Rookie Hunter Jeong Jae-ha (3)
I asked Lee Hae-il to excuse me and put off going out.
She seemed quietly pleased with the suggestion, as if she were a little tired herself.
"Get in."
Su Seong-min slid into the back seat of a luxury sedan that came with its own driver.
"Take the military road and floor it. I'll call ahead."
She dropped a word I had never once heard in twenty-five years of living. A military road. The world really had changed.
"So where are we going?"
"Sejong. Every one of the top ten guilds keeps its headquarters there."
Saetbyeol's headquarters, she said, was in Sejong City, and I found myself wondering how much that place had changed as well. A few days ago, on the way to the tutorial gate, the view beyond the window had been deeply unsettling—too many temporary buildings, streets gone filthy, the city itself drained of life.
"Whoa..."
Sejong had changed, and changed a great deal.
"Something, isn't it? It's for keeping flying beasts off."
"It's a sight I thought belonged in science-fiction films. I can hardly believe it."
A translucent dome of blue energy wrapped the whole city, skyscrapers and all.
"Mana stones are expensive because of things like that."
Even in Sejong, Saetbyeol had claimed the tallest tower for its headquarters. We stopped at a shop nearby and left the phone for forensic recovery. The owner said his appointments were backed up and he couldn't get to it for two months—until Su Seong-min turned his hot americano into an iced one, at which point he told us to come back that evening.
We waited in a cafe in front of Saetbyeol headquarters, sipping coffee.
"Huh?"
Su Seong-min frowned out the window.
"Fuck. Why is that bastard who ought to be in the Demon Realm here?"
"The Demon Realm?"
"That's the gate's name. No, that isn't the point. You see that guy over there?"
"Yes."
"Team Leader Choi Jong-hyeok. An absolute lunatic. Got passed over for executive and came to throw another fit, by the look of it."
I followed the line of her finger and saw a man just stepping into Saetbyeol headquarters.
He had the look of hard rock that had weathered years of wind and rain, and he was the tallest person I had ever seen—taller even than the basketball and volleyball players I used to see in the athletes' village.
"When you say lunatic...?"
She had called him a crazy bastard.
"If someone's a criminal, that bastard grinds his teeth."
"Isn't he simply a man with a rather strong sense of justice?"
"No. He lived in Seoul with blood on his hands and dirt under his nails, and now he acts like he's the only clean one in the room. Even if you had a reason you couldn't help, do one bad thing and he grinds his teeth to the root."
"..."
"Among your seniors—the first and second classes of rehabilitation hunters—there are some that bastard beat to death. You're a bit of a special case, but still. If you get posted to the same region as him, watch yourself. Understood?"
I studied his face once more. Those heavy brows, that nose and jaw as if chiseled from stone, reminded me of a senior from the fencing team—a man strict with everyone else, and stricter still with himself.
"If you land on the same team, call me. I'm not about to let that maniac beat to death the prospect I went to the trouble of bringing in."
From the look of him alone, he didn't seem like such a bad man.
"Yes."
Of course, my answers to Su Seong-min were nothing but yes and thank you. An athlete owes a tournament sponsor a little generosity.
Ding.
"They say it's done. Let's go."
The call had come through: the forensics were finished.
"I've put everything on here for you."
Every file from my old phone had been moved onto the new one I'd been issued at the training center. I was still hunting for the gallery, meaning to show her a photo, when Su Seong-min snatched the phone out of my hand.
"This is driving me insane. Hey, give it here!"
In a flash she found the gallery app, pinned it to the home screen, and opened it.
"Find your sister. The most recent one you've got."
There it was—the photo I'd taken for her the last time I went up to Seoul to have some fun.
"Here."
Su Seong-min zoomed in on Chae-ha's face and covered everything below the eyes.
"..."
A silence passed in which one second felt like an hour. It was like waiting on the ultra-high-speed camera in a final.
"I think I've seen her. No. I have."
The verdict, once again, was mine. Of course Chae-ha would never lie to me.
"Truly?"
"The shape of the eyes, the brows, where the mole sits—all identical. I saw her a few times back when I was out in the field. Never caught a name. Everyone just called her Manager Jeong."
"Then you're saying my sister really is working at Saetbyeol?"
"Yeah. Unofficially."
This time, though, it was no clean and total victory. It felt closer to a win on points, the kind that comes trailing a crowd of objections.
"Unofficial? What do you mean by that?"
Working at Saetbyeol unofficially—I couldn't make sense of it. For a moment I wondered whether Chae-ha had committed some crime of her own and come in through the rehabilitation track, the way I had.
"Well... a lot of things happened during the apocalypse, you know? Things that can never be shown to the public. Nuclear-war scares, that kind of thing."
"Yes."
"Everything Manager Jeong's people do is work like that. Classified."
Hearing it, I realized it was closer to the opposite of what I had feared.
"Working with the government to seize North Korea's nukes. Dumping foreign spies who came to steal the awakening-drug formula into the Geum River. That sort of thing."
"Even so, you're the head of HR, aren't you?"
I met Su Seong-min's eyes. They were clear as ice, and her heart showed straight through them.
"These people don't even exist on the company org chart. They're worse than black operatives from the National Intelligence Service. I barely laid eyes on them a handful of times, and only before the guild was properly organized."
She looked profoundly embarrassed.
"She probably won't ever show herself in front of you. Not for the rest of your life. Someone will always be watching her."
There is nothing more shameful, for someone from an agency, than letting an athlete see the limit of their authority.
"Then how high would I have to climb to make contact with that department?"
I had decided to embarrass her just a little more.
"Headquarters executive? Get that high and you can spit on classified files, surveillance, all of it."
"What would I have to do to become a headquarters executive?"
"Kill a fuck-ton of beasts. Kill them, and kill them again, and once you hit A-rank they'll pin the executive badge on you."
"Is that so? Understood."
Every athlete has contract terms that matter more than money, and a private goal that exists for no one's satisfaction but their own. Mine, now that I had joined, was set: become an executive of Saetbyeol. It would be difficult. It would not be complicated. It might even be pleasant. Was a hunter not a brilliant profession, one in which you could swing a fine sword as much as you pleased? Wealth and honor would follow, just as they once had—and with them the strength to laugh at the gun that had stolen both from me. I had always aimed for the top. The target had only grown a little more precise.
"Hold on. Don't tell me you're going to make officer in our guild just so you can see your sister."
Once she grasped my terms and my goal, Su Seong-min looked genuinely appalled.
"Yes."
"Are you insane, Athlete Jeong? Just forget it and live your life. You'll rest easier that way."
Her eyes were clear as ice, every feeling showing through. She was afraid I hadn't accepted the situation—afraid that, stirred up as I was, I might do something reckless.
"You've got talent, I'll give you that. But from A-rank on, it isn't a grade you reach by trying harder."
"I see."
"Even among natural awakeners like me, almost no one has broken the B+ wall. Among artificial awakeners like you, nobody has even cleared the C+ wall yet."
"Understood."
"That Team Leader Choi from earlier is A-rank, and even he couldn't make executive. So you—"
"But however hard it is to make executive, could it be harder than becoming world champion?"
I had no intention of thinking so.
"You aren't hearing a single word I'm saying!"
The truth was, I was in a rather good mood.
"Team Leader. If Chae-ha is doing that kind of work now, she must be a fairly powerful awakener, mustn't she?"
"She... she would be, yeah?"
"That's a relief."
Seizing nuclear weapons. Fighting foreign spies. I was worried, deeply so, and at the same time genuinely proud. My little sister had grown that strong, and she was doing work that remarkable.
"A relief?"
"Yes."
More than anything, what I felt was relief.
"If she's an awakener that formidable, then she isn't going to take a bullet somewhere and end up a cripple, or suffer something ugly at the hands of neighborhood thugs who pick the lock and walk in. Isn't that right?"
"..."
At the very least, Chae-ha would never again be the heroine of some dreary, commonplace tragedy. The shining dream she had treasured like a star hidden in a closet would not be smashed to pieces by worthless punks lower than beggars. What had happened to us once would not happen a second time.
"Athlete Jeong—no. Jeong Jae-ha—"
"Even so, I can't leave my sister to carry work that hard on her own. I'll need to get strong, and quickly."
That much, at least, was a very good thing.
"Thank you for helping me today. It really was a good day."
An athlete thanks the people from the tournament and the agency as naturally as breathing in and out. This time I bowed, and meant it.
"There are quite a few awakeners like you."
Su Seong-min let out a sigh and went on.
"The ones who read every single thing in whatever way suits them best. The ones who sincerely love their own ability. And so the ones who believe that with this power, they can do anything."
What came out of her mouth was a portrait of people I had seen over and over in the world of sports and the arts. There was no helping it. If you weren't positive to that degree, if you didn't love your own talent, you could never even think of making a life in that world. I could never have gone after a world championship if I hadn't believed I could do anything.
"You know me a little too well, don't you? I looked at your status window. You didn't have mind-reading."
"Most of them are dead."
"I thought as much."
Of course, a mindset like that doesn't make a champion of just anyone. One winner begets tens of thousands of losers, and from third place down, no one remembers a name. Even so, every champion carries that mindset.
"Among the people I know, there was one whose mind ran that way harder than anyone else's."
"Yes."
"Want to know what they're doing now?"
Su Seong-min narrowed her eyes. In one of them the Saetbyeol headquarters stood reflected, and I thought I already knew the answer. I let her say it.
"Our chairman."
I'd thought so.
"..."
"I'm just saying."
Expectation and unease rose together in Su Seong-min's eyes—the look of someone who wanted to see me truly become an A-rank hunter and take an executive's seat, and who feared hoping only to be disappointed. A long silence followed, the kind only time and effort could break. Across the street, Team Leader Choi Jong-hyeok came out of the headquarters building he had entered earlier.
"Shit. What am I doing, saying this to a rookie who just got hired."
The sight seemed to bring her back to herself.
"Executive, my frozen ass. Just don't get beaten to death next to that bastard. Watch yourself. Got it?"
"Yes."
I bowed my head deeply once more.
The middle floor of an apartment left unfinished. A silver-haired woman smiled behind a bondage-style mask studded all over with rivets, and the man in a suit standing behind her spoke.
"He really didn't suspect a thing."
"It was all his own choice. What is there to suspect?"
"Become a hunter, and you can fix your leg. Go to Saetbyeol, and you can meet your family. Become an executive, and you can actually meet your family. Doesn't that look like bait to anyone?"
"It only looks that way because we're doing the filthiest work in the filthiest age since the Cold War."
"Isn't it too easy? Too contrived."
"Oppa's life has always been like that."
The silver-haired woman answered, lifting both hands slowly. The reel at her gauntlet's wrist turned, drawing a thin wire back in.
"Sorry?"
"I was pretty good at guitar myself, you know. Sang well, too."
"Yes."
"But once pure practice ran past six or seven hours a day, it got so hard I wanted to throw it all in."
"Your throat must have given out."
"It did. Anyway—Oppa was different."
The man lifted a brow, as if asking how.
"He'd practice from before the sun was up until after it went down, and he never stopped smiling."
"..."
"Quitting kendo to start fencing wasn't some grand turning point, either. The fencing coach dangled an Olympic gold in front of him, he went 'Whoa!' and switched over. And then he actually won it."
"How does a person like that even exist?"
"Which is why, for Oppa, a situation where you can have everything just by doing what you love as much as you want is simply how things are. It isn't strange."
"Now that you say it, I don't recall you setting any special operation in motion."
The black-haired woman gave a small nod. With the wire fully reeled in, she folded and opened the fingers of the gauntlet one by one, checking the gear, then stretched like a cat.
"Call the cleanup team and let's go. I'm tired."
"Yes."
All that remained where she had been was the hacked-apart corpse of a demonic beast, human arms and legs sprouting from it without number.