Chapter 25
Seongmin turned toward the direction of Hyun-jun’s voice. There, standing in the wreckage, was Hyun-jun himself. His entire body had been scorched, and yet he stood there as if nothing were wrong. The pain had to be excruciating, but aside from a slight twist in his expression, he didn’t even let out a groan.
“M-Monster…”
“You’re weak.”
The words came out cold. Thanks to Carthago and Hashashin, pain was familiar to him. The storm of flame had been dangerous, and Seongmin was an execution branch hunter with lethal killing techniques of his own, but he was nowhere near strong enough to compare with Carthago or Hashashin. His attacks, in contrast to those two past lives, were easy to read. They were still fast enough that he couldn’t slip away cleanly, but Hyun-jun had managed to avoid any fatal injury.
“Flames!”
Seongmin unleashed fire once more, but Hyun-jun didn’t regard it as a serious threat. Having already been struck once, he could see the attack’s trajectory clearly. His insight had improved dramatically from dying hundreds, then thousands of times in the chamber of his past lives.
“Die!”
The storm of flame struck at Hyun-jun again.
I’m not getting hit by that twice.
Unfortunately for Seongmin, Hyun-jun burst out to the left of the firestorm and rushed straight at him. Seongmin hurriedly summoned a flame shield, but before the fire could even finish taking shape, Hyun-jun’s sword pierced his left hand first.
“Aaaagh!”
“I’d like to play with you a little longer, but sorry. I’m short on time.”
Hyun-jun wrenched the blade free from Seongmin’s hand and immediately carried the motion into his next strike. Seongmin swung his sword and called up more flame. Even as fire licked over Hyun-jun’s legs, he never stopped his own blade.
“Ghk!”
The slash tore deep into Seongmin’s upper body. He staggered, spilling red blood.
“W-Why…?”
“Because I’m used to pain.”
With that answer, Hyun-jun thrust his sword into Seongmin’s abdomen. A proper counterattack was impossible with one hand already crippled. The only reason the blade ended up in his stomach instead of his heart was that Seongmin had managed to twist away at the last moment. Had he stayed still, it would have gone straight through his chest.
What kind of swordsmanship is this…?
Seongmin’s pupils trembled. The level of swordsmanship was on a completely different plane from anyone he had faced before.
“So it wasn’t just gear…?” he coughed. “Cough!”
He vomited up more blood. The monstrous pain in his left hand and abdomen made real thought impossible. He had plenty of experience in direct combat, but he had never taken wounds this severe, so he had no tolerance for pain.
Compared to him, Hyun-jun was used to it. When engulfed in flames, others would have collapsed, screamed, or thrashed helplessly, but Hyun-jun could remain calm enough to evade and counterattack at the same time.
“Ghhh… Damn it!”
Seongmin spat out a curse along with a groan. The pain made it hard to focus on controlling the flames, and with a sword buried in his stomach, he could hardly move properly. He was wide open to the next attack.
“You… Do you even know who’s backing our guild…”
“It’s over.”
Hyun-jun didn’t even need to hear the rest. Instead of pulling out his sword, he swung the shield in his left hand with full force. A shield was for defense, but sometimes it made an excellent club.
Bang!
The impact was so violent it drowned out even the scream that tried to rise. Seongmin’s face caved in. Watching him collapse in a mangled heap, Hyun-jun let out a cold sneer. When he drew the sword back out of Seongmin’s abdomen, the man still twitched like a worm, which meant he wasn’t quite dead yet.
“P-Please… s-save me…”
Seongmin lifted his ruined face and begged. He didn’t want to die like this, meaningless and forgotten. But Hyun-jun’s gaze only grew colder as he looked down at him. Without a word, he drove his sword into Seongmin’s heart.
“Guh…”
“Sorry, but I don’t keep loose ends around.”
Seongmin’s body shuddered once at the spear of steel through his heart, then his head fell limply forward. Hyun-jun left the corpse behind and swept the office with a frost-edged look.
-Ripper is excited. The thing he seeks is here.
A voice sounded. At the same time, he felt a familiar pulse of mana. It was the same kind of resonance he had felt when Ripper’s blessing had activated.
Here?
Following that pull of mana had brought him to the personal office of Execution Branch chief Jeong Seongmin. From the drawer of his desk, he could feel Ripper’s fierce current. Hyun-jun opened the drawer, and inside was an old wooden storage box.
The lingering mana that had flowed in with the blessing seemed to be telling him to open it. He picked up the box and did so. Inside were a small dagger and an old necklace.
Is this what Ripper was talking about?
There was no time to inspect it carefully, not with the office burning around him. He took the dagger and necklace, then stepped out into the corridor, where the flames had spread less aggressively, and drew up his mana.
-Hashashin begins a wicked scheme. The Shadow Behind You erases every trace connected to you.
As Hashashin’s blessing activated, evidence destruction began. Hyun-jun gave a cold smile and left the building.
Not long after, the flames summoned by Seongmin completely devoured the Echo Guild office building. Because he had quietly dealt with the execution branch hunters responsible for internal security, most of the people who rushed to the scene were firefighters.
The Special Police Bureau had also dispatched personnel, but only a handful. From the look of it, they didn’t seem to know that a murder had taken place at all.
This should be fine.
Hidden in the darkness, Hyun-jun watched with a satisfied expression. With Hashashin’s blessing erasing the evidence and the fire consuming everything else, it was a perfect assassination, save for the few corpses with sword wounds in them.
Time to go back.
The injuries weren’t fatal, but the burns and the overall damage were nothing light. If he returned to the hospital like this, it might raise suspicion, so he planned to contact Tae-min and get help from a recovery-type hunter.
He slipped deep into the alley, took out his smartphone, and called Tae-min. The line didn’t ring for long.
“Mr. Kang Hyun-jun? My God, I just received a report that a major fire broke out at the Echo Guild office. Could it be…”
“It’s me. I’ll explain the details when we meet. Come with So-jin noona.”
Smartphones could be tapped, so he didn’t explain anything in detail. With the help of So-jin, a recovery-type hunter, his injuries should be manageable.
“Understood.”
“I’ll send you the location by message right away.”
The call ended. Hyun-jun sent Tae-min his current location. He leaned against a wall and waited for about thirty minutes before he felt two presences entering the alley.
“Mr. Kang Hyun-jun!”
It was Tae-min’s voice. Only then did Hyun-jun lower his guard and step out before them.
“Hyun-jun!”
Seeing him covered in burns and blood, though not critically injured, So-jin hurried over and drew up her mana. White healing energy bloomed from both her hands, and tears gathered in her round eyes.
“Heal.”
As So-jin’s mana touched him, the burns from the battle with Seongmin slowly began to mend. While Hyun-jun recovered, Tae-min stood a little distance away, keeping watch on their surroundings.
“Hyun-jun.”
So-jin called to him carefully. Perhaps because she had already spent so much mana, her voice trembled faintly. Hyun-jun couldn’t bring himself to meet her face, heavy with complicated emotion, and kept his head lowered. Only after a long time did she speak again.
“I won’t ask anything.”
Thanks to So-jin refusing to stop the healing even as her mana neared depletion, his injuries recovered significantly.
“Don’t push yourself too hard.”
Her voice held tangled feelings.
“I’m fine, noona.”
That was the only answer he could give. It was the answer So-jin wanted.
“I see…”
There was no strength in her voice. Hyun-jun, who had once felt so close, suddenly seemed far away, as though he had become someone else entirely.
“Don’t go too far.”
She whispered it carefully, letting her wish rest inside the words.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
A man was walking down a dark corridor. At the far end of the long hallway, he could see a wooden door engraved with ornate patterns. The man moved his eyes quickly over the surroundings, then hastened his steps. Because of the dim lighting, his face was hidden in shadow.
“Councilman. It’s me. May I come in?”
“Come in.”
The man spoke lightly as he knocked. When someone inside gave permission, he opened the door in a calm, measured motion.
“This is serious. Isn’t it?”
“As expected, it’s you, Councilman.”
“Well, when the execution branch chief comes looking for me first, I’ve never once heard good news.”
The man called the councilman gave a short sigh and shook his head. He seemed to have already prepared himself for a negative report from the execution branch chief.
“The Echo Guild has been hit.”
“Did the execution branch take a blow?”
“Yes. At this point, they’ve effectively lost the ability to function.”
As the councilman had expected, it was not good news.
“We invested quite a bit into the Echo Guild, didn’t we? I heard the execution branch had recently been strengthened, too... What on earth happened? Weren’t we just told nothing was wrong not long ago?”
“It seems the ongoing matters had gone off track, and the damage within the execution branch was accumulating. The report makes it look like they deliberately understated the losses.”
The execution branch chief reported as much. The councilman brought the glass to his lips with a dissatisfied expression.
“The most recent thing Echo Guild handled was the subjugation of Wraith Guild, yes?”
“Yes. That’s correct. Echo Guild’s plan was to suppress Wraith Guild’s execution branch, absorb it, and aim for promotion to Silver tier.”
“Then we can assume Wraith Guild was behind this?”
The councilman thought the most likely suspect who had destroyed Echo Guild’s execution branch was Wraith Guild.
“But there’s one thing that doesn’t make sense. Wraith Guild doesn’t have the power to suppress Echo Guild. We did confirm the appearance of a mercenary in an unofficial guild war recently, but there isn’t enough material on him.”
Jeong Seongmin, the execution branch chief of Echo Guild, had information on Hyun-jun, the mercenary in Wraith Guild’s unofficial guild war, but he had never filed an official report. On top of that, the materials were still in document form, so when the guild office burned completely, they were reduced to ashes along with everything else.
“An unofficial guild-war mercenary... Sounds like that bastard’s the culprit.”
“I think so too. We already sent someone to inspect the Echo Guild office, but we couldn’t find a single piece of evidence. There wasn’t anything left, as if a ghost had passed through.”
“Then at minimum, an A-Class hunter was involved. And one specialized in assassination, at that...”
The councilman said it himself. He wasn’t a hunter, but he had been involved in this world so deeply that he understood it better than most.
“For the execution branch chief to be taken down like that... it had to be someone of A-Class caliber. The question is how Wraith Guild managed to recruit him.”
The price of an A-Class hunter was effectively whatever the market could bear. It was more than a Bronze-tier guild like Wraith Guild, low-ranked even among its own tier, could ever afford.
“Maybe the Five-Star Group got involved.”
“Has the Five-Star Group decided to make us their outright enemy?”
“If not them, there isn’t any other force that could be backing Wraith Guild.”
“Then what do we do?”
“Moving directly isn’t... a good idea yet, so contact a decent Silver-tier guild and have them handle Wraith Guild and that mercenary bastard.”
There was killing intent in the councilman’s voice.