Because She Came From the Same Lab
"Still haven't bought a new phone?"
That evening.
Lee Joongoo greeted me the moment I showed up right after work, flashing an awkward smile as he said it.
The usual café.
Despite sitting right in the heart of evening commute hour, the place remained as quiet as ever — one of the few spots in all of South Korea where a man as famous as Lee Joongoo, arguably the most renowned person in the entire country, and I could meet without worry.
Personally, though, I'd had my doubts.
He had his reasons, sure, but the man was a sitting National Assembly member.
Meanwhile, I'd barely managed to squeeze in a call at the last possible second before today.
I'd worried whether my schedule could ever be accommodated, but it turned out to be a needless concern. Think about my side of things for once — I have to take your calls from a different number every time, you brat. Enough with the drama.
He was, if anything, the most famous hunter in the world, let alone Korea.
The only reason I could reach him at all was that I still had his old number saved.
At his level, the list of people with a direct line to him had to be painfully short.
Which meant even if I called from an unknown number, there was almost no chance he'd ignore it. Unless he'd been recklessly handing his number out to strangers, anyone calling him in a panic would be assumed to have a genuine emergency.
And yet for all that brilliance, the great hero couldn't see the darkness right beneath his own lamp, apparently.
At my casually tossed-out remark, bitterness seeped into his smile.
So he'd guessed the situation after all.
Lee Yeeun was his little sister before she was ever my student.
No matter how much time he spent away from home, it would have been hard to believe he'd missed even that much.
Having confirmed his reaction, I nodded slowly and spoke.
"Lee Yeeun. She's been using something strange."
"I see."
"Did you teach her that?"
I asked, but honestly, I didn't really believe it myself.
Seeing Yeeun's ability with my own eyes had heated my head for a moment, yes.
But after turning it over since then, I simply could not bring myself to believe Lee Joongoo had taught such a technique to his own little sister.
It wasn't a matter of trust or faith. It was a matter of sheer capability.
To put it bluntly, Lee Joongoo was the least talented of every hunter I knew.
Of course, if this were an industry where talent alone carried you through everything, humanity's strongest wouldn't be Lee Joongoo — it would be Choi Seungjun.
But this man wasn't clever enough to teach anyone else anything, period.
"You think so?"
"No."
"Yeah, you're right. Looks like she watched me fight. She suddenly showed it off right in front of me, all proud."
His smile deepened into something wry as he said it, almost self-deprecating.
Which was fair enough.
His signature technique was not the kind of thing anyone should copy just because it looked impressive.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
You'd have to call it the desperate flailing of a dullard.
Had Lee Joongoo been competent from the start, the technique would never have needed to exist in the first place.
To explain that, I'd have to start with his ability itself.
Or more precisely, with the exact details of how it worked.
Thunder God.
True to the name, Lee Joongoo was an ability user who could discharge electricity.
But very few people actually knew precisely what his power entailed.
Some liked to say that humanity's strongest hunter, the so-called Thunder God, could surely hurl down bolts of lightning with a flick of his finger — that his power must be overwhelming.
Unfortunately, no.
If anything, his ability was among the most garbage-tier I'd ever seen in any hunter.
Its exact name was Electrical Discharge.
The farther you got from the ability's core, the weaker the output became — in a sense, a perfectly typical power.
Except.
The fundamental problem with his ability lay in exactly that output gap.
For most hunters, output simply rises the closer you are to their body. That's as far as it goes.
Lee Joongoo was different.
The gap in his output was violently, absurdly extreme.
To put it bluntly — at this point, after being trained to its absolute limit.
His maximum output extended precisely to the surface of his own skin.
And even that was weaker than an ordinary stun gun.
Meanwhile, around his heart — the core of the ability — the output was excessive to the point of absurdity.
He had the basic electrical resistance befitting a lightning-wielding hunter.
But the storm raging around his heart brushed that resistance aside like it was nothing.
If that piece of trash had been the ability I awakened with, I'd have quit being a hunter on the spot.
Or killed myself.
It was that bad.
A devastating backlash that strained his heart every single time he activated it.
And in return, less power than a stun gun built by an elementary schooler.
Faced with such a garbage ability, the Lee Joongoo of the past stood at a crossroads.
In other words, the dilemma every hunter faces at least once.
How do I develop my ability?
Ordinary people treated hunter powers like some kind of psychic phenomena, but a hunter's ability was, at its root, a physical function.
Specifically, it was the output of the mana-forming organs that took shape through contact with mana.
Which meant abilities could be trained.
Beyond that, hunters could even choose the direction in which their power evolved.
In short, Lee Joongoo had to decide how to design his own ability.
Would he labor to control that bizarre output gap and smooth it into something with a workable average output?
Or would he lean into the power's peculiar nature instead?
Me, I'd have chosen the former without a second thought.
But this lunatic chose the latter.
Even if he'd gone the former route, he'd only ever end up on par with every other electricity user out there — and realistically, even that was a stretch.
So instead, he resolved to do what no other hunter could.
That was his decision.
...If the man had any stroke of fortune at all, it was that among the hunters he knew, there happened to be someone with healing powers.
Having decided to throw himself on that woman's mercy, he began training his ability in earnest.
Though "training" is a generous word. From where I stood, it was nothing short of self-torture.
In fact, more than one healer quit on the spot mid-treatment, muttering those exact words.
At first, he merely ramped up his output in small increments.
He started within the range his recovery could keep up with — but as the medical team's skills climbed along with him, he steadily escalated the intensity of his training to match.
And then.
After frying himself crispy with his own power well over a hundred times.
At last, it was complete.
A battle style unique to Lee Joongoo, built to weaponize the extreme output locked inside his own body.
Literally: converting his entire body into lightning and hurling himself into bare-knuckle close combat.
The technique known as Thunder God was the very reason he came to be called "thunder that took the shape of a man."
Which is exactly why there was no way in hell he'd taught it to his little sister.
Quite simply, because it was lethal.
Circulating his power through his whole body, transmuting his own flesh into lightning — that was the essence of the technique.
He'd even gone and learned martial arts just to wield it at full capacity, this man sitting in front of me.
And yet the way Lee Yeeun used her ability was clumsy to an almost painful degree.
She didn't circulate her power through her body at all — she wore it like an external coat.
And her movements? Not a shred of martial foundation anywhere, no matter how hard you looked.
There was nothing in her of the agonizing thought Lee Joongoo had poured into squeezing every drop from his meager ability to devise an optimal fighting style.
How to put it — she was imitating the surface, all appearance and no substance, without grasping a single principle.
Watching her felt like watching rookie hunters copy a tactic without ever wondering why its creator had adopted it in the first place.
Needless to say, if you could fire lightning normally, shooting from range was strictly better.
Even with martial arts training, it made far more sense to harry from a distance and only close in for melee when forced.
In other words, Lee Joongoo's style was a desperate stopgap — the best a man could scrape together when that was literally all he could do.
Besides.
It's not even a style that suits telekinesis in the first place.
"That much is true."
Lee Joongoo agreed.
He'd committed to using his ability that way in the first place because it was, for his power, the only combat method that fit.
Close combat, where he could squeeze the most from his ability.
Converting his entire body to lightning to control a backlash violent enough to ruin his own flesh.
And above all, the inherent nature of lightning itself.
Touch it, and you're shocked. Or — it's simply fast.
Either way, it was a trait that fire or frost could never claim.
Converting his whole body into a bolt of lightning and driving home a straight punch at the speed of thunder — that was Lee Joongoo's signature, and his alone.
But telekinesis?
Right off the bat, nothing about it clicks.
An invisible force. The most iconic psychic power there is.
Fine, I get that much. But what advantage does turning your entire body into telekinesis actually grant you?
You could maybe apply it to dodging attacks, but honestly, compared to Lee Joongoo's offense-and-defense-in-one lightning transformation, it just felt bland.
If her ability had some unique quirk like his, she'd have needed to get creative to differentiate herself.
Unfortunately, Lee Yeeun's power belonged to no such category.
The problem was, if anything, that it was versatile to a fault.
Put simply, she was forcing her head through clothes that didn't fit her.
And yet the reason she'd put up more than respectable results until now came down to one thing.
Sense.
Lee Yeeun's own instincts were simply exceptional.
Exceptional enough to deliver flawless performances while wearing clothes that didn't fit at all.
In raw talent output and refined technique, she naturally fell far short of Choi Seungjun.
But.
In her adaptability — having watched Lee Joongoo's style and reinvented it in her own way — there was unmistakably the caliber of a top-tier hunter.
Not that this industry was forgiving enough to survive on sense alone.
"So what are you planning to do? You gonna make her run telekinesis through her nerves like you do? No wait — what would that even change?"
"Nothing. I know that, I do..."
A short sigh.
In the end, Lee Joongoo had no choice but to admit it.
"It's... not as easy as it sounds."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You're looking after a kid yourself these days, so you'd know. Relationships between people — they're really not that simple."
"Huh? She never complains about anything. Quiet as anything at home, too."
"...Well, yeah. She's the type who'll sit there without a word of complaint even in that dump of yours. What can you do."
As he shook his head, something in the gesture rubbed me the wrong way in a way I couldn't quite name.
It was like watching middle-aged men knocking back soju and sighing, you just don't understand life yet, kid.
"Life's bitter, so soju tastes sweet to me..."
There it was. The eighteenth entry in their sacred playbook.
"Bullshit. Sweet my ass. I live my life without thinking, and wine tastes sweeter."
"You'd better watch yourself. Your situation's special right now, sure, but a teacher living under the same roof as his student isn't exactly a good look..."
"Wow. You've fully become a kid's dad."
"Honestly, a basement semi-basement isn't great for a kid's emotional development, is it?"
Are you shitting me.
I nearly fired that back before I could stop myself, and only barely managed to swallow it by drawing an advance on roughly three years' worth of patience.
Yes, the annoyance was there. But the man in front of me had genuinely raised a sister ten years his junior all on his own, a boy-turned-head-of-household.
At the very least, I — the guy who'd once announced, forget childcare, I want to go kill that monster Daddy's always fighting, so I'm running away, byeee — and lit the fuse of family collapse in the process, had no standing to say a word to him.
"Well... there are things I can't really talk about."
Even so, I couldn't exactly refute his point either.
Speaking of emotional development — nothing I owned in my one-room apartment was worse for a kid's psyche than this man's training regimen.
High school girls.
That legendary life-form capable of citing a hundred reasons to grieve over a single falling leaf.
And he wanted to demonstrate that training method in front of a little sister who'd only just started high school?
How, exactly?
"What?"
"No, nothing."
Sorry, little sis, but your brother's turned me into medium-rare more than a hundred times doing that move? Think I should tell her to knock it off?
Absolutely, categorically impossible.
Lee Yeeun, who idolized her brother to a frankly excessive degree, would only take it worse.
If anything, the situation might escalate.
With that bone-chilling scenario flickering before my eyes — the kind that makes your jaw tremble involuntarily — I shook my head hard.
"No. Still, we have to do something. You're not seriously planning to just leave her like this?"
Truthfully, it made no difference to me.
If it were genuinely her conviction.
Everyone has at least one thing they refuse to compromise on while living in this world.
Put that way, me lecturing Lee Yeeun now — after never once stopping Lee Joongoo from his crispy-on-the-outside, raw-on-the-inside self-immolation — might be a somewhat farcical double standard.
Granted, she'd probably fire back: how exactly does flattening my own nerves with telekinesis help anyone?
But.
If Lee Yeeun said she truly wanted to be a hunter.
Then I, too, would have no choice but to call it a problem.
A hunter is, above all, a hunter.
It's a job that slits the throats of those accursed bastards on behalf of the helpless people who'd otherwise just writhe in the dirt when monsters appear.
And a hunter who plays half-baked cosplay of her own brother with her ability?
That's nothing short of a public menace.
To her teammates, and to civilians alike.
A hunter who prioritizes playing big brother over saving the people she's supposed to save?
Even I could never forgive that.
"That's just how it is."
It's not as if I've never considered how convenient it would be to throw ordinary people out as bait and drive monsters into a driven hunt.
But the reason I've never done such a thing comes down to one thing.
Because it's wrong.
Well — partly because the man sitting across from me would probably go berserk like a rabid dog if he found out...
But more fundamentally:
Let's not do bad things.
You can't make a levee to protect humanity out of someone who can't even live up to a first-grade ethics textbook.
If it came to that, talent or no talent, she'd be better off never becoming a hunter at all.
For Lee Yeeun's sake, and everyone else's.
At the end of the day, who's going to object if a retired hunter wants to use her ability however she pleases?
As I said it with finality, Lee Joongoo's face twisted into that bitter smile again.
Relieved, yet somehow anxious.
A strangely hard-to-read smile.
Looking at that face, a thought suddenly struck me.
Maybe he'd recommended me for that teaching post — one so ill-suited to me — because he'd been hoping, all along, that I'd settle this question for him one way or another.
"I can't just leave her be."
And yet you knew, and you did exactly that until now.
"Sorry. I couldn't help it."
And then.
With that sheepish face. That relieved face.
The man opened his mouth and dropped the biggest bombshell of the entire evening.
"Because she came from the same experimental lab I did."