It Was Filthy Working With You—Let's Never Meet Again
They said the sweetest water in the world was the spring you found in the middle of the desert, right before you died of thirst.
The fruit called freedom, earned only after the agony of extreme exploitation.
In this very moment… I was tasting it.
"I'm discharged! Discharged! I can finally get the hell out of this dump! I don't have to live looking those bitches in the face anymore!"
Back when I'd graduated from the military academy, I'd always imagined that the day I was discharged, bloody tears would stream from my eyes.
That had seemed only natural.
For a soldier, discharge was basically the same as getting fired.
I'd entered this world determined to survive to the very end and pin a star on my chest, and I'd sworn to myself countless times that no matter what hardship came, I would endure it.
But right now—
At barely twenty-nine years old, packing my bags for discharge, what came out of me was not bloody tears at all. A cheerful little hum kept rising from my throat all on its own.
Even if tears had fallen in this moment, they would not have been the bloody tears of despair and defeat. They would have been tears of pure joy and triumph.
Is this what sergeants feel when they get discharged? No… even that can't compare to this. At least they could count down the days. I spent every single day in hell without any promise of an end!
With that thought, I packed faster than I ever had in my entire life.
My room in the guild annex looked more like a warehouse than anything else, piled high with stuff—but there wasn't much I actually intended to take.
Anything related to military service that had nothing to do with my work, including firearms, was staying behind, of course.
Given the nature of my position, now that I was discharged I wouldn't even have to report for reserve duty or civil defense, so there was no reason to bother packing my uniform either.
Still, I should at least take the combat boots. Ugly as they look, they're built as well as any decent hiking boot.
In the end, what I was taking amounted to the combat boots, my dog tags, one book I'd been grinding through in whatever scraps of free time I could find, my journal, and the phone I always carried.
As for the instant coffee and hardtack stacked in the corner of the room, I left them alone—a silent invitation for whoever came next to deal with them however they liked.
Once I'd gathered what I needed, I slowly turned my gaze toward the things that took up the greatest share of space in the room.
Dozens of notebooks and volumes stacked like a mountain.
Three years of work—cataloging the habits and strategies of the Abysses we were at war with, then drafting countermeasures and tactics in response.
Roughly seventy percent of that room was filled with the materials and records I had written by hand over my years as an adjutant.
Every single one of them bore the marks of my hands.
They were the things that had always given me a quiet sense of pride—proof of how hard I had lived.
And yet… I had no intention of taking them with me.
The sheer volume was one reason, but more than that, I had already decided this was no longer my concern.
That didn't mean I planned to sort them or destroy them myself, either.
It wasn't out of consideration for my successor.
Whatever expert our oh-so-merciful Guild Master was bringing in would no doubt be more capable than I was.
Someone like that would have no need for the notes I'd scratched together.
The biggest reason was simpler: I felt no obligation to clean up after myself on the way out.
And, as a bonus, after three long years of grinding to put those materials together—love them or hate them—I just couldn't quite bring myself to erase them with my own hands.
So I left all three years of compiled data behind. I packed the last of my belongings into a box and sealed it tight with blue packing tape.
Compared to the weight of everything I was leaving, the box was almost absurdly light.
It felt like a promise of the free, happy life waiting for me ahead.
Carrying that box, I left the room that was no longer mine without a shred of regret, and before long I stood at the base exit.
With that, my military service was completely over.
Beyond this point, only a new path as a civilian remained.
A fresh shiver of thrill ran through me at the thought.
I raised my voice one last time toward those women who were far too distant to hear me.
The C-class hunters guarding the gate flinched slightly at the words.
I gave them one last, brilliantly bright smile, then pulled out my phone, left the guild group chat, and blocked it on the spot.
Of course, I didn't forget to drop a video into the group chat right before I left.
A scene from some anime I'd watched as a kid.
The famous clip of a girl in a dress waving and calling out goodbye—
The one I'd always wanted to use just once.
"Huh?"
"What is it?"
"Hold on… what the hell is this?"
Three or four hunters were cleaning their gear in the barracks. B-class hunters belonging to the 28th Hunter Guild, they stared blankly at the incomprehensible video and system notice on their phones.
A message that had appeared in the group chat every single member of the 28th Guild was in.
It took people longer than expected to grasp what it meant.
"Why did Adjutant leave?"
"No idea. I can't even invite him back—he must have blocked us. What the hell is going on all of a sudden?"
"Adjutant blocked us? That doesn't sound like him at all… What is this…?"
Adjutant Lee Jinhyun had, until now, been the one who effectively managed the guild group chat and passed along non-classified announcements.
The fact that he had left without any warning, leaving only a farewell video behind, left not just the women here but most of the hunters on base thoroughly bewildered.
And among them, the ones who reacted most sharply—and with the deepest unease—were the A-class hunters who had a rough sense of what went on inside the guild's command staff.
"Hey… you don't think…"
"No… looking at this, I think that 'you don't think' is exactly right."
"Honestly, same. You've all seen it at least once, right? How those so-called S-class hunters treat Adjutant."
They had occasionally witnessed Adjutant Lee Jinhyun's suffering firsthand whenever they visited the officers' office for reports or other business.
As A-class hunters, they couldn't freely speak out against S-class hunters who were both their superiors and possessed power that could overwhelm them—but they had eyes, and they had pieced it together well enough.
How those four officers treated Adjutant Lee Jinhyun.
"I always figured it would blow up someday, but still—discharging out of nowhere like this?"
"Come on, be real. He lasted a long time as it was, didn't he? If it were me, I wouldn't have lasted four days in that situation, never mind four years."
"Yeah… fair point."
"Quitting a job dealing with those bitches? If it were me, I wouldn't have posted some resignation video—I'd have unloaded a stream of curses and vanished on the spot."
The A-class hunters expressed sympathy even as they reeled from the adjutant's sudden discharge.
But then, slowly, something else began to bloom in their minds—not worry for Lee Jinhyun, but worry for their own futures.
"Hey… but if Adjutant is just gone like this, what happens to the 28th Guild from now on?"
"Well…"
"Obviously…"
"…"
The words that should have come next…
The A-class hunters couldn't quite bring themselves to say them out loud.
In some ways, they were deployed into the field even more frequently than the S-class hunters.
And in their minds, a picture rose unbidden—one they would rather not have seen.
Regarding that picture, the most blunt among them finally spoke the single line that perfectly captured what they were all thinking.
"We're fucked, that's what."