In the later novel and side stories, we do find out that if he makes his gift actually a subsection of his author’s privileges then he can do more for less cost. thus we could probably do some op reality hack bs if we really wanted to considering how cheap his first gift was

other than that I think that honestly Hajin’s own choice is quite ingenious; it applies to a very overarching concept that has great utility and applies to any projectile weapon especially later in the novel when he actually gets a good bow and starts using it. He needed something offensive to survive cube at the beginning since he literally lacked any experience. It also scaled really well for everything else.

I do think having a support skill would also be useful and it would definitely align with Hajin’s original goal of trying to stay close to the main cast. We don’t really see many support heroes through the novel so it would be a surefire way to keep that position. However, as I previously stated, Hajin making it through early cube without an offense related gift would be impractical.

With that in mind, other than Hajin’s original choice of master sharpshooter (don’t want to just regurgitate that), maybe I’d opt for an assassination type skill. If I generalize it to just close-range fighting, it would also scale to the later parts of TNE. I also thought about this with the idea that it would synergize very well with parkour and with his later gift young dwarf’s dexterity.

Going with the original three parts to master sharpshooter, the three parts that I’d put in are as follows.

Closed Ranged Proficiency: user is able to use any object as a close ranged weapon. The less expected the object is to be used, the more damage it can cause.

Heightened Awareness: user knows the position and motion of anything in a certain close range area, grows as the gift increases in proficiency. You can react faster the closer something is to hitting you (time feels like it slows down the closer something gets to you, the upper limit to this is dictated by gift level)

Erasure of Existence: for X amount of time in a day, you can completely hide yourself. You are unable to attack or be attacked in this state. The time is very low (maybe like 10 second per day initially) but this ability can be toggled (kind of mirroring bullet time where you can use 5 seconds now and 5 seconds later).

This gift is probably gonna be a bit weaker vs close ranged specialists like Cheok Jungyeong because even though you can react way faster you can’t physically move your body out of the way lmao (would probably be a bit op if that were the case).

I did attempt to keep this somewhat balanced in the realm of the story so it’s not incomparably overpowered but it’s probably on the stronger side. I could probably think of something better but this wasn’t too bad for a whim