The café on Daehak-ro served overpriced coffee to university students and office workers who wanted to feel cultured. Art prints on the walls, jazz playing too loud, baristas who looked personally offended when asked for simple black coffee. The kind of place Raze would normally avoid.
Today, he arrived twenty minutes early.
He took a corner table with sight lines to both entrances, ordered something unpronounceable that tasted like burnt chocolate, and waited. His enhanced senses mapped the room automatically: fourteen customers, three staff, one fire exit through the kitchen. The couple by the window was arguing in whispers. The businessman in the center was playing a mobile game and pretending to read reports. The three students near the counter were debating something about film theory with the aggressive confidence of people who'd just discovered opinions.
Normal people. Normal problems. A world he was sliding further from every day.
At 1:47 PM, a woman walked through the front entrance and scanned the room with the quick, assessing look of someone who did this professionally. Late twenties, athletic build, dark hair pulled back in a functional ponytail. She dressed like an off-duty hunter — tactical pants, layered jacket that could conceal weapons, boots that could take a kick. Her mana signature was moderate — C-rank, maybe low B — but there was something strange about its texture. Uneven. Patchy.
Old injuries. Significant ones.
She spotted him, hesitated, and then crossed the room with steps that were slightly too fast. Nervous energy. Her hands fidgeted with her phone case, and when she sat down across from him, she drummed her fingers on the table twice before catching herself.
"So you're, like, actually here. I wasn't sure you'd show up. I mean, I figured fifty-fifty odds, right? Someone calls you with — you know — accusations, and the smart move is to run. But you came. Which either means you're confident you can handle whatever I throw at you, or you're, like, desperately curious. Or both? Could be both."
Raze took a sip of his bitter coffee. "You have a name?"
"Kira. Kira Vance." She stuck out her hand, realized he wasn't going to shake it, and withdrew the offer without visible embarrassment. "I'm a hunter. Or I was. It's complicated. The point is, I know what you are, and before you do that thing where your eyes go all murder-y and you consider how quickly you could silence a witness — which, honestly, impressive threat display, very predatory — I should mention that I'm not here to turn you in."
"Why are you here?"
"Because I'm like you." She said it simply, the nervous rambling dropping away for a moment. "Different, but similar. And people like us? We don't have a lot of options for honest conversation."
Raze set down his cup. His instincts were pulling in multiple directions — suspicion, curiosity, the faint hunger-recognition that occasionally activated around high-quality cores. She didn't have a core. She was human. But something about her registered as... adjacent.
"Explain," he said.
Kira glanced around the café, confirmed no one was paying attention, and leaned forward. "Three years ago, I was a B-rank hunter. Guild affiliated, good reputation, rising star trajectory. Then I got caught in a dungeon collapse — like, full cave-in, buried under a mile of rock, no rescue for seventy-two hours." She tapped her chest, over her heart. "I should have died. I didn't. Something happened down there, something that — okay, this is going to sound insane, but you're literally eating monster cores for breakfast, so we're already past the sanity threshold."
"Something happened," Raze prompted.
"A dying monster gave me its core. Not physically — I didn't, you know, swallow it. But the transfer happened. Its mana, its skills, its... memories? Kind of? It's fuzzy. Point is, I came out of that dungeon different. My mana signature is wrong now. Hunters with good sensing abilities can tell something's off. The Association has a file on me in their 'concerning anomalies' folder. I know because I hacked it."
Raze processed this. "You're an aberrant."
"Aberrant-adjacent. My changes are internal — no physical mutations, no visible tells. But the Association knows I'm not normal anymore, and they've been watching me for three years. Which is how I found out about you." She pulled up something on her phone and showed him the screen. "This is surveillance footage from the Blackpine Dungeon. Association sensors flagged unusual mana activity after your party's clear. They sent a drone."
The video was grainy, taken from distance, but it clearly showed Raze consuming the Fenris core. The timestamp matched the night of the kill.
"They don't know it's me," Raze said. It wasn't a question.
"Not yet. The footage quality is bad, your face isn't visible, and the Association analysts are idiots who can't believe a porter would have the capability. But they know someone in that party ate a B-rank boss core, and they're going to keep investigating until they figure out who."
Raze's mind mapped the threat vectors. The Greyhound Party would be re-interviewed. His background would be scrutinized. Eventually, someone would notice the physical changes — the silver hair, the slit pupils — and connect the dots.
"How long?"
"Two weeks, maybe three, before they have enough to bring you in for 'questioning.'" Kira made air quotes around the word. "Which is Association-speak for 'detention until we figure out what to do with you.' I've seen their protocols. Aberrants who cooperate get research facility assignments. Aberrants who don't..." She drew a finger across her throat. "The public story is always 'dungeon accident.'"
The café jazz switched to something melancholy. The couple by the window had stopped arguing and was now holding hands. The students had moved on to complaining about professors.
"Why warn me?" Raze asked. "What do you gain?"
"I want in."
"In to what?"
"Whatever you're building." Kira's nervous energy had shifted into something more focused, almost hungry. "You're not just surviving, are you? You're not eating cores because you have to — you're doing it strategically. Choosing targets. Combining abilities. You're trying to become something, and I want to understand what."
Raze considered lying. Considered playing dumb, thanking her for the warning, and walking away. But the truth was, he'd been operating alone for six months, and loneliness wasn't the same as safety. Having someone who understood — who couldn't judge him because she was marked by the same strangeness — held an appeal he hadn't anticipated.
"I don't have a plan," he admitted. "I have hunger. It tells me what to eat, and I eat it. Everything else is improvisation."
Kira's eyebrows rose. "That's... terrifying, honestly. But also kind of refreshing? Most hunters have these elaborate justifications for everything they do. You're just like, 'the monster inside me is a food critic and I'm its personal chef.'"
A laugh escaped him before he could suppress it — short, surprised, rough around the edges. Kira grinned like she'd won something.
"There it is. I knew there was a person in there somewhere."
---
They talked for two hours.
Kira's story came out in fragments — the dungeon collapse, the dying monster that had been some kind of psychic type, the transfer of abilities that had left her with limited telepathy and an understanding of monster behavior that went beyond academic knowledge. She couldn't read minds, exactly. But she could sense intentions, detect lies, feel the emotional states of creatures around her.
"Which is how I knew you weren't going to kill me," she said, stirring her fourth coffee. "Your body language was all threat, but underneath, you were just... curious. And tired. You're really tired, aren't you?"
Raze didn't answer. He didn't have to.
"The aberrant thing," she continued, "it takes a toll. You're caught between two worlds, and neither one wants you. Humans can tell something's wrong, even if they can't articulate it. And the monsters — the real ones, the dungeon creatures — they see you as competition. There's no rest."
"You've been doing this for three years."
"Surviving it for three years. There's a difference." Kira set down her cup, her expression going serious. "I've been watching the aberrant community — yeah, there is one, sort of — and people like us have two options. We hide forever, always running, always one bad day away from exposure. Or we find power. Enough power that the Association decides we're more useful alive than dissected."
"You think I'm building toward that."
"I think you're the first person I've seen who might actually achieve it." She met his eyes, and for a moment, the nervous rambling was gone entirely. "Most aberrants try to stay small. You're actively getting bigger. That's either genius or suicide, and I want to find out which."
Raze thought about the hunger. The way it guided his choices, pushing him toward specific cores, specific combinations. He'd assumed it was instinct, biological programming from the monster traits he'd consumed. But what if it was something more?
What if the hunger had a destination in mind?
"The Association footage," he said. "Can you make it disappear?"
"Already working on it. I have access to some of their internal systems — not deep access, but enough. The original file will get corrupted, the backup will have a timestamp error, and the analyst who flagged it is going to receive a job offer from a private guild that pays three times his current salary." Kira shrugged. "Bureaucracies are easy to manipulate. You just have to understand what each person wants."
"And what do you want?"
"Partnership. Or mentorship. Or whatever we're calling it when one aberrant helps another stay alive long enough to figure out the bigger picture." She hesitated, and the nervousness crept back into her voice. "I can't do what you do. The core consumption, the physical integration — my body rejected that path. But I can do other things. Information gathering. Social engineering. Reading people. I can be useful."
Raze studied her for a long moment. His instincts were quiet for once — no immediate threat assessment, no hunger response. Just a recognition that felt almost like familiarity.
Two aberrants in a world that wanted them dead or contained. The math was simple. Together, they had better odds.
"I operate alone," he said.
"Okay."
"I don't take orders, I don't explain my decisions, and if you become a liability, I will remove the liability. Understood?"
Kira's grin returned. "Very predator-alpha of you. I'm into it. Platonically. Professionally. You know what I mean."
"I have no idea what you mean."
"That's probably for the best." She stood, dropping cash on the table for both their drinks. "I'll send you secure contact protocols. There's a dead drop system I've set up for situations like this — old-school, paranoid, completely offline. We use that for anything sensitive."
She headed for the door, then paused and looked back.
"Oh, and the Sector 7 break? The one the Greyhound Party was asking for backup on?" She smiled with too many teeth. "There's a B-rank Tunneler still unaccounted for. Association thinks it's dead. It isn't. Just burrowed deep, waiting for things to calm down. If you're hungry, might be worth checking out."
She left. The door chimed closed behind her.
Raze sat with his cold coffee and processed the last two hours. He'd come here expecting a trap, a threat, or a recruitment pitch from some government agency. Instead, he'd found something he hadn't realized he was missing.
Someone who saw him clearly and didn't run.
His phone buzzed. A message from an unknown number — Kira, presumably — with coordinates and a simple instruction:
**Three blocks east of the original break site. Follow the mana trail. Good hunting.**
The hunger stirred. The B-rank Tunneler would be worth the risk — another defensive ability, maybe, or something for underground movement. Combined with Shadow Walk, he could become untraceable.
Raze finished his coffee, left the café, and headed east.
The hunt was on.
