Chapter 2: A Very Serious Guide to Looking Harmless

I was just about to sink back into the warm, blissful embrace of not-being-awake when the sound of the bathroom door clicking open cut through the quiet. A moment later, my bedroom door slid aside.

“Oppa?”

I peeked out from under my blanket. Standing there, bathed in the pale morning light, was Mia.

Four years younger than me. Not by blood, but by something thicker. She was fourteen, all long limbs and messy morning hair piled into a haphazard bun. She was wearing… I had to squint. Tiny sleep shorts and a tight crop top shirt that definitely belonged more to a K-pop idol’s practice room than a gosiwon in post-apocalypse Mapo. I made a mental note to have another “appropriate homewear” talk. It was a talk we’d had approximately seventeen times. It never stuck.

“You’re staring,” she said, a sleepy smirk on her face. “My eyes are up here, you know.”

“I’m staring in horror,” I corrected, sitting up. “At the fashion crime. It’s freezing. You’ll catch a cold.”

“The heating’s on,” she shrugged, padding into the room. “And I was warm. Anyway. Can you cook something? A little? I need to finish my math homework. I fell asleep in the middle of making it last night.”

There it was. The reason. The whole damn reason.

Mia. Her parents—good people, the kind who shared their food with a lost, scared teenager when the Gates first opened—didn’t make it past the first wave of the Chaos. I found her three days later, hiding in the ruins of a convenience store, clutching a broken plush toy, covered in dust and completely silent. She hadn’t cried. She’d just looked at me with these huge, empty eyes and asked if the monsters were gone.

I was nobody. An 18-year-old kid who’d just watched the world end. But I had two hands and a suddenly very real fear of being completely alone. So I said, “Yeah. They’re gone for now. Come on.”

I didn’t know I could steal souls then. That came later, in a much more panicked, messy encounter. But by then, I had her. And having her meant I couldn’t afford to be nobody. I had to be someone with an income. Someone with a registration. Someone who could keep a roof—even a tiny, crappy one—over our heads and keep her in school. School was non-negotiable. It was the last thread of normalcy, the only promise of a future that wasn’t just hunting and being hunted.

So I became an E-Ranker. The most cautious, rule-abiding, soul-stealing E-Ranker in all of Seoul. Not for glory. Not for power. For tuition fees, textbooks, and the occasional pair of jeans that weren’t patched.

I looked at her now, this kid who’d somehow become my entire responsibility and my only solid ground all at once. She was waiting, head tilted.

“I’ve got a mission ping,” I said, gesturing to my phone on the floor.

Her face fell, just a fraction. A tiny dip in her eyebrows. She masked it quickly, turning to look out the window at the snow. “Oh. It’s okay. I can just have cereal.”

Ah, hell.

“It can wait,” I sighed, throwing off the blanket. “It’s just a Slime clean-up. They’re not going anywhere. Does bacon and eggs do it?”

The smile that broke across her face was worth more than any S-Rank paycheck. It was sunrise after a long night. “Yup!” she chirped, and before I could say another word, she giggled and sprinted out of my room, her footsteps a quick patter down the short hall to the kitchenette we shared with three other gosiwon residents (all of whom were, thankfully, still asleep or already at their own terrible jobs).

I dragged myself out of bed, the chill of the floor seeping into my socks. My Low-Light Vision made the dim corridor perfectly clear. I shuffled into our microscopic kitchen. Mia was already sitting at our tiny two-person fold-out table, her textbook and notebook open, pencil in hand, pretending to be deeply focused. She was a terrible actress.

The kitchen was a masterpiece of minimalism, meaning it was depressing. A single induction cooktop, a mini-fridge humming like an angry bee, and about two square feet of counter space. But within those limits, I had become an artist.

I pulled eggs and a pack of precious pre-smoked bacon from the fridge. This was the good stuff, not the synthetic protein mash most people ate. A luxury afforded by my… profession. I set a pan on the cooktop.

The ritual began. The bacon went in first. The sound of it hitting the warm pan was a tiny, satisfying ssssss. I let it render slowly, the white fat turning translucent, then golden, then crisp. The smell that rose up was a time machine. It smelled like a world before Gates, like slow weekend mornings that didn’t have an undercurrent of dread. I used tongs to turn each strip, the action precise, almost meditative.

Once the bacon was perfect—crisp but not brittle, salty and rich—I moved it to a plate lined with a paper towel. Into the glorious, shimmering bacon fat left behind, I cracked two eggs. They hissed in protest, the edges immediately curling into a delicate, lacy brown. I seasoned them with a pinch of salt and a crack of black pepper. For Mia, I left the yolks runny, just how she loved them, so she could dip the bacon in them. For myself, I’d flip them hard a little later. Chef’s privilege.

I toasted two slices of bread in a separate pan, buttering them generously as soon as they were hot. The butter melted instantly, soaking into the pores.

I plated it all with a focus usually reserved for defusing bombs. Bacon arranged like sun rays. The two perfect, sunny-side-up eggs in the center. Toast on the side. A little extra sprinkle of pepper on the eggs. It was a tiny monument to normalcy, built on a foundation of stolen monster souls and bureaucratic ranker paperwork.

“Okay, monster,” I said, sliding the plate in front of her. “Eat up. Brain food.”

She looked down at the plate, then up at me. Her eyes were a little shiny. “It looks like it’s from a drama,” she whispered.

“It’s from me. Now eat, do your homework, and for the love of all that is holy, put on some real pants before you leave this room.”

She giggled, picking up a strip of bacon and dunking it straight into the egg yolk. I watched her take that first, perfect bite, the crunch audible, the smile genuine. The math homework lay forgotten.

This. This was the ability I’d stolen. Not just Three Times Grip Strength. This right here—the quiet, the safety, the smell of bacon cutting through the cold Seoul morning—this was the real power. And I’d fight a thousand Mossback Rats, steal a thousand useless Passives, and remain an E-Rank forever to keep it.

As long as nothing came along to fuck it up.

I left Mia hunched over her homework, a half-eaten piece of bacon dangling from her fingers as she wrestled with algebra. The image was my armor as I stepped out into the hallway, then into the grimy, narrow stairwell of the gosiwon. The snow was still falling outside, turning the usual urban soundtrack of honking and chatter into something muffled and distant.

The cold air hit me like a slap as I pushed open the heavy front door. Good. I needed waking up. I took a deep breath, the crisp air mixing with the ever-present smell of street food from a nearby stall—a smell that somehow persisted through monster attacks and dimensional rifts. Humanity’s stubbornness, again.

I was two steps onto the sidewalk, mentally going over the gear I’d need for the Slime clean-up (a sturdy broom, mostly), when I walked straight into a brick wall.

Or, more accurately, the brick wall walked into me.

I bounced back a step, my Low-Light Vision processing the scene instantly: a man, tall, built like a fridge that had been left out in the rain one too many times. He had a shaved head, a scowl etched deep into his face, and he was leaning forward with his hands shoved deep in the pockets of a puffy jacket, the very picture of a guy looking for a problem to have.

“Oi,” he grunted, his voice like gravel in a tin can. “Watch where you’re going, punk.”

Classic. You could evolve the world, give people the ability to shoot lasers from their eyeballs, but you couldn’t evolve the basic street-level thug. They just got bigger.

“And here it is, folks,” I said under my breath, then louder, “Another piece of background radiation in this brave new world. Just floating around, looking for a protagonist to annoy.”

He blinked, the scowl deepening. “What’s your problem, bumping me in the morning? I’m in a real bad mood, see? But I’m a reasonable guy.” He took a step closer, the smell of cheap cigarettes and cheaper energy drink wafting over. “You make it right, and I forget this ever happened. Simple.”

I looked him up and down, a wave of profound pity washing over me. Not fear. Pity. This guy was peak D-Rank energy—all muscle and menace, probably slapped monsters around for a living and thought that made him hot shit on the sidewalk. He was a fossil. A relic from a simpler, dumber time.

“A philosophical question for you, my large and grumpy friend,” I said, tilting my head. “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? And if a thug tries to shake down a stranger on a snowy day and the stranger really, really doesn’t care, is the thug even real? Or is he just a sad, poorly written plot device?”

His eye twitched. “You think you’re funny?”

“I think I’m trying to buy bacon and pay rent,” I sighed. “I’m just a simple man, trying to make my way in the universe. A humble E-Ranker, contributing to society one low-level monster at a time. And you… you dare try to tax me? For what? The privilege of inhaling your second-hand smoke? Bold strategy.”

He didn’t back down. Instead, a nasty smile spread across his face. “Is that so, punk?” He leaned in, and I had to give it to him—he knew how to use his height. He loomed. It was a practiced loom. “You got a real smart mouth on a real small body.”

I deadpanned, looking up at his chin. “Ah, I see. The classic ‘intimidation by vertical advantage’ technique. Tell me, when you go through a Gate, do you just stand there and let the monsters admire your stature? ‘Oh no, a Goblin! If only I were… taller!’ What are you, a giraffe? Do you fight by asking them if they’ve ever seen the leaves up this high?”

That did it. The nasty smile vanished, replaced by pure, unadulterated rage. His hand came out of his pocket, and it was glowing with a faint, ugly orange light. A Strength-enhancement type ability, probably D-Rank. Basic. Crude. Perfect for him. “You’re gonna eat those words, you little—”

“That’s enough.”

The voice cut through the morning air like a knife. It wasn’t loud, but it was sharp. Clear. Unmistakably authoritative.

A hand, clad in a thin, sleek gauntlet of dark metal and brown leather, slid between us. It didn’t shove, but it applied pressure, firm and undeniable, pushing the thug back a step and gently steering me to the side.

The owner of the hand stepped into view. A woman. Short, dark yellowish hair cut in a practical, sharp bob. She wore form-fitting leather armor over a simple black bodysuit, stained and worn at the edges but clearly high-quality. She had no visible weapons, but the way she held herself—balanced, relaxed, ready—screamed of someone who didn’t need them to be dangerous. Her eyes, a cool gray, flicked from the thug to me and back.

“Using a Ranker ability to menace a civilian on a public street,” she said, her voice flat and unimpressed. “Section 4, Paragraph 12 of the Post-Chaos Public Safety Act. You want to spend the next six months in a concrete cell doing manual labor? Walk away. Now.”

The thug’s glowing fist clenched, the orange light pulsing. He looked from her stern face to her unflinching posture, then to the gauntlet on her hand. He might have been a meathead, but he wasn’t entirely stupid. He recognized authority when it wore combat gear.

“Tch. Fine. Lucky day, runt,” he spat at me, then turned and stomped off, melting into the flow of pedestrians with a final, furious glance back.

The woman watched him go, then turned her cool gray eyes on me. “Are you alright?”

I sighed, a long-suffering sound. “Wow. I’m a Ranker, though. An officially registered, guild-affiliated, monster-dispatched E-Ranker. But hey,” I gave her a small, sarcastic salute. “If that’s how people see me, I guess looking harmless is its own kind of victory. Thanks for the assist…?”

She didn’t offer a name. She just gave me another once-over, her gaze lingering for a half-second too long on my face, as if memorizing it. “Stay safe,” she said simply. Then she turned and walked away, her movements efficient and silent, disappearing into the snowy crowd as if she’d never been there at all.

I stood there for a moment, the spot where the thug had been now occupied by a swirling eddy of snowflakes.

“Right,” I muttered to the empty air. “Drama before coffee. Just another Tuesday.”

I pulled up the guild dispatch notification on my phone. The Slime Gate awaited. A simple job. No tall thugs, no mysterious armored women. Just me, my slightly enhanced abilities, and a whole lot of goo to clean up.

It was, all things considered, exactly the kind of morning I wanted.

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Author’s Notes:

He lives! Ethan is out of bed and has already attracted the wrong kind of attention (both thug and mysterious). The man just wants to buy bacon and be left alone. Is that too much to ask?

As always, thank you for reading. You guys keeping up with this is what makes the typing happen. Comments, theories, or just screaming into the void are all welcome fuel.

Update schedule? We don’t use that word here. We use “vague intentions.” The intention is to not vanish.

Stay safe. May your own mornings be thug-free.