The Extremes of Siberia. A frozen land, a pure white world.
In the cold, frosty eastern tundra, if you go down below, surprisingly, there’s a bunker.
Inside it, Yu Parang wakes up.
“Ugh… Hm.”
Looking at the clock, it’s eight-thirty in the morning.
‘What time will it be when I get back to Korea…’
Parang tries to calculate with her sleepy head but gives up out of laziness.
‘I need to arrive in Korea before lunchtime.’
In this countryside where Elvira lives—actually, it can’t even be called a countryside, since no one lives here except Elvira. It’d be more accurate to call it a remote area—naturally, there’s no luxurious facilities like a warp gate.
To get to Korea, she has no choice but to swim.
Parang sneakily spins the clock in her head and realizes it’s the last moment to start.
Skipping the breakfast that Elvira would have prepared, she dives into the sea and begins to swim diligently towards Korea.
Thus, she arrives in Korea.
Popping out of the sea off the coast of Pohang, she opens the door to her longed-for home sweet home, and ta-da! It’s nine in the morning.
Practically, it took about five hours.
‘Since the appointment is at two…’
Quite leisurely indeed.
‘If I had known this, I should’ve just had breakfast before coming out.’
Her stomach growls. It’s understandable after swimming non-stop for five hours on an empty stomach.
Just thinking about it, the steamy Russian home-cooked food already dances in front of her eyes.
But what can she do? With tears in her eyes, Parang opens the fridge and hastily pulls out the remaining side dishes to mix them with rice.
By the time she finishes one bowl of rice with a crunch,
Brrrrr!!
“Huh?”
Brrrrr!!
Her phone vibrates violently, announcing a message has arrived, and upon checking, it’s a text from Yuna.
Yuna: Hey hey
Yuna: (picture)
Yuna: Is this a monster fish?
They’ve long since dropped the formalities between them.
Looking closely at the photo, Parang thinks it’s something… something.
As expected, the photo Yuna sent is of a submarine that the association was controlling.
At first, Yuna thought, ‘Oh, it’s a submarine.’ But when more than twenty identical ones popped up from somewhere, she wondered if this could be a monster fish, leading her to contact Parang.
‘No, no matter how you look at it, that exterior isn’t a monster fish, right?’ she could argue.
After all, it looks completely mechanical, a submarine, doesn’t it?
Moreover, as she reads Yuna’s description,
Yuna: I saw it wandering in the East Sea at dawn. It makes a buzzing sound, moves with propellers, and when broken, it goes bang and sinks.
Seriously, this is just a machine. Even she unconsciously used the expression ‘when it’s broken.’
Parang: No, that’s just a machine;;
But,
Yuna: No, it could be a monster fish.
Parang almost starts typing, ‘What kind of nonsense is that?’ but pauses.
Thinking carefully, there’s really no particular reason it couldn’t be a monster fish.
‘Ugh, I don’t know.’
Even the self-proclaimed monster fish expert Parang senses that, somehow… it might be a monster fish.
Determining whether something is a monster fish or not just by appearance is a pointless task, as has long been made public through Parang’s broadcasts.
There are plenty of monster fish that look even more mechanical than this one.
There are even monster fish that are truly machines. Of course, this is still a heavily debated topic in academia.
So Parang stops her lively spoon movement, hesitates, and after some thought,
Parang: I don’t know;;
She decides to answer honestly.
That’s how the sea is.
Even if you know ten lengths of water, you can’t know one length of a person’s heart, right?
At least in this world, that’s just nonsense.
Clatter-clatter—
Having finished her bowl of rice, Parang picks up her phone and carefully looks at the photo Yuna sent.
‘She said she saw it while exploring the East Sea at dawn…’
It seemed worth a day’s worth of exploration.
‘Hmm, but…’
The schedule is tighter than expected.
Right away, tomorrow she has to go explore another Hive, and after returning and completing her dive, it should be about time for the ‘evidence’ repairs.
After that, she’ll be busy with something regarding the clues that come from there.
If she has to find a suitable time frame, it’d have to be tonight.
‘I’ll need to check it out.’
Setting a rough plan, Parang checks the clock again.
It’s almost time to set off.
Where to?
To Seoul.
It’s the day she’s meeting Branch Chief Seo Sunwoo.
‘I hope it’s not going to be that bothersome double-talk again…’
Remembering the pain of the past, Parang shudders slightly.
Her gaze happens to fall on the pen she had written notes with on the calendar last time.
‘Should I bring one…?’
Grabbing the pen, Parang places it in her waterproof bag and, with a somewhat uneasy mind, leaps into the sea, heading for Seoul.
#
Meanwhile, in Daejeon. Silo Corporation Material Research Lab.
Kwanng-!!
…not quite, but someone opened the door with a somewhat intense push.
That is, they wanted to open the door with force but tried to do it gently enough not to bother the people inside.
With a bang, the door swung open, and she stepped inside.
With ebony hair and golden eyes.
An S-rank crafting hunter and one of the few hunters officially designated as a “cooperative hunter” by Silo.
It’s Shin Yuna.
As all the researchers in white coats turned their gaze to her, she walked over and plopped down.
Bringing along about a dozen rolled-up papers, she dumped them onto the biggest table in the center and began to unfurl them.
Researchers who recognized her cautiously approached the now-spread contents, their curiosity mixed with the fear of a crazy person, and once they took a look, they all fixated their gazes on her with their curiosity completely wiped away, replaced by a 100% crazy person stare.
What she brought were blueprints and designs.
Blueprints for a heavily armed submarine, about 100 meters in length.
Just a glance shows it has one, two, three… so many gun barrels that they couldn’t even count them, and the energy efficiency, thanks to that so-called steampunk design, is something that could be thrown to the fishes, not to mention, it has numerous other issues.
But the researchers, looking into Yuna’s eyes, instinctively sensed their fate.
Ah, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen those insane eyes.
Ah, I want to quit.
“We’re making this.”
Fire was already blazing in Yuna’s eyes.
#
Brrrr—
Splash!!
Parang popped her head out from under the Han River bridge.
Current time, twelve o’clock.
A relaxed arrival.
She arrives at the meeting spot with a slightly fluttery heart.
‘Huh? This isn’t the association’s building?’
The place she arrived at was not an association building, but a fancy restaurant.
The entrance isn’t garish but elegant and neat, giving off a much more luxurious vibe, and the building’s exterior is just the same.
Parang, who loves tasty food, usually enjoys fine dining whenever she’s in Seoul, and based on her experiences, this place is definitely very expensive and high-end.
‘Right. There’s no way they’d do that while eating.’
Feeling a bit relieved, Parang stepped inside the restaurant.
Once inside, it definitely exudes an air of high quality.
After mentally noting the restaurant’s location, she followed the staff further inside.
And then she arrived at a place that clearly looked like a VIP room!
Upon entering, Branch Chief Seo Sunwoo greeted her with a tidy smile.
“Nice to see you. Even though this is our second meeting, it feels familiar. Is it because you often catch my broadcasts?”
“Ahaha… I appreciate that you enjoy it.”
As Parang sat down, she quickly surveyed the table.
No pen, no paper!
‘Yes!!’
She could hardly contain her joy.
Before long, elaborately prepared and visually appealing dishs began to arrive one after another, and Parang gazed at the food with twinkling eyes.
“Let’s eat first. I don’t like talking about work during meals either.”
“Ah, thank you for the meal.”
Wow, cartoonish meat! Parang happily devoured the stack of food with vigor, munching away.
#
“Thank you for the meal. This restaurant is genuinely nice.”
“I’m glad to hear it suits your taste.”
Sunwoo said softly, glancing at the empty plates that had vanished without a trace.
“Well then, onto the main topic… shall we?”
Parang gulped again nervously.
It felt like Sunwoo might pull out paper and a pen at any moment.
Parang took out the documents she had brought from her waterproof bag.
Documents detailing the ecology, characteristics, strength, size, and more of various monster fish. The information was almost at the stalker level of detail.
These were the materials she received from Vertea.
These are the monster fish to be featured in the ‘Underwater Hunter Grade Test’ that she had talked about during her previous meeting with Sunwoo.
They’ll appear as ‘anyway physically interactive holograms’ during the exam and fight against the hunters.
This was the reason Parang came to Seoul today.
After Sunwoo took the papers, he pulled out something else and handed it to Parang.
Not paper and pen, but a small metal box.
“What’s this?”
“Open it alone in a safe environment. Just take the contents with you and toss the box into the sea.”
‘Huh….’
Parang instinctively sensed that something headachy was about to happen again, so she just packed the metal box away.
Then, they talked a bit about work and ‘work.’
“Wait a second. Is it okay to talk like this? Aren’t we gonna get eavesdropped on or something?”
“It’s fine. I’ve already taken care of that.”
“Oh, I see…”
She returned home without incident.
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