Men Don't Need Many Words to Say Goodbye
The army is a love-hate thing for men.
Serve even once, and you understand what that means. You can never quite hate it, and you can never quite like it either. It wasn't all bad—and yet the moment you try to remember it, nothing comes back but the awful parts. There were happy times, meaningful ones too, you know there were, but years pass and you look back and realize they were never purely meaningful at all.
Anyone overhearing him might have asked why he was being so needlessly philosophical. Plenty of people, though, would have understood. That is what a love-hate thing is. Right up there with a girlfriend who slips out the door in backward shoes.
"Why do you keep talking to yourself? And you've never even dated."
"...Brother Dokgo, you don't hit a man with facts."
"Hey! Call me Platoon Leader! We're in the army, not out of it!"
"Grievance letter..."
"......Just call me hyung."
Brother Dokgo went on grumbling, spilling his complaints, and under his breath he muttered that if he hadn't been promoted he would have beaten this brat senseless. Lee Han watched him with something like wonder.
Feels real.
Not only the face. The way he talked, the personality—all of it belonged to the Brother Dokgo he knew. The man's father had read a single martial-arts novel that stuck with him and named his son Gupae, and perhaps the name had something to do with it, because there was a big-hearted streak in him. He didn't throw his weight around with the soldiers, and he knew how to look after them. Even when people called him hyung the way Lee Han did, he only grumbled and let it go.
So the enlisted men, the ones with Cadre are the enemy! carved into them like gospel, still marked Brother Dokgo, and only Brother Dokgo, as one of their own.
Because he was a good man...
How rare it was for an NCO to be called one of their own—only the people who knew would ever know. Lee Han let out a short laugh.
"What are you grinning at?"
"Nothing. Just glad to see your face."
"...?"
"It happens."
"...Crazy bastard."
They really didn't have to render the swearing that faithfully.
One hell of a trap.
And a vicious one.
Lee Han didn't need long to realize he had walked into a vicious trap. There was a little confusion, but he understood that this was an illusion.
And more than that—
An incredibly well-made illusion.
An illusion in which all five senses, pain included, felt real. The wind was cool. Food had taste. Move, and it hurt, and his breath came short. The sensations were so convincing that anyone else might have wondered whether they had been brought back to life in the world of their previous existence.
Lee Han did not ignore the itch of wrongness in a corner of his mind. An unease. A discomfort he could only call by that name, insisting that this world was false. And the greatest proof of all—
Bang!
"Whoa! Han, was that a gunshot out of your fist?!"
"No way...!"
Gyeong—the art he had made himself, the proof of his effort, the history that taught him the truth.
This world was nothing but an illusion.
The response is a fraction late.
A delay measured in microns. An ordinary person wouldn't have felt even that. It was only a sliver of a sliver. But how many times had a difference that small saved Lee Han's life? He could deny everything else. He could not deny his own effort. That would have been an insult to his life.
So this world was a pack of lies.
How do I wake up?
He had recognized the illusion. Then there had to be a way to break it. And that way was—
"—Ah. There's something I have to do first."
It came to him that there was a task waiting for him inside this illusion. Nothing other than—
"—Hey, you crazy bastard! What happens if you beat the battalion commander and his son like that!"
"Felt great, though, didn't it?"
"......Th-that's not the point...!!"
"Keh heh."
"Don't laugh like a creep, you punk!"
Lee Han laughed inside the military prison. It was nothing less than a congestion ten years old—no, forty—bursting clear at last.
In his past life, there were a few people he held grudges against. First on that list, no matter what anyone said, were the battalion commander who had been the root of his stress through all his years as an NCO, and the lieutenant—the commander's own son. Back then, when he had believed it a virtue to live obedient and endlessly good-natured, like a sucker, those two were no different from mortal enemies. Even beating them for a full seven hours had been, honestly, letting them off easy beside what they had done to him.
But there were still plenty of people Lee Han needed to thrash.
It's an illusion anyway. Might as well settle some scores.
If he still didn't know the way out, he might as well enjoy the place.
Kwaang!
Lee Han broke straight out of the military prison. Staying would only earn him punishment for insubordination and assaulting a superior, so if he was going to be punished anyway, he meant to finish everything first and take the punishment after. The body he wore was a paltry thing beside the strength of his true self, but even a strength that paltry would pass for a Kryptonian in the modern world.
He went after his targets one by one.
"Been a while, Teacher."
"W-who...?"
"They say the one who does the hurting never remembers the one he hurt. Even in an illusion, that's foul. Not that you need to remember. You're going to take about as much as you ever screwed me over."
He tore out the spine and the eyeballs of the teacher who had refused to treat him as a person because he had no money and no parents.
"Living well, you rotten bastards. Guess you really do have to live like trash to make money. Not one car here that isn't imported. Figures."
"H-how did you get in here..."
"That isn't the point. The point is I can't forgive you."
"W-wait...!"
For the delinquents from his school days, he served the full course of Tendon-Splitting Bone-Dislocation. They must have loved it. Every bone and muscle in their bodies twisted as if to express their joy.
And then—
"Y-you! Why are you here!"
"Ah, beating you once didn't quite feel like enough."
"D-don't come closer! I said don't come closer!!"
He found the battalion commander and his son again and beat them down. Could a mood be this clean?
Who was it that said revenge is hollow?
"When it clears you out like this, the guy who said that just never tried it."
"......"
"Right, Brother Dokgo?"
"...Hey. Ease up, you lunatic's brat..."
Dokgo Gupae had been standing behind him for who knew how long, silent even while Lee Han beat the commander and his son. Now he came over, raking a hand through his hair.
"Then you should have stopped me. You didn't even try."
"Would you have listened?"
"I wouldn't have."
"Right. Because you're that kind of guy."
"......"
Lee Han studied Dokgo Gupae the way a man studies something he means to understand, and before long he nodded.
"...You aren't Brother Dokgo after all."
"What nonsense is that?"
"You imitated the others well enough, but you failed at him. Maybe you're the reason I'm even more certain this world is an illusion."
"......"
"The man I know as Dokgo Gupae is a bigger martial-arts fanatic than I am. He'd care more about the techniques I'm using than about me running around on some indiscriminate revenge spree. And you have no interest at all in what I'm using? That isn't the Dokgo Gupae I know."
The man who had led Lee Han onto the path of martial-arts novels, and who at some point had even argued them with him. If Lee Han had a master in the martial arts, it was none other than Dokgo Gupae.
"He got teased for that name when he was young, but the name is exactly why he came to love martial arts so much."
"......"
"So what are you? The master of this illusion?"
"......Hmm. I didn't think I'd be caught for a reason this absurd..."
Dokgo Gupae—no, the man wearing Dokgo Gupae's face—looked deflated, as if he truly hadn't expected to be found out so quickly.
And then—
"I also didn't think you'd pass the Gate this fast."
"...The Gate?"
"That's the name of this world you call an illusion. Originally it's a security measure, something to stop illegal intruders. This is the first time it's activated in nearly three hundred years."
"That bastard. All that swagger..."
Lee Han thought of the spearman. He had thought the man impressive, only to be dropped into a trap like this.
"Don't be too hard on him. Illegal entry or not, he did get through. And the Gate isn't entirely a bad thing. There's a lot you can gain from it. You can overcome old trauma, for one."
"...Still, I was only hitting a hallucination. That doesn't mean much, does it?"
"Mm. You can't be so sure."
"?"
"This Gate is a Mystery in itself. The Holy Law cast by countless priests is one thing, but the power of the Sacred Relics inside the Sacred Vault is formidable as well, so it can build a world identical to the real one. It can even call actual souls—even people who exist in another world."
"!?"
Lee Han's eyes flashed. That meant—
"Then I..."
"You carried out your revenge. You struck their souls. They'll probably spend the rest of their lives hurting without ever knowing why, and misfortune will keep crashing down on them. What's left of their lives gets hard."
"......My god."
Lee Han was more astonished than he had ever been. After reincarnating he had forced the old grudges down and packed them away, and he had never imagined they would be settled like this.
I thought the blows felt different. I thought my chest felt strangely clear...
What kind of luck was this? His eyes went wide. He couldn't understand why anyone would call this a gate, or a security device. This was a heaven-sent chance among heaven-sent chances.
To that thought—
"No. It is the Gate. An ordinary person couldn't have kept their memories or their sense of self in here. Normally you would have been assimilated into the Gate and thrashed forever inside your trauma. You keep your memory and your self only because you're a knight whose very soul has been tempered."
"......"
"And even if you overcome the trauma, you still have to find me—the Gatekeeper who maintains this Gate. In that sense, of everyone who has ever infiltrated the Sacred Vault, you overcame your trauma and found me the fastest. So congratulations."
"Is this... something to congratulate?"
Passing the Gate was certainly something to be glad of, but he had come to steal a Sacred Relic. Being congratulated for it left a sour taste. The Gatekeeper answered lightly.
"If a knight with a soul as upright as yours broke in, there must be a reason. Or else the temple is doing something shameful."
"......"
"The temple causes a lot of accidents and rots badly, on about a thirty-year cycle. I'm used to it. Haha."
"...Doesn't seem like something to laugh about."
"I don't expect anything from humans anyway."
"......"
Lee Han thought the temple's darkness ran deep, and yet it was almost refreshing to learn there were stretches of thirty years when it managed not to be corrupt.
Why did it have to rot while I was in the kingdom.
He felt a little resentful, too.
"Life..."
"Haha. That's just how living goes. Don't despair too much."
"......Enough. Just let me out."
"Oho. That's some way to talk to a superior."
"You're the Gatekeeper."
"Puhaha. Caught again."
"......Hm?"
Lee Han's head came up. A laugh unlike the Gatekeeper's—warm, familiar, for no reason he could name. He looked at the Gatekeeper's face. No. At Dokgo Gupae's face. His eyes went wide.
"......Brother Dokgo?"
Lee Han called to him a beat too late. Their eyes met, and he reached out.
But—
A flash.
"......"
When he opened his eyes the next moment, no one was there. As if there had been nothing from the start.
Lee Han let out a breath.
"...You could have at least given me time to talk."
Feeling anew how vast a Mystery could be, he shook his head with a bitter smile. The bitterness lasted only a moment.
"...I'm glad you looked healthy."
He had met someone he missed. That was enough.