Chapter 18
"Because she's from the same laboratory as me, you see."
Saying which, Lee Joongoo took to stirring the teacup set before him, round and round, for no reason at all.
...For a moment, a doubtful hum slipped out of me before I could stop it. With a sheepish smile and a nod, Joongoo eventually opened his mouth and began explaining all over again. I let it go in one ear and out the other as I slowly lifted the teacup that had been served for my share — naturally, to hide my face.
Because.
'No. Seriously?'
I hadn't the faintest clue what to make of what he'd just said. Fuck — what even is a 'laboratory,' you goddamn weeb?
As it happened, the whole era was like that. An era where carelessly asking after someone's parents could spark a blazing curse-out about their family. People had gradually stopped asking one another after family or acquaintances, and I was no exception. In fact, all I knew of his family history amounted, at most, to a suspicion that his parents were probably gone. Counting Yeeun's existence, that made exactly two. And even that much wasn't certain. How would I know why he'd lost his parents — let alone a word like 'laboratory'?
'Anyway, why does that bastard talk like that?' A tone that acted as if I, of all people, should obviously already know. No, I don't. I don't know, so tell me — explain it to me...!! Just what the hell did that bastard take me for?
Lapping at my coffee over the rim of the cup I'd raised to swallow my bewilderment, I slowly worked on keeping my face in order.
"You know this already, but this country was never safe from the gates either."
"Mm."
I nodded along as if I understood every word, but in truth I hadn't fully grasped what he was getting at. I could take a guess, though. From the laboratory. And once the word 'state' entered the picture, it was hard not to connect the dots.
"We're test subjects — created under the state's direct leadership, in that kind of situation."
Experiments to manufacture hunters. There had certainly been rumors to that effect — no, urban legends, more precisely. Legends that, in the early days of the gates, the leaderships of various nations had waded into human experimentation to artificially cultivate hunters. The problem was that, unlike most conspiracy theories, a fair number of countries had actually gone through with it.
These days we'd more or less grown used to it, but back during the Great Invasion, monsters had been as good as living natural disasters — things that could appear without warning, anywhere, anytime, and set about tearing people apart. So politicians reaching for an artificial hunter project was, in a sense, the obvious move. An investment to seize the upper hand overnight in a world thrown into chaos. Or an issue to wrap the domestic political scene around their fingers. And even setting those motives aside, it was self-evident that being able to manufacture hunters would be an enormous boon to the front lines against the monsters.
In fact, to this day the nations of the world were still researching awakening agents and the like to induce hunters artificially. The results were lackluster — but considering research ethics and the cascade of side effects, that was only to be expected. Development was bound to take time.
And the story went that some nations had answered all of that by telling research ethics to go to hell. In truth, everyone was simply keeping it hushed up — most of the countries staring down the unprecedented disaster of the First Great Invasion had been in no position to keep their hands clean, whether they liked it or not.
That said. Did that make it justifiable? No, it didn't. Least of all for the ones it was done to.
"The subjects were orphans, of course. It's a bit ugly to say, but there were more than enough of them to go rotten."
He meant that literally.
"Even saying so — for me it's a story from so far back I can barely remember it now."
But. In the years since the gates first appeared, this country's orphan rate had done nothing but climb; not once had it ever fallen. Thanks to that, there was no need to chew over his words now. I could more or less predict what he would say next. Or rather, the gist itself wasn't so different from the conspiracy theories — perhaps because, from the very beginning, those rumors had been built on facts exposed all over the world.
"Manufacturing artificial mana circulation organs. Limit-testing abilities... It feels wrong for me to say it, being one of the subjects, but the unethical experiments happened there about as routinely as meals."
"Hoo. And things like that actually got approved?"
"Strictly speaking, they were never approved. Quite a few people got stripped of their posts over it, too."
That figured. What he'd described just now was hardly ordinary either. An 'artificial mana circulation organ' meant, literally, that an artificially manufactured organ for handling mana had been implanted into the body. And unlike the organs a person was born with, implanting such a prosthetic naturally required clearing out what was already there — physically, to make empty space. And what, I wondered, would have been done to orphans to secure that empty space? ...Not something I wanted to dwell on.
The ability limit tests were no different. 'Limit test' was a polite name for it — it meant forcing the subjects to use their abilities until they died. Literally, an experiment to find the limits of an ability. Considering that an ability was itself a kind of bodily function, it was no different from ordering someone to hold their breath until they killed themselves. And to make that possible, what exactly had been perpetrated inside that laboratory? According to him, even that counted as the ethical end of the spectrum — it was easy even for me to guess why the nations of the world kept the whole thing hushed up.
"Well, I was a defective one."
At those words, I called his ability to mind once more. Lightning so violently wild it would char its own owner to a crisp. Genuinely intense — and beyond that, hopelessly inefficient. Thinking about it now, it was so unnatural that calling it something which had simply occurred on its own was a hard sell. A psychic power that opened its eyes one day, out of nowhere. Looked at that way, it might be hard to grasp.
But a hunter's ability is, in the end, nothing more than an extension of the body's own functions. Choi Seungjun's ice, for instance — strictly speaking, it wasn't a power that had abruptly awakened. The talent for handling ice he'd always carried had bloomed the moment it touched mana. Then what aptitude, I had to ask, could produce an ability that poured out voltage so fierce even its owner could barely contain it, radiating from the center of his own heart? ...I forcibly shook off the sinister imaginings the word 'laboratory' conjured up. Because that part wasn't what mattered to him right now.
Yeeun hadn't been one of those. That much figured.
In that sense, Lee Yeeun's ability was unmistakably refined. Stable output at any range, and a total capacity richer still. Hard to stack up against Choi Seungjun, maybe, but that alone was a more than respectable talent — all the more so considering she wasn't even an active hunter yet. Bluntly put, hers wasn't some crazed wild stallion of a power like Lee Joongoo's. Which was exactly why she drew so much attention. And understandably so: an ability far superior to the average hunter's, and far more stable than the other test subjects'. Had the technique ever been properly commercialized, it would have given South Korea ironclad grounds for standing tall as a hunter powerhouse. But at least I'd never heard so much as a whisper of such a thing.
In other words —
"So she was just the odd one out?"
"Hard to say? I honestly don't know. Whether Yeeun really had the talent, or whether the drug they injected into her just happened to work unusually well..."
"I'm guessing there were fights over that, too."
"Well, it got to the point where they assigned me to her."
He shrugged, as if to say it was out of his hands.
But it was plain with a moment's thought. If it were simple talent, the story could end there — one of the orphans just happened to be extraordinarily gifted. That's a story that can end there. But what if the awakening agent rationed to her had, by pure chance, proven exceptional? Whether impurities had worked their way into the blend, or whether it simply happened to agree with her, nobody knew. If the former, they would need to recover that formulation. If the latter, it could be the very hint needed to spur full-scale development of a hunter awakening agent.
And so the 'laboratory' had begun treating her as special. Attaching a family to her under the name of 'guardian' was part of the same. To put it bluntly — in that environment, what an immense privilege it was simply to have family at all. For me, it was hard even to imagine. I could only dimly suspect that this, too, might be part of why Lee Joongoo, the self-styled defective, had survived this long. Either way, to them it must have seemed the most natural calculation in the world. Lovely if they could carve her open, dissect her, and learn something at a stroke — but what if they couldn't? It was an opportunity they'd barely gotten their hands on. No madman proposes slitting open the goose that lays golden eggs while promising to take the responsibility himself.
In that respect, he really had been a superb guardian. An ability that plainly would never aid the research. No harm even if he ate up their time. On top of that, he'd come through all of that still carrying a personality without a single sharp edge. A perfect fit for the researchers of the day — they were siblings, after all, and his ability wasn't strong enough to pull any tricks of its own.
And so, as Yeeun's older brother, Lee Joongoo became her guardian. And that relationship has continued, unbroken, to this day. The laboratory fell. The boy who'd had no choice but to become a test subject for the nation's sake became a hunter. And at the end of that road, he came, at long last, to be called a hero.
"Hoo."
That was about all I could manage for the moment.
"No, I get what you're saying. I do — it's just a story so dense I can't digest it in one sitting."
"So basically, you two siblings were subjects of state-run biological experiments, is what you're telling me?"
"Yeeun was still little back then, so she probably doesn't remember much of anything."
"You sure about that?"
"Honestly? I can't say for sure. She might remember it, vaguely. She's pretty dependent, you see," he said, wearing a wry smile.
In short, that was what he'd been driving at all along. Startling content, certainly — but not something I needed to know at this point. Bluntly, what business was it of mine whether this guy or his sister had been subjects of biological experiments? I could offer sympathy, sure. I could even call it pitiable. If he wanted, I could probably track down whoever had run the project back then and strip them of their posts. Though judging by his attitude, he seemed to have already tied off that chapter in his own way.
Which meant —
"In the end, it can't come from your mouth, can it? You're hardly in a position to talk her out of it."
"Hahaha."
"Quit cracking jokes, or I'll crack you open."
"Sorry."
That was the gist of it.
"The truth is, that ability of hers is enormously dangerous. I'd know — back when I was developing my own, I got blown up about a hundred times, give or take."
Even tossed off that lightly, it was a heavy line.
But if that had been all, I could somehow have coaxed and soothed her into learning a different technique. I hadn't been able to. The problem lay exactly there — or, to put it more precisely, in Lee Yeeun herself.
It's a common phenomenon in children who came close to losing their families young. In short, a pathologically intense aversion to being separated from them. Family is a bond that can drift apart at any moment; the reality that she might be the one left behind alone. Carrying that awareness, a child might well turn aggressive toward anyone who told her to be apart from her family. It couldn't be helped. Least of all in this era. Even if the other party was Lee Joongoo, hailed as humanity's strongest, from where she stood it would be hard to simply feel at ease. She was bound to be anxious, like the family of any hunter. On top of that, Lee Joongoo had recently gone and switched careers to politician. If you pressed the point, you could call that a safer situation. And yet nothing had changed at all, which meant —
'No — it's the other way around.'
She must have worried about her brother's safety, too. But the more fundamental problem wasn't there. If it had been, there would have been some improvement lately. Of course, as far as I could see, improvement my ass — all I saw was a girl who'd only gotten worse. Well, naturally. With the Great Invasion over, a National Assemblyman was bound to be busier than a hunter. And that anxiety had no cure so long as Lee Joongoo, her only family, never showed his face at home. Even that would be nothing more than treating the symptom.
Surely he'd tried telling her directly, more than once. Maybe he'd even scolded her. And of course, every time, it must have looked to that young lady like her brother trying to throw her away. 'Not that he had any self-awareness of it, probably.' It would have been the same with the teachers telling her not to use her brother's technique. My guess is, to her, they must have looked like people trying to drive a wedge between her and her brother.
Mmm~ that reeked of danger.
Well, I had a fair idea of what he was getting at. But that was beside the point anyway. That was that, and this was this.
"That there are pitiable circumstances behind it — fine, I get it. That there are reasons things couldn't be said outright — understood. It's just that none of it changes my conclusion. The circumstances are pitiable, but I have no intention of cutting her any slack."
"The misunderstanding is cleared up. That doesn't mean my mind has changed. I can't raise someone in that state as a hunter. Certainly, that talent might go to waste. But we are, in the end, Hunters — and at the decisive moment, we can't send to the front line a girl who might freeze up playing house instead of killing monsters and protecting people."
My judgment of Lee Yeeun ultimately hadn't budged from there. In that sense, apart from learning their circumstances inside and out, this little meeting might not have yielded much of anything.
"That's exactly why I told you."
...And yet. The guy. South Korea's strongest hunter — and, at the same time, the bastard whose career change into politics might well have worsened his little sister's symptoms even further — simply went on smiling, looking thoroughly satisfied with himself.
...A face that made it impossible to call his trip here a waste.
Whether he'd never intended to raise that girl as a hunter in the first place, or whether he'd genuinely concluded there was no other way — either way, for a man whose only actual contribution had been dumping the parenting on me, the sheer gall of that contented expression. I couldn't help but call it shameless.