No Right to Weep
And with that, the whole affair surrounding Kim Minchul came to an end.
A rogue former hunter. A monster worshipper. The goddess's true identity, not to mention the kidnapping and the self-destruction. Considering the sheer scale of everything that had happened, it was a remarkably tidy resolution.
My unexcused absence from work went much the same way. I simply had no choice, I explained—I'd vanished without a word to go looking for my student, Ja Hayeon, who'd disappeared just as abruptly. Honestly, I doubt that excuse would have flown anywhere other than an academy where every student was a hunter in their own right.
My sincerest apologies go out to Choi Seungjun. This time, it was entirely my own doing, after all.
Well, seeing as the absence was less a request and more a notification, I did get hit with a pay cut and a formal warning... Frankly, at this point, the words barely registered. Even I knew it was a lousy attitude to have, but so be it.
And so. Tiamat and I made our way to a nearby hospital, to pay Hayeon a visit.
According to the doctors, she was fortunate—no visible injuries to speak of. Which, viewed from the other side, meant that even with the goddess herself pouring her restoration into the girl, something had still been left behind. That alone told you just how much of a bastard Kim Minchul had been.
Which was how we ended up here, behind the hospital, killing time in that lonely little corner of the grounds that sat apart from everything else.
There were things I wanted to say. But the atmosphere made it awkward to bring any of them up just yet.
And the one sitting at the center of that atmosphere was, of course, him.
Kim Minchul. Once Tiamat's adopted son—the boy she'd awakened as a hunter in hopes of proving her power as a Constellation. At the same time, a traitor and terrorist who had turned his back on the hunters he'd once served alongside, despite belonging to the Association himself. Above all, a cultist said to worship and love monsters in equal measure—a monsterphile, plain and simple.
In the end, that lunatic had to die by my own hand, his neck severed. And just like that tangled mess of titles, he remained a thoroughly complicated subject between Tiamat and me.
What a pain in the ass this is~
More than anything else, the problem was the fact that he had died as a monster. Not that I wouldn't have killed him anyway, monster or not. But still.
What if he had died as a human? Maybe I would have felt some flicker of guilt. Maybe I'd have been shaking at the weight of my first kill, sobbing my way through it.
But he had died a monster.
And so, honestly? Not a single shred of remorse touched me now.
No—that wasn't all of it. To put it bluntly, it had been thrilling. Exhilarating. Electric. Every single moment felt new!
...Not exactly something I could say in front of the deceased's family.
Deep down, I knew the truth. Kim Minchul had been a person once, too.
And yet. No matter how many times I tried to remind myself that Kim Minchul had been human, my mind—where the image of what he'd become was burned in with perfect clarity—kept writing him off as a monster of its own accord. In a word, it never felt real. I'd try to think I killed a person, and all I got back was the sensation of putting down one more monster. Or, to be precise, the sensation of killing an S-rank monster.
Which meant that, to me, Kim Minchul's death carried none of the weight of a life—nothing more than a component of simple pleasure. Which was to say, I couldn't have squeezed out a single performance-tear if I tried.
Whoops.
Better fix my face. I cleared my throat and hauled back the expression that had started slipping loose on its own. Remembering Kim Minchul's death had put me in a good mood, after all.
Then again, how long had it been since I'd hunted a high-rank monster? Lately it had all been hunters who killed people, half-monsters, that sort of vermin—so no wonder the feeling was back. I'd carved my way through a monster village or two, sure, but a high-rank monster had a flavor all its own.
...What's that supposed to mean?
Hm?
You know, that thing from before.
Mm.
Why did you do it?
Unable to come up with an answer, I found myself waving a hand vaguely through the air. The blessing. Was that what you'd even call it? What Tiamat had bestowed on Kim Minchul that day had been, without question, the power of a wisdom goddess straight out of mythology.
But.
Does the Association know about that ability?
If someone asked me that, I'd have no choice but to shake my head. It was nothing that could ever be made public.
After all, even the mass production of hunters already hung on the goddess's every whim. And if word got out that that same fickle goddess could, in fact, turn a hunter into a monster?
Even forfeiting her merit as a Constellation descended upon the earth, the calls to eliminate her would be deafening. No—precisely because she was a Constellation, they'd only be louder.
Until now, Tiamat had reigned above the Association as a goddess who simply dabbled, on a whim, in cultivating hunters. But if the truth that she could create monsters were proclaimed to all the world... What if that whim of hers turned toward me one day, without warning? Would I just... become a monster?
That's simply how the human mind works. Which was exactly why the question had been gnawing at me.
The goddess Tiamat. Why had she used such a monstrous power in front of me that day? Sure, it was the reason I'd survived at all... but even if I'd failed to stop Kim Minchul's detonation, this woman—being merely an avatar—wouldn't have taken any real harm.
It's a bit crude to say, but I'm not exactly overflowing with consideration for others. And with her as the counterpart, even less so. Bluntly—what was her plan if I went and announced this to the world? What was she going to do about it?
...Huh?
She'd gone on and on about wanting to kill me, and now she was the one hesitating?
U-umm.
It wasn't wrong, what she said. It really wasn't. Somehow—call it a more physical reason—the strength just wouldn't come when facing a human.
Well, if you'd been watching me fight from the sidelines, you'd probably assume the same. Either way, it wasn't an answer to the question I'd asked.
And yet I had no choice but to let it go. Had the goddess's non-answer come from not understanding my question, or from deliberately dodging it? I genuinely couldn't tell.
And so silence settled over us once more.
A mother who raised the blade against her child's killer, and the death of that child. The relationship between the two of us was not the kind of thing that could be summed up in a single breath.
...But worry not overmuch. It is not a power one may wield so easily, you see.
Is that so?
Mm. It may only be granted when both the patron and the vessel consent to it.
That was a pretty brutal condition.
One must consent, heart and soul, to casting away everything one currently is, you see.
The goddess said it with a studied brightness in her voice. Not that I had any intention of running around broadcasting this either—but there'd been no order of silence, no don't you dare tell the others.
That was how our conversation went—deflated, somehow. Repetitive, even. Like two people forcibly trading words that didn't need saying.
Only.
When I thought of Kim Minchul—how he'd become a complete monster in less than a single second—it suddenly crossed my mind that while this ending might have meant nothing to me or anyone else, it was very possibly the one outcome she had prayed would never come.
I have pondered it from every angle, you know.
Huh?
Was it that I fell short? Or could it be something else entirely...
Here—what difference do you think there was, between you and my Minchul?
Intelligence, probably? That was my first thought. But there was no way I could say it, not in this atmosphere. So this time, I decided to just shut up.
You both lost your families to monsters. Yet one became a hunter, and the other became a monster. Heh heh. Is there any cruelty so exquisite?
Oh, but whose fault was that, exactly?
Even I couldn't keep my face neutral at that follow-up. But hearing it laid out like that, I started to wonder whether environment hadn't been the real problem for me too.
Of course I know. I have no right to weep. In the matter of Minchul, I was never the victim—only the perpetrator.
Perhaps she'd misread my expression; she added it in a voice thick with bitterness.
I didn't say it quite that harshly...
For someone who insisted she wasn't his mother, she sure had a knack for reading—and wrecking—a room.
But this wasn't a topic I could wave off with a casual it's fine. Because it wasn't wrong.
Kim Minchul had certainly been a lunatic from birth—but the woman standing here as the party in question couldn't possibly see it that way. And from watching her these past few days, I'd learned something: this goddess was unexpectedly sentimental. She'd called Kim Minchul by name, over and over, even after he'd betrayed every hope she'd placed in him. Naturally, when it came to the people he'd hurt, there was no way she could look away.
Call it unexpectedly human, or call it a standard of scrutiny befitting the word goddess. It's not as if we're erecting a memorial shrine for the guy—but honestly, so what?
I figured I could at least tell her this much. Sure, Kim Minchul's victims might flip the table if they overheard. But even so, there was no need to reopen the wound of a mother already mourning the child she'd raised wrong.
Not that Tiamat herself was doing anything but blinking those wide, bewildered eyes at me.
I want to gouge them out. Seriously.
Ah—my mistake.
I'd meant to ask if she was okay. Which, conveniently, gave the goddess her opening to collect her expression in an instant—no, if anything, she seemed to have recovered a measure of her composure entirely.
My, how considerate of you today. My, my—what on earth has gotten into you?
Giggling lightly, Tiamat opened her mouth as if nothing in the world had happened.
No, listen—
I didn't actually dislike her, was what I meant.
...I'm sorry, what?
I just want to kill you, that's all.
And even that was purely because Tiamat's species was monster. About Tiamat as an individual, I was more or less indifferent.
No—what was there to complain about, really? For the sake of humanity. For the sake of South Korea. A Constellation who had lent her strength without pause ever since descending to the earth. Where was the reason to hate her?
This whole incident proved the same. She'd unleashed her power without a moment's hesitation, even with me—the man who wanted her dead—standing right beside her.
Which was why I couldn't help thinking: yes, it was undeniably Tiamat who had raised Kim Minchul into the criminal he became. But wasn't pressing her any further than this simply too cruel?
This wasn't the era of collective punishment. And besides—hadn't Tiamat, at the cost of unnecessary bloodshed, helped bring about her own son's subjugation? ...She had raised a child with her own hands, and sent him off with those same hands. Wasn't that enough to say the goddess Tiamat had paid her debt in full?
I'd never say it to her face—it'd leave a bad taste—but as an individual, she'd more than earned a measure of respect. Not that the sum total of all those virtues stops me from wanting to kill her for the single fact that she's a monster.
Which was, come to think of it, the same reason I wasn't forcing a deathmatch with her here and now. Because I had no reason to kill her. Because if I did, several people would cry rivers of blood over it. That was the whole of it.
Bluntly put, I'm not the type to dance to the Association's tune anyway.
Anyway—I'd say you've shouldered your share of the blame more than enough by now.
...Is that so.
At my words, the goddess smiled—a look caught somewhere between pleasure and helplessness. And still, to the very end, she showed no tears.
Even after being told she'd done enough. That it was okay. Even then.
...I said I had no right to shed tears for myself, did I not.
For her, I suspect, that had never been deflection. Never a shield against the reproach of others.
By international standards, A+ rank, or S rank. By the yardsticks of modern society, these are beings at the very ceiling of measurable power—and for that very reason, they have nothing left to answer to. They pay attention to society's rules one by one, precisely because they can reshape those rules to suit themselves.
And so the faces such beings wear in daily life inevitably become signatures, reflecting their true nature. I might claim aloud that any of them could be hiding some scheme or other—but there was a reason I'd chosen the goddess as the figurehead to stand against the Order's cabal.
Because for an S-rank monster capable of erasing entire nations, she possessed a temperament delicate to the point of excess. Although—maybe that was less nature, and more the result of nearly getting her skull caved in by a holy warrior of Islam.
Learned intelligence, they call it.
Islam is fucking terrifying.
Shall we head up, then?
That was enough of the heavy stuff. Before rising from my seat, I asked her one last thing.
A personal question.
Mm.
That thing you used at the end—was it because, if he'd been human, you were afraid it'd break me?
My, I haven't the faintest idea what you mean.
Is that so.
Having asked that much, I gave a light shrug. It wasn't a matter worth pressing—nothing more than genuine personal curiosity, in the end.
With a casual wave of my hand, I started toward the hospital steps. Tiamat didn't follow. No one had told me she wouldn't, but I didn't press her either.
I have no right to weep.
That's what she'd said—but no matter how you slice it, a person needs time to sort through her feelings.
Well, then.
All that was left was the get-well visit itself.
Hayeon's face—swollen and bruised from Kim Minchul's blows—still flickered before my eyes. Good timing, actually.
There were things I wanted to say to her. Maybe not the kind of things you say to a girl who's just woken up—but I hadn't come here to scold her, either.
To be clear, the fact that Hayeon had resisted Kim Minchul to the very end was, without question, admirable. It may even have been the very reason I managed to win.
But still. Knowing all that, I wanted her to look after herself a little more. After everything that had happened, she'd earned that much.
And besides—this was the perfect opportunity to finally clear the air. That odd, unspoken distance that had always sat between Hayeon and me.
Thinking that, I climbed the stairs to go and talk to her.