Dragons in Disguise
"Hast thou truly gone mad?"
At the flippant offer I'd tossed out, the goddess's gaze snapped sharply upward. Fair enough—it was absurd. Objectively speaking, that was exactly where I stood: a scoundrel who had, at the very ceremony where her blessing was to be bestowed, suddenly lopped off the goddess's horn and run. For a man who'd vanished without a trace to reappear one day and open his mouth with a proposal like that, a laugh or two was only to be expected. It would have been no different even if there were people who'd waited days on end for a single word of her counsel—at an attitude like mine, they'd have managed nothing more than hollow, disbelieving laughter.
But for me, it was dead serious. There was exactly one reason I was here: to forge a line onto my résumé claiming I'd received the goddess's grace.
Well—no, that wasn't truly the only reason. Honestly, if that were all there was to it, I'd be getting called an unqualified parachute hire myself. I readjusted the gas mask that never failed to feel suffocating and thought as much.
Which was why Lee Joongoo had attached a tidy justification to my out-of-nowhere request. Or maybe, for him, this had been the real agenda from the very start. In any case, a man who'd walked away from hunter life could hardly have found any legitimate pretext to approach the goddess—not as humanity's strongest hunter, but as Lee Joongoo, freshman National Assemblyman, requesting a private audience with her was simply out of the question. Granted, with a name that carried as much weight as his, there was little he couldn't have managed, but on matters like this the man was a principled bastard to a fault.
"What a trifling little thing."
The goddess said it as though chiding me, yet in the same breath beckoned me closer with a crooked finger, as if she couldn't be bothered to care. For a moment I entertained how satisfying it would be to seize that finger and snap it in two—then I fished out the hunter's license I'd been wearing around my neck for this Association visit and flung it over.
She caught it, turned it over a couple of times, and brought the proceedings to a close by snickering at my ID photo. It pissed me off a little, but the license she handed back was unmistakably imbued with the goddess's power. It wasn't so much a physical effect as literal, tangible proof that her power resided within it—but with this, I could invoke the goddess's blessing without it being a lie. Capricious she might be, but in these matters the woman was refreshingly prompt.
I pulled out the tongs I'd dutifully packed, took the license she held out, dropped it into the lead-lined box I'd prepared in advance, locked the lid, wrapped the whole thing in foil, sealed it in a plastic bag, and tied it shut. That put my mind somewhat at ease. Digging it out again later would be a pain in the ass, but I couldn't exactly go around carrying that hideous thing on my person, so it was what it was.
"Now then—to the main matter."
"Hmm. It is certainly a matter thou wouldst be curious about."
I briefly debated jabbing a finger into those eyes that regarded me with such pity, but ultimately decided my finger deserved better. Instead, I brought up the actual business at hand. The goddess had said that just now, but my own business was already wrapped up—so to be more precise, this was Lee Joongoo's main matter. In any case, the justification that had moved this woman to speak at such length was none other than the recent incident: the whole cascade of events surrounding that girl, Ja Hayeon.
Frankly, I couldn't have cared less. That incident had left the realm of anything I could influence long ago. Besides, with this visit having all but confirmed that she drew monsters to her, my purpose here was more or less fulfilled. Above all, as I'd said back then, this was a subject for the high and mighty to agonize over. The problem was that Lee Joongoo—the man who'd smoothed so many paths for me this time—was precisely one of those high and mighty. Tch. And so, however little I liked it, I found myself nodding along.
Past the goddess's satisfied bobbing head, hair that smoldered like live flame spilled downward.
That said, I wasn't pinning much hope on it. To put it bluntly: goddess this, divine that—all the fanfare aside, her true nature was a monster. Since descending into that body, she'd frittered away most of her time on this top floor, and my honest feeling was, what could she possibly know? Honestly, I was starting to wear thin myself.
To me, monsters were nothing but overgrown cockroaches. If one scuttled into view, I'd exterminate it thoroughly; if it turned to flee, I'd chase it down and see the kill confirmed. But I had zero interest in actively hunting for a roach that might be lurking somewhere inside the house. And besides, there was still a cockroach sitting right in front of me as things stood. A monster in disguise, no less—so no, it wasn't as if there weren't any.
But what came out of her mouth was quite different from anything I'd expected. Frankly, I hadn't thought I'd get anything out of this. After all, with me and Joongoo both banging our heads against the wall, I couldn't imagine this goddess—who'd presumably heard the situation secondhand through Joongoo and his ilk—uncovering something we hadn't. Even granting that Joongoo and I were born brawlers, that wouldn't be so different for this goddess either.
"What is there to be so surprised about? Surely thou dost not mean to say thou knowest not what I do ordinarily."
Hearing her put it that way, I could sort of see her point. Fair enough—this was an age where even the world's most die-hard atheist couldn't deny the existence of gods. But as the goddess before my eyes made plain, the Constellations worshipped the world over were, in the end, nothing more than monsters.
The woman in front of me was no different. She might wear the shape of a beautiful woman now, but her essence was, at bottom, no different from those dragons that had gone about in disguise. In a manner of speaking, her current form, too, might well be called a kind of disguise. I couldn't claim she'd melted into society, even as a joke—but it was equally true that she behaved with a familiarity that made the word monster feel like an understatement.
"Wast thou not already harboring suspicions of thy own, in the first place?"
"Meaning what?"
"Disguise is not so simple a thing as one might imagine."
She wasn't wrong. As I'd noted before, a monster's attempt at disguise was hardly something you could actually put to use. We live in an era where, from a historical perspective, it counts as comparatively recent that people pointed guns at one another over nothing more than differences in skin color—so the odds of pulling off a disguise as an entirely different species were slim to none. Which meant the image that comes to mind when people first hear the word—a monster wearing a human face, slipping unnoticed into society—was, realistically, a nonstarter.
"In that sense, this case is a strange one, is it not?"
"Hmm?"
"Did they not say those creatures were clad in human clothing?"
"Did they?"
It definitely felt like something like that had been said... or maybe not. Come to think of it, Joongoo's report on the scene might have mentioned it. Or not—I'd skimmed the thing, so my memory was hazy. Even so, come on... By the time I came to my senses, they were already lumps of meat. There was no way I'd remember, one by one, the things I'd beaten to death with my own two hands. In the end, all I could manage was a puzzled tilt of the head and a nod.
Whether my cluelessness struck her as funny, the goddess let out a short, hearty laugh.
"What's this? I heard thou hadst retired, but hast thy edge truly dulled? The infamous Butcher, of all people?"
"Fuck—that goddamn 'Butcher.'"
The curse slipped out before I knew it. Seriously, what even was a 'Butcher' supposed to be? Why did Joongoo get to be the Thunder God while I got stuck with 'Butcher'? They couldn't have at least gone with 'Slaughterer'? There were plenty of more dignified options! Having grumbled despite myself, I smothered the sour feeling and prompted the goddess to get on with it. After all, what this goddess—bricked up on the Association's top floor, frittering away her days—had pointed out was genuinely something even I had missed.
"Which is to say—it means they have grown well and truly accustomed to human society."
"Yeah, I can see that at a glance."
"Oh ho? Truly? That those insufferably arrogant dragons learned the tongue of humans and clad themselves in human garb?"
Hearing that much, the thought struck me too. To put it crudely: a human might come to understand the language of ants, but no human would ever shed his own body to become one.
"For a monster to pass itself off as human, a period of adaptation is all but inevitable. And these are dragons we speak of—insufferably proud creatures, every last one."
"Like you?"
"...Dost thou truly imagine such dragons went rummaging through clothing donation bins? Rest assured—they would have arranged some other means of acquiring garments."
And, ironically enough, modern society required that you already be wearing clothes in order to buy any. Debating that little contradiction—one that wouldn't be mislabeled as a paradox of modern life—might not have been a bad way to spend an afternoon, but unfortunately, that wasn't what she was driving at.
"It seems they have taken root rather deeply."
"Hmm."
"Dragons in human guise, with leisure enough to procure clothing. And no particular difficulty pronouncing the human tongue, at that. How long dost thou suppose such a thing would take? A good ten years, at the very least."
Boldly, the goddess declared it. And the conclusion that followed from it was no simple thing. Ten years, she said—but that measured only the time it took dragons to acclimate themselves to human culture. The means by which they learned the human language. And beyond that, the means to secure human clothing. In practical terms? Fifteen years at the bare minimum—perhaps they'd been there since the very beginning of the Great Invasion.
Some portion of the monsters had, to some degree, succeeded in settling in. This time, I had no choice but to agree. For dragons to have blended into society that naturally meant, in other words, that they'd built up a working infrastructure for adapting to it.
I might have to retract what I'd silently denied just moments ago. Perhaps monsters had already seeped into this society. And not just any monsters—the dragons, hailed as the most superior of their kind.
"I, too, shall have to take it back."
Toward me, still turning that thought over, the goddess suddenly said so. The non sequitur wrung a frown out of me before I knew it, and the goddess, a sneer tugging at her lips, waved her hand with easy grace.
"It seems thou hast not gone dull after all."
With somewhat mixed feelings, I let the tension drain from my face. I had no intention of standing there like an idiot, groping about to figure out what my expression was doing.
The information I'd walked away with was bigger than I'd anticipated. First: the dragons might be hiding within South Korean society. Second: by the goddess Tiamat's reasoning, they'd likely been lying in wait for a good ten years or more. Third: those dragons in hiding were, for reasons unknown, targeting Ja Hayeon.
Any way you sliced it, this was beyond what a self-employed nobody like me could handle. At the very least, Joongoo needed to hear about it. We'd have to spin the hunters loose like rat catchers and flush out every dragon in hiding. No—even the ones in hiding might not all be dragons. We'd only just come off a stretch where we couldn't turn up a single monster, so I didn't think others were lurking nearby, but you never know.
And once we found them? Needless to say: chop them to pieces on the spot. That was the whole point of the protective surveillance I'd applied for in the first place, wasn't it? If the monsters hiding inside society ever bared their true nature, I couldn't even guess the scale of the carnage. If for no other reason, we needed to smoke them out as fast as humanly possible.
...There was no question that this situation sat at an unprecedented, absurd level of danger. And yet, even so, I couldn't stop the corners of my mouth from curling upward.
"Hayeon! So thou wert truly my winning lottery ticket! My thanks!!"
"That should just about do it, should it not?"
At the voice that rang out belatedly, I forcibly flattened the mood that had been swelling up in me. Certainly, without her, this case might have gotten seriously awkward. When it came to the ins and outs of those fucking monster bastards, nothing beat asking one of the bastards themselves. I hated to admit it, but she'd undeniably helped.
Other hunters would probably have packaged all this up as 'the goddess's wisdom.' With that thought, Park Woochan decided, for once in his life, to nod along obediently and send a word of praise the goddess's way.
"Turns out even you have your uses."
"Genuinely so fucking annoying."
The next moment, the goddess had muttered it before she could stop herself. A tone so flippant that anyone else flitting in and out of this room would have fainted dead away on the spot.