Your Fucking Homeland Calls You Again
For three days, we stayed with Association President Volkov. Thanks to the mountain of food and drinking water he had brought, the Korean government's usual method of crushing mutinous hunters—starving them out—no longer worked.
"I'd like to see you hunt sometime."
At Volkov's request, we took him along and showed him how we hunted high-level monsters.
Troop movement by wyvern. The way we avoided unnecessary combat and entered the hunting grounds with our stamina intact. The hunters who had long since learned to move as one with Yeonghak hyung butchering monsters with terrifyingly precise teamwork. After watching it all, Association President Volkov clapped his hands in delight.
"To think hunters of such high levels work together this seamlessly! Shocking!"
"Korea never had the means to build multiple bases. So we set up just one, and whenever a rift opened, the hunters would raid all the way out to the rift themselves to suppress it. It was a high-risk approach, but the elevated combat rate produced a lot of high-level hunters as a result."
"Completely different from our approach. We build as many bases as possible and draw the bosses and monster hordes near the rifts back to the bases for siege battles."
"Much more efficient and stable."
"The trade-off is that our hunters' levels aren't as high. Haha! And the magic stone yield is relatively lower, too."
Yeonghak hyung and Association President Volkov talked often. After ten years of living at the base and creating most of the existing monster-hunting techniques, know-how, and field manuals, of course he had plenty to say.
For three days the Korean government—who knows what they were thinking—did not send anyone back through the gate. All our fretting about more people coming, all the watches we had stood, turned out to be for nothing.
And when three days had passed—
The Flame Dragon of Despair's HP has been fully restored!
Right in front of everyone, I summoned the Level 1200 ancient dragon boss we had hunted.
A body sixty meters long. Wings spanning nearly a hundred meters. And a staggering Level of 1203, visible to any awakener with a status window. Association President Volkov's mouth stretched from ear to ear—no explanation needed.
"Ready to leave?"
Over those three days we had done our damnedest to empty the containers of food and pack them tight with magic stones. We had also built several baskets large enough for a hundred people to ride at once.
Just before stripping the base of everything and leaving for the American sector—
"I'll ask one last time! Anyone want to stay at the Korean base? Anyone who doesn't want to leave? If so, turn around right now, cross the gate, and go back to Daejeon."
Yeonghak hyung put the question to the 103 hunters one final time. From the rookies who had been here less than three months to the veterans who had seen every kind of hell—not a single one moved.
Everyone had watched Sangmin die.
And everyone had seen how that death was received by Korean society. For a man who had given his life to keep a rift from tearing the country apart, all that came back was a cover-up, the insult of "death by pre-existing condition," and the women's mockery of [The male parasite is back at it].
Among these 103 people, at least, not a shred of patriotism for this country remained.
"Then we leave!! This is what all of you chose!"
And so it was decided.
The hunters and Association President Volkov climbed into the baskets. The thirty tons of high-level monster magic stones were secured tight in the containers.
"We're going to the American sector."
At my command, the ancient dragon lifted everything with ease. Then it spread its massive wings and took flight.
In an instant the Korean base began to fall away.
And the American bases drew closer and closer.
Inside the presidential office at the Blue House, a cold silence hung heavy. It was because of what Major Lee Haecheol had reported the day before, dragging out Base Leader Cho Geunseong's corpse—so mangled it was hard even to look at.
The hunters who were supposed to defend the Korean base had fled. If a rift opened in the Korean sector of the gate tomorrow, there would be no one left to stop it.
"How the hell did you manage the hunters to end up like this!!"
At those words, the Minister of Defense and Korean Hunter Association President Ju Cheolwu both bowed their heads.
"We're sorry."
"I didn't call you here to hear apologies. Bring me solutions. Solutions!! If a rift opens in the Korean sector of the gate tomorrow, if monsters pour out and citizens start dying—are you going to take responsibility?"
Faced with the president's irritable tirade, the Defense Minister and Ju Cheolwu could only keep their heads down in silence. Magic stones. Those damned rocks suddenly turning out to have world-changing utility had thrown everything off course.
If not for that, this mutiny would have been crushed in a few days of starvation. But America had caught the scent, snatched the hunters, and now this mess.
"Perhaps we should summon the American ambassador and lodge a protest?"
The Defense Minister stammered out a suggestion, but it only scraped the president's temper further raw.
"You think America will let them go? These are people who invent laws that never existed just to keep what they want. They've got personnel who can continuously supply magic stones in their hands—they're not fools who'd hand them back."
"At the very least, we could request the return of the stolen magic stones......"
At that, the Chief of Civil Affairs beside the president answered in a chilly voice.
"We've already made the request. The only answer we got was that the state cannot seize goods that hunters risked their lives to earn. We could drag it into a tedious legal battle if we wanted, but by then the magic stones would already have been processed into Elixir and circulating on the market."
"They're Korea's!! Those magic stones! Korea's!!!! How can America just take them—does that even make sense!!!"
As the president slammed the desk and roared, the two guilty men once again could only bow their heads like mute fish. The president looked at them with open contempt and clicked his tongue.
"Losing the magic stones is bad enough, but what's worse is that we no longer have any way to handle rifts inside the gate. What are you going to do about this? Do you have a solution?"
".......We've never had a situation where people simply defected to another country, so there's no manual yet. We don't know how to handle this either......."
"Pathetic."
The Defense Minister shut his mouth. Ju Cheolwu carefully offered an idea.
"What if we use the defected hunters' families as leverage to bring them back? Threaten them with heavy fines on their families if they don't return, and force them to come back......."
"The opposition would love that. I can already see tomorrow's headlines. The conservative party president, heir to a military dictatorship, takes ordinary citizens hostage to drive young men back into the jaws of death once more. A president who created a security hole doing something like that—wouldn't that be perfect material for them to tear into?"
The Association President also fell silent, becoming a mute. The president waved his hand in irritation.
"Keep protesting to the American government. They won't listen, but keep the pressure on and keep sending people. If you want to keep your jobs."
At that icy voice, the two men gave half-hearted bows and scurried out of the room. Now only the Chief of Civil Affairs and the president remained in the office.
"Chief of Civil Affairs."
"Yes, Your Excellency."
"This situation. We can call it a national emergency, correct?"
"Of course."
"Good."
The president tapped the desk for a moment.
After various calculations ran through his mind, the president spoke.
"There's one way to solve the security problem."
Thirty tons of high-purity magic stones from high-level monsters.
The moment the American government saw them, their eyes lit up.
"Welcome to becoming American citizens! Haha!"
In just three days, citizenship for all 103 was issued at bullet speed, and every condition I had presented beforehand was immediately processed by presidential order. We were given Sector 32—the most forward of the thirty-two bases America had established in its gate territory—as our base of operations.
We were also assigned the mission of training American hunters and helping them level up together. In exchange, we gained the right to sell the magic stones we obtained to American private companies.
Settling into the new base and unpacking.
Getting American citizenship and making our faces known by meeting people in the American hunter industry.
And even while doing all that, the phones at the US military base inside the gate rang off the hook every single day.
There were even cases of people claiming to be corporate chairmen coming all the way to the military base just to meet us.
It was a moment that showed exactly what kind of value magic stones held—what kind of status they had attained.
After a chaotic week, a magic stone auction hosted by the US government was finally held in Los Angeles, California. Yeonghak hyung and I headed to LA as representatives of the 103, and there, amid the passionate support and cheers of countless corporations, we began selling off the magic stones.
"Magic stone obtained from a Level 701 monster! Weight: 2.3 kg! Starting bid: ten thousand dollars!"
"Twenty thousand!"
"Thirty thousand!"
"Fifty thousand!!"
It was madness.
Yeonghak hyung and I sat there doing absolutely nothing and made enormous amounts of money, over and over.
And finally, when all thirty tons of magic stones had sold out—
"We'll deposit the net proceeds after taxes into your account. Thank you for your hard work."
"S-so, what's the total?"
"Sixty-one million dollars."
We had made roughly eighty billion won in profit.
It was a mind-numbing sum. Yeonghak hyung and I hugged each other and screamed like little kids.
"This is just the early days—it's still undervalued at this level, hyung!! Think about it!! The full utility of Elixir hasn't even been revealed yet!! Research has only just begun! As time passes and more uses are discovered, we can make even more than this! Hyung!!!"
"Insane! This is insane!! Even if we split it equally among a hundred people, per person......."
"Eight hundred million won in Korean currency! Fuck!!!"
"Woohoohoohoo!!!!!"
That night, hyung and I stayed up figuring out how to distribute the profits. It was decided they would be distributed differentially based on skill, level, and years of service, and we returned to the main gate in Nevada with big smiles on our faces.
We distributed the profits differentially to the 103 hunters who had trusted us and followed, and the guys' eyes went wide when they saw the money hit their accounts.
"What the fuck are you waiting for!! Let's party!!!!!"
When we told Association President Volkov we were going out to play, several luxury trucks arrived in front of us in less than ten minutes. As a group, we headed to Las Vegas, the city near the main gate.
For a week, a wild party continued.
All the food we hadn't been able to eat while forcibly stuck inside the gate. Shows. Entertainment. We enjoyed and played to our hearts' content. Volkov, quick on the uptake, also assigned us several Korean international students and Korean-Americans to use as interpreters.
It was a truly joyful time.
A time of pure happiness.
And then, on the exact seventh day of that mindless eating, drinking, and partying—
"Hey. Seongho."
"Yes, Yeonghak hyung."
"They're re-conscripting hunters who were discharged in Korea?"
Lying on the plush bed of a luxury hotel, mid-bite of room-service ice cream, I finally understood why the Korean government hadn't come looking for us.