Chapter 43: Variable Against Variable
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 43: Variable Against Variable
14
Cough.
In the dark space.
With a cough, Seo-ho slowly lifted his eyelids, his eyes darting around to assess the situation.
His body ached all over, a lingering aftereffect from his clash with the returnee, but he wasn't dead.
‘Their goal was to kidnap me, after all.’
He had endured this level of pain countless times while dealing with dimensional gates.
Besides, once this was over, Si-ho’s safety would be guaranteed.
If this pain could atone even a little for his failure to protect Si-ho and his mother, he would endure it a hundred times over.
“You’re awake?”
It was then.
A woman’s voice reached his ears.
Sensing something strange, Seo-ho raised his head.
He didn’t know why, but the voice was incredibly familiar.
“...Kwak Sa-yeon?”
“Ahaha, my dear Seo-ho, you recognized me just from my voice? Oh, you’re just adorable.”
Click.
At that moment, with the sound of a switch flipping, the room was flooded with light.
Seo-ho squeezed his eyes shut against the sudden glare. When he opened them again, he saw a woman in a state of undress on the bed.
Black, translucent lingerie and chestnut hair pinned up.
And a distinct mole above her lip.
It was none other than Kwak Sa-yeon.
How was she here already?
‘Wasn’t Girasung supposed to use me as a bargaining chip with Kwak Sa-yeon? But they just handed me over this easily?’
A look of bewilderment crossed Seo-ho’s face.
He couldn’t understand how Girasung and Kwak Sa-yeon could have finished their deal while he was unconscious.
Seo-ho was well aware that Kwak Sa-yeon’s feelings for him were excessive.
She displayed an obsessive desire for whatever she wanted, a trait that had always made him wary.
That was why Girasung had planned to use Seo-ho to kill two birds with one stone.
First, to make the spatial ability user, Si-ho, bend to their will.
Second, to have Kwak Sa-yeon, one of the heirs to Korea’s top hunter company, JMC, personally release artificial dimensional gates into the hunter world.
Girasung was confident they could even place Kwak Sa-yeon in the JMC chairman’s seat in the process.
Yes, that was why the deal between Kwak Sa-yeon and Girasung should have happened later.
‘I should be in Girasung’s headquarters, not some abandoned building with nothing but a lone bed.’
Something was wrong.
Unable to pinpoint where things had gone awry, Seo-ho tried to push himself up to escape.
Clank!
But his movement was stopped by a steel collar connected to a chain bolted to the wall.
“Ugh?”
He was an S-rank hunter.
If he put his mind to it, he should have been able to snap something like a steel chain with sheer force, but for some reason, the chain showed no sign of breaking.
Instead, he felt his strength draining every time he moved.
“Even this looks good on you, Seo-ho. It’s a special product made just for you. They say it severs a hunter’s aura channels or something. Once you’re wearing it, you become a regular person, you know?”
As Kwak Sa-yeon watched the struggling Seo-ho with an amused smile, a murderous glint appeared in his eyes.
“...When did you accept Girasung’s offer?”
As Seo-ho asked through gritted teeth, Kwak Sa-yeon’s eyes widened.
Then, as if she found something hilarious, she burst into cackles.
After laughing for a long while, she dabbed at her tears with a finger and smiled faintly.
“My dear Seo-ho, it seems you’ve misunderstood something.”
And then, she answered his question.
“I was the one who proposed the deal to Girasung.”
Hearing the words that left Kwak Sa-yeon’s lips, Seo-ho’s eyes shot wide open.
An unforeseen variable that neither he nor the World Returnee Association had predicted.
It was Kwak Sa-yeon’s deviant and excessive possessiveness and obsession.
“To think you’d go to a place like the Tower of Revelation without me. Didn’t I warn you? I told you I couldn’t let you go somewhere so dangerous.”
The trigger for her impulsive action.
It was none other than the rumor about the Tower of Revelation, which had been spread to lure out Girasung.
The bait was originally intended for only one fish, Girasung, but another had taken it.
That other fish was Kwak Sa-yeon.
The Tower of Revelation was a place where even S-rank hunters and returnees could lose their lives.
In Kwak Sa-yeon’s eyes, Seo-ho challenging the Tower was a suicide mission.
And that meant she would lose him forever, unable to possess him in this world.
From the moment Seo-ho had mentioned the Tower of Revelation in front of her, Kwak Sa-yeon had been consumed by anxiety. The moment the rumor started spreading, she had acted impulsively.
“Thanks to what you said that day, I learned about Girasung’s existence. Maybe it was my destiny to protect you, Seo-ho?”
“Don’t talk nonsense.”
Seo-ho was radiating palpable killing intent.
But she paid it no mind, continuing to speak as she traced his shoulder with her index finger.
“My brother was actually doing what he said he would, warning other companies not to get involved with Girasung, you know? Something about how if they don’t protect this country, who will. So old-fashioned.”
Just as he had told Seo-ho that day, Kwak Do-reon had intended to protect his country to the very end.
He encouraged the surrounding hunter companies and even offered various benefits to ensure they wouldn’t fall for the malicious scheme of artificial dimensional gates.
“But thanks to him, I was able to trace the deal proposals I was blocking and find out where they were.”
However, rendering all his efforts futile, the one who contacted Girasung was none other than his half-sister, Kwak Sa-yeon.
His younger sister, Kwak Sa-yeon, born from his father’s remarriage after a divorce.
Believing his father had abandoned his own mother for Kwak Sa-yeon and her mother, Kwak Do-reon had hated and ignored them since childhood.
He acted like a kind brother and son on the surface, but he never gave them an ounce of his heart.
And that habit had now become a problem.
Because he never paid Kwak Sa-yeon the slightest bit of attention, he had no idea what she was up to.
Nor did he realize just how twisted her obsession and possessiveness had become.
“So I made them an offer. My brother is an obstacle to their artificial gate plan. I told them I would eliminate him, become the heir, and promote the artificial gates in this country if they gave me just one person: you, Seo-ho.”
“What do you want from me?”
“What I want?”
Hearing Seo-ho’s question, a smile steeped in madness spread across Kwak Sa-yeon’s face.
“Everything. All of it. Without a single piece left over. Seo-ho, you have to be mine.”
The toxic emotion flowing from her eyes was so horrifying it made Seo-ho shudder.
“You crazy bitch.”
“Ooh, so my Seo-ho knows how to curse, too.”
Kwak Sa-yeon laughed with delight, taking even his profanity as a new side of him to enjoy.
Her values were twisted.
And the one who had started twisting them was none other than her own mother.
From the day her remarried father began showing interest in his ex-wife, Kwak Do-reon’s mother, again, Kwak Sa-yeon’s mother grew stranger by the day.
She became sensitive about everything and insisted on accompanying her husband wherever he went.
And there was something she always told Kwak Sa-yeon.
「Sa-yeon, this world is yours. You have to take everything you want, and you have to possess it all. You’re the daughter of the JMC chairman, after all. You can’t let anyone take anything from you.」
Every time she heard those words, even at a young age, Kwak Sa-yeon felt a terrible chill.
Her mother was slowly breaking, and she was injecting that brokenness into her young daughter.
Whether her mother intended it or not is unknown.
But in that environment, Kwak Sa-yeon gradually developed an obsession and possessiveness that made her feel anxious unless she had everything she was interested in.
Eventually, her mother, who had been wasting away from an illness of the heart, passed away.
Not long after, her father, JMC Chairman Kwak Hae-ju, remarried Kwak Do-reon’s mother.
The moment she saw that, Kwak Sa-yeon realized.
Her mother had died because she couldn’t possess her father, Kwak Hae-ju.
On the first anniversary of her mother’s death, clutching a portrait of her late mother, Kwak Sa-yeon had a thought.
If she couldn’t have what she wanted, she too would meet the same end as her mother.
Her twisted values were all forged from such experiences.
And this time, her warped values had fixated on none other than the Snow Mountain Wolf, Ha Seo-ho.
Their first meeting was unremarkable.
A promising 20-year-old boy had joined JMC, and she had merely noted that he was quite handsome.
But one day, his expression suddenly turned cold, and he became less emotionally expressive.
For some reason, that started to bother her, and Kwak Sa-yeon found herself thinking of him more and more often.
One day, on her way home, Kwak Sa-yeon was caught in a sudden dimensional gate.
The moment she was about to be killed by a dimensional entity, the one who saved her was none other than Ha Seo-ho.
When his usually cold face was overcome with relief upon seeing her.
She thought.
I want him.
It was the moment her twisted possessiveness fixated on a person for the first time.
“I’ve been holding back, you know. I really, really liked you, Seo-ho. I held back and held back, waiting for the day you’d finally recognize my feelings.”
Kwak Sa-yeon’s grip on Seo-ho’s shoulder began to tighten.
Her nails dug into his shoulder, which had been reduced to that of a normal person.
“But you were going to a place like the Tower of Revelation? To die? How could I possibly stand for that! Seo-ho is mine! And my possession was about to disappear!!”
Had she completely lost her mind?
Seo-ho thought so.
He couldn’t bring himself to listen to the words spewing from the madwoman before him.
Instead, he began to carefully piece together the situation in his head.
‘Unlike with Girasung, JMC was being kept informed of my every move. Kwak Sa-yeon must have been spying on that and feeding it to Girasung.’
That’s why the plan had gone wrong.
Girasung knew he was in contact with the World Returnee Association and must have planned accordingly.
They used the variable of Kwak Sa-yeon to turn our trap into a different one.
‘So they weren’t completely blind.’
It was a cockroach-like resilience that made him understand how a mere criminal group could survive this long, even with the World Returnee Association in existence.
‘Still, my location is being fully reported to the Association.’
He thought of the nanomachines implanted in his back.
A creation of a returnee from a modern fantasy world at the Association, the device constantly transmitted his location and, in an emergency, would inject him with a special stimulant and healing agent while enveloping his body in a barrier.
Trying to remove the nanomachines would trigger the same response, making removal impossible.
“Ah, I know what you’re thinking right now, Seo-ho.”
Just then, Kwak Sa-yeon, who had been watching his face, spoke up.
“You’re thinking about those nanomachines, aren’t you?”
Seo-ho’s eyes wavered as he saw her smirk.
“What was it again? I’ve been collecting all sorts of things from you, Seo-ho—your fingernails, hair, blood for testing, bodily fluids. They used them to create something called a homunculus. They wouldn’t have been able to make it without me.”
Seo-ho’s eyes flew open.
Creating a homunculus was so difficult in terms of time and materials that even alchemist returnees gave up on it.
But a few factors had aligned, making the creation of a homunculus possible.
First, she had contacted Girasung first, shortening the timeline.
Second, Kwak Sa-yeon possessed all the base materials for the homunculus.
With these two facts combined, Girasung was able to create a homunculus of Ha Seo-ho.
Absurdly, the single variable of Kwak Sa-yeon contacting Girasung first had caused this entire mess.
She traced the bright red circular mark on the nape of his neck with her fingertip.
“They implanted it in your homunculus’s neck, and it grew and grew until there was another Seo-ho. It was just an empty shell that couldn’t move, but it was you. They said they moved the machine to that.”
Fuck.
The curse escaped Seo-ho’s lips automatically.
He couldn’t possibly comprehend this woman, who committed such vile acts so casually, with a normal mindset.
Goosebumps rose on his skin wherever her hand touched.
He wanted to rip her head off right this instant, but his body wouldn’t move properly.
Meanwhile, Kwak Sa-yeon buried her face in Seo-ho’s bare chest and nuzzled against him.
“Don’t worry. It’ll all be over soon. After I kill my brother and my father, I’ll become the JMC heir and protect you forever, Seo-ho.”
“Stop spouting bullshit! Kwak Sa-yeon, you crazy bitch, how much more insane can you get!”
Smack!
The moment Seo-ho screamed, Kwak Sa-yeon slapped him across the face.
Then, she grabbed the cheek she had just struck and met his eyes.
“I told you, Seo-ho. You’re mine. How can my property talk back to me when I’m speaking?”
“...You’re insane.”
“Do you really need to be punished? Your little sister, Si-ho. Would you be okay if something happened to her?”
At the mention of Si-ho, Seo-ho’s face instantly hardened.
Kwak Sa-yeon, finding his reaction immensely amusing, caressed every feature of his face with her hand.
“That’s right, yes, yes. You have to be a good boy. Right, my Seo-ho?”
Just as she was smiling happily at the glaring Seo-ho.
“Like hell!”
A man’s voice suddenly echoed from behind her.
A man’s voice? But there was no one else here besides her and Seo-ho.
Before she could process the situation, she turned her head and came face-to-face with the sole of a shoe filling her vision.
Then, with a crisp sound, she was sent flying from the bed, tumbling across the floor as she let out a scream.
“Kyaaaaaaah! Aah! It hurts! It huuurts, ugh!”
Amidst her piercing screams, she lifted her head to see a man, a large woman, and a small woman standing there.
And the man was looking down at her, his eyes blazing with fury.
“Does it hurt? Good. I almost died from the pain for five years, too. Now it’s your turn to get a five-year beating!”
He spoke as if he had known her for a very long time.