Demon Realm (2)

The unawakened hunters who had been sweating through the punishment drill were finally given a rest.

"Thank you."

"You're Athlete Jeong, aren't you? I saw on HunterNet that you were coming here."

A few of them came over to offer their thanks, or to act as if they knew me. With no idea what I was supposed to do next, I stood there like a post and looked around. Fortunately, that stiff, awkward stretch did not last long.

Vmmm.

"The hunters are clocking in!"

The automatic doors slid open, and a file of awakened hunters came through.

The status-window ring chimed and laid hologram after hologram across my sight. Every one of them was a powerful awakener—tall, with shoulders packed wide. Even among them, one man stood out. A height like a village guardian post, and eyes that glared, fierce and unblinking.

Choi Jong-hyeok. The man Su Seong-min had called a lunatic. Word was he beat hunters with a record ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠for no reason at all—and had even killed some. I'd been telling myself he couldn't truly be a bad person, but that didn't make him any less daunting. If I thought only of my own comfort, I would have wanted a different team.

"That's the guy, Hyung-nim."

"I know."

Choi Jong-hyeok half-heard the unawakened hunters' greetings, if he heard them at all, and swept his gaze across the lobby.

"Good morning, sir!"

"Quiet today."

If this place deserved the name Demon Realm—a sports club gone completely off the rails—then he was that club's head coach. I waited, turning over how he would react to me, what I ought to do if he truly meant to beat me to death, and whether I would even be able to answer him.

"New awakened recruits. Clocked in?"

"Yes, sir! Clocked in, sir!"

Lee Hae-il was quick on the uptake. She raised a hand and stepped forward at his question, and I took a step out as well. Jeong Ho-min and the awakened hunters who had been snickering along with him came forward too.

"All rehabilitation types, I take it."

Choi Jong-hyeok looked us over with a gaze like stone. An A-rank hunter's stare carried a weight that felt almost physical. Even my legs locked for an instant.

"Y-yes, sir."

Lee Hae-il answered, her spirit plainly crushed.

"State your crime, and how many years. You first."

Choi Jong-hyeok pointed at Jeong Ho-min with the tip of a finger.

"Assault and battery. Four years."

Jeong Ho-min lifted his chin, as if determined not to be cowed by the man's presence.

"Four years."

Whether Jeong Ho-min raised his head or not, Choi Jong-hyeok didn't seem to care. He looked to the awakened hunters around him.

"Team Leader. You really can't kill them this time, can you? Seong-min might come storming into HR."

"We don't have the manpower. From Team Seven on, the team leaders are the only awakened hunters those teams have."

"And how long are you planning to tank by yourself? Even if you don't like them, put up with it. That's what a team leader does."

So the talk was true—that he beat new hunters with records, and killed them besides. Every one of them clung to Choi Jong-hyeok as if begging. They looked like assistant coaches trying to hold back a head coach who had gone off the deep end.

"Four."

Choi Jong-hyeok spat it out as if that settled the matter, and raised a fist the size of my head.

"H-hey, wait, hold on!"

Jeong Ho-min was out cold from a single blow.

"Next."

Jeong Ho-min's crew followed right after him.

"Aaaagh! Agh!"

Watching them take the beating was satisfying, and it stirred something stubborn in me besides. A hit or two didn't frighten me. What grated was the chance that I might be handled the same as those contemptible bastards.

"Jeong Jae-ha."

Choi Jong-hyeok resembled a strict senior on a sports team, or a pigheaded coach. The sort of older man who was rigid about rank, stubborn enough to be called a fossil, and yet held to convictions of his own, however crackpot the philosophy. If Team Leader Choi lumped me in with those men, my pride was going to take a wound whether I liked it or not.

"Murder and involuntary manslaughter. Ten years."

Even so, I had no thought of drawing my blade then and there. Not because I couldn't beat him. Because he seemed like the sort of man who wouldn't change his mind even if I did.

"Jeong Jae-ha?"

Choi Jong-hyeok stopped in front of me.

"Mind if I ask you one thing?"

His shadow fell across my face.

"I overheard a little of it outside."

"Yes."

"Why did you stop it just now?"

He didn't raise his fist.

"It wasn't for any reason that grand."

"Wasn't?"

"To be honest, I even hesitated a little over whether I ought to interfere at all. Nobody likes a man who walks in on his first day and starts running his mouth, right?"

I slowly lifted my head and met Choi Jong-hyeok's eyes. They were shut like stone, and what lay behind them was hard to read. Maybe he really was insane, just as Su Seong-min had said. But they call it the direct approach because it works all the better the more twisted the person is.

"Still, people have a sense for these things, don't they? It looked less like keeping order and more like taking your anger out on them."

"You know we stand in front of those civilian hunters."

"Yes."

"And that if they misfire, the rounds hit us in the back?"

"Beating them doesn't make them better shots, does it?"

"You don't think it does?"

If he was a stubborn coach, he had no choice but to like an equally stubborn athlete.

"No."

I gave him the conclusion first, then the grounds for it.

"No matter what you do, the ones who will, will, and the ones who won't, won't. Passion comes from a person's own goal. It doesn't come from fear imposed from outside."

Even the brutal training in boys' comics is nothing more than a device to show off the hero's passion. Try that sort of training for real and you die of rhabdomyolysis.

"Unawakened hunters aren't conscripts, either."

If he had been beating rehabilitation-type awakened hunters who refused to work, there might have been something in it I could understand. What I had seen a moment ago was simply violence. I hadn't stood by and watched that sort of thing even before I awakened.

"They're all here to earn their own money. What was the point of doing that to them? It seemed wrong, so I stopped it."

Said this much, I figured he would understand. If he didn't, then I had misread the man. And watching Lee Hae-il take a beating on top of it would be truly wretched—I might have to ask Su Seong-min for a transfer.

"I hear you were a ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠famous athlete."

Choi Jong-hyeok opened his mouth slowly.

"I can see how you ended up like this."

He nodded, the words heavy with meaning. A strange light flickered through his eyes and vanished, like countless shards of mineral flashing sharp off sunlit rock.

"You lot, run the field as usual."

He directed it at the awakeners around him.

"I'll take the recruits and put them through training."

His low, cold voice carried through the whole lobby. I let out a quiet breath of relief. It seemed he had no intention of hitting me, or Lee Hae-il.

"Uh—just a moment."

Just then Jeong Ho-min, freshly conscious, raised a hand.

"What."

"Why aren't these two getting hit? It's not fair."

Choi Jong-hyeok looked at Jeong Ho-min with unmistakable contempt.

"I was going to skip the remaining three, for the sake of time."

He sighed, and closed his fist again.

We drew our gear from Saetbyeol Guild and followed Choi Jong-hyeok. Each of us received one submachine gun and three grenades. I left the gun and took one extra side sword instead.

"Once you're inside the gate, you do exactly as I say. If you don't, you'll be past the point of needing to."

Beside the branch building lay a wide space ringed by temporary walls as high as a construction site's hoarding. A large gate stood on each of the four sides, and unawakened hunters in tactical combat gear, guns in hand, were swarming toward them along with porters in work clothes, pickaxes on their shoulders.

"Out of the way! Porter bastards!"

The unawakened hunters advanced with their guns, swaggering, and shoved the porters aside.

"Don't push."

Officials from the Gate Management Bureau, in suits, and police officers checked identities one by one, scanning the barcodes on their phone screens.

"The hunters are here!"

Someone among them shouted at the sight of us.

"It's Team Leader Choi Jong-hyeok!"

We didn't need to wait in line. We entered the walled yard through a separate entrance off to one side. Inside, the space was broad, with several large trucks and excavators standing in every direction. Porters hauled mana stones in on handcarts and dumped them, and the excavators loaded the loads into the truck beds.

"Hyung-nim. Look over there."

Lee Hae-il pointed at the scene, openly fascinated.

"Machines break down all the time inside a gate, so they haul everything out by hand, looks like. If I stream this later, I'll have to get an interview on that too."

As ever, beneath every stage there were people laboring to build it.

"Let's go."

Choi Jong-hyeok led us toward the center. Waiting there was a gate far larger than the one I had seen in the tutorial. A reddish fissure tore the air like a blade.

Incheon's largest mining-type gate.

"This is giving me the creeps. Are we okay?"

One of Jeong Ho-min's crew asked Choi Jong-hyeok. I felt no small pressure myself. Air thick with dense mana poured from the gate and bore down on us.

"The Demon Realm has some extremely powerful beasts. It also has far more that even you can handle."

Choi Jong-hyeok glanced at my hand and went on.

"The grade on display is the boss's, or a field boss's. Don't take it for an average."

We kept walking toward the gate.

"Iron Blood gunslingers, this way!"

"Saetbyeol porters, over here!"

Porters and unawakened hunters had been streaming in and out in droves, but at the sight of us they split left and right and opened a path.

"We're going in."

Shaaaa—

The moment we entered the gate, my vision swam, then snapped back to what it had been.

"Fuck. This is unreal."

Jeong Ho-min and his crew let out curses tangled with awe. The sight that opened before us was so overwhelming there wasn't even room for their swearing to grate.

"Hyung-nim. A waterfall. A lava waterfall."

The Grand Canyon came back to me, from a tournament I had gone to in the States. The gate called the Demon Realm was far darker, far hotter, far more violent. Lava poured like waterfalls down a colossal canyon of black basalt. We were inside a cave, and yet it didn't feel close. The ceiling was too high to make out, and the passage looked hundreds of meters across.

"That side is Iron Blood. That side is Angel. That side is the Murim bastards' dig."

Choi Jong-hyeok moved off to one side. A large flag bearing Saetbyeol's logo was planted there.

"Lee Hae-il."

"Yes, sir!"

"Tell me the types of gates."

He asked it as he walked.

"Gates are broadly summon-type and fixed-type. A summon-type releases its beasts and then vanishes. A fixed-type keeps releasing beasts from the same place."

"Mining-type?"

"That's what we call a fixed-type that meets certain conditions, mana-stone yield among them, and is deliberately left unclosed."

"Go on."

"We deliberately don't kill the boss, so the gate stays open. We only take down the beasts that respawn, and mine mana stones inside."

"What job classes are there?"

Lee Hae-il answered, wound tight as a wire.

"Awakened hunters, who kill the powerful beasts. Unawakened hunters, who kill beasts that can be hunted with firearms. And porters—noncombat personnel who dig the mana stones."

Choi Jong-hyeok nodded, so slightly it was almost impossible to see.

"Right."

That might have been Choi Jong-hyeok's version of praise. He led us deep into Saetbyeol Guild's sector. The passage narrowed and branched like a tree.

A holographic message rose in my vision.

"The cart's broken!"

"Mr. Kim! Put your back into it!"

Just as the message said, porters were digging mana stones in the caverns, large and small, that opened along the way.

How much farther we walked, I couldn't have said.

The message in the status window changed.

"From here on is the hunting zone."

Choi Jong-hyeok stopped deep inside it.

"The hunt isn't finished here yet. Our work is to go farther in, kill the beasts, and push the mining zone outward."

"I have a question."

Jeong Ho-min shot a hand up.

"I'm not finished."

Choi Jong-hyeok looked at that hand as if he wanted to break it.

"S-sorry."

Jeong Ho-min folded at once.

"For a while you'll work as awakened team members under the existing awakened team leaders. In time you'll become team leaders yourselves and go out on your own."

Choi Jong-hyeok went on.

"In here, anything can happen. Even if someone dies, the beasts eat the evidence. Try anything crooked among yourselves anyway, and I'll kill you myself."

He looked at Jeong Ho-min's crew.

"Some of you know this and some of you don't, but I hate ex-convicts. However you came to commit the crime, I hate the fact that you broke the peace of this society."

They dropped their eyes as if a rock had been set on them.

"I don't know why they awakened the likes of you. This country needed hunters and mana stones, so they dragged you out. Don't forget that you're criminals."

Choi Jong-hyeok glared at each of us in turn, as if he might devour us.

"Get a scrap of power and start harassing porters or unawakened hunters, looking down on them, and I won't let it stand. The same goes for raising hell at the bars nearby."

Choi Jong-hyeok, it seemed, was a man sensitive to the excesses of the strong. Among the old fighters, plenty had stressed the training of character far more than the training of technique. Grapplers especially—judo, aikido—often said that power spilling over without restraint was wrong in itself. Even so, I never dropped my eyes.

"......Pass today's entrance test, and that's how it will be."

Because of that, I understood the words all the faster.

"What did you say?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Jeong Ho-min and his crew stirred.

"Hyung-nim?"

"Quiet."

I pulled Lee Hae-il in behind me.

"Looks like this coach's standards are even higher than I thought."

I had a fair idea of what was about to happen. Choi Jong-hyeok turned without expression and stamped his foot.

Thud!

And we learned just how versatile an A-rank hunter's Earth Magic could be.

Rrrumble—

The rock wall that had sealed the way turned to sand and poured away, and a new space showed itself.

"My god......"

A wave of heat pushed into the passage. Beyond it spread a cavern larger than any we had seen on the way in—two or three times an Olympic soccer pitch, it seemed. The floor was brutally rough, crowded with rock pillars large and small and with sunken ground, and a creek of lava ran through it.

The cavern teemed with beasts great and small. There were at least several hundred orcs, and here and there demons a full head taller than the orcs, some larger still.

"The demons are born where that mana-laden lava pools. So they keep driving the volcanic orcs to make more lava pools."

Jeong Ho-min stared at the scene, his face gone pale.

"We have to kill them and drain the lava before the porters can go in and dig mana stones. Which means, obviously, one team has to be able to take one cavern."

Choi Jong-hyeok stamped his foot once more.

Tss-tss-tss—

The sand that had collapsed flowed around behind us and rose again as a dense iron grate.

Choi Jong-hyeok passed through the iron grate as if it were water.

"If you can't get out, you'll die to the beasts, or drown in the rising lava."

Something close to a smile touched his mouth. It looked like the pride of a man setting the world back to turning the way he believed it ought to turn.

"Fuck, what kind of rule says we die the second we join!"

"L-let me out!"

An awakener out of the Scorpion Gang bolted for the grate in a panic. But the bars that had let Choi Jong-hyeok through without resistance stopped that hunter cold.

"I wish you misfortune."

Choi Jong-hyeok stamped once more. Sand gathered thicker still, filling even the gaps in the grate until it became a wall.

Worse, the wall—still sealing the passage—began to drive in toward us.

"H-Hyung-nim. What do we do now?"

Lee Hae-il asked it, flustered.

"You heard him."

I wasn't particularly tense. I had seen terrain with a serious difference in elevation, and I had heard him say the lava would rise. The flame bats worried me a little, but those, at least, I could leave to Lee Hae-il.

"Let's go kill them all."

The demons, I could take. I was D− now; a gap up to a plain D, or a D+, was something skill could close. The orcs were the real problem...... but I had an idea for that.