Nymph. World. War. # 1
The famous scientist Einstein once said something like this.
He couldn't predict what weapons would be used in a third world war, but if a fourth one broke out, humanity would be fighting each other with sticks and stones─.
I was deeply impressed when I heard that story as a kid.
I thought to myself, that scientist sure knows how to deliver a joke with real weight behind it!
At the same time, a shiver of fear ran through me at the thought of how truly horrifying a third world war would be.
It wasn't hard to imagine everything coming to a complete end, after all!
And now that very third world war was about to break out because of me.
Like a newborn fawn, my legs wouldn't stop trembling.
"It was a good life."
Everything I'd lived through spread out before my eyes like a panorama.
The memory of buying a pack of bread just to get the sticker tucked inside it.
The memory of walking home hand in hand with my seatmate from class, only to freeze in horror when the other kids teased, "Are you two dating?"—and then dropping her hand and running off.
And the memory of grinding away for years as a bottom-tier D-Rank, followed by the moment I met Oinoi, then Keongkeongi, Ang-ang-i, Kwang-kwangi, Kalinoi, and Myeong-i—it all came flooding back in a rush.
There was a lot of static in the signal, but overall? A pretty enjoyable life!
Swoosh─.
Then Lee Jina pressed a hand to her own forehead.
"I told you to get straight to the point, but you left out way too much, Ha Ildo. You just washed up nice and clean—stop sitting on the floor and get up."
Swoosh─.
Lee Jina took hold of me and pulled me to my feet.
Soon after, Tsubaki nodded as if acknowledging her own mistake.
"I did trim my explanation down a bit too much. But you know what they say—you have to listen to what a Korean is saying all the way to the end. That's all this was."
Being taught the "listen to a Korean to the very end" proverb by a foreigner left me with a strange, complicated feeling. And while I was busy feeling strangely complicated, Tsubaki kindly added to it.
"Ha Ildo. It seems my explanation was insufficient and you misunderstood. To spell it out: the yakuza and ninja of the Kangeki Alliance might be coming after you."
"……."
Hearing the explanation only confused me more.
It felt like sinking deeper and deeper into a maze.
This S-Rank awakener named Tsubaki had been like this from the moment we met.
The gender field on her paperwork had been a question mark, and now she was turning everything else into question marks too!
"Ha Ildo. Any interest in coming to Japan and living with me? If you come to Japan, there'll be all sorts of wonderful things waiting for you. My Yagami family has a long, storied history. We have more money than we could ever run short of. You could eat and play for the rest of your life."
"Tsubaki-ssi. Just to be clear, I'm only asking: does 'live together' mean living together in the man-and-woman sense? Or is it more of a business thing, like a recruitment offer?"
I wasn't completely oblivious.
I knew perfectly well that what Tsubaki was saying was, in many ways, very close to a confession. But Tsubaki was a special case in many ways, so I figured it was worth confirming one more time.
WHOOSH─.
Tsubaki's pale face flushed so red it looked like steam might come shooting off it.
Drip drip─.
Fresh out of a clean, hot bath, sweat began running down her forehead, and her hands and feet flailed here and there like they'd lost any idea of where to go.
I recalled a scrap of trivia that physically enhanced awakeners have metabolisms running at more than double a normal person's—profuse sweating was apparently one of their traits as well.
SMACK─.
Tsubaki slapped both of her own cheeks hard enough to make a startlingly loud sound.
Then, like someone steeling themselves before dropping an obscene amount of money on luxury goods, she made a great resolve and declared in a booming voice:
"Romance and business! Come to think of it, it's both! Ha Ildo, I've heard a great deal about you. From what I hear, you've had a very hard time of things, haven't you?"
Swoosh─.
What Tsubaki showed me was the "Ha Ildo's Backstory" thread that KeongkeongiTheWifey had pinned as the best and most upvoted post on the gallery.
It was all true.
But how on earth did they know that I used to mix up bibim-myeon every single day back in the day?
"Ha Ildo. You worked so hard and so diligently for the sake of a better life, didn't you? Come to Japan with me and join the Kangeki Alliance! Then I'll take responsibility for you for the rest of your life. Well? What do you say?"
Thump─!
I felt like the heroine of a shoujo manga.
Was this what women felt like when a devastatingly handsome man pursued them so single-mindedly? Swept up in a proposal this forceful, it was only natural to find yourself swayed in all sorts of ways.
Besides, Tsubaki was a magnificently healthy and impressive woman.
Great abilities, and plenty of money, too.
Her promise to take responsibility for me for life probably wasn't an empty one either.
Refusing an offer like this would make me a genuine fool!
Maybe I was burning through every last scrap of luck I'd been allotted in this lifetime.
In fact, Lee Jina, listening in beside us, was so thoroughly stunned that she asked half-jokingly, "Those are incredible terms. Can I get married off instead of Ha Ildo?"
Swoosh─.
Tsubaki spread out her fingers.
"If you can't answer right away, take a week—no, a month to agonize over it. I'll be in Korea for at least a month, probably up to a year. I still need to eat my tteokbokki and my hot dogs, after all."
I see.
She was giving me quite a lot of time to think it over.
But I had already made up my mind.
"Tsubaki-ssi. Thank you very much—it's a wonderful offer. But I'm going to have to decline after all."
"What?"
Tsubaki looked flustered in every possible way.
Then she asked me:
"Are the terms not satisfactory? Ha Ildo, if it's what you want, I'm more than willing to adjust the conditions however you like!"
"No. The terms couldn't be better. So good you wouldn't need to sweeten them a single degree further. If I'd had even a single day to agonize over it, I'm quite sure I would have accepted your proposal, Tsubaki-ssi."
What if Tsubaki really had given me the time, and I'd sat down and seriously deliberated over this offer?
I'm only human. I would have had no choice but to nod along to what she said.
A life of being provided for by the magnificent Tsubaki.
How glorious would that be?
I wouldn't even be Ha Ildo anymore—I'd be Tsubaki's Keongkeongi.
What a delightful life it would be!
Sleeping in a cool, shady spot every single day, eating whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, the calendar practically bleeding red with holidays—like Christmas and my birthday coming one right after another, forever.
"And that's exactly why I'm declining."
Back when I was grinding away as a permanent D-Rank, I learned one fact about my own nature.
I was, apparently, the kind of person who only found motivation when I was hungry.
The moment my belly was full and my back was warm, whatever you might call my hardness as a human being would inevitably soften.
Then I'd turn into a lazy, rotten person, and whatever 'sparkle' Tsubaki might have seen in me would fade away in time.
And then I would be discarded.
Besides, I had a goal I absolutely had to achieve.
"And because I really want to see what it's like to become S-Rank."
# # #
The topmost floor of a Macheon City hotel—the sky lounge suite.
In a room where the whole world lay visible at a glance through floor-to-ceiling glass, Japan's S-Rank hunter Yagami Tsubaki replayed what had just happened.
"Rejected. This is the first time in my life anyone has refused my proposal. It's also the first time I've failed at anything, in any way."
Clench─.
Tsubaki squeezed her fist with all her strength.
The mere tremor of her mana made the entire top floor of the hotel shudder, as though an earthquake had struck—uuuuuuuh─.
Tsubaki had never felt anything like this before.
She was a little vexed, and at the same time, her competitive spirit had been set ablaze.
"I heard Korean men were supposed to be tender. Ha Ildo—so despite everything you said, you hid the truth to spare me and turned me down gently. I see how it is."
Swoosh, swish─.
Tsubaki swiped through the photos in her album on her tablet.
Seo Yerim, Yu Ari, Lee Jina, Han Juryeon—page after page of beautiful, highly capable women photographed in frequent contact with Ha Ildo.
"With women this lovely and this high in womanly charm all around him, no wonder I didn't even register. I'm lacking in womanly charm in every possible way. So in the end, my failure to win a man comes down to a shortage of femininity—"
Overwhelming femininity.
If I had that, could I take the fortress of Ha Ildo?
But how long it would take Tsubaki to polish her femininity starting from now was anybody's guess.
Not that it was a problem.
"If it comes to it, why should I need to become the prettiest? I could simply strip the other women away from Ha Ildo's side. There are plenty of ways to do that."
Yagami Tsubaki was the daughter of Yagami Irochi, supreme chief of the Kangeki Alliance and the man they called the Rock Dragon.
The darkness of the underworld runs deep.
Drrring—right at that moment, Tsubaki's phone rang.
"Yes, Chief. I was just about to call you, as it happens. I failed to win over Ha Ildo. But I haven't given up and—yes?"
Tsubaki received some astonishing news.
"Return to Japan? Right now?"
Her father, Yagami Irochi, was a man who rarely took back words once they'd left his mouth—.
So what possible reason could there be for him to summon Tsubaki back to Japan, after he'd all but cast her out?
On the other end of the line.
The man himself, Yagami Irochi, was staring at satellite imagery spread across a hologram monitor.
Japan's state-of-the-art intelligence satellite Amaterasu, launched recently—.
The data it had beamed back contained something staggering.
"Tsubaki. If you want to bring Ha Ildo to Japan, you need to get back here this instant. The other countries' people will catch on before long. Inside the temporal storm that was just announced, there is—"
Just as Yagami Irochi was about to say more, it suddenly occurred to him that he was being far too candid, spilling everything like this.
He was not, by nature, a man of so many words.
Flinch, flinch─.
Yagami Irochi wrinkled his face to its utmost, nose twitching and snuffling.
Then he let out a low chuckle—khh-khh─.
"I don't know drugs, but I know the people who use them. This cozy little fragrance. A form of truth serum, is it? Come to think of it, today's musician has softer hands than Makiko does."
The hands of the woman wearing a fox mask, plucking at the strings of her shamisen with a twang-twang─, froze solid.
About two seconds of silence passed.
"You bastard. What exactly are you?"
Irochi demanded, bristling with menace.
The fox-masked woman gave a soft huhuhu─, hurled the shamisen with all her might, and with a burst of movement ripped through the paper doors and bolted out of that anachronistic Japanese fortress built in the twenty-first century.
"A spy! After her! We must catch her and find out who sent her and from where! And you must thoroughly investigate how much she's learned, and from where!"
At Yagami Irochi's single roar, ninja sprinted out from every direction in pursuit of the fox mask.
Of course, the woman behind the fox mask—Yu Ari—shook off those ninja with relaxed, practiced ease, slipped around a corner, and tapped away at a specially built encrypted satellite terminal.
Swoosh─.
Yu Ari sent Cha Yura the photograph captured by her ultra-compact drone.
The image showed next-generation satellite footage taken from inside the storm—inside it, something in the shape of an enormous artificial structure stood towering in magnificent silhouette.