Vol 3 Chapter 7 – “First Steps as a Free-to-Play Hunter”【Vol 3 – Graduating High School and Taking On the Dungeon 】

I graduated from high school.

No college. No job offer.

The path I chose was becoming a Hunter.

That said, it wasn’t like my life was suddenly going to be wall-to-wall adventure.

The time I used to spend on school would just shift over to Dungeon runs — everything else stayed the same. I planned to keep my part-time job. This world wasn’t soft enough to live off Hunter work alone, especially at the start.

In practice, beginner Hunters pulled what amounted to about a hundred yen an hour when you did the math. It used to be higher back when the system was new, apparently — but as more people signed up, the average took a nosedive.

Sure, just about anyone could handle entry-level work, but the injury risk was real, and the time-to-reward ratio was flat-out terrible. A regular part-time job paid better. The consensus was that you’d need to level up enough to reach the middle floors before it became “worth it” — before the income started matching what a normal working person brought home.

And on top of all that, death was always in the picture. Even once you leveled up enough to push from the middle floors into the deeper ones, you were doing a job where one wrong call could get you killed.

The reputation of Hunter work had settled into something pretty bleak: it paid nothing at the start, and even once the money got decent, you were one bad run away from not coming home.

The result? The flood of applicants that had surged early on had dried to a trickle.

These days, roughly 30,00030,000 people register as new Hunters every year. But nearly seventy percent of them signed up and never actually set foot in a Dungeon. I’d been one of those back in my third year of high school.

So the real number — people treating it as actual work — was closer to ten thousand a year.

And just as many were walking away from it, which meant the total Hunter headcount barely budged.

That was the natural outcome. Ordinary people weren’t built for jobs where dying was a genuine possibility. Some who made decent money would take a break and never come back.

What grew in their place was the conglomerate pipeline. Corporate Hunters. Their employers scooped up treasure chests, put strong gear in their people’s hands from day one, and ran dedicated leveling sessions to push them up the ranks fast.

Watching that gap grow from the outside was apparently enough to kill most ordinary people’s motivation. Why bother?

The word was that over 90% of the ten thousand or so Hunters registering annually as working professionals were now corporate employees. If you wanted to be a Hunter with any real support behind you, the move was to apply to one of the big firms, pass their screening, and sign on as one of their people.

But I’d already decided I wasn’t doing that.

I’d thought about it. Going the corporate route wasn’t off the table, conceptually. But something in me wouldn’t allow it.

In my gaming days, and again in high school — my clan, and the person I cared about — both taken by someone with more money. I wanted to prove something. That feeling was louder than anything else.

I’ll show them what free-to-play looks like.

I was going to get strong. I had a younger brother and sister counting on me, so I couldn’t afford to be reckless — but I’d be careful, keep my margins, and climb steadily.

That was the plan.

Vol 3 Chapter 8 – “Dungeon Orientation Sign-Up — and Hiyori, of All People”【Vol 3 – Graduating High School and Taking On the Dungeon 】

Right after graduation, I made it official — I was becoming a Hunter.

The registration itself was just paperwork, but the Hunter Association strongly recommended that beginners go through their “Dungeon Orientation” program before doing anything else.

So I signed up.

I figured I had a decent foundation between my gaming knowledge and what I’d picked up through friends back in high school — but current information was worth having. If something I “knew” turned out to be wrong, it could set me back in ways that were hard to recover from. Game experience had taught me how badly that could go.

On the day of the orientation, I walked up to the Association’s reception desk — and stopped cold.

“Wait… Hiyori?”

Sitting behind the counter was my childhood friend — Amakawa Hiyori. The one who’d been coming over to my place constantly lately. What was she doing here?

She didn’t seem thrown off at all. She just looked up at me and smiled.

“Oh, Ren. Long time no see.”

She wasn’t in a school uniform anymore. She had on a crisp suit — the kind government workers wore at the Association — and it looked natural on her, like she’d been wearing it for years. She caught my expression, and her smile widened.

“Long time no see? We literally saw each other two days ago.”

“And — you said you were going into civil service, right? That meant the Hunter Association?”

“Yep.” She gave a small shrug. “Not many people specifically request Hunter Association placement when they go through the civil service track, so both the exam and the posting came through pretty smoothly.”

She said it lightly, like it was nothing.

“Working here means I pick up knowledge about this whole world, which means I can actually be useful to you — and it’s civil service hours, so I’m home on time. That means I can still look in on your brother and sister. It works out well for me.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. Grateful didn’t even come close. I was floored.

But she must have read something in my face, because her expression shifted — settled into something more professional.

“That said — here, I’m a receptionist and a government employee. I can’t give you special treatment. I can pass along general information, but classified material is off the table. You understand that, right?”

“…Yeah. Of course. I know.”

That hadn’t changed at all from when we were kids — she still went out of her way to lay things out clearly, to draw the line even when she didn’t have to. It was the right call. Anything else would’ve caused real problems for her.

I said I understood, and I did.

But somewhere underneath that, a quiet doubt had already taken root.

Is it okay to keep leaning on her like this?

Taking advantage of her kindness was easy. But something told me I couldn’t keep letting that be the whole story.

I’d already figured out that I had feelings for her. She was kind, she was someone I genuinely cared about, and she’d already done more for me than I could ever pay back.

At some point, I need to tell her properly.

But if I did — and it changed what we had — I didn’t know what I’d do.

I’m a coward. The thought that telling her might mean losing the person who helped look after my brother and sister — that alone was enough to lock the words in my throat.

I hadn’t even set foot inside a Dungeon yet, and I was already frozen.