The Hunter’s Gonna Lay Low Chapter 12

The laws related to Awakened in South Korea were strict. This was especially true when it came to the Awakened Registration Act.

If a person did not visit the center in person within one month of awakening to register as an Awakened, they would be fined at minimum in the hundreds of millions of won. So while there might be power-hiding Hunters who concealed their rank and strength at the time of registration, a power-hiding Hunter who hadn’t registered at all could not exist. South Korea was that kind of country.

Jeongbin, who had been lost in thought, rubbed his chin.

“Lee Sayoung, is it correct that this Awakened is B-rank or above?”

“Yeah.”

“How are you so certain?”

“He blocked my attack.”

“Your attack, Lee Sayoung?”

When Sayoung nodded, Jeongbin quickly accepted it.

“If that’s the case, then he’s certainly B or above.”

“He also cut down the thorns that suddenly burst out of the addict’s body.”

“That level means he’s not someone who recently awakened. He seems quite familiar with handling his abilities.”

Sayoung also agreed with that opinion, so he nodded again. Then he briefly added.

“With a ladle.”

“Huh? A ladle?”

He wouldn’t be wearing an apron like ChamXseul for fashion. Lee Sayoung predicted that ‘hyung’ was either a part-timer somewhere or the son of a shop owner. He’d said he was older than Sayoung, but his face looked no older than early twenties. He probably didn’t have money to pay fines either—what kind of guts did it take to not even register while risking all sorts of disadvantages?

Lee Sayoung couldn’t understand that whole set of facts. Because he couldn’t understand, his mood grew progressively worse. Even when the guys he’d attached to ‘hyung’ returned on stretchers with only a business card in hand, he hadn’t been this irritated. He’d been confident he could find him quickly, and he’d confirmed his skill once again by the fact that he’d taken out four elite guild members in an instant.

Touch him and you die

Sayoung looked at the crooked handwriting on the crumpled business card ten times a day. By this point, Sayoung’s patience was also slowly hitting rock bottom. Eventually, he turned on the microphone connected to the secretary’s office.

“Hunter A Tiny Little Miracle Mingi, tell him to come to the Guild Master’s office. As quickly as possible. No, just call him over the broadcast.”

—Hunter name A Tiny Little Miracle Mingi, real name Seo Mingi, please come to the Guild Master’s office immediately. I repeat, Hunter name A Tiny Little Miracle Mingi, real name Seo Mingi…

With 40 minutes left before the end of the workday, Sayoung summoned Seo Mingi to the Guild Master’s office.

A short while later, A Tiny Little Miracle Mingi, real name Seo Mingi, entered the Guild Master’s office with a haggard face, dark circles hanging down to his chin. He bowed his head gloomily in greeting.

“You called, sir.”

“Why is your face like that?”

“…Weren’t you calling me to torment me?”

At his words, Lee Sayoung replied with a shameless face.

“Torment? Are you busy right now?”

“…Even if I were busy, you’d call me anyway.”

“You know it well.”

His tone was as if it were obvious. Actually, Seo Mingi also felt a tiny bit of conscience-stricken guilt whenever guild members asked, ‘Why is 240’s mood like that?’ because he had his own sin to atone for. He muttered in a voice mixed with sighs.

“Anything except digging through the Awakened Management Agency database is possible.”

Lee Sayoung smiled languidly like a well-fed cat.

“That kid I told you to find last time. What was the name?”

“You mean Park Haeun, second grade, class 2 at Saetbyeol Elementary School?”

“Yeah, that kid.”

Sayoung glanced at the business card placed on one corner of the table and clasped his hands together.

“I’m pretty sure I told you to investigate that kid’s family relations too….”

Oh, my God. Seo Mingi’s face turned pale. He had been so focused on digging through the Awakened Management Agency database that he had completely forgotten. And he’d even failed at the digging itself, so in the end, he’d done nothing at all.

As Seo Mingi began to tremble, Sayoung spoke coldly.

“Go investigate right now.”

“…Yes! I’ll go immediately.”

After Seo Mingi promptly dashed out. Sayoung held the business card in his hand again. A moment later, beyond the hand fiddling with the crumpled paper, the phone screen that had been lying there popped on, displaying an incoming call screen.

[Seowon Guild Nam Woojin]

After checking the caller, Sayoung pressed the call button.

“What. What’s going on?”

—Jeongbin contacted me saying he collected the addict’s corpse. Apparently a report came in.

“…”

—We’ve taken it over on this side for now, but it’s quite interesting…. I called because I thought you should come see it in person.

Sayoung glanced at the clock. 5:25 PM. He put the crumpled business card into his inventory and rose from his seat.

“I’ll be there soon, so wait.”

∞ ∞ ∞

At 2:40 PM the same day, the hangover soup restaurant, which had hung up the sign reading “Ingredient Preparation Time,” was enjoying its most leisurely hours of the day. Haeun, who had been sitting at the green table for 20 minutes without managing to turn past the first page of her workbook, rolled her eyes and looked up at Wijae. And she pointed at his head with her hand.

“Uncle, the inside of your hair got brighter.”

“Hm? Did it?”

“Yeah. I think you need to dye it.”

Wijae glanced over at Haeun’s workbook. In the blank where the answer to question 1 should be written, instead of the correct answer, a drawing of two earthworms sitting side by side on a leaf had unexpectedly taken up residence. Wijae propped his chin on his hand with a serious face.

“I’m asking because I’m genuinely curious, is the answer to question 1 earthworms?”

“Yeah. And Uncle, you don’t look in the mirror so you wouldn’t know, so I’m telling you on purpose. Dye your hair.”

“Okay. Thanks for letting me know. I’ll go look in the mirror, so try solving question 1 again while I’m gone.”

“Tch, fine.”

Haeun pouted her lips and began scribbling something on the workbook again. Wijae rose from his seat and stood in front of the mirror on the wall, lifting his hair to look at the inside. He’d thought he might have seen it wrong because of the fluorescent lights, but the ashen hair he’d covered with black was revealing itself again from the roots. He tugged at the ends of his hair with a disgruntled expression.

‘How long has it been since I dyed it and the color’s already fading.’

From the moment he escaped the Rift, his hair had been graying to ashen. To avoid standing out as much as possible, he was mainly dyeing it black, but whether because of his recovery ability or some other unknown reason, no matter how much he dyed it, it quickly returned to ashen.

‘The cost of dye is no joke either.’

His hair didn’t take dye well, so each time he had to use two or three tubes of dye, and the dyeing cycle was short. It was to the point where he wondered if he dyed his hair more often than celebrities who changed their hair color to attempt an image transformation.

Today, he’d prepared a lot of ingredients, so he was planning to spend a relatively relaxed afternoon. Since it came up, should he just do a root touch-up? He untied his apron strings.

“Haeun, Uncle’s going to dye his hair for a bit. I’ve hung up the sign, so don’t open the door even if someone comes.”

“Even if they hang on the door?”

Sometimes even when the ingredient preparation sign was up, there were Hunters who clung to the door begging for just one bowl of hangover soup. Most of them were Hunters whose eyes had gone crazy after just finishing a dungeon raid. Wijae nodded firmly.

“Yeah. Even if they hang on it, you must never open it. If they seem like a really terrible difficult customer, call Uncle right away. Try your best on the workbook. Promise.”

“Yeah. Promise.”

Haeun answered half-heartedly and didn’t even give Wijae her attention. Judging by the movement of her pencil, it seemed she wasn’t writing letters but drawing. She seemed to be burning with creative desire rather than solving problems…. Wijae laughed with a deflating sound and hung his apron on the wall.

He brought two squid ink dye packets from the small room attached to the hangover soup restaurant and headed to the bathroom attached to the shop.

[Unique Trait, Skilled Hands (S+), is activated.]

Wijae’s hands, wearing vinyl gloves, moved nimbly, applying dye to every corner of his hair. His unique trait, ‘Skilled Hands,’ is a trait that enables him to do things skillfully and meticulously even when trying something for the first time.

Not only could he skillfully handle a weapon he was using for the first time, but with this trait, he could boil a hangover soup he was making for the very first time like a master who had walked the single path of hangover soup for 30 years. The reason Wijae could run the hangover soup restaurant alone without the owner grandmother was all thanks to Skilled Hands.

It was the best trait that anyone would covet, yet its owner, Cha Wijae, was using it to dye his hair faster and more cleanly. It was a sight that would make others weep tears of blood.

Wijae put down the comb and looked at his face in the mirror. He smiled contentedly at the dye applied evenly without any missed spots. Perfect.

‘If I can’t work at the hangover soup restaurant anymore… should I try being a hairdresser.’

Wijae, who had come up with a new career path following zombie simultaneous interpretation, hummed a happy tune. Whatever it was, thanks to his excellent trait, there were many holes through which he could make a living even without doing Hunter work. Wijae took off the gloves covered in dye and checked the time on his phone. He needed to leave the dye on for the next 30 minutes.

The moment he tidied up the dye and grabbed the bathroom door handle, his phone vibrated twice briefly.

Haeun: Uncle

Haeun: There’s a strange person at the door

‘…A strange person?’

Haeun is the granddaughter of a Hunter-certified tasty hangover soup restaurant. Having grown up seeing all sorts of Hunters, her threshold for strangeness was high, and unless someone was extraordinarily strange, she wouldn’t attach the modifier ‘strange’ to them.

In other words, if Haeun said someone was strange… it meant they were not a human within the bounds of common sense. Wijae’s face hardened. A bizarre energy was lingering nearby.

<Soundless Footsteps!>

After using a skill to erase his presence, Wijae carefully opened the door. And he poked only his head out to check the entrance of the hangover soup restaurant.

A shabby man with his head deeply bowed was standing pressed close against the door. His shoulders hunched for a long while, his body trembling, muttering incomprehensible words and biting his fingernails. The man intermittently banged his head against the glass, thunk, thunk.

Wijae found the man’s appearance… strangely not unfamiliar. Wijae furrowed his brow and searched his memory. Where had he seen this before? The rough breathing and the energy of something not human.

“Sorry. This bastard doesn’t know anything. His brain’s been pickled in drugs.”

Ah.

The strange gas mask—he was exactly like the guy who’d attacked him with thorns on the day he met Lee Sayoung! The moment he realized it, Wijae ran out of the bathroom and shouted loudly.

“Park Haeun, lock the door as soon as Uncle goes out!”

And without hesitation, he dashed outside and delivered a flying kick to the man’s face.

Bwaek! The man, properly struck in the face by the kick, rolled over and over and got buried in a pile of trash. Wijae grabbed the broom he’d left by the door and strode toward the man. The man kept grinning even as he struggled to get up. Blood was streaming from his crushed face, but there was no sign of the laughter stopping. Blood soaked thoroughly over the volume-based garbage bags.

“Krr… hehe, hih…. hik!”

“Stop f*cking laughing, you piece of shit. A kid can hear you.”

Wijae glanced back at the hangover soup restaurant. Fortunately, it was at a position where it wouldn’t be visible unless the door was opened. Haeun was a sharp kid, so she’d hide well inside on her own. But sounds might carry, so he should handle this as quietly as possible…. No.

‘Just breaking his neck would be faster.’

It was the moment he reached out to grab the man’s neck. The man’s body flinched greatly, but in Wijae’s vision, only the blood-soaked face and neck were visible. The grinning man suddenly stopped moving.

And then…

Shwaeaek!

Black thorns that pierced through every part of the man’s body poured fiercely toward Wijae.