The apartment smelled of coffee and regrets.
It wasn't much, really. Two rooms and a kitchen, all crammed onto the seventh floor of a gray brick building that had seen three decades pass without ever knowing renovation. The walls were cracked, the wallpaper peeling in places, revealing successive layers of desperate attempts at embellishment. The living room window overlooked a narrow alley where garbage trucks made their racket at five in the morning, without fail, every single day.
But it was their home.
The slightly yellowed photos of Lyon, taped to the wall, brought a touch of nostalgic warmth that contrasted with the coldness of Seoul's concrete. In one, their parents, young and smiling, stood in front of the family home. In another, Aiden as a child, perhaps six years old, holding Emy's hand as she looked at him with that tenderness she had never lost. These images were all that remained of a life they had left behind – a home, parents, a childhood without mana or monsters, without dungeons or Awakened, without that constant threat that hung over every city in the world.
Aiden often stared at these photos. At twenty, he barely remembered his mother's laughter, his father's protective gaze, the smell of the kitchen on Sundays. These memories were sweet ghosts dancing with the shadows of Goblins and the silent scream of dungeons. Sometimes, at night, when sleep wouldn't come, he tried to recall the exact sound of his father's voice. But it always eluded him, like water between his fingers.
The faint morning light struggled to penetrate the living room blinds. It was a gray, sickly light that gave everything a faded hue. Outside, Seoul was already rumbling, this megalopolis that never truly slept, where the neon signs of commercial establishments stayed lit twenty-four hours a day, where advertising screens boasted the merits of the latest dungeon detection technologies or the performances of star Awakened.
In the kitchen, the acrid and reassuring smell of coffee mingled with that of slightly burnt toast. Emy, his sister, three years his senior, was already busy, her brown hair tied in a loose bun that let a few rebellious strands escape. Her forehead was beaded with sweat despite the morning chill. She wore her work uniform – a navy blue polo shirt with a convenience store chain's logo – and flat shoes whose soles were starting to come off. She was the light of that place, the sun that pushed back the insidious darkness of the outside world. Even tired, even exhausted by twelve-hour days standing behind a cash register, she maintained that ability to smile, to make the apartment livable, habitable, almost warm.
"Aiden!" she called out, her voice soft but firm, a steaming cup of coffee in her hand which she placed on the small wobbly table. "You're going to end up merging with your mattress! You have class this morning, don't you?"
In the adjacent room, Aiden groaned, burying his face deeper into the worn pillow that had long lost its shape. "Five more minutes. Just five little minutes."
"That's what you say every morning," Emy replied with a small laugh, but in that laugh, there was a hint of fatigue that only Aiden could detect. "Come on. Get up."
But the image of Emy, up since dawn to prepare their breakfast before going to her part-time job – a cashier in a crowded convenience store, a forced smile for indifferent customers who treated her like a machine, who ignored her or worse, who complained about the price of bread as if it were her fault – that image finally pulled him from the arms of Morpheus. He couldn't afford to be lazy. Not when Emy carried all of this on her shoulders. Not when she sacrificed her own rest so he could study, have a chance, a future.
Aiden got up, dragging his feet, his hair disheveled, his eyes still heavy with sleep. He stumbled to the bathroom, a tiny room where the shower, toilet, and sink seemed to have converged in a space designed for a closet. In front of the cracked mirror, an angular face looked back at him. Pale. Too pale. Dark circles under his eyes, prominent cheekbones. He had lost weight in recent months. Not voluntarily. Just from lack of means. Nothing heroic about it. Just a kid trying to survive in a world that didn't give a damn about his existence.
"I'm up, I'm up!" he finally replied, a forced cheerfulness in his voice that sounded false even to his own ears. He splashed cold water on his face, brushed his teeth with mechanical gestures. "I have an important midterm today, but I'm going to ace it. You know, the future elite of the nation!"
Emy laughed, a light, crystalline sound that filled the small room and seemed to chase away, for a moment, all the darkness of the world. "The future elite of the nation had better eat his toast before it gets cold. And not forget his bag. Again."
Aiden emerged from the bathroom, dressed in worn jeans and a sweater that had seen better days. He sat down at the small kitchen table, a wobbly structure of particleboard that threatened to collapse with every meal but held on by sheer stubbornness. Emy had already laid out the toast, butter, some cheap jam, and the two cups of coffee.
They ate in silence, a comfortable silence, woven from decades of complicity. It wasn't an awkward silence, not one of those heavy silences that weigh on dead conversations. No. It was the silence of two people who didn't need words to understand each other, who had built themselves around each other to form an inseparable whole. They had lived everything together, or rather, they had survived everything together. France. The Lyon dungeon break that had transformed their peaceful residential neighborhood into an apocalyptic war zone. That winter afternoon when the sky had torn open, when the portal had opened in the city center, unleashing a horde of creatures no one had seen coming. The sirens. The screams. The chaos. Their parents who had pushed them into a closet, who had told them not to make a sound, not to move, no matter what. Then the silence. That terrible, definitive silence that had marked the end of their old life. Aiden was eight. Emy was eleven. When rescue teams found them hours later, they were still in that closet, huddled together, trembling, unable to cry, so violent was the shock.
The arrival in Seoul. The new language. The new culture. The forced adaptation in a country whose language they didn't understand, where social codes were different, where everything was foreign. Emy had been his rock during this brutal transition. She had held strong when he couldn't, she had learned Korean in three months by sheer will, becoming his interpreter, his guide, his lifeline. She had helped him with his homework, to understand the teachers, not to feel completely lost. And when their parents' Korean friends – well-meaning people who had their own lives, their own problems – began to show signs of weariness with the burden of two traumatized orphans, it was Emy who made the decision. At sixteen, she had found a part-time job, convinced social services that she could provide for their needs, and they had moved into this shabby but their own apartment.
It was in this new, independent, and precarious life that the bond between them had grown even stronger – inseparable, protective, almost vital. Emy had become more than a sister. She was his entire family, his only anchor in a world that seemed determined to crush them.
She sacrificed everything. And me? I'm just a burden. A student with no guaranteed future, who depends on her for every meal, for every bill.
This thought, recurrent, obsessive, gnawed at his stomach far more than hunger. He chased it from his mind during the day, but it always returned at night, in those moments of insomnia when he stared at the cracked ceiling, wondering what kind of man he was becoming. A parasite. That's what he was. A parasite sucking the life out of his sister, watching her burn out slowly so he could have a hypothetical chance of succeeding in his studies and finding a decent job. No. He wanted to help now. He wanted Emy to finally be able to rest, for her not to work all those hours to make ends meet, for her to live instead of just surviving.
"Well, I'm off," Emy said, glancing at the cheap watch on her left wrist. She stood up, grabbed her worn handbag, and leaned down to kiss the top of Aiden's head. Their goodbyes were always quick, without too much fuss. It was their way of not dwelling on the precariousness of each departure, on that dull fear that one day, one of them wouldn't come back.
"Be good," she added with a small smile. "And don't hang around in neighborhoods with dodgy ads."
She looked at him, a hint of worry in her eyes. It wasn't the first time she had made that remark. She knew he was looking. She knew he was desperate to help her. And she knew that desperation pushed people to do stupid things.
"Don't worry," Aiden said with a smile that he hoped was reassuring. "I'm just going to class, then to the library. Usual routine."
Emy nodded, but her gaze lingered on him for a second too long. Then she turned and left, the door closing softly behind her.
When the silence fell again, it was heavy this time. Oppressive. Accusatory.
Aiden finished his coffee, the bitter taste filling his mouth, mingling with the lie he had just told his sister. His gaze slid to the small shelf where his old phone lay, its cracked screen still functional. A search engine open. A query typed and erased dozens of times in recent weeks. He stared at the screen for a long time, his fingers nervously tapping the edge of the tablet. One day's work. Maybe two. Enough to cover next month's rent and relieve Emy. Just an effort. A sacrifice. I can do this. He took a deep breath, like a diver preparing to jump into troubled waters, and typed. "Cleaner. Seoul. Recruitment."
.....
The results appeared instantly, a long list of ads that all resembled each other in their barely concealed desperation. It was like looking into a distorted mirror of his own situation.
"Seeking personnel for post-raid cleaning. Urgent."
"Lucrative opportunity, no experience required."
"Immediate payment. No questions asked."
Most were hosted on fringe forums, those dark corners of the Internet where people came to seek what the legal economy refused to offer them. Sites with evocative names – "SecondChance Jobs," "QuickCash Seoul," "NoQuestionWork" – that flirted with legality without ever truly transgressing it, at least not openly. Aiden knew these sites. He had browsed them for weeks, reading the ads, weighing the risks, each time persuading himself that he would find something better, something less… desperate.
But nothing paid like the Cleaners.
He had seen the reports on television. Not the glorious reports about the Awakened, those modern heroes who plunged into dungeons with their gleaming armor and impressive skills, no. The other reports. The ones that aired late at night, when ratings were low, when producers could afford to be a little more… honest. The Cleaners. The invisibles of the system. The dungeon rats. They weren't heroes. They were ordinary men and women, often non-Awakened, sometimes Awakened too weak to be recruited into an official squad. They had no military training, no institutional recognition, no protected contract like the Hunters. They were paid by the task, by the filled bag or by the kilo of broken crystals. Their job? To enter dungeons while the Hunters were still purging monsters, to collect carcasses, fragments, everything the glorious Awakened didn't have the time or inclination to collect. Maximize recovery while others risked their lives a few corridors away. Low-end equipment, often recycled from previous missions. No official health coverage, or very minimal. No insurance in case of injury or death. Irregular hours, called in urgently for last-minute replacements.
"Did you fail the awakening tests? Are you too old to register with the Association? Welcome to the Cleaners."
The phrase, spoken by a cynical journalist in a documentary aired at two in the morning, still resonated in Aiden's mind. He remembered the face of the man who had said it, a jaded investigative journalist who had spent months following a team of Cleaners. The documentary ended with images of an anonymous grave. One of the Cleaners had died in a dungeon. Crushed by a rockfall. His body had never been recovered. It wasn't a job. It was a dead end. An option for those who had no other. But it paid. Really. Much more than any other job accessible to a simple student without "Awakening," without particular skills, without a network.
Aiden scrolled through the ads, his heart beating faster and faster, nausea slowly rising in his throat. Each ad was a reminder of his own powerlessness, of his failure to find something better.
Then an ad caught his attention. It was different from the others. More… professional.
URGENT - Cleaner Replacement - Atlas Guild
Immediate need for a replacement for post-raid cleaning mission. Regular Class E Dungeon. One day's work. Exceptional payment: 800,000 won for the session. No experience required. Briefing on site. Equipment provided. Meeting tomorrow morning, 6:00 AM, Warehouse District 7, North Industrial Sector. Punctuality required. Discretion appreciated. Contact: XX00X0XX
Eight hundred thousand won.
Aiden reread the figure three times, four times, five times, certain he had misread, that there was a mistake, a zero missing somewhere. But no. Eight hundred thousand won. For one day. It was almost double the monthly rent. With that, he could not only pay the rent in advance, but also fill the fridge for two weeks, maybe even offer Emy a day off that she would never take for herself. He could tell her not to go to work tomorrow, to sleep, to rest, to do something for herself for once.
But something was wrong.
Eight hundred thousand won for one day of unskilled labor? Even for Cleaners, even in the worst conditions, it was exorbitant. The average Cleaner's salary was around three to four hundred thousand won for a full session. Here, they were talking about double. And then this mention: "Urgent replacement." Someone had backed out. Or worse, someone couldn't do it anymore. Someone died, maybe. Or seriously injured. Or finally came to their senses and fled.
Aiden stared at the ad, his fingers trembling above the keyboard. A part of him, the rational part, the one that had listened to all the warnings, all the reports, all the horror stories, screamed at him to close that page, to look for something else, anything else. But another part, darker, more desperate, showed him the image of Emy coming home tonight, exhausted, collapsing on the sofa with that empty look she had more and more often. He closed his eyes. He saw Emy this morning, the dark circles under her eyes that she tried to hide with cheap foundation bought in a discount cosmetics shop. He saw her hands damaged by the cleaning products she used at the store, her skin cracked, almost raw in places. He saw her shoulders slump a little more each evening when she came home, as if an invisible weight grew heavier day by day.
He reopened his eyes and, before he could change his mind, before his reason could take over, he copied the meeting point address and noted the phone number. Just one day. What could go wrong in one day?
The rest of the day passed in a strange haze, as if Aiden was watching his own life from the outside, a detached spectator of his own actions. He attended his classes, sat at the back of the contemporary sociology amphitheater, took notes he would never reread. The professor spoke of the impact of dungeons on social structures, of how the appearance of the Awakened had created a new form of aristocracy based on power rather than birth or wealth. It was ironic, really. Aiden sat there, listening to theories about a world he wasn't really a part of, a world that played out above his head, in the upper echelons of the social pyramid.
At noon, he ate alone in the crowded university cafeteria, a bowl of instant ramyeon for three thousand won that burned his tongue. Around him, groups of students talked loudly, laughed, complained about their classes, their romantic relationships, their problems that seemed so… insignificant. Not their fault, of course. Just a difference in perspective. When you're hungry, other people's problems always seem trivial.
In the afternoon, he went to the library as he had told Emy, but he didn't really work. He stared at pages of textbooks without reading them, the words transforming into abstract symbols that refused to make sense. His mind was elsewhere, already in that warehouse in District 7, already in that Class E dungeon, already picking up pieces of dead monsters.
At six in the evening, he returned to the apartment. Emy was already there, which was unusual – she usually finished later. She was slumped on the worn sofa, a hand on her forehead, her eyes closed. She looked more exhausted than usual, if that was possible.
"Hey, champ," she said, opening her eyes when she heard the door. She offered him a tired smile that hid nothing. "How was your midterm?"
Aiden placed his bag near the door. "Good. I think I aced it."
A lie. There had been no midterm today. But it was simpler than explaining that he had spent his day staring at walls thinking about dead monsters. He sat down next to her on the sofa, and for a moment, they just stayed there, in the comfortable silence that belonged only to them. Outside, Seoul rumbled, merciless, indifferent, its millions of inhabitants stirring in the giant hive of concrete and neon. Here, in their small shabby sanctuary, the world seemed able to wait a little longer.
"Are you okay?" Aiden asked after a moment. "You came home early."
"Yeah," Emy replied, keeping her eyes closed. "The manager let me leave early. Not enough customers."
Which meant fewer hours. Less money. Aiden felt his resolve strengthen.
"Emy," he began, his voice more hesitant than he would have liked. "If… if I find a job this weekend, would you be okay with it? Like, just one or two days, well paid."
Emy turned her head towards him, her keen eyes scrutinizing his face with that intensity she had always had, that ability to read him like an open book. "What kind of job?"
"Nothing dangerous," he hastened to say, the lie slipping from his tongue like oil, viscous but necessary. "Just handling. In a warehouse. They pay well because it's urgent, you know how it is."
Emy's gaze lingered on him, suspicious, digging beneath the surface to find the truth. "Aiden…"
"I swear," he insisted, placing a hand on her shoulder, trying to appear as reassuring as possible. "Nothing crazy. Just… we need this money, Emy. You know that. I can't let you carry all of this alone. Not anymore."
Emy looked at him for a long time, too long, and Aiden was afraid for a moment that she would see through him, that she would understand where he was really going, what he was really going to do. But finally, she sighed, and in that sigh, Aiden heard all the fatigue of the world, all the sleepless nights, all the double shifts, all the invisible weight she had been carrying for years.
"You don't have to do this, you know," she said softly. "I… I'm managing. We're managing. We'll get by."
"No," Aiden said, and this time, there was no lie in his voice, just raw conviction. "You're managing. I'm just here, depending on your money, eating the food you buy, living in the apartment you pay for. I dream of a hypothetical future while you work yourself to death. Let me do this. Just once. Please."
Emy looked at him again, and something passed in her eyes. Sadness, perhaps. Or resignation. Or both.
"Okay," she finally said, her voice barely more than a whisper. "But you promise me it's legal and not dangerous?"
"Promise," Aiden said, and this time, the lie burned his throat like acid.
That night, Aiden didn't sleep. He lay in his too-narrow bed, the one Emy had bought him secondhand years ago that creaked with every movement, staring at the cracked ceiling on which damp stains formed abstract shapes. His phone was clutched in his hand, the cracked screen glowing faintly in the darkness. He had reread the ad a dozen times, looking for details he might have missed, warning signs of a scam or a trap. But everything seemed… legitimate. As legitimate as an ad to become a Cleaner could be, anyway.
Atlas Guild.
One of the largest guilds in Seoul. Not as prestigious as The Dawn, of course – nothing was – but respected, professional, known for its efficient management of medium-importance dungeons. They had contracts with the Association, employed dozens of C and B rank Awakened, and had a solid reputation. Why would a guild of this caliber need a replacement found on an obscure forum?
Because they need cannon fodder. Someone desperate enough not to ask questions. Someone who will accept any conditions because they have no choice.
Aiden clenched his teeth in the dark. He knew. Of course, he knew. He wasn't stupid. But the number kept flashing in his mind. Eight hundred thousand won. Two months' rent. A month and a half's worth of food. A chance for Emy to breathe a little. No matter the risk. No matter what he had to do. Tomorrow morning, he would go. He would do this job. He would collect monster remains, crystal fragments, everything the glorious Awakened disdained to touch. He would work in the shadows, in the grime and blood, while others reaped the glory. And he would come back. He had to come back. For Emy. Just one day. One day. I can do this. I can survive this. He looked at the time on his phone. Three in the morning. In three hours, he would have to get up, get ready, take the subway to District 7. He closed his eyes, trying to force sleep to come.