If the Roots Still Hold
A month and a half had passed since Eunha entered the training center. Under a low lid of cloud she trained that day as she always did, and she did not stop until the scarecrow was smashed to pieces.
"You've worked hard."
Gyeon Woncheol, director of the training center, spoke from behind her; she could not have said when he had come to stand there. He sounded as if he had known all along that she would still be at it at this hour.
Woncheol glanced at the poor scarecrow, reduced now to ash.
"The quartermaster's going to grumble again."
The words had the shape of a scolding, but he tossed a glossy apple her way all the same. Eunha caught it on reflex and stared at it, blank, until he gave a short laugh.
"You skipped supper again, didn't you."
Only then did she realize the sun had gone down. She lifted her chin. Stars packed the night sky—stars you never saw in Seoul.
"......Thank you."
She dipped her head and bit into the apple. Sweet enough, and crisp, it filled a mouth gone dry and rough.
"Well?"
"Sweet. It's good."
"Isn't it."
Woncheol laughed, low and rough. Eunha took another bite of the ripe fruit and, without meaning to, laughed with him.
Neither of them was the first to suggest it. They simply sat down side by side and watched the night sky for a long while.
After a time Woncheol's gaze slid sideways. The hand closed around the bare stem was a ruin of cuts; anyone could see it. Training had stacked wound upon wound until her healing could no longer keep pace.
He looked at that wreck of a hand and spoke through a sigh.
"You couldn't even hold chopsticks with hands like those."
"......"
Eunha regarded her own hands without expression, then hid them behind her back, stem and all.
"Is there a reason you drive yourself this hard? Once the training here is finished, you'll have to stake your life in fight after fight whether you want to or not."
"When I leave this place, it won't be only my life I'm carrying."
She meant to finish every preparation she could before she walked out. She did not want to watch anyone else die in front of her. Not again.
"Even so, you have to know how to look after your own body. That's part of our duty. September 1997—the day the world changed. We survived, didn't we."
"......"
Eunha gave him no answer. She only lowered her lashes. Nameless insects bored into soil so dry it held not a trace of damp.
September 1997.
How could she, of all people, forget that nightmare?
The memory she could never put down rose again, and slowly she brushed the dirt from her clothes and stood.
"I really don't have time to sit here."
She had the strength now to kill those things. So she would hone that strength, and in the end she would—
"I told you once. That day, I lost my daughter too."
Woncheol's voice came from behind her.
"......"
Eunha stopped where she stood.
A dry wind passed between them. Their hair blew the same way.
He drew a pack from his front pocket and set a thick cigarette between his lips. Flame caught with a soft hiss, and he spoke again.
"The house fell in, and an ill-omened vortex opened. My daughter was lying in the living room with a book, and it pulled her straight in. Right in front of me."
Like water drawn down a drain. That was how he murmured it.
He had watched his little girl taken by a Gate, and still he threw himself into the vortex. Inside it he met a devil-shaped monster armed with a scythe. At the very edge of death a System window rose before his eyes, and all at once he Awakened.
"So I managed to keep my life. That much, at least."
"......In the end, I couldn't save my daughter."
He added it with a wrecked little laugh.
Afterward his wife, shattered by their daughter's death, sickened by degrees and at last took her own life. He turned his face from the only family he had left—his son—and fell into drink.
"I thought my life ended there. I didn't believe it could get any worse."
It had been the same for Eunha.
Her mother's sudden death. House, family, and even her dream, gone in a single moment. Not one person had reached a hand out to her.
"If I was going to live like that, I thought I might as well fight monsters until something tore a hole through my gut and I died."
Having said so, Woncheol lifted his head.
"But one day the boy came home with a crumpled career form."
The high school he attended had closed with no date to reopen, and even lessons at home were impossible. The form he carried was one the school had handed out just before the nightmare began.
"He said he wanted to be a firefighter. Saving people in danger—that had been his little sister's dream, so he was going to make it come true in her place."
On the day of the catastrophe Woncheol had Awakened faster than almost anyone. His son had not. The boy was Unawakened.
An Unawakened person could never become a Hunter. So if peace ever came, he wanted to be a firefighter instead of a Hunter, and pull people out.
"That child was better than me."
He laughed quietly and blew out a lungful of smoke. What left his mouth was acrid and harsh; it stirred him through to the bottom before it thinned away into the air.
Eunha did not know what she ought to say. So she simply listened.
"Looking at you is like looking at myself back then. But listen."
A brief silence. He pressed what remained of the cigarette hard into the dirt until the ember died, and when he spoke again his voice was lighter.
"Now that I've lived a while, I see that a person—a person's life—is like a tree. Every time a hard wind comes, it lets a leaf go, and then another. So when a winter arrives that's too cold and too cruel to bear, maybe nothing will be left but bare branches. But, Eunha."
He hoped she would remember at least this much. He added it quietly.
"— — —"
Eunha closed her eyes slowly, and opened them.
What had the Director said, in the end? She could not quite remember.
Only that he had smiled.
Even beneath that black-and-white sky, she thought he had simply smiled.
A corridor lined with wreaths of pure white.
Eunha, sunk in thought, slowly lifted her head.
She gazed at the name Gyeon Woncheol for a long time, then slowly took off her shoes.
Even after she stepped inside, she could not see a single mourner. The hour was late; perhaps most of them had already come and gone. Or perhaps, as it had been for her own mother, there had never been many people who would come at all.
No one sat at the desk. A condolence book lay open on it. A glance told her that before Eunha, two visitors at most had been here.
Why?
The Director had been a selfless man, deeply considerate of others. In their days at the training center, plenty of his colleagues had respected him with all their hearts. Eunha had been one of them.
So why were there so few mourners at his funeral?
She found it strange, but first she picked up the pen to write her name in the book. And then—
"......"
She froze like that.
Cha Eunha. She could not write the name. Her hand would not move.
Only then did she remember the restriction she had forgotten all this while: the contract she had made with the cat, and the name it had taken from her.
"You are......"
A low voice came suddenly from behind. Eunha, gone still as stone with the pen in her hand, turned toward it.
A middle-aged man she had never seen. For a mourner, his clothes were...
A firefighter's uniform?
Vivid orange. It was unmistakably a firefighter's uniform. But the black-striped armband on his left arm was just as clearly the mark of the chief mourner.
Then he was—
"Father always liked me best like this."
Reading her look, he smiled, a little awkward, and fussed with the set of his clothes.
Eyes exactly like the Director's. The man before her was, without a doubt, his son.
He had lost his younger sister in a Gate, then lost the mother who could not survive that grief. The little boy who had brought home a career form and said he would become a firefighter instead of a Hunter now stood middle-aged in a dust-stained uniform.
"......"
Before him, Eunha hesitated over how to begin. My condolences. Even that set phrase would not leave her mouth. Because—
"Right. I was just on my way to see Instructor Jang. You remember him, don't you? What do you say. If you're not busy, come with me."
If she had not ignored the Director then. If she had not refused that invitation.
—He might not have died.
She only blinked, pen still in hand, and he offered her a faint smile.
"If I'd known someone was coming, I should have worn a proper mourner's suit."
He spoke as if he had expected no one at all.
"Father used to say it to me, and to everyone around him, like a habit. When I die someday, I hope nobody comes to the funeral."
"Why......"
Eunha murmured it, and the man's eyes, remembering his father, sank deep.
"In his younger days, Father suffered for a long time under the guilt of having pushed innocent people—people who knew nothing—into a place of death."
"......"
"His old students and comrades met miserable ends inside the Gates. They never even returned to their families. They closed their eyes alone in the cold earth. He would say, what right do I have to leave for the next world with everyone seeing me off?"
Eunha listened in silence, and in the end said nothing. The Director she knew was exactly the sort of man who would have said it. Thinking so, the empty funeral hall seemed lonelier still.
As if to lift the weight in the air, he smiled and turned.
"Would you come this way? You don't have to sign the book. It's all right. As you can see, there's no one here anyway."
I'm dressed like this myself, he added, and turned with an easy spin. He tipped his chin for her to follow. His tone, his manner—both were those of a man who already knew who she was.
Eunha set the pen down and decided, for now, to follow him.
The whisper of cloth walked over the quiet. When they went farther in, that room was empty too. Only a few sticks of incense in the burner proved that anyone had been there at all.
Amid a lavish bank of white chrysanthemums, a memorial portrait sat alone.
Director.
There she faced the training-center director from her memory, a little younger than he had later been.
She approached the incense altar in hesitant steps, took up a stick, and lit it from the burning candle. Only then did she realize her hand was trembling, faintly.
She held the incense in both hands and set it respectfully in the burner. White smoke rose, thin and soft. Through it she looked at the portrait once more.
"Thank you."
A low voice beside her. Woncheol's son.
A beat too late, she realized she still had not properly greeted the chief mourner. In the end she had not even signed the book.
"Ah, I'm—"
The moment her lips moved toward a belated introduction, he cut her off, as if there were no need.
"The day Father died, I got a phone call. They told me he had met you."
......Ah. A short breath, and Eunha closed her mouth. As she had thought, he knew who she was.
While she was still searching for what to say, he kept his smile and spoke gently.
"His voice was brighter than I'd heard in a long time. Of course it was. He ran into the student he treasured most, by chance, after all these decades."
"......I see."
"Yes. A few months ago I watched a program you were on. With Father. I think it was a special on Concept Hunters."
A Concept Hunter special. Eunha had certainly appeared on a broadcast like that. Not as Cha Eunha, but as the Princess of Dark Flare.
"The moment Father saw it he shot up off the sofa and called the station in a complete uproar. In the end he never managed to get a contact... but he did learn that your name was Lee Yura. It wasn't the name he remembered. Still, he said the name didn't matter."
He smiled.
"That child hasn't changed one bit. That's enough... he said."
A gentle smile, gentler than you would expect from a man who had just lost his only family. It was like looking at the Director in her memory. Perhaps that was why.
"I'm sorry."
All at once, Eunha apologized to him. Sorry for what? Perhaps for all of it.
For some reason she could not hold his gaze, and her eyes dropped. She felt his look resting on this place for a long time.
"......Only three people came all the way here today."
One was the high-school student his father had thrown himself to save. One was that student's mother. And the last was Eunha.
The few mourners had all said the same thing.
"All three of you told me you were sorry."
"......"
"If anyone ought to apologize to me, it's Father. He went and left me behind without so much as a goodbye."
Isn't that right? He laughed lightly.
"But I don't think anyone has to apologize. Not you. And not Father, either."
His gaze went past the white smoke to the portrait.
"I'm not a Hunter. I'm not even an Awakener. But from here on, I'm going to live the way he did."
Because to me, Father was the greatest Hunter there was. He added it.
In that moment a voice of a similar tone brushed past Eunha's ear.
"A person is like a tree. Every time a great wind blows, it drops its leaves, one and then another. And so, when a winter comes that is too cold and too cruel to bear, perhaps only bare branches will remain."
......Ah.
The fog in her head seemed to clear, little by little. Eunha blinked slowly. The memory she had forgotten came in at last, the way a tide sweeps back over the sand.
"But, Eunha. Even so—if the roots are still set in that ground. If nothing there has shaken loose."
Her eyes met the man's. White smoke from the incense wrapped widely around them both.
"For me, too......"
Eunha's lips moved, slowly.
"He was the same to me."