A B-Grade Comedy Goodbye
This was the emergency center of BOND — an outfit famous for being the busiest in all of South Korea.
Fortunately, even amid the barely organized chaos, I had been assigned one of the beds tucked into the farthest corner, and there I lay, staring at the IV line threaded into my arm, until a sigh slipped out of me.
"Hah…."
Well. Somehow, I survived.
And here I'd been thinking I might drop dead on the spot.
I cast my mind back a few hours — a few hours that had passed in the blink of an eye.
……Right after we'd stumbled out of the gate, the heavy steel doors had ground open and people had come pouring in. Confronted with a scene none of them had expected, they'd all zeroed in on me — the only one still standing upright — and started firing off questions.
"Wait, how did you even get in here?!"
"Forgive me, but how did you locate the dungeon boss? The clear itself…"
"Good heavens — aren't you the teachers from Bada Kindergarten?"
"Sir, how on earth did you end up in there with that criminal?"
While I sat blinking dazedly under the barrage, someone dropped a blanket over my head.
"Everyone out, except the ones handling this."
At that one line from the man who'd thrown it, the surroundings went cold-quiet, and then — with almost eerie efficiency — the crowd drained away and order reasserted itself.
"Are you all right, sir?"
The low voice turned on me next. Peering under the blanket, I saw shoes identical to the black combat boots Lee Seohyeok had been wearing.
After that, all I remember is bobbing my head vaguely at the man's questions and shuffling along behind him. The moment we ascended from the underground levels toward the emergency center above, I could feel fervent stares boring through the blanket — but even those vanished like ghosts the instant the man clipped off a few short words.
And so, here I was….
Flat on my back in this corner, legs stretched out, living comfortably.
Once treatment was finished, they'd said there would be a light interview-style preliminary investigation, so all I had to do was wait.
Rustle.
Speak of the devil — that investigation appeared to be starting now.
I pushed myself upright and looked at who was pulling back the curtain.
…That person.
The woman with the dark navy hair… almost certainly Lee Seohyeok's direct superior. Also the one who'd been pointing at my kidnapper in the corridor, asking whether I'd ever seen him before.
And the person trailing in behind her would be the man who threw the blanket over me.
"How are you feeling? Any lingering injuries?"
"…I think I'm all right. A little sore and stiff, that's all."
At the woman's question, I even made a show of rolling my shoulder once, out of politeness.
From what I'd gathered, CEO Baek Cheonhyeong — who'd heard the news late — had summoned every healer and medical staffer in the building down to the emergency center.
Which is why even the smallest scrapes vanished without a trace, apparently.
The others had all been treated without incident and were sleeping it off, so there was nothing left to worry about. I peeled the crusted edge of my bandage and ran my hand over my palm. Smooth and clean — even the small scar from my childhood was simply gone.
It feels a little strange, but…
Good abilities really are good.
"That's a relief. Your hand was in such a state that the healers were shocked. Did you scrub your palm across a wire or something?"
…It was that bad?
I'd been too out of my head to check properly.
Come to think of it, something kept running down my hand, and I'd assumed it was sweat and hastily wiped it on my clothes.
Looking back now, apparently all of that was blood.
I glanced down at my crisply changed hospital gown and barely strangled the sigh rising in my chest. Clocking out in blood-soaked clothes…. that was not an easy gig.
"Well, it's a mercy you've been treated cleanly, at least."
"Yes. Truly a mercy."
I forced a smile and exchanged the obligatory courtesies before getting into the preliminary investigation proper — and in the process, learned their names and positions.
The woman: Moon Chaeyoung, Team Leader of Field Team Na. Lee Seohyeok's direct superior, per the grapevine.
The man: Lee Gyeon, Team Leader of Field Team Ga.
This one's presence was not a joke.
"I'd hoped to greet you properly next time we met, but it seems circumstances had other plans."
"'Circumstances' is putting it generously, I'd say. Haha…."
The conversation, led by Moon Chaeyoung, exchanged far more information than a set of formal introductions strictly required.
Of course, on reflection, the two of them seemed to have handed me nothing but fluff while plucking every useful detail about me straight out of my pockets — but then, the most sensitive information on my file was whatever fit on my résumé, so no harm done.
Somewhere along the way, the talk with Moon Chaeyoung flowed naturally into the events of the day. Lee Gyeon, who had stood silently at her side the whole time, listened quietly and only chimed in now and then.
"The dungeons beneath BOND headquarters are, for the most part, filled only with sites verified safe in advance. That said, even among dungeons granted that safety designation, there exist a handful designated for special monitoring."
"Dungeons of that class are reclassified whenever a specific anomaly is detected."
"Indeed. The dungeon you happened to enter, teacher, had gone years without a confirmed boss monster ever being sighted — everyone was quite puzzled by it."
"And yet, it has been cleared."
"Yes, yes — and as that gentleman says, the fact that the dungeon was cleared is precisely what's causing a little commotion at the moment."
Busy admiring their valiant effort to explain things in layman's terms, I was following along just fine — until the conversation took a sudden turn that tilted my head sideways.
"…It was cleared?"
Something Kwon Haeseong had said before we entered the gate surfaced in my memory.
"That door is rigged to open only from the outside, for security reasons. So… there are two options."
"One. Force-clear the dungeon so the alarm goes out to the security team…. Honestly, that's borderline impossible."
Even as an outsider to this world, there was one thing I knew with certainty.
There is exactly one way to clear a dungeon.
Kill the boss inside it.
Defeat the boss, and the gate seals itself and the dungeon disappears. And Haeeseong and I had never so much as dreamed of attempting such a plan.
How exactly would two civilians take down a boss?
Besides, neither of us had known the dungeon's boss had been missing for years.
"Which is why the outside is, in fact, in an uproar right now. A boss no one had even glimpsed the tail of in three years turns up —"
"— discovered not merely by a civilian, but dealt with by one. The whole organization is beside itself."
I mustered my facial muscles into something calm and tilted up the corners of my mouth.
"…Surely not. We never even saw the dungeon boss. There was this strange… thing, but —"
But surely not, my ass.
What we — no, what I — had seen wasn't so much a dungeon boss as… something beyond one.
I may not know a thing about monsters, but even I know that wasn't one.
I'd felt it instinctively. Anyone who laid eyes on that thing would have felt it too.
That the word monster simply wasn't big enough for it.
My throat went dry. Leaving me to my silence while I gathered my thoughts, Moon Chaeyoung and Lee Gyeon pressed on with their explanation.
"The assigned rank before and after the clear are completely different. It was definitively certified as safety-grade when it was brought in, but after the clear, the resonance gauges read far above danger-grade thresholds."
"Danger-grade applies only to dungeons of A-rank or higher. Which is to say, the fact that you returned alive, teacher, admits of no explanation other than a miracle."
"……"
If that was true, did that mean that enormous hand-thing really was the dungeon's boss?
Which would make me a woman who'd struck up a friendship with a dungeon boss. A friendship that hadn't been worth a damn.
"You look startled. Oh, but it's far too early to be startled. All sorts of absurd rumors are circulating internally as we speak."
Moon Chaeyoung scratched the back of her head with an embarrassed laugh.
Now what?
"The story going around the company right now is that you single-handedly beat down the dungeon boss and cleared the dungeon…. Unfortunately, since plenty of people personally witnessed you walking out of the underground dungeon on your own two feet, the rumor appears to have spread with considerable embellishment."
I listened quietly as Lee Gyeon recited, one after another, the rumors freshly updated on the internal community boards.
Some were light enough to laugh off; others had been inflated far past anything a sober person could process.
If I assembled the most-repeated rumor into a single coherent narrative, it went something like this:
In truth, I was a hidden awakener of tremendous high grade who'd falsified my rank to get hired as a kindergarten teacher; then, upon happening to enter a dungeon alongside a violent criminal, I had beaten a boss monster to death with my bare hands to rescue the children, and, caught up in the momentum, apprehended the criminal too, in the name of justice…
…Okay. Stop. Let's stop thinking about it now.
I think the people here have been reading way too many web novels.
That's the whole "secretly overpowered" trope, right?
"Forgive the presumption, but I must ask: is any of this true?"
Lee Gyeon pressed again, his face utterly serious.
You think it's true?
I didn't even know my kidnapper — that son of a bitch — had an actual criminal record until about an hour ago.
In the end, I unscrewed the cap of the water bottle sitting on the side table and shoved the whole mouth of it against my lips.
If I didn't, I was going to combust from the inside out.
The first thing Mr. Kim's newly opened eyes landed on was not a worried medical team.
……It was the f***ing cops.
One of the officers he'd seen plenty of times before was gazing down at him with an infuriatingly pleasant smile.
What the hell are you smiling at like that, you creep…!
The moment his head cleared, he bolted off the hospital bed — and was immediately tackled. This time both his wrists were snugly fitted with restraints, and a control collar sat clamped around his neck.
Damn it! Damn it all!
Cursing up a storm inside, Mr. Kim resisted with every fiber of his body as the police hauled him along. And then, at the person sitting quietly on the neighboring bed, watching him get dragged off with a placid gaze, he exploded.
"Hey! Nam Taejae! Say something, save me…! You remember how I ran myself half to death through that dungeon carrying you, right?!"
Nam Taejae nodded, his feet swinging an inch above the floor.
"Yes, I remember it."
That's right! Of course you do!
All that hardship we weathered together!
Mr. Kim rejoiced inwardly and hurried on. "Exactly! So put in a word with the police officers here! Mercy, or — whatever it's called! I did a good deed, you knooow!"
Everyone in the ward stared at him with open disdain. Begging a child, because there was no one else left to ask.
And such an absurd request, at that.
Staff and bystanders alike had all been quietly concerned for the little boy who'd come through such an ordeal. They were just opening their mouths to dress the man down on young Taejae's behalf when —
"No. If you did wrong, you must be punished."
Unwavering.
The child shook his head side to side, but his eyes were solid as stone.
"Hey! What wrong do you even think I did?!"
The bystanders' flustered surprise lasted only a moment before everyone's attention locked onto the boy's answer.
What would that tiny little thing have to say?
"I don't know. But your face is telling on you, sir."
A small index finger pointed, straight and sure, at Mr. Kim's face.
Bruised here, there, and everywhere — swollen and puffed up.
Any fool could see it was a beaten face.
"You got hit badly enough to change how you look, and you never once told me it hurt."
"…S-so what?! What's that got to do with anything?!"
"When you get hit without having done anything wrong, your heart gets sad. So people keep saying it hurts. But you never told me even once that you were in pain, sir."
"That's — !"
Of course, Mr. Kim had known perfectly well, all this time, exactly what crimes he'd committed.
That was why he'd endured it in silence while BOND's people battered him and the police made his life miserable. And this child, sharp as a tack, had read the tiny pea-sized twitch of his conscience in a heartbeat.
Struck dumb, Mr. Kim could only flap his mouth open and shut. The boy, meanwhile, climbed down from his bed with an untroubled expression and came toward him.
One step.
Two steps.
And then, finally, up to his chin.
Two soft little palms settled gently over Mr. Kim's lumpy, swollen face.
Woooosh.
Before long, a warm, cozy current wrapped around his entire face. The needle-pricking pain and the throbbing, burning ache… faded away.
Grinning up at the gormless expression on the man's face, the boy beamed.
"All better."
Only then did Mr. Kim understand.
This little brat is… a healer of a pretty high rank….
But what came out of his mouth had nothing to do with what he'd just realized.
"Wha — then why'd you wait until now to do it?!"
"Because if I did it first, you wouldn't reflect on your actions, sir."
"You sassy little punk!"
"Sir, didn't everything turn out exactly as I said it would?"
"…Like what."
"Everything you set your mind to came true, didn't it? You and me — we made it out!"
— Things are going to change. Everything I've set my mind to has come true. And I've decided that today, I'm leaving this place with you, sir.
…He really did say that, didn't he.
The little boy with no manners whatsoever gave Mr. Kim's shoulder a few pats. Not too fast, not too slow.
"Now it's your turn to make up your mind, sir."
"Listen to yourself. You see the state I'm in and that's what you've got to say, you doomed little gremlin."
"Yes. It does come out."
For a moment, Mr. Kim's chest seized up — but not in the usual way. Not the hot, choking bitterness that always boiled up inside him, but something milder, something that made his face flush warm instead.
"……Hey."
"It's Taejae, sir."
"Right. Nam Taejae."
"Yes?"
"Take care of yourself, kid."
A fare-thee-well delivered while kneeling on the floor — hardly a graceful one, but Mr. Kim was satisfied.
His life was wrecked either way.
He could manage at least this much of a goodbye — something straight out of a B-grade comedy film, couldn't he?
For the first time in a long while, Mr. Kim smiled at another person.
"Yes, sir. Oh — and one more thing."
"What now."
"Make up with your little brother."
"…I'll see."
"Sir."
"What else! I have to go now!"
"Sir, 'a stingy old skinflint whose heart's gone dry as a wick'? That's exactly what you are."
To the very end, Nam Taejae remained the most irreverent little brat Mr. Kim had ever met.