portals

As soon as I got out of bed, I took my toothbrush and toothpaste from the second drawer of the drawers next to my bed and went out of my room.

I lived in a hostel. You know, people stay in single rooms and there are bathrooms and toilets that everyone uses together.

The main reason I lived in this hostel was that it was completely free.

I went to the restroom two doors to the left of my room, stood in front of the mirror and started brushing my teeth while thinking about things I had done in the past.

About 3 years ago, I was just an ordinary college student, and one day I was watching the news on my phone and saw a report about a big portal that had suddenly appeared in the capital of Korea.

People were always talking about it at the time, and the day after it happened, portals appeared in the capitals of the United States and China.

In just one month, at least one portal had appeared in every country in the world. The portals were actually just magical rings that appeared out of nowhere, with a transparent center, suspended in the air, and people could walk through them as if nothing was there.

Within the next month, the portal in Korea suddenly started to turn red, and a week after that, cracks started to appear in the middle of the portal

The changes this gigantic illusion underwent attracted a huge audience around the world

While I was watching a live broadcast of a broadcaster broadcasting these illusionary rings with the dream of becoming famous, a green hand reached out from inside the cracks and completely shattered the portal

After the portal was shattered, small, short and green creatures came out of the portal with primitive weapons in their hands. These creatures, which we later called goblins, were horrified by the sight of the surrounding buildings as soon as they came out of the portal.

After the goblins got over their brief confusion, or rather after confirming that these buildings were not alive, they stopped trying to strain their little brains any further and started running into the surrounding crowds. Then began a massive massacre involving many people, including the broadcaster I was watching.

Hundreds of goblins were slaughtering ordinary people on one of the busiest streets in Korea. Since goblins are not much superior to ordinary people in terms of physical characteristics, the massacre did not last long and the goblins were killed by the soldiers who reached the scene.

They looked just like the goblins we see in the games, and game makers around the world were arrested and questioned, but nothing came of it

Although the disaster in Korea was quickly stopped by the Korean army, several scientists who thought that portals were a natural wonder and were studying them were killed by goblins during the disaster. The loss of these valuable scientists naturally outraged the country's leaders and the public.

After the incident in Korea, a very interesting news was echoed on televisions across Korea; a man went on television and claimed that there was an invisible screen in front of him and that this screen told him that he could become stronger by hunting monsters in portals.

This news, which no one cared about at first, became a worldwide news story when hundreds of other Koreans with the same symptoms emerged.

Over the next few weeks the world learned that these people could tap the portals and get in and out of them. And for the next few months there was no news except that the portals opened in the US and China had been hacked.

The portal ruptures in America and China around this time did not kill anyone because the weak creatures that emerged from the portals were only slightly stronger than an ordinary human and were quickly destroyed by the military

For half a year after that, no social media influencers or news outlets mentioned the issue and it stopped being talked about even on social media, until everyone found out later that it was the state authorities who suppressed the issue.

When I was studying my last year at university, portals were back in the media spotlight, even in my home country there were people talking about some invisible screen like the one that first appeared in Korea

These people later came to be called hunters

One day all the leaders of the world gathered around the same table and formed an association called the hunters association and spread it all over the world

Now a hunter was a person with a prestigious job all over the world. Hunters had a passport called a black passport, valid in every country, and each one was paid $1,000 a month by the hunters' association.

As time passed, people started to learn more and more about hunters: all hunters have an invisible screen that allows them to kill monsters and become more powerful.

Now let's talk about how I became a hunter...

One day, as I was leaving school and walking to the nearest restaurant for lunch, I narrowly avoided being run over by a speeding pickup truck in a narrow alley.

I can still remember the heat of my shoe rubbing against the truck tire

The moment I was saved from being hit by the truck, one of those blue screens that hunters on TV channels talk about appeared in front of my eyes

In the excitement of the event, I forgot to go to the hospital or the restaurant and went to the nearest hunters' association and registered as a hunter, because the minimum wage in the country where I live is only 530 dollars and I could earn a thousand dollars a month as a hunter even without doing anything, and there were only 22 hunters in Turkey, the country where I live, besides me, which made me a very special person.

People who were chosen as Hunters were either doing something they would rarely do in their lives, or they had a certain level of superiority over other people in a certain area. For example, if someone was cooking, they would be chosen as a Hunter and would be given the title of "chef" or something similar.

All Hunters gained skills according to the titles they obtained.

Strangely, in the country where I live, more than half of the hunters are famous doctors.

The title I got the day I was saved from being hit by a truck was "survivor" and the only skill this title gave me was to increase my chances of survival.

For a while I got invitations from many local news channels and television programs. I did hundreds of interviews and I became quite famous for a while, when I was walking on the street many people would come up to me and ask me questions and take pictures.

Then one day a portal was opened in Turkey and all hunters living in Turkey like me were called for military service.

Before we entered the portal, they put us through a month of military training and taught us the weaknesses of the monsters encountered so far in portals around the world

I remember very well the first time I dived into a portal; I found myself in a huge rainforest and for some unknown reason we couldn't bring technological weapons and technological tools into the portals.

After wandering around in the rainforest for a while with the other members of the team, a snake emerged from the grass and bit one of our teammates and poisoned him, and we soon learned that there were hundreds of poisonous insects living in the forest.

Fortunately, most hunters in the group had healing-type abilities and dealt with the poisons from the bites

All the monsters we encountered in the woods were poisonous insects and after a while we decided that we had gone far enough for today and started to retreat