Leveling Up Alone

Han-Yeol had initially thought that the Hunter Mall would only be the size of a large supermarket when he first discovered that there was a mall exclusively for the gear needed by Hunters. After all, how much gear did Hunters really need? To be honest, he had actually thought that he was being generous with the size estimate by comparing it to a large supermarket.

‘This is on the scale of a massive department store!’ he exclaimed inwardly.

The grandeur of the Hunter Mall turned Han-Yeol, who had lived in Seoul his whole life, into a country bumpkin in an instant. Although it was simply called the Hunter Mall, it was actually a large complex made up of several different buildings.

It was a mall made for Hunters, but there were various families strolling around the plaza, where there was a large fountain in the middle. Several children were present, running around and playing with the fountain water.

Han-Yeol looked around the place while standing dumbfounded in place like a country bumpkin. After a moment, he read the information board at the entrance of the mall and followed its directions to the dedicated Hunter’s corner.

“Welcome!”

As soon as the automatic sliding doors of the Hunter’s corner opened, Han-Yeol saw eight beautiful ladies lined up, four to each side, and they all bowed at the waist as they greeted him. No matter how large and grand this place was, it was still sustained by the revenue from their main customers, the Hunters.

One of the beautiful staffers approached Han-Yeol and said, “I will personally guide you if there is a specific item you are looking for.”

“Ah, then kindly guide me to where they are selling the firearms, please,” Han-Yeol replied.

“Yes, sir. Please come this way,” the attendant said as she escorted him to an elevator. They both went up to the fourth floor.

Han-Yeol exited the elevator after the doors opened again, taking a look around the place. The fourth floor was packed with numerous stalls, with a variety of firearms made by crafting-class Hunters on display. These firearms would just be ordinary guns with slightly higher quality than average when used by someone without mana, but they instantly became deadly monster-killing weapons in the hands of Hunters.

“Is there a specific kind of weapon you are looking for?” the attendant asked.

“Hmm… Please guide me to where the automatic rifles are,” Han-Yeol said. The attendant walked ahead, and he followed behind her.

Gulp…

‘What an ass she has…’ Han-Yeol thought. He was not sure whether she was trying to seduce him or that was just how she normally walked, but her rear was moving a bit too much compared to a normal person’s gait.

‘As expected… Being a Hunter is a job blessed by the gods! Hurrah!’ Han-Yeol secretly cheered inwardly.

Most average people would choose Hunters as their ideal marriage partners. That was the case for both men and women.

The occupation of Hunter had a very low survival rate. In fact, nobody had ever worked in the field for more than twenty years since the job emerged thirty years prior, according to the statistics laid out by the Hunter’s Association recently. It was said that the average lifespan of a Hunter after they started working as one was a meager 10.8 years.

The fatality rate had remained at 10% ever since, which meant that ten out of every hundred Hunters died every year. In the end, the ‘ideal spouse candidate’ for most people was someone who had a lot of money and lived on borrowed time.

‘Well, that’s why Hunters tend to only marry their fellow Hunters,’ Han-Yeol thought.

However, that did not mean there were no Hunters who had relationships with average civilians. In fact, it was quite easy to see various Hunters who were in such relationships. However, most of those relationships never continued all the way to marriage. After all, Hunters were very well aware of how people saw them. Additionally, being a Hunter was a lonely and arduous occupation, and only someone who worked in the same field would be able to understand and sympathize with the challenges they faced.

However, there was another problem. The gender ratio among Hunters was between 7:3 and 8:2, skewed toward men. There were bound to be a lot of male Hunters left over even if every female Hunter married their fellow Hunters.

‘That’s why normal women keep trying to seduce us Hunters,’ Han-Yeol thought.

Of course, it was not their fault; they could not be blamed for it, since the disproportionate gender ratio had presented them with an opportunity anyway.

The attendant stopped walking while Han-Yeol was deep in thought, saying, “This is where the automatic rifles are sold. Please take your time looking around.”

“Ah, alright,” Han-Yeol replied. Before him were numerous shops lined up on both sides of the corridor with numerous firearms on display. There was quite a distance between where he was and the end of the corridor as well.

‘This is amazing…!’ he thought to himself. Afterward, he walked around to various shops on his own, inspecting the many firearms on display.

‘Hmm… There seem to be both the generic guns sold all over the world, and the ones exclusively created by crafting-class Hunters,’ he thought as he observed a few of the firearms.

The world’s economy now revolved around monsters, and the wars between nations had stopped because of that. As such, the technology used to produce firearms was shared all across the world, and there were no longer any copyright restrictions placed on it.

Additionally, weapons manufacturers had all abandoned any business related to supplying firearms for international warfare, focusing all their resources on supplying firearms to Hunters. The guns and other weapons manufactured by those companies specifically for Hunters and Porters were very expensive. For instance, there was even a certain model of weapon made in the United States worth 120 million won that was still not being exported to Korea.

The reason for that was very simple. Any weapons manufactured through a collaboration between weapon companies and crafting-class Hunters required a significant amount of mana and various exotic monster parts to be produced. As such, those kinds of weapons were different from the ones that were mass-produced in factories, and each of their parts had to be made by hand. The only way to mass-produce such weapons was for crafting-class Hunters to craft the parts, and for normal workers to assemble them. Due to that limitation, there were a different variety of weapons available in the market, and their prices were astronomically high.

Han-Yeol started to feel indecisive, overwhelmed by the many rows of shops. As such, he chose one at random to enter.

“Welcome!” the owner greeted him.

“Hello. Oh? You seem quite young for a shop owner,” Han-Yeol remarked as he saw the young man who was manning the store. He gave off the impression that he was someone who had just graduated from university and begun a new venture as a budding entrepreneur.

“Haha! Yes, I’m quite young compared to others, but you can still trust me! I can assure you that I never pull any tricks on my customers,” the young man said, thumping his chest with his fist a few times.

‘What an interesting fella…’ Han-Yeol thought. He asked, “Hmmm… Could you please show me some American rifles with grenade launchers attached to them?”

“Ah… I suppose you have no interest in our local products, then?” the young man asked.

“Right. Admittedly, they’re on the cheaper end of the spectrum, but I’m not doing this for fun, nor am I going to hunt deer in the mountains. Why would I use a local rifle when American-made rifles, which are the best in the world, are readily available?” Han-Yeol replied.

Han-Yeol meant every single word he had just said. He had fired tens of thousands of rounds with Korean-made firearms when he worked as a Porter, because the rifles provided by the Porter Department were mostly locally made, stamped with the ‘MADE IN KOREA’ seal and all.

However, he could never forget the feel of the American-made rifles that he had gotten the opportunity to use when he worked for a large-scale raid party once. He thought, ‘The bullets never jammed, and I didn’t have to clean the barrel so often. Ah, it had more firepower than the local ones too.’

That was when Han-Yeol had made up his mind to only buy American-made firearms when the time came for him to purchase his own weapons.

“Tsk, tsk… I know, right? They invest an astronomical amount of money every year into crafting-class Hunters just to develop our own weapons, but I wonder where all of that money went, since we’re only left with trash like this.” The young man clicked his tongue and openly complained, even though he was supposed to be selling weapons to customers.

“Are you even allowed to say that when you’re supposed to be selling guns?” Han-Yeol asked.

“Of course not, but I saw that you were already putting some distance between yourself and the local firearms anyway. I knew I would have no way to convince you no matter how hard I tried. So, wouldn’t it be better for me to talk crap about these and build up some trust with you?” the young man replied.

“Haha! You are an interesting fella,” Han-Yeol responded with a laugh.

“Haha, I do get that a lot. Ah, but this isn’t the time for that. I have a fella here that’s just been freshly imported from the United States,” the young man said as he started looking for something under the showcase. He took out a rifle from underneath it, placing it atop the showcase in front of Han-Yeol.

“What is this?” Han-Yeol asked.

“It’s the M4A2-001[1], which was released in the United States last year. The M series designation refers to automatic rifles, and this little fella was a big hit not only in the United States, but on the entire American continent! It was so popular that the demand for it in the United States alone already depleted the entire supply last year, which made it impossible to import, but I managed to get my hands on this fella just fifteen days ago,” the young man explained, giving the gun a grand introduction.

However, Han-Yeol was not convinced, feeling that something was off. He asked, “But why was a product that was such a big hit in the United States tucked away in a corner?” He thought that if he were the owner of the shop, he would display such a gun as the main product of his store and promote it massively.

“Haha, I thought the same way too when this product first arrived, but I took it down after just four days,” the young man said.

“Huh? Why?” Han-Yeol asked, tilting his head in confusion.

The young shop owner silently showed him the gun’s price tag.

[28,200,000 won]

“T-Twenty-eight million won…?!” Han-Yeol exclaimed in shock.

“Haha, yes. The price is the problem,” the young man replied.

“Why the hell is it so expensive…?” Han-Yeol asked.

The locally-made K2 rifles normally sold at around three million won, going up to twelve million won for the higher-end ones.

“This is all because of those damned Defense Ministry bastards. They used petty tactics such as levying higher taxes on imported firearms when they found that the imported ones had better quality for a slightly higher price tag. They’re really hopeless! They should have focused on increasing the local firearms’ quality rather than thinking of petty tactics like this!” the young man lamented in frustration.

“That’s just too much,” Han-Yeol remarked.

“Well, would you like to try it out, at least?” the young man asked.

“Hmm… Why not?” Han-Yeol replied.

Testing the weapons was free, after all, so he did not decline the young shop owner’s offer to let him test it out. He went to the basement with the M4A2-001 rifle in hand and shot a few rounds.

Ratatata…! Ratatata!

His heart was now captivated by the M4A2-001 after shooting it in several different ways.

‘It’s amazing!’ he exclaimed inwardly. He could understand why this weapon had been such a big hit on the American continent. This rifle was in a different league compared to the locally-made ones.

“It’s good, right?” the young man asked confidently.

“It’s the best. It makes other rifles look like a toy,” Han-Yeol replied.

“Haa… But the price is still an issue, I guess,” the young man said as he let out a sigh.

The young shop owner prided himself in selling goods at reasonable prices, but even he could not find a way around the massive taxes levied on the rifle that made the price jump severalfold. In fact, some of the other shops were selling the same model for more than forty million won. That had happened all because the government turned a blind eye to the taxes levied on imported firearms.

“I’ll buy it,” Han-Yeol said.

“Huh?” the young man exclaimed in confusion.

“I’ll pay it in full,” Han-Yeol added.

“Are you serious?” the young man asked, still in disbelief.

“Yes. Here’s my card,” Han-Yeol said, extending his debit card.

It was a fact that the rifle was very expensive, but in truth, it only looked overpriced when compared to local rifles. The price was not really a burdensome amount for Han-Yeol, as he had already saved up quite a bit from hunting the Giant Ants. He might have taken the bus instead of a taxi to save money, but he was not the type of person to skimp on something his life would depend on out at the hunting grounds. After all, the millions in his bank account would be worthless if he died. As such, he always tried to arm himself with the best equipment available.

‘I can’t die while trying to save money when I have to take care of father,’ he thought.

“Oh, right, do you sell pistols as well?” he asked.

The young shop owner smiled and nodded before replying, “Of course! This might be a shop that specializes in rifles, but I do sell pistols as well.”

“Then, can you recommend a nice pistol? An American-made one, of course,” Han-Yeol said.

“Yes. Please give me a moment,” the young shop owner replied.

A pistol was not an absolutely necessary piece of equipment when hunting because it did not pack as much firepower as a rifle, but it was still a wise choice to keep one as a backup in case of an emergency.

The young shop owner eventually recommended a revolver to Han-Yeol. After purchasing the revolver and bullets on top of the rifle he had just bought, Han-Yeol’s bill came up to thirty million won.

He then left the shop, and the beautiful attendant asked him with a smile, “Is there anything else you require aside from firearms?”

“Ah, would you know where I can buy a chain, by any chance?” Han-Yeol asked.

“A chain…?” the attendant muttered in surprise. The staffers here were trained to be the best in the industry when it came to providing the best services, but even she, who had gone through intense training to always maintain her composure, showed her confusion for a moment. Her smile disappeared for a split second due to Han-Yeol’s strange request.

“Yes, a chain. Something like this?” Han-Yeol replied, taking his chain out of his bag and showing it to her.

“Ah, you may find these in the miscellaneous corner on the basement floor. Shall I guide you there?” the attendant asked.

“Yes, please do,” Han-Yeol replied.

“As you wish, sir. Please follow me this way,” the attendant said as she escorted him to the basement.

Thankfully, there were a variety of chains available in the miscellaneous corner. Chains were usually used to bind monsters, so they came in all sorts of shapes and sizes depending on the target monster’s size. Han-Yeol had fun shopping for chains because of the huge variety available.

1. Technically, the designation M4A2 already belongs to the Sherman tank, but author-nim used this name for his fictional gun. In the real world, the current American army rifle is the M16A1, also known as the M4, and scheduled to be replaced by the M5. ☜