You Have to Beat a Lunatic
"Haaaham..."
Maybe it was because I knew I didn't have to prepare for a raid today, but my mind was at ease. For the first time in a while, I slept in and woke up late.
I'd started this work of my own accord, and every time I did it, I found it rewarding and genuinely enjoyable — but that didn't mean it came without pressure. Being responsible for the lives of other hunters was a heavy burden, even for a veteran like me. After all, when people's lives are on the line, who could possibly feel no sense of responsibility whatsoever?
Anyway, by the time I finally dragged myself out of bed, the sun was already well past lunch. I picked up the phone I'd been deliberately ignoring since last night.
Partly, I'd held off just to savor this moment.
"Khoo..."
As I read through the pile of messages one by one, a smile spread across my face before I even realized it, and an admiring sigh slipped out of my mouth unbidden.
Honestly, I knew this kind of behavior could look pathetic to other people. It was, after all, a way of refilling my own self-esteem.
But every time I saw that there were people out there worried about me, I couldn't help the rush of warmth that came with it. That's just human nature, isn't it?
And I knew perfectly well that those people on the other end had probably not been saying kind things about me. If my guess was right, they were likely spreading outright slander about what I'd done yesterday. That being the case, the fact that so many of them still sent me worried messages meant I'd lived straight enough to earn it, didn't it?
Now, whether I was "right" or "wrong" is all relative. But at the very least, I had this many people who knew I'd given my best in that guild. And frankly, that was something to be proud of. Having people recognize you and seek you out is a genuinely joyful thing.
Besides, everyone who sent me those worried messages was a good person to begin with. Yes — receiving worry from good people like these felt really good.
It seemed to me like there were quite a few people in this world who disliked me for no reason at all. So surely I was entitled to a little of this reasonless love... well, I suppose there was a reason behind it, but the point stood. Didn't I deserve a bit of love and attention too?
Not that the people who hadn't contacted me were bad people. They had their own circumstances. In hunter society, staying out of other people's business is simply the wise move. No matter how connected you are to someone who got helped, sticking your neck out carelessly can end up slicing off your own flesh.
That's exactly why the ones who left me messages were all the more appreciated. They'd put my well-being ahead of their own safety.
In a way, it felt like proof that I hadn't wasted my life as a hunter. Those messages were the evidence, and that made me feel genuinely good.
Of course, not every message was a pleasant one. A few had arrived that left me feeling a little guilty on this end.
In this hunter society, where everyone strapped on perception-inhibition kits and desperately scrambled to hide their personal information from one another, these were people who had openly shared their names and ages with me and dropped all formalities. Reading their worried texts, even I couldn't help swallowing a bitter smile.
I wanted to explain the situation to them, but it was, well, awkward to explain. I could roughly picture how things would unfold going forward, but stating it like a certainty felt wrong. They were likely events, sure — but they hadn't happened yet.
And right now, I was a man who'd left the guild. If I went around greeting my former guildmates so readily, suspicion would be inevitable.
Are you poaching members?Is this Tempering? If accusations like that came flying at me, I didn't have many means of defense. To be precise, I could protect myself just fine — but I wasn't confident I could fully protect the people who'd be hit by that same attack alongside me.
So for now, regretfully, I couldn't reply to any of the people who'd sent me those worried messages. I didn't want them dragged into this too, made into ammunition for people attacking me. How I looked to others was one thing — but to me, at least, these people were good ones.
As long as they were inside that guild, reaching out to them carelessly would be reckless. I might endure it, but they might not.
So, much as it stung, it was time to fold these feelings and these messages away for a while.
And this last one was from Lee Junho — that man.
Can we talk? On the surface, a perfectly rational, perfectly ordinary message.
But I had decided this was the one to ignore most cleanly of all. Because Lee Junho, that lunatic, was not a sane man.
After joining the guild, I'd made an effort to get along warmly with as many people as I could. I liked meeting people by nature, and I was grateful to the guild that had recruited me. Not that I had some pitiful backstory about being neck-deep in a pit when someone reached out a hand — I hadn't even been planning to join a guild, but these people had sincerely, persistently talked me into it. That earnestness had moved me and made me grateful, so I did my best to make guild life work.
And in fact, my relationship with Lee Junho hadn't been bad at all. He was, after all, one of the people who had most strongly urged me to join the guild when we first met. He'd only ever said nice things to me, so it was impossible for my impression of him to be bad. On top of that, he was one of the rare hunters who, like me, didn't wear a perception-inhibition kit, so I felt a little extra kinship because of it.
So from the very first day, seeing that he looked older than me, I made an effort to get close — close enough to tell him it was fine to drop the honorifics. And that effort seemed to bear fruit. For a while, anyway. Junho did drop the honorifics too, and I could feel him treating me with a certain ease.
Of course, that mask shattered before long.
"I text Sungah every morning, you know."
"Huh? What are you talking about, hyung?"
One day, the two of us were just walking down the street when Junho blurted out that completely random line out of nowhere. That he and Sungah texted every morning.
Up until then, we hadn't been talking at all. Not because things were uncomfortable or awkward — I'd just felt that Junho looked a bit worn out, and honestly, I was a little sleepy myself, so I'd simply kept my mouth shut and walked alongside him in silence.
Apparently, though, silent Junho had been picking and choosing what to say inside his own head. Case in point: pulling that line out of thin air. And given that I could feel, with my whole body, how he'd suddenly turned hostile toward me —
"Don't call me hyung. We're not that close."
There was no way those were words that could come out of the mouth of a man who'd been dropping honorifics at me until literally moments before. He'd accepted being treated like an older brother just fine, and then abruptly switched to drawing a hard line like this. At the time, I couldn't understand it at all.
It was just too far out of left field.
And that out-of-left-field talk didn't stop at one line.
"Sungah and I are in touch all the time. We cleared the Stalgard Gate together yesterday, too."
"I see."
Faced with this unprompted torrent of statements, there wasn't much I could say in response. Because back then, I still had good feelings toward Junho. I even considered him a friend — though that might have been my one-sided assumption.
Anyway, here I was thinking well of the guy, and he was coming at me with all that hostility... no, "hostility" wasn't quite it. More like spouting those bizarre non sequiturs. Going on and on, without any context whatsoever, about what he did with someone named Sungah. It was just — grotesque.
You know how they say that when people face the fear of the unknown, their bodies freeze up and they can't move? That was exactly what the Junho standing in front of me back then felt like. Something beyond a genuine lunatic — some incomprehensible existence.
Because seriously, by any reasonable standard, how do you look at a person who mumbles that kind of thing mid-walk, unprompted, and call them normal? A guy who'd been calling me hyung this and bro that until yesterday, suddenly slamming down a line like a wall?
From where I stood, there was no way to see him in a good light. But Junho couldn't have cared less about my gaze, and he just kept muttering on and on. As if checking something against me. As if he wanted confirmation.
"We actually see each other's faces all the time, too. If you check Sungah's HunterTalk, we've even shared photos with each other. Ages ago, at that."
"Ah... is... is that so."
"In the mornings we text asking if we slept well, and before bed at night we stay on the phone until we fall asleep. That's the kind of relationship we have."
"Oh ho."
It was information I wasn't curious about in the slightest and had zero desire to know, but for the time being, I just humored him. Staying silent, or straining to redirect the conversation, seemed like it would only make things more of a hassle. I didn't want an already sufficiently annoying situation to become more annoying.
"You get it, right? Do you understand? Sungah and I have that kind of relationship. Yes?"
"Yes. Understood."
Thankfully, once I answered politely that I understood, Junho's torrent stopped there.
From then on, the two of us stopped exchanging words unless it was strictly business. Partly because he'd been the one to draw the line first, but also because I now knew Junho wasn't in his right mind. I mean, who on earth wants to get close to a guy who mutters that kind of nonsense out of nowhere? To my eyes, he was nothing more than a certified lunatic. A lunatic you should never get entangled with.
Anyway, whether Junho's claims were true or not, I don't know — but after hearing him out and mulling it over later, I reached a conclusion: Junho apparently liked Sungah. Or the two of them were dating.
After all, it was Junho who had brought Sungah into this guild in the first place. So the fact that they were close was something anyone could figure out.
And as far as I was concerned, none of that was my business. Whether they were dating or not was no concern of mine.
Sungah and I hit it off — we clicked, as they say, and she dropped honorifics with me within a single day. But even so, at that point we'd only known each other about three days. Junho, by comparison, had spent months around her, so I had nothing to feel wistful about.
If anything, if the two of them really were in that kind of relationship like Junho said, then his sudden unhinged behavior made a rough kind of sense too. Something like: he got jealous that I might sink my hooks into his girlfriend. I understood it, anyway.
Of course, understanding something and forgiving it are two entirely different things.
So at the one-on-one tournament held for the guild event the following week, I beat the living daylights out of him.
After all — you have to beat a mad dog to keep it from coming anywhere near you.