Tried to Vent at the Han River and Snapped My Wrist
“Hah… hah… hah…”
“Ghhhk…”
“A-are you okay?”
“No… I’m… not okay… I think I’m dying.”
“…Still got enough energy left to crack jokes, so you’re probably doing alright.”
“Haaah…”
Seonyeong lay sprawled on the ground with a severe injury to her leg. Comrades had gathered around her to carry the wounded, yet now that the mission was over, every face among them was cast in the same dark shadow.
Exhausted, wounded A-class hunters and B-class hunters alike. Support had arrived at the last possible second, so they had somehow completed the mission and kept their lives. But success or not, the damage from this operation was far too heavy to dismiss lightly.
And that damage was not merely physical.
The greatest wound they had suffered on this mission—the one that hurt the most—was not of the body, but of the mind.
Even the agony of past S-class missions that had truly deserved the name “hell” had never felt quite like this. Back then the casualties had been more than double what they were now; some had even been forced into retirement by injuries that would never fully heal. Yet the moment those missions ended, they had still been able to laugh and cheer together with genuine joy.
The sheer exhilaration of finishing a mission everyone had called impossible, of reclaiming the objective, had been enough to blow away every physical and mental torment, if only for a little while.
But the emotion filling them now that the mission was over was neither joy nor relief. It was despair at the present situation, dread for their own futures, and a crushing sense of helplessness—as if their own powerlessness had been stripped naked for all to see.
We used to clear even S-class commissions… and now we’re reduced to this over a mere B-class job?
I knew it on some level, but… does this really mean our skill was never more than this? That every success until now was only possible because Adjutant Lee Jinhyun was with us?
It had been the new adjutant’s first mission, so a certain amount of inexperience was inevitable. Compounding that were the power losses caused by the S-class hunters’ own mistakes—a cascade of overlapping disasters. Even so, these were the same people who had won missions everyone else had written off as impossible.
To have been tossed around and nearly broken by a situation like this was a mental blow far too heavy for veterans who had always prided themselves on being battle-hardened survivors of countless killing fields.
And that shock naturally made one absence feel terrifyingly large today: the man who had single-handedly created that enormous difference in outcomes.
Adjutant Lee Jinhyun’s empty place.
If only the adjutant had been here, it never would have ended this miserably…
What do we do now…? Looking like this, we can’t even take A-class missions anymore, let alone S-class…
Feeling the hopeless reality press against their skin once more, the women began to shrink into themselves.
Just then—
“Damn it… that bastard of an adjutant. The second I get back I’m going to—”
“….”
“Haaah…”
A voice thick with rage brushed past the hunters. The fundamental cause of this entire disaster, the one who had handed them their present despair—Guild Master Lee Sena—walked by. Heavy sighs escaped the hunters, and a cold light they could no longer hide began to gather in their eyes.
Right… that bitch will never understand why this happened.
From the look of it, she thinks the new adjutant is the reason everything went wrong. Of course she does. From her point of view she just danced around swinging her sword like always and the mission still didn’t clear.
We’re finished… the moment that damn woman drove Adjutant Lee Jinhyun away, we were already done for.
Because of the military chain of command, none of them could openly voice their grievances against their superior—an S-class hunter and guild master. They could only swallow the boiling resentment and force it down.
Meanwhile Lee Sena, completely oblivious to the icy stares fixed on her back, prepared to board a helicopter with Yujin and return to base at once.
She had a new adjutant to punish for the humiliation he had dared to inflict on her.
“What…? You little shit. Say that one more time.”
“I-it was you who ignored my command and acted on your own, wasn’t it, Guild Master? Why are you directing your anger at me for the casualties that resulted from that?!”
Lee Sena stood before him radiating murderous intent so thick it could crush a skull like an eggshell. Even under that S-class pressure, Choi Han still said what he had to say. His voice trembled from the overwhelming terror, yet he had absolutely no intention of shouldering the blame for this disaster unfairly.
“I simply did the best I could in that moment! And if you had only moved according to my instructions, Guild Master, those losses never would have—”
“Ha! So you’re saying you did nothing wrong? Fine, let’s say I didn’t listen to you. But when you dig into it, the real reason this happened is because you brought us some weird mission and labeled it B-class! Even without any upper-class Abysses, that volume of enemies should have been rated A-class at the very least!”
“What are you talking about…? There weren’t even three thousand Abysses! That is not a large force!”
“Shut your mouth! Are you telling me I, Lee Sena, struggled that hard against fewer than three thousand of them? Me! One of the strongest S-class hunters in the entire country, ranked inside the top fifty! I’ve beaten ten thousand Abysses before, and you’re saying I got pushed around by that little number? That doesn’t make any damn sense!”
“…Kh…”
Choi Han felt the injustice burn, yet he could no longer argue. The combat records Lee Sena had built made today’s mission look like child’s play. In pure battle experience she was on a completely different level from an adjutant who had only just arrived. More than that, she had been on the ground swinging a blade, feeling the situation with her own body, while he had only watched limited camera angles from the rear.
The conditions were simply not the same.
In the end Choi Han, crushed by her pressure, was forced to accept responsibility for the entire incident and turned away to write a written apology.
Watching him go, Sena kept her face carefully blank, but deep inside a thick wave of relief began to settle.
Good. At least this way I can bury the fact that I forgot to charge my weapon.
Honestly, she had already concluded that the single most decisive reason the battle had turned into such a mess was her own failure to recharge. If the Rose Cutter had kept its usual cutting power, the fight would have ended twice as fast, and she never would have been pushed around by mere Beetles into that humiliating spectacle.
Right… when you look at it, this whole thing started from one tiny little mistake. Sure, that bastard adjutant tried to screw me over in the middle of it, but there’s no way I would have struggled this hard over something that small.
Still clinging to absolute confidence in her own strength, Sena finished her private analysis of the disaster however she pleased.
Meanwhile Choi Han, thoroughly chewed out, reached his desk to write the apology. He switched on the computer without hesitation and began typing at high speed.
But the document that took shape was nothing like the written apology he had promised Sena.
Yes, it contained the required statement that every fault for the incident lay with him. Yet beneath that, Choi Han had added something else: a declaration that, feeling the full weight of responsibility, he wished to transfer to another region.
In short, it was not an apology letter at all. It was a transfer request.
“So long, you bitches! It was a short time, but being with you was pure hell!”
Using the wave that had crashed over him as a springboard, Choi Han cleanly left the 28th Guild behind.
Yet what he left for the 28th Guild—more precisely, for Sena—was not only his departure.
Unlike Lee Jinhyun, who had quietly walked away out of consideration for the remaining A-, B-, and C-class hunters, Choi Han was not the quiet type.
Immediately after his transfer, a post appeared on the adjutants-only community under the title “The True Face of the 28th Guild,” laying out every single thing he had endured in meticulous detail.
At the same time, several major news outlets received a tip from a reasonably credible source.
And that tip was…