The First Awakening

"Damn it..."

This couldn't be. I'd seen it coming, and still the sheer nerve of it left me speechless.

Ha. What the hell was this? Had I actually regressed?

My head was still a wreck, but I didn't have the luxury of sitting here stunned. If the past really was repeating itself—if something like a regression had happened—then I already knew exactly what came next.

System. Status window.

The thought alone was enough. A soft chime, and translucent electronic letters rose at once.

A newly awakened Awakener would have stumbled through every wrong turn just to get this far. I, though, was already a veteran Hunter.

Whoa. Look at these stats.

I stared at the miserable base stats that would make me a perfect D-rank, and my stomach dropped.

Awakener rank was decided by your initial awakening stats. The baseline itself changed with rank, and the gaps were obscene. My Strength sat around 17. An S-rank would break 100 the moment they awakened.

And the higher the rank, the bigger the stat gains that came with every level.

So no matter how many levels you clawed up, a D-rank only ever grew by a D-rank's measure. A level 40 D-rank still fell short of a level 1 S-rank who had only just awakened.

Beggarly. Unfair. And what was there to do about it?

Everything happening now was already impossible.

Whatever the method, it seemed only my consciousness had been carried into the past. The body was a chick that had just cracked its shell.

Right. Mentally I was a veteran Hunter. In the flesh, I was a complete soft body.

Wait. What was Soul 100P?

P... points? There had never been a stat like that. Still, points usually meant some kind of benefit, didn't they?

A gift to mark the regression? What good were a hundred points? I was sure of it...

"Ha-jun! O-over there...!!"

Han Gyeol, peering out through the shattered window, waved at me in a rush.

They were a long way off, but my eyes—already past anything an ordinary person could manage—caught the scene cleanly. A dungeon portal had severed the tracks. And there—

"Grrrr..."

A hyena, walking on two legs. Not a hyena, strictly speaking. A monster built in the likeness of one.

"Gnolls."

They averaged over a meter and a half, and the big ones cleared two meters easily.

Weaker than orcs. Stronger than kobolds or goblins. Yeah. Exactly like the past.

"Gnolls? You mean monsters?"

The color drained out of Gyeol's face. In the last decade or so, an ordinary person had almost never met a monster this exposed, with nothing between them.

Of course, he wasn't ordinary anymore. He'd get used to scenes like this.

"Gyeol. Calm down. They're still far. Easy."

"...But."

"You have to get a grip. Awakeners will come for us soon. Until then, we buy the time. Focus."

"We do?"

I caught his shaking shoulders.

Focus. Stay calm. Those used to be the words I heard from him.

"In your head, say System, status window. Then check your skills. You remember those Awakener documentaries, right?"

Panic sat naked in Gyeol's eyes. He drew one deep breath and nodded.

As expected. Whatever it was, Gyeol was fast, and he was strong.

The truth was, the old me had only thought about running. I'd hauled Gyeol with me, farther and farther, pretended not to hear the screams at my back, and sprinted like a madman.

Status window. Skills.

While Gyeol checked his stats and skills, I checked mine.

Ugh. Fresh awakening, and almost no skills. Even when my level climbs I never really get a usable attack skill, but still.

I scowled at the window hard enough to twist my whole face. This was the problem. Being a hybrid with no knockout offensive skill was bad enough; starting with neither a defense skill nor an attack skill had always slowed my growth.

At least the skill I used most is here from level 1.

Relief, and then something that snagged.

Pioneer's Barrier? I don't know this one.

The moment I wanted a closer look, the window unfolded the description.

Calling that a detailed description was generous. The System had always been this kind of crap.

Soul-type debuffs...? Not mental-type? That didn't exist before.

Which left me in an awkward spot.

Most of my skills came with explanations that seemed tied to the soul. There was something like astral projection, and something like possession.

But every one of them had been filed as mental-type or energy-type.

Fourteen years as an Awakener. As a Hunter. I had never once seen a type called soul.

Same as that Soul 100P just now. What is this? Is this not a regression? Did I fall into some other world?! Another dimension's Earth?! A parallel world?! Then is the Gyeol of the real world actually dead?!

Frantic, I checked the other skills too.

A quick pass. The skills I knew matched what I remembered.

All except one line on Soul Appraiser: You can see the quality and grade of a soul.

What was that supposed to be?

At least the effects themselves didn't look drastically different. Having Oppressive Chains was a relief. A level 1 skill wouldn't be strong, but it could buy people a little time to run.

First, let's try Soul Appraiser.

A thin, keen hum. Energy I could never have felt before awakening seemed to turn through my body, and information rose beside Gyeol.

Good. I can use Soulmate right now. Last time I didn't know the method, so I only barely managed it after we reached the Awakener Center.

The skill was second nature to the me of now, but the feeling was new.

Before the regression, just grasping a skill and using it had never been this easy.

Before, all I could measure was the sync rate. That, though...

Soul grade and condition were visible. B-grade. Unstable. What did that mean?

Gyeol's Awakener rank ought to be S-rank. So a separate grade existed? I turned it over and still couldn't pin the meaning down.

I'd regressed... so why had something already changed?

In the movies, the protagonist goes back and lays a hand on the events of the past. The future shifts. Happy things, tragic things, unfold past anyone's reach.

The butterfly effect. Something like that.

But I hadn't done anything yet.

Even in novels, the early stretch was supposed to be the cliché—use the information in your head, ride a winning streak, drink your catharsis! Wasn't that how it went?

Nothing disadvantageous had happened to me yet. It still sat wrong.

"Ha-jun. I checked, but... honestly, even looking at it, I don't really get it."

Gyeol tapped my arm. The unease still hadn't left his eyes. Of course it hadn't.

Awakening did make you incomparably stronger than an ordinary person. Overnight. But right after, almost no one could actually handle that power. Not even the strongest S-rank Awakener.

You wouldn't have imagined you'd become an Awakener in the first place. Not until it happened.

A brand-new Awakener didn't know their own strength, or their abilities. They had to go to a training ground built for Awakeners, drill for a long time, and study.

Say there was someone with a talent for running absurdly fast, though no one had ever taught them. Fast enough for the Olympics. But what if they didn't know a single rule of the Games? What if they didn't know they had to follow the rail and stay in their own lane? What if they didn't know everyone lined up together and started on the signal? What if they didn't even know how to enter the Olympics to begin with? Could that person run the race? Could they compete properly? And could they raise that running to a higher level?

Education for Awakeners was that. The way you hammer iron into a sword, you had to pass through a series of processes before you could do one person's share of an Awakener's work.

Of course, this was fourteen years ago... Wait. What had Awakener education even been like back then? I could barely remember, which probably meant it had been miserably, horrifically bad.

"It's fine. What skills do you have?"

"Longsword, two-handed sword, and greatsword specialization. Sacred Obstinacy. Blessing of the Lightning God, and Son of the Clouds... If you mean what each of them actually does—"

"Good. That's enough. An S-rank really is different."

I didn't need the explanations. We'd been a pair for fourteen years; hear the name and I knew what it was. Level 1, of course, so they'd still be weak.

Sacred Obstinacy was a passive that drove defense to absurd heights. A cheat skill. The more you got hit, the harder you became.

Thanks to it, Gyeol had earned the nickname of a Hunter you could never kill unless you killed him in a single blow. And he even had that Excessive Avenger skill on top of it. Honestly, his tanking was monstrous.

Blessing of the Lightning God has a passive and an active together, so he's immune to lightning and can summon it on the spot. Use Son of the Clouds as movement and attack from there... add even a 0.5% buff from my skill, and it's possible. Against gnolls, more than enough.

Gnolls were, without question, a hard fight for Hunters who had only just awakened. But I was here. With my information and my memory, I could find a way to win.

"S-rank? How do you know that? I don't see anything that says so."

Damn. Slip of the tongue.

"Uh— uh? I don't know, I just feel it? You're insanely strong? Like this huge aurora is pouring off you?"

"You can feel that? I don't feel anything from you."

"...You— you little— tch. You needling me because I'm weak?! Fine, you bastard. Be generous and I'm a D-rank right now! What are you gonna do about it!"

"...D-rank?"

Gyeol flushed, thrown. I furrowed my brow as hard as I could, pretending to be offended.

Inside, cold sweat was running. An Awakener's rank was decided by a state agency after they compiled stats and skills together, and unless you could see straight through someone's stats and skills, another person's rank was not easy to know.

Unless they were a high-level S-rank, reading rank off something as vague as the air they gave off was impossible.

So I had misspoken completely. The Gyeol of now probably knew next to nothing about Awakeners, so a sloppy excuse might still slide past him.

I had to be careful. I had memories of the future, as if I had regressed—but this was the past.

"Drop it."

"I wasn't trying to put you down."

Fortunately, flustered as he was, Gyeol never got around to pointing out that I seemed to know his skills inside out. He missed the moment so badly he seemed to forget it entirely.

I got up without ceremony and shouted to the others.

"Excuse me! Everyone! Monsters are coming! If you can run, even if it's dangerous, get toward the rear! Off the train, and straight along the tracks!"

I shot to my feet and waved, and fear seized the passengers. The situation was already enough to throw anyone into a panic, and now monsters. Of course they were scared.

"H-hyaaak! M-monsters?! That's impossible!"

"I-it's real! There! Outside the window...!!"

"Kyaaah!"

"S-save me!"

One by one, people broke into a run. The gnolls had already drawn much closer to the train.

"Grrrrrr..."

The growls of beasts worked into a frenzy were right on top of us.

"You don't know a thing. Neither do I. But we have to live first, don't we."

At the low, serious drop in my voice, Gyeol nodded just as gravely. I gripped his shoulder hard. It was trembling, barely.

It's all right, Gyeol.

This time, I'll do better.

This time, let's only suffer half as much.

This time—until you get married. Until you have a child.

Until you're happy.

I'll stay alive until this black hair goes white.

I used the skill.