The Grim Reaper's Request
When was he ever going to get through all of this? He had to find the two of them—no, three of them—as quickly as possible, but who knew when he would track them all down.
How many unbroken frog eggs could there be left in the world? Surely they hadn't gone and crossed into another country. Beneath his expressionless face, Ardor repeated thoughts like these in an endless loop as he roamed about, stabbing frog eggs one after another.
Whenever something human-shaped crawled out of an egg, he knocked it cold on the spot and left it where it lay; whenever something was, to any eye, unmistakably a monster that had crossed the Dimensional Rift, he dealt with it himself. So the cycle went, over and over.
How long had he been wandering like that?
Lord Rembrary. How much must he be struggling, with no one to wait on him?
Imagining the High Priest—who had lived his whole life without a single drop of water touching his hands—now toiling away in another world, Ardor gave another frog egg a few perfunctory kicks.
Hm?
And then a strange sight caught his eye.
What is this?
It was a hand. A hand thrust out through a frog egg, hanging limp as a deflated balloon—as though every last ounce of its strength had been spent just breaking through the shell.
Don't tell me. Did it try to come out on its own?
Ardor's eyes went wide. He had heard that in the early days, people crossed the rift with nothing at all, bare-bodied. But the side effects were so severe that eventually anyone crossing over was made to don a protective shell, like an egg. Even shelled, however, the side effects persisted—one of which was that it was terribly difficult to break out of the egg alone.
And yet here was a hand, reaching out all by itself...
A holy knight from our temple? Lady Mulu? Or... one of the Demon Race that slipped in after us?
Whichever it was, it would be no ordinary existence. Ardor smiled and drew his gun.
"What's the matter? You look grim. Is it the album?"
As Sunwoo Sil poked listlessly at his ramen with a face like stone, the colleague seated across the table asked. Sunwoo Sil bristled.
"What about my album? Sales are good, the reviews are good—everything's good!"
The colleague shrugged.
"Even so, you might not like it yourself."
"I do like it."
"Then what's eating you?"
The colleague asked again, but Sunwoo Sil wouldn't really say. After several more attempts, the man scrunched up his face and grumbled.
"If you're not going to talk, at least quit sitting there looking like you're at a wake. It's killing my appetite."
Sunwoo Sil glared at his colleague—who had a genuine gift for saying the most irritating thing possible—then set his chopsticks down first.
"I'm the one losing my appetite here. Me."
But his expression stayed dark all the same, and only now did the colleague begin to actually worry, his brow creasing. Yet no matter how many more times he asked what was wrong, Sunwoo Sil gave no answer. To be precise, he couldn't. The reason his face was so clouded was a precognitive dream—and no one on Earth knew he was an Awakener.
"Water, please."
In the end, Sunwoo Sil muttered it, pushed back from the table, and walked to the water purifier. As he pulled a cup from the sterilizer and filled it, he found himself recalling the precognitive dream he'd had tonight.
Once before, he had dreamed of a hunter trainee named Rembrary, draped in a strange cloak, walking over blood toward a throne. This time there had been no throne. But the dream was every bit as strange as the last one.
The trainee sat in a rough-hewn chair, hemmed in on all sides by men in black suits brandishing every manner of weapon.
What stood out were the expressions. It was plainly one against many, and yet while the trainee Rembrary was smiling, the men surrounding him looked wound tight as bowstrings.
"Suspicious..."
Sunk deep in thought, Sunwoo Sil murmured it without realizing, and his colleague, wandering over with his emptied ramen bowl, asked yet again.
"What is?"
The instant he heard the question, a thought surfaced in Sunwoo Sil's mind: I need to check this out. Instead of answering, he set down his cup of water and pulled the thin jacket he'd left over his chair back on.
"Huh? Where are you going?"
His colleague's eyes went round at the sight, but Sunwoo Sil didn't so much as slow down, tossing the reply over his shoulder.
"I've got somewhere to be! Back in a bit!"
"No, I'm asking where—...and he's gone."
The colleague called after him one last time, but Sunwoo Sil was already sliding into his car and turning the ignition, far too preoccupied to answer anyone.
"Suspicious. Way too suspicious."
"Tae-ri isn't answering her phone."
Rembrary was in the middle of a call with Shin Jo-woon.
"She said she was fine, but could she actually be angry?"
"That's odd. Tae-ri isn't the type to cut contact just because she's mad."
"You never know. Go by her house. With both hands full of food."
"Maybe I should. I'll head straight over after work."
"Shall I come along?"
"No, it takes far too long to get you ready and out the door. Showing up that late would be rude. I'll go myself."
"Very well..."
"Did you check the email I sent?"
"Ah, you mean those songs?"
"What do you think? Pick out a few and release an album. And don't go getting tangled up with LLL again and eating the loss a second time."
"They were all good."
"Then pick several and put out a full album. If you show the whole production process from the very beginning, it'll blend with the sympathy votes you've been getting and pull in eyes right out of the gate. And once you've caught their eye early, that voice of yours will have mainstream appeal pouring in before you know it."
His years of running an entertainment agency hadn't gone to waste. As Shin Jo-woon handed down advice like a boss back in his element for the first time in a while, Rembrary nodded along and obediently agreed with everything he said.
Then the phone vibrated against his ear. He eased it away just enough to glance at the screen...
Usil?
The phone had buzzed because Sunwoo Sil had left a secret comment for Rembrary. But Shin Jo-woon was still saying something on the other end, so Rembrary resolved to check the comment later and brought the phone back to his ear.
Yet something unexpected on that glimpsed screen made his hand stop.
"Hold a moment. I am going to end the call."
Rembrary pressed the end-call button, opened SNS, and read the comment in full.
Just as he'd thought. He had seen it right. Sunwoo Sil's comment said exactly what he'd glimpsed.
A visit request, out of nowhere. He had no idea why the man wanted to meet, but Rembrary was glad all the same, and quickly posted a reply. Astonishingly, the response came back in less than thirty seconds.
What was more, Sunwoo Sil wasn't in an "on my way" state—he had already arrived.
"?"
What was this? Why had Sunwoo Sil suddenly come looking for him? Rembrary tilted his head, but with every intention of going to see, he rose from his seat.
With the Lion Lord's help, Rembrary found the cafe Sunwoo Sil had named in no time at all.
"If it's the cafe across from the cinema, this should be the one."
"So it would seem."
"Shall we go in together?"
Rembrary was about to say let's when he remembered that Sunwoo Sil had told him to bring not only no one from the broadcasting station, but no one else at all.
"Shall I wait, then?"
Quick as ever to read the room, the Lion Lord changed his question, and Rembrary nodded.
"Go enjoy a film while you wait. I will text you when the conversation is done."
The Lion Lord agreed and vanished in the blink of an eye. Rembrary entered the cafe and dialed the phone number Sunwoo Sil had given him earlier.
At once, a figure in a hat pulled down deep leaned over from the cafe's second floor, beckoning him up.
Usil?
Rembrary offered a warm greeting to the cafe employee who, having recognized him, was grinning wide and silently mouthing Rembrary! Rembrary!—then followed the hat, presumed to be Usil, upstairs.
Unlike the first floor—a broad space scattered with tables of every shape and size—the second floor stood open in the middle, with private rooms lining the walls, room-cafe style.
He followed the hat into one of the rooms, and the hat removed the hat and shut the door behind them. As expected, it was Sunwoo Sil.
"I'm sure it startled you, me calling you out of nowhere like this. Thanks for coming."
Sunwoo Sil set his hat down on the table and settled onto the sofa in greeting. Rembrary took the seat across the table, debating whether to call him Usil sunbae or Mr. Sunwoo Sil, but for the moment only gave a nod.
Usil sunbae was what came more readily to his lips, but...
"You know who I am?"
"Mr. Sunwoo Sil."
Watching him, Sunwoo Sil felt a sudden impulse to ask Rembrary, But are you really my fan? The two of them had exchanged messages on SNS before, but back then he honestly hadn't been able to tell whether the man was a fan or someone posing as one to pick a fight.
Seeing how he acted on broadcasts had eased his mind somewhat—ah, so he's like that with everyone—but still.
That wasn't what he'd come here to discuss, though, so Sunwoo Sil got straight to the point.
"That place of yours—is it in some kind of dangerous... situation right now?"
"No. I am about to order some very good coffee."
"No, not what you're doing this second. Your situation, your position, your surroundings—things like that. Is any of it dangerous?"
"No. Why do you ask?"
Rembrary picked up the menu and unfolded it, waiting for Sunwoo Sil to arrive at the point.
For this body of his, that one exchange on SNS had been the full extent of their contact, in truth—but from the moment the man had summoned him so abruptly, claiming to be nearby, Rembrary had suspected this was no ordinary matter.
Yet whatever it was he wanted to say, Sunwoo Sil couldn't easily bring himself to open his mouth. Hands clasped, he said nothing at all while Rembrary flipped through the menu.
But in contrast to his tightly sealed lips, his eyes were sharply taking Rembrary's measure.
When Rembrary finished choosing and looked up at him, Sunwoo Sil finally spoke.
"Honestly, I can't tell whether you're a dangerous person, or whether you're the one in danger."
"?"
"Either way, you're definitely mixed up in something dangerous. That's why I came."
Around that same hour. Jang Tae-ri—the source of all Shin Jo-woon and Rembrary's worrying—was still in that night with the woman who had announced herself as a Grim Reaper.
At first, she hadn't believed a word of it. A Grim Reaper, appearing out of nowhere? There was no way anyone could swallow a claim like that so easily.
Besides, had this not become a world where people had sprung up wielding something like psychic powers? Even if the woman calling herself a Grim Reaper displayed strange abilities, the words themselves were still hard to believe.
But in the blink of an eye, the entire backdrop transformed—even as the yellow streetlamp and the nearby wall stayed exactly where they were—and Jang Tae-ri could no longer refuse to believe the pale woman's words.
Above all, the very air itself felt utterly different from the land of the living. She couldn't have said precisely what had changed, but she sensed it instinctively.
"Does a Grim Reaper appearing mean that my time to die has come?"
Once she accepted that the woman before her was a Grim Reaper, Jang Tae-ri assumed her lifespan had simply run out. What other business could a Grim Reaper possibly have with a living person?
But that wasn't it.
"I have come to find you, Jang Tae-ri, to request aid from you—the Saint."