Chapter 6: Day Labor

The day-labor yard behind the closed Hwangji station filled up at half past four every morning, and by five the vans would be gone.

Seok-hyun had walked past it a thousand times on his way to the mart and never once stopped.

It was five below, and two oil drums burned at the edge of the gravel with men standing around each one, stamping.

Orange vests, work boots, thermoses, and in every pocket a laminated climber's license with a letter on it.

D, mostly, and E.

The Association's license cost a hundred and eighty thousand won, and it let a man enter a registered dungeon on a guild's contract.

Most of the men in the yard had never held a contract, because a guild took the C-ranks and above.

A guild that took D-ranks put them in the carry line.

They hauled ember sacks out of other people's dungeons for a hundred and forty thousand a day.

The office that sent them kept fifteen percent.

Seok-hyun had done the sum on the bench in the lamp house at two in the morning.

He had written it in the ledger book, in the margin by his father's last line.

He needed killers, and he needed them honestly, and he needed them this week.

At the ten o'clock turn the night before, he had raised the Spawn rule from forty crawlers to sixty.

Six people would kill faster than the Pit refilled them.

Sun-ja had said it plainly over the stew.

"A hole this size, the old man did it alone because he had to. You don't have to."

"They'll talk," he had said. "They'll sell the place the day they leave."

"Then pick the ones who won't," she'd said.

He had no idea how, and he was standing in a gravel lot in the dark trying to learn.

The manager of the manpower office stood at the door of a prefab hut with a clipboard.

His face had not been surprised since 2019.

"Ten minutes," he said to Seok-hyun, not unkindly. "After that the vans fill, and I charge you for the men."

"I'm not buying anyone," Seok-hyun said. "I'm hiring."

He climbed on an upturned crate, and the men in the yard turned their heads.

He felt it in the back of his neck.

It was the feeling of ringing up a drunk at three a.m. and trying to be kind about the change.

"I need six," he said. "D or E. Licensed."

"Daily rate is a hundred and fifty thousand won, no skim, and the rider on top, which is twenty-five thousand, paid by me."

A murmur went through the yard; that was already ten thousand over the going rate.

"And you keep five embers a head," he said. "Out of whatever you kill. At the desk price, that's nearly three hundred thousand more."

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