Waiting
It felt as if I had stepped into a film depicting some distant future city—an alien sense of dislocation settled over everything.
Beep—.
An alert chimed from the temporary smart terminal the Administration Bureau had issued and strapped to my wrist.
When I checked the screen, it was packed solid with breaking-news notifications from every media outlet imaginable.
It was deafening.
I scrolled through the screen a few times with my finger, then switched off the notifications without a second thought.
The "Sword Demon" they were all shouting about was not me.
No—more precisely, he was nothing more than a ghost of the past I no longer wished to become.
Hero. Legend. I was thoroughly sick of every one of those titles.
The world had changed a great deal.
But none of that change stirred anything in me.
Everything I saw felt like a story from another dimension, something that had nothing to do with me at all.
Ten years in hell had worn away most of my senses for the world. Only the ones needed for survival and combat remained, honed to a razor's edge.
Then, from the driver's seat, I felt the careful motion of someone turning on the radio.
He was probably checking whether I was awake—but a moment later, a loud voice filled the car.
"…Yes, exactly! The return of Hunter Kang Taejun—the living legend of the Gate era, the Sword Demon—means far more than the simple homecoming of a hero! It is proof that humanity can at last conquer even S-Rank Gates, and his overwhelming power will reshape our entire anti-Gate strategy going forward…"
A man who sounded like a well-known current-affairs commentator was pouring out his excitement in a heated monologue.
He dressed it up in fine words, but the real intent was obvious: drag me back onto the battlefield, or at the very least bring me under the state's control.
"Turn it off."
At my low, irritated voice, the agent in the driver's seat jumped and killed the radio at once.
In the rearview mirror, tension was written plain across his face.
Thinking he could play chatter in front of me.
He still hadn't fully grasped the situation.
Silence settled over the car again.
Yes. This was much better.
Other thoughts began to surface in my mind.
My father's face, the lines carved deeper. My mother's hair, gone further to white.
For ten years I had been nothing but an unfilial son.
Now that I had come back alive, I wanted to stay quietly by their side and make whatever years they had left as peaceful as I could.
And… one more person.
Yoon Seoa.
She would be a proper young woman of twenty by now.
Ten years ago, when I had unilaterally broken off our engagement—how hard had those small shoulders been shaking?
What expression had she worn?
The memory itself was faint, but the bitterness of that moment still lingered.
I told her it was over… so she must have forgotten a man like me and gone on living well.
She had to.
I repeated it to myself once more.
That she had forgotten me and built a new life—that was the best outcome I could have hoped for.
So why did the faint remnant of her face keep flickering before my eyes?
It was something I had no right to wonder about.
I no longer had any claim to step back into her life.
I was nothing but a ghost of the past.
Before long the vehicle turned onto a familiar country road.
The scenery outside had nothing to do with the city's glitter.
Unpaved roads. Abandoned houses scattered here and there.
The decline of the outlying regions after the Gate crisis had been an unavoidable reality.
But something was strange.
The closer we drew to the village entrance, the more the landscape diverged from what I had expected.
I had been told the neighborhood I once lived in had all but fallen to ruin.
A place where the young had all left for the cities, and only the elderly remained, barely keeping it alive.
There had been no direct monster attacks, but the indirect damage and the neglected environment had slowly drained the life from it.
What I saw now was different.
Empty houses still stood abandoned in places, casting a desolate air—but my old home and a few of the houses around it were different.
As if someone had been steadily tending them, the walls had been repaired, and the yard was free of a single weed, swept clean.
Even the front gate of our house looked freshly painted.
Who…?
A small question brushed through my mind.
There was no way my aging parents could have managed all of this themselves.
Then…?
In that moment, a very faint but familiar presence caught at the edge of my senses.
The senses I had forged inside the Gate were on an entirely different level from those of an ordinary human.
This presence was neither mana nor killing intent. It was something warm and gentle.
The kind of aura that settles into a place after long habitation—the residue of daily life.
And somewhere within it was a distant, aching familiarity.
At last the vehicle stopped in front of our gate.
The agent in the driver's seat cut the engine and waited in silence, not daring to speak first.
For a moment I stared at the house beyond the window, and at the faint presence lingering around it.
A homecoming after ten years.
But the first impression was nothing like what I had expected.
From inside my coat I took out a small magic stone.
One of the byproducts I had obtained inside the Gate.
Its grade was low, but its purity was so high that ordinary currency could barely measure its value.
I tossed it to the agent in the driver's seat.
"Good work."
Startled by the sudden gesture, he caught the stone.
He looked down at the luminous blue gem and for a moment lost his words.
There was no way he didn't know what a magic stone harvested by an S-Rank Hunter was worth.
"…Th-thank you! Hunter Kang Taejun!"
He bowed his head in a hurried salute.
Tension still edged his voice, but it had clearly softened from before.
I paid him no further mind and opened the car door.
Creak—.
The sound of a rusted hinge rang out awkwardly.
After ten years, I stood once more before my childhood home.
A moment later the SUV quietly turned back the way it had come and disappeared.
Now I was truly alone.
I stood there for a while, staring at the neatly kept house that had once been mine.
An old but tidy gate. A yard swept clean. And that warm, familiar presence faintly woven through it all.
I needed to understand what this strange orderliness meant.
I slowly reached for the firmly closed gate handle.
Instead of cold, hard metal, a wooden grip worn with the grain of years settled into my palm.
Familiar and foreign at once.
They say even mountains and rivers change in ten years—had this gate always been wood?
No. Somewhere in the haze of memory, I recalled my father replacing it with an iron one.
Then this… had been newly installed?
The ordered yard. The freshly painted gate. And this wooden handle.
All of it seemed to point to a single person.
But I deliberately erased that possibility from my mind.
It couldn't be.
It must not be.
What I had wanted for her was happiness—not this kind of penitent waiting.
I drew a deep breath.
The air of home that filled my lungs was nothing like the acrid air of the city.
The smell of earth. Of grass. And somewhere, the faintly briny scent of the river.
Instead of the blood and death I had breathed until I was sick of them inside the Gate, the fragrance of living things brushed my nose.
This ordinary sensation, felt for the first time in ten years, felt almost unreal.
Now I had to open the door.
It was time to face the parents waiting inside.
What expression should I wear?
What should I say first?
A kind of tension I had never felt even when cutting down hundreds—thousands—of enemies stiffened my whole body.
I swallowed dryly and was about to put force into the handle again when—
Creeeak…
Before I could push, the door slid open from the inside.
As if someone had known I was coming and had been waiting.
I stepped back on reflex.
In the gap of the open door, a person stood.
She was silhouetted against the afternoon sun, her face in shadow—but even that outline alone made my heart drop, hard, as if it had hit the floor.
Slowly—very slowly—the face that had been hidden in shadow came into view.
Soft brown hair brushed her shoulders and stirred lightly in the wind.
There was no trace of the girl from ten years ago, whose braided hair had made her look so young.
Clear, calm light-brown eyes.
Those eyes held me without the slightest tremor, perfectly steady.
Her pale skin looked healthily touched by the sun, and the firm set of her lips carried a quiet strength.
Slender, and yet somehow solid at the core.
Twenty years old.
A presence that fit that age exactly—and yet seemed to carry a weight beyond it.
I stopped breathing without realizing it.
Time itself seemed to freeze.
I could not tell whether the figure before me was real, or the start of yet another nightmare.
My mind felt blanked white.
A single name I had spent ten years trying to turn away from—trying to believe I had forgotten—rose to my throat.
"…Yoon Seoa?"
The voice that slipped out of me was wretchedly cracked.
I wasn't certain.
Or rather—I didn't want to be certain. That might have been closer to the truth.
Not the ten-year-old child I remembered, but a woman who felt like someone entirely different.
And yet those eyes.
Those clear, deep eyes looking at me… were no different from the ones in my faint memory.
At my call, her gaze seemed to tremble for the barest instant—then recovered its composure at once.
She studied my face carefully.
The scars earned on the battlefield. The deepened set of my eyes. A face carved through with ten years of time and exhaustion.
Her eyes widened, just slightly, as if in surprise—then settled again.
I did not miss the fragment of emotion that passed through in that brief moment.
But that was all.
She showed no further disturbance.
And then, very faintly—
the corner of her mouth lifted, and she spoke.
Her voice was far calmer, far clearer, than I had expected.
As if she were greeting someone she had seen yesterday and was meeting again today.
"You've come, Taejun."
That impossibly composed voice and manner left me completely without words.
My thoughts tangled over themselves and refused to form a proper sentence.
Had I been expecting an explosion of resentment, anger, grief?
Or at the very least, shouldn't there have been some bewilderment, some awkwardness? It had been ten years.
Long enough for mountains and rivers to change, for the world itself to turn upside down.
And yet she was welcoming me with perfect ease—as if I had merely stepped out for a short walk and come back.
I could not understand it.
This situation itself.
That calm of hers.
"Why are… you…?"