One month since he had come back to the past, by means of some unidentified “something”—whether it was regression or whatever.
There was nothing wrong with it. Not a damn thing.
“Chomp, chomp.”
Whether he was mentally ill or not, what did it matter? In any case, he was leisurely wasting the money he’d earned from assassination, and it couldn’t have been better.
“Buuurp.”
After finishing the pizza and letting out a happy belch, Uju took the earphones out of his ears, lumbered to his feet, and began cleaning up. Since he was at it, he left the room to throw out some trash as well.
“......Hm. Maybe I should start exercising soon.”
Then, suddenly feeling as though his body had grown a little sluggish, he muttered to himself.
In truth, saying only now that he felt sluggish was a rather shameless thought.
The only time he went out was occasionally to buy canned beer at the nearby mart. Daily necessities were delivered, food was delivered, and as for trash, all he had to do was put it outside once a week. He had continued such a lazy and debauched lifestyle for an entire month—one where it would have been strange if he hadn’t gotten fat.
“I should think about making money, too...”
He still had plenty of money left, but it wasn’t enough savings to laze around and live off for the rest of his life. And it would be difficult to rely on the diary and make a living as a contract killer. He didn’t know what kind of world this was supposed to be, but at the very least, the Lee Uju currently occupying this body was a useless, trashy porter who had never even caught a single monster, as well as Lee Uju of the field recovery team.
Since he had money, making money by rolling that money around would be easiest on his body and the best option. But the only work Uju had ever done was porter work, which was no different from hard labor, and field recovery work, which was close to hard labor as well.
He had even looked into investing once. But in a world where the Gate Incident had not occurred, there were too many blue-chip companies Uju didn’t know, and conversely, too few companies that he did know. And even when it came to companies he knew, the ones that should already have been major corporations were still stuck at small-to-medium size, or had even gone bankrupt long ago, which made him hesitate to invest.
“Chomp, chomp.”
As long as he didn’t spend money in stupid places, he had enough to live like this for another four years... but it wasn’t as if he planned to live only four more years and then die. Even if it was annoying and difficult, he had to work.
“......Pfft.”
At a thought that suddenly came to mind, Uju laughed vacantly.
It wasn’t as if he planned to live only four more years and then die—coming from someone who had actually died four years later, there was no better joke.
“Huaaaam. Anyway, what the hell was it in the end?”
And the end of thoughts like these was, as always, contemplation about the cause of his regression. Even now, a month later, he still couldn’t figure it out. No, was it even right to call this phenomenon regression in the first place? What the hell was this?
“Kieek!”
While he was throwing out the trash in front of his house, wrestling with worries that had no answer, he heard something like a strange animal cry.
“What the hell? What kind of water deer noise is that—fuck?!”
Uju freaked out and sprinted like a madman, fleeing back inside the house.
-Bang!
He hurriedly shut the door, then collapsed to the floor as the strength went out of his legs.
“Fuck... fuckfuckfuckfuck, what the hell was that?! Wasn’t that a goblin just now?”
An F-rank monster, a goblin. A humanoid monster that looked like a dwarf with a crushed face, standing only 140 centimeters tall on average. Contrary to its small and scrawny appearance, though there were differences between individuals, it usually possessed physical abilities comparable to a fairly average adult man.
And naturally, since it was a monster, it was a life-form that could not exist on Earth without a Gate. Even then, for it to wander around Earth like this, a Gate Break would have to occur.
“Why is a monster that’s supposed to be inside a Gate here?! A Gate Break? No, wasn’t this a world where the Gate Incident never happened in the first place? ......The Gate Incident?”
As soon as he muttered that far, a dreadful speculation arose in Uju’s mind.
Uju had been “made” to regress into the past without knowing the principle behind it. At the very least, since he hadn’t done it himself, it wouldn’t be wrong to phrase it that way. After that, upon grasping the state of this world, he had thought of it as “a world where the Gate Incident had not occurred.” But... what if it hadn’t simply not occurred, but rather a world where it had not occurred “yet”?
He didn’t know why things had turned out like this. But even in the world before his regression, the cause of Gates had never been discovered. That meant there was no point pondering the reason.
There were only three important facts. Something presumed to be the Gate Incident had now occurred, and Uju was still an ordinary person who hadn’t even awakened. And the last, most important thing: there was a way to survive.
“......Hooo.”
Uju slapped his legs to loosen the tension, then returned to his room. Then he groped at the center of the room and opened the storage compartment.
-Click.
-Wiiiing.
That’s right. That method was none other than the guns that the psychopath-happy-trigger-pleasure-killer Lee Uju had lovingly collected.
F-rank monsters, and even some E-rank monsters, could be killed sufficiently with firearms. But before his regression, that method had long since fallen out of use, and the reason was nothing special. It was because Hunters who had not awakened a “shooting-related unique skill” could never grow by killing monsters with guns.
As he had said, only some E-ranks could be killed that way; D-rank and above could no longer be killed with ordinary guns. That meant Hunters who had grown to a certain degree were absolutely necessary. So what would happen if ordinary people killed all the E-rank and lower monsters with guns? It would be no different from destroying the foothold for the Hunters who would awaken later to grow.
For that reason, unless there was a threat to life due to a Gate Break, doing so was strictly forbidden. But with the Gate Incident having just occurred, there was no way such laws existed. No, there probably weren’t any awakened Hunters in the first place.
And even if there were, so what? He had to survive first.
“......I’m leaving the sniper rifle.”
As Uju examined the guns and organized his thoughts, he decided to leave the sniper rifle behind. It was a shame, but the sniper rifle was too bulky. He had no idea how long he would have to keep moving around, and packing up everything just because it felt wasteful would be close to suicide.
And in the first place, it wasn’t as if he planned to shoot people to death, so he had no need for a sniper rifle. If a monster was dangerous enough that he needed a sniper rifle, then the correct judgment wasn’t to try killing it with a sniper rifle, but to run away.
-Rattle.
“Good, these are the right bullets, right?”
Honestly, holing up in this house, where weapons were prepared, was also one option. But Uju was someone who, because he had plenty of money and found things bothersome, ate delivery food every time. Since he didn’t have so much as a single packet of ramyeon at home, he would have to go outside at least once to get food.
“Kieek! Kyaaaa!”
-Thud! Clang, clang, clang!
After finishing his preparations and returning to the front door, the area outside was noisy, unlike a moment ago. It seemed that, because he had slammed the door shut in surprise, the goblin had aggroed onto the door.
“......”
Uju checked his equipment one last time.
First, two pistols at his waist. Perfect. He had also put several magazines into his backpack. And with a submachine gun slung over his left shoulder, his weapons were complete. Even if he wanted to bring more, any more than this would hinder his movement.
His clothes, too, were layered excessively thick, within the limits of not restricting his movement. It was a stopgap measure to prevent blades from cutting him as much as possible.
-Click.
He waited for a moment when the pounding stopped and carefully opened the door.
“Kie?”
And in the instant the goblin in front of the door looked puzzled, he swiftly stepped out and fired.
-Bang!
The sequence of actions was so clean that even he was surprised by himself. The moment he decided, “I’ll do it,” a naturalness seeped out of him, as though he had done it thousands upon hundreds of times.
“Hmm......”
Even though it was his first time firing a handgun, the feeling of it sitting far too comfortably in his hand was strange.
“What is this?”
Looking at the goblin with a neat hole between its brows exactly where he had aimed, it felt only natural. That made it even stranger. He was definitely exempt from military service, so he had never fired a pistol, let alone a rifle, and yet rather than awkwardness, there was a familiar, practiced feeling, as though he had swung an arm he had always used.
“Sssup.”
He decided to set that strange feeling aside for now. That wasn’t what was important at the moment.
He quietly closed the door and examined his surroundings. This area was a residential neighborhood, so if a monster appeared, people should have been making a fuss. Yet something felt odd.
“Ah... that’s not it.”
Now that he thought about it, it was the middle of the day on a weekday. Most people would be at work, so it was normal that only people living an enjoyable life like Uju, or the small number who worked nights and were currently fast asleep, would be around.
Seeing as there was only one goblin, it seemed some idiot that had gotten separated from its group had wandered all the way here.
-Thwack, thwack.
Uju roughly kicked the goblin corpse and shoved it far away with his foot, sinking into thought. It was a bit of a ridiculous thought to have after he had already fired a gun, but he was beginning to feel that he had acted too hastily.
The lowest rank of monsters that appeared from A-rank Gates was definitely D-rank. At least, that was what humanity’s accumulated data had shown. But this piece of trash was F-rank. A true piece of trash that appeared throughout F-rank to C-rank Gates and died even to a handgun.
If it was an F-rank Gate Break, a few people would die, but civilians would be able to respond somehow. As for the boss mob, the police would step in and fire a few shots, and that would be the end of it.
Even an E-rank Gate Break would be no different. More people would die, and the E-ranks and boss monster would be cleaned up once the police stepped in and shot them.
For D and C-ranks, the military would still have to step in. They would need firepower on the level of explosives, not just firearms. But even so, it would be dealt with.
That’s right. He had made a fuss, calling it the Gate Incident and a Gate Break, and acted in a desperate attempt to survive... but perhaps there was no need for that at all. In this history, it might not be named the Gate Incident; it might simply be recorded as the first occurrence of a Gate, a small but important event.
“Ah... fuck.”
-Smack!
Should he just shut himself back inside the house? Just as that thought was about to arise, he slapped himself across the cheek and forcibly cut it off.
“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know...... I don’t know.”
That’s right, he didn’t know. He didn’t know a single thing. Not one thing fit the knowledge and common sense he possessed. And yet he was going to make assumptions like this? Did he want to die again? There was no way. He wasn’t mentally ill; who in the world would think they wanted to die? Who would want to die “again”?
He didn’t want to die. So he should assume the worst. He should think that an F-rank goblin had come out of a mutated A-rank Gate. If he thought that way, there was no time to delay. He had to secure food as quickly as possible and hole up inside his house.
If it really was A-rank, holing up in his house wouldn’t be safe, but it would still be a hundred times better than wandering around outside. After all, he had more than enough weapons for self-defense.
Without letting his guard down, Uju ran toward the mart he usually went to.