Chapter 156 - Chapter 153: Episode 151 - Lee Ji-ah (2)
Lee Ji-ah realized that the proposal she'd submitted today had been rejected.
'Why on earth... why won't they consider operating more efficiently?'
If her plan were implemented, they could clear gates faster and more effectively.
Unlike other guilds, the Han-il Guild had the capability to protect males while annihilating every monster, even if a swarm poured out from the mist.
If they increased the personnel assigned to the clearing team, it was a perfectly achievable scenario.
However, her mother's reaction had been skeptical.
The document returned to her contained only a short, dismissive sentence: "One must not view people as objects."
What could her mother possibly mean by that?
When hunters were deployed to destroy a gate, a tiny fraction of them died or were disabled.
New hunters always emerged to fill those vacancies.
They were like consumables, constantly being created and disappearing, just like objects.
In her view, a hunter was an object.
And a guild was nothing more than a business that dealt in the "objects" known as hunters.
Still, I had hoped that hunters wouldn't be treated as mere objects.
My plan was designed with the possibility that their survival rate would increase drastically, as males would be targeted before the real hunters.
I felt nothing but frustration toward my mother, who sat idly in the representative's seat without even acknowledging that contradiction.
There were the women who were "real hunters" belonging to the guild, and then there were the males who had no abilities at all.
If I had to weigh whose life carried more value, I could confidently choose the former.
It wasn't such a bad deal for the males, either.
The annual salary of a hunter in a clearing team was on a completely different level from a regular office worker, so for an Awakened individual with little to no ability, it was a golden opportunity to earn a large sum of money.
My mother had scrapped a plan that could have been a win-win for everyone and instead left me holed up at home with those two relatives.
The mother I knew was the epitome of inefficiency.
"Ha... my magic power replenishment seems so slow. Maybe it's because the charging speed is so sluggish... It's even hard to practice magic fixation..."
While Min-ah went to the kitchen to cook, Seon-ah muttered to himself.
He possessed pure magic power like Min-ah and Yena, but compared to them, his reserves were woefully insufficient, and his efficiency seemed poor.
He knew this because his magic power would be completely drained in just an hour or two.
He knew that Yena and Min-ah could use their magic continuously for over fourteen hours.
'I need to practice for efficiency, but when I do, my magic power just drops again... Isn't there a way to replenish it quickly?'
Seon-ah was lost in thought.
Wondering where there might be a concentration of magic power on Earth, he thought of the gates again.
He remembered the place he couldn't go to because he'd gotten caught up in a dispute with scavengers and retired when he became a hunter last time. He gave up, thinking it was impossible.
'I can't ever be in a dangerous situation again, so I have no choice but to give up...'
Furthermore, Seon-ah couldn't grasp the extent of the power he could exert when he was able to use magic.
In a situation where he couldn't even estimate his rank as a physical enhancement ability user, there was a high possibility that something big would happen if he fought for no reason and made a mistake.
There was a way to extract magic power from the weakest gates, but since he had never done proper hunter work, it was difficult to even distinguish the rank of a gate.
The only thing he knew about gate ranks was that they were determined by the radius of the mist emanating from them.
If he consulted Sophia, who possessed his mother's memories, she would definitely scold him for trying to put himself in danger, so he couldn't even bring it up.
However, there was one more hunter in the house he could consult.
'Now that I think about it... Lee Ji-ah was a hunter too...'
Seeing her look younger than him, he had even forgotten the fact that she was a high-level hunter.
Since Lee Ji-ah was also a hunter, he felt that if things went well, she might be able to guide him to a gate.
Therefore, he knocked on the door to ask Ji-ah, who had gone into her room.
"Um... Ji-ah? Can I come in?"
"Yes, you can come in."
Seon-ah opened the door and went in.
Ji-ah's room was cleaner than he thought.
Seeing such a large room kept so neatly, he could tell how diligent she was.
It wouldn't be easy to keep a room so tidy that there wasn't a single speck of dust on the floor.
Especially as a working professional, it was impressive.
Just as he finished that thought, a strange sound came from under Ji-ah's bed.
It was a low humming.
As Seon-ah turned his gaze there, Ji-ah spoke.
"Ah... I forgot to turn off the robot vacuum."
As Ji-ah turned off the power to the vacuum under the bed, the humming sound disappeared.
'...The world has become convenient these days.'
Before he went to the Demon World, such things weren't commercialized, so he could feel that quite some time had passed while he wasn't on Earth.
Hiding his embarrassment, he asked Ji-ah.
"Um, Ji-ah, to get straight to the point... I came because I have questions about gates."
"What are you curious about? To be honest, I don't have a long career, so I only know the really simple things."
First, a way to easily measure the rank of a gate...
"It's not that difficult... I just wanted to know the criteria for classifying gate ranks..."
"Hmm... To be honest, we use the method of looking at how large the radius of the mist is immediately after the gate appears. The larger the scale, the higher we rank the gate."
Seon-ah nodded after hearing that.
Since she explained it no differently than what he already knew, he couldn't do anything other than that.
"I... I see. By any chance, can a regular person like me enter the place where a gate appears?"
"Um... Seon-ah oppa. You aren't thinking of trying to enter a gate, are you?... You might not know well, but if a regular person gets sucked in there, it's as good as dead..."
Ji-ah looked at Seon-ah as if he were ignorant.
Even an elementary school student would know what a gate was, yet her own cousin wanted to enter that dangerous place.
Reading Ji-ah's expression, Seon-ah said, flustered.
"I... I'm an Awakened too, so I'm confident in my abilities. It's just a shame that I've never been to a gate."
"Oppa... No matter what, it's really dangerous for a frail man to enter such a place... I can't tell you everything because you're a man, but you could really suffer shameful things."
Ji-ah tried to persuade Seon-ah to the end.
She didn't look like the person who had suggested putting a man with no abilities into the clearing team to use as bait.
It was hypocritical, but to Ji-ah, Seon-ah was her cousin.
Because he was family, she had no intention of letting him do such a dangerous thing.
"Then is there no way?..."
When Seon-ah dropped his head slightly with an incredibly disappointed expression, Ji-ah's heart ached at that pitiful sight.
She hadn't known he wanted to see a gate that much.
She had told him that something really big could happen, but Seon-ah didn't seem like he would give up.
'If I leave him like this, something big might happen if he enters a gate alone later... If so, it's better to show him the reality of a gate.'
She was an A-rank hunter.
She was confident that if it were a low-rank gate, she could show Seon-ah oppa the gate while protecting him.
Thinking that, Ji-ah spoke to Seon-ah carefully.
"Seon-ah oppa, there is one way. It would be possible if I took you myself... But please keep it a secret from Min-ah auntie... If I took oppa to such a dangerous place... I don't know how Mom and Auntie would look at me..."
"Of course... Thank you, Ji-ah."
When Seon-ah said that with a smile, Ji-ah turned her head to the side.
It was an unavoidable action because she felt her face heating up at her cousin's surprise smile.
However, Seon-ah mistook it for Ji-ah wanting to hide her shyness.
The Succubus Lord was clutching her head in her office again today.
Even though years had passed and the council had disappeared, she remembered the fact that the Royal Knights had swarmed into her territory back then, and she was currently participating in the Demon King Faction for fear of being branded a rebel force.
It was an action she had taken to avoid being branded a rebel, but there was just too much work.
Especially now, while the Demon King was briefly absent, the rebel forces had crossed a line they shouldn't have in order to increase their numbers.
They had started to join hands with the humans of Earth.
The humans of Earth, known as Scavengers, had formed a cooperation with the rebel forces.
The Scavengers received rare ores or items in the Demon World in exchange for offering human males.
Seeing the actions they took, I could only speculate that since they were items that had value in the Demon World as well, they likely had high value on Earth, allowing them to benefit each other through barter.
In that way, the rebel forces easily obtained human males and made them available to their members whenever they joined their forces.
Because of the rebel forces, which were increasing more and more with males as bait, there was so much work to handle again today.
Even if I led my daughters and soldiers myself to crush the rebel forces again and again, they kept gathering, so if things went on like this, I might die of overwork.
Therefore, I intended to dispatch informants, and based on the information gathered now, I planned to storm the gate where the rebel forces and Scavengers were meeting, kill all the rebels, and deal with the Scavengers as well.
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Thinking that she would deal with all the rebel forces that had colluded with the Scavengers tonight, the Succubus Lord, with dark circles under her eyes, trembled with the joyful thought that she would finally be liberated.