And Then Yoonha Opened Her Eyes
And then Hwang Yoonha opened her eyes.
Her mind was foggy. A strange, floating lightness wrapped around her, as if she were drifting somewhere above the clouds. Which was exactly why Yoonha couldn't immediately figure out why she was currently face-down in the dirt in such a sorry state.
The first thing that did come back to her was, naturally, her last goodbye with Park Woochan. She hadn't expected to end up in a situation like this mere moments after parting ways with him, but still.
After her homeroom teacher Park Woochan left, she'd spent a little while wrapping up the gargoyle materials she'd somehow managed to keep more or less in one piece. Then, thinking it might be worth asking the work-crew foremen for advice, she remembered stepping out of the dismantling site.
Very diligent, aren't you.
That was how the foreman had assessed her. The way kids her age usually were, he'd assumed — the tone said he figured she'd quit before long anyway.
But.
Am I really that hardworking? Looking back on her own attitude, Yoonha couldn't help tilting her head in confusion.
It was true that she seemed to be working harder than usual. Unlike her other part-time jobs, where her philosophy had been to do exactly what she was paid for and not a lick more, here she'd actually racked her brain over how she could do better — had even gone out of her way to ask questions.
Why was that? Yoonha asked herself. Was it because, as Park Woochan had said, the work connected to her future career?
No, she shook her head inwardly. It felt a little awkward to admit, but Hwang Yoonha was, at heart, a short-sighted person. For the future — sure, that was definitely part of it. But she'd never thought of herself as confident enough to change how she acted so proactively over a reason that flimsy.
Which meant—
If there's a reason, it's got to be that person.
Park Woochan.
Her mentor, who had listened patiently to the self-centered ramblings of a hopelessly nearsighted girl, and who had introduced her to this place when she'd gone off the rails. Standing in front of him, Yoonha had been ashamed of her past self, who'd dumped her whole sob story on him as if he'd asked for it — and so she'd wanted to show him someone who could pull her own weight, even a day sooner.
She'd quit every other part-time job she had. Working harder than all the class time she'd ever skipped, and then some — Yoonha believed that was the only way she could repay the teacher who had believed in her.
Maybe that was why.
Maybe that was why she couldn't refuse what the man waiting outside the dismantling site had said to her that day.
Miss, I've got a decent-paying gig. Interested?
Yes.
Under a moon drenched in deep shadow, those were the words offered by a man who looked suspicious from every conceivable angle—
'……No.'
No. No, no, no.
It suddenly hit Yoonha.
'Goddammit, that was suspicious as hell.'
What do you mean you couldn't refuse?
Just recalling it now, it was dripping with sketchiness.
Only now did Yoonha bite down on her own tongue. Unusually, it had a slightly numb taste.
Drugged. That was her immediate instinct. That, too, was a trick Park Woochan had taught her — a quick way to gauge the potency of a toxin after touching one released during a monster dismantle.
'Right, because — hell no!'
Even with my pea brain, I wouldn't fall for something that shady. Only then could Yoonha relax. If she'd actually been taken in by a line that transparent, she'd rank below an orangutan. Thus, in that moment, a high school girl was born who felt relieved upon realizing someone had drugged her.
Slowly, she took stock of her body. Her limbs wouldn't obey — the toxin was apparently still in her system. She distinctly remembered hearing there were monsters that used this kind of drug too…
Rummaging through the knowledge she'd picked up from Park Woochan, she checked her arms and legs. Bound, as expected. Nine times out of ten, it was something capable of restraining even a hunter. A kidnapper who'd stocked a toxin potent enough to work on her — someone with a physical reinforcement ability — was hardly going to get sloppy about the restraints at this stage.
"You're awake?"
As she lay there whimpering, someone suddenly addressed her.
She'd tried her best not to make it obvious, but she was still a high schooler. She attempted to calm herself with a joke wildly inappropriate for the situation, but the involuntary flinch of her shoulders was beyond her control.
The gaze of the man looking down at her was calm to the point of excess. It was impossible to reconcile him with the image of a degenerate who'd drugged and abducted a high school girl.
"There's no need to worry. I have no intention of harming you — so long as you stay quiet, that is."
"I can't say what would happen if you resist."
The man spat out words Yoonha couldn't begin to parse, then added them almost as an afterthought, as if passing by. But listening to that utterly flat voice — one that had just spoken of a person's death without a flicker of emotion — Yoonha couldn't help but realize this man was entirely serious.
"You came."
Fortunately, she didn't need to force her frozen tongue loose to ask a question.
Because when she followed the man's gaze as he rose to his feet, she could see Park Woochan approaching from far in the distance — alone.
The designated location was a fair distance from the dismantling site where Yoonha had been working.
To be more precise, it was a gate assigned to a different dismantling site altogether.
The moment I set foot inside, a dry, parched feeling wrapped around me.
Unlike the gates attached to the Academy, this place was packed wall to wall with withered, twisted trees.
A landscape that looked like someone had taken tropical rainforest and painted the word apocalypse right over it.
Conveniently enough, the one who'd summoned me was already standing before my eyes. Easy to spot — right beside him, at his feet, lay Yoonha, bound and collapsed.
"Bwahahahaha!! I told you to come alone, but I never dreamed you'd actually do it! Is that boldness, or plain stupidity!"
Holy shit, buddy, for a pervert who kidnaps high school girls your villain dialogue is textbook.
I wanted to fire back with exactly that, but for now I decided to shut up and listen.
And with that, the man began babbling away, unprompted, as if to convince himself of his own words.
"I couldn't believe it when I first heard. The 'Butcher,' showing his face again, of all things!"
The way he said it made it clear he'd assumed I was almost certainly hiding inside the gate in disguise. The man looked, frankly, like a clown.
I wasn't mocking him. With that exaggeratedly comical expression, both arms flung wide as he roared, he looked exactly like a puffed-up little sparrow trying to make itself look bigger than it was.
"Surely you understand by now?! That's right — I am a hunter of the unlicensed, just like you!! A comrade, cast out and purged by those bastards at the Association!!"
The man roared on, swept up in his own momentum. In the most literal sense, he was a chatty villain straight out of pop culture.
I felt a sigh escaping before I knew it, but even as I held it in, the man's grand monologue was barreling toward its finale.
"I had no choice back then. I lacked the strength. But with you, it's different. What do you say, Butcher?! Will you not join me, and purge the corrupt Association together?!"
"……Right. Sure. Lovely speech, very moving. Mind if I ask a question?"
"Of course!! If a future comrade such as the Butcher asks, how could I refuse?! If you join this grand cause of mine, then this girl as well—"
"Who put you up to it?"
Stop.
It was as if someone had taken a recording of this very scene and awkwardly spliced it. The silence that fell between us was so jarring I couldn't think of it any other way.
"What did you say?"
"Do I look like an idiot to you?"
At a point where I hadn't even agreed to cooperate, there was no way a man would be this giddy, this nakedly advertising his intentions. And even if such a man existed, someone that sloppy wouldn't have dodged my sight and snatched Yoonha in the first place.
A discordance.
Yes. That was exactly the wrongness I'd been feeling all along as I watched a man bellowing to the four winds, as if begging the world to acknowledge that his goal lay right here.
Or, one might call it certainty.
As I said, there was little reason for Yoonha to be kidnapped in this particular situation.
So let's flip it around.
Before enrollment.
During practical training.
And now.
In a span of barely half a year — how many incidents had piled up?
Once, you could write off as coincidence. Twice, not impossible. But three times?
However you sliced it, that was too much to swallow.
So then — what if there was a connecting thread running through all of these incidents?
For someone like me, who'd spent the last three years withering away with nothing but quiet, this was by far the more reasonable inference.
And if so, I could roughly read the thinking of the faction orchestrating this affair, too.
First, they sent three dragons. High-ranked beings, capable enough of wielding Polymorph at will — who then died abruptly one day.
Next, a single demon. Likewise dispatched with the Academy's academic calendar in its sights, and it completed its reincarnation into extermination bounty, safe and sound, in my hands.
So? Having realized that neither numbers nor specs would cut it, they escalated to a hunter this time?
Then something Choi Seungjun once said in passing floated back to me.
I expected the Academy's opposition to stage a protest at most — I never imagined an S-rank monster would come bursting out.
He was right; back then, we'd all been certain of it. No way a opposition faction holding less than half of South Korea's upper echelons could control an S-rank monster.
But at this point, whether I liked it or not, I had to admit it.
Judging by the flow of mana I could feel right in front of me, this guy was roughly A-rank or above.
A hunter of this caliber at his beck and call, intimately familiar with the Academy's schedule — and yet, someone who hadn't known who the hell Park Woochan even was until I killed that demon bastard.
In other words, someone with some distance from the field. One of the Association's high-and-mighty suits.
And if you factored in that, until quite recently, they'd been deploying high-rank monsters—
Only one conclusion could be drawn.
Even those Association suits were, for whoever had engineered this string of incidents, nothing more than pawns.
Even by my own standards, it was an absurd conspiracy theory. Surely the Association's top brass weren't fraternizing with monsters of all things?
But if the theory were true, it would explain a remarkable variety of things.
Like how, after the day I met Hayeon, Lee Joongoo had gone conspicuously silent — I probably should have found that suspicious. Because under that theory, it meant there was a mole inside the Association.
Same with my failure to sense the monsters' emergence. If humans and monsters truly had joined hands, then someone with the Academy's calendar memorized need only plant a single person in advance.
And if that person hiding inside the gate used a spatial-ability tool similar to the ones I carry, and summoned in a Polymorphed monster?
Even I would have been helpless.
Just who exactly was meddling in affairs of this scale? Honestly, no idea.
Then again, it's not my job to investigate this sort of thing — that's Joongoo's and Seungjun's.
With that thought, I leveled my gaze at the man in front of me — a pawn of a pawn.
"Are you out of your mind?"
My conspiracy theory had apparently rattled him; the man, who'd been cackling away mere moments ago, asked with a dead-serious face.
That attitude alone came across to me as the finest confirmation I could ask for, but I had no intention of wasting any more time on petty bickering.
"Honestly, it doesn't matter either way."
Because it genuinely didn't.
What mattered to me was Yoonha's safety, plain and simple. Plausible theories and hard evidence — the courtroom can go looking for those.
A rough guess or a lunatic conspiracy theory.
Either one was fine, so long as it convinced me.
And judging by his reaction, I'd hit somewhere close to the mark.
More to the point — so what if you're insane? So what if you're serious?
"Hey, dimwit. Sorry to break it to you, but I've got power on my side."
"What?"
"I don't mean force. In this capitalist society, there is no power mightier than—"
Once before, I'd exercised one of these powers in an attempt to save Yoonha.
Which meant now was the time to use the other.
"No particular evidence, but I'm going to beat the shit out of you now."
"What did you say?"
"If I'm wrong, I'll apologize later. Worst case, I'll bury it under Joongoo's name, so just settle out of court."
"Hold on. A hunter can't just—"
"Shut the hell up!! Why does a kidnapping piece of trash talk this much?! Behind me stands Choi Seungjun's money and Lee Joongoo's name!! That is the power of capitalism — no, the power of our bonds!! Submit, you garbage!!"
"Are you insane?! Listen to yourself—"
"And if you're gonna put on an act, at least do it properly, damn it!!! If you're this bad from the start, I can't help but notice even when I don't want to!!!"
Look, the moment I confirmed my opponent wasn't a monster, I was already furious beyond words, you piece of trash!!!
"Gas's off, prayers said, said everything I had to say, no last words, no will to leave, et cetera, whatever, doesn't matter!!! Prep's done, so come at me, you trash!!!"
With that roar, rather than waiting for the bewildered fool to actually charge, I lunged first — knife already gripped — in the proud spirit of first-strike-wins.