The First Hunter

The Premise

A guy buying washer fluid ends up gutting a monster with the bottle in his hands, and that’s just the start of his New Year’s Eve. Goblins and Orcs tear through a supermarket in Bucheon out of nowhere — witout any warning signs, they just appear — and turn a shopping trip into a slaughterhouse. Survivors get trapped behind fire shutters on the second floor with dead phones, no rescue, and just growing pile of bodies. This your not-so-everyday RPG style Apocalypse trope novel.

The Protagonist & Stakes

Kim Tae-hoon isn’t your average shopper — he’s ex-military, the kind of guy who’s killed people and knows exactly how to kill ‘things’ quietly and efficiently, and he treats the whole nightmare like a job. He picks up strays along the way — a baseball player named Bang, a scared dad, a freckled woman with a knife — and starts running the group like a survival unit, rationing information about their new “Awakener” powers like currency. The cost is written all over him: burnt-out calm, zero sentimentality, and a body that’s literally being torn apart from overusing a power he doesn’t fully understand yet.

Why Read This

• Grounded Survival Horror: No chosen-one nonsense here — people die because they don’t fight, looters get exposed mid-crisis, and every win comes from improvised weapons like fishing line, engine oil, and cooking oil cans straight out of Home Alone.
• Game-Stat Awakening System: The power-up mechanic is discovered in real time through smartphone photos revealing stats and monster crystals that boost abilities when eaten, which makes the whole thing feel like characters figuring out patch notes mid-fight.

“If you want to survive this unspecified change, you must be selfish, and wisely selfish.”