A strawberry-patterned shopping bag swung heavily from his hand.

It had been twelve years since the first Day of Fracture, and now both the Whitehole and the System were gone.

The grand Era of Great Hunters, which had replaced the so-called Fifth Industrial Age, had come to a pitiful end.

There had been a time when, if you asked a child what they wanted to be when they grew up, more than eighty percent would shout Hunter! Dungeon Slime ASMR videos were all the rage, and bored Hunters hosted unboxing streams, slicing open delivery boxes with A-rank longswords.

That time was over. Hunters had gone from idols to nuisances.

“Hunters? You mean those has-beens? They’re lucky if they’re not starving.”
“There are too many Hunter thugs around. It’s scary.”
“You can’t even walk through an alley anymore—there’s always some ex-Hunter waiting in the dark to shake you down.”

So it went. The masters who once ruled an era were now scratching their sides in idleness, jobless in a peaceful age. Former Hunters—now unemployed—scrambled to find ways to live. But many, unable to adapt to the changed world, had turned to crime.