The Weight You Never Forget
What must that have felt like?
They say a person who lives by the sword never forgets the sound of their blade breaking.
Rina knows that isn't true.
What you never forget is not the sound.
It is the weight.
The weight that traveled into your palm with every swing. That lingering sensation left in the hand — a swordsman can never forget it, not for as long as they live.
The first time she received that sword, it had no name.
All the tag carried was a six-digit inventory number. She hated calling it by a number, so she spent three days turning it over in her mind. She wrote candidates in her notebook and scratched them out. She said them aloud, then grew so embarrassed she had to cough into her fist and pretend she hadn't.
On the morning of the fourth day, the name arrived.
Byeori.
The moment it left her mouth, she remembered the thing in her hand going warm, as if it had answered her.
A trick of the mind, of course. Swords do not answer.
Even so, from that day on the sword existed as a name, not a number.
She took such gentle care of it.
She wiped it down with a cloth. She fed it oil. The slightest nick, and she stopped by the workshop.
Those were the days when Rina had only just become a hunter. A rookie who fumbled everything, paired with the first sword in the country to receive an S-rank seal. People said they made an odd match. But Rina lived the whole of that season with that sword at her side.
She ate her meals alone. The rifts, she always entered as two. When something was hard, she poured it out to Byeori. When something was good, she bragged to Byeori and giggled over it.
Time passed. Human civilization, which the rifts had once brought to its knees, began — because of those same rifts — to pick up the progress it had set aside. Research into mana cores multiplied. S-rank armaments with all manner of abilities started appearing in the world.
The new S-rank weapons were different, no question. They took sword aura more cleanly. Their engravings were ornate and practical. They were nothing like Byeori, who was no different from a well-honed Master Sword that simply cut well.
…With a sword she had come by almost by accident, her hunter rank shot up almost overnight. And once that climb had started, another S-rank weapon hauled her up again.
The days she closed her hand around Byeori grew fewer.
Is Byeori the reason my growth is stalling? It isn't as if Byeori has any great ability, or any remarkable engraving.
Once that thought had taken root, Byeori lived only in a cold warehouse.
The days it spent under a film of dust grew longer. The days it spent alone, staring at a wall from morning to night, grew longer.
She no longer took her worries to Byeori. She no longer bragged about her joys.
The warehouse door stayed shut for a long time after that.
Before she quite noticed, Rina had become a B-rank hunter. A rank you could take anywhere and not feel small.
The day her rank rose to B-rank, she finished a celebration dinner with her colleagues, and — a little drunk — she stepped into the warehouse. A single strand of cobweb had settled over Byeori.
Is it right to leave Byeori — the first S-rank in the country — sitting in a warehouse like this? I don't think I'll have any use for it going forward. Wouldn't it be better to pass it on to a good master who would actually wield it?
That was how Rina arranged her heart, as she decided to let Byeori go.
A choice for the sword's sake. The wrapping on it was almost convincing.
She did not even wipe it down one last time.
Whether that was simply because pulling out a cloth felt like too much trouble, or because of the strange feeling that rose in her whenever she looked at the blade, she could not have said.
Not long after she passed Byeori on, Rina developed a strange habit.
She started collecting weapons.
By then she was a hunter of a rank anyone would recognize on sight. Money was no object, and she gathered enough steel to earn herself a reputation as a collector. New weapons appeared by the day. Blades grew more impressive in both performance and function.
And yet she kept leaving the first slot in her cabinet empty.
Whatever she put there felt wrong, and she would take it out again.
Maybe she just couldn't get attached to the new swords. She even considered giving them names.
She could not manage it for a single blade. Nothing would come to her.
She only understood the true shape of that hollowness much later — on an ordinary afternoon, scrolling an auction site the way she always did, hunting for the latest weapons.
A post with a man's story in it. His treasured sword had broken. He did not think he could keep working as a hunter. He was retiring.
That was when Rina finally understood.
Byeori had not been a weapon. It had been a friend. It had been family. Blinded by success, she had thrown away the sword that had endured the hard years with her — the sword that had held her up.
She had understood far too late.
…That precious sword. How did I treat it, at the end?
Rina started looking for Byeori. She had heard, now and then, that it was passing through famous hands, so she thought she would find it quickly.
She was half right, and half not. The news turned up fast enough. The problem was what the news said: Byeori had broken in a gate.
She went to that gate herself. Naturally, all that remained were the scars of a savage fight.
The sword was already gone. Its last master had sent it to a disposal auction, and the consignor was anonymous. Byeori had vanished down a process that left no record behind.
Byeori's reputation had not been kind, but if it had gone to a proper auction it might still have fetched a decent price. And if it had, it might have passed from collector to collector until she found it again.
Byeori's trail ended there completely. Rina knew too well what became of weapons that went through a disposal auction — how they were used, and how they disappeared. She drank that day into nothing.
…An apology is a word that only holds if there is someone on the other end to receive it. A confession offered alone to a sword that had vanished without a trace was nothing but a soliloquy with nowhere to land.
Even so, Rina kept practicing that apology no one would hear.
She did not know why. She would never meet it again. So why?
Rina rewrote the first sentence of the apology a hundred times. She never did make it to a second.
And it was around then that the habit started — the one where she found herself looking through the Hunter Gallery.
In case anyone mentioned that sword. In case, against every odd, someone turned up who said they had saved Byeori.
And that, in a sideways kind of way, came true.
It was not a post about anyone finding Byeori. It was people tearing into a sword that had done nothing wrong.
Just buy a new one.
That comment hurt in a way she could not quite explain. There was no chance of it, but the thought that the sword might see that post — and be so terribly sad — made Rina leave a comment on the Gallery for the first time in her life.
All that came back was mockery.
Of course it did. It was not a sane thing to say.
The part about resting well had really been a sentence she was writing to herself. She had written it because she wanted to believe that Byeori — the Byeori she had hurt so many times — was somewhere kind, resting easy.
That same day, a private message arrived.
They had treated it like a joke. Strangely, that did not feel bad.
Because it had not been a laugh at her expense. It had felt like someone laughing with her — genuinely, because they understood.
After that day she talked with that person often. They were the only one who would listen all the way through when she talked about swords, even if their tone always sounded a little put-upon.
…No.
No. No.
The truth was that all of it was hypocrisy. Self-satisfaction.
This was the same Rina who had said to a certain girl, After I passed it on, I only heard rumors that it was doing well. I thought, good for it.
It had not been a lie. She had simply told half of it.
Had Rina truly, with her whole heart, done everything she could to find Byeori?
Looking back, she had not.
If Byeori really had been doing well, then her chasing after it — after what she had done to it — would have been nothing but filthy greed. And if Byeori had not been doing well, that too would have been her fault, for having let it go.
Either way, Rina was terrified of what would come after facing Byeori again. She had wanted to see it. And at the same time, seeing it again had frightened her more than she could bear.
It was greedy. A thought without a shred of conscience.
She just… wanted to say she should have polished it on that last day. No — that she should have stayed with it a little longer, even before that.
…That she was sorry for leaving it alone.
That was all she had wanted to convey. Cowardly as it was.
The first slot in Rina's cabinet was empty today, too.
A girl. The first time Rina saw the girl she had told about Byeori, it was in a photograph.
The Hunter Gallery. A picture of a trainee hunter with no rank at all, who had supposedly taken down a B-rank monster that had appeared out of nowhere.
A little girl with blue hair and a cute, round-eyed face. The way she held the sword in the photo was adorable, but the stance itself was quite clean — and it looked a great deal like Rina's own.
She clicked two pages past it, then came back.
There was no reason. She just kept looking at that one picture of the girl.
What if—
She could not find a sentence that belonged after those words. She was not even sure what she wanted to put there. So Rina folded the thought up carefully and put it away inside her chest.
The second time she saw the girl was during an Association support request.
A-7. After they had come out through the collapsed access road.
Standing in front of the rift was that little kid from the Hunter Gallery.
That color. That light. The sheen she had polished every single day was still there, caught in the child's hair.
After she pulled the girl back from the brink of being dragged into the rift, she carried her out in her arms, and for a long time on that walk she could only look at that hair.
That night, in her quarters, Rina took out every last sword and polished them.
One by one. One by one. Not the way she had once tended her first blade, lingering over every inch — but with the inorganic, mechanical motions of someone handling tools.
The third time she saw the child was on an Association document. She stopped at the name, and rubbed for a long time at a checkbox she did not even have the authority to tick.
Kang Byeori.
Not a common name. Not an impossible one, either.
She let it go again. Only after that, whenever a dispatch roster came in, she developed a habit of scanning it from the K's.
And the fourth time. Rina found herself facing that girl once more.
When she gave the child her name, the girl made a strange face.
It was the name of an S-rank hunter. It turned up on the news. It circulated through the Gallery.
And yet the child looked startled, the way a person does when they are hearing a name for the first time.
Looking back, it had not been a startled face so much as… yes. The look of someone delighted by a discovery they had never expected to make.
Rina simply could not understand herself.
What am I even hoping for from that girl? What answer am I looking for, that I keep finding my way to her side?
A low, rolling thunder shuddered through the earth — far enough to reach South Point 4.
She did not check the instruments. Her body had already turned toward the sound.
The sword at her hip knocked and rattled as she ran.
She left the measuring equipment where it stood. An S-rank abandoning their gear meant a formal write-up, but that thought did not occur to her once while she was running.
Dust blew into her eyes. They would not close.
She ran through the roaring noise, and what Rina was looking for was a little girl. A girl who came up to her waist. Byeori — the brave child who said she hunted to make money.
The epicenter, when she arrived. Rina forgot even that she had been about to shout for everyone to evacuate, and stood staring at what was in front of her.
The Guild Leader of Saetbyeol Guild was swinging a sword.
A silver blade. Blue lightning coiling along the edge.
The woman laid the sword sideways and, with a technique Rina knew in her bones, turned aside a flash of white sword-light. The deflected radiance fell on empty ground and split the earth.
But what caught Rina's eye was not that familiar way of fighting, and not the Guild Leader using Rina's own swordsmanship.
The sword. The sword in that woman's hand.
"Ah."
Unbroken.
"Ah…"
Intact… a whole, complete blade.
Rina could not take her eyes off it. She could only stand there, dazed, her hand locked around her own hilt, and watch the fight unfold in front of her.
It was over in an instant.
Was it an instant? It felt like one, anyway.
The rumbling subsided, and from a closing seam in the earth a scrap of metal rolled free.
And then the sword in the Guild Leader's hand was wrapped in silver light.
When the light receded, sitting there on the ground was a little girl.
Blue hair. Round eyes. The girl Rina had told to scream for her anytime.
It was a sight too hard to believe — and because of that, she could believe it.
Rina felt the relief land.
She's safe. She became an Ego Sword. That's why I could never find her.
And after that thought had passed, the debts she had been putting off came flooding in.
If. If, back in the years she had spent as a sword, she had already been able to see and hear everything the way she could now as an Ego Sword…
Then it meant Byeori remembered all of it. Every hour Rina had left her there.
The footsteps passing the warehouse door. The dust settling over her, layer by layer. The moment a cobweb finally came down to stay.
That small child, alone in that cold dark.
"Nnh…"
And then. The last day.
Without a goodbye. Without a thank you for everything, all that time. Without even wiping down the blade. Those careless hands, sliding her into a case as if it were nothing — all of it—
"……."
The world in front of her wavered. Out of habit, Rina groped at the other side of her waist.
She had meant to close her hand around a hilt. Her fingers were shaking too hard. She clutched at nothing, and her hand cut emptily through the air.
"Hh."
Her breath went shallow. Inside the glove, her palm was slick.
The wish to run and the wish to take even one step closer arrived at the same time.
An apology. An apology… the words she had wanted to say all this time…
The first sentence she had rewritten a hundred times. The things she had even told her friend on the Hunter Gallery.
What good was any of that preparation? In this moment, she could not find a single character of it.
Kang Byeori. A kind, fragile sword that still wore the name its wretched first master had given it…
What right did Rina — who had locked that child in a warehouse and, in the end, thrown her away — have to say any of those things?
The memory surfaced.
The things she had said to the girl in front of her, back then. Watching Rina babble excuses about how she'd had no choice but to pass her on, and — disgustingly — mutter that she should have polished her just one more time.
That child… underneath that harmless smile, how sad must she have been?
"…Ah."