TRGBH 13

Chapter 13

I came outside the dome with the guidance of an Association agent. The tall buildings of downtown Yeouido were quietly buried in darkness.

It was 5 a.m. The Selection Evaluation had started at noon yesterday, so I had stayed inside the Stage for almost a full twenty hours.

Maybe because it was so early in the morning, the streets were completely empty. I stretched my arms and headed toward the subway station. Then, I sensed someone near the main entrance.

“Kim Daram!”

That refreshing voice, which now felt rather familiar. I turned my head toward where the voice was coming from. Lee Hasol was running toward me.

“What? You didn’t go home?”

“No. I was waiting for you to come out.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to see you before I left.”

“…How long?”

“About five hours?”

“Here?”

“Yeah.”

“You should’ve gone somewhere else. You mean you stayed here all night?”

“If I did that, we might have missed each other.”

“You could’ve just called…”

I realized my mistake only after saying it. Cool nineteen-year-olds like us didn’t exchange phone numbers when they first met. I quickly changed what I was going to say.

“Didn’t you think I might come out before you?”

“I didn’t. You’re stronger than me.”

Lee Hasol answered without the slightest hesitation. Strangely, I felt even better than when the President of the Hunter Association had praised me.

“…Anyway, let’s go.”

The two of us walked in silence for a while. Then I suddenly asked,

“By the way, where are you going?”

“Me? Well… I guess I need to find a place to stay now.”

“A place to stay? You’re not going home?”

According to the Association agent, the next gathering was scheduled for next week. The date and time of the gathering would be individually announced according to each participant’s results.

“There’s no one there even if I go. My parents aren’t around, and my grandfather, who I lived with, passed away last year.”

Lee Hasol’s expression was calm. I didn’t know the details, but it seemed that he had already recovered from the pain of losing his family.

“Oh, I see. Then, do you want to stay at my house for a while?”

The words came out of my mouth without me thinking. There was something about this guy that strangely moved people’s hearts and made them want to take care of him.

“Really? Do you have a room at your house?”

My mother was Joo Miyeon’s, one of the top stars in South Korea. There were plenty of empty rooms in our house.

“Yeah. We have an extra room.”

“Hehe… Then I’d love to! Honestly, I had no idea where I was supposed to find a place to stay.”

Lee Hasol accepted my offer without the slightest hesitation. He must have been quite worried about where he would stay. I hadn’t asked my mother for permission yet, but she probably wouldn’t object. She might even be happier that I had brought a friend home.

“But, how far did you clear?”

I asked Lee Hasol. I already knew from the President, but I still wanted to hear it directly from him.

“I cleared Stage 15. What about you?”

“I cleared Stage 20.”

“Wow, Kim Daram, you’re insane. Then you’re first place?”

“Yeah. They said you’re second.”

“Kkkkkk. This is awesome. We’re the best, huh?”

Lee Hasol, who was short, jumped up and put his arm around my shoulders.

Yeah, we’re the best, you punk. I also felt like I had gone back to my immature nineteen-year-old days. It wasn’t bad.

As we walked through the empty streets of Yeouido, chatting about this and that, Lee Hasol suddenly grabbed my sleeve and pulled me.

“Kim Daram, Kim Daram! Over there! That person!”

“Huh?”

The moment I turned my head toward where Lee Hasol was pointing, I almost screamed without realizing it.

‘M-Mom?’

A white van, the kind celebrities usually rode in, was stopped on the main road. In front of it, a woman with her face covered by a scarf and sunglasses was pacing around and looking at her surroundings. Beside her, a man who looked like a manager was nervously stamping his feet.

“Kim Daram, isn’t that Joo Miyeon?”

At Lee Hasol’s words, I almost screamed again. As her son, I recognized her right away, but with her face completely covered, she was actually quite difficult to recognize.

“H-How did you know?”

Lee Hasol looked at me as if I had said something ridiculous.

“Hey, what Korean person doesn’t know Joo Miyeon? She’s obviously Joo Miyeon! My grandfather was a huge fan of hers. That’s why I’ve been a fan for a long time too.”

I couldn’t agree with the claim that she was obviously Joo Miyeon. I decided to believe that he had recognized her thanks to the sharp eyes that only true fans seemed to have.

I looked at Mom again.

You could’ve at least worn something warmer…

The early morning wind in March was still bitterly cold. There was no doubt that Mrs. Joo Miyeon had come all the way here herself because she was worried about her son, who hadn’t come home even after an entire day had passed.

Soon, Mom spotted me too. Since we were the only two people walking along the quiet sidewalk before dawn, it wasn’t difficult at all.

“Daram!”

Mom ran toward me while calling my name. Her manager hurried after her.

…Oh, Mother.

“Daram? Daram? What the hell, Kim Daram…”

Lee Hasol, who was standing beside me in shock, muttered quietly.

“This is amazing! It’s really crazy! No way! Kim Daram, you’re Joo Miyeon’s son! Kim Daram! Let’s be best friends! Okay? We will, right? No betraying each other!”

Inside the car heading home, Lee Hasol kept expressing his amazement.

“Yeah, yeah… Let’s.”

“Wow! This is insane! My best friend’s mom is Joo Miyeon!”

“Stop yelling. My head hurts.”

“Now that I look at you, you really look a lot like Joo Miyeon!”

Look alike, my ass… We weren’t even related by a single drop of blood.

“Oh my, really? This is the first time someone has told me that our son looks like me.”

But Mom seemed to really like what Lee Hasol had said. Sitting in the front seat, Mom leaned her head back toward us and smiled brightly.

“Ah! It’s too bright, Mother! You’re so beautiful that I think my eyes are going blind!”

Lee Hasol shamelessly started flattering her out of nowhere. Well, he wasn’t exactly wrong. Mom’s face really was beautiful when she smiled so brightly like that.

“You said your name was Hasol, right? You’re such a friendly and cute boy. This is the first time our Daram has ever brought a friend home. Make yourself comfortable and treat this as your own home. You can stay as long as you like!”

“Yes, Mother!”

A little later, as we entered through the front door, Lee Hasol let out another gasp of admiration.

“Wow. Kim Daram, your house is freaking awesome.”

When I woke up, the clock had just reached twelve.

When I stepped outside my room, Lee Hasol was sitting in front of a huge table filled with food, eating like there was no tomorrow.

At that moment, Mom came hurrying out of the kitchen carrying a huge plate of braised ribs. I quickly went over and took the plate from her.

“What’s all this?”

“Mom decided to show off her cooking skills for once.”

“Kim Daram, your mom’s cooking is reeeally amazing.”

Hasol, you’re spraying rice everywhere. Close your mouth and eat.

“Son, you’re going to eat too, right?”

Mom asked me with a smile.

“Of course. Give me three bowls of rice.”

“They said the next gathering won’t be until next week at the earliest. What are you going to do until then, Kim Daram?”

Lee Hasol asked while rubbing his full stomach. We had moved to the living room, where a large table of fruit and snacks had been prepared in front of us.

I picked up a slice of neatly cut melon with my fork and said,

“What else? I have to train.”

“Train?”

“Yeah. Train.”

Hunters basically have a job that requires them to use their bodies. And unlike other professions, it is an extremely dangerous job where how well you use your body can determine whether you live or die. The fact that being a Hunter had held the number one spot for the highest death rate among all professions in the world ever since Hunters appeared proved that.

Awakened people basically continued their lives as Hunters using the power of the Trait they gained when they awakened. Traits gave Awakened people absolute powers that ordinary people couldn’t even imagine. Because of this, most Awakened people focused more on studying and completely mastering their own Traits than on the simple physical enhancement they gained from leveling up.

That wasn’t necessarily wrong. Since people’s time was limited, it made sense to focus training on abilities that gave the highest return for the effort invested.

However, the power of a Trait was often difficult to use freely outside the Stage. I was the same.

Where was I supposed to find an enemy in the middle of Seoul and stick a Puppet Needle into them? Besides, Puppet Needle had absolutely no effect on living beings that had nothing to do with the System.

What about the Tentacle Trait? No matter how many unusual Awakened people appeared in the world, human standards of beauty wouldn’t change easily. I didn’t even want to think about it.

Anyway, Traits were important, but an Awakened person should never neglect physical training.

Many Awakened people took their improved physical abilities from leveling up for granted and simply enjoyed them.

A great many Awakened people were willing to risk their lives to level up their Traits, while neglecting physical training. But that was the wrong way of thinking.

Depending on how well they controlled and polished their increased strength and speed, an Awakened person’s basic abilities could be completely different. Instead of simply being happy about their improved physical abilities, they had to properly absorb and master them until they became completely their own.

If they had trained their Traits through actual combat inside the Stage, then in their daily lives, they needed to spend time training their bodies. A Hunter’s survival rate greatly depended on how they used their free time.

“I’m looking for a training facility we can go to right now, so let’s head out as soon as our food settles.”

I said while scrolling through my phone.

“Okay.”

Lee Hasol nodded without complaint.

“Daram. Should I ask Representative Jung to look for a training facility for you? It would be better to go somewhere proper.”

Mom suddenly spoke while cutting fruit beside us. Representative Jung was the president of JJ Entertainment, my mother’s agency.

He had also worked as Mom’s road manager until she married Dad, but now he was fully focused on running the agency.

‘Ask Representative Jung?’

I was curious, so I asked,

“Mom’s agency doesn’t manage Awakened people, does it?”

“No. But I’ve been thinking that maybe we should enter that field too. Representative Jung must have been interested in it as well, because the moment I brought it up, he became very enthusiastic.”

For reference, my mother was a major shareholder of JJ Entertainment. To be honest, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the current headquarters of JJ Entertainment had been built on the name Joo Miyeon.

‘But this is different from my previous life.’

In my previous life, when I left home at nineteen and spent twenty years as a Hunter, JJ Entertainment, where my mother Joo Miyeon worked, never once entered the Awakened management business.

But now, at this point in time, wasn’t what Mom was saying a little different?

Perhaps all of this had come from the dramatic reconciliation between Mom and me two days ago.

In both lives, I had awakened and become a Hunter. But in one life, I had turned my back on my family and left, while this time, I had returned to my family’s embrace. That was the decisive difference.

A little later, Mom handed me an address.

“Son, go here. Apparently, it’s a training facility used by an Awakened person that Representative Jung has his eye on as his first choice for recruitment.”

“Thank you, Mom.”

The training facility was in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province. It was a little far from home, so I borrowed Mom’s car and set off.

“Kim Daram, you can drive too? That’s awesome. Kim Daram! You’re totally an adult.”

There’s a lot that surprises you, Hasol.

“When you have time, make sure you get your driver’s license too.”

“Okay.”

Who could have imagined that this innocent country boy, who reacted with amazement to everything, would go on to stand at the top of South Korea’s Hunter world twenty years later?

As I drove, I suddenly asked Lee Hasol,

“Hasol, why do you want to become a Hunter?”

Unlike usual, he seemed to hesitate for a moment before Lee Hasol finally spoke.

“When I was young, both of my parents lost their lives to monsters. So I decided that I had to protect my grandfather at least, and that’s why I decided to become a Hunter… But my grandfather also passed away last year. Haha… Still, I made a promise to my grandfather, so I’m going to see it through to the end.”

Lee Hasol spoke with calm eyes. But faintly hidden inside them was his longing for the family he could never meet again.

“I see. It must have been really hard, Lee Hasol. But you endured it well. I’m really proud of you.”

“What? Why are you suddenly acting like an old man? We’re the same age, you know?”

Sorry. I really am an old man.

When I chuckled without answering, this time Kim Daram asked,

“Kim Daram, what about you? Why do you want to become a Hunter?”