Chapter 5
As the examiner stood there gaping and stammering, messages appeared one after another before my eyes.
[All monsters in the Stage 1 Gate, ‘Three-Eyed Rabbit Meadow,’ have been exterminated.]
[The dungeon has been cleared. You will be ejected from the dungeon in 60 seconds.]
“All the monsters...?”
There were several types of Gates.
Some were ordinary Gates shared by multiple people, while others reset the entire dungeon inside whenever someone entered.
These were called instance-type Gates, or simply instance Gates.
This Stage 1 Gate at the Gangnam Assessment Center was the latter.
Instance-type Gates were considered cleared when every monster inside had been killed.
In other words, I’d killed every monster in this Gate.
Hmm, now that I think about it...
I’d ordered the bacteria to kill the rabbits, but I hadn’t specified how many.
I’d thought they’d only kill ten, but they must’ve spread out and killed all the rabbits across the meadow.
Was this the terror of biological weapons?
Just as I thought I’d have to specify the range properly from now on,
I was caught up in a swirl of light and ejected from the dungeon.
A message appeared at the same time.
[Great achievement! You have cleared ‘Three-Eyed Rabbit Meadow’ in the shortest time ever.]
[As a reward, you have received a ‘C-Rank Random Guardian Summon Ticket.’]
A Guardian Summon Ticket, huh...
I didn't even know if that was good or bad.
[Your Class Master, the Constellation Avicenna, intervenes in your reward!]
[Your reward has been replaced with ‘Avicenna’s Bloodgold Golem.’]
“Huh?”
Class Master? They can replace rewards?
I wanted to see what kind of reward it was.
But I had to put that off.
Beyond the fading light, everyone inside the assessment center was staring at me.
And the overriding emotion in their eyes was... sheer shock.
**
A woman fell into step beside Ryu Hyeonsu as he walked over with a grin, and spoke to him.
“Senior, did something happen? You look cheerful.”
“It did.”
Ryu Hyeonsu tapped at his waist, where his sword hung without its scabbard.
“Where’d you sell your scabbard?”
“I left it with the new era!”
“That’s a line from a comic, isn’t it? I keep telling you to stop reading comics.”
Though few people knew it, Ryu Hyeonsu was a fan of manga and anime. He scratched his head and replied,
“Ahem. I had a bit of a run-in earlier.”
When Ryu Hyeonsu briefly explained what had happened, the woman’s eyes widened.
“He took your scabbard apart without you even noticing?”
“Yeah. And it was a rookie who’d just come in for an assessment. Pretty amazing, huh?”
Even by pushing his aura to its limits, he couldn’t break something down so completely that it left no trace.
What was even more absurd was that, despite the power involved, he hadn’t felt any mana flowing at all.
If someone had been pulling some trick, his senses should have picked it up, but he hadn’t noticed a thing.
Ryu Hyeonsu stared intently at Kim Segyun’s back as he prepared to enter the Gate, then said,
“Anyway, I’d say he’s the most promising rookie I’ve seen in a while.”
“You’re going to buy low on him right away, aren’t you? Let me check how much signing money we can free up...”
As she pulled out her phone to check something, Ryu Hyeonsu gently caught her wrist to stop her and shook his head.
“I don’t want to approach him like that.”
“Like what?”
“Too capitalistic? There’s no romance in that. No romance at all.”
“All the people who went looking for that damn romance are dead, and now you’re the only one left in the industry, Senior. Do you know how many rookies you’ve lost by going on about romance?”
“If I let him slip away, you’ll reel him in and package him up nicely anyway. Besides... he said he was my fan. How can I just bring up a contract right off the bat?”
“Isn’t that why the company gave you shares and made you chief scout?”
His junior’s sharp retort made Ryu Hyeonsu smile wryly.
“You’re right. This job’s a pain in the ass.”
“He’s entering the rookie Gate now. How long do you think he’ll take?”
“I think I heard he was a mage.”
“Then three minutes?”
“Five. If a mage does it in that time, he’s SSS-rank.”
“You seem to have high expectations.”
Mages were generally late bloomers.
They were different from warrior-type classes, which could show considerable power right from the start.
A talented rookie warrior could kill ten monsters in as little as a minute or two, but five minutes was already quite fast for a mage.
And how long had it been?
It hadn’t even been three minutes since he entered.
“Huh?”
A golden light appeared at the Gate entrance.
“W-What? Is that a clear?”
The two of them widened their eyes in surprise.
Murmurs rose from the people around them as well.
That golden light didn’t appear when someone simply left a Gate.
It appeared only when a Gate was completely cleared and its occupants were forcibly ejected.
“Did anyone else enter the Gate?”
“N-No. Kim Segyun is the only examinee who just went in.”
“Then why is there a clear?”
“I don’t know.”
The startled conversation among the Gangnam Center employees reached them.
The only two people who could answer their questions.
The examiner and Kim Segyun emerged through the golden light.
“Examiner! Examiner!”
The examiner stood there dumbfounded, mouth hanging open, and only came to his senses when people shouted at him.
“Y-Yes? Yes...!”
Though he was currently working as an examiner, he had once been a Hunter who’d cleared stages up to a fairly high level.
Seeing someone like him wearing an utterly disbelieving expression only made everyone more curious.
“What on earth happened in there? Did you clear it, Examiner?”
“N-No. The examinee...”
Murmurs rose.
If he’d killed ten monsters in that amount of time, he’d be recognized as a top-tier rookie.
But a clear?
It had never happened before.
It might have been dismissed as just a Stage 1 dungeon.
In truth, assessments at the Assessment Center were little more than a formality to determine whether someone passed or failed the Hunter qualification.
Even so, they carried considerable weight as the debut stage for rookies.
“W-What was the assessment record?”
“The ten-kill time was one second... The clear time was... I think just under twenty seconds.”
Normally, they only counted the time it took to kill ten monsters and didn’t bother recording anything after that.
Killing ten was the test, and there wasn’t any extra reward for clearing the whole Gate.
But the Gate had naturally been cleared before he’d even been ejected after killing ten.
So the clear time hadn’t been measured precisely, but most of the people here were Hunters or former Hunters.
They could make a rough estimate of the actual clear time.
“If you add the delay entering the Gate and the automatic ejection delay after clearing... it really only took around thirty seconds from entry. And if you factor in the preparation time...”
That was Ryu Hyeonsu’s assessment after hearing the examiner from a distance.
His junior clenched her fist and said,
“Don’t stop me. Even if you do, I’m going to go make contact.”
“I wasn’t going to stop you, but...”
Gesturing with his chin toward the nearby scouts, who were greedily eyeing Segyun as if they’d spotted a gold nugget lying on the ground, Ryu Hyeonsu shrugged.
“Looks like buying low is already out of the question.”
**
Naturally, I passed.
After getting my Hunter license in no time, I left the assessment center, only to be approached by a huge crowd.
“RJ Management! If you join our agency...!”
“Starfish Management! Here, take my business card!”
The Hunter management agencies, too.
“Daehyun Group’s Resource Development Division!”
“We’re from Sekyung Group!”
The companies, too.
“Fresh Wind Guild! At our guild...”
“Phoenix Guild, the number one guild in the U.S., Korean branch!”
Even the guilds.
One of them was even foreign.
Countless scouts were showing interest in me.
No, ‘interest’ didn’t begin to describe it.
They were ecstatic.
Before I knew it, my hand was full of business cards.
When I could barely accept any more, someone approached me from behind.
“Ah, sorry. I don’t have a free hand.”
“Use this.”
It was a familiar voice.
“...Zephyros?”
“I told you, I’m Ryu Hyeonsu now. Haha.”
Smiling, Mr. Ryu Hyeonsu handed me a small waist pouch.
“Th-Thank you. I’ll use it for a bit and return it.”
“Just keep it. The company had a bunch made as giveaways, and they’re piled up in the warehouse. See the RHS logo on it?”
“Oh, you’re right.”
“Want a tip?”
“A tip?”
“Never choose a company by searching online. The internet these days is crawling with viral marketing. I’ve seen a lot of rookies get screwed over by it and end up at weird places while I’ve been scouting.”
“Ah...!”
I felt a little called out.
I’d been planning to look up the companies whose cards I’d gotten as soon as I got home.
“Young people these days try to decide everything over the internet. You can think of this as some old-timer’s ‘back in my day’ story, but in our time, we met with every company individually, even inspected their facilities before making a decision.”
“Thank you.”
“If you’re grateful, want to join our company?”
“Huh? Uh, well...”
W-What should I do?
Of course, Zephyros’s company probably wasn’t a bad place...
“Hahaha! I’m kidding, kidding! What happened to everything I just told you? You’re already worrying. In that kind of situation, you can say this.”
“S-Say what?”
He looked me in the eye, flashed a mischievous grin, and said quietly,
“How much have you been offered?”
“...Pardon?”
“The ability to sell yourself well is also a Hunter’s virtue. Someone with 200 worth of ability who gets 150, and someone with 100 worth of ability who gets 150, are evaluated about the same in this industry. I’m where I am because I’m not good at that. I hope you don’t end up like me, Segyun.”
Pat, pat. Then he lightly patted my shoulder and walked past me, murmuring under his breath,
“Of course, the best thing is to become irreplaceable, rather than a replaceable part. Like the world’s top-ranked Hunters. Then you won’t need to sell yourself at all.”
World top-ranked Hunters.
The strongest Hunters, whose going rate was whatever they demanded, and who could easily be called one-person global corporations.
This guy...
Was he telling me, who’d only just entered the Hunter world, to become a world top-ranked Hunter?
That was far too grand a thing to say as a simple word of encouragement.
And yet.
Suddenly, I wanted to make that grand wish come true.