A Devotion Two Thousand Years Too Late
Though he could never quite articulate it, Kim Minchul often found himself wondering if he hadn't simply been born too late.
Of course, that's a fantasy anyone born into this era could be forgiven for entertaining.
But Kim Minchul was different.
Not ten years, not even a hundred — the way such people always put it — but two thousand.
Kim Minchul genuinely believed he had arrived two millennia behind schedule.
It happened every time he spoke with others, every time he brushed up against the so-called common sense of the world. The laws and ethics of modernity fit him like a suit of clothes tailored for someone else.
…Was it because he'd been raised by an ancient goddess? Or because he'd been born into an age of violence?
Or perhaps it was simply his nature.
One way or the other, Kim Minchul could not understand it.
Why he shouldn't burn alive the thugs who laid hands on a single meal the goddess herself had brought down for him. Why he shouldn't kill a man and strip the clothes right off his back.
Understanding nothing, he had lived a life of patience — obedience offered solely at the goddess's word.
And yet.
In time, an unbearable impulse found its way to Kim Minchul as well.
The goddess Tiamat.
Kim Minchul had fallen in love with the beautiful goddess who had cradled and nurtured him.
…Perhaps it was restlessness, in part.
She who had been his goddess alone had become the goddess of the Association. That fact.
The reality that soon she would be worshiped not only by him, but by legions of hunters. That reality.
Kim Minchul could not stand it.
Disgusting vermin.
When the goddess was at her lowest.
When she was struggling most, the only one at her side had been him — him alone.
And the moment things improved slightly, these bastards came swarming like flies to a corpse.
To Kim Minchul, the hunters of the Association were not comrades. They were nothing more than maggots writhing on a carcass.
And so Kim Minchul trained. And trained. And built his strength.
Only the finest warrior of the age could win the goddess's love — of that he was certain.
He never forgot the stories the goddess had once murmured to him at her bedside, even if to her they had been nothing more than fairy tales.
Therefore.
On the day he bared his heart and was refused, there had been despair, there had been anguish — but no resentment, no hatred.
Because he had understood it as a declaration: his strength was still insufficient to claim the goddess's body and soul alike.
A kind of oracle.
The demand: power. The reward: the goddess's love.
That was how he read it, and so Kim Minchul resolved to leave the Association.
And to make it known that he had not given up, he threw himself into the cult.
It was a group far removed from anything he'd imagined, but even so, Kim Minchul managed to build a fair rapport with the faithful.
In truth, Kim Minchul was not the type to shun human company.
Had he been, he would never have earned a high rank in the Association to begin with.
If anything, his attitude was merely: is there any need to associate with them?
This time, however, was different.
In the Association, he'd kept his distance at the goddess's request. Now, for the first time, he chose of his own will to entangle himself with people.
To put it more precisely — he simply never let the tangled knot of his inner self show.
Because to Kim Minchul, Tiamat was, above all else, his goddess and no one else's.
At the same time, he was certain of one thing.
The day he ever opened his mouth about the goddess, the faceless worms of the cult would come swarming just like beasts gone mad with hunger. He could see it coming a mile away.
Naturally. She was so beautiful, so magnificent, so exalted and sublime a being.
And so Kim Minchul never once spoke of her within the cult.
Provided the goddess was not involved, Kim Minchul could pass for an amiable young man.
Thanks to that, his position within the cult had been comfortably secure since the day he joined.
Best of all, the environment suited him.
His combat prowess was impressive enough to command respect even among the cult's ranks.
Unlike his days as a registered hunter, shackled to obligation after obligation, Kim Minchul could devote himself entirely to his own training.
Well — occasionally, when he wished to catch a glimpse of the goddess, he would join in the fireworks displays.
Doing so naturally earned him the brand of terrorist, but he couldn't have cared less.
What mattered to Kim Minchul was never society. Only the goddess.
As long as the goddess alone knew his true heart, that was enough.
Ultimately, Kim Minchul was the kind of man who could burn a friend he'd been laughing with the day before, without a flicker of hesitation, at a single word from the goddess.
And what makes him all the more vicious is that he took a certain pride in exactly that.
So when Kim Minchul finally returned home after so long an absence, the sight that greeted him—!
At the bar where he had retraced the contract between himself and the goddess, there she was, walking out alongside Park Woochan.
It was a shock beyond all measure.
In that sense, whether Park Woochan actually adored the goddess was, perhaps, almost beside the point.
The moment Kim Minchul saw the goddess smiling at a man who was not him, any thought of letting Park Woochan live had already evaporated.
And so.
Ugh, I'm sick of this.
Even Kim Minchul could only click his tongue at the present situation.
Considerable time had passed since the interrogation began.
Yet Ja Hayeon hadn't coughed up so much as a single syllable.
Of course, Kim Minchul had done a fair amount of research on her as well.
For reasons unknown, she was a girl living under the same roof as Park Woochan, currently employed as an instructor at the Academy.
That was the extent of it — but the broad strokes were easy to infer.
He'd encountered men like that once or twice back in his active days, after all.
Families of victims he had failed to save. Children who wouldn't have lost their parents if only he'd been a little stronger.
There were men who gathered nothing but those people and raised them. He still remembered thinking, unbidden — is he planning to open an orphanage or something?
And so Kim Minchul had naturally assumed Park Woochan was cut from the same cloth.
That was why he'd kidnapped Ja Hayeon.
He judged her the perfect material with which to provoke Park Woochan — and the most efficient candidate from whom to extract information.
But.
'Is she really a student?'
Kim Minchul knew the true nature of what hunters were.
Contrary to what civilians always imagined, a hunter was, in the end, either a day laborer or a lunatic out for revenge. The glamorous figures in the advertisements were nothing more than illusion and staging.
A hunter was ultimately just some ordinary person who happened to stumble into power, or someone drowning in the grief of a family lost to monsters, gambling their own life on a death match with the beasts — the dregs of the social order.
Knowing that, Kim Minchul had assumed the girl before him would be no different.
Hunter or not, at her core she was a high school girl.
If anything, he'd thought her hunter status would make her easier to handle.
After all, a capable individual who had just abducted her was standing right in front of her.
Someone with only a half-baked grasp of her own power would feel the crushing gulf of strength between them all the more keenly — or so he'd believed.
Add a dash of violence now and then, and she'd break perfectly.
And yet.
Her hair torn loose, footprints stamped across her whole body — through it all, Ja Hayeon had held her bearing without a single change.
Had she shut her heart away, or simply grown numb to violence, she wouldn't have said a word at all.
Kim Minchul could tell.
Ja Hayeon was not numb to violence.
She wasn't even unable to feel the pain or the fear.
She was simply enduring all of it — accepting every last bit of it — and still had not opened her mouth once.
Why?
No — how?
That was the first thought that crossed his mind.
He had no intention of killing her, of course. The goddess herself had once instructed him to avoid laying hands on the girl wherever possible.
Perhaps she'd seen through that reservation of his.
Even so.
'It doesn't even hurt?'
The questions he'd asked her had been simplicity itself.
What were Park Woochan's hobbies? What did he do on his days off?
It was true that he'd been gathering such details piece by piece, sketching out a blueprint of Park Woochan as an individual.
But was there any real need to guard a single hobby this stubbornly, this obstinately, to the bitter end?
'What should I do here.'
He could read it.
What lived in Ja Hayeon's chest was expectation — the belief that Park Woochan would come to rescue her one day.
A faith with not one shred of evidence behind it.
Conviction, would you call it? Or devotion?
He never imagined he'd reach for words like those to describe a girl barely past her teens — but Kim Minchul had no other way to put it.
At the same time, Kim Minchul knew something else too.
That one day, he and Park Woochan were destined to collide.
Because of that shameless nerve of his — daring to let his lecherous eyes roam over the goddess, and still trying to stay alive.
When that hour of reckoning arrived, the victor would be decided by what each man knew about the other.
In that sense, this whole situation was a miscalculation Kim Minchul took no pleasure in whatsoever.
To think he'd burn this much time on a single girl.
'This is getting troublesome~'
Until now it had been mere rough handling, but perhaps it was time to consider actual torture in earnest.
To think he'd have to pick and choose methods just to learn a man's hobby.
Pull her fingernails? Or use his ability?
Thanks to some not-particularly-proud experience, Kim Minchul knew very well just how much a properly heated piece of iron could coax out of a human being.
And so.
If, at this precise moment, Kim Minchul's guard had grown slack—
then it was entirely because Ja Hayeon had shown a tenacity beyond anything he'd predicted.
And.
As fate would have it, Park Woochan was not a man inclined to miss such an opening.
The next instant, fire swallowed Kim Minchul's vision.
His usual reflex — an ability kept passively deployed at all times.
Should harm ever come to his body, flame would erupt in response.
Reactive armor, in essence.
It was what had let Kim Minchul survive ambush after ambush from the Association's hunters all this time.
And yet.
Hm?!
The searing heat wrapped around him scattered.
An impact detonated against his shoulder.
As a chill swept through him, cutting straight through the explosion, Kim Minchul let the strength drain from his entire body in an instant.
Rather than resist the blow, he had yielded to it.
A sound judgment, as it turned out.
Certainly better than leaping backward — because the attack had come from directly behind him.
A single strike from the rear.
A greatsword — a weapon that should have been impossible to swing in such cramped quarters — carved across Kim Minchul's shoulder blade.
He knew that weapon at a glance.
CRASH!!
And so Kim Minchul's body was slammed into the wall of the abandoned building.
Near the New City — a derelict structure left to rot under the threat of gate activity.
That was precisely the kind of place Kim Minchul had chosen for his hideout.
And then.
Through the flames, his attacker revealed himself.
A hulking figure with, at a glance, an utterly ridiculous appearance.
The full-body pressure suit was fire-treated, certainly, but no one could call it battle gear. The face was worse still.
Beneath the round space-suit helmet that swallowed half his field of vision sat a gas mask pressed on for good measure.
Had anyone witnessed it, they'd have called it avant-garde nine times out of ten.
And yet.
Ironically, the sight drew from Ja Hayeon the first sob she had shed since entering this abandoned factory.
Was it the sweltering heat?
The emotions she'd been holding down all this time began to melt away.
The feeling that spilled out with every hot breath was joy.
At the same time, her vision blurred.
Only when she felt the sand against her cheek turn damp did Ja Hayeon realize she had broken down crying.
The man in the pressure suit looked down at her.
His expression was invisible.
But.
She could feel it — the emotion seeping from his every movement, steeped in a strange, aching relief.
Because they had spent enough time together that she could read him that easily.
…Oppa?
Her cracked voice was so wretched she half wondered if she'd been the one who made it.
And yet.
The man inside the suit slowly bent his knee, and reached out with a slow, careful hand to wipe the tears from her eyes.
Romantic it was not, unfortunately.
The feel of synthetic resin against her cheek nearly drew a laugh out of her instead.
But.
Something greater than helplessness. Something greater than sorrow for her.
And gratitude greater than both of them together was welling up inside her heart.
Presently, the man straightened his legs again.
For a moment she felt the loss of his touch — then she noticed him gesturing to her.
You're all right.
Don't worry. Rest.
I was worried.
Are you hurt anywhere?
A gesture laden with everything he couldn't say.
In answer, she nodded slowly and closed her eyes.
As before, sleep came rushing in without warning.
As if someone had hidden a sedative behind her eyelids.
Her consciousness spun, then slowly sank, and at last — certain now that it was safe to let go — she slipped under.
Looking down at her as she finally surrendered to rest, Park Woochan gave a quiet jerk of his chin.
What it carried was nothing more than irritation — honest irritation, too plain to call rage.
The one revealed by his movement was a woman with hair the same shade as the flames raking through the abandoned building.
Serpentine eyes, slit vertically like a serpent's.
The goddess Tiamat — the one who had guided Park Woochan to this very place — scooped Ja Hayeon's body up into her arms.
Stay out of the way. Get lost.
That meaning was unmistakably there in Park Woochan's gesture.
And besides — even for her, this carnage had stoked her anger.
'Minchul.'
She bit down on her lower lip before she could stop herself.
Laying hands on a girl a full ten years his junior. Unforgivable.
Having taken up residence at the Academy and begun, in her own way, to grow close to its students, it was a sight that could only strike her as shocking.
He committed terrorism? He began spreading dangerous ideology?
Compared to such empty abstractions, the girl's face before her eyes — bruised, trembling, real — was something she could not help but feel in her bones.
And so Tiamat, too, kept her silence, and laid her blessing upon Ja Hayeon's bruised body.
The restorative grace she bestowed upon her faithful washed over the girl, tracing every wound.
Park Woochan watched until the very last moment of it, and only once the girl's breathing had quieted did he slowly turn his head.
There was plenty he wanted to say — but while Hayeon was being treated, there was no need to say any of it.
Besides, there was time to spare.
He could vent about Kim Minchul all he liked later. There would be no shortage of opportunities.
Even if the other party objected to that decision, it changed nothing.
After all, dead men don't get to argue.
Today. Right now.
Park Woochan had come here for one purpose: to put that bastard Kim Minchul in the ground.