The Choices
The moment the dead man's corpse began to ring was when it happened.
Having no desire to touch his corpse, I used my qi to pull the phone toward me instead. When I checked the screen, the honest word Client was blinking across it. I pressed the call button, and an urgent voice came through.
"How did it go?"
I said nothing. The man on the other end must have sensed something had gone wrong, because silence stretched between us for a long moment.
"Jang Yeongsu?"
"Hup!"
At the sound of my voice speaking his name, I heard him suck in a sharp, panicked breath. That answer was more than enough. The fact that he reacted to the name alone confirmed that the man I'd just killed hadn't been lying.
"I'll be there soon."
I said it with a twisted smile, then crushed the phone to pieces in my hand.
The reason I'd bothered to warn him I was coming was simple. Whether he spent the time preparing a flawless defense or burrowed into the deepest hole he could find, I was confident I'd dig him out either way.
Cheongseol Guild, in Yangcheon-gu.
After all, once you tore a rat's nest apart board by board, even the most well-hidden rat came scurrying out.
"Um... would you like something to drink?"
Inside the living room, Choi Seoyeon asked Kang Iseol the question with careful hesitation.
Their first meeting had gotten off on the wrong foot, sure, but Kang Iseol was still the head of one of the largest guilds in South Korea. And unlike the Blood Bird Guild, the Baekya Guild she led had always shown a friendly face to ordinary citizens — more than once, Seoyeon had caught herself wishing Baekya were the guild in charge of her own neighborhood.
How can one person be that pretty?
On top of everything else, Kang Iseol's beauty was the kind that made even another woman unable to look away. Which was to say, in the eyes of Seoyeon — barely eighteen years old — Kang Iseol was quite simply the person she wanted to become.
"Oh. Yes. Anything is fine, thank you."
Of course, Kang Iseol felt just as if she were dying of awkwardness herself.
She had originally come here to negotiate with the faction that had seized Guro in the Blood Bird Guild's place — and the first words she'd managed to produce to her crucial negotiation partner had been a request to use the bathroom.
And that wasn't even the whole problem.
It had taken her no time at all to figure out who had brought the Blood Bird Guild crashing down. The man before her — the uncle of these two adorable kids — was a fortress with no cracks to be found anywhere.
Then there was the trap she'd fallen into right in front of his house, which she still couldn't begin to make sense of. The real issue was that the man with the genuine power had simply told her to discuss everything with his niece and walked outside.
From Kang Iseol's position, she should have been grabbing onto him, begging him for help — anything short of that wouldn't have been enough. But honestly, that man scared her a little.
No — to be precise, it was that strange power of his that did.
"Oh, um... all we have is water. Haha."
"No, it's fine. I like water."
Kang Iseol hurriedly said this as Seoyeon offered her a glass. Whatever else was true, if she wanted to secure that uncle, building a friendly rapport with the girl in front of her could only help.
The problem was that she knew absolutely nothing about how to befriend a teenage girl.
"...Uncle, why is he taking so long?"
"Y-yeah, I wonder. Oh — are your parents...?"
"They're not here."
"Oh."
And so the living room stayed steeped in an air of suffocating awkwardness.
The one to break it, unexpectedly, was Seojun.
"Big sis. Is that lady maybe our aunt?"
Seojun's reasoning was simple. His uncle had appeared out of nowhere one day, so as far as he was concerned, maybe the aunt had done the same.
But Seoyeon nearly had a heart attack at the question and grabbed her brother.
"No, Seojun. She's just a guest who came to see us."
"Really? Okay. And here I thought she was the one who married Uncle."
"Besides, if someone married Uncle, she wouldn't be an aunt — she'd be an aunt-in-law. No wait, a little mom? No, since he's our mom's brother, she'd be a maternal aunt-in-law."
It went without saying that Kang Iseol's face turned bright red as she listened to the two of them.
She'd heard people call her pretty so often she was sick of it, but hers was a poverty amid plenty — she had never once, in her entire life, dated a man. And now these kids were chattering away about her being someone's aunt-in-law, someone's little mother. Her cheeks had no choice but to burn all over again.
"Sis, that lady's face went red again."
"Huh? Oh — I'm so sorry!"
"N-no, it's quite all right."
A peculiar silence settled over the living room once more, but this time it didn't last long.
"You're still here? Good."
Because Lee Jaeseong had opened the front door and come back inside.
"Do you happen to know someone named Jang Yeongsu?"
"Jang Yeongsu... do you mean the director of Cheongseol Guild? Why would you ask about him all of a sudden?"
Kang Iseol answered his out-of-nowhere question with her own.
"Those guys from earlier — he's the one who sent them. Cheongseol is one of that alliance you mentioned, I take it?"
"...Yes."
"Good. Then I accept your proposal. It's not for nothing — I need to show what happens to people who touch my niece and nephew."
"Ah — thank you."
Kang Iseol replied at once, almost too eagerly. Whatever else, her purpose in coming all the way to Guro had been accomplished, and the relief lightened her whole chest.
"Well then. Leave."
And Lee Jaeseong said this to her with a completely indifferent face.
It was an unmistakable order to see himself out, and Kang Iseol found she had nothing to say to it.
Truthfully, no man had ever treated her like this before — and strangely, that was exactly what put her at ease.
"You two should get to bed too. It's late."
Even as she walked toward the door, Kang Iseol caught herself straining to listen to the man's voice drifting from inside the house.
Would you look at that. He's gentle with the kids, too.
That night.
Once I confirmed that Seoyeon and Seojun were asleep, I left the house without delay. There was no longer any reason to stall.
After dealing with the corpses littering the rooftop, I immediately called Park Jaehyun. The line rang about three times before his voice came through.
"Mr. Lee Jaeseong? What business could you have at this hour?"
I told him flatly that I would be entering the Yeouido Gate immediately.
It did cross my mind, just faintly, that I could go catch the rats of Yangcheon Guild first — but checking on my brother-in-law came before that.
Rats can be hunted and killed any time.
It bothered me just a little that I was going without telling Seoyeon, but a gate was something I'd already experienced once — nothing all that special. Even if the Yeouido Gate was rated A-rank or higher, it wasn't as if everyone who had entered had died, and if things truly went bad, I was confident I could pull myself out.
"Ah — I'll pass that along to the person in charge."
Park Jaehyun answered without asking a single question. I set off at once, heading straight for Yeouido.
After all, it wasn't that far from Guro.
As I ran along the outer walls of buildings with the Blood Shadow Divine Art, I could see the gazes around me sliding backward and vanishing one after another.
There it is.
The Yeouido Gate at last.
"...Hup! Who goes there?"
The soldier guarding the entrance asked me this with a startled expression as I dropped out of empty air right in front of him. I remembered Park Jaehyun's explanation — no guild managed Yeouido itself, which made it the only gate administered directly by the government.
"Gate clearance. I have authorization."
"Ah — would you happen to be Mr. Lee Jaeseong...?"
I nodded, and he promptly unlocked the entrance to the gate. Before he could get another word out, I threw myself through it.
Around that same time.
Cheongseol Guild headquarters, Yangcheon-gu.
Jang Yeongsu was scanning the room with a trembling face.
"Damn it all."
He knew he'd kicked a hornet's nest he should never have touched. The moment he'd watched the man move, he'd known — there was no other explanation. He was a returnee. No ordinary powerhouse just dropped out of the sky like that. Only a returnee could appear like that.
And the fact that the man had learned his name this quickly only proved how dangerous he was.
But regret never solved anything. Rather than waste time on it, Jang Yeongsu decided to turn this crisis into an opportunity. If the man was coming to him, that meant he had time to prepare.
"You've called in every fighter we can use, right?"
"Yeah."
The one who answered him was Yoon Jiseok, the guild master of Cheongseol Guild. A longtime friend of Jang Yeongsu's, Yoon Jiseok was the one who handled the guild's muscle, while Jang Yeongsu served as the brains behind Yoon Jiseok's brawn.
By every assessment, Yoon Jiseok himself was an A-rank hunter, but Jang Yeongsu couldn't shake his unease. No matter how he turned it over, the warning from Oh Pilsang — the man who'd led the Blood Bird Guild — gnawed at him. Oh Pilsang had been rated A-rank too, and the Blood Bird Guild had still collapsed in a single night.
"What about the other guilds?"
"Eh, they're all just watching the fire from across the river."
"Bastards."
Jang Yeongsu slammed his fist on the desk and shouted.
Cheongseol hadn't cooked up this scheme to get ahead all on its own. Pressuring Baekya in Yeongdeungpo had required Guro's cooperation, so they'd reached out — and if things had gone well, all of Guro's profits would have gone straight into Cheongseol's pockets. Jang Yeongsu considered that a fair reward for his efforts.
But the moment things went sideways, every other guild was playing dumb and washing their hands of it.
"Seriously, aren't you being way too scared about this? You said the place barely has any guild members left anyway?"
Jang Yeongsu let out a long sigh as he looked at the man saying this. It was nice that Yoon Jiseok followed his lead without much thought, but every time he saw him act this carefree, it made his stomach churn.
Instead of launching into a long explanation, Jang Yeongsu simply held out a tablet toward him.
"Huh? You want me to watch this?"
But even the easygoing Yoon Jiseok began to stiffen, little by little, as he watched the footage. The man in the video leaping into the air as though stepping on nothing at all and snatching the Golden Goblin out of midair was exactly that shocking.
"...You still think you can handle him?"
"I mean... that thing's a monster. But if the guys all rush him at once, something's gotta give, right? There's no such thing as unfair numbers in a dogpile."
"Then the Blood Bird Guild wouldn't have folded that easily."
"...Huh. Fair point. Damn it?"
Jang Yeongsu shook his head as he watched Yoon Jiseok finally grasp how serious things were.
That said, their situation wasn't quite the Blood Bird Guild's. Blood Bird had been caught flat-footed with no time to prepare — they weren't.
Even setting aside the other allied guilds currently playing dumb, Jang Yeongsu was pulling every scrap of manpower from the other guilds inside Yeongdeungpo into Cheongseol's ranks.
"Hell. You only die once — can't die twice, right? Let's just see it through."
At his simple friend's conclusion, Jang Yeongsu gave a hollow laugh.
He'd already done everything within his power, so like the man said, all that was left was to lift the lid and see what boiled out.
Of course, he could always abandon everything and run — but he had built up too much over the years for that.
That was the moment Yoon Jiseok's phone rang.
"Huh? Says Heukchi's coming?"
"Heukchi?"
"Yeah. And the guild master's coming in person."
At those words, Jang Yeongsu's face visibly brightened.
Heukchi from Mapo joining the fight would improve their odds, obviously — but what mattered most was that the guild master himself was coming.
Jin Dohyuk, the Berserker of Heukchi.
He, too, was one of the returnees — a man who had crossed into a world other than Earth and come back.