The Return
A sickening crunch rang out as a massive head slammed into the earth.
The Abyss Lord’s final thrashing—once a force that had driven the world into terror—ended in nothing more than feeble convulsions.
Above the corpse stood a man, expressionless, coated in blood, dust, and fluids no one could name.
Kang Taejun.
Or rather, the man now known far better by the alias Sword Demon.
Beneath his boots, the lord’s enormous eye slowly drained of its last spark of life and went dark.
Ten years.
A fucking ten years.
That was how long he had spent in this hell.
Whether from the shock of the final blow or something deeper, the space around him rippled unsteadily. The landscape cracked like shattered glass, then sealed itself, over and over. The bastard’s blood squelched underfoot in a thick river, and the stench of rotting entrails clawed at his nose—but none of it registered anymore. It was just the familiar reek of a decade.
Empty black eyes swept the surroundings with deliberate slowness.
Endless mountains of corpses. Rivers of blood.
This was the final face of the S-rank Gate known as the Abyss Rift.
Even this damned soul resonance… is it finally over?
The chaotic waves that had scrambled his mind, the lingering remnants of the Soul World Fluctuation that had saturated the Gate, were ebbing away at last. A silence settled in—something he hadn’t felt in ten years, or perhaps ever. Yet what wrapped around him was not relief. Only bone-deep exhaustion and a hollow numbness.
The sword in his hand was already ruined beyond any recognizable shape. He flicked a broken shard free without care. It hit the ground with a dull clink.
“Ten years.”
The words were spoken to himself, or maybe to the empty air. No emotion rode in the voice.
“With this… it’s really over.”
In the distance, faint murmuring reached him. Support hunters waiting outside the Gate, no doubt. Their gazes would be a tangle of shock, fear, and a thin thread of awe. None of them would dare come closer; they would be holding their breath, watching from far away.
Alone… cleared an S-rank Gate… after ten years… so that’s the legendary Sword Demon…
They were thinking something like that, he was sure.
Hundreds had entered this place at the start—elite hunters who had dominated their fields. Now only one remained.
The sole survivor.
That was the most accurate word for what Kang Taejun had become.
A careful presence approached a moment later. Field director from the Hunter Management Bureau, most likely. High-ranked enough on paper, yet the tremor in his aura made him feel like a child standing before a monster.
“S-Sir Sword Demon! You are magnificent! Hero of humanity…!”
Taejun cut the trembling praise short without mercy. He was done with the nauseating hero farce.
“Enough.”
His own voice startled him with how dry it sounded—as if every drop of feeling had evaporated.
“Bring the retirement papers. Right now.”
The director’s face went blank, as though the words refused to make sense. Of course. No one expected the monster who had crawled out of hell after a decade to open with a demand for retirement.
“Y-Yes? Retirement… what do you mean…?”
“Hard of hearing? I said I’m retiring. Get the papers. Now.”
Irritation edged the words. The director’s face drained white. He frantically opened a communication window in midair and began babbling a report to headquarters.
“Y-Yes! Preparing immediately! Hunter Kang Taejun has… yes? Yes, he just returned! But… retirement… yes, he wants it right this second!”
Taejun closed his eyes while the noisy exchange continued. Silence after ten years. Yet in that brief stillness, shards of memory cut through.
A girl still young, ten years ago. Small hands clutching his sleeve, eyes brimming with tears. And himself, coldly shaking those hands free and turning away.
That kid… Yoon Seoa.
His fiancée, ten years younger, bound to him by a promise between adults. He had declared the engagement broken on the very threshold of death, wounding her deliberately. He had believed it was the only kindness left—to free her from the ghost of a man who would never return.
…I couldn’t keep the promise.
Before Seoa’s father died, he and Taejun’s own father had sworn an oath passed down through generations: protect that daughter for life. Taejun had been unable to honor it. He was walking into a hell with almost no chance of survival. Staying would only have made him a burden that ruined her future. So he had severed the bond without mercy.
A brief bitterness flickered and died.
What did it matter now? Someone like him would already be forgotten. She would be living well. She had to be. That was the only outcome he had ever wanted.
Before the thought could settle, a video call came through from a high-ranking Management Bureau official waiting near the return portal. Taejun accepted it with a frown of pure fatigue.
The sleek-faced man on the screen launched into every polished phrase in the book, begging him to reconsider. Peace of humanity, national security, a hero’s duty—repertoire he had heard until his ears grew calluses.
“My decision.”
He cut the man off as if further listening were worthless.
“That’s all.”
Meaning: I’ve said what I needed to say. We’re done. He ended the call on the official’s flustered face.
Clicking his tongue in irritation, Taejun walked toward the Gate’s return portal. The blue vortex still wavered unsteadily. Beyond it lay the world he had left—and the world he now had to re-enter.
The instant he passed through, every sense shifted. The air was stable, quiet, utterly different from the chaotic Soul World Fluctuation that had ruled the Gate. Earth’s air, after ten years. Solid asphalt under his boots instead of hell’s unstable ground. Yet no emotion rose, no relief—only crushing fatigue.
He took one step in dust-caked boots. The hardness of the asphalt was nothing like the shifting earth inside. The air filling his lungs felt alien: ozone, dust, a faint reek of exhaust—the smell of the world he had forgotten for a decade. Still no feeling. Only bone-deep weariness and the dull certainty that everything was too much trouble.
Where the soul-gnawing waves of the Gate had been, only hollow silence remained.
Noise flooded in—distant car horns, murmuring crowds, the grind of machinery dismantling structures. Everyday sounds after ten years, reduced now to meaningless background static.
The view ahead was ruin. The area around the return portal looked bombed-out, a gray wasteland of shattered buildings and twisted steel. In the middle of that devastation, the unstable blue portal he had just exited glowed with an unreal presence of its own.
“I-I’m truly… sorry, Hunter Kang Taejun!”
The same high-ranking official from the call was suddenly in front of him, bowing deeply. Cold sweat shone on the polished face that had looked so composed on screen. Behind him, heavily armed Bureau agents and a few researchers in lab coats watched with tense eyes. Awe mixed with clear fear of something they could not control.
“Regarding the retirement request… th-there are procedures… perhaps for now you might rest at the safe house we’ve prepared…?”
The man’s voice trembled. He knew perfectly well how stupid it was to push right now. The thing that had crawled out of ten years of hell was not someone ordinary persuasion could reach.
“No need.”
Taejun’s voice remained dry as desert wind, stripped of every trace of feeling.
“I’m going home. Quietly.”
“…Home?”
The official stared as if his ears had failed him. His eyes flickered with pure bewilderment. He had clearly prepared a hero’s triumphant return—press conferences, national medals, the whole circus. To Taejun those things were only the most repulsive noise imaginable.
“I said I’m going to my hometown house. Get the flashy escort vehicles out of the way.”
At the flat finality of the tone, the official’s face went even whiter. He hesitated a second, then caught the faint killing intent that slid through Taejun’s eyes and nodded hard.
“Y-Yes! Immediately! We will absolutely not disturb Hunter Kang Taejun… escort you as quietly and safely as possible!”
He spun and began barking orders at the agents behind him. Amid the sudden bustle, Taejun closed his eyes again.
A faint afterimage rose: a small child looking up with a tear-streaked face. A bond he had cut cold for her future—and for his own selfishness.
…She’s living well, right?
The girl who had been ten years younger would be twenty now. Ten years could change mountains and rivers. He hoped she had forgotten a man like him completely and gone her own way. That had been the only reason he forced the breakup. It had to be.
A Bureau agent approached and guided him with careful politeness. The vehicle waiting was an ordinary black SUV on the outside, yet the solid bulletproofing and specialized interior modifications were impossible to miss up close. No gleaming official motorcade—just an unmarked transport meant to avoid every eye. At least they had understood that much.
He sank into the heavy back seat. Soft leather offered a comfort he hadn’t felt in a decade. The body could rest; the heart still stood on a barren plain.
The car slid away from the ruined Gate zone without a sound. Outside the window the world had changed. Skyscrapers climbed higher than before; vast multicolored hologram billboards flashed unreal images across their walls. Driverless buses and cars glided along the roads in silent, fluid streams.