The Floor That Doesn't Exist
At the very top of the Hunter Association building lies a floor that appears on no blueprint.
Whether it was the fruit of an exquisitely botched renovation, or whether some very important people simply developed a sudden taste for the secret organizations of spy films, no one could say anymore. But through the pointless diligence of shaving each floor's height down just enough to escape notice, the Association had managed to carve out a hidden space between the rooftop and the publicly acknowledged top floor — one that was utterly undetectable from the outside.
And that secret space.
The Association's deepest shame, crouching just beyond its highest floor. In this place — where only the most carefully handpicked among the Association's elite could so much as guess at its existence — she was always there.
Among the countless people who sought her out for countless purposes, few could say precisely who she was. Fewer still knew when she slept, or how she managed her meals.
It couldn't be helped. Every time anyone visited this hidden floor, she was seated on the sofa at the center of the room, receiving her visitors with an air of magnificent boredom.
Morning or dead of night, it made no difference. And so the cleaners who occasionally came through to tidy the place took to joking about it:
The mistress of this room, apparently, needed neither sleep nor food.
As if she weren't human at all—
Of course, they couldn't have known how right they were.
Her breathtaking beauty. Her singular presence. And the idle gossip they'd tossed around as a joke after witnessing her strange, inhuman way of living — who could have imagined it would land so endlessly close to the truth?
Objectively speaking, this was a deeply alarming situation. A secret room known only to a sliver of the Association. Inside it, a beautiful woman of unknown identity — even how she managed to eat and drink was a mystery...
And yet, despite a setup that screamed kidnapping and confinement no matter how you looked at it, no sleazy gossip ever leaked. For the very same reason.
High-ranking Association officials, journalists sniffing around for a scoop — in the end, all of them were merely human.
None of them could hope to stand against a goddess who had taken it for granted, for thousands of years, that she reigned above mankind.
Talk about being up shit creek.
And now.
The goddess who lived on human faith and worship found herself utterly dumbfounded by her own predicament: forced to listen to that punk — who had requested this meeting in the first place, mind you — lecture her about etiquette while wearing a gas mask.
The Hunter Association. Its very top floor.
The vast room, stripped of every wall, was less spacious than simply desolate — "boundless" was the only word that fit.
At the center of that barren floor sat a lone sofa, abandoned as though someone had forgotten to put it away.
The woman was draped across that very sofa.
It was an elegant picture. A woman with her long legs crossed like a crane's, her chin tilted high. Her cascading hair was a crimson so vivid it made fire look dull, and each time that splendid mane swayed with a turn of her head, blooming and scattering across her snow-white legs, it was like watching a painting come alive.
Her bearing was as brazen as it had been that day... and yet, at the same time, I couldn't help but admit it.
The woman before me was a being who had every right to wear that much arrogance.
But two things held my attention more than all of that.
One was the massive horn rising above her hair; the other, her violet eyes — slit vertically, like the dragon's eyes I'd seen somewhere before.
A dragon, and a goddess.
A monster, and one who had become the earth itself.
Whether she was merely impersonating the name, or whether some genuine connection existed, I still couldn't say. But rather than waste breath on such trivialities, the two of us were trading glances no different from that day.
That, right there, was the goddess Tiamat.
The great adversary of the gods of Mesopotamian myth — and, at the same time, the mother of gods who fell beneath their own children's blades.
Literally, a Constellation descended upon the earth.
This was the single greatest secret the Korean Hunter Association kept.
And at the same time, a fact so explosive that, were another nation to learn of it, they might well go to war over it.
There are, broadly speaking, two known paths to awakening as a hunter. Prolonged exposure to the high-density mana found in gates, waiting for an adapted body to grow mana-circulation organs of its own... or studying another's mana manipulation and deriving a technique of your own.
Naturally, both are maddeningly difficult. The former means facing an intuitive threat called monsters, and with the latter, the running joke is that finding a mana technique suited to you takes a good ten years at minimum.
But.
Constellations held the power to overturn those premises entirely.
The so-called Blessing of the Constellation.
Literally, the ability to bestow divine favor on whoever caught their eye.
The blessings came in endless varieties. Awakening someone who was a civilian literally yesterday, raising another to an entirely higher plane — everything reported so far had been so tremendous that the word "miracle" felt inadequate.
And among them all, the power this woman possessed was something more special still.
After all, as far as I knew, she was the only god to have descended upon this earth in the flesh.
Beings said to look down on humanity from beyond the distant night sky — ever since the "God of the Stars" first revealed itself while countless people were being shredded beneath monsters' claws.
Hence the name: Constellation.
But for all their godlike power, they were more capricious still.
They would fall silent before a million deaths, yet had been known, time and again, to answer a single person's call.
Which meant that Korea's current position — able to negotiate directly with a Constellation — was, in other countries' eyes, an advantage maddening enough to make them foam at the mouth. After all, if the negotiations bore fruit, Korea would become the first nation on earth capable of manufacturing hunters at will.
Granted, the Constellation's caprice had produced no meaningful results so far. But having it and not having it are two entirely different things. All the more so if it ended up in someone else's hands.
Well, none of that had anything to do with me.
Because Constellations? They're actually monsters.
No, that's not public knowledge. Rather, it's a story that neither can nor should become public. Because to most hunters — and to the general public — Constellations are saviors who looked upon humanity with compassion and extended a helping hand.
'But they smell like monsters, see~'
And that was exactly how I came to meet her.
Was it when I beat an A+ rank monster to death for the first time? The Association, which had been hounding me with contact attempts up to that point, finally arranged a meeting between the two of us. For an Association bleeding manpower at the time, the plan was probably to recruit me and, in the same stroke, bind the Constellation's blessing to the Association.
For me — a man who, for no particular reason, had somehow ended up drifting around the Association's periphery — it was cause for celebration.
The problem was that at that very first meeting, I'd gone and sliced off one of her horns without even noticing.
By the time I realized what I'd done, I was already diving off the Association's rooftop.
Because the woman in front of me had given off that distinctly fucked-up feeling unique to monsters.
That was the decisive reason the Hunter Association gave up on recruiting me. And naturally, I had little choice but to give up on joining them, too.
'Ah, fuck~ if it was a monster, you should've said so~'
It was also the reason I was wearing a gas mask right now. I had no desire to share air with a monster, and it would be terribly inconvenient if I ended up lopping off her other horn and bolting again in a setting like this.
Of course, she knew nothing of my feelings and was busy belittling my efforts — but I could say with confidence that, for my part, I had done my level best.
Look, I don't know the fine details, but mythologically speaking, it's hardly a rare story. In myth after myth, gods and monsters share the same bloodline. Monsters are so powerful because they were gods once, and gods are so great because they slew the monsters and seized dominion over the world — that sort of arrangement.
Like Zeus of Greco-Roman myth casting out his own kin under the name of Titans, or Odin of Norse myth who, if you traced the bloodline, was a giant from the very start.
Look further afield and Mesopotamian myth is no different. Mother of gods, and mother of monsters. That is precisely who the goddess Tiamat is.
So I could only speculate that the reason she — alone among gods — could take flesh and descend to earth was because her foundations were those of a monster.
That a goddess of the Middle East, of all places, had joined hands with South Korea — a land that must seem like paradise at the far end of ten thousand miles — was purely thanks to the faith currently flourishing back on her home soil.
Islam is fucking strong.
Talk about being up shit creek.
"And is that a thing for one wearing a gas mask to say, hmm?"
In any case, that being so, you can hardly expect me to show Constellations any respect. It's enough that we let the monster bastards live at all, no?
Besides, once you consider what Constellations really are, this whole "Blessing of the Constellation" business looks plenty shady too. Strip it down, and isn't it just pumping mana into someone until something sticks?
If that's the case, then I can only pity the hunters who've been "chosen" by a Constellation. Fuck — condemned to have a monster trailing you for the rest of your life. It turns my stomach just thinking about it.
Come to think of it, that was probably why this woman hadn't refused my meeting request despite my earlier rudeness. If she had eyes and ears, she'd have long since figured out what kind of man I am. And if so, then at the very least, she'd have realized that I'd seen through her true nature.
Calling us allies thrown into the same boat would be a stretch, but...
Still, for someone who'd so shamelessly tucked tail and fled, wasn't I rather late in showing my face?
Anyone listening in would think I'd come to apologize.
A tendon rose quietly along the goddess's brow.
Of course, by any common-sense standard, swinging a blade the moment you come face to face with someone is normally a hanging offense. True enough — but shouldn't you cut a little slack for my position too, which was no different from a crocodile pouncing the moment it was invited into someone's home?
Honestly, from the moment she started infiltrating human society while passing herself off as a god, there's no way she didn't know a blade might find her one day.
If anything, as far as I'm concerned, the fact that I — the crocodile in someone else's house — stopped cutting at all deserves more than mere praise.
Naturally, that was probably why she didn't grumble any further. And I had no desire to go poking at old boils either.
But I could tell at a glance that she was still sore about it. Otherwise, why would a wound from years ago still sit there, unregenerated, to this day? It's not as if anyone had dusted it with regeneration-blocking poison herbs.
This was a goddess, after all. A monster who, all on her own, rivaled an S-rank. Plenty of others I could believe — but I found it hard to imagine she lacked the power to regenerate by now.
'Not like anyone sprinkled anti-regen herbs on it.'
Was she trying to prick my conscience or something?
Unfortunately for her, I had no intention of playing along with such childish games. Because by not swinging my blade right now, I was already paying out every last drop of mercy I had to give — up front, and in full.
But.
The reason I'd come back here, going so far as to lean on Lee Joongoo's connections, wasn't to play these games of nerve.
Catching my gaze, the goddess gave a short snort.
"So then, what business brings you? Idle I may be... but even so, I've no wish to let my guard down before the likes of you."
There she goes. Look at the mouth on her.
"The first I heard of it, I nearly doubted my own ears. Surely not — the madman who bolted from our very first meeting, come to beg an audience of me?"
"That knack of yours for letting my words slide right past you, deaf as a stone, was nothing short of remarkable."
But this time, I was unavoidably entering as the losing party. Namely: I was the one who had requested the meeting. In other words, the one who needed something here was me, plain and simple.
Faced with a reality I had no choice but to accept, I felt an idle urge to tear her limb from limb — but thankfully, this time I somehow managed to hold it in. Phew. If I hadn't packed the gas mask, things could have gotten dicey...
I tried to slowly steady my breathing, then snapped my mouth shut in horror at the thought that her exhalations might drift in through it. In the end, I could only open my mouth after I'd finished bottling up my thoroughly complicated feelings deep inside.
"Hey."
"Hmm. Very well, I am listening. Come, speak your piece. What fresh nonsense do you intend to spout this time?"
"Let me use your name."
However.
No matter what, that insufferable attitude of hers was bound to curdle my stomach.