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Episode 1: Even Being a Hero is Hard
I was just an ordinary job seeker.
That is, until I got hit by a truck on my way home and fell into another world.
‘At this point, I wonder if dump trucks are designed with some principle of dimensional travel…’
But it wasn’t so bad. Landing a decent job at a reputable company in South Korea in 2025 was akin to a war. And even if you won that war, it wasn’t like some rosy future was guaranteed.
In that case, being reborn in another world seemed better in many ways.
“Actually, this might be for the best.”
So, in a way, I was even excited. I thought I would become a hero, like the protagonists in other worldly stories.
At least, that’s what I believed… until I met the crazy fairy who introduced herself as ‘GM Celia’.
“Hmm… I really can’t seem to find any talent in you for swords or magic, Hero.”
“W-what does that mean?”
“Exactly what it sounds like. To defeat monsters and save the world, you need ‘talent.'”
“Then why am I even the hero?”
“Well, you got hit by a truck, didn’t you?”
“……”
It was absurd. No talent?
Right. Even in the modern world, I wasn’t someone with any special qualities. So, the word ‘talent’ never really suited me in the first place.
But…
“What the hell, then why did they send the truck in the first place?”
So I thought that in this other world, at least, I would have some special talent. Moreover, if they pinpointed me out of billions on Earth to send a truck, wouldn’t common sense dictate they saw some talent in me? Even the crazy Celia nodded in agreement with my words.
But.
“Right, how could there be no talent?”
“What?”
“It’s not like this truck can be sent to just anyone.”
“……”
The conclusion took a bizarre turn.
“So, let’s try to find your talent!”
“W-what talent?”
“Let’s figure out what you’re good at together!”
The strange sense of deja vu I felt from the fairy’s words!
‘Isn’t this… something my mom said to me when I was about 16?’
The fairy had brought up the century-old conundrum that even my mom and I couldn’t solve in over ten years.
From that moment on, the fairy Celia transformed into a full-blown maniac. She said she’d have to use the ‘Beta System’ with her administrator privileges, and then she confined me to an endless hell-like space.
“In the constellation’s game ‘Leica,’ there are roughly 17,895 system-defined professions.”
“What are you trying to say…?”
“Ah, that’s according to official data from the ‘Hero Ministry of Employment and Labor.'”
“……”
“But if you roughly group similar ones into categories, the number of representative professions drops to about a thousand, right?”
“So?”
“Let’s try them all, one by one.”
“What?”
“You were chosen by the truck! There must be something you’re good at, right?”
This was the beginning of the tragedy. While my mom struggled just to support my studies, the fairy was different. The maniac fairy’s concept of time was vastly different from a human’s.
“Th-this isn’t it either?”
“Doesn’t seem like it, Hero. Ugh… This really can’t be happening!”
So I… truly had to live over a thousand lives within this game-like world called ‘Leica.’ No, far more than a thousand. Sometimes, she made me try the same class multiple times, saying it seemed like there was some potential.
“Sigh… Th-this can’t be…”
“This one’s ambiguous too…! It’s too ambiguous!!”
Around maybe the twelve-hundredth run? The fairy’s once lively expression began to darken and rot.
But the funny thing was.
“This one’s not it either, right?”
“No, unfortunately.”
“Can’t be helped, I guess.”
The fact that I had achieved enlightenment at some point.
“How can you say something so irresponsible…!!”
“What’s next? What do I have to do this time?”
At first, this endlessly repeating life was truly agonizing, but before I knew it, I had surpassed enlightenment and started to enjoy it. Even averaging 10 years per run, it was well over ten thousand years—an eon of time. And it wasn’t like I just breezed through each run. I approached every job preparation with sincerity, more than anyone else. I just never received the fairy’s approval.
But.
“I really can’t do this anymore, Hero.”
“Can’t do what?”
“It seems…”
Celia finally shook her head.
“I think I’ll have to give up on you, Hero. I’ll be the first HR manager in history to do so.”
“What? You’re giving up on me?”
“Yes. I truly couldn’t find any talent in you at all.”
Celia had grown weary before I did.
“S-so what happens now?”
Because of that, I had no choice but to return.
“Back to where you originally came from.”
“Huh?”
“You have to go back to Earth.”
“What…?”
“It’s never happened before, but… it seems the truck made a wrong delivery this time.”
To borrow Celia’s words, I had become the first hero since the dawn of time to fail at job seeking.
“You’ve worked hard all this time, Hero.”
“……”
And so, I—who even failed at becoming a hero—returned to Earth exactly ten years later. It seemed the tens of thousands of years inside the world of Leica were only ten years on Earth.
CRASH-!!
Well, I returned by dropping right in the middle of the road and almost got hit again, but compared to what happened over the past eons, this was a very minor mishap.
‘It’s really… Seoul, isn’t it?’
I felt bittersweet, but my steps moved instinctively. The place I returned to was that crosswalk from my way home ten years ago. So, my steps were naturally heading towards ‘home.’ Although feelings like ‘longing’ had faded a lot during the eons, now that I was back in Seoul, I missed my mom.
“Wow… The world has changed a lot.”
But as I walked mindlessly, I soon had to stop in my tracks before a large banner.
[Hunter Recruitment Notice]
“What is… this?”
Because inside that banner… I found that tiresome name I thought I’d never see again, in a different sense.
[Recruitment Period: Until January 30, 2035.]
[Open Positions: Around 5]
[Eligibility: Leica Level 30 or above.]
‘Leica…?’
Surprisingly, on Earth after ten years… the beta test game [Leica] I had played for thousands of years had been ‘officially released.’
During the eons with the fairy, the word I heard most from her was ‘official release.’
“Pull yourself together!”
“Mistakes won’t be tolerated in the official release version, you know?!”
I never conceptually understood what a ‘beta test’ or ‘official release’ was from my perspective. But anyway, she mentioned the official release several times a day. So one day, I asked Celia.
“What exactly is the official release?”
“Um… well…”
“Where and how are they even releasing this?”
And I once heard a clear answer to that.
“Countless dimensional planes exist in the other world.”
“So they say.”
“And we administrators call those dimensional planes ‘servers.'”
“…?”
“But Leica hasn’t been released on all servers yet. One of them is the ‘Earth’ server where you originally lived.”
“What happens when it’s released?”
“A Gate will open on Earth, right?”
“Huh…?”
“A Gate to access the official version of ‘Leica.'”
But even after hearing this story, I honestly never even imagined that a Gate would open on Earth in my absence. So I was flustered.
“…A Gate?”
On the way home. Right in the middle of a square in Seoul Forest…
HUM-!
…the exact same Gate I saw when accessing the beta version was opening.
‘It’s really [Lyca]?’
But it seemed the shock I received couldn’t possibly be greater than that of a mother discovering her son after ten years.
“Oh, my goodness!”
In front of the apartment’s recycling bins. The mother I found on my way home fainted and collapsed right there.
Home was the same. The only thing that changed was my younger sister, twelve years my junior, who had become an adult in ten years.
“W-what? It’s really… you, oppa?”
Surprisingly, my parents had never moved even once in ten years. Even my father’s convenience store in front of Seoul Forest Station was exactly as it was ten years ago. They said they couldn’t do otherwise. Their son might come back someday. They thought they must be there when their son returned.
“……”
I thought all my emotions had dried up and vanished, but hearing that story made my heart feel heavy. Being dragged to another world had nothing to do with my will… but I couldn’t help feeling sorry nonetheless.
“Your father took out loans, sold the car, sold everything he could to hire hunters to find you… That’s why we couldn’t sell this house.”
The day I went missing ten years ago. Not long after that, ‘Gates’ began to open for the first time, they said. Moreover, the Gates that initially appeared worldwide weren’t the peaceful(?) ordinary ones in Seoul Forest but dangerously irregular Gates. So my parents had thought all along… that I had been sucked into a Gate. Although the banner attached in front of my father’s store was a bit embarrassing…
[Missing Person Search]
[Name: Lee “Geonyul-ah.”]
[Age at Time of Disappearance: 26]
[Estimated Current Appearance]
[Photo]
“Estimated appearance, what’s this?”
“……”
“You didn’t just paste a photo of Dad here, did you…?”
Seeing my parents, who had become desperately poor because of me, my desire for employment surged incomparably more than ten years ago.
“I’ll earn money from now on, Mom.”
“You?”
So it seemed I had to challenge getting a job again.
“Now, for real… I have to get a job.”
“How?”
Even if I couldn’t become a hero, with the experience I gained grinding in Lyca, shouldn’t I be able to become a hunter?
“I… practiced being a hero for over ten thousand years, you know?”
Of course, it seemed my mom didn’t find her son’s ambition that reliable.
““Geonyul-ah.”
“Yes?”
“You weren’t… dragged into some religious cult or something, were you?”
“……”
“It’s okay, son. What matters is you’re back. We can earn money somehow.”
My sister had a similar opinion.
“A job? It won’t be easy, oppa.”
“Why?”
“The paradigm of job seeking has completely changed from ten years ago.”
But when I glanced at the workbooks my sister brought from her room, my shrunken confidence became fully replenished.
[Hunter Manager Appointment Exam In-Depth Interview Analysis Collection]
[Item Appraiser License Written Exam Mastery Workbook]
…etc…
[Monster Protection Specialist Certification Deep Dive]
‘No matter how I look at it, these seem easier than the TOEIC/TOEFL workbooks from ten years ago.’
Anyway, I’m a veteran with at least tens of thousands of years of job-seeking experience as a hero. During that time, even if I lacked talent, I put in more effort than anyone. To exaggerate a bit, I felt like I could get half of a workbook right even if I started solving it right now.
“I can let the others slide, but what on earth is a Monster Protection Specialist license? Do people raise monsters on Earth too?”
“If you want to get a job at a monster protection organization…”
“This world has lost its mind.”
“Was it sane ten years ago?”
“Well, it wasn’t normal back then either.”
Seeing my sister, who had become worn down by the world in ten years, made me sigh automatically.
“But weren’t you 14 ten years ago?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you remember what the world was like then?”
My sister glanced at our mom.
“I was solving calculus problems in the first year of middle school.”
“……”
“Honestly, that’s not normal, is it?”
Right. That’s how it was. Unlike me, my sister, who had a talent for studying, had become a victim of the advanced learning culture. As the memory surfaced, I felt a bit of pity for her.
“You’re right.”
While having such conversations, my father also returned home.
“You… you…!!”
My father also cried buckets of tears, but fortunately, he didn’t collapse like Mom did.
“Seeing you return safe and sound…”
“You must be deeply moved?”
“Suddenly, the money I spent on hunter commission fees feels like such a waste, son.”
“……”
“Anyway, welcome back.”
Judging by his words, he didn’t seem to have changed much from ten years ago either.
“Dad.”
“Yeah?”
“Actually, about our house… It’s not that you couldn’t sell it because you thought the price would go up, right?”
“Hmm, hmm.”
Anyway, even though it was family I thought I had erased from my mind, reuniting with them warmed my heart considerably. The world felt somewhat harsher, but thanks to my family, positive energy bloomed for the first time in a long while. So, well, I could get a hunter license and get a job. Or, if I just knew how to access Leica and farm some equipment…
‘Isn’t this a world where you won’t have trouble making a living?’
Even though I was a beta test version player and an unqualified hero who played over a thousand runs without even defeating the Demon King… No matter how different the official release is from the beta version, it’s not like I wouldn’t be able to handle a Goblin, right?
‘It’s not like a Goblin suddenly becomes a Troll just because it’s the official version, is it?’
They said that just knowing how to deal with low-tier monsters like Goblins would allow you to easily earn three to four hundred million won before taxes per month.
‘But in my last run, I was slicing up Death Knights too… Maybe I could even handle an Ogre?’
Honestly, I felt greedier… But this is a bit dangerous.
‘No, don’t get cocky, Lee Geon-yul? No talent.’
Even after grinding for eons in the beta version, I ultimately couldn’t obtain a single hero qualification. Life should be lived thin and long. Knowing your place is also a very important virtue in life, right?
Creak-
While talking with my family, night had fallen, and I plopped down on the bed in my room after ten years. Returning home after so long, my head was quite cluttered, but…
‘For now, let’s not think and just rest.’
During my time with the maniac fairy, I don’t think I ever rested this peacefully even once. So it should be okay to clear my head and rest for a few days. Thinking that, I soon fell asleep.
