He's Stronger Than Me
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Ever since he'd parted ways with Park Woochan and returned, Lee Joongoo had been fidgeting with his mouth, an old habit that dated all the way back to when he first entered politics. You're fine in every respect, but your face gives everything away. He owed the tic to a passing bit of advice from the opposition politician who had once taken him on as a secretary. That politician had since passed from the world after a D-rank monster made an uninvited guest of him, but the advice itself still lived on, bold as brass, inside Joongoo.
As a politician, it was a fatal weakness. Fortunately, though, nobody ever called him on it. Part of that, admittedly, was the practical reality of who in this Republic of Korea could afford to pick a fight with him — but more than that, no one wanted to needlessly poke at a man who had never shown the slightest interest in partisan squabbling and risk stirring up trouble for nothing.
For the rights of hunters.
For a society where hunters and the public stood together.
Having thrown himself into politics under those banners, Joongoo was, in truth, a household name in political circles as well. It was thanks to his achievements as a hunter, of course — but it was equally true that he was reaping the benefits of that fame in turn.
And yet, a thought occurred to him: even if he'd had no track record as a hunter at all, today of all days he might have escaped without a single scolding.
Wait, does that even make sense?!
Well, why wouldn't it make sense? Name one person here who knows the industry better than that man does.
Oh, so he's the only hunter in the room?! My son-in-law is a hunter too!
That's rich. So has your precious son-in-law ever actually taken down a B-rank monster? I mean, honestly, don't even get me started.
What does what have to do with what?!
It was that kind of pandemonium.
Among the towering buildings rising into the New City skyline, at the very top. In an era where the emergence of flying monsters had turned "living on a high floor" into a byword for gambling with your life, the conference room on this building's top level was nonetheless packed with people.
Naturally, none of those gathered here were resigning themselves to death every time they rode the elevator up to a meeting. If anything, the fact that all of them could do so without a flicker of fear was proof of just how unassailable their backing was — though watching them squabble like fishwives at a street market was enough to make one genuinely wonder whether these were really the politicians entrusted with the future of the nation.
Since the gates first opened, countless hunters had parlayed their fame into political careers, much like America's war heroes of old.
But as war heroes turned politicians so often do, most of them had been swept into the swirling brawl over their share of the pie and quietly retired from the field.
Joongoo was one of the rare few who had managed to actually land on the political stage — yet even he, watching the commotion unfold before him, felt the urge to set it all down and walk away swelling up inside him like a rising tide.
Today, however, he couldn't afford to escape into that kind of daydream like he usually did.
Because the chaos in front of him was, at bottom, his own doing.
That's right. Answer the question, Assemblyman Lee!
The man jabbing a finger at him was a heavyweight of the ruling party. Aside from the vast gulf in their stature, he and Joongoo — of the opposition — could hardly be called rivals. But the light flashing behind those narrowed eyes wasn't jealousy of a famous war hero's reputation, nor persecution of a rookie politician. It was pure, unfiltered irritation.
Of course, I trust you'll provide a satisfactory explanation?
This time it was the branch director of the Hunter Association. Though never a hunter himself, he was a political power broker who commanded legions of them beneath him — and, back when Joongoo was still active, a benefactor to whom Joongoo had owed favors beyond counting. But even for this man, whom Joongoo might have called a comrade, the whole affair was nothing short of bewildering.
The reason for their collective flusteredness was simple.
Joongoo had declared, unilaterally, that one of the key positions at the heart of the project currently being negotiated behind closed doors would go to a friend of his.
The room had, predictably, erupted. It was beyond dispute that Joongoo had been granted discretion over this project. But that discretion had been entrusted to him out of faith in his judgment and his eye for talent — not so that he could march in and openly appoint a crony.
Granted, such things did happen as a matter of convention. But convention was, at the end of the day, only convention. Once a man named it to their faces so brazenly, the other side had no choice but to dig in and fight.
Politicians had an image as swindlers, as men who couldn't be trusted — and in truth, playing dirty was part of their job description. But it had been a mere three years since humanity won its victory over the gates. This country simply didn't have the luxury to waste on pointless arguments.
In other words, even Joongoo found their outrage entirely reasonable. Had they been raising their voices over some private stake, he'd have stonewalled them without a second thought — but since they clearly weren't, he owed them a proper answer.
That was the whole point of this session, after all.
…
Even in the middle of all this, the leader of Joongoo's own opposition party held his silence. It looked irresponsible from one angle, and from another it read as a tacit instruction: clear the field yourself.
Put differently: you have permission to speak.
And with that, Joongoo regained his confidence. Not that he considered himself guilty of crony politics. However many times he turned it over in his mind, his choice of candidate was as close to optimal as it could get. It was true he'd handled things in something of a rush — but this was a man who had, only recently, vanished for three straight years without so much as a word. In a situation where he couldn't even be sure of crossing paths with him again if he let him slip away now, there was nothing to be done.
"I will now speak."
At Joongoo's words, the clamor in the room died down. Three seconds passed like that. Savoring the silence, counting the seconds in his head, Joongoo slowly swept his gaze across the room, left and right.
"I understand your consternation at my actions. And I agree with those who say the appointment was reckless, discretion or no."
Then agree and fold, damn you!
The grumbling voice didn't even bother to hide itself anymore. It was the same politician who'd been shouting about his hunter son-in-law a moment ago. Having raised his voice that loudly, he'd surely looked into the recommendation too.
Which made it all the more unacceptable to him. After all, the man Joongoo had recommended had no record whatsoever with the Association — a complete unknown.
But Joongoo had no intention of backing down. Beyond politics, beyond partisan warfare, he possessed an unshakable certainty that this choice was the right one.
"However, I have complete confidence in this appointment. Absolute confidence. I will go so far as to declare: no one alive is better suited to that position than the friend I have recommended."
And who exactly is this friend of yours, hm?
"The hunter Park Woochan."
At those words, the room split cleanly into two camps.
Park Woochan? Who in the world is that?
No — if his name alone were enough to make the case, we wouldn't be sitting here like this!
As if on cue, they erupted in protest all at once. Yet their voices began, curiously, to dwindle before anyone could even move to silence them. Their gusto, compared to moments before, had somehow gone flat.
There was no helping it. Nearly half the room — most of those who hadn't joined the chorus a moment ago — were sitting in silence, eyes wide open, staring.
These were mostly politicians who had entered politics after the gates appeared, or people who had been close to the hunting industry from the start.
…The Butcher?
You mean that lunatic?
Among them were even a few who began, sotto voce, to murmur Park Woochan's old epithet from his active days. Their tone wasn't so much asking as pleading for someone, anyone, to deny it. In fact, when Joongoo nodded, the room filled with a low rumble of groans.
And yet, no objection came.
For those without ties to the Association's working staff, it could only be baffling. The atmosphere was impossibly strange. Even the people who'd spent the last few minutes praying they'd heard wrong made no attempt to denounce this hunter Park Woochan's abilities — or his flaws.
Indeed they didn't. Through the deeply troubled silence, a handful of hands were already tapping rapidly at phones. No doubt they were reaching out to the informants they'd planted in the Association — but even so, it was obvious they wouldn't get a straight answer.
That was simply the kind of man Park Woochan had always been.
It had been true even today.
The memory of how his expression had warped, instant and visceral, at the question ever thought about joining the Association? was still vivid enough to taste.
Of course, anyone who knew Park Woochan could have predicted that reaction, and Joongoo was no exception. Which was precisely why he'd been able to table this proposal, keeping it in reserve for the day contact with Park Woochan was finally restored.
Still, the bitterness was unavoidable.
Three long years had passed since humanity at last conquered every gate, and an age of peace had arrived.
And even now, Park Woochan remained on the battlefield.
A lone wolf. A somewhat tired expression, but Joongoo had never found a description that fit him better.
His absence from the Association's records was only natural. He had never enrolled in the first place.
He hadn't openly declared war on the Association, but neither had he ever maintained close cooperation with it. And so no one knew precisely how many monsters he had carved through — though, conversely, no one who had ever hunted alongside Park Woochan, not a single one, would dispute the claim that he must have butchered no fewer than a thousand.
That was the Park Woochan Joongoo knew.
A hunter with a hunger for killing buried deep behind his eyes, aimed forever at monsters. What on earth could have happened to turn a boy no older than Joongoo himself into someone who carried eyes like that? Joongoo could still recall, as clearly as if it had happened yesterday, the chill that ran through him the first time they met.
In a word, the man was a born slaughterer.
What Park Woochan had been through in the past, Joongoo didn't know. It wasn't in the man's nature to go around broadcasting such things to begin with, and no one was thoughtless enough to ask him to his face.
It was that kind of era. Even setting aside the unwritten rule among hunters never to pry into each other's pasts, Park Woochan was a presence from whom everyone instinctively kept their distance.
And yet, despite it all, he had always gone out to hunt in silence, without a single word of complaint. He carried emotions that black and heavy, yet never let them show — never vented them, either. There was only one way Park Woochan dealt with monsters: a cold, unwavering killing intent so absolute that one might suspect he regarded even his own emotions as just another tool in the kit, rather than something he indiscriminately unleashed.
That said, he hadn't outright rejected the people who tried to approach him. Quite the opposite — outwardly, he could be cheerful and easygoing, and there were times he mingled freely with the others. A few of those who had fought monsters at his side were even moved by that side of him and chose to keep working with him.
One of them, a telepath who'd been especially close to him, had once said as much. That whole act of Park Woochan's was nothing but bravado, he'd claimed. The man had no particular tragic backstory at all; he was simply playing to the room, managing the mood, mindful of the eyes on him.
And yet.
Even the people who'd said that went quiet and began avoiding him after they watched him hunt.
The cheerful, lighthearted Park Woochan who charmed everyone around him simply wasn't there.
What remained was a mass of killing intent — as though an overflowing wellspring of murderous hunger had been forcibly crammed into the mold of a human being.
Does that man lie to himself even in his day-to-day life?
So had the telepath once assessed him, and Joongoo had reached the same conclusion.
Joongoo didn't believe the monsters they'd encountered together were anything special. And yet the Park Woochan who faced a monster was a profoundly different creature from the man they all thought they knew. The sight of him running wild, whites of his eyes showing, was — even in the eyes of hunters whose duty was to kill monsters — excessively violent, and more than that, self-destructive.
It was not an emotion that could possibly be conjured up as mere bluster.
So judged the telepath, who had taken the full blast of Park Woochan's killing intent at point-blank range. If anything, he began to suspect the flippant casualness they saw every other day was the true facade. A helplessness like watching every component of a human heart get swept away beneath a wave of bloodlust. Only then did the telepath understand just how dense and how bottomless the emotion called killing intent could be.
How had it come to that?
Was it because he'd carried on as if nothing were wrong, acting the part to bury whatever had been done to him? Telling himself it was nothing, that his family was fine and safe, that his usual behavior was nothing more than an act — had he repeated it to himself until he half-believed it?
Watching Park Woochan chat and laugh as usual after every battle ended, the telepath had felt an indescribable horror. The knowledge that such a clinging, suffocating emotion lived beneath that easygoing face — and that it was aimed at other living things — was enough to inspire outright dread.
As Joongoo saw it, Park Woochan's behavior came from hoarding his own emotions like a miser. Grudges, hatred — all of it was kindling for the fire called rage. And fire, left without fuel, inevitably dies. In other words, what Park Woochan feared above all else was that after carelessly spewing out his anger, the ember at its core would gutter and go out.
No life to speak of.
No hobbies.
No joys or sorrows to call his own.
No doubt that breezy, devil-may-care manner he wore in public was just another defense mechanism.
It was obvious from the glimpse Joongoo had gotten of Park Woochan's room the other day. A man who couldn't have been short of money, yet the room sat bare and abandoned without a single proper piece of furniture. And the phone-shaped marks ground into the wall — surely the residue of some nightmare he'd once lived through, left behind in the real world.
A hunter who could only live inside the fight.
That was the kind of man Park Woochan was — and as if to prove it, the man who had vanished with the coming of peace had resurfaced the moment new embers of war began to smolder.
Which was why Joongoo had named him. Part of it was hope — the hope that as one of the man's few friends, he might finally pry loose the fire demon still burning in Park Woochan's chest. But more than that, this country needed Park Woochan's strength. Right now.
Oh, so who the hell is this Park Woochan supposed to be?!
Unable to bear it any longer, someone finally exploded in fury.
At the outburst, Joongoo slowly gathered his scattered thoughts. He reined in the runaway train of his mind, dragged the part of his brain that had been wandering through thoughts of Park Woochan back to this room, and put force into a voice he cleared with a couple of dry coughs.
"Then I will answer."
It was a remarkably weighted voice for a political newcomer. And at his bearing, every soul in the room straightened up. Everyone — the man who'd been texting his son-in-law mere minutes ago, the opposition leader with his eyes narrowed in suspicion, even the Association staff staring back at him with expressions that begged the question, are you serious?
Which was only natural.
What else could explain how a mere rookie in politics had been handed a project large enough to summon not just the opposition leadership but the branch director of the Hunter Association itself?
The one presiding over this project was not Assemblyman Lee Joongoo, the political newcomer.
It was Lee Joongoo, the hunter.
The Thunder God — lightning given the shape of a man.
Put plainly: the strongest being in humanity's arsenal.
The one directing this project was not some politician of the Republic of Korea, but the strongest hunter of humanity, Lee Joongoo.
And the presence that poured out of him as he finally opened his mouth was far too intense to be dismissed as the bluster of a wet-behind-the-ears politician who didn't know which end was up.
Like a statesman of decades' experience, carrying the absolute conviction of a man speaking within his own field of expertise, Lee Joongoo said it plainly.
"Because he's stronger than I am."
And with that.
That single, simple sentence from humanity's strongest was at once the largest bomb dropped on this assembly — and the final word that closed it.
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