Raydel's unfocused eyes looked at Han as if he could not believe his own ears. His consciousness started to grow dim. The pain in his stomach hurt all the different aspects of his senses. He was held tight to Han's chest, making it hurt so much that he could cry.
Raydel coughed blood out, before answering softly.
"You… you hate me, don't you?"
Silence.
If you really hate me, then stop talking to me. Raydel thought before looking at the hazy figure of the boss that gradually expanded over the entire area. The smell of blood filled up his nostrils, making it hard for him to breathe. He knew that in a few seconds, darkness would devour everything, so he closed his eyes, letting the biting death swallow his numbing body.
But the man carrying him still said something with a low voice Raydel could not understand. Annoyed and tired of all the chaotic events leading up to his death, he…
He also gave Han a middle finger.
Then, silence prevailed. Everything went black.
…until a message box brightened up in his subconsciousness.
[You have successfully cleared an S-rank tower.]
[Start the process of distributing prize to 'Raydel Klein.']
Huh?
He heard a 'ting' sound in his mind as if he were having some weird dreams.
[Body Strength +1]
Ting.
[Boss' Language Skill +1]
Ting.
[Dagger Skill +1]
Raydel was startled because he felt like he was attacked by a cramp. He still saw the shining message box even with his eyes closed. The 'ting' sound kept ringing for about ten times, stinging his eardrums till he could not bear it anymore.
Ting. Ting. Ting. Ting…
[Hunter Attraction Skill +1]
Hunter Attraction Skill?
Raydel had only a few seconds to think about it because he then fell asleep again. Drowsiness washed over him like a warm tide. Not long after the surrounding noises quieted down. Everything stayed still. Then...
Gasp!
Raydel woke up with a jolt.
He heard the ringing sound echoing in his ears as he squinted his eyes to examine the room with confusion. He began to absorb the environment in which he was, and soon saw a clean hospital room and a functioning air conditioner. The light smell of medicine infused with the relaxing atmosphere of the room.
Was he in a hospital?
And still alive?
Creak.
Someone opened the door.
"Hello, Mr. Klein. Are you awake now?" The young nurse greeted him and walked toward him to examine his condition. "Don't worry. Now, you're staying at this hospital under the care of government welfare. The Self-Defenses Forces found you in the evolved S-rank dungeon that had been cleared. You don't have to worry about anything. We won't charge any medical fees for your treatment here. Can you sit up?"
"Yes."
The nurse observed the patient. Even though he had just woken up and his handsome face was still pale, his clear and sparkling eyes told her that he fully regained his consciousness. After hearing her explanation, he gave her a soft smile as a thank you, making her heart beat faster uncontrollably. She lifted a small basket that had the patient's phone in it and placed it next to his bed.
Raydel took the phone and turned it on. As he waited for the phone to finish turning on, he asked the nurse.
"What about my sister?" Jinny was the first person that Raydel asked for. "She should have been lying around the dungeon as well."
"Do you mean Miss Jinny Klein? Her family had just taken her home yesterday. She recovered before you."
Raydel nodded. It meant that both Jinny and him were saved by the government. In the novel 'Ways to Become the No.1 Hunter,' there were several mentions of the government. They were the one that set up the alarm system when dungeons appeared and the cooperation between cities from setting prizes for clearing dungeons. Even the cost of medical care, they also took all the responsibility. It did not matter if you were a hunter or an ordinary citizen, if you were found in a dungeon after it had been cleared, you would receive free treatment from the government.
The treatment not only involved sending the injured to the hospital, but also sending hunters who had 'healing powers' to assist in their recovery. That meant Jinny would not have had a broken leg now, since the government should have sent a hunter to heal her leg already.
This counted as good luck in bad luck. They were unlucky to get caught up in the dungeon, but were also lucky that the government found them in a dangerous area. He knew it would take much longer for Jinny to recover her broken leg without the help from the government. Raydel sighed with relief and slowly turned to look at the window. It looked like he woke up in the evening, so the sky outside was deep red.
"If you need anything, you can always call me," the nurse told him before leaving.
Once the door was shut, Raydel frowned and looked at himself.
His body was swathed in bandages from the neck down. It hurt even with just a slight movement. His right middle finger… had a bandage as well.
Raydel tried to bend the finger but he could not do it. He was sure that he still had his middle finger. It was there, but he felt nothing from it. He tried touching it and pain exploded throughout his whole body. It was like he was cut by a sharp knife.
Raydel opened his eyes wide.
Did this mean that the boss accepted his middle finger as the sacrifice?
"..."
Raydel had goosebumps when he thought back to the boss' laugh. He could not understand the logic of the boss at all. Wasn't giving a middle finger a rude and disrespecting gesture? Or was it because it was Cthulhu, so it did not understand the meaning when a human gave it a middle finger? Was that why it considered him successful in clearing the dungeon? …for Raydel, that was impossible. Han being the one clearing the dungeon sounded way more believable. It could not have been because he successfully met the boss' condition. Because if he cleared it, the boss should have given him prizes…
"Huh?"
Raydel felt something in his shirt.
He took it out and was stunned for several minutes.
"A legendary…artifact…?"
In the novel 'Ways to Become the No.1 Hunter,' artifacts were tools that gave hunters power. They could be categorized into three types. The first one was ordinary artifacts like the dagger he got in the hospital. The second one was unique artifacts which had a balanced power. The last type was legendary artifacts, the ones that could only drop from high-rank bosses.
Legendary artifacts were the precious treasures that all hunters longed for. Apart from being extremely rare and expensive, when hunters used it, they could 'borrow' the power of the boss that dropped the particular legendary artifact.
And Cthulhu gave him something like that!
"Wait," Raydel murmured before narrowing his eyes to take a better look at the legendary artifact.
He was wrong…. It was not a legendary artifact.
Raydel thought it was because the object was round. But from the patterns and the weight of it, it did not feel like an artifact at all. It looked like a large coin with the pattern of Cthulhu's tentacles on it. He focused his mind on the object and tried to activate it, but nothing happened.
Raydel sniffed the coin.
"..."
It did not have the smell that metal normally had. It seemed like a fake.
He raised his brows in confusion, not sure if somebody took the real artifact and replaced it with this coin when he was unconscious. But the coin had Cthulhu's tentacle pattern, so unless the one who took it knew beforehand that the dungeon would be Cthulhu's, this coin really was the prize he received from clearing the dungeon.
What is it, then?
Whatever. Let it be whatever it wanted to be. He would sell it at the Hunter Guild anyway.
Raydel sighed and stayed still to take in the atmosphere for a while.
So… he was still alive?
Once he realized he was breathing, a surge of relief flooded over his whole body. He smiled, thinking back to when he gave Cthulhu a middle finger. He didn't believe that he would be able to escape his destined death. No matter how he looked at it, there was no way he would have survived. Raydel almost fell into the bottomless abyss of despair, but now, he was still breathing. He got another chance to live, so… this time, he would live the best side-character life humans ever could imagine!
It was a given that Raydel still had the same goal. He did not want to get involved with the world of hunters anymore. It did not matter to him how powerful or significant this coin was, there certainly would be people who were willing to buy items dropped by an S-rank boss. After he sold it, he would use the money to pay the fees of Jinny's ice skating classes, and he would go back to prepare for the university entrance examination.
Raydel put the coin on the bedside table before turning on the television with the remote control.
He stayed in the hospital for another night. When a new day arrived, he felt he was good enough to get out of the hospital, so he contacted his family to tell them that he would go home today. His parents were so relieved to hear his voice while Jinny who was already at home kept boasting about how her leg fully recovered. She would get back to ice skating tomorrow.
"Once I finish selling things at the guild, I'll rush back home," Raydel said. He wanted to keep the surprise to himself for now. "See you," he said when he heard Jinny's giggles.
"See you."
After hanging up, Raydel got up and changed back to his normal clothes.
The healing power of a hunter helped cure the stab wound a lot, so Raydel could put on his shirt and pants without any problems. He wore a hoodie as well before picking up his phone. He frowned when he saw the information on his status page managed by the government system.
He read through his set of skills before stopping at one particular skill.
[Hunter Attraction Skill +10]
What was that…?
Raydel could have sworn he had never seen this skill in the novel before, so he pressed for the description.
[You will be the first person that hunters think of.]
"..."
That made it even more confusing.
Raydel scratched his head before heading out of the room while still being on his phone. He met an old nurse in front of the elevator, so he smiled and said, "I'm leaving the hospital now. I'll stop by the Hunter Guild."
"Good luck."
He walked into the elevator. As the door was closing, a nurse who was holding a phone walked towards the direction Raydel left. She knocked on the door of Raydel's room before saying, "Mr. Klein, your relatives have called…"
She stopped speaking and had a confused expression when she saw no one in the room.
"Mr. Klein has already left the hospital. He said he'll go to the Hunter Guild," the old nurse walked in to inform her.
The woman stood stunned for a second before telling the person waiting on the phone with a careful manner.
"I'm sorry mister, but Mr. Klein has already left the hospital. I heard that he's going to the Hunter Guild."
The person did not say anything back for a while. Finally, she heard a deep voice responding back.
"Okay."
At the other side of the call, Han hung up and looked down at his phone. The screen indicated that there was an outcoing call, but no matter how hard he tried, he could not reach that person. This was the tenth attempt.
Ring.
A message appeared on the screen, letting him know that the eleventh attempt also failed.
"Hunter Guild…?"
Han murmured, his eyes narrowed down. It was hard to guess what he was feeling.
*
Raydel spent about ten minutes strolling around under the sunlight of the mid-morning. He stopped here and there to take photos of the capital city's scenery and walked into a convenience store to buy some snacks. He had read the novel 'Ways to Become the No.1 Hunter' for hundreds of chapters, but he still could not believe that he got to see the world in the novel with his very own eyes. It felt as if he was traveling in a developed country because the roads were clean, there was no garbage in sight, and the air was nice.
The government in the novel was the one that deserved some praise. They set up the system and structure in a disciplined and efficient way, so the quality of life of the people was quite high. The only bad thing about it was the fact that dungeons and towers kept appearing every day, though it seemed like everyone got used to it now. Dungeons could be considered an everyday natural disaster for this country. It was impossible for the government to completely stop this.
However, as long as dungeons and towers did not appear in big cities or got neglected till they evolved into mutated dungeons, there was nothing to worry about.
"This train is heading toward the terminal station…"
Raydel barely touched his phone while he stood in the train. He watched the people around him live their lives and felt fascinated by it. He could not put the feeling into words but people in this world were no different than that of the world from which he came from. The majority of them were office workers or students. The only difference was that some of these people might work as hunters as well.
Speaking of hunters, a conversation between them drifted into his ears.
"Yesterday I went into a C-rank dungeon. It freaking sucked. I got nothing useful at all."
"I'm preparing for the rank ascension test."
"Hey, did you hear the news about the mutated dungeon? They said it's in the nearby city."
Raydel looked at the board above the door and saw there were still several stations left before he arrived at the Hunter Guild station. So, he crossed his arms and picked up his phone to kill time. The Hunter Guild had an application where people could log in and use, so Raydel thought he should put the title of the coin dropped by Cthulhu into the system. However, first, he needed to research how much he should ask for it as this money would be used for Jinny's ice-skating class fees.
The ice-skating classes normally charged around 800 - 900 del per hour while an item dropped by an S-rank boss had the minimum price of 5,000 del. If it was a legendary artifact, its price could skyrocket to several ten thousand or even a hundred thousand. As for Raydel, he did not know how important this coin was, so he set the starting price at 3,000 del. Then, he took a photo of the coin to post along with it and set a time period that the coin would be available for auction before turning off his phone.
Yet when he looked up, he froze in fright.
Raydel stood still like a rock. After he blinked, everything became normal again. He looked left and right but no passengers acted like they saw what he had seen just now. His heart raced as he confusingly swallowed.
Just now, when he looked up from his phone and saw his own reflection on the opposite window… he saw that he was… the empty train except for himself and there were tentacles wrapping around the train and his body.
The suction cups sucked on his face. He did not notice at all that some of the tentacles were slithering down under his shirt.
"..." Raydel frowned. Was I seeing things?
Yeah, maybe I was seeing things.
He sighed. There were three more stations left before he got to the Hunter Guild station. Raydel looked around before hearing an alarm.
The sound had a high pitch and went on for a good minute. It came from the mobile phones of several people in the train.
He and those people looked at their own phones in unison. Raydel felt like he was punched at his solar plexus by an invisible fist because of the message he saw on his phone.
[To all the hunters on the train, please remain calm. You are entering the mutated area of an A-rank dungeon.]