"Shall we start with the easiest thing first?"
A few minutes earlier.
Having officially begun the lesson, Kim Giryeo first gave a theoretical explanation of the blurring phenomenon, then demonstrated it himself.
He told Haseong to watch closely from that point on and casually activated a spell.
Unfortunately, what followed only presented Haseong with yet another obstacle.
"How was that? Pretty easy, right?"
"-_-"
"First, just try doing what I showed you a moment ago. Let's keep things simple and focus on getting the basics down today."
Kim Giryeo, the alien serving as his instructor, displayed a talent so absurd that it was enough to leave anyone speechless from the very beginning.
"Huh? Why is Jung Haseong making that face?"
After finishing the spell, Giryeo briefly went back over what he had just done.
First, he had activated the ability of the [Pyromancer Necklace] for Haseong's benefit.
Naturally, he had kept its power down to roughly F-rank.
Manifesting a fire skill through a magical tool.
No matter how he looked at it, there shouldn't have been anything particularly strange about that...
"Why do you look so tense?"
At that, Jung Haseong replied.
"You just used the skill on the back of your own head with your eyes closed."
"Hmm."
"And just like you said you would, you hit the exact center of the tile behind your head with the flame."
What was so strange about that?
To begin with, Jung Haseong had one particularly bad habit.
He only used magic within his field of vision.
Of course, there was nothing inherently wrong with choosing a target simply by looking at it, but relying exclusively on that method inevitably caused all kinds of problems.
"I never said you had to hit the exact tile from the beginning. It's fine if you're a little off."
Giryeo intended to build the foundation one step at a time.
But things were already going wrong.
The S-rank in front of him seemed to have completely forgotten about the demonstration and merely stood there with his mouth slightly open.
"Anyway, close your eyes and imagine a small flame appearing behind your head."
He urged the primitive before him once again.
Haseong closed his eyes and fell silent.
Thirty seconds passed.
Then, in a trembling voice, he said,
"I'm sorry."
"Don't apologize. Just use the skill."
Silence descended again.
Watching Haseong hesitate, clearly wanting to say something but unable to get it out, Giryeo finally realized what kind of situation he was dealing with.
"Ah. So this is where you're getting stuck this time."
This is a problem.
I'm supposed to teach him the four basic operations, but my student can barely even crawl...
"Turns out our Yoonseung really was a genius."
Faced with Haseong's disastrous basic control, Giryeo suddenly found himself missing his first apprentice.
But he couldn't give up now.
Three billion.
Three billion.
Well, since when had taking someone else's money ever been easy?
"I can do this... I can understand him..."
Giryeo calmed himself by thinking about the price of the epic-grade magic tools he still needed to buy.
A short conversation followed.
"Jung Haseong, now that I think about it, I heard this gym keeps first-aid supplies around. Do you know where they are?"
"I do."
"Would there happen to be antiseptic among them?"
"Probably."
"Then bring some."
At this point, Giryeo figured that if necessary, he could always resort to a bit of brute-force teaching with Jung Haseong.
"And once you bring it, disinfect your skin properly, then prick your own wrist."
The same method he had used on Seonwoo Yeon.
A short while later.
There was a minor crisis along the way, but fortunately, the first lesson came to an end without disaster.
The moment Jung Haseong drew blood from his wrist as instructed, Giryeo interfered with the flow of his mana, just as he had done back in Ha-dong, and forcibly awakened his senses.
"By the way, what just happened... Was that some kind of awakening skill you have, Hunter Kim?"
Whoosh.
Giryeo washed the Earthling's blood from his hands in the restroom attached to the gym.
Even so, he answered sincerely.
"It's not a skill. You can do it too if you practice."
Now the only question was whether all that effort would actually bear fruit.
"Anyway, let's go back and get you used to the sensation."
By manipulating the mana inside Jung Haseong's body, Giryeo had artificially awakened in him the sensation of what it felt like to cast magic at a location he could not directly see.
The feeling of energy surging through the body and flowing toward a specific point somewhere outside it.
That peculiar sixth sense was indispensable for determining magical coordinates.
"That's it. You're doing great!"
Soon enough, the results began to show.
Fortunately, the fire mage's talent could hardly be called poor.
No.
If anything, he was far too capable to be dismissed as unsuitable for training.
Despite appearances, Jung Haseong had spent nearly half his life as a model student.
Naturally, his ability to learn was well above average.
"Am I doing it correctly?"
"That's right. You just used the skill with your eyes closed."
His ability to absorb new information is pretty good.
Giryeo nodded, pushing aside the exhaustion building up from manipulating someone else's mana.
He had been somewhat worried when Haseong struggled at the beginning, but with this level of comprehension and sincerity, the rest of the schedule probably wouldn't pose much trouble.
"This is going smoothly!"
The problem was resolved far more easily than expected.
"-"
And yet, at that very moment, the black-haired hunter who had just received knowledge from another world stood in one corner of the gym with a strange expression on his face.
***
Would you believe that simply solving the problem he had been given could become a crisis in itself?
Whoosh.
As their first lesson approached its end, the man who had been reviewing the skill techniques Giryeo had taught him slowly opened his eyes.
"It's true... I can really use the skill now without checking the target with my eyes."
Frankly, it was absurd.
"So simple."
Teaching oneself how to use an awakening ability.
It wasn't as though this hunter had stubbornly clung to such an inefficient method for no reason.
There were circumstances behind Haseong's low expectations regarding his own ability to improve.
After all, hadn't mana only been discovered seven years ago?
Well, another spring had already passed, so technically they were now entering the eighth year.
Even so, scholars were unanimous on one point: the awakened people of this world were still in their infancy, barely learning how to walk.
Some people had been born with exceptional talent and could manipulate their abilities more flexibly than others.
But even those people had not yet reached a level where they could properly teach others.
That was precisely why, despite possessing more money than most people could ever dream of, Haseong had never been able to receive anything resembling a proper lesson in this capitalist society.
"Huh..."
This was on a completely different level from those cheap courses sold by fraudsters on the internet!
What Kim Giryeo had just done could easily be called a miracle.
Like lifting up a lump of flesh that could not yet stand on its own legs, he had seized another person's magical power directly and forced a new sensation into him.
"What in the world was that..."
A skill he had failed to activate no matter how much he practiced had suddenly worked.
Until now, every failure had only made him angrier at his own incompetence.
There had even been times when he had cried after confronting the reality that no amount of effort seemed capable of changing anything.
"And my problem was solved this easily?"
A faint sense of joy rose within Haseong.
It was that distinctive satisfaction that came from finally solving a difficult problem.
How could he not be happy?
For the fire mage who had suffered ever since receiving an awakening he had never wanted, the situation unfolding before him was nothing less than the realization of a wish he had prayed for again and again.
There was hope.
"I can get better too."
Haseong completely reevaluated Kim Giryeo's value.
He realized that Giryeo was not someone who should merely be regarded as a possible future teammate.
He was the guide to the path Haseong had spent so long searching for.
Giryeo's teaching ability was astonishing.
At that moment, Haseong became convinced that if he simply followed the instructions of this S-rank hunter, then even overcoming that enormous inferno would no longer be impossible.
"If I had proper help like this... I could improve too..."
However, there was one problem.
As you already know, the pyromancer standing here was not mentally resilient enough to have required the aid of modern medicine for no reason.
Swish.
"Wait."
"I almost got my priorities backward."
"Now that I think about it, this isn't simply about learning some secret technique."
"That hunter gave me the opportunity to work as part of a team."
Haseong's gaze shifted in one direction.
An archmage was letting out a quiet yawn.
And while watching that peaceful scene, Haseong sank deeper into thought.
"Even now, I'm learning this much..."
"If I actually got to work alongside someone like him, how much more could I learn?"
Without realizing that he was being deceived, he set himself entirely the wrong goal.
He resolved to master the techniques he had just learned and produce remarkable results.
And through those achievements, he desperately hoped to earn the recognition of Korea's fourth S-rank hunter and officially become part of his team.
Unlike Ahn Yoonseung, whose reaction had been comparatively restrained, Jung Haseong's attitude underwent a dramatic change the instant he personally experienced Giryeo's ability.
He began obsessing over his connection with this hunter.
At the same time, an unimaginable sense of pressure regarding the future settled over him.
"If I can't keep up with the lessons properly, he might cancel his promise to work with me..."
If Haseong ever learned that the entire team proposal had been nothing more than empty words, things would undoubtedly become troublesome.
Unfortunately, the alien responsible had yet to recover enough magical power to read another person's thoughts.
"What should I have for dinner after class?"
The archmage's soul remained occupied by such idle concerns, wasting the remaining lesson time worrying over utterly pointless matters.
***
"Don't you have any hobbies or anything?"
"Hobbies?"
"Reading. Games. Whatever. What do you normally do when you have free time?"
That afternoon, two people sat talking inside a quiet restaurant.
"Well... to be honest, I don't really have anything I'd call free time."
They were at a barbecue restaurant in Seoul.
Truthfully, the country's top-ranked hunter had never been especially interested in food, and he generally regarded eating out like this as more trouble than it was worth.
"What do you mean you don't have free time? Are you still working yourself to death these days?"
He had agreed to come only because Kim Giryeo had invited him.
He had thought that, in a private setting like this, he might finally have an opportunity to talk with the other man, even if only a little.
But even now, sitting face-to-face with him, Haseong still couldn't make sense of him.
"What has he been doing all this time?"
Where had this hunter named Kim Giryeo come from?
It was a question Jung Haseong had wondered about for quite some time.
Dungeon Shock.
The appearance of the Kraken in Busan.
And countless other major incidents.
The hunter sitting in front of him had never appeared in any of them.
It was almost as though he had suddenly fallen out of the sky one day.
Yet judging by the way he behaved, no matter how Haseong examined the matter, Giryeo did not seem like someone who had only recently awakened.
"According to what the Association announced, he seems to have some connection to the government."
"That would make sense."
But ultimately, every one of those thoughts was nothing more than speculation.
At present, there was only one thing Haseong could say with certainty.
The hunter sitting in front of him was surprisingly kind.
"Haseong-ah, don't overdo it."
Giryeo placed a piece of grilled meat onto Haseong's plate as he spoke.
"More importantly, do you actually eat properly on a regular basis? You're not just shoving whatever nutrients you need into your mouth because you're too busy working, are you?"
Haseong's chopsticks stopped.
He couldn't exactly deny it.
He frequently survived on things like vacuum-packed chicken breast.
At that moment, the man sitting across from him, who had apparently been observing his reaction, displayed a rare expression.
One eyebrow drew downward as his face twisted with displeasure.
"I knew it."
Unlike in the past, when he had deliberately maintained an unnaturally perfect facade, he now allowed his emotions to appear on his face quite freely.
"Seriously, what's wrong with you? The way you're living is way too much like how I used to live. It's kind of pathetic."
"Yes?"
"Never mind. Just hurry up and eat the meat."
Watching him, Haseong felt a strange new emotion stir inside him.
"If you don't want to die young, start eating properly from now on. And get enough sleep."
"Yes."
In truth, this kind of nagging was unfamiliar to an S-rank hunter.
Jung Haseong suddenly found himself recalling memories from long ago.
Peaceful days when he used to sit down for dinner with the only family he had.
Now that he thought about it, his mother had always nagged him about eating properly.
And yet, even after he had become an S-rank "monster," here he was hearing that same trivial kind of scolding once again...
"-_-"
He had never had an older brother.
And yet, in that moment, an inexplicable sense of longing surfaced within him.
Haseong remained lost in that emotion for a while, his face thoughtful.
Then, just as the extra order of soybean paste stew was set down on their table,
"Excuse me."
The young hero hesitated before speaking.
"Hunter Kim Giryeo, now that I think about it, it seems like we'll be seeing each other pretty often from now on..."
"Hmm."
"But doesn't it feel a little strange for two hunters who know each other to keep calling each other 'Hunter' all the time? So..."
The introduction had grown unnecessarily long because he kept circling around the subject.
But in the end, what he wanted was simple.
"If it wouldn't be rude... could I call you Hyung from now on?"
However, the man sitting across from him rejected the suggestion without hesitation.
"No. You can't."
"Ah. I see."
So he couldn't.
Haseong awkwardly closed his mouth, swallowing whatever he had been about to say next.
An uncomfortable silence settled between them.
The only sound filling the table was the steady sizzling of pork belly cooking on the grill.
Ssssh.
How long had he been sitting there listening to the fat crackle?
The blond man holding the tongs finally broke the silence as he cut apart the meat that had finished grilling.
Then, in a perfectly matter-of-fact tone, he explained exactly why Haseong could not call him Hyung.
"You're two years older than me."
Ssssh.
Haseong gave a small nod, almost automatically, as the words flowed past him.
A moment later, he placed the piece of pork skin he had been given onto the grill.
Only then did the black-haired awakened hunter finally react.
"...Excuse me, but what did you just say?"
With S-rank physical abilities, there should have been absolutely no possibility that he had misheard him.