Worries
After being thoroughly wrung dry by Sohee—
"Well, I'll be heading out."
"Alright. See you next time, then."
Taejin stepped outside with his body half-wrecked.
He'd managed to hold his own during sex somehow, but ending up this completely spent was unavoidable.
Looks like I'm going to have to raise my stats again.
Originally, he'd been thinking about ranking up once more now that sex had become somewhat manageable — but it had become painfully clear he still had a long way to go.
So Taejin was just thinking to himself that he needed to boost his ability scores when—
"Taejin. Wait a second."
"Huh? What is i—"
At Sohee's sudden call, Taejin turned around—
Smack.
She pressed her lips to his.
"A kiss to mean hang in there for the rest of the day♥"
"...Thank you."
"Don't mention it♥"
Receiving her unexpected farewell, Taejin walked out into the apartment complex with half his soul drained from his face, then eventually sat down at the smoking area and thought.
"...We're friends with benefits for now, so... I can hold out, right?"
In the end, he and Sohee had agreed to keep things as friends with benefits.
More accurately, it was closer to being friends who also mixed bodies whenever the urge struck.
It was a goddamn trash arrangement, but there was no helping it.
He'd already told Sohee he couldn't date her yet. And the friends-with-benefits proposal had come from her first, anyway.
Either way, they'd decided to stay friends with benefits until his business was finished — but Taejin couldn't be sure.
— Thump.
— Thump.
I can hold out until the end, right?
The conviction that he wouldn't completely fall for Sohee before achieving his goal.
Because a beauty like that coming on so aggressively packed a ridiculous amount of destructive power.
"Haa... things just got a whole lot more complicated."
Revenge was still a long way off, but Taejin had the distinct feeling that everything was only getting messier.
Which was why, for a while, the cigarette never left his hand.
Meanwhile, as Taejin was drowning in this new set of worries—
"Haa, isn't there any fun toy around these days?"
The very person who had driven Taejin to start using that suspicious app — the woman who carried the brutal alias of S-class Heavenly Punishment — Lee Jihye muttered to herself while lying on her bed.
Lately, she was thoroughly bored.
If you asked why, it was because she was currently on break.
You might wonder whether Hunters even get rest periods, but the truth is that plenty of Hunters work themselves to the bone only during specific stretches, then take time off afterward.
And if you asked why that was, the answer was obvious: being a Hunter was a job that burned through both mental fortitude and physical stamina, so recovery time was a necessity.
Of course—
"Ah, maybe I should just go do some Hunter work."
That was all lower-tier Hunter talk.
Once you hit the upper ranks — say, S-class — you simply rested when you felt like resting and worked when you felt like working.
From S-class onward, the power gap with A-class was on an entirely different dimension.
For people like that, a "rest period" was just a temporary break because they'd gotten bored.
And Lee Jihye was no exception.
She'd spent some time tormenting a toy whose name she couldn't even remember, then her body had started itching for action, so she'd taken on commissions and gone back to work.
Of course, she'd finished those off in no time and gone back to loafing around again.
The problem was that the downtime had stretched on too long, and her body was starting to feel stiff and restless.
It was about time to either snatch up some nearby civilian to play with, or take on a commission from the guild.
The easiest targets — the security guards — still hadn't hired any new recruits, so ideally she'd go with the latter option, but...
Ugh, seriously. This guild is fine in every other way, but something about it just feels off.
The truth was, the guild Lee Jihye belonged to — the Magic Tower — was not a particularly good guild.
Considering they cleaned up after her whenever she treated people like toys for her amusement, it was clearly not a wholesome place by any measure.
But that wasn't what she meant.
More precisely, it was the unease her S-class instincts kept whispering about.
"Having them cover my back is nice and all, but every last one of them has a screw loose..."
The Magic Tower was a collective of lunatics.
This was a fact that every nation's intelligence agencies and conspiracy theorists knew all too well.
You might think a Magic Tower was just a place where old men gathered to research magic, right?
That was correct, as far as it went.
There were plenty of elderly researchers among the mages, after all.
But of course, it wasn't those perfectly ordinary people who had the conspiracy theorists and intelligence agencies watching the Magic Tower so closely.
It was the darkness buried far deeper than the face the Magic Tower showed the world.
Surprisingly, the Magic Tower distinguished between official guild members and unofficial ones.
And if most people ever saw the unofficial talent roster, they would probably jump out of their skin.
Because the majority of those unofficially affiliated guild members were—
A mad scientist conducting human experiments under the patronage of a Russian warlord.
A self-proclaimed black mage who had carried out a large-scale demon-summoning ritual in Central Africa.
A deranged cultivator who had tried to refine an elixir of immortality from the blood of ten million people in order to ascend.
—wanted criminals and mass-murdering psychopaths from around the world, more often than not.
They were walking disasters of such caliber that you had to wonder how the guild could possibly operate as a legitimate organization while maintaining a lineup like that.
More precisely, they weren't formal members — they were people the guild sponsored through unofficial channels.
And the truly hilarious part was that whenever one of their identities got exposed, the guild would cut off the unofficial sponsorship, the people involved would conveniently commit suicide, and the guild would issue a formal statement of condemnation.
On the surface, they were always the first to mourn such "regrettable" individuals.
For the record, almost none of this ever leaked to the outside world.
After all, behind the scenes they poured massive amounts of money into lobbying to prevent the guild from ever being designated a target for subjugation.
Thanks to those efforts, the Magic Tower had never been classified as a villain organization.
No — the truth was, their image management was so thorough that most people simply thought of the Magic Tower as a place where mages gathered.
On top of that, the Magic Tower was currently the group that had advanced magical engineering technology the furthest, so everyone just kept quiet about it.
Of course, those who loved conspiracy theories knew that many mysteries were connected to the Magic Tower and had pieced together fragments of the truth, and government agencies were desperate to dig up even the slightest weakness — but that was another matter.
In any case, Lee Jihye held a fairly high position within the Magic Tower, so she was well aware of all this.
Which only made the whole thing feel more unsettling.
The commissions those people handed out looked ordinary enough at a glance.
Occasionally testing the power of a spell, or retrieving material items, or — every now and then — catching a monster that had escaped from a lab.
You might say other guilds handed out similar jobs all the time, but the details were on a completely different level.
For one thing, the spell-power tests were usually conducted against monsters — and sometimes against Awakened individuals who looked like their minds had already gone sideways.
The material items were almost always monster corpses, and only the ones that looked particularly dangerous.
And the "monsters" from the labs were either actual monsters or things that had been modified beyond recognition.
In other words, these weren't just shady people — they reeked of something rotten from a mile away.
So why did she keep hanging around a place like that?
Because a place like this was the only one that would put up with and cover for a crazy bitch like Lee Jihye.
If she went somewhere else and asked them to clean up after her antics, all hell would break loose.
The guilds in Korea, at least on the surface, still had to watch the government's reaction — so there was no way they'd tolerate Jihye's insanity.
Overseas guilds were a bit more flexible, but none of them made it as easy to dump work on them as the Magic Tower did.
"Whatever. I'll just take a commission."
In short, it felt off — but so far nothing major had gone wrong, so she kept using them all the same.
"This commission is... North Korea? Ugh, sending people out to that backwater hellhole..."
Well, how long that arrangement would last was another question entirely.
After wrestling with his complicated feelings about Sohee, time passed quickly.
By the point when Korea had gone past merely cold and frozen its rivers solid — when the peninsula had become a freezer so bitter it made your eyes sting—
"Hyung-nim, think we can clear this?"
"...Just make some kind of path and leave it at that."
"Got it."
As usual, heavy snow had blanketed Korea.
In that miserable weather, with snow piled up to their knees, Taejin and his senior spent a while just barely carving out walkable paths.
"I'll be clocking out, then."
"Yeah, go ahead. Oh, right — Taejin, they said the dorm boiler's broken and the repair guy won't come until next week. Be careful."
"Understood."
When quitting time arrived, Taejin changed into clothes a little thinner than everyone else's, as always, and headed home.
Arriving at the dormitory, he found the boiler once again knocked out by the bitter cold snap. He rolled himself up tight in his blanket on the bed and lay down.
Nothing beats a blanket in a freezing winter.
For a while, Taejin had been living quietly.
No — the truth was, he'd had no choice but to live quietly.
Korean winters were enough to make even monsters flinch.
They were living creatures too. Of course they'd panic when a place that had been warm until a few months ago suddenly turned into a land of freezing cold snaps.
That meant Hunters were spending more time at home — which in turn meant the workload for security guards like Taejin had gone up.
Thanks to that busy stretch, he'd kept his head down and stayed quiet.
More precisely—
I think I've finally sorted my feelings out a bit.
—because calming the heart that Sohee kept pulling in other directions had taken a considerable amount of mental energy.
"Alright. Time to get back to it for real."
Having focused on work and steeled his resolve, Taejin was ready to resume his duties as a "security guard."
The duties the Security Guard App had assigned him, that is.