The Day He Doesn't Remember
In truth, there was nothing he absolutely had to talk about. To begin with, Lee Joongoo had nothing left to say. The bet, the home discipline—both were matters he had handed over to Park Woochan, having decided there was nothing more he could do about either. He knew it had been an irresponsible thing to say, but at this point, he couldn't imagine himself being of any help.
Above all, the bet itself had simply fizzled out. The practical training had been suspended, for one, and even Lee Yeeun herself could hardly claim she'd shown Park Woochan anything worth acknowledging. There had been no dramatic resolution between the two of them, nor had she gained some tremendous enlightenment overnight that would let her cast aside the technique she'd been honing.
And yet.
"Oppa."
"Yeah."
"……Was it him, by any chance?"
A few days earlier, returning home cradled in her brother's arms, Lee Yeeun had asked him that.
It was a question with both subject and object neatly amputated, but Lee Joongoo understood perfectly what it meant—even as the party concerned opened his mouth and fumbled for words. The situations were that alike. And that was why Lee Joongoo was sitting here now.
"Come to think of it—do you remember?"
"Huh?"
"You know, from before. Around here somewhere."
Idle chatter, dredged up as if for amusement's sake—for the sake of this single question, which could never sound like anything more. Park Woochan, of course, couldn't answer right away. If anything, it seemed he only began groping backward through his memory after hearing Joongoo's words. To him, that day was probably nothing more than one of those days that never needed remembering.
Not for Lee Joongoo.
It was still as vivid as if it had happened yesterday. As though the scenery of that day had scorched itself behind his eyelids, Joongoo sometimes dreamed of it even now.
It had been a day that important—important enough to be a turning point, not only for the man called Lee Joongoo, but perhaps for the Republic of Korea itself.
……Back when he, branded a failure by the state, had been barely scraping the bottom rung of the Hunter Association. In what could only be called the dawn of the Second Great Cataclysm, a gate had opened inside the Experimental Laboratory—a facility operated under the state's direct control.
In truth, it was hardly an event worth singling out. Gates were blooming everywhere in those days, and this one was, after all, nothing more than a B-Rank. The problem was that no order to raid it ever came down.
Which was only natural. The Laboratory's existence was, first and last, a state secret. Had the Second Great Cataclysm never occurred, the whole affair would have been buried in darkness without ever surfacing. The Cataclysm had, by sheer accident, stretched the facility's lifeline—but by rights, it was a place that should have vanished quietly, hidden not only from the public but from the hunters themselves. And now they meant to send hunters in?
Without a shred of exaggeration, the Republic of Korea could have split in two all over again.
So long as the gate could be cleared peacefully, there would be no problem. But what if one of the hunters stumbled upon the research data? The hunters would be disillusioned, without question—furious to learn of a state that had kept them under its thumb and tried to breed hunters artificially. The public, in turn, would be horrified: by what their government had actually been doing, and by the possibility that artificial hunters, side effects unknown, might be walking freely among them wearing the same faces. What waited beyond that was, quite literally, a rift between the general public and the hunters—nothing less than the collapse of the state.
That was why the Laboratory's overseers had pulled every string they possessed to make sure no raid order was ever issued. Or rather—this, too, was only ever Joongoo's speculation. Perhaps the truth was simpler: they simply hadn't trusted themselves to bear the responsibility.
But the Lee Joongoo of that time couldn't afford to think that way. That was the kind of man he was. However many times he turned it over, a petty, small-minded fool. The Joongoo of those days had been exactly that kind of person. Because in that moment, the only thing on Lee Joongoo's mind had been his own future.
……He had no fond memories of the Laboratory. And yet that cramped facility had been, for the Joongoo of that time, nothing less than the whole world. So were the shouting that battered his ears hard enough to tear them, and the rage of researchers whose palms cracked across his face. As with any bird shut in a cage, the Laboratory's scenery had—like a drizzle soaking through clothes unnoticed—long since become just another piece of the everyday for Lee Joongoo.
There were practical concerns, too. What if the hunters noticed the Laboratory existed? Before the country could be torn in two, the facility would be shut down—that much was certain. And in that case, nine times out of ten, the researchers would pin the blame on the boy standing right there. He was no different from them. Joongoo, too, had no confidence he could bear such a responsibility.
It would have been the same even if the arrows never found their way back to him. A failure. An inferior product. That was the verdict this research facility had passed on him. No parents, no proper identity. Even if he became a hunter, the limits of his ability were obvious. Could someone like that survive in the world without the researchers' protection? He couldn't know—that was what the Joongoo of those days believed.
It was no different when word came that his younger sister was still inside.
He still remembered it with perfect clarity. The unrest rippling through the hunters changed, in an instant, to stunned disbelief. The eyes of hunters who had assumed the Association's judgment was merely delayed turned upside down; some were shouting—what on earth was the Association doing, had it finally lost its mind? And yet not a single soul present dared to move first. Because if anyone among them had the right to be the first to erupt in fury, they believed it was the boy.
Everyone's gaze gathered on him naturally. To some eyes it looked like caution—careful not to provoke him rashly. To others, like expectation—waiting for the words he ought to say.
Lee Joongoo could not move.
The many hunters who had sneered at the Association's lax handling while waiting for the boy's answer began to harbor suspicion. Joongoo could feel it as if he were holding it in his hand: their bewilderment at the Association's callous silence, answerless until now, slowly turning toward him.
Beyond the flames the monsters spewed, an eerie, writhing heat haze was burning up the night sky. It was a moment of such searing intensity. The flames swayed as if determined to expose the shallowness of the man called Lee Joongoo before all of heaven, and beyond the acrid smoke, where not a single star showed, he could feel the flame demon flicking its tongue.
……No doubt that was why he still could not forget that moment. That ugliness—prioritizing his own safety even while his sister's life hung by a thread—had branded itself across the man's eyes like a branding iron fresh from the coals.
And so, ever since he came to be called by the unearned name of hero, Lee Joongoo had never once believed himself worthy of it. Every time he closed his eyes, his own vileness—etched vividly against the dark behind his eyelids—was always there, glaring back at him.
And so—to the man he had been, the figure of the boy who came dancing down beneath the night sky the very next moment must have burned itself all the more vividly into memory.
Even then, Joongoo couldn't bring himself to speak. Was it that arrogance—dismissing, in a single stroke, the deliberations hanging over the hunters mere moments before? Or that decisiveness, cutting through the air as if passing verdict on the very delusion he himself had been nursing?
Honestly? His eyes had been stolen away. Beneath the night sky, above the heat haze—the boy who stood revealed before the burning laboratory. Park Woochan's bearing was so unapologetically proud that no other word would do. At least, that was how it felt to Lee Joongoo. What a waste of time. The boy declaring that to the hunters still floundering in confusion looked for all the world like a freshly honed blade.
The fate of the nation, nameless devotion—words that had repeated endlessly within the Laboratory's walls, words Joongoo had been chewing over without even realizing it. To him, the boy declared even those nothing but wasted worry. And then, half-deaf to the cries of the hunters, the Park Woochan of that day threw himself toward the burning laboratory without a moment's hesitation.
An instant became an eternity, and time passed as though it had ripened into fruit. And then—when even the night had burned away and a dawn soaked in ash-gray arrived—in place of the Association's official notice, which had still not come down, Park Woochan walked out. His sleeping younger sister, breathing soft and shallow, held against his chest.
"Hey. Take her."
The curt tone was the same then as now. And yet, in the hands that held his sister out as he said it, there was a quiet gentleness.
Joongoo slowly reached out and took his sister into his arms, and the hunters around them erupted in cheers all at once. But even amid the commotion, his sister did not open her eyes. Had she simply been that exhausted? Or was it that she couldn't bear to open them—the terror of facing monsters alone while her only family was gone, the quiet resentment toward an older brother who hadn't shown his face once. Was forgetting it all the only way she could?
"Oppa……."
A murmur, slipping out softly. And what, faced with that, went through the mind of the older brother who—with this before his very eyes—had been agonizing over his own future instead of his sister's safety?
"Thank god."
Thank god—without realizing it, that was what spilled from his lips. This time, at least, he could say it while looking at his sister, safe and sound. Though he couldn't be certain, the man repeated those words like a penitent, wetting her forehead with his tears.
"You're safe—thank god, thank god you're safe……!"
……By the time his sobs finally subsided and he moved to offer his thanks, the boy had already vanished without a trace.
After asking around endlessly, he had finally managed to salvage a name—Park Woochan—but the rumors that clung to it were anything but flattering. A hunter of poor character who trespassed into the Association's jurisdiction without so much as a registered name. A lawless brute. A hunter with nothing in his head but the hunt.
But Lee Joongoo knew. The boy's thoughtfulness, hidden behind that impossibly careless manner. The consideration of someone who had saved his sister and then disappeared without claiming a shred of credit. And above all—whenever the Association's rules moved to bind hunters—the nobility of the one who stepped in, always first, in their place.
That was why Joongoo was ashamed of himself. And at the same time, he thought: that detachment, as though transcending the rules of the mundane world. That strength of heart that felt no constraint because of it. While he himself had been busy weighing the rest of his life, that boy had broken the Association's rules without hesitation to save a person. He thought that state of mind…… noble.
And so the man honed his strength. He refused to remain just another nameless hunter. Throwing his whole body into the climb had been for that very reason. Using the position he'd won to its fullest, he set about correcting the wrong he had committed that day. Righting every injustice carried out in this country's shadows under the name of devotion—that became the man's dream.
Because that was what he wanted to become. He wanted to live the way Park Woochan lived. He thought the figure of a man living like a lone beast was beautiful.
Yes. Just as Lee Yeeun must have thought, that day, looking at her brother's tear-streaked face. And that day, Lee Joongoo had felt admiration for the figure of Park Woochan, calmly doing in his stead what he himself should have done.
It was for that very reason Joongoo had recommended Park Woochan as a teacher. He had the skill. He had the record. But more than that, Joongoo had wanted the hunters who would shoulder this country's next generation to resemble Park Woochan.
"Huh? No—why are you suddenly bringing all that up?"
"What do you mean, 'all that'? What's wrong with it?"
"No, I remember it fine. That thing. You know, when I blew off the Association's orders."
"That's the one."
"Hey, hey. You know how badly I got chewed out over that, right? The old-timers gave me hell—said if hunters started ignoring Association orders and running their own hunts, it'd get harder for everyone else to get paid. Don't tell me you dragged me all the way out here to lecture me about that too?"
Of course, the man in question didn't seem to remember what that day had actually meant. Watching Park Woochan's chin tremble, Lee Joongoo burst out laughing before he could help himself. Strangely enough, he wasn't disappointed at all.
In truth, he had expected as much, more or less. That was the kind of hunter he was; that was the kind of hunter he had always been. No doubt that day had been the same. A meeting so momentous for Lee Joongoo had probably been nothing worth singling out for Park Woochan. Even saving Yeeun likely hadn't carried any special meaning. He was a hunter, and he couldn't just leave a child to be devoured by monsters—that was all there was to it. And so Joongoo wasn't disappointed. If anything, he felt a strange kind of satisfaction.
People say it. That Park Woochan is a cold-blooded hunter. A savage with nothing in his head but killing monsters. That someday he might throw people out as bait if it meant a monster's death. But Lee Joongoo paid it no mind. He knew what kind of man the hunter called Park Woochan was.
Perhaps, as people always whispered, he had once lost someone precious to a monster. Surely he had despaired, too, crushed by his own helplessness. But Park Woochan is strong. Not in power—his heart is what's strong.
And so—even when countless others break under sorrows too vast to bear, he will keep moving forward. Rather than hating the monsters, rather than hating the hunters who couldn't save his family when the monsters tore them apart, rather than hating above all the weak, powerless self he once was—he simply runs, as if to say the Association's circumstances and its laws be damned, and saves people. That is how he takes his revenge on the world. Against an age that bares its teeth at people, saving those who should have been sacrificed—that is his revenge.
……If his sister truly meant to become a hunter, Lee Joongoo wanted her to become one like Park Woochan—not like him. Today's meeting was the same. Might Park Woochan remember that day? How would he and Yeeun talk from here on? He was curious, of course—but more than that, he trusted Park Woochan.
And so, instead of talking about monsters popping out of nowhere or the uneasy state of the world, Lee Joongoo had come here to say one thing: that he was leaving Yeeun in his hands, and please keep taking care of her. There was nothing to worry about. After all, not once in all the years he'd known him had this friend ever merely stopped at the edge of anything as paltry as Lee Joongoo's imagination.