal.
"Huh...?"
"So the fullness just hit you. It's a cherry tomato from Starlight Foods. One of them runs a full thousand calories—premium rations. And it isn't like chocolate, where all you've got is the calories. It's a balanced food, loaded with every kind of nutrient."
Hearing that, Kim Jinsu understood why no one was eating a proper meal. In a Gate, where you barely had an appetite to begin with, there was a way to settle food this easily!
One of the inconveniences hunters always named was how miserable it was to eat inside a Gate, but with a tomato like this you never had to suffer that again. After a hunt there was the queasy reek of the fluids a monster gave off, and some hunts were so fierce a coppery tang rose in your mouth. On days like that, no matter how good the food, appetite simply would not come. You were hungry, and still your body did not want to eat.
Even so, however little appetite you had, a single one of these cherry tomatoes went down without any trouble at all.
"This... where can I buy them, sir?"
Wonder written across his face, Kim Jinsu stared at the cherry tomato in Kim Chunsik's hand.
"You just go to a supermarket or a convenience store. They sell them."
That day, Kim Jinsu saw a whole new world.