Was he completely useless?
Summary:
- There is a hunter ranking system in Solo Leveling.
- E-rank hunters are the weakest.
- Jinwoo was just slightly stronger than a regular person.
- His intelligence was the thing that helped him stay alive.
Solo Leveling (Ore dake Level Up na Ken) has a ranking system, and all the hunters are ranked from S (the strongest ones) to E (the weakest ones).
While speaking about S-rank hunters, the most appropriate question would be “what can’t they do?” due to how powerful they are, but with E-rank hunters it’s interesting what they are capable of.
At the beginning of the story, Jinwoo was an E-rank hunter, and the series openly states that he’s the weakest hunter out there. Others laughed at him due to his lack of abilities and even said that a dungeon should be a piece of cake if Jinwoo’s in the party. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been sent there.
Sung had to get medical assistance even after the easiest dungeons, and he was admitted to a hospital after raiding an E-rank dungeon. To cut it short, he was really useless when it came to doing the job.
E-rank Hunters
E-ranks are treated with disdain by other hunters. They are too weak to be effective and respected, so their wages are also rather low. Such hunters are basically just people others take with them for a raid if there aren’t enough people in the party.
But even E-ranks are still hunters, so there has to be something that makes them different from other people. They don’t have any powers, but they are stronger than regular people.
The physical power of E-ranks is slightly greater than that of non-hunters. Their reflexes are a bit better, they have higher endurance, and they can regenerate faster, but that’s pretty much it.
E-ranks cannot fight even the weakest monsters (perhaps only scratch them), since there’s not a big difference between their abilities and regular people’s ones.
Jinwoo’s Intelligence Was His Power
All of the above applies to Jinwoo, since he was an E-rank at the beginning. He was mostly useless when it came to battle and had to be protected and healed by his more experienced colleagues. He was practically a regular human.
But it doesn’t make him completely useless. Due to the lack of power and hunter skills, Jinwoo had to have something to help him survive, and that was his wits and intelligence.
We can’t say that Jinwoo is the brightest person in the series, but we shouldn’t forget that he was the one who didn’t allow his party members to get slaughtered in the Double Dungeon.
Jinwoo understood what had to be done with the statues and instructed the rest of the hunters. When it was needed, he managed to collect himself and even take on the role of a leader in some way.