Once he sensed no one else around, the gentle smile on his beautiful face vanished without a trace. Dohae irritably brushed off his shoulder where the PD’s hand had touched.
“You could be an actor. How can you lie so well without even wetting your lips?”
Byun Taehui followed behind, sneering. Since taking on the role of supervisor, he’d become a manager and stuck to Dohae’s entire schedule like a shadow.
As Taehui said, the claim about a raid was a lie. Legally, hunters had an obligation to be on standby at all times for emergencies, but in reality, nighttime deployments were rare.
Dohae checked his wristwatch again. Three minutes until 7 o’clock. Dohae pulled his car keys from his pocket and tossed them to Taehui.
“Drive.”
“Oh my, what’s this? You never let me take the wheel.”
“If you speed, I’ll kill you. Just crawl instead.”
“Hmm, I’ll try my best.”
Taehui shrugged and sat in the driver’s seat. Dohae sat in the back seat and pulled out his tablet PC.
Taehui, who had been glancing at Dohae in the rearview mirror, giggled as if understanding the reason.
“Aha~ Was Pax’s stream at 7? You’ve become best friends, our honey~.”
Dohae didn’t respond and typed 404NotPax into the search bar. Pax’s game stream was already broadcasting live.
Just seeing the thumbnail of Pax wearing a gas mask making a ‘V’ with his fingers made Dohae’s mood plummet.
‘Why have I been catering to this bastard all this time?’
Pax had started internet broadcasting without a single word to Dohae, who had been contacting him daily.
He was wearing a gas mask so you couldn’t tell what he looked like from the stream, but his build and voice were fully exposed. For someone who’d supposedly been cooped up at home for so long, he looked way too normal.
He wasn’t even awkward despite it being his first stream, and he talked on and on just fine. He claimed to be a hikikomori but had no gloomy aspects.
‘Fuck, I knew it. It was all lies!’
Everything Pax had told him was suspect. He’d received the list of new students for Korea University’s Virtual Reality Department in advance, and the thought occurred to him that Pax might not be among them.
His insides boiled thinking the past six months of enduring that troll’s disgusting flirting had all been for nothing. He wanted to slap the cheek of Pax who said ‘I love you, noona’ at the end of his live stream.
What if even liking ‘DdoHae’ was a lie? His scalp heated up with anger at the thought of being played.
Dohae had ignored Pax’s messages for two whole days. Only after receiving five A4 pages’ worth of pleading messages did his anger cool a bit. Even when he gave short answers like ‘ㅇ’ or ‘ㄴ’, Pax fawned over him saying it was good.
‘Disgusting bastard!’
Dohae ground his teeth and played the stream. At the same time, an ear-splitting noise echoed through the car.
-Kyaaaaaaak!
Dohae and Taehui’s shoulders flinched simultaneously. When they lowered the volume, they could tell the screaming was children chattering noisily.
-Gungjung Elementary 6th grade class 5 friends! I’m gaming with Pax! Jealous? Jealous? Kyaaaa!
-Hyung! Hyung! How many viewers right now? Over ten thousand?
-I’m good at this! Tralalalero tralala~ Tung tung tung sahuru~ Bombardillo crocodillo~
-Hey! You guys stop talking! You’re draining Pax hyung’s energy! This is Pax hyung’s stream!
The broadcast screen was in third-person perspective, capturing Pax from the front.
Pax, wearing a gas mask, sat weakly in a waiting room chair with his head down. And next to him, four elementary school students were stuck to him, not leaving his side.
‘ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ’ comments kept appearing in the live chat window. The reaction was that seeing Pax suffering felt refreshing.
Dohae’s cheek twitched. It was funny how someone who usually annoyed people with childish behavior couldn’t even hold his shoulders up in front of actual elementary school students.
“Oh my, elementary school kids? These days elementary school students’ skills are no joke~.”
“How would you know?”
“Of course I know because I play sometimes too~ Oops, secret from the higher-ups!”
“You play this? Wouldn’t it be better to raise your stats in real life in that time?”
Dohae’s brow narrowed. Non-hunters aside, why would a hunter fight even in a game? When you can’t even get stronger…….
‘Hehehehe, how cute.’
Taehui glanced at the rearview mirror and let out a low laugh. Do Dohae, who’d been educated to wear a beautiful smile and only speak refined words, didn’t know how to fly better than a caged bird.
He’d told him to pretend to be a woman and contact Pax to mess with his boring life, but he never expected him to do it faithfully for half a year. He’d never admit it himself, but to Taehui’s eyes, Dohae seemed to enjoy communicating with Pax.
Taehui hadn’t reported to his superiors that Dohae had gained a texting friend with whom he could reveal his true personality. Pax didn’t know Dohae’s identity anyway. Since there was no way for malice to arise, it seemed better to give Dohae some breathing room at this point.
Taehui was curious whether Dohae would be able to kill Pax in the future. If he couldn’t, it would be fun to mess with him himself. Tormenting his cute cousin siblings was the joy of his life.
“What’s fun about this game is that awakened people’s stats become similar. An S-rank hunter and that elementary school kid passing by could face off, and the S-rank hunter might get wrecked.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. How would an S-rank lose to an elementary school student?”
“If you don’t believe it, why don’t you try it?”
“I won’t.”
Dohae didn’t particularly like <Last On>. The period when the hunter application rate among awakened people noticeably decreased was after the game’s release.
Though the game market was booming, the hunter industry was hit by a sharp recession. Since they could make money using their constellation’s abilities without risking their lives entering Gates, awakened people didn’t feel the need to necessarily become hunters.
Hunter guilds all complained of labor shortages. Not only new awakened people, but even existing hunters were moving over to <Last On>. The abilities of newly recruited hunters they barely managed to hire were also at disappointing levels compared to before.
Dohae was negative about the rapidly changing flow of the world. People said it was individual freedom to choose whatever, but that freedom wasn’t free.
Gate occurrence frequency was increasing every year, and hunters to manage Gates were gradually disappearing. That meant the burden each hunter had to bear was growing.
‘Ha! And yet they still won’t close Gates.’
Most hunter guilds left Gates open to harvest resources. The Dojeon Guild that Dohae belonged to was no exception. But due to labor shortages, for years now there had been countless abandoned Gates all over South Korea.
Ordinary people didn’t know that a Gate’s time limit could be shortened without warning. The Seoraksan dungeon break that claimed tens of thousands of lives was officially announced to be caused by negligent management by guard hunters, but the reality was they’d missed the golden time because there was no management personnel and it had been left unattended.
Hunter guilds still tried to possess more Gates. Gate time reduction phenomenon was extremely rare, and their attitude was that there were no problems since they stationed guard personnel at Gates near major cities.
Dohae found those assholes irritating, who didn’t even pretend to prevent issues they could prevent in advance. His occasional going out in a mask to close abandoned Gates also included the intention to screw them over.
‘Fuck, it’s because they don’t manage them that kids just waltz in.’
He recalled the brat he’d coincidentally encountered three years ago when entering an abandoned Gate. It was fortunate he happened to be there, otherwise that brat would have met his end in that place without question.
I wonder if he’s matured a bit now, Noh Pyeonghwa…… He was such an impressive kid that he still remembered his name. Dohae snorted briefly, recalling the brat who’d messed around ceaselessly in front of him without knowing to be afraid.
[1 minute until match start.]
-Alright, it’s starting! Hyung, where do I go? What did you tell me to do when I get there?
-Hyung, hyung, hyung! I remember all the strategy you told me yesterday! All of us together… Oop!
-What if you say it while the stream’s on? What if our whole strategy gets exposed!
-Hyung, shouldn’t we decide on a cheer or something? When you watch players, they shout cheers at the start……!
The elementary school students grabbed and pulled Pax. Pax staggered up from the chair. The screen moved back a bit to capture Pax’s full body. They said he was 183cm tall, and he had quite a good build.
In the chat window, people were predicting Pax’s defeat with his elementary school team composition. There was also a game streamer on the opposing team, so viewers seemed to know the team composition in advance.
There were even two former pro gamers on that side. One of them was a very familiar name to Dohae.
“……Yoon Gyeom?”
“Oh my, Yoon Gyeom hyung is in it?”
“They’re saying Yoon Gyeom is on the opposing team.”
“That hyung retired as a hunter and switched to pro gamer then quit, but seems he’s still playing~.”
