# Chapter 2 — The Commission
The Crimson Lotus banner expired on a Tuesday.
I stared at the notification — *Thank you for your patronage! This banner has ended* — and felt the kind of grief that theologians write about. Forty-seven pulls across three weeks. Not a single five-star. The game had given me nothing but four-star duplicates and a growing suspicion that God's mercy had a budget.
I closed the app. I opened my crystal balance. Zero.
I opened my bank app. The number stared back at me with the quiet judgment of a disappointed parent.
Rent was covered. Utilities were covered. The parish salary handled the bones of survival — roof, water, electricity, the bare architecture of not dying. But the flesh — the fried chicken, the new manga volumes, the next gacha banner that was already announced and looked even better than the last one — the flesh required funding.
I lay on my couch and considered my options.
Option one: live like a monk. No snacks. No delivery. No gacha. Survive on parish meals and tap water until next payday.
I considered this for about four seconds.
Option two: take a commission.
The Sanctum Commission Board had been sending notifications to my phone for weeks. I kept the app installed the way you keep a gym membership — technically active, theoretically useful, practically ignored. But the SCB paid well. Even a low-tier job could cover a month of snacks and still leave enough for a ten-pull on the next banner.
I should probably explain what the SCB is. Or rather, I should probably explain what the world is, because if you've been reading this thinking I'm just a normal priest with a snack problem, I have news.
Sometimes, reality cracks.
They're called Fractures — spatial anomalies that tear open like someone took a knife to the air itself. Light bends wrong around them. Colors bleed at the edges. Step too close and your teeth ache from a frequency you can't quite hear. Inside a Fracture, the rules get loose. Physics takes a lunch break. And things crawl out.
Hollows. Shadow-bodied creatures that range from the size of a dog to the size of a building, depending on how bad your day is about to get. Nobody knows why Fractures happen. They've been showing up for decades. The city adapted the way cities adapt to everything — with bureaucracy, insurance premiums, and an app.
The Sanctum Commission Board posts the jobs. Licensed Agents take them. You go in, you kill the Hollows, you close the Fracture, you get paid. Most Agents are ex-military types, freelance fighters, people with unusual abilities and overdue rent. The work is dangerous, the pay is decent, and the survival rate is — well, it's a number. They put it on the website. I try not to look at it.
Now, priests of the First Light aren't supposed to take commissions. The Church considers monster-hunting beneath the dignity of holy office. Officially, we channel divine power for healing, blessing, and spiritual protection. Unofficially, a priest who can throw a barrier strong enough to stop a charging Hollow is exactly the kind of person the SCB wants on their roster.
The Church looks the other way. As long as it doesn't make the news.
I opened the app.
The interface was clean — government-funded, no personality. A list of active commissions scrolled past, sorted by district. Each one had a threat rating, a location, an estimated Hollow count, and a payout.
I scrolled.
*Fracture — 7th District, Sector 14. Threat Level: C. Estimated Hollow count: 4-6. Type: Shade Hounds. Payout: 280,000 won.*
Shade Hounds. Bottom of the food chain. Fast, but fragile. They hunted in packs, moved through shadows, and died the moment anything holy touched them. A C-rank Fracture with Shade Hounds was the monster-hunting equivalent of taking out the trash.
Two hundred eighty thousand won. That was a month of fried chicken. That was two ten-pulls on the next banner. That was the difference between living and surviving.
I accepted the commission.
My phone buzzed with the confirmation. Location coordinates. Entry window — Fractures didn't stay open forever, so you had a timeframe. Rules of engagement. Emergency contact protocols. The usual.
I sat up. I looked around my apartment. Chip bags. Soda cans. The tablet still open to an anime I'd been rewatching for the third time.
"Okay," I said to nobody. "Work time."
The 7th District's Sector 14 was a warehouse district on the eastern edge of the neighborhood. Old brick buildings, loading docks, a parking lot that hadn't seen a car in years. The kind of place where a Fracture could open and nobody would notice for hours.
I noticed it immediately.
It hung in the air between two warehouses like a wound — a vertical crack about seven feet tall, edges shimmering with light that moved wrong. The colors around it bled: the red brick of the warehouse wall shifted to purple near the crack, the gray concrete underfoot took on a greenish tint. The air hummed. My teeth ached.
I was wearing my cassock. Not because I wanted to — I'd have preferred the hoodie — but because the SCB registration was under my clergy credentials, and showing up in sweatpants would raise questions I didn't want to answer. The cassock made me look like a seminary student playing dress-up, which was its own kind of problem, but at least it was an official kind of problem.
I checked my phone. The entry window was open for another two hours. No other Agents had accepted the commission. Just me.
Good. I didn't like working with people. People asked questions. People wanted to talk. People might see me fight and form opinions, and opinions led to conversations, and conversations led to someone eventually asking why a twenty-one-year-old priest was hunting monsters for cash.
I stepped toward the Fracture.
The transition was always the same — a pressure change, like diving underwater, and then the world shifted. The warehouse district dissolved. In its place: a corridor of black stone, lit by a pale light that came from nowhere. The walls were smooth, almost organic, and the air tasted like iron and static. Fracture interiors didn't follow normal architecture. They were spaces that existed because something had gone wrong with reality, and they looked like it.
I stood still. I listened.
Claws on stone. Distant. Moving fast. Four — no, five distinct sets of footfalls. Shade Hounds, right on schedule.
I rolled my shoulders. I cracked my neck. I closed my eyes.
When I opened them, the prayer was already on my lips.
"Lord, grant me Your light."
It came the way it always did — not like flipping a switch, but like opening a window. Warmth flooded through my chest, down my arms, into my fingertips. White-gold light gathered at my palms, soft at first, then steady, then bright enough to push the shadows back three feet in every direction.
The first Shade Hound came around the corner at full sprint. It was the size of a large dog — low to the ground, body made of something that looked like smoke given weight. No eyes. A mouth full of teeth that shouldn't have fit in its skull. It moved fast, claws sparking against the stone floor.
I raised my right hand.
"Smite."
The bolt of light left my palm like a thrown spear. It crossed the distance in less than a second and hit the Hound center-mass. The creature didn't scream — Shade Hounds didn't have the anatomy for it. It simply came apart. The shadow-flesh dissolved where the light touched it, peeling away like ash in wind, and what was left collapsed into a smear of dark residue on the stone floor.
One.
The second and third came together, flanking from both sides of the corridor. Smart. Pack tactics. They'd learned that a single approach got you killed.
I didn't move. I extended both hands.
Two barriers snapped into existence — translucent walls of golden light, one on each side, angled inward. The Hounds hit them at full speed. The impact was silent. The barriers held. The Hounds bounced off, stunned, legs scrambling on the smooth stone.
I closed my fists. The barriers collapsed inward, crushing both Hounds between planes of divine light. The shadow-flesh compressed, cracked, dissolved.
Two. Three.
I walked forward. My footsteps echoed in the corridor. The light at my hands was steady, casting long shadows ahead of me that moved when I moved.
The fourth Hound was smarter than the others. It stayed in the shadows, circling, waiting for an opening. I could hear it — the soft scrape of claws, the wet sound of its breathing. It was behind me. Then to my left. Then above me.
Above me.
I looked up. It was clinging to the ceiling, body flattened against the black stone, mouth open, ready to drop.
"You know," I said, "that's actually clever."
I raised my hand. A circle of light expanded from my palm — a purification field, radiating outward in a sphere. The Hound tried to leap away. It was too slow. The field touched it, and it dissolved mid-air, shadow-flesh evaporating before it hit the ground.
Four.
The fifth was the pack leader. Bigger. Denser. The shadow that made up its body was darker, more solid, and it moved with a deliberateness the others hadn't had. It stood at the end of the corridor, watching me with the eyeless focus of something that understood it was outmatched but hadn't decided to run yet.
I stopped walking. I looked at it. It looked at me.
"You can leave," I said. "I won't chase you."
It charged.
They always charged.
I sighed. I raised my hand. The smiting bolt hit it in the chest. It staggered but didn't dissolve — the denser shadow-flesh absorbed the first hit, cracking but holding. It kept coming, mouth wide, claws tearing grooves in the stone.
I fired again. The second bolt hit the crack the first had made, and this time the light punched through. The Hound split down the middle, both halves dissolving before they reached me, trailing wisps of shadow that curled and vanished in the glow from my hands.
Five.
I stood in the empty corridor. The pale light hummed. The air tasted like iron and ozone. Somewhere deeper in the Fracture, the spatial anomaly was already destabilizing — without the Hollows to anchor it, the interior would collapse back into normal space within the hour.
I let the light fade from my hands. I rolled my shoulders. I checked my phone — the SCB app had already logged the kills. Five confirmed. Commission complete. Payout pending.
Total time inside the Fracture: eleven minutes. I'd spent longer deciding what to order for dinner.
I walked back toward the entrance. The Fracture spat me out into the warehouse district like a bad taste. The evening air hit my face — cool, real, smelling like concrete and distant rain instead of iron and static.
I stood there for a moment. The crack in the air behind me was already shrinking, edges pulling together like a wound closing.
My phone buzzed. The payout notification.
*Commission complete. 280,000 won deposited.*
I looked at the number. I did the math. That was four large fried chicken combos with cheese sauce. That was a ten-pull on the new banner. That was a month of living like a human being instead of a monk.
I opened the delivery app before I'd even left the parking lot. Fried chicken combo — large, extra crispy, cheese sauce, cola. Order placed.
Then I opened the gacha game. The new banner was live. A limited character — some kind of ice mage with a design that had no business being that detailed.
"Okay," I whispered, walking home in my cassock, phone held in both hands like a prayer book. "This time. This is the one."
I pulled.
Blue light. Three-star.
"Lord," I said, to the sky, to the city, to the fundamental architecture of probability. "We need to talk."