The Corporation (3)
Every safety regulation was written in blood.
For hunters, that wasn't an exaggeration in the slightest.
No matter how hard the media worked to polish the image, most hunters were manual laborers who used their abilities.
A fair number of them fought monsters, so the Association had a tendency to be obsessive about safety regulations.
But even the Hunter Association was still a public bureaucracy in the end.
From its founding to the present, there had never been a single moment with enough personnel.
The manpower to dedicate to low-rank dungeon raids was even more critically short.
Black Horse Guild had exploited that gap with real expertise.
"From the looks of it, your safety violations were highly strategic. You'd be hard-pressed to find a case this malicious in the entire Association."
"Black Horse Guild only did as much as everyone else."
"The list is long, so listen carefully and correct me if anything's wrong. First, raids must have at least a one-week gap between them. Black Horse Guild hasn't honored that a single time in the past six months. The deceased Ha Min-seong's dungeon raids averaged at least five per month just on the official records."
At my words, the president's face hardened and he swallowed dryly.
That was right. The unofficial side of things had already been exposed long ago.
"Up to this point, you'd just get a recommendation from the Association and be done. But you weren't satisfied with that. You used every trick you could to stretch the number of business trips."
The hunters originally belonging to Black Horse Guild numbered about twenty.
Even dungeon raids of the lowest rank had to be conducted with a team of at least six.
Guild members couldn't always move as a group, and the employees were especially reluctant about provincial business trips.
The deceased Ha Min-seong was made to run raids alongside workers from other subcontractors.
Black Horse Guild exploited this structure with considerable intelligence.
"The business trips were originally assigned to a different employee each time, but I'm told Ha Min-seong was the one who went every single time."
The civil servant assigned to on-site supervision had naturally been thrown off, but...
Black Horse Guild always had excuses ready—a bad cold, a family funeral, and forced Ha Min-seong in as a substitute every time.
If a schedule fell apart like this, the proper procedure was to cancel the raid, but provincial civil servants' administration didn't work that way.
Everyone had traveled a long way to run the dungeon. How could anyone say, "Just go back for today"?
A delayed raid like that was guaranteed to trigger complaints from nearby residents.
So they pushed ahead anyway.
Black Horse Guild even showed the meticulousness to rotate the regions they sent the same employee to, worried that local civil servants would catch on if they kept sending the same person.
First Gyeongsang Province, then Jeolla Province, then a metropolitan city. That was the pattern.
I paused for a moment and recalled what I'd seen earlier in the holding room.
Most of Black Horse Guild's employees had been visibly tormented by Ker's barking, but...
A few of them lay there as if dead, without a single complaint.
Those were the male hunters who'd been ground down by endless provincial deployments.
It was a given that whenever one person died from overwork, his colleagues were already in a perilous state.
I'd already ordered thorough medical examinations for them to secure additional evidence.
"You skipped routine medical checkups for the male hunters by sending them on business trips, and the female hunters never even left Gyeonggi Province. We found out from the vehicle dashcam investigation. Did it ever occur to you that you were going too far?"
"Too far, my ass! We men are a bona fide privileged class!"
"A privileged class?"
I froze at a statement I'd genuinely never imagined, and he seized the opening to raise his voice.
He seemed to think he could turn this around if he argued his case properly here.
"Korean women have always suffered discrimination. I'm a real man who understands their pain, so I just offered them a little consideration on the business trips, nothing more!"
"What discrimination?"
"Women get snide remarks for going to college, or they get sexually harassed like it's breathing. The glass ceiling makes it hard for them to advance in society. Same thing."
Since my battle with Blue Lightning, I hadn't taken a shock this powerful.
Was this man seriously living in the 1990s?
Stunned, I fumbled for a counter.
"Hold on. The Black Horse Guild's entire executive team is male, isn't it? And who the hell gets crap about going to college these days? You never even set foot near a university yourself."
"Our company's just too small! There are only three of us in the executive team including me, so it can't be helped—"
"That's some absolute bullshit. And sexual harassment? That from personal experience?"
It was only then that I properly grasped what kind of man the president of Black Horse Guild really was.
A man who assumed later generations suffered just as he had in his own era.
The type who sins against the women in bars and then repents by being generous to the women in his company.
All high-minded talk with zero substance.
Having been momentarily tongue-tied by my counter, he now pulled out what he must have considered his ultimate argument.
"All our employees agreed to it in the first place!"
"Oh, really? Did you get contracts or something? Not that they'd mean anything."
"Contracts, my ass! The fact that none of them have quit means they agreed to it!"
"..."
Dealing with this bastard made me question my career.
The hunter criminals I'd faced until now had either committed their crimes with careful planning or at least prepared a minimum of an alibi, but...
This man didn't even appear to recognize that what he'd done was a crime.
Well. Most criminals were about this level, that was true.
The ones I'd been dealing with up to now probably constituted the top five percent.
Whatever anyone said, A-rank hunters and above were elites in their own right.
Unfortunately, the hunters of Black Horse Guild weren't in a position to quit even if they wanted to.
The hunter industry was contracting at a rapid pace right now.
With even established guilds vanishing, no one knew when they'd get hired again if they quit now.
Most hunters were in the position of needing to earn every penny while they still could.
Every single male hunter still at Black Horse Guild was married.
They had only struggled to hold on without quitting, to fulfill their duty as breadwinners.
Effectively held hostage by their own families.
Those who hadn't been in that position had quit long ago.
'This is a waste of time. We'll see each other in court anyway. Might as well wrap it up.'
I checked the messages my team members had sent and gave him the notification.
"For now, I'll indict you for professional negligence causing death, intentional and habitual false reporting, omission of mandatory physical examinations, workplace coercion, and sexual assault. More charges are still being added in real time, so sit tight and wait."
"Wh-What? Coercion? Sexual assault?"
"The employees already testified. In my experience, guys who spout the kind of crap you do always have a sex crime on their record. Wow, you've even got a prior conviction for the same."
"Shut your damn mouth! You—you threatened them into—"
I ignored his protests and walked out of the interrogation room.
In the other rooms, the general employees' interrogations were underway.
As I stood watching through the one-way mirror, Seo Ji-yu approached carefully.
"Team Leader. How do you intend to handle this case?"
"You heard earlier. You can't hold a corporation liable for murder. A corporation has no criminal capacity."
But it was possible to hold individual employees responsible.
Normally, investigative manpower was too short to go this far, but...
This time, Blanche had been tremendously helpful.
She now handled tasks smoothly even when given rough instructions, which drastically improved efficiency.
The vehicle dashcam investigation from earlier had also been her doing.
'The person who opposed introducing AI the most is the one using it most effectively... I'm going to get an earful from Matthew later.'
"How on earth did it come to this?"
Seo Ji-yu murmured with a hint of a sigh, and I could only give a bitter smile.
"In a way, it's only natural. The Republic of Korea has never once paid its soldiers what they were worth, from its founding to the present."
"Excuse me?"
The safest country in the world, the Republic of Korea.
The reality behind that shining title was a monument built on the bodies of hunters.
Korea had always, as it always did, tacitly accepted their sacrifice for the sake of the nation.
Other countries probably weren't much different, to be honest.
"The truth is, the state is far more malicious than any corporation. The bigger entities like that get, the more shamelessly and remorselessly they sacrifice people. And they never properly take responsibility. You could call it a very safe and rational system."
"Th-That's..."
When the wealthy and the powerful start wars, innocent citizens die in their place.
A time-honored custom that has propped up human history.
Having let my true thoughts slip for the first time in a while, I belatedly gave Seo Ji-yu a warning.
"Ah, don't take it too literally. My views are pretty extreme."
"You're aware of that yourself?"
"Go through some unjust treatment like I did, Ji-yu, and you'll end up the same way."
The Big Dipper Incident had transformed my very soul.
There was no going back now.
Seo Ji-yu, who knew that well, smiled sadly.
"I feel a little bad saying this, but... thanks to that, I got to meet you, Team Leader. So I'm grateful."
"That's just cruel."
"Ah, then I take it back—"
"No. Don't take it back. I already heard it. Taking it back is even crueler."
"Understood, Team Leader."
I scolded her as I got moving again, intent on dismantling Black Horse Guild completely.
There were plenty of guilds to clean up anyway. I could just mark it down as having taken out one piece of trash first.