Chapter 1
#01. Matching
Name: Kang Hyunwoo, age 21.
He was an ordinary college student, the kind you could find anywhere.
But if there was one thing that set him apart, it was that he was a lifelong virgin who had never dated?
Of course, being a lifelong virgin at twenty-one wasn't all that rare, and there were even people older than him who were still virgins who had never dated.
“Sigh, this is just self-justification in the end.”
Just because there were lots of people like that didn't make it something to be proud of.
Rather, spending over a year of campus life in a department overwhelmingly dominated by women, yet failing to make even one female friend he was close to, let alone a girlfriend, clearly meant there was something wrong somewhere.
"My face isn't exactly bad, either..."
Neither his face nor his body was bad enough to make a bad first impression right off the bat.
'I have to enlist soon, and when I come back, there's no doubt they'll treat me even less like a person than they do now. So am I, a college student—not a high schooler—supposed to stay a virgin until graduation?'
At least in high school, there had been plenty of other virgins besides him, so it had been fine.
But now that he was an adult, remaining a virgin until graduating college was something he simply couldn't accept as a man.
"Haa... Even so, going to a brothel to get it over with would really be a last resort..."
His pride wouldn't allow him to lose his virginity at a brothel.
Better to just live as a virgin until thirty and become a wizard.
Grrrgl-
..."Should I eat first and think about it?"
As usual, he tore open a package of ramen.
A poor student's best friend.
Then it suddenly occurred to him that if he were dating someone, instead of ramen costing less than a thousand won per pack, he'd be eating pasta that cost over twenty thousand won a bowl.
And with his girlfriend's portion too, forty thousand won would go toward a single meal.
Just imagining it for a moment sent a chill down his spine strong enough to make air conditioning unnecessary.
As expected, dating was a luxury his wallet couldn't afford.
"Looks cooked enough. Where did I put the bowl?"
He set the pot atop a textbook for his major, using it as a trivet.
This fucking, ridiculously thick textbook for his major had cost him a fortune, and he'd even had it bound, yet those so-called professors only taught from PowerPoint.
Thanks to that, all he had accumulated were unnecessarily expensive ramen trivets.
Still, what could he do? If it pissed him off... what could he do?
There was nothing a mere student like him could do. He might as well just eat his ramen.
Slurp- As he ate a mouthful of ramen and browsed NewTube, a news story he normally wouldn't have spared a glance at caught his eye.
The headline was unusual.
[A New S-Rank Hunter Appears in Japan!]
"What a commotion."
If he remembered correctly, this meant Japan had now become an absurd hunter superpower with no fewer than eleven S-rank hunters.
By comparison, South Korea had only four, a woefully inadequate number considering the country also had to fend off monsters coming down from the north.
"Well, Korea's... pretty safe, more or less."
It felt a little unfair to complain about getting a bad spawn point when at least this wasn't South America or Southeast Asia.
Sure, people occasionally died to monsters, but the country hadn't been occupied by villains.
While he was lost in other thoughts, the woman who had supposedly newly become S-rank this time stepped onto the stage in the video.
She was ridiculously beautiful.
The Japanese prime minister was on the stage. He hung a medal-like object around the woman's neck, then they laughed and shook hands as a barrage of camera flashes went off.
Watching that made his appetite abruptly vanish, so he set his phone aside.
He was jealous.
Even if he couldn't become an S-rank hunter, if he just awakened some incredible superpower, he could quit living off ramen at every meal and get a pretty girlfriend too.
He knew perfectly well that nothing like that would happen, and that such a life was absolutely impossible in this lifetime, so all that came out was a hollow laugh.
He could almost taste the bitterness in his mouth.
Still, not wanting to waste what remained, he crammed down the rest of the ramen and picked up his phone to find something that might improve his mood.
Ding-
[The Otherworld Dating App has been installed]
Right then, a notification popped up.
"...?"
It was a notification saying an app he'd never seen before had been installed.
“What is this?”
Naturally, he hadn't installed anything like it.
When would he have had the time to install something while watching NewTube?
“Did I hit an ad while putting my phone aside earlier?”
Otherwise, there was no way to explain it.
No matter how advanced voice-phishing technology had become, there was no way some strange app could install itself when he hadn't even clicked a link or received a text.
“Speaking of which, a dating app...”
He had tried random chat a few times in the past.
But every room was full of people asking about his gender the moment he entered, going, ‘ㅇㅈ?’; he quit pretty quickly. Still, a dating app was a first.
“Should I give it a try?”
It seemed worth trying just to kill some time.
From the shoddy icon design to the bizarre naming sense behind ‘Otherworld Dating App,’ it screamed of something some shitty little company had slapped together to make a quick buck and run, but he had no intention of paying anyway.
Apps like this often made the first match free, though the problem—if it could be called one—was that the match was overwhelmingly likely to be a company employee.
When he launched the app, a truly half-assed design greeted him.
[Otherworld Dating App]
[Shop][Match][Profile]
“...Look at the state of this main screen.”
It was practically on the level of something made in Paint, not PowerPoint.
Right, the important thing wasn't UI design.
Whether it was a company employee or an AI, as long as it was enough to kill time, that was all he needed.
After thinking for a moment, he went into his profile first.
As expected, it was a place to enter his information, but uniquely, it also had a field for race.
“Is this why it's called an otherworld dating app? The concept is kind of interesting.”
For now, he entered only his age and name.
Next, he went into the shop. As he'd said, he had no intention of paying; he was just curious what they sold.
[The shop function is currently locked]
"What?"
What the hell? Wasn't this app made by people planning to make a quick score and skip town?
He couldn't understand why the most important feature, the shop, was locked.
"Come to think of it, I don't see any ad banners, either."
Did it even have a revenue model?
If money wasn't the goal, had they made this app just to harvest personal information?
But if that was the case, there were plenty of easier ways—and besides, he'd heard personal information wasn't worth all that much anyway.
"Well... if they don't want to make money, that's not my problem."
Either way, all that mattered was that the dating app made good matches.
Hoping that even an AI had been made with at least a little effort, he pressed the Match button.
Ding-
[First match confirmed]
[Thank you for using this app. Please complete the survey before the matching process begins]
"A survey?"
[Preferred race]
[Preferred gender]
[Preferred age range]
[Preferred hobbies]
·
·
·
·
·
"Whoa..."
Now that he looked at it, was this not an app made for a quick score at all, but one made simply for fun?
Otherwise, they wouldn't have casually included race among the survey items, or things like dissecting corpses under preferred hobbies.
"They really nailed the concept.“
At this point, it was starting to get pretty fun.
He didn't know who had made the survey, but there were enough varied categories to show that they'd put a fair amount of effort into it. About fifty or so?
At once impressed and half-serious, half-amused, he began filling out the items.
He chose elf as his preferred race, female as his preferred gender, naturally, and set the age range to around five hundred years. As he continued filling in the items here and there, time flew by.
[Thank you for cooperating with the survey]
[Matching will begin shortly]
[Matching may take some time, so please be patient]
He began to get a little excited at the thought that the app developer might reply in character as a five-hundred-year-old elf.
"...Taking a while."
Contrary to his expectations, a match wasn't found as easily as he'd thought.
'Did everyone go home for the evening? Can't it at least match me with an AI?'
In the end, no match had appeared even by the time he finished his ramen.
He wasn't the type to wait around that long, so he tossed his phone aside and cleared the table.
As more and more time passed, he eventually even forgot that he'd started the matching process.
Ding-
A strangely grating notification sound reached his ears.
He picked up his phone at the sound.
[Matching complete]
"Oh, finally."
The damn developer was finally doing their job.
With a strange sense of anticipation, he hurriedly touched his phone.
Flash-
"Huh?"
[Moving to Planet EB-17]
An enormous light pouring from the screen swallowed him whole.
***
Deep beneath the World Tree, said to be the last god remaining aboveground, lay a vast cavern known to few.
Even the people of Pelledia, the elven nation built around the World Tree, knew nothing of its existence.
A single prisoner had been confined in such a place for no less than two hundred years.
“...Resilia.”
Even in the pitch-black darkness, her blond hair gleamed, her green eyes glowed softly, and her ears stretched long unlike a human's.
An elf.
She was so beautiful that it was impossible to imagine she had committed a high-treasonous crime serious enough to land her in a lightless hell.
“How much longer am I going to remain in this place...”
Her lament echoed hollowly through the cavern, scattering without a single listener.
Though elves were said to live for dozens of times longer than humans, or even more, two hundred years of imprisonment was by no means easy.
The hellish loneliness of having no visitors, along with the fact that she had been imprisoned here because of the betrayal of her most trusted subordinate, who was also a beloved friend, were both gnawing away at her mind.
All that remained to her now were her conflicted feelings toward her friend and questions without answers.
Why did you betray me?
What could possibly have been so important?
In this place, where there was no one to answer, even those questions merely echoed hollowly before fading away.
"...I'm lonely."
Iris, the underground cavern's sole prisoner, was worn down by the loneliness that grew greater with each passing day.
Could anyone even imagine it?
She had spent no less than two hundred years without contact with another person.
No one had come to visit her, let alone speak with her.
There was neither a jailer nor another prisoner.
Iris was the only one here.
This unfillable emptiness and loneliness were not the sort anyone could possibly endure.
Even for her, a high elf who had lived for hundreds of years, contact with others was incredibly precious.
"If only..."
Her eyes, gazing at the sharp fragment of stone rolling across the floor, sank into even deeper darkness.
'Would ending this miserable life finally bring me peace...?'
Even elves, said to be free of worldly desire unlike humans, could frame someone they followed for the sake of power and lock them in an underground prison for two hundred years; they could even commit the great sin of taking their own life, the very life God had bestowed upon them for the sake of rest.
The moment her slender, deathly white, trembling hand closed around the stone fragment—
Flash!
“Eek?!”
In the dark void overhead, where not a single ray of light ever descended, an enormous beam of light flashed as if exploding.
Squinting at the sudden brightness after so long in darkness, she glimpsed a blurry human figure within the light.
"U-uuuaaa!!! Fuuuck!!!"
"...A person?"
A person was falling from midair.
Without time to wonder what was happening, Iris instinctively gathered her mana.
With the last scrap of mana she had left, she cast a spell.
Levitation.
The successfully cast spell slowed Kang Hyunwoo's plummet, making him descend toward the ground as though a parachute had opened.
Thanks to that, Kang Hyunwoo was able to set foot on the ground safely. Without Iris's swift response, by now Kang Hyunwoo would have become ‘what used to be a human.’
Kang Hyunwoo, barely getting to his feet on trembling legs, stared blankly at Iris standing before him.
..."An elf?"