We Have to Bring Him In—No Matter What
Rembrary swept his gaze over the surroundings. Riding past in the car, drifting in and out of a doze, he had definitely seen someone collapsed on the ground. And the figure that had flickered briefly around that person — that had unquestionably been a youkai.
He stopped in the middle of the alley and checked left and right again. It was somewhere around here, he was certain of it.
While he stood deliberating, a faint groan drifted over from somewhere close by.
Over there?
Rembrary hurried off in that direction, and Shin Jo-woon, having no idea what was going on, simply kept following.
After running for a while, Rembrary finally spotted a figure writhing on the ground and came to a halt.
"Are you all right?"
He rushed over and gently lifted the man's head — and blinked.
"Huh?"
Against all expectation, the injured man was a face Rembrary knew.
"I know you... I've definitely seen you somewhere before."
As Rembrary muttered this with a frown, the wounded man worked his mouth open and shut, weakly forcing out the words Sung-woo, Sung-woo.
Only then did Rembrary place him.
Back when they'd claimed they were running some kind of test or other, he had reluctantly tagged along after Woo Sung-woo to somewhere he had no wish to go — and this had been one of the Nakru people who'd gone with them.
Nakru without the 'Eyes,' but with combat ability to spare. He'd been so taciturn that they'd never exchanged a word, but it was definitely him.
It had stuck in his memory relatively well, too — that was the place where he'd abruptly crossed paths with Lim Yu-han, and with the strange man who went around putting collars and leashes on demons.
"What are you doing out here?"
At Rembrary's question, the taciturn man tilted his chin toward his own back.
"Good grief."
Rembrary groaned. From the man's shoulder down through his arm, and from his back along his side, the flesh had been caved in.
"That must hurt."
The taciturn man glared at him with a look that said, are you kidding me?
Rembrary hadn't caused the injury, but the sheer pain had the man wound tighter than a drum — and being told, so serenely, that must hurt, while he lay bleeding, made his irritation spike far beyond what it needed to be.
"How did this happen to you?"
"A youkai..."
"Tch. What could a feeble little thing like that do, rampaging about."
Clicking his tongue, Rembrary pulled out his phone. It was obvious at a glance that he was gearing up to dial 119, and the man, gritting through the pain, thumped Rembrary's ankle — tap tap tap — to stop him.
"Don't..."
"I have to call an ambulance. You're bleeding a great deal."
Even at that, the man shook his head.
"Don't call."
Rembrary's brow creased.
In any other situation, with any other person, he would gladly have taken the risk and healed the man directly with his divine power. But this man's wounds were external injuries in plain view of everyone, this was Nakru — the organization that tried to kill Saints — and Shin Jo-woon was standing right beside him.
That was precisely why he couldn't treat him directly and was reaching for an ambulance instead — and now the man was refusing even that, hemorrhaging all over the pavement. It put Rembrary in a genuinely awkward position.
"I refuse."
But however he turned it over, a life was a life. Rembrary flatly refused, and raised his phone again.
"Don't—"
The man tried to protest, but he ran out of breath and the words died in his throat.
Right on cue, a hissing sound slithered in from somewhere nearby, cutting him off.
Gritting his teeth, the man stretched out a hand toward the sword he'd dropped.
Rembrary gave the man's wrist a light tap with the hand holding his phone — a signal to quit it — then lifted the phone again, as if he'd heard nothing at all.
"A youkai."
Call it a dying man's last wish or what have you — the author of it seemed to have decided he would listen to no one's objections, because the man finally came out with the truth.
"The youkai is still nearby."
Rembrary opened the keypad and stopped with his finger resting on a single '1.' Instead of lowering his hand, he only shifted his eyes, looking down at the man sprawled on the ground.
"The youkai has to die."
The man forced the plea out between groans of pain.
"You're worked up. If I call an ambulance now, other people might get hurt too."
"You don't have the 'Eyes,' and you're badly hurt. What exactly do you think you'll do?"
"Call... call Sung-woo for me."
"Calling Sung-woo won't heal you."
Rembrary said it flatly, and pressed the '1' again.
That instant — the hiss came again, closer this time.
Unfazed, Rembrary moved his finger to the '9.'
And it was precisely then that something came shrieking — Kiiieeek! — charging straight at the three of them.
The wounded man had no 'Eyes,' so he stared off in a slightly wrong direction and struggled to force himself upright.
Shin Jo-woon and Rembrary, who both had the 'Eyes,' saw the charging youkai perfectly.
It was a creature woven together from tangled tree branches. Where its eyes were, no one could say, but it clearly saw well enough, because it came barreling toward the three of them like something out of its mind.
The moment Shin Jo-woon, having seen it, calmly lowered a hand to his waist—
Rembrary took off his shoe and hurled it at the youkai.
What in the world is he—? Shin Jo-woon's eyes went round as he stared at Rembrary.
The man, who had no idea what was happening, also watched Rembrary suddenly yank off a shoe and throw it, his eyes shrinking to peas.
But however shocked Shin Jo-woon and the man might have been, none of them compared to the youkai itself — which had charged, brimming with confidence, at a group of humans who looked like barely a single bite's worth of food.
Hweeeong!
The youkai, worked into a frenzy, was just winding up a swing of its trunk-like arm when the shoe smacked it square in the head and sent it staggering backward.
It was only a shoe thrown by a mere human — it shouldn't have made it blink. And yet, astonishingly, the moment it took the hit, something like a bolt of lightning cracked off inside its skull.
The youkai's judgment was lightning-quick. Reeling back, it turned tail without so much as a glance behind it and bolted the way it had come — a retreat so swift it didn't carry a single moment of hesitation.
"Wh-what just happened?"
The man without the 'Eyes,' sensing that the youkai's menacing hissing had abruptly fallen silent, asked in alarm.
Shin Jo-woon, eyebrows raised, slowly lowered the hand he'd rested on his hip back down to his side.
Rembrary hopped over on light feet, retrieved his shoe from where it had landed on the ground, slipped it back on, and made his request to Shin Jo-woon.
"Mr. Shin, please carry that man for me."
"You want to pick him up?"
"We have to take him to a hospital, don't we."
"You really shouldn't go around collecting strays like this."
"How can you be so heartless? He's a person."
Shin Jo-woon's brow furrowed.
"Then why am *I* the one who has to carry him?"
"Because if I carry him, blood gets on my clothes."
Even if I carried him, he'd get blood on my clothes all the same... Shin Jo-woon opened his mouth to argue, then changed his mind and, without complaint, slung the wounded man roughly over his shoulder.
Shin Jo-woon called his secretary and had the man moved to an emergency room.
At first he'd simply carried him there himself, but both Shin Jo-woon and Rembrary were public faces. Getting tangled up in an incident like this could needlessly blow the whole affair out of proportion.
Only after confirming that the man had been taken inside the emergency room did Rembrary turn to Shin Jo-woon and ask him to take him back to the dormitory.
He had just saved a dying man, yet he gave that fact no further thought whatsoever. There wasn't even a trace of pride in him for it.
Shin Jo-woon walked with Rembrary toward where the car was parked and asked,
"Do you know who that man was?"
"I don't. My brother would, though."
"You mean he's a friend of your brother's?"
"They didn't seem close. But then, I'm not close with my brother either, so I can't say for sure. I got the feeling they worked together — though I don't even know if that counts as a workplace."
Shin Jo-woon's eyebrow arched at the evasive answer.
Rembrary, for his part, kept walking with a blank expression, eyes fixed straight ahead.
In truth, Rembrary was thinking nothing of it. I should tell Sa Gam-jae about this. Though even if I do, would he actually do anything? That was the extent of it — vague and idle.
Shin Jo-woon, on the other hand, had a head cluttered with a hundred different thoughts.
The way Rembrary had let go of his brother believing them close, only to say with his own mouth that they weren't. The way he'd chased off a youkai with a thrown shoe. The way he'd spotted an injured stranger and sprinted over to help as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. And yet the way he'd brushed off everything the injured man said as though it hadn't even reached his ears. Too many things about him sat squarely in the ambiguous middle.
"Yeon-woo."
"What."
"Do you know what your brother does for a living?"
"Don't care."
The two of them walked on through the dark alley without another word, until at last Shin Jo-woon's car came into view, parked alone and floating in isolation beneath a ruddy streetlamp. Rembrary climbed naturally into the passenger seat and buckled up.
Shin Jo-woon dropped into the driver's seat just as promptly — but didn't start the engine. He didn't reach for his seatbelt either. He hesitated a moment, then asked again.
"You said it before, didn't you. That closeness doesn't matter when it comes to saving someone. Do you still feel that way?"
Rembrary turned to him with a look that said, why on earth is that any of the questions?
"Am I not allowed to?"
"Suppose your brother's friend provoked that youkai first — that he poked at it while it was minding its own business, and that's how all this started."
"Fine. Suppose he did."
"And the youkai attacked him in return, because he attacked it first."
"Let's say that's what happened."
"Even then, you think you have to save him?"
"If he can be saved, then he should be saved."
At Rembrary's matter-of-fact answer, Shin Jo-woon fired back,
"Why?"
His face said he genuinely, honestly did not understand.
Rembrary didn't understand either, and stared back at Shin Jo-woon as though he were the strange one.
"Isn't it obvious?"
"Even if your friend is the one who provoked the youkai first?"
"How would anyone know, in the middle of it all, whether he provoked it first or just got attacked walking past?"
"If. We're *supposing* he did."
"Then he should still be saved, shouldn't he?"
"Why?"
Round and round the conversation went, a wheel spinning in place.
Rembrary eyed him with a look that said, this person is genuinely off, isn't he? — and then explained anyway.
"Because youkai are evil by their very nature. Exceptions exist, of course. But only exceptions."
Shin Jo-woon looked at him in silence for a long moment. Then he asked,
"Do you really believe that?"
"We're taking turns checking into the hospital now, huh. Should we pencil in visiting shifts or what?"
That was the first thing his teammates tossed at him when they came to see him, lying in a hospital bed after emergency surgery.
The Nakru operative — the man Rembrary privately thought of as the taciturn one — glared at his colleagues with an expression of pure irritation, but not one of them so much as blinked.
"So what happened?"
The Team Leader shot the scowling man a shut it look, then turned to the patient in the bed.
"Do you have any idea how worried we were when the word came in? Sudden critical injuries, out of nowhere?"
Eon Du-sin piled on from the side.
"You could've ended up on the news too, you know."
In truth, the only reason the taciturn man's bizarre injuries had never reached the press was the rock-solid web of connections Nakru had threaded through every sector of society.
Nakru had walked alongside human history since the days when people sneered at supernatural phenomena as unscientific. Naturally, that meant ties to whoever held power.
Those who wanted the supernatural dismissed as superstition had helped Nakru in every way imaginable — burying information, feeding it, supplying weapons — and in exchange, Nakru gave their problems top-priority resolution whenever one of them got tangled up in a troublesome supernatural incident.
To be fair, even Nakru's cronies couldn't always step in properly when there were too many witnesses — as with Eon Du-sin's injury on the film set — but by and large, they had been useful.
The taciturn man ignored Eon Du-sin's nagging entirely and spoke straight to the Team Leader.
"I ran into the youkai I failed to hunt previously, and it attacked me. I'll submit a separate report on that matter. What I want to discuss is Woo Yeon-woo."
The Team Leader — who, privately, was a devoted fan of the celebrity Woo Yeon-woo — whipped around at once.
"Yeon-woo? Why?"
"From what I hear, he helped me. Is that what this is about?"
"It goes well beyond helping."
"Then what?"
"Woo Sung-woo's little brother. We have to bring him over to our side. No matter what."