Silence Is Also an Answer
It looked for all the world like a vicious nightmare.
The corpse of Do Joojin, the man I'd been all but certain was the culprit.
Thoughts locked rigid in place.
Blood scattering through the air.
And beyond it, Yunha's body crumpling to the ground.
Yunha!!
Honestly? My mind couldn't keep up.
No, seriously — what the hell was even happening right now.
Out of nowhere, Yunha — who'd been hiding somewhere this whole time — leapt out, took a bullet, and dropped.
……Did she block it? For me?
Then who the hell just fired that shot──
Damn it.
In the gaps of my absurdly sluggish thinking, it finally dawned on me that someone had fired — and only then did a figure come walking toward me.
A lazy, swaggering gait.
A mouth curling quietly into a smile.
And on top of that, a pistol still leaking smoke.
It was a face anyone could look at once and know: this was the shooter.
A man with forgettable, unremarkable features.
Up until this very moment, that had been true enough.
The someone who had pulled the trigger at me just now.
The one who had shot Yunha down.
And, nine times out of ten, the one who had killed Do Joojin.
And yet — a face so bland that if he'd simply tossed the gun aside, he could have melted into a crowd without a hitch.
An artificial, manufactured wrongness clung to him.
Who is this guy?
"Hm? Now that's a little hurtful, don't you think? Haven't we met any number of times already?"
"The hell are you talking about?"
Now that I thought about it, the face was plenty familiar.
Specifically, we'd met just yesterday, as it happened.
No — wait.
We really had met.
"You — you're that guy!"
"Oh, so you do remember."
Of course I did. I'd thought it through well enough.
Considering Do Joojin's movements, the place where that organization had made contact with him could only be inside the Gangwon Branch, nine times out of ten.
And then there was Do Joojin's fame.
Think of the popularity of a man called the foremost of the next-generation hunters, and the culprit had to be someone he knew personally.
Popularity rivaling an idol's, responsibilities heavier than a soldier's.
In this day and age, the reality was that high-rank hunters were nearly impossible to meet unless you were summoned by one first.
With a few exceptions. Like me.
But still.
Motherfucking hell.
Guarding against even the minor supporting cast like this — that really was a stretch.
Just today, in fact.
The guide who had relayed Do Joojin's summons to me during that lunchtime meeting.
That man was standing right in front of me now.
Well — sure, of course.
No infiltrated spy bothers maintaining a flashy appearance.
But of all things, the culprit had been right beside me the whole time.
"I'll ask just in case — you're the one who killed Do Joojin, aren't you?"
"Hm. Even if I said no, I doubt you'd believe me."
"You set off the stampede too."
"Who knows? Maybe it was the monsters."
Was the plan originally to make Do Joojin set off the stampede himself?
The man gave a slippery, evasive little shrug.
Wherever he'd learned to talk like that, he never let a single incriminating word slip — and it was endlessly irritating.
But still.
"You were planning to kill me, weren't you."
The man didn't answer.
Yet there are questions in this world for which silence is itself the answer.
This was one of them.
It was certainly puzzling, though.
Even if they set off a stampede in a situation like this, what did they stand to gain from it?
Hayeon was under airtight protection.
Testing whether they could actually control monsters?
That hardly explained why they'd do it here, of all places — where I happened to be.
But flip the assumption around, and everything becomes simple.
What if they'd intended to kill me from the very start?
Lure out Do Joojin. Set off a stampede.
At that point, hunting the commander monster directing the stampede was something only I could do.
And the moment I succeeded in taking down the commander, my blade would naturally turn toward Do Joojin — who had conveniently vacated his seat.
If Do Joojin had accepted their offer, the one greeting me here right now really would have been Do Joojin himself.
……A battle with the commander monster. Then a battle with Do Joojin.
Were they planning to ambush me at my most exhausted?
The problem was that Do Joojin himself had refused their offer.
I let my gaze slide briefly toward the corpse.
The hole punched through his heart looked painfully, unbearably senseless.
After this, it almost felt sorry for having doubted him even blindly.
'I owe you an apology.'
Offering that apology in my head, I opened my warehouse.
And along with it, one more top-grade potion.
Under the man's watching eyes, I bent slowly over Yunha.
Blood soaking her side.
I tipped the bottle over the wound punched clean through her flank.
Drip. Drip.
The potion fell past the beads of blood, layering its color over them.
Like the one I'd used before, it was a potion that consumed mana.
Granted, given Yunha's condition, spending her mana at all might have been dangerous.
And so I slowly fed my own mana into the potion as it trickled down.
Timing it precisely for the moment the potion made contact with Yunha's skin.
The potion — absorbing my mana instead of hers — began to take effect.
Her color gradually steadied.
The wound punched through Yunha's side began, little by little, to close as the potion drained to its dregs.
For a short while I emptied the bottle completely.
Before long, I could feel that Yunha's complexion and breathing had settled into something markedly calmer than before.
Yunha might not appreciate hearing it, but the fact that she'd been pierced clean through was, if anything, a mercy.
If the bullet had lodged inside, she'd have suffered far worse.
The whole time I treated her, the man never moved.
Never once trained his muzzle back on my head, never made ready to strike.
He simply kept quietly measuring the distance between us.
'Figures.'
Do Joojin's refusal to cooperate must have been an unforeseen wrinkle for them as well.
Which was why his killer had left the corpse where it fell.
As one component of a trap meant to kill me.
The very instant I discovered the body and my thoughts froze —
the man struck at me.
Two things had gone wrong for them, though.
The first, of course, was Yunha's interference.
Naturally, it was hard to believe that the man who'd crushed Do Joojin head-on had failed to notice her hiding there.
'He must have left her alone on purpose.'
In case the ambush failed.
A contingency aimed first at Yunha, to be kept in reserve for later.
And there the second problem arose — namely, my own situation.
I had shattered their plans head-on, every single time.
So they'd stacked countermeasure upon countermeasure to manufacture a situation like this.
Drain my strength with a commander monster, wear me down with Do Joojin, then strike at what remained.
But with Do Joojin having refused to join them, the only reliable tool left to them was the commander monster's raw power.
And yet.
At this point, I wasn't green enough to struggle against a monster of that caliber.
In fact, the damage I'd taken amounted to nothing more than simple recoil — and even that, I'd already recovered from with a potion.
To their eyes, I must have looked like a man who'd felled Duduri without a scratch on him.
My ostentatious use of mana on that potion served the same purpose.
No issues with stamina. No issues with mana.
I was advertising exactly that.
And thanks to it, the gunman before me — for all his composed face — couldn't afford to move carelessly either.
Could you beat, in a head-on fight, a hunter who took down a monster that size without taking a single wound?
That was the image I wanted burned into his mind.
Of course, the reality was different.
The man in front of me was human.
Unfortunately.
I swept my senses over him two more times just in case, but no — that was the truth of it.
So then.
'This is the man who crushed Do Joojin head-on.'
How far could I actually take him?
Honestly? It was a knife's-edge situation.
With a stampede in full swing, I could probably force mutual destruction by layering my signature on top of everything else.
Which is to say — that was the extent of it.
Maybe I'd win more easily than expected.
Maybe it'd be far harder than I expected.
For a hunter, the single most dangerous circumstance of all.
The absence of information.
Which left me with no choice but to choose conversation.
While he was busy staring at a mirage of me, I was looking at the reality of him.
If I'd been the only one here, I might have hurled myself at him ready to trade my life for his……
But not now.
And what if I died here?
The stampede, sprung in this bizarre form.
Given the circumstantial evidence, the Gangwon Branch might well notice that this stampede was man-made.
And if so.
The first suspect would be Do Joojin — the hunter who vanished right before the stampede began.
'That'd just be cruel.'
Do Joojin, who refused their offer to the very end and died for it.
Letting a man like that be painted as the culprit was something I couldn't stomach.
Not to mention Yunha was here now.
I'd used a potion, but potions weren't omnipotent.
Frankly, if that man pressed the attack even one more step, Yunha might genuinely die.
I wanted to avoid that outcome at all costs.
And so.
"So what exactly is your purpose in all this?"
This time, I had no choice but to fight with my tongue instead of my blade.
At the same time, I was genuinely curious.
True, I'd thrown a wrench into their plans.
But I hadn't imagined they'd come charging at my life so suddenly, so brazenly.
And dragging Do Joojin into it for my sake — that made even less sense.
We were living in an era where the very phrase "residency investigation" had become a dream within a dream, but Do Joojin was a rising star hailed as the foremost of the next generation.
If a hunter of his stature abruptly vanished or turned up dead under suspicious circumstances, there was no way it wouldn't leave traces.
Multiplying one's enemies while leaving fingerprints behind — a textbook blunder, you'd call it.
Nothing like monsters.
Gates were natural disasters.
Unlike those creatures, who still carried that reputation, a hunter's death could never be quietly smoothed over.
Their organization was powerful, sure — but why on earth go out of their way to make enemies of themselves?
"Hm. I suspect you've already guessed."
And yet.
In answer to my question, the man simply smiled that same oily, evasive smile once more.
……And.
Honestly? That was that.
The suspicion that had been mere doubt until moments ago became all but certain through this one answer.
Think it through, and it's simple.
They had turned the Gangwon Branch into an enemy.
They'd accepted the risk of leaving traces and killed a heavyweight like Do Joojin.
In other words — they valued my death above even the traces they'd leave and the enmity of the Gangwon Branch.
Why?
I couldn't bring myself to believe my life was worth that much.
If I was merely an obstacle to their goals, they'd have tried to win me over instead.
Considering everything they'd shown me so far, that would have been the more rational play.
Setting aside the fact that I'd almost certainly have refused.
And yet.
They were men who'd tossed out this bribe and that inducement, feeling for cracks in the wall — and toward me alone, they'd driven the knife in without a moment's hesitation.
Only one explanation remained.
'They judged there was no chance I'd ever accept.'
Why?
It's a strange thing to say about oneself, but even Lee Joongoo or Choi Seungjun couldn't be said to truly know me yet.
And still, they had concluded that I was beyond all persuasion.
There was only one reason that made sense.
The Butcher.
Nothing more than the image radiating from the name of Korea's greatest hunter.
……Their true purpose was tied to monsters. They were seeking dominion over them.
That much I knew. That much I'd suspected.
And so?
I folded this new piece of evidence into what had been a flimsy guess, and shaped it into conviction.
Judging by their actions, they believed the Butcher would never cooperate with their purpose.
And that I would stand in its way.
Otherwise, why ever send an assassin?
And from there, one more question.
'Why send the assassin now, of all times?'
The first attack. They didn't know who I was.
The second. They learned who I was for the first time.
The third. They felt my strength firsthand.
The fourth. They had the hand they played broken.
By that point, I had flattened every piece they'd sent, one after another, head-on.
The hunter who hunted men.
The half-breed.
The high-rank monster.
Not one of them had managed to stop me.
So they'd changed methods — trading force for a campaign in the press.
And even that had quieted down lately.
And now, suddenly, this?
I retraced what could have triggered the shift in their behavior.
The monster colony inside the gate tangled up with Seoa's guild and others.
The Namhae Branch incident.
Or, stacked on top of those — the Succubus Queen affair.
'There's only one explanation.'
Perhaps, just perhaps, it's because I now hold enough evidence to deduce their purpose.
That was the conclusion I reached.
Nothing else could account for so abrupt a reversal.
Their purpose.
Whatever it was, it was something the Butcher would never, under any circumstances, aid.
And so they sought to bury me.
Then what was their purpose?
I picked through each point that defied rational explanation.
Despite putting collars around monsters' necks, the monsters themselves were cooperating eagerly.
In other words — something that benefited even an S-rank monster.
And simultaneously, something greater than an S-rank monster──
Ah.
A chill of certainty.
A shiver deeper than that.
And with it, shock slammed into me like a fist.
'Maybe I had it backwards.'
They weren't cooperating with the monsters.
Think of it in exactly the opposite way.
Astonishingly simple, when you do.
The one holding out its hand wasn't the monsters.
It was humanity's side, all along.
I had no choice but to believe it.
The purpose of this organization — one that even this country's uppermost echelons had dipped half a foot into……
The Great Cataclysm.
The Third Great Cataclysm — its occurrence, and its control.
Or, a transaction timed to the Third Great Cataclysm.
The selling of the Republic of Korea itself, as collateral for their own safety.
"Haha. So — how close am I?"
At last, the question left my mouth.
But even now, the man only wore that shameless, maddeningly composed expression and dodged the answer.
Yet there are questions in this world for which silence is itself the answer.
And this question belonged squarely to that kind.