Creator’s Favoritism

The system message rang loudly. The slime, somehow back in its original form, perched conspicuously on my shoulder. The only difference was its size—once large enough to cradle in my arms, it had shrunk to fit comfortably in the palm of my hand.

I scanned the iron cage. Shards of broken cameras littered the ground. In the brief chaos, every hunter on the school grounds had converged around me, eyes locked on the cage, no doubt trying to assess my newly awakened skill.

Even if they couldn’t read the entire description, they could at least see the skill’s name.

‘Status window.’

I followed their lead and pulled up my own. A new skill had indeed appeared in my skill tree.

[Skill]

Bearer of ■■ (Unranked/Conditional Activation Skill): The □□ of □□ is subservient to you.

‘A scam contract after all, huh?’ The vagueness of the hidden content was suspicious, and it didn’t seem like anything I could use in combat.

As I processed this, my eyes met Hwang Hee-yoon’s. She stood with a sphere of blue energy floating above her palm. Without a word, she strode into the cage and grabbed the slime off my shoulder. In one swift motion, she drew her knife, its blade glowing with a familiar blue aura.

The slime let out a tiny scream, its face contorting in fear.

I acted on instinct, hand outstretched.

“Don’t kill it!”

Hee-yoon froze mid-motion, eyebrows raised.

“…?”

“If it dies… I’ll die too.”

Her skeptical gaze flickered between me and the slime. She studied the creature, tilting it this way and that, then reluctantly handed it back. The slime quickly scurried into my pocket, trembling. Meanwhile, the surrounding hunters whispered among themselves, their expressions serious.

“Is this an effect of additional skill awakening?”

“It’s too flashy. More like the awakening of an S-rank skill.”

As their murmuring continued, a drone camera from the broadcasting station circled overhead, capturing the scene. The situation was far from under control.

Hee-yoon glanced up at the drone, her expression deadpan.

“It’s already five o’clock. When do we get off work?”

* * *

[Korea’s Largest Hunter Information: Hunter Masters]

[Info] What does this mean???
(png file attached)

Maeng Sun-woo awakened an additional skill during the broadcast interruption. I didn’t censor the words; this is exactly how it appeared on the news:
┗ Seeing how the unranked monster stuck with Maeng Sun-woo… Are the squares “unranked” and “monster”?
┗ It could be “unranked” and “life.”
┗ This is tough, what could it be??

[General] Who cares about MSW’s additional skill???
The important thing is the skill is unranked, not even F-rank^^ Don’t waste your energy trying to figure it out.
┗ Upvoted.
┗ Do you really think people care that much? They’re just curious. Way to show you have no friends, lol.

[Info] Official statement on Maeng Sun-woo’s additional skill
Exact details are unknown, but it seems to make unranked monsters feel strong affection for the skill caster. No further comment was provided.
┗ So it really was nothing special?
┗ Is it limited to unranked monsters?
┗ Yeah, seems that way. If it worked on higher-ranked monsters, it’d be at least A-rank.

[General] Even if you control the slime like a limb, it doesn’t seem useful.
Looks completely useless.
┗ Nah, he could become an ASMR YouTuber.
┗ It’s like a stress ball for combat. Something to squeeze when you’re tense.
┗ Stress ball… lol. Taking care of it would just cause more stress.

[General] I brought a slime gif.gif
(gif file attached)
┗ It’s cuter than I thought.
┗ I’m jealous, Sun-woo.
┗ Shouldn’t that thing be euthanized?

“Are you okay?”

Hyun Sora looked at me with concern as I scrolled through the forums in the cafeteria. I nodded and put my phone away.

As I awkwardly turned my gaze to my food tray, a narration box appeared before my eyes.

「Tito ponders how to explain what happened when ‘Maeng Sun-woo’ was enveloped in mist.」

Come to think of it, not a single flash had gone off while I was talking to ■■. Tito must have only drawn the outside of the mist.

「After wracking his brain for a while, Tito puts down his tablet pen. He decides to leave it as a plot hook for now and draw it later.」

“Haah…”

Even the god of this world doesn’t know everything. That must be why the system error occurred.

The slime, its brain apparently shrunken along with its body during molting, was completely absorbed in sliding up and down my forearm.

“Hey, you said you’d give me strength,” I whispered threateningly to the slime, careful not to let others hear. But the slime just continued to frolic, flipping its body this way and that.

“Sun-woo. Are you alright? Should I tell the teacher you can’t attend the First Sponsorship?”

Hyun Sora asked, worried. I must have looked pretty weird, muttering to a slime that couldn’t even understand words.

“Huh? No… I have to attend the First Sponsorship…”

Honestly, I didn’t want to go, but I had no choice. I needed to appear in the webtoon as much as possible to secure screen time.

Even though I had awakened an additional skill, it didn’t boost my combat power. Generally, hunters with strong abilities get more sponsorship requests.

Right now, the only abilities I had were drawing aggro and carrying around a single slime.

I couldn’t even reveal that I’d gained power from the monster, since I’d already pretended nothing happened.

Who would sponsor me in this situation? Unless there was a Liquid Monster Lovers Association out there.

I sat quietly, holding my spoon, lost in thought. I hadn’t checked the results yet, but my written exam scores had been promising.

Even if the test scores turned out to be useless, and even if I didn’t get many sponsorship offers…

I had a plan to leave an impact on the gods.

* * *

‘Everyone looks pretty ragged.’

That was my first thought upon seeing the new students huddled together on the gymnasium stage before the First Sponsorship began.

The top three high-rankers looked relatively fine, but the sorry state of the bottom three of us, covered in dirt and dust, was quite a sight.

“Please, just stay still until the sponsorship is over…”

The slime in my jacket’s inner pocket kept squirming. I gently punched the pocket, careful not to hurt it, and a dissatisfied “keeng” sound emerged.

The interior of the gymnasium was set up similarly to a professional sports league draft, where rookies are selected.

A banner reading ‘First Sponsorship’ hung high, crisp and new.

Behind a long table covered with blue velvet cloth, six new students sat in a row.

Between Tito’s constantly popping flashes and the lighting from the press photographers right in front of the stage, I had to keep my eyes narrowed the whole time.

The viewership of the entrance ceremony broadcast must have peaked by now. I wanted to check the public’s reaction, but with cameras recording every move of the students, there was nothing I could do.

“New students, thank you all for your hard work during the evaluations. We will now begin the First Sponsorship under the observation of Ministry of National Defense officials. Please maintain silence.”

As soon as the elderly principal spoke into the microphone, the noisy atmosphere in the hall subsided a bit.

First Sponsorship.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that all the procedures of the annual entrance ceremony existed solely for this moment.

If there was a standout new student, companies would do everything in their power to secure a sponsorship deal with that hunter.

This was due to the restriction that until reaching legal adulthood, i.e., twenty years old, a hunter could only have one sponsorship with a private company.

It was designed to prevent excessive commercialization of underage hunters.

While the Gate Disaster Response Headquarters basically sponsored all underage hunters, the extent of their sponsorship was limited to wearing the Ministry of National Defense patch on their chest.

For private companies, this meant that if they played their cards right, they could have exclusive use of a promising hunter as a walking billboard for three years.

There were two ways to make a sponsorship offer to a hunter at the First Sponsorship.

First, attend in person and make a sponsorship offer as soon as the hunter’s brief statement ends.

Everyone filling the auditorium now was there for that purpose.

Alternatively, one could watch the sponsorship broadcast from outside the school and contact the administration.

However, by the time the sponsorship request was conveyed to the student through various procedures, a hunter sponsorship had usually already been concluded on-site.

For this reason, almost no companies chose the second method.

Perhaps because this year marked the first enrollment of an S-rank student, there seemed to be more companies aiming for the First Sponsorship than usual.

Hunter sponsorship representatives from various companies flipped through their file folders with cold eyes. Those who came in pairs or groups of three whispered among themselves.

Some of them kept their gazes fixed on us. It was indescribably burdensome.

“We will begin sponsorship proposals starting with the student who scored lowest in the combined written and ability evaluations.”

I looked at the principal with anxious eyes. Sure enough, our eyes met immediately as the principal turned around.

“First up is Hunter Maeng Sun-woo.”

It was a merciless order, just as I had expected.

I had a small hope that Kang Chagyeong’s ability evaluation score might be lower than mine.

However, there was no way I, who couldn’t even kill an unranked monster, could be considered on par with him, who had definitively destroyed an F-rank monster.

What happened inside the iron cage was completely different, but nothing was visible to those outside, so there was nothing I could do.

From the side of the stage where the lighting didn’t reach, the physical education teacher shot me a laser-like gaze as if to say, “Hang in there.” I slightly bowed my head in greeting.

As I stood up and approached the table, the PPT displaying the background changed. It showed a brief summary of my profile, entrance evaluation scores, and skill descriptions.

[Maeng Sun-woo]
15 years old (Born May 5)
[Written Evaluation] 300/300 points. (1st out of 6)
[Ability Evaluation] 34/500 points. (6th out of 6)
[Skills]
Human Worthy of Death (F-rank/Innate Skill)
Bearer of ■■ (Unranked/Additional Skill)

‘Shouldn’t the Human Rights Commission say something about this? It feels a bit like a human rights violation.’

I quickly read through the content with narrowed eyes.

Fortunately, I had a perfect score on the written test. Even though the questions were at a basic academic level and therefore easy, it would have been embarrassing if I had gotten even one question wrong after all that struggle.

Especially in math, where I had to use tricks that required knowledge of high school content I had studied in advance for some problems. I scanned the auditorium once with a bit of expectation.

However, while there were those who marveled at my perfect written evaluation score, only one group seemed to be eyeing me with interest.

The badges on their chests read “High Study.” It was a massive private online lecture site targeting high school students.

I looked at them intently, wondering if they might make a sponsorship offer, but even they didn’t seem to have any intention of actively participating.

Impatient representatives usually raise their hands to request sponsorship even before the new students sit at the table.

However, until I sat down and slowly adjusted the height of the microphone, none of the company representatives showed any particular movement.

They were thinking about the next order.

Once a hunter sponsorship was established, no further sponsorship proposals would be possible.

If I had been last in order, a company that lost out in the competition might have made a sponsorship offer as a last resort.

Being the first up was an unconditionally disadvantageous condition for me.

“Ah, ah.”

As I checked the sound by speaking into the microphone, the audience split into two groups: those who looked at me out of courtesy and those who openly showed their lack of interest.

One woman wearing a badge from a major corporation even had her head down, talking on the phone with someone. How rude. I clicked my tongue inwardly.

Anyway, I had already planned my next strategy.

T/N: So you may have noticed that in this chapter, Sun-woo is 15 years old. I have a perfectly logical explanation for that and that it’s the author’s fault.

The raws for this chapter states that she’s 15 but then I was like “huh? wasn’t she 17?”

So then I thought it was my fault and I mistakenly typed 17 instead of 15  in chapter 1. But then I checked the raws for chapter 1 and it clearly states 17.

So I was like “huh? wtf?…. is she 15 or 17?” so I did some research because I knew that at the start of this novel, it says that she’s in her 3rd year of middle school, and what I got from Google was:

“- Elementary School is 6 years (ages 6-12) Grades 1-6. – Middle School is 3 years (ages 13-15) Grades 7-9. Culminates in the Certificate of Graduation from Middle School. – High School is 3 years (ages 16-18) Grades 10-12.”

Hence the result: Sun-woo is 15 years old. I already made sure to change her age in chapter 1.

Unless there’s a birthday scene or it explicitly says that a year passed, Sun-woo will always remain 15 years old. If you see any chapter before ch 17 saying otherwise, then ping me in discord under “All Novicelily Novels.”

That is all, thank you for coming to my TED talk. <3333