Chapter 22
Monday morning.
Lee Seo-ah woke to the alarm and, as always, got ready for school.
As she washed her face, she caught sight of herself in the mirror.
Her cheeks, lightly flushed with color, were damp and full of life.
Did my face always look like this?
The thought drifted through her, faintly strange.
The face in her memory had always been dark and bloodless whenever it appeared in a mirror.
At some point, she had started living by forcing everything down deep inside, just so she would not break.
Her expression, her feelings, her own will, everything.
The only reason she had endured like that for so long was a stubborn compulsion: she must not die.
This life had been saved by her precious father.
No matter how painful it became, Lee Seo-ah believed she could never choose death.
And yet death was still what she thought of most often.
Every day had felt like falling into hell, so suffocating that even a breathing body felt cursed.
It had begun simply enough.
When she was drowning in grief after losing her father, a boy in her class confessed to her.
He was one of those so-called handsome rich boys.
But she had not even had the strength to refuse him, and for several days she had gone around mute, as if her tongue had been cut out.
Before she knew it, Lee Seo-ah had become the rude, impossible kid.
Malicious rumors and bullying slowly led her toward the swamp of despair.
At first it had mostly been girls, but as the years went by, the more rotten boys began joining in too.
Lee Seo-ah had asked the people around her for help.
She had begged for it again and again, resisting the malice with everything she had.
In the end, she only understood later that all of it had been pointless.
The adults turned away from her.
They never reached out a hand.
It was more profitable to stand by and watch a shabby orphan girl suffer than to help her.
Power, money, influence.
The kids who bullied Lee Seo-ah had all of it.
They wielded the power of their parents without hesitation and isolated her from everyone else.
No one helped her. No one was willing to face it head-on.
So in the end, she had given up.
Even as the violence grew worse by the day, she kept her face blank.
She swallowed pain and hurt, injustice, and the tangled knot of resentment and rage, over and over, and kept breathing.
Just breathing.
It’s different now.
She had escaped hell with almost absurd ease.
The pain that had lasted for years disappeared in just a few days.
Around a month ago, everything changed because of one person who came looking for Lee Seo-ah.
There were so many things Lee Seo-ah felt toward her.
She was someone truly beautiful and worthy of gratitude.
Someone odd, but kind.
Someone clumsy, but earnest.
At times she was frightening and impossible to understand, but she still held a warmth that had never gone away.
And that made Lee Seo-ah hesitate even more.
She was far too good for someone like her.
Was it really all right for her to become her daughter, just as she wished?
Could she ever really call her Mom?
I still don't know.
She did not know, but one thing was certain: she was happy now.
It was the same feeling she had once had when she lived with her father.
“Ah, Seo-ah.”
“Director.”
When she came out of the bathroom, the orphanage director was standing there.
They had already exchanged morning greetings, so she must have something else to say.
When Lee Seo-ah looked at her in silence, the wrinkles around the woman’s eyes trembled faintly.
The director, looking hesitant, finally spoke.
“How have you been these days?”
“I’ve been doing well.”
“I see. That’s a relief.”
For what?
She swallowed the question that had nearly risen to her throat.
She had matured early because of the life she’d grown up in.
Like her father, she could read the room, and she was not stupid.
Only now...
The middle-aged woman in front of her was regretting things. She was blaming herself.
Lee Seo-ah understood the director’s feelings, and her position, to some extent.
But understanding and emotion were separate matters.
“Um, Seo-ah, I mean...”
“I’m sorry. I think I’m going to be late for school, so I should get going.”
“Ah...”
She closed her eyes and passed the director by.
The lingering sadness tried to cling to her, but she turned away from it.
She returned to her room, grabbed her bag, and left the orphanage.
The director’s face, glimpsed in passing, had fallen deeply into shadow, and that left her feeling uneasy.
“Seo-ah!”
The moment she opened the door and stepped outside, warm white-and-red heat rushed over her.
The discomfort she had been carrying turned into confusion.
“Oh, unni.”
“I’m sooooo sorry!! You’re not mad, right? Huh? Please say you’re not!”
The beautiful older girl who rubbed her cheek hard against Lee Seo-ah’s, nearly crying as she did so, was Cynthia.
If Lee Seo-ah had thought the sight of her sniffing would still be beautiful, would that have been strange?
“Goreuk. Lee Seo-ah. Good morning.”
“Ah. Good morning, Mister Gobra.”
Then came the green dwarf in a pink Love and Peace shirt, walking over at an unhurried pace.
She did not even think of him as a monster anymore.
To Lee Seo-ah, Gobra was simply an easy, kind adult.
“Hah! Why does she get to greet you first! Seo-ah, what about me?!”
“...You too, unni.”
“Master. Please don’t get any uglier than this. Even Gobra’s embarrassed just watching you.”
“You little punk! You’re all smug because you got greeted first by my cute, precious Seo-ah!”
Cynthia bristled, her white hair standing on end like an angry cat’s.
Gobra shook his head as if he could not deal with her, then offered an apology.
“I am sorry, Lee Seo-ah. I spent all of yesterday messing around by myself because of what happened, so the master is not in a good state right now. I would appreciate your understanding.”
“Ah, yes...?”
What happened yesterday?
After a moment, she blushed.
The memory of relieving herself in someone else’s blanket flashed through her head.
Then she remembered how embarrassed she had been afterward, how she had washed up and come straight back to the orphanage.
Gobra had been the one to escort her back.
Cynthia had offered to take her, but Lee Seo-ah had refused.
She had said no without meaning to, because every time she faced her, that incident kept coming back to her.
Lee Seo-ah looked at the beauty clinging tightly to her and on the verge of tears.
Cynthia was looking at her with anxious, wavering eyes.
Was she this upset over that?
Something in her chest tightened, and a place she could not quite name started to itch.
Her heart grew warm in one corner.
“Unni, I’m not angry. So...”
She had been about to say it was fine, to ask her not to act like this and just smile like always.
Then Cynthia suddenly pulled something from her arms and spread it out.
A pure white pair of triangular panties.
It was Lee Seo-ah’s own thing from yesterday.
“I washed Seo-ah’s clothes clean and brought them back too! Look, there isn’t even a stain—”
“Kyaaah!!”
Lee Seo-ah screamed, her face burning red.
The headquarters of the Ability Management Bureau.
In the repaired director’s office, Kim Su-hyun was buried in work when he took off his glasses and rubbed at the corner of his eyes.
Recent days had brought one accident after another, large and small, and he had not slept a full night in days.
The most troublesome issue at present was the sharp rise, over the past month, in rescue signals coming from outside the Wall.
They had identified two causes.
One was the sudden increase in wanderers and villains roaming around Daejeon City.
The other was the confusion spreading through the monsters’ movements.
The former still had no clear explanation, but the latter was something he could more or less guess at.
Cynthia Valentine.
Kim Su-hyun was certain the phenomenon had been caused by that woman, who barely seemed human, while operating as a hunter.
She was working around the almost abandoned land near Gwangju with a single goblin familiar, and the amount of money she made every day was outrageous.
By simple calculation, she was hunting somewhere between 1,000 and nearly 3,000 monsters a day.
They were not even low-level monsters, and among them were occasionally some first-class high-risk species.
Actually, the hunting itself isn’t the real problem.
Even a top-ranked guild would not be able to match Cynthia’s performance unless it launched a full-scale operation with serious intent.
And it was not as if she were stealing other hunters’ prey; there was no real reason to complain about her going into a dangerous zone and hunting on her own.
The real problem was that her hunts were having a profound effect on the existing monster ecosystem.
The high-level monsters living near Gwangju are shifting their territory to avoid her.
It was fine for them to move south. But it became a problem when they moved north.
In fact, that had already thrown the existing hunting zones into disarray.
High-level monsters were repeatedly showing up in areas where lower-ranked hunters were working.
On top of that, the sudden surge of villains and wanderers had turned the area outside the Wall into chaos itself.
Haa. I still need to investigate what happened in the old Daejeon City, too.
The mysterious barrage of explosions that had recently blown apart the old Daejeon City area.
A massive mushroom cloud and thunderous blasts had shaken the ground for half a day.
Kim Su-hyun, who had been away at the time, received the report late and rushed back to the city.
Shin Hyun-ah had happened to be nearby, so they came back together, only for another matter to erupt before they could even begin planning the investigation.
That was when the level 700 returnee, Cynthia, appeared.
After that, one thing piled onto another, and in the end the investigation into old Daejeon City was pushed back again and again. With the outside situation now worsening and manpower running short, it had become something he could only keep tucked in the back of his mind.
“Could that have been her doing too?”
The thought came to him almost casually, but it sounded disturbingly plausible.
If that was the kind of power she had shown against the Eraser, then an explosion of that scale would certainly be possible.
Kim Su-hyun found himself entertaining a very reasonable suspicion.
Of course, it remained only a suspicion. He could not bring himself to ask her directly.
His hand moved cautiously to the left side of his eye.
He was still afraid of Cynthia.
Knock, knock.
“Come in.”
“Sorry to disturb you when you’re busy, Kim Su-hyun.”
“Guardian?”
Thinking it was his secretary, Kim Su-hyun stood up when the short-haired maid entered the office.
“What brings you here? Ah, did you confirm it?”
“Yes. The American side has officially confirmed Eraser’s death. The Observer verified it, so it’s certain.”
“I’m glad it wasn’t just Jeju Island that got split apart.”
Kim Su-hyun let out a relieved breath. Cynthia had said she was going after Eraser, then caused all that chaos and returned completely fine without saying a word, so he had been uneasy all this time.
Then he looked at Shin Hyun-ah in confusion.
“If that was all, you could have just called me like last time.”
“I came because there was more news that had to be delivered in person. I also brought five copies of my body, including this one.”
Kim Su-hyun’s eyes widened and his mouth opened.
A bad feeling began ringing through him like a warning.
“There was a reason Eraser, who had been lying low, suddenly appeared again.”
“What?”
So it had not simply been because his body had recovered from what Archangel did to him?
“There are people who fed Eraser the lie that he had a daughter here in Daejeon.”
“What did you say?”
“They were trying to verify it through Eraser.”
“Just what exactly were they trying to...”
“Cynthia Valentine. They wanted to find out how strong she really is.”
“...!”
Shin Hyun-ah closed her eyes briefly, then opened them again and continued.
“The information was leaked.”
“T-that’s impossible!”
Kim Su-hyun had personally sealed off and manipulated the information in case anything happened.
Nothing had been released to the outside except her name, the fact that she was a Special Class ability user, and that she was a returnee.
Only Kim Su-hyun, Shin Hyun-ah, and the guardians of each nation knew about Cynthia’s power.
And when her information had been revealed at the summit, Eraser had already begun operating.
Which meant there was no traitor among the guardians.
Then just what in the world...
“Villains.”
“Villains?”
“The problem was the thousand villains who were killed in order to test Cynthia Valentine’s abilities.”
“What do you mean?”
“There was a host among them.”
Kim Su-hyun’s eyes flew wide open.
“G-Guardian. Are you saying...”
“Yes. They’ve started moving. The Union, that is.”
And then.
“What they’re targeting is probably Cynthia Valentine. They’ll be trying to drag her over to their side.”
“...We’ll have to stop them.”
His head began to throb.
He did not want to get entangled in this, but the situation kept twisting itself tighter.
Kim Su-hyun adjusted his glasses and felt a sour ache rise in his stomach.
After the morning commotion.
Lee Seo-ah went to school as usual and sat in her seat, wrapped in her usual indifference.
But today was a little different.
A transfer student had arrived.
“Hi, hi! My name is Ma Yu-ri! Nice to meet you all from now on!”
She was a girl with an unusually high energy level.
And she was very pretty.
“Um, the seat is...”
“Teacher! I think I like that one! I’ll sit there!”
“What? W-wait, you can’t go there.”
The homeroom teacher looked quite flustered and tried to stop her.
Lee Seo-ah also looked rather surprised.
Ma Yu-ri, her long black hair swaying all the way down to her hips, strode over with energy and sat down in the empty seat beside Lee Seo-ah.
Her bright smile, as she turned back like a mischievous boy, was dazzling.
“Hey! Nice to meet you!”
“Oh, yeah. R-right.”
In a way, she was a girl who shouted agreement with her whole body.
For someone as shy as Lee Seo-ah, it was a little overwhelming, but she did not seem like a bad person, so it felt difficult to push her away.
“I forgot my Device at home, so can I look at the material with you?”
“...Yeah.”
“Hehe. Thanks, Seo-ah!”
Ma Yu-ri pressed her desk right up against Lee Seo-ah’s and leaned her shoulder in close as well.
That brazen physical closeness reminded Lee Seo-ah of someone.
Then class began.
As she and Ma Yu-ri looked over the textbook while ignoring the glancing eyes around them, Lee Seo-ah suddenly noticed something strange.
Huh? Wait, did I ever tell her my name?