Chapter 1

Cancelled

"Boss, we need to move the van. Right now."

The youngest road manager's voice was shaking, but Han Doyun just held up a palm, a phone pressed to each ear. Left was the TV station. Right was the evacuation shelter.

"Yes, PD-nim, today's taping is off. There's a hole in the sky, what taping? No, the appearance fee... let me check the contract again. Was there a force majeure clause? Sure. Let's talk about it once we're both alive."

He hung up the left and tilted his head to the right.

"Yes, the shelter. Five—no, four. Four people. We're leaving now."

Four people were huddled in the back of the van. A girl group six years past debut, best-ever chart position: No. 87. Their agency had sold the group off to cover its debts, the buyer had dumped them, and ever since, Doyun had been keeping them running out of his own pocket. The road manager he'd taken on after the company vanished called him Boss, but the girls had never stopped calling him Chief, the way they had since their trainee days. There used to be five. The youngest was staring out the window.

"Chief, are we actually going to die?"

"Nope. I booked us a spot at the shelter."

"You can book a shelter?"

"Ten years as a manager. Name one thing I can't book."

In truth, you couldn't book a shelter. Doyun had just bought three bottles of soju for a district office clerk he knew and asked for a spot near the front of the line. That was most of what managing was. You said the impossible thing like it was already done, then went backstage and made it happen somehow.

The van pulled out. Outside the window, Seoul was coming down.

It had been exactly ten years since the first Gate opened.

At first, it was just a hole two meters across at a construction site in Seongsu-dong. Monsters crawled out, and people appeared who could fight them. People called them Hunters. Hunter quickly became a job, and the job became an industry. Once it was an industry, agencies sprang up as if that were only natural. Places like Zeus Guild cast talented Hunters, worked them, used them up, and threw them away.

Doyun had been outside that industry. An idol manager. A manager of a flopped idol group, at that.

But today, there was no outside. The sky above Gwanghwamun had torn open three kilometers wide, a hole bigger than every Gate of the last ten years combined, and monsters were pouring out of it. The Hunters held for the first hour. After that, they didn't.

"Chief, look."

The youngest pointed at the sky.

Directly above the Great Gate hung an enormous number. A number made of light, big enough to cover half the sky over Seoul.

【 1,204 】

Doyun had seen that light before. Every time he scrubbed through Hunter fancams shot near Gates, there'd been a faint smudge flickering in the corner of the frame like noise. Everyone wrote it off as bad video quality, and so had he. Only now did he realize it had been a number.

【 873 】

【 412 】

It was going down. Nobody had to explain. On the radio, an announcer said "countdown" in a shaking voice, and people in the streets said the same thing as they looked up. When it hit zero, it was over.

The youngest grabbed Doyun's sleeve.

【 37 】

【 9 】

【 0 】

The sky burned white.

The last thing Doyun saw was the back seat in the rearview mirror. The four of them were holding hands, and the youngest was looking at him. Instead of saying he was sorry, Doyun gave the youngest a small tip of his chin in the mirror. The same signal he gave every time he sent them out of the waiting room and onto the stage.

"It's fine. We've got another schedule after this."

The white light swallowed the van.

The alarm went off at 7 a.m. Both phones at once.

Without opening his eyes, Doyun reached out and silenced them one after the other. Ten years of muscle memory. But the device in his hand felt oddly chunky, and the screen under his thumb was too small.

He opened his eyes to the ceiling of a studio apartment. Mangwon-dong, a five-million-won deposit and 400,000 won a month, mold blooming in the corner of the wallpaper. The exact room he'd lived in ten years ago. Two suits hung on the clothes rack, one of them the cheap thing he'd bought for job interviews.

A delivery scooter buzzed past outside. The sky was blue, with no tear in it and no numbers. The date on his phone was April 9th, exactly ten years ago.

It took three presses of the remote to get the TV on. Even the half-dead batteries were the same.

【BREAKING】 Seongsu-dong 'Rift' Enters Third Day... Government: "Cause Under Investigation"

On screen, beyond the police tape, was a hole two meters across. The anchor calmly read that three unidentified creatures had been subdued, and that some civilians involved in subduing them had shown unexplained increases in physical ability.

The first Gate. A time when the word Hunter didn't exist yet. No Zeus Guild, no Hunter Management Corporation, not a single Hunter contract template anywhere in the world.

Doyun turned off the TV and took a notebook out of his desk drawer. Ten years ago, he'd always written his schedules in a notebook. A phone died when the battery did. A notebook never did. He opened to the first page, and his hand started moving on its own.

Writing down four names took less than a minute. For ten years those names had led every Hunter headline; they'd sit side by side in the S-rank row at the very top of the rankings. But when he tried to write where those people were right now, and what they were doing, the pen slowed down. He had to dredge up pre-debut hard-luck stories half-heard in interviews, the struggling-years anecdotes variety shows had milked to death, one at a time.

Only the top name, Kang Taeha, got a long note beside it. Some PC bang in Sillim-dong. No. 1 on the game server. Shut-in, nights for days. The kind of place where the old lady who owns it is famous in the neighborhood for being terrifying.

In his past life, the four who'd become the strongest in the world ten years from now had every single one of them joined Zeus Guild, every single one been run into the ground, and one by one broken down before the Great Gate opened. That was why nobody had been left to protect Seoul that day.

Until yesterday—that is, until ten years from now—Doyun had been a failed manager. The guy who hung on to a failed group to the bitter end and went down with it. And now he held exactly one thing. Who would make it big, when, and where they were rotting right now.

With one phone he searched for the PC bang in Sillim-dong. With the other he opened his bank balance.

3.27 million won.

"Bit short for a casting budget."

He laughed after saying it out loud. Smiling harder the worse things got was an old habit.

He put on the suit that wasn't the interview one and knotted his tie. The twenty-eight-year-old face in the mirror had no dark circles, and he couldn't get over it. Before he walked out the door, he peeled a photo off the top of the TV and slipped it into his notebook. A practice-room photo he'd cut out of the company brochure they'd handed him on interview day—the company he was supposed to start at next week. The first group he'd ever managed, in his past life. Faces where nothing had started yet—so nothing had flopped yet either.

Doyun tucked the notebook into his inside pocket and pushed the front door open.

The cherry blossoms were falling in Mangwon-dong that April. In one corner of the sky, a very small number blinked.

【 1 】

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