The Man with the Paper Bag
"Section Chief Seo?"
"Yes. Section Chief Seo Woojin from Planning Team 1."
After lunch, two women from the office sat drinking coffee at a café near the company.
"What about Chief Seo?"
"I think his eyes are a different color. Have you heard anything about that?"
"What are you talking about? I stare at him in every meeting, and if his eyes changed color I'd have noticed immediately."
"Why are you staring at him in meetings?"
"Because he's gorgeous."
The other woman snickered at the answer.
"He is handsome, I'll give you that. Every time he walks past, it's like my eyes get cleansed."
"Okay, but what do you mean his eyes were a different color?"
"So... at the last team dinner, I ended up sharing a table with some people from Planning Team 1. He was drinking across from me, and one of his eyes turned gold for a moment before going back to normal. I caught it changing two more times that same night."
Her eagle eyes were no joke—she could pick up the tiniest change, and being a devoted Chief Seo fan made her even sharper. Her bragging knew no end.
"You must've seen wrong. No matter how good your eyes are, how could someone's eye color change that fast?"
"But they say there are odd-eye hunters out there. People who've had abilities implanted into their eyes..."
"That's for awakened people. If Chief Seo had awakened, why would he still be coming to the office? He'd be going into gates."
The social and financial gulf between ordinary citizens and hunters who braved gates was the difference between heaven and earth. Once someone awakened, the government certainly didn't let them keep quietly showing up at a desk job.
"Did I really imagine it? The color was so pretty, though..."
"Ha... good grief..."
"What's wrong?"
Two men stood in front of the storage yard, staring at a forklift.
"I had to pee, so I parked the forklift here and ran off. When I came back, it was way over there. Someone must've moved it to get the car behind it out."
The lot was a makeshift parking area, nothing but painted lines on bare ground. A passenger car sat in the corner, and the forklift had ended up blocking it, of all things.
"So what's the problem? Sounds like you couldn't spare the time to wait."
"I didn't have the keys either. More importantly—there are no tire tracks underneath."
"Tire tracks? Ah..."
It had rained that morning, and the dirt ground was still damp. The tracks should have been there, but the ground was clean even along the path the forklift had traveled.
No—on closer inspection, there were what looked like dress shoe prints.
"It's not like the thing can fly. I have no idea what kind of trick this is."
"Those shoe prints... don't tell me someone carried it?"
"You're kidding, right? This thing weighs over five tons."
It was a mana-powered forklift, and once you counted the magic stone, it tipped well past five tons.
"Nothing there but footprints. Wild. Could a hunter actually do that?"
"No hunter alive could carry this."
Awakened hunters did display superhuman abilities, but outside a gate their physical prowess dropped to the level of a wild beast.
Still, that meant they could trade blows with a gorilla or a bear—an overwhelming threat to any ordinary person.
One of the workers suggested checking the CCTV, but this was a temporary outdoor lot tucked into a corner, and no camera reached this far.
"By the way, whose car was that?"
"Someone from headquarters. Came to see the site manager. Sharp-looking fellow, too."
Only then did the man remember the HQ employee who'd been talking with the site manager in the break room. He'd walked in to report something without realizing anyone else was there and had awkwardly exchanged greetings with the man.
"He said he was a section chief from the Planning Team. So that was his car. His name was... Seo...? I've already forgotten."
"What's wrong with your leg?"
Behind the office building was an unofficial smoking spot for the male staff. One of the men lit a cigarette, hands drifting again and again to his leg.
"Twisted it coming down the stairs. Thank god Chief Seo was in front of me, seriously."
If Section Chief Seo Woojin hadn't caught him, a mere twist would have been the least of his injuries.
"Something's bothering me, though."
"What?"
"When I grabbed his arm to steady myself, the feeling was... ugh, I can't explain it in words."
"You lunatic. Fine, Chief Seo's a looker, but gushing about the feel of another man's arm?"
"That's not what I mean."
"Then what do you mean?"
"It didn't feel like a human arm. It gave me chills... haah, thinking about it just makes it weirder."
It had felt like touching the edge of a razor. He'd sensed a resonance no human body could produce, and the sheer pressure of that single touch had sent ice down his spine. The man carried on like this at length, but his listener couldn't have cared less.
"If it's not a human arm, what, it's a Weapon? From a guy who isn't even a hunter?"
High-rank hunters sometimes replaced their limbs with magical armaments to boost their combat power. Such replacements were called Weapons.
They were strictly the privilege of hunters—something an ordinary civilian could never qualify for.
"That feeling can't be put into words. Touch his arm yourself sometime. Then you'll understand what I'm saying."
"Why the hell would I touch Chief Seo's arm?!"
"This is Team Leader Choi Seon-il of the Response Team. Who made the initial report?"
"Th-that was me."
A man standing beside the Blue Gate shuffled forward and raised his hand. Behind him, the gate keeper's core glowed steadily.
The gate keeper, one of the crown jewels of magitech engineering, controlled all traffic in and out of a gate. Once it locked down as a raid party entered, there was no way in from the outside.
An S-rank hunter with a special skill or a Weapon could smash the core—but no sane S-rank would go to that much trouble just to enter a Blue.
"You saw someone enter the gate?"
"Yes, well, I saw... something flashed, and... I'm not even sure it was a person, but... anyway, they vanished into the gate."
Team Leader Choi frowned. There was a witness, but it was far from clear what the man had actually seen.
He'd already reviewed the CCTV footage on his way over; it was drowned in noise and practically unreadable. The witness's account, for what it was worth, said the figure had seemed human.
"There was some sound from that lock thing, and then—gone, just like that. I don't know if a person can even move that fast..."
Neutralizing the keeper while it was fully operational and slipping inside was, to begin with, impossible. Even a Regressor couldn't manage it.
A few more questions turned up nothing useful.
He left the cleanup crew to it and headed for the on-site office to check other camera feeds.
"Sir, headquarters is asking for a status report on the raid."
"It's white already. You saw it yourself."
Once the core—the heart of a gate—was destroyed, the gate turned white regardless of its original color. From that point on, it opened to ordinary hunters for farming, no raid party required.
"On a gate showing signs of rupture? It can't have been cleared that fast."
Gates sometimes cracked from inner wall breaches, outside interference, mana overload, and the like.
But the instruments stationed outside the gate had registered nothing, which ruled out external causes.
Something had happened inside—and in such cases, the culprit was almost always the gate's monsters.
Whether a powerful beast had smashed through the inner wall, or their numbers had suddenly ballooned and corrupted the flow of mana, the rupture had definitely originated from within.
Did the raid party even hold out?
Blue, third from the bottom in the Rainbow Gate hierarchy, was for the most part handled by C-rank parties.
Team Leader Choi was combing through the remaining camera feeds when the entrance erupted with noise. The C-rank party that had gone in to raid the gate was back.
Stepping outside, he found the returning hunters in appalling condition.
It had been a five-man party. Three were so thoroughly wrecked that the on-site medical team swarmed them the instant they emerged. The dealer was out of his mind, and only the C-rank tank was capable of speech.
"They were monsters none of us had ever seen. They came at us so ferociously—I couldn't even tell when the other three went down."
Every hunter commits the bestiary of monsters to memory. What had appeared was something that existed in no bestiary at all.
"How did you get out? If your dealer's in that state, I can't imagine your attacks were landing."
"Someone suddenly appeared... no, an armored knight, from the side, and then—dozens of panels from behind, and the monsters just burst apart... he wove a barrier out of mana thread..."
Team Leader Choi had heard enough. He cut him off.
"What on earth are you talking about? Who appeared?"
"The paper bag..."
"I'm sorry?"
"The bag they put bread in."
While the team leader could only frown in bewilderment, the tank simply kept repeating the same words.
An alley not far away—
A man stared down at a torn paper bag with a look of utter desolation. The logo of a famous bakery chain was printed on its side.
"You cut that way too close."
With an air of resignation, he stooped to gather the fallen bread piece by piece. In the glow of the streetlight, his right hand gleamed with particular brilliance.
[You dare squander this supreme existence on scavenging scraps of bread?]
"I know perfectly well you're still grumbling about that cream soboro bun I ate."
[...No one was grumbling.]
"You get petty the moment you're in a bad mood. Wrecking the whole terrain just to swat a few small fry?"
[It was not a tantrum. When would I have found the time to cleave through all of that? It was an area-of-effect strike in the interest of saving time.]
He had no rebuttal—not because it was wrong. Brushing the dirt from the bread's plastic wrapper, he spoke toward his own arm.
"Tomorrow I'll definitely buy you a soboro bun."
[Buy the chestnut flavor. I've grown tired of milk.]
"Fine, fine. Just calm down."
[I am not upset!]
headquarters of Laplace Magitech Engineering—
"Chief Seo is on leave."
"—It's Department Head Hwang from HR. About Chief Seo filing for leave."
"Yes, sir. He emailed overnight asking for three days of annual leave. Honestly, I only just saw it myself."
"Leave? For what? He seems to have submitted the request remotely from home, doesn't he?"
Section Chief Seo Woojin was famous for clocking in and out with military precision and burning through exactly zero days of leave, year after year. Now, suddenly, he'd taken three.
The reason listed on the groupware request said only "personal matters," and the curious HR director had picked up the phone.
"The email says personal matters too. Shall I try reaching him?"
"I'd assumed he'd told his team. Forget it, don't call him. The man's on leave."
Hanging up, the employee glanced toward Chief Seo's empty desk.
"What's gotten into him? Chief Seo, of all people, taking leave."
The previous night—
"—Woojin, it's me."
"Hello, Uncle. It's been a while."
The caller was Choi Taesoo, Secretary-General of the Korean Hunter Association.
"Is something wrong? You're not usually one for phone calls."
"There is. Ahem... it's not the sort of thing to say over the phone, but I can't get away from my desk."
"Go ahead."
Choi Taesoo was not a man who hemmed and hawed before delivering news. Woojin, who knew this better than anyone, found himself genuinely curious about what was coming.
"The Association President passed away a little while ago."
Ah.
A returnee who had awakened as a Paladin in the otherworld of Elysion and come home.
South Korea's first EX-rank hunter.
The man who laid the cornerstone of the Four Great Guilds, then threw himself into the Hunter Association and dragged its standing up several rungs.
His father—Seo Jiwoong.