Chapter Text
It’s a fine, spring morning and Bak Yerim is cooped up inside a small bathroom trying to make herself look more intimidating. There’s a fine line between looking poor but vulnerable and poor but someone not to fuck with.
It’s, unfortunately, a line she doesn’t really know how to straddle.
The fact that her family will be awake soon enough does not help matters. Yerim tries to apply some long expired makeup to look older and more punk, but her shaking hand doesn’t pay her skill at cosmetics any compliments.
If she’s being honest, she looks more like she just rolled out of a trash can. Somehow, she looks worse than the party girls she sometimes sees stumbling to cars or back home, with smeared lipstick, makeup that looks like bruises in the wrong light, and a general smell of alcohol and smoke.
Yerim sighs, turning on the faucet to wash the makeup off when an alarm rings through the apartment.
She closes the faucet and, as quietly as she can, speeds out of the house before her cousin even has the time to hit snooze.
Yerim will just have to make up for the lacking parts of her appearance with her attitude. Plenty of people are scared of teenagers. It honestly confuses her, ‘cause you’d think that if people were so scared, they’d treat teenagers just a little bit better.
To be fair, the adults she’s met so far haven’t really been afraid of teenagers. Just incredibly annoyed by them. She hopes that the brokers she’s going to meet will be a first and actually be scared of her.
Taking one last look in the window, she smooths her hair and shoulders her ratty backpack, heavy with the weight of all her savings and a pair of brass knuckles she lifted from a customer years ago.
He’d been an asshole and she thought it looked cool, so she took it. And now, it’s her only line of defense in case the brokers try anything.
Yerim walks without only a little bit of a slouch as she gets onto the metro. Carefully, she keeps her mind blank of all the worst-case scenarios. Whatever happens will happen and she’ll just roll with the punches as they come.
At least the people on the metro want to edge away from her. The place is packed, and so it’s not like anyone can just move away to avoid standing or sitting next to her, but she can tell they want to. Their eyes glaze over her like she’s not there.
Yerim honestly doesn’t mind. Their lack of attention makes it all the easier to spy on them.
As she speeds closer and closer to her destination, she studies the faces of the metro-goers. There are children of varying ages gathered at one end, probably going to school. Some look like older siblings, the way they keep looking over the younger ones, as if making sure no one slipped off.
There’s a lot of people heading to work. They’re in business uniforms, prim and proper, such a sharp contrast to Yerim’s own messy appearance.
There’s also some families—mothers or fathers with very young children. Not quite infants, as there’s no crying, but not young enough to be left unattended by any good parent.
Yerim looks away from the families soon enough but because she’s not entirely disrespectful, spares a thought for her parents.
She likes to think that if they could see her now, they’d be proud of her for surviving. From what she can remember, they just wanted her to do her best.
It’s a hard belief to hold onto, though, when she lost them so early and there’s no one around to actually tell her what her parents were like. And besides, wanting a child to just do her best in an elementary school test is very different from being okay with a punk, ill-behaved kid.
Yerim snorts softly. How sad. Her parents never knew anything other than an eight-year-old Yerim and she will never know who they were outside of being her parents.
… Her parents never saw the world as it became. They died before the dungeons, before things went to true shit everywhere.
A part of Yerim aches. The world has changed and her parents will never get to change with it. And yet at the same time, she doesn’t think they’d be very happy with this new world. It’s probably for the best that they’re gone, even though Yerim is left behind.
Then she’s at her stop and it’s time for her to get off. She buries her parents again in her mind. It wouldn’t do for the dead to keep rising.
Yerim shifts the backpack straps and keeps her head down as she follows the movement of the crowd down the street. It’s a simple manner then to cleanly branch off into a seedy alleyway.
This is when she glances quickly down at the directions she wrote on her hand yesterday. She doesn’t want to get lost here and she doubts that people will be so kind as to direct her to a group of awakening brokers. They’d definitely report her first.
There are people who stare at her, but Yerim glares at them whenever their eyes meet. To them, she needs to be the dog that bites first. The act seems to be effective enough because no one bothers her.
Eventually, she finds the incredibly suspicious-looking shop. It has a faded out sign, titled, ‘Hope Resources,’ and really just seems like a junk store.
The person over the phone said they offered numerous services, though, so that’s what pushes her forward even though it looks like it could be a front for something much worse than awakening brokers.
At any rate, the store looked to be in better shape than her uncle’s place, so she really wouldn’t complain too much.
As such, she just shoulders in, stomping as she comes and throwing her head back. She already knows that her hair is sticking out wildly, a strange, barbed lion’s mane.
The people at the counter don’t look very impressed.
“Bak Yerim,” she says before they can ask. “I have an appointment.”
Some shoppers look at her, because she just said all this among aisles of convenience store food, but the cashier nods.
“The job interviews,” he says. “Go down the hall, the stairs to your left, and then your second right. There’s a sign on the door.”
She nods and then makes her way to the room, hands jammed into her pockets so no one can see them shaking.
Before she enters the room, she takes a few deep breaths. She can handle this and anything that comes her way.
It’s a middle-aged woman waiting for her, typing out something on a computer. Even though Yerim knows she shouldn’t let her guard down, she can’t help but feel a bit relieved.
“Bak Yerim, right?” the woman asks.
Yerim’s eyes cast around, looking for some notice of a name.
“You can call me auntie,” the woman offers.
“No way in hell,” Yerim spits out. “Give me your name, ahjumma.”
“Brat,” the woman says, but it doesn’t sound completely mean. “It’s Hong Yeonghui. Happy?”
“Sure, you can say that.”
Hong Yeonghui raises a brow. “Keep with that attitude and you’re not going to get Awakened.”
“Keep with those responses and you’re not going to get any money,” Yerim snaps back.
“Kid, everyone wants to become Awakened nowadays. I have no shortage of customers.”
See, Hong Yeonghui says that, but the woman does look more nervous now.
A smile curls on Yerim’s lips. This ahjumma really had more to lose than Yerim did, if she thought about it. Yerim could always reveal her location and of course Yerim was just the pitiful, scammed child. It wasn’t her fault.
Hong Yeonghui’s face settles into a calm and that’s when Yerim thinks the two of them are on the same page.
“Let’s get on with the talk, then,” Yerim says.
Hong Yeonghui studies her for a moment and then shrugs. “It’s a very simple proposal. You pay us one lump sum beforehand, we take you to one of the dungeons at our disposal, lead you through it, and if you have the ability, you will Awaken.”
“Sounds too good to be true,” Yerim says.
“We do not guarantee an Awakening,” Hong Yeonghui says. “And depending on the price you pay, you can choose what level of difficulty you want the dungeon to be. They say the harder the dungeon, the more likely you’ll Awaken.”
Yerim hummed. “So what are these different prices?”
Hong Yeonghui rattles off a list of prices, most of them out of Yerim’s price range. Of course they are. She saved until she knew she had enough money for the lowest price she heard floating around.
It’d have been nice to have more options, but beggars can’t be choosers.
“They say more difficult dungeons lead to more Awakenings?” Yerim asks, though she’s not really looking for an answer. As Hong Yeonghui nods, Yerim points at the option for a C-class dungeon.
“That one,” she says.
“You’re… sure?” Hong Yeonghui asks.
Yerim scowls. “I thought you wanted the money.”
“Like I said, there’s plenty of people wanting to get Awakened.”
“I’m sure,” Yerim says. And then, for good measure, takes out her savings and throws it all out on the table.
“That’s one way to go about it, I suppose,” Hong Yeonghui mutters and then gets up. “Stay here. I’ll go settle an appointment and will come back with your guide.”
Yerim nods like she knows how this works and not even when the door closes does she relax. For all she knew, there were cameras in this place.
The one consolation was that Hong Yeonghui didn’t take the money with her when she left. If she had… well, Yerim doesn’t think she’d be as relaxed about this as she is now. But now, Hong Yeonghui has to come back with something.
Yerim’s nails press painfully into the palm of her hand as she counts how long she holds her breaths, waiting for Hong Yeonghui to arrive.
Hong Yeonghui comes back with a rather sad and pathetic looking man.
“This is Yoo Myeongwoo,” Hong Yeonghui says, slapping Yoo Myeongwoo on the back. “He’ll drive you to and lead you through the dungeon.”
“I am in your care,” she says and Yoo Myeongwoo mutters the same back to her. He is looking anywhere but her.
Some people are just nervous. Some people may not be normal but that doesn’t mean that they’re unsafe. Yerim has met plenty of people and Yoo Myeongwoo is probably just one of those people who talks to himself or hears things sometimes.
“I’ll give the money when we get there,” she says, pulling her bills back inside the backpack. Maybe she shouldn’t have just revealed her hand like that.
“Sounds good,” Hong Yeonghui says, leaning back in her chair and lighting a cigarette. Yerim’s nose wrinkles at the smell. “Close the door on your way out. Text me when you’re coming back, Yoo Myeongwoo.”
“Sure,” the man says and then starts to leave, not even waiting for Yerim to follow.
The nerve of some people. Yerim speed-walks until she catches up, and even then, the man doesn’t even look at her.
There’s a lot of things she wants to say to this guy, but instead, she just gets into the car that they arrive at. She rests the backpack on her lap and decides that all choice words can be after she Awakens.
“Hey,” Yerim says when Yoo Myeongwoo starts the car. “What class are you?”
“F-rank,” he mutters.
Low bar to beat then. Even if she was an F-rank, she could probably defeat this guy. Benefits of not being depressed or whatever is wrong with him.
“How’d you Awaken?” she asks, just to fill the silence.
“Doesn’t matter,” he says, making a sharp turn. “It’s not that long to the dungeon.”
A part of her wants to be annoying as all hell, but she keeps her mouth shut. He is still more powerful than her, technically.
Yerim watches the sky as Yoo Myeongwoo drives them to the dungeon. Her phone is completely still in her pocket but that’s really just because she put it on silent.
Yerim doesn’t want to look at it. Her family rarely gets in contact with her, but sometimes, when she’s out too late or they’re feeling especially needy, they’ll spam her with calls and texts. She’s fairly certain there’ll be some messages from them now, demanding where the hell she is.
The dungeon somehow looks to be in better shape than the actual broker headquarters. Still, Yerim is not complaining. As long as she Awakens, all of this will be worth it.
“Give me the payment first,” Yoo Myeongwoo says. His eyes are looking carefully to the side.
“Why?” she says.
“If you Awaken as anything high, I can’t defend myself against you. You can easily decide to extort these services in that case.”
Yerim thinks a bit and then nods. It does make sense, so she hands the money over to Yoo Myeongwoo, who, for some reason, looks so incredibly disappointed.
“Alright, then,” he says once he’s finished putting the money in a bag. “Here we go.”
Yerim lets Yoo Myeongwoo lead her, because outside of the fact that she doesn’t know where she’s going, she doesn’t think she can contain the shaking to her hands.
Despite all the buzz around dungeons, Yerim really hasn’t looked too much into them.
She knows the basics, of course. She’s seen some new reports and some live streams. And of course, she knows that there’s five or something S-ranks in Korea, but it’s not like she’s ever had a lot of time for this sort of stuff. Her peers, with their stable family lives and hope for a future, could obsess over hunters and idols alike. Yerim has always had other things on her mind.
As such, she doesn’t expect any of what she sees in the dungeon. The portal Yoo Myeongwoo leads her through bends and she thinks she’s either about to fall, break her bones or throw up. Perhaps all three at the same time.
Instead, she stumbles through the other side, her eyes landing first on the ground beneath her. Her backpack falls to the ground behind her, somehow having fallen off through the portal.
Still, she doesn’t pay attention to that. The ground’s fucking purple.
“Wha—”
“This is a C-ranked dungeon, the kind where only by killing the guardian beast you can escape,” Yoo Myeongwoo says in a low voice. He picks up her bag. “Be very quiet and careful. You will be found—best to buy time first.”
“How am I supposed to Awaken?” Yerim hisses.
Yoo Myeongwoo looks at her with really tired eyes. “Survive.”
And then, before she could retort to that extremely unhelpful statement, he’s gone. He’s fucking disappeared and stolen her shit and now Yerim is alone in a dungeon that is way too highly ranked. She might’ve chosen it, but Yoo Myeongwoo was supposed to still be here to guide her.
She could just about kill Hong Yeonghui. Yoo Myeongwoo too, while she’s at it. Burn the agency down and then her uncle’s apartment.
Her imagination barely appeases her, because soon enough, her knees are shaking and she’s a bit scared she actually will fall if she takes a step.
However, the cracking of twigs, the shifting of water, the rustling of leaves sound around her, and she’s really not sure how much longer she’ll be alone.
Yoo Myeongwoo was not helpful, but his statement of buying time does ring in her mind. Perhaps it’s stupid to stay near the water, but Yerim has always been decent at swimming.
And so, a part of her mind racing and the other just trying to focus on walking, she starts to crawl for some kind of exit.
Bak Yerim will survive. She did not come here just to die in a dungeon. When she does die, it’ll be with a body that can be cremated and the ashes kept near her parents.
She will awaken. She just has to.
Funnily enough, despite all her determination to Awaken and survive, she completely misses when she actually does Awaken.
She’s caught in a particularly difficult situation. There are these large, rat-like creatures patrolling the ground, but the half-maggots, half-wasps living in the trees are beginning to awake.
She is hiding in a tree, carefully breathing so she doesn’t make too much sound. There’s a maggot-wasp right next to her, already starting to twist its skin open and wake up, and she refuses this to be her end.
Yerim tries to step away on the branch, which is a great idea until she’s falling through the air, the giant rats’ shrieking growing louder and the maggot-wasps starting a swarm.
She doesn’t hear most of that, though. What she hears instead is the muffled world around just after she slams into the river. The world is tinted orange—because of course even the water is colored weirdly—and for a moment, she just floats.
Then, because Yerim has no luck, she realizes that the water is not still. There are creatures down here, too. They appear with luminescent eyes and Yerim doesn’t think she’ll like aquariums in the same way ever again.
For a brief moment, she is suspended in the water, watched by all the creatures. Then a bubble of air escapes her and she knows with clarity that they are going to pounce.
She kicks upward, but a jaw latches onto her leg, pulling her back down. Another goes for her arm, but she pushes her arm back until she hits something. The motion is enough to disorientate the creature and so Yerim focuses on kicking the one drawing her deeper.
Her eyes are burning from exposure to the water but finally, somehow, her leg is free. The water feels colder than it did before and somehow less smooth, but she doesn’t pay attention, just desperately lashes out until she’s out of the water and out of reach of all the beasts.
Yerim gasps for breath, grasping onto solid land, and then whirls around, trying to get farther from the river but also making sure that those giant rats don’t catch her.
It’s then that she sees the ice, jagged and sharp, that pierces its way out of the water. It’s then that she realizes that the river is no longer made of water but some snowy flurry.
Even though she’s on the bank, she can see the movement of each ice shard with detail, and the glare from the sun is more intense than she ever imagined it could be. She hears the creatures underwater moaning and even the footsteps of rats making their way downstream, trying to follow where she had been taken by the river.
Every since, she realizes as even her own breathing is leagues too loud, is dialed up to fucking one hundred.
She doesn’t check—she doesn’t know how—but she has Awakened.
There’s some time that she still has before the beasts attack again, and desperately, she racks her brain for some kind of an escape.
Then, Yoo Myeongwoo’s words come back to her.
“It’s a C-ranked dungeon, the kind where only by killing the guardian beast you can escape.”
Yerim flexes her fingers and rolls out her wrists. She doesn’t know where to find this guardian beast nor does she know what her new abilities entailed, but she’ll figure it out. She’s already come this far.
The maggot-wasps are what appear first this time.
Yerim’s eyes flit to the ice poking out of the water. She made that, she’s certain of that, but the only issue is that she’s not sure how. The best she can do, in this case, is reproduce the situation that led to this.
Which means getting back into the water.
Something has to have changed in her because before, Yerim knows she would have been repulsed. The water is dangerous and her leg is still bleeding from where that creature latched on. Or at least, it was.
But now? She doesn’t even hesitate before taking a running leap and plunging back into the water.
If there are creatures down here, she’ll kill them all. It’s always been Yerim alone, and since the world has shown that to her time and time again—her parents’ deaths, her shit family, even strangers like Yoo Myeongwoo and Hong Yeonghui just scamming here at the first opportunity—she’ll affirm it. Someone with a bleeding heart might feel bad for anything that is hit by the indiscriminate shards she sends out, but she doesn’t care.
She can’t care anymore.
Besides, she gets to learn more about her skills in this way. She knows of the ice that comes intuitively from her—or, rather, that’s the wrong word. It’s not intuitive, but it certainly comes easily, like she’s wrenching something into place—but it’s only through getting slammed into the air that she realizes she can fly.
Her legs flailed out and soon enough, she was walking on air.
Yerim, she realizes standing far above the river, far above all life, for once in her miserable life, is powerful.
When she descends, there are still maggot-wasps swarming, but this time, they’re swarming as defense, swarming to get away from her. Like she’s the monster that plagued them or like she attacked them first.
Really, these creatures were no different from people.
Water shoots from the river, drowning the stragglers, and Yerim isn’t sure if it’s her own emotions or if she actively chose that in this altered state of hers.
But it doesn’t matter, now does it? She is a hunter now and this is what hunters do.
It’s only when she runs to catch up with the few that have escaped that she realizes that maybe, leaving them alive can be a good thing. After all, beasts flock to other beasts. Perhaps these maggot-wasps will lead her to the guardian beast.
What the maggot-wasps do lead her to is an infested forest. They try to hide by burrowing into thick trunks and the birds—though, that's the wrong word, right? These birds have protruding teeth and feathers that are too sharp and not suited to flight—dive at her.
The river followed her, though, and so it’s easy to sweep the trees from their foundations. She splits the trees into two with the ice shards and the birds? Well, perhaps their diving would have been more effective were she not able to sidestep them midair.
It really is quite funny, she thinks, running along the air, to hear each bird shriek when she moves at the last moment to avoid getting impaled.
The birds are easy to drown as well. The river is like her shadow, and what she wants, it obeys as swiftly as the current runs.
Soon enough, it's just her, watching a flooded landscape from high up.
The thrill slowly leaves and she sags in the air, slouching closer and closer to the ground.
She should find some survivors, see where they lead her and all that. As she passes over, stepping carefully on the air as if it might no longer support her if she presses too hard, she sees all the corpses of the creatures she’s killed.
On dungeon streams, these kinds of creatures are exchanged for some kind of value—bodies for coins, parts for potions, experience as a level up in a way... that is all common.
These bodies aren’t unsalvageable but they are rather wrecked.
The other thing is that on the streams, none of it really looks real. It is impressive, what technology can fake these days, and if she squints, whatever is in the movies is close enough to the creatures on dungeon screens.
After all, isn’t this entire concept like something out of a video game? There are so many advocates for dungeon beasts or talking about the dangers of dungeons, but it is hard for Yerim to take any of those people seriously. This is the kind of game that she could find at the discount store. She still remembers a world that had none of this.
And so, she’s expected to just accept all of it as real? She’s expected to treat every action here with an appropriate level of gravity?
A beating heart might be aghast at the destruction. Yerim, however, knows that this dungeon will reset eventually. These beasts would be gone then anyways.
So, despite the fact that this is probably a really horrific landscape, Yerim doesn’t feel anything.
The color scheme of the dungeon, all purples, oranges, and pinks, is really not helping, she decides as she stretches, drops to the ground fully, and starts to head out again.
She examines her surroundings, her eyes drawn back to the river, though it looks more like toxic sludge now.
A chill passes over her arms and she thinks, for a moment, she can see someone in the water.
The image passes soon enough and Yerim focuses on moving forward. There aren't any survivors in this region anyways.
The landscape up ahead is not much better in terms of clarity of direction. Yerim throws ice in random directions, hoping to elicit some kind of a response, but all the creatures run from her. She usually can either only miss them or kill them.
It makes Yerim wonder as to her status. High-ranked Hunters are supposed to find lower-ranked dungeons to be much easier, and that seems to be Yerim's experience so far.
Yoo Myeongwoo said that this is a C-ranked dungeon. Did that mean, then, that she was a higher rank than C?
She can't get her hopes up too high. First, she needs to get out of here. Then, she can start to dream.
Her radius of destruction is harder to wade through on the ground than it was in the air, but she perseveres, because she doesn’t want to exhaust that flying skill. So she deals with a soggy ground that she’s half-convinced wants her to drown. The water, for now though, is just a comfort.
The other benefit of the wet ground is that it becomes exceedingly obvious where beasts tread. The river is not supposed to come out this far, that Yerim figures out quickly by how many creatures she catches unaware.
She kills most of them, but there is no sudden opening or portal for her escape.
After an indeterminate amount of time accidentally drowning creatures, she takes a small break. This was not working well, just killing everything. Additionally, either she was too overpowered or not skilled enough to follow the creatures, because even when she did manage to trail the creatures, they never brought her to the guardian beast.
She'd have to do a little more investigation it seemed.
Guardian beast... perhaps there was some clue in the title? Obviously, it would have to be a powerful beast, but looks could be deceiving. Perhaps instead of investigating the animals, she should pay more attention to her surroundings. If there was a guardian beast, it had to be guarding something, and that something would look most like some exit out.
Ergo, looking in a field or in forests wouldn't be the most productive. Yerim squints her eyes at a set of distant mountains. That seemed like a pretty obvious place for there to be a path.
As she starts to head over, she pauses. Would the most obvious place to look really be the smartest place to look? It feels all too easy.
Then again, she defeated all these monsters rather easily. Perhaps that is all there is to this. Perhaps she is just overcomplicating this.
She continues walking, and then, when that proves too slow, she starts to run.
It takes little time, then, for her to make it to the mountainous region of this dungeon. It's almost a footnote, then, when she finds a lion-like creature guarding a flame and when she kills the creature. Instead of the corpse remaining, the fire spreads over it and reduces it to dust. Then, the flame itself disappears and the ground is shifting.
A portal warps into existence and Yerim stares at a warehouse setting before she kicks herself mentally and rushes through.
And just like that, she's out. She's escaped the dungeon she was abandoned in, and she's Awakened.
Yerim falls to her knees, dust rising as she does so, and she doesn't know how long it takes for her to drag herself out of the warehouse. She leaves imprints where her hands grab, but she really doesn’t have the bandwidth to care or comprehend.
She would've thought that someone might have come to check up on her. This is the exit for the dungeon belonging to those brokers, so why did no one come to see if she had exited? Did they really mean for her to—to—
It's fine. It always is. It's especially better now that she is actually Awakened. Who gives a fuck if anyone came to help her when she actually has power now.
Yerim, just to test, punches the ground and has to close her eyes to prevent concrete and dust from blinding her.
She doesn't stop the grin that cracks its way across her face. She doesn't let it fade as she pushes her way through crowds—though isn't it more that the crowds part before her? What does it mean, if people instinctively step away from her, as if she’s, no, she’s not going to continue that thought—and she keeps the smile up as she waits in line to register an Awakening.
Yerim knows she's a bit of a sight. There’s colorful stains all over her clothes, her grin doesn't speak to her shreds of sanity, and there are quite a lot of remains and blood splattered across her. But this is the world of Hunters now, so no one says anything.
She is patient, as she waits in line, instincts buzzing.
"Name?" the person at the desk says, looking both incredibly skeptical and shocked when looking at her.
"Bak Yerim," she says, and repeats as necessary until the secretary gets it down right.
"Age?"
"15."
The lady's eyes tighten at that, but there is no law for restricting who can Awaken. Yerim may not have researched a whole lot about dungeons, but she knows this, at least.
"For what purpose?"
"To register an Awakening."
“Have you filled out your form?”
Yerim just blinks at her.
“Right,” the lady at the desk says. “Alright, go down the hall, to your left, second door down on the right. Someone will help you with registering there.”
Yerim nods at her and follows the steps, stuffing her hands in her jacket pockets before they can start shaking. It's not from nerves but rather some form of... well... almost excitement.
The person inside the room is cleaning some glassware when she enters.
"Ah, an Awakening?" the person says. Yerim nods tightly.
"Well, just step here on this meter and we'll go through the process."
Yerim follows and frowns a little when the device they have her on starts to creak. She wonders what that says about her skills.
"How do you know you've Awakened?" the person asks.
Yerim is not stupid. She's not just going to reveal that she went to an Awakening broker. That shit's illegal.
"Walking back home," she just says. “Sidewalk kind of came apart.”
The person does not look amused in the slightest. "Ah, and all this debris?"
"I was bullied. Probably won't be anymore," she adds lightly. It's not like any of that is a lie.
The grin comes back in full force when she imagines the looks on her family's faces. Them, just regular people, how will they feel about the fact that the girl that they called useless and a freeloader is now more powerful than they will probably ever be?
"Well, say 'Status Window,' and you should be able to see your stats on your own," the person says. "When you see it, just let me know and I’ll confirm the stats that I have measured, okay?”
Yerim nods and whispers, “Status Window.”
For a moment, she's afraid that she fucked up. That she didn't actually Awaken, or that her Status Window is broken, or that she wasn't loud enough.
Then bright screens flood around her, overwhelming in their data.
Yerim's eyes fly around, trying to track words—something about a corpse? Hermes?—when a man's figure appears.
He waves at her, a holographic little figure that's standing among the field of data like a news broadcaster.
"Hello," he says. She opens her mouth to reply back, and he says, "No, no, don't bother doing that. Your buddy in the room can't see or hear anything that's happening here, so it'll just get a little awkward if you just start speaking aloud."
Yerim nods, just stopping herself from saying, "Okay," aloud. The man smiles at her. He doesn't look very young and he has a kind of gentle air around him.
“Did you get it up?” the man in the room, not the hologram, asks.
“Oh, uh, I just wanna see it a bit on my own first,” she says, smiling. “It’s a lot to take in.”
“It is rather impressive that you Awakened as an A-rank at your age,” the man says, understandingly. Yerim freezes at the words. “I’ll step outside for now, to give you some privacy. I’ll come back in ten minutes or so.”
Yerim just manages to nod as the door closes.
“Well, that was certainly a way to find out,” the hologram man says. “But trust me, you’ll get through it.”
“Who are you?” she whispers.
"I'm here to guide you through your Awakening," he says. "You can call me your System-guide, if you want."