The Hero

One moment, Sangwoo was falling, sliding sideways in a puddle on a narrow Busan sidewalk with the headlight of a truck washing out his vision. The next, he was laying on cold cobblestones, staring up at the leather soles of shoes and sandals stepping over him. Climbing to his feet as curly-bearded men in tunics and hose jostled around him, he peered through this mass of humanity at the skyline of this new city.

Really, calling it a skyline was generous. Looking uphill, to the city center set on a rocky outcrop a few blocks away, Sangwoo saw only one structure taller than three stories, though that one was enough to make his breath catch. This city had for a citadel a castle in the European style, partly built up from and partly carved into a towering natural monolith of blue-veined white marble, with its spires and hoardings white-plastered and painted in blue lines to match. The structures nearer Sangwoo similarly had white and sometimes blue-striped walls between their timber frames, and most had second stories overhanging the street precariously far.

The place didn’t smell as charming as it looked. More people than not here had a dank sweat-stench wafting from them, but more offensive was a constant background odor like a pigsty. As unpleasant a detail as that was, it only made the hairs on the back of Sangwoo’s neck stand up farther as he considered what may have just happened.

The thoroughly unremarkable day he was having back in Korea had been interrupted by what may have been his death, or else he had been whisked away by unknown forces the moment before it. Either way, he was quickly coming to suspect something had happened which, in the back of his mind, he had wished for from a young age: he was in another world, one less tamed and more ripe for adventure than the Earth he knew. A glance over his shoulder confirmed it: the sun was setting, not over the horizon, but halfway to the zenith of the sky as it slid behind an enormous celestial body, what Sangwoo realized must be the gas giant this planet– moon, rather– orbited, probably in a tidal lock. He was mainly a fantasy guy, but he’d watched enough sci-fi to retain that concept of how a habitable world might form. Had formed, it seemed.

A man in a wolf pelt vest clipped shoulders with him, hard. “Wake up,” he barked, and Sangwoo only noticed he was understanding a language other than Korean when the fellow followed up with an ethnic slur, one that didn’t have a direct equivalent in Sangwoo’s mother tongue.

Well, if he had arrived in this new world with his memories intact, plus an instinctive knowledge of the local language, it probably wasn’t part of some passive cycle of death and reincarnation, but a deliberate choice by some higher power, a god or Fate or the Wheel or whatever, in need of him specifically. It made sense that he would be a Chosen One straight out of a cheesy manhwa, after all. Compared to everyone he had ever met, he had just been a little smarter, a little more determined, capable of more. All his teachers routinely said so– except Mrs. Kim, but who cared what that toad thought? Now nothing remained but to find where he needed to start his quest; the rest would sort itself out.

He wandered up this street for a time, inward toward the castle. As the dusk grew dimmer, he doubled his pace.

There should be some sort of guild I can join, Sangwoo thought, if I know this sort of setting. World. I guess this one is real. “Adventurers’ Guild,” something like that. That'll put me in the right place to do whatever I was brought here to do, and in the short term they might have a bunk for me to spend the night on. No telling how I'd pay for an inn; I don't think a few thousand won in paper bills will get me anywhere here.

As the sun disappeared behind the gas giant and dusk grew thick on those unlit streets, a voice called from a man Sangwoo couldn't make out through the crowd, save the head of the halberd he carried. “Curfew in thirty minutes! Finish your business, or fetch a lantern if you really must be out after dark!”

Anxiety jolted Sangwoo alert, and he forgot the pride that had held him back from asking directions before this point. A cauliflower-eared man in a dark cloak glanced at him from a corner; Sangwoo met his gaze, and approached him with a wave.

“Excuse me, sir, do you know where I can find an adventurers' guild?”

“A… what?” To call the man's voice gravelly would be much like calling the cobblestone street they stood on a gravel path. Boulders slid over each other when he opened his mouth.

“Monster hunting lodge, dungeon crawler's association, something along those lines.”

“Dungeon? Uh, the Guild of Torturers is by the south gate.”

When the man cocked an eyebrow, Sangwoo realized his face had twisted in a look of pure disgust. “Just… is there some place a freelance fighting man can get a bed for the night? Ideally, where he can fight to pay off his room and board.”

The eyebrow remained cocked a moment, then the man looked thoughtful, then he glanced around furtively. “I think I take your meaning. Follow me.”

He led Sangwoo to a district of the city just below the elevated center, built in a depression where the pig-stench was stronger and mingled with a swampy rot. “You new in town, buck? What's your name?”

“I am Lee Sangwoo, from a distant and technologically advanced country called Korea. I believe my timing is–”

“You traveling with anyone else from… Korya? Any local contacts?” He beckoned Sangwoo down a muddy lane between two ramshackle tenements.

“I come alone, as surely your prophecies have for-”

Sangwoo slammed against a tenement wall, the wood behind him groaning under the strain as the man's forearm pinned him in place. He had a long dagger out, its point a hair’s breadth from Sangwoo’s gut.

“Why?” was all Sangwoo could gasp out, the wind driven from his lungs.

The man shrugged. “I’d hold you to sell to the Lugomen, the next time their flesh-hawkers came around, but you did say you were a fighting man. Best not give you a chance to escape.”

Sangwoo didn’t die then. Not immediately. The dagger didn’t puncture anything that was vital in the short term, and he didn’t lose enough blood in the night to die that way. But he couldn’t move from where the robber had tossed him after taking everything in his pockets and most of his clothes. No, the end came in the morning, when the pigs found him.