Tonight, the rain seemed like it would stop in Shinsoo City.
Late into the night, long past the point when honest people were home, the streets still pulsed with a strange life—hollow-eyed salarymen stumbling from bars, the hiss of tires over wet asphalt, the hum of electric signs stubbornly glowing in the downpour.
Riku dragged his hood tighter over his head and kept walking, shoes sloshing with every step. He hated the rain.
He hated It soooo much!
It was heavy, clinging, the kind of rain that seeped into your bones no matter how many layers you wore. It reminded him too much of himself—unwanted, unshakable, an annoying weight that never let go.
His reflection wavered in the black glass of a puddle as he passed. Pale skin. Bags under his eyes. Twenty-two, though he looked older.
He was a college dropout who had barely survived a year of half-hearted study before quitting, now scraping by with night shifts at a convenience store. Rent overdue. Fridge empty. Parents disappointed enough to have stopped calling.
He laughed bitterly at the sight of himself—small, hunched, pathetic. His voice was barely audible over the rain, but he muttered anyway.
"I feel like the universe already concluded on me being a joke."
It wasn't even melodramatic anymore. It was just fact.
His stomach growled, a hollow ache. He thought about instant noodles waiting for him at his dingy apartment.
He thought about Junko, his landlady, who would almost certainly be waiting in the hall to nag him about rent. He thought about the cold sheets and the silence waiting for him after that.
He didn't think about the streetlight ahead though. Or the way the rain blurred the red glow into something vague and meaningless.
Riku stepped into the crosswalk without looking.
Headlights cut through the rain.
For a moment, the world sharpened into absolute clarity.
Hoooooorn!!
The roar of the truck's engine. The splash of its tires. The way every drop of water seemed frozen in midair as it barreled toward him.
"Damn," Riku thought, the words dry and bitter in the eternity of that instant. "Not like this. But at least, I won't get to pay rent."
Bang!
The sound was bone-cracking, metal-screaming. His body lifted from the ground like a ragdoll, weightless, before crashing down in a spray of rain and blood. His world went black.
Silence...
When Riku opened his eyes, the city was gone. The rain, the colored lights, the truck—all of it had vanished.
He floated in darkness. Not the comforting kind of dark you found when you closed your eyes, but a vast, endless void without depth or direction. It was rather unsettling.
There was no ground, no sky, nothing to orient himself. Only an endless expanse, as though he only but a speck of dust in an infinite space.
His breath echoed strangely, louder than it should have. Panic clawed at his chest, but before he could scream, something else stirred.
A voice.
Cracked. Ancient. Heavy with time. It didn't come from one direction—it came from everywhere, curling around his mind, vibrating in his very bones.
"…A vessel… finally."
Riku spun uselessly in the void, searching for a speaker. The words scraped against him, cold and hot at once, like rusted metal dragged across his skin.
"Who's there!?" he shouted. His own voice sounded pitiful against the weight of the one pressing down on him.
The void shifted. Flashes of light seared across the emptiness—visions not his own.
He saw a godlike figure, colossal and terrible, bound in chains of light. Its body was eroded, crumbling like stone weathered by endless centuries.
Symbols burned into its flesh—seals, marks of judgment written in what looked too divine to be called mere "ink".
Riku's mind throbbed with the weight of it. He wanted to look away, but there was nowhere to look.
The voice cracked again.
"They thought… me erased. But… fragments endure. A vessel… a hunter. You… will hunt."
Before Riku could respond, black light surged from the chained being. It hurtled toward him, blinding, encompassing, and inevitable.
"Wait—!"
The light struck his chest.
Agony. Untainted, searing, soul-tearing agony.
Riku's body convulsed though he had no body here, his form shattering into shards of himself. The thing wasn't just touching him—it was burrowing into him, invading, merging.
He screamed, but no sound left his mouth. His throat tore, lungs collapsed, but still the scream went on.
Heat spread through him as if liquid fire was being poured into his veins, searing down his spine. He clawed at himself, but his hands dissolved into fragments of black light. He was breaking apart, piece by piece, and being filled with something alien.
In the blur of pain, whispers coiled around him.
"…Hunter…"
"…System…"
"…Devour…"
Each word vibrated through his marrow, branding itself into him. His vision blurred, the void collapsing around him. He was no longer Riku alone. He was something else—something tethered to a fragment of a forgotten entity.
His form shattered completely, dissolving into light.
The void collapsed.
Riku's eyes snapped shut against blinding white. His last thought before consciousness returned was simple, panicked, and small.
"What… the hell… is happening to me?" Riku jolted awake with a strangled gasp. One moment, he was hit by a moving truck and the next, he was in an infinite expanse of Darkness. Now?
The ceiling above him wasn't darkness, or void, or chains of light—it was a dull white, cracked and yellowing from years of neglect.
The smell of antiseptic filled his nose. A thin blanket covered his sweat-drenched skin. His heart hammered so loudly he thought it might set off the monitors around him.
"…A hospital?" His voice was hoarse.
He sat up slowly, groaning as his muscles screamed in protest. He half expected to see twisted bones, blood, maybe even missing limbs—but no.
A few scratches, bruises along his arms, a bandage on his forehead. That was it. For someone who'd taken a truck head-on, he looked like he'd just fallen down a flight of stairs.
"Barely a miracle," a nurse muttered from the doorway, checking the clipboard at his bed. "No fractures, no internal bleeding. Just a concussion. You must have nine lives, kid."
Riku swallowed, nodding weakly. His throat was too dry to speak. When she left, the silence returned—and with it, something else. A sound like the one from a phone's notification.
Ding!
A glow.
At first, he thought the concussion was making his eyes flicker. But then the glow sharpened, forming words in the air above him, etched in faint white-blue light.
[Milf Hunting System: Initialized.]
Riku blinked.
"…What?"
The words didn't fade. They hovered no matter where he looked, crisp and undeniable. He shook his head hard, trying to dispel it, but the glow clung stubbornly to his vision like a cruel afterimage.
Another line appeared.
[Tutorial Binding Active.]
"…Oh, hell no." Riku rubbed his eyes until they hurt, then pinched the skin of his arm. Still there. He lay back, staring at the ceiling. Concussion hallucination. Must be. I'm seeing things. I just need to sleep this off.
The glow pulsed once, and the letters rearranged themselves into something new.
[Quest: Conquer Junko Takashima (Landlady) in 3 Days.]
[Failure Penalty: Soul Erosion 20%.]
[Reward: +2 Charisma, Skill: Milf Radar (basic).]
Riku froze.
"…Conquer? What the hell does that even mean?"
Then his brain caught up. His eyes widened, and his voice broke into a strangled shout.
"What the hell kind of cursed hentai role playing game is this!?"
The words didn't vanish. They just sat there, waiting. Silent. Inevitable.
"Nope," Riku said quickly, shaking his head. "Nope. Not happening. Not real. Definitely not real." He lifted a hand and swiped through the holographic screen like it was some kind of augmented reality display.
For a moment, it worked. The text wavered—then locked back into place, immovable, dead center in his vision.
[Denial Detected.]
The glow flared.
And then pain hit.
It wasn't like being punched or stabbed. It wasn't physical at all. It was deeper, sharper, as if someone had reached into his chest and was peeling away strips of his very soul.
"Arghhhh!" He tried to scream as his veins burned with acid, his mind split open like glass. He could only cry out, back arching against the hospital bed, clawing at his own skin as though he could rip the agony out of himself.
Beeeeeeep!
Beeeeeeeeeep!!
Machines beeped frantically. Nurses rushed back into the room, shouting his name, checking his vitals. But none of them could see the truth. None of them could see the blazing light carving him from the inside.
The pain vanished as suddenly as it came.
Riku collapsed against the mattress, gasping, drenched in sweat. His fingers trembled. His body was intact, his skin unburned, but his soul felt ragged, as if someone had taken sandpaper to the edges of his existence.
His vision swam. The holographic screen remained.
[Failure Penalty Preview: Soul Erosion Active.]
His throat was dry. "It's… real."
No one else noticed. The nurse adjusted his IV drip, muttering about "seizure aftereffects," then left. The door clicked shut.
Riku lay there in silence, staring up at the words that refused to leave him. His breathing slowed, but the terror didn't. The system was real. The pain was real. And if he failed…
The glow pulsed once more.
[The Hunt Begins.]
The letters dissolved, but the weight of them remained lodged in his chest.
Riku's gaze drifted toward the glass window beside his bed. Down the hall, at the front desk, stood a familiar figure.
Junko Takashima. His landlady.
Even from here, he could hear her nagging voice, muffled through the glass as she argued with a receptionist. "Yes, that useless tenant of mine. He's behind on rent again. No, of course he doesn't have family to cover it—he's worthless! That's why I'm here."
Riku's stomach dropped. His eyes snapped back to the now-empty space above him.
The system's words echoed in his mind. Conquer Junko Takashima in 3 Days.
"No," he whispered, horrified. "Not her. Anyone but her."