The Ballad of the Death God

Looking back, it had been a truly unlucky life.

At age five, too young to even remember, my parents were sentenced to prison side by side. The orphanage I entered afterward was so rotten with corruption and embezzlement that there was nothing about it worth calling good.

Horrendous days, one after another, filled every moment of my childhood.

South Korea was a country that granted those blessed with Phantom Aptitude the chance to enlist in the Hwadam Army.

And in the winter of my sixteenth year, I was judged to have that aptitude in the 2021 Phantom Aptitude Exam.

Would I be thrown out into society after suffering nothing but unfair treatment in that godforsaken orphanage, or would I fight otherworldly creatures, protect my nation and its people, and earn money and honor in the process?

There was nothing to think over. I meant to choose what might have been the one and only chance at reversing my life. But that hope was blocked by the hands of others.

Before the enlistment exam, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠I was handed over as if sold to the gang syndicate that had been generously funding my orphanage.

In the spring of my seventeenth year, I somehow stepped into a place that didn't seem to belong to reality. After wandering it for days and nights, I barely made it back to the real world — but my circumstances hadn't changed. If anything, they'd gotten worse.

In the summer of my seventeenth year, the syndicate's boss decided he wanted to make good use of me. It was because I had come back from that strange world carrying strange powers.

I was beaten to the edge of death, occasionally fed expensive meals, and every scrap of compassion I carelessly showed came back to me as a blade.

And so, draped head to toe in luxury brands, I committed my first murder. There was no climbing back out of that mire.

In the fall of my nineteenth year, a government investigation long in the making came crashing down on me and the organization I belonged to. Naturally, since my reach had extended all the way to murder, I was shipped straight to trial the moment I was caught.

In the winter of my nineteenth year, my death sentence was finalized.

The claim of coercion, the fact that I was legally a minor — none of it helped me. I had fallen too far for any of it to matter.

“We lack the manpower to fight the otherworldly creatures. It would be a waste to simply kill him...”

“He defeated three Hwadam Army soldiers dispatched with only low-grade Phantoms, to begin with—”

“The murders started under duress, and he did surrender first. That deserves consideration—”

None of the outcomes really felt unjust to me. Did it not?

It just... was what it was.

Even with things having come to that pass, I didn't want to die.

“Wow. So now we're making use of death row inmates?”

“What happens if he decides to screw everyone over and get us all killed...”

“I heard on-site commanders are authorized to execute him on the spot.”

“He's dying either way, so taking down a monster with him is a net gain, isn't it?”

Fighting otherworldly creatures was grueling work, but it wasn't unendurable.

The callouts that came near-daily, the discrimination heaped on me for being ex-death row, the constant dread that one wrong move could end in my execution. It was all, more or less, fine. Better than living by killing people, at least. Tolerable.

“Nice to meet you. I'm Seong Gwon.”

And yet that daily routine changed, somehow, at some point.

“Why do I treat you no differently from the others? A strange question. You are my subordinate, and as your commanding officer, I have a duty to treat all my subordinates as equals.”

At twenty-three, the platoon leader I'd somehow ended up sharing a pot of rice with was the starting point of every problem.

“You're a criminal? So what? Your past means very little to me. You are already atoning for your crimes in the manner this country has designated. That is all that matters to me.”

Because you were the one who was kind to me first.

Because you were the first person to treat me — a man everyone pointed fingers at — like a human being.

“If rejection is supposed to be the fitting reward even while I serve out my punishment, then why does the concept of corrective justice exist at all? What meaning is there in rehabilitation? I am simply doing what I believe is right.”

Because it taught me just how much happiness there was in being treated not as a criminal, but as an ordinary person.

“Captain, was I of use to you?”

At twenty-six, a life I had lived only because I didn't want to die had somehow turned into a life I wanted to live for something.

“Wait, Yahui—”

“I'll stay behind. You still have work left to do, Captain.”

And because of that, I chose death of my own will.

“Wait—”

“It's fine.”

There was no other way. It was a situation where someone had to stay behind and sacrifice themselves. It was a binary: me, or you.

“I'm all right.”

So... if only one of us gets to live, then it should be you. It has to be you.

“Yahui!”

“Consider the birthday present repaid with my life.”

Because you were a better person than I was. Because you were the one more worth keeping alive.

“Sleep well, Captain.”

I'll go on ahead.

“Aaagh...!”

I slammed the manhwa shut and hugged it to my chest.

It wasn't a scene I was seeing for the first or second time, and yet tears blurred my vision all over again. My already-troubled heart felt like it had seized up cold in my chest.

“You insane author! How could you leave a character like this as nothing but a semi-supporting role? How can you relegate him to past flashbacks, to a character who's already dead—?!”

And seriously — is it even fair to hand a dead character such a painfully wistful backstory? The person connected to it, Seong Gwon, isn't even the protagonist. She's nothing more than the protagonist's role model!

No — no. The real problem was me, myself, agonizing this much over a character who didn't even get that much screen time.

“Why did he have to have the same name as me...”

Yahui. A supporting character who appeared in barely two of the manhwa's forty-three volumes.

At first I'd taken an interest simply because we shared a name, and somehow he'd settled in as my most beloved character of all. A truly lamentable state of affairs.

“Hnngh.”

I flopped onto my hospital bed, manhwa still clutched to my chest, and the tears slid out from both my eyes, streaking across my temples. It was a ritual I'd already repeated more times than I could count.

Whenever I got to the volumes Yahui appeared in, the tears just came streaming down. Which was absurd, because from the very moment he was first mentioned, I'd been given the information that Yahui was already dead.

I'd known he was a goner from the start, and still, every time I saw a flashback of that moment, my chest ached.

“Ugh, seriously... if Yahui had lived here, more than half the main story's incidents wouldn't even have happened...”

But what could I do? I'd already gone and gotten attached.

I couldn't help pitying Yahui — a man who lived a life worthy of moral condemnation, yet was never once given the chance to make a single proper choice.

He suffered over the lives he'd taken, and yet lacked the courage to choose death, and simply kept on living — even that was pitiable.

He felt, for the first time, the desire to stand beside someone — but the sins he'd committed barred the way. Sins he hadn't even committed by choice, and yet not even those could be undone, and so he wept and wept. Even that made me ache for him.

He was my sore thumb. My aching finger.

My chest felt too stifled to bear, so I picked up my smartphone. The last site I'd visited filled the screen — a forum where people ranted and raved about the manhwa I'd just been reading, Codename: Baby.

And the thread I'd been looking at was, of course, one where people ranted and raved about Yahui.

A few more posts expressing sentiments much like my own followed one after the other.

Reading them, my heart was torn at all over again.

I already knew that Yahui wasn't a character born wicked so much as grey matter — a man who could have become anything — and that if only he'd been given the chance to escape that environment, he could have lived a righteous life without the slightest difficulty. Knowing it, there was nothing I could do.

Yahui was, truly, a character who would never have died that way if only his starting point hadn't been what it was.

“If only he'd taken the exam. Just the exam...”

If only the orphanage hadn't interfered. No — if only they'd never found out, to the very end, that I was aiming for military enlistment. If only I'd completed the third round of exams like normal and gone straight into the military academy, where that unknown talent of mine might have bloomed.

If that had happened, the story wouldn't have flowed the way it did. With overwhelming talent, he'd have made a name for himself, won everyone's praise, and earned the right to stand proudly at the side of Seong Gwon — the one person he'd admired so deeply.

“If he'd just stayed undiscovered until the final exam, his whole life after that would've been different—!”

I thrashed my limbs against the bed — then stopped, wheezing, as my heart squeezed tight in my chest. But anyway. That was how it was.

By the time my heart had settled, I was looking at the cover of the manhwa.

On it was a female character with cherry-red hair. Seong Gwon. The character Yahui had yearned for — the one who saved Yahui, and was saved by him in turn.

“...He really should have lived.”

It wasn't that I disliked Seong Gwon. I loved her just as much as I loved Yahui, if not more.

After all, when Yahui had joked that he'd never once been to an amusement park, Seong Gwon was the only person who refused to just let it slide. She was the character who accepted a disadvantage to herself, wangled a single day of leave, and took him to an amusement park.

How could I possibly dislike someone like that? Seong Gwon was worthy of Yahui's respect, and she was someone I wanted to see survive to the very end.

The problem was that I couldn't stop imagining how much better it would have been if Yahui had been there at her side.

Knock knock.

Just then, someone knocked on the door of my hospital room.

I hurriedly smoothed out the ruined blanket and wiped my face. If they found out I'd gotten worked up over a manhwa, I was going to get another lecture for sure.

“Come in—! Hyung!”

Thankfully, my visitor was neither a nurse nor a doctor. It was the brother who was staying in the same ward as me.

Wave, wave.

Just as he always did, he strolled into the room waving his hand back and forth. Screech. The visitor's chair dragged across the floor to my bedside.

“Were you reading that manhwa again?”

Seated in the chair, he spoke to me through his notebook. His injured neck hadn't recovered in years, and because I still wasn't fluent in sign language, he was fond of notebook conversations for my sake.

“Yeah. It's fun.”

“Glad you're enjoying it.”

He was the one who'd introduced me to Codename: Baby in the first place. So instead of scolding me for being so hopelessly hooked, he simply ran his hand over my head, ruffling my hair.

“What is it you like about it so much?”

“Hmmmm. All of it, overall? The action's cool, the art style is gorgeous. And I love how it takes the clichés you'd find in any hunter story and twists them into something distinctly Korean.”

“The worldbuilding is original, I'll give it that.”

The essence of a hunter story is, at its core, the appearance of the gifted in a modern-day setting. And it's not just ability users — plenty of works use Gates to bring monsters into the world.

“Exactly. But it's not so radically different that it loses the feel of the genre, and that balance is what I really love about it.”

Codename: Baby was, in the strictest sense, a textbook hunter story.

The existence of Gates connected to the other world — Dimension Gates.

The appearance of monsters crossing over from the other side — otherworldly creatures.

The entities that served as abilities — Phantoms — and the ability wielders who commanded them, the Phantomists.

And the Hwadam Army, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠which inherited the role that hunters usually play in these stories — exterminating otherworldly creatures, closing Dimension Gates, and so on.

Only the terminology was fresh; most of the genre's standard elements had been carried over intact.

“I especially love the Rear World and the Phantom setting. There's something so mysterious about it.”

Did that mean the series had no unique settings of its own? Not at all.

In Codename: Baby, the Phantoms that served as abilities were a kind of spirit — something like fairies, elves, or yokai.

And as is true of most spirits and fairies, they could only be seen within special spaces. In other words, separate other-dimensional zones — spirit realms, fairy realms — existed in their own right.

Codename: Baby called that space the Rear World. A concept that existed entirely apart from Dimension Gates and the other world.

“A story about contracting Phantoms in the Rear World, and fighting otherworldly creatures alongside them to protect the Earth... Yeah. I love it. I really do. It's just so sad that my favorite character had to be the one who dies...”

As a story, it was unremarkable in the pleasantest way possible.

The protagonist, Baek San, mowed down otherworldly creatures together with his partner Phantom and dug into the identity of a hidden villain — a classic, by-the-book shonen manhwa arc.

But then, what makes a cliché a cliché? Stick faithfully to the fundamentals and it endures forever — that's what makes it a cliché in the first place, no?

“Do you like Yahui that much?”

“Yeah. Maybe it's because we share a name, but somehow I just got attached.”

“Do you wish he'd survived?”

“Mmm. Honestly, not so much that I'd say 'absolutely had to'... No. You know what, I do think it would've been better if he'd lived.”

I glanced slowly around my hospital room.

“...I'm already on my deathbed ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠here, and the one character who shares my name is a goner. That's just sad, isn't it?”

If Yahui hadn't been a dead man, could I have taken a little hope away from him too?

If Yahui — trapped in a past of crime, just as I was trapped in this sickroom — had been allowed at least to keep on living... and if one day he'd seized a better future for himself...

Then couldn't I have drawn some courage from that, too?

“...Sorry! I shouldn't be saying things like that.”

“No. It's okay.”

Ah. So that was why Yahui kept nagging at me. Because my own situation was partly reflected in his... that was why my eyes kept drifting back to him.

“Hey. Do you think you could do better than Yahui?”

“Huh?”

“If you became that 'Yahui.' Do you think you could live a better life than he did?”

“Uh... hmm? Well, I mean, I'd know the whole plot. If I went in blind, who knows — but knowing everything?”

“So what you're saying is, right now, with the plot in hand, you're confident you could at least outlive him?”

“Is that how it comes across? Hyung.”

Then again, even with all the information in hand, it would be hard to live worse than that. I shrugged my shoulders.

“Well. I'd probably manage just fine.”

The moment I gave that answer, my brother's lips curled upward — subtly. It looked a little satisfied, a little apologetic... a truly ambiguous smile.

“Then let's try it.”

“Hyung?”

“It's just about time.”

“Huh? Time for what?”

He didn't answer. Instead, looking down at me with golden eyes, he ran his large, broad hand over the crown of my head.

“Yahui.”

A pre-written page was held out to me — and a wave of drowsiness crashed over me all at once.

“Yahui.”

No. This wasn't sleep.

“Yahui.”

My heart began to constrict — without any pain.

“N-nurse—”

I tried to call out, but my body was falling faster. And even in that moment, my brother did not reach over and press the button for me.

It was a strange thing.

“Why...”

...Wait. Had that hyung's eyes always been gold?

“Remember. There is no second time. You must succeed.”

Along with a profound sense of wrongness, my eyes closed completely.