One Second of Resolve
All the same, something about this was seriously off.
That was the verdict Hwang Yoonha passed on the situation she now found herself in. A good ten minutes had passed since she'd crossed paths with that hunter—Do Joojin, or whatever his name was—and from that moment to this one, the man had done nothing but climb. At first she'd assumed he meant to cull the monsters in the vicinity, but apparently that wasn't it either. He hadn't reacted so much as once despite her calling out to him several times, which meant he was lost in thought—deeply, thoroughly lost.
So Yoonha, too, gave up on understanding and trailed his footsteps for a while. And by the time the watchtower at the summit began to come into view, even she couldn't help but be thrown off balance.
No, what is this?
It was a situation she simply could not make sense of. Yoonha knew there was a dungeon-surveillance watchtower on this summit, one installed by the Gangwon Branch. So why head there, all of a sudden?
Wasn't he here looking for us?
For now, that was the only conclusion she could draw. No branch would spin up its watchtower over a mere dungeon practicum. And even if they did, brushing aside the word of the student concerned was another matter entirely. Either way, one thing was self-evident: this was no ordinary situation.
Which meant Yoonha could no longer afford to play it cool, either. She could feel it—a sticky, clinging sense of wrongness creeping up the back of her neck.
And yet.
No, fuck!!
Even so, there was nothing—absolutely nothing—she could do about her current predicament. Because she flat-out could not catch up to Do Joojin's strides as he sprinted into the distance. The man was moving at close to combat speed. Yoonha strained until the last possible moment to close the gap, but in the end, far from catching him, she lost sight of him entirely.
Not that it was much of a problem. Judging by his bearing, Do Joojin had been all but certainly headed for the watchtower at the summit.
The problem was—
Could she really just follow him in?
However she looked at it, Hunter Do Joojin's current state was anything but normal. Whatever his circumstances were, maybe this wasn't something a mere student should be sticking her nose into... The thought crossed her mind, but the next moment she was moving toward the summit without a shred of hesitation.
It was that boldness peculiar to Hwang Yoonha—the one Park Woochan had once described. A reaction bordering on indifference, working in her favor for once.
Naturally, she wasn't a fool. There were a few convictions propping her up. The location, for one: the conviction that nothing truly serious would go down while students were in the middle of their dungeon practicum. Or the expectation that even if she did land in danger, someone would come for her.
Because he was that kind of person. That ill-natured homeroom teacher of hers, who was probably watching her flounder around from somewhere far away this whole time.
...Perhaps it was a feeling closer to letting her guard down. An emotion too heavy to package as trust.
But reality extends courtesy to no one's circumstances.
And so—
Huk, kheuk...!!
What Yoonha, who had climbed that watchtower without a second thought, laid eyes on was the death of a man. A body crumpling to the floor, a hole punched clean through his heart. Life draining from a face no one would believe had been briskly climbing a mountain mere minutes ago.
What on earth had happened? What could have occurred in the span of a few breaths? The questions began chasing their own tails. The scent of death hung thick and heady. And at the same time—
Gunsmoke?
Yoonha's nose caught a smell so acrid it stung. It was unmistakable. Gunsmoke, a rarity in this day and age—what could it possibly signify here? Before she could arrive at an answer, though—
"What a wretchedly pitiful state you're in."
Someone. Someone standing over Do Joojin looked down at him and murmured those words. A voice so cold it made her shoulders jolt of their own accord. Gentle in tone, and yet—it was the voice of a person utterly indifferent to whether anyone lived or died.
"If only you'd cooperated quietly from the start."
"You bastard—what the hell is your objective...!"
"Hm? No, I did tell you, didn't I?"
"You expect me to believe that now...?!"
"Ah, that story about the Butcher and all the rest of it was, of course, a lie."
But.
Even someone like her had words she couldn't ignore. The Butcher?
She knew that word. No—perhaps "epithet" was the better term. Her homeroom teacher's nickname, from back in his active days, if she remembered right. But why would that name come up here? Without meaning to, Yoonha stilled her breathing and strained her ears toward the conversation.
"Though I was entirely sincere about the method."
"You lunatic...!!"
"How harsh. You're hurting my feelings." The man said it with a practiced, guileless shrug of his shoulders. From where Yoonha stood she couldn't even make out his face properly, but the voice told her at least that he was a man. No—before that, it sounded like a voice she'd heard somewhere before.
"When a stampede breaks out, you can see the Butcher fighting monsters. I said nothing untrue, did I?"
"Do you think that makes any sense?! I am a hunter!"
"Yes. A stirring speech—heard every word. I'm relieved to see you've lived a life of such high job satisfaction."
And then—
Bang! Bang!!
The successive shots tore through Do Joojin's body once again. For Hunter Do Joojin, who had been barely clinging to life on the strength of his physical reinforcement, it was an unquestionably fatal wound. And thanks to that, Hwang Yoonha knew something else, too: that the voice Do Joojin had squeezed out moments ago had, in effect, become his last.
...What came after that, she couldn't quite remember. The man who'd made a corpse of him without so much as a flicker of concern simply vanished from sight. At the same time, a dull boom rolled through the earth. The watchtower began to sway this way and that as if an earthquake had struck, and at its edge Yoonha crouched, hugging her knees, trembling.
The carnage before her eyes. The death of a person. She was used to the tragedies monsters wrought—but the fact that a human being had killed another human being was something she found she could never quite get used to.
Pit-pat. Pit-pat. Rain began to fall, drumming down in a strangely lively rhythm—and then, at some point, even that cut off with a snap. Into one corner of Yoonha's fear-frozen vision, an intruder came crashing in.
"Do Joojin, you fucking bastard!!"
A flippancy utterly ill-suited to the scene. A voice that boomed across the whole tower. It was her homeroom teacher, Park Woochan. And at that fact—God, how much relief flooded through Yoonha?
Did he come to save me?
Eh, whatever.
He shouldn't have come up here at all.
Either way—please save me, Ssaem.
Yoonha's mouth, on the verge of saying exactly that, clamped shut with a clunk. A mere coincidence? Or someone's design? And in the eyes of Yoonha—still half-forming the words—a gun barrel slid into view, peeking out from the far side of the watchtower.
Her heart lurched—fear had seized her by the ankle.
What is that.
Why is that here.
No way.
Didn't he get away?
Why?
Her thoughts accelerate as if struck by lightning. In time stretched taut like a wire, Park Woochan's face—stiff, as if caught off guard—was vivid to the point of agony. If she didn't move now, he would die. He would simply die. She couldn't help but feel the truth of it in her bones. That was how clean, how seamless, the ambush was.
And so, for the one second she had left, Hwang Yoonha spent her time cursing the world.
I have to say something. If I don't warn him, he dies.
Even if he is our homeroom teacher, there's no withstanding that.
He has to dodge.
But then what?
If I yell dodge, what comes next?
Won't I be the one who dies?
Why?
I don't want to die.
Even if I'm the one who outs him, won't he come for me?
No, that's not the point.
Then what?
Why me, of all people? Why am I stuck in this situation?
Damn it, I never even wanted to be a hunter. If the money had been good, I'd have shrugged everything off from day one. But there's no money.
That was where the tragedy started, huh.
I really, really hate this.
I was going to quit when I got back, you know.
Who ever wants to die in the first place? When people say they want to die, it means they don't want to live like this.
I don't want to die.
Then just stay still, then.
"Ssaem!!"
The next moment, Hwang Yoonha was running. Why? For what reason? However many times she asked herself, no clear answer ever came.
Fuck.
Without meaning to, Yoonha let out a hollow laugh. Were there seriously blockheads like this in the world? And yet—there was one thing even a blockhead couldn't help but realize. The thought she'd just had was, truly, disgusting. Because she didn't want to die. Because she was scared. ...It hadn't been any sense of duty pushing at her back. If she had to put it into words, she'd simply thought it would be a little lonely.
Lonely over what?
If her homeroom teacher disappeared.
Out of nowhere, Yoonha recalled a face of his she'd seen once before. Not the profile of the man who'd pulled her out of the hands of that deranged kidnapper. No—the expression of her homeroom teacher, the day he came looking for her when she'd skipped school to work a part-time job, tossing one question after another her way. The shameless mug of the man who'd set her up with a new job and then dropped by to ask how it was going. The sight of him nodding along, dead serious, to worries she'd never once shared with another soul. For him to vanish now, of all times—it would be a little lonely.
...In the time stretched taut like a wire, for the one second she had left, Hwang Yoonha had meant to spend the moments cursing the world. And that was exactly why—the instant that moment passed, she suddenly understood. Why she'd been rattling on and on with all these pointless thoughts. And why, though more than enough time had passed, her homeroom teacher's flustered face was still so vividly, impossibly clear.
Son of a bitch.
This is my life flashing before my eyes, isn't it.
A magic-infused bullet shatters her shield to pieces. Even the ability she'd triggered too late proved of precious little help. What it felt like to be shot for the first time in her life—she would have been hard-pressed to describe. A white-hot pain. Agony. The feel and the smell of blood trickling stickily down. Before she could even begin to grasp the sensations crashing over her, Hwang Yoonha's consciousness sank past the lip of a bottomless abyss.
It was, without question, a critical wound.