Those to Kill and Those to Spare
‘What is with this atmosphere?’
Having smashed the door of the Cheongseol Guild master's office to pieces and stepped inside, I had no choice but to stare at the room with a sour expression.
It wasn't that dozens of men had laid an ambush to kill me, but I'd at least expected them to be preparing for a desperate last stand.
"...So it's really 'die, die, die' for me, huh."
But the scene I actually walked in on was nothing of the sort.
One of them was muttering to himself with a completely hollowed-out look on his face, while the other was staring at me blankly, his features beaten to a pulp somewhere along the way.
And in both of them, not a trace of fighting spirit could be found.
"Haah. I am Yoon Jiseok, Guild Master of Cheongseol."
I made a face of utter disbelief at the man who addressed me that way.
He was doing his best to put weight into his voice, but coming out of that bloodied face, it had zero persuasive power.
"I came here looking for Jang Yeongsu, actually."
"Heh. What did a man who just did as he was told do wrong? Let's just finish this cleanly — cut my throat and be done with it."
I gave a hollow laugh at the Cheongseol Guild Master, who was trying to settle the score of kindness and vengeance on his own terms.
Where I collected my debt was my decision to make, not something the man in question got to decide.
But the situation kept escalating.
"Shut the hell up, you moron. I'm Jang Yeongsu. I'm the one who ordered that brat kidnapped anyway, so just kill me."
"Don't listen to him. Let's settle this man to man, head to head."
"You idiot. It's useless no matter what you say."
Watching the two men's bargain-basement melodrama, all I felt was exasperation.
The thought crossed my mind — if they were this fiercely loyal to each other, why on earth had they tried to kidnap someone else's family?
‘And now what's this?’
But at that moment, something caught my eye.
In a space shared by two men who looked to be well past thirty, a pile of items that clashed violently with the surroundings was stacked in one corner.
"...Toys?"
"W-well, that's... we bought them in case the kid cried, so... is there some kind of problem with that?"
I stared at Yoon Jiseok as he said this, his face flushing red.
His face didn't look like he'd hastily made the lie up on the spot.
Of course, that didn't mean I felt like forgiving what they'd done — but the truth was, a little of the steam had gone out of me.
I'd expected something more properly villainous, and instead it felt like watching a pair of slightly pathetic villains.
‘Is there really any need to kill these guys?’
That was the moment a small whim stirred within me.
Today was, all things considered, the day I'd gotten my brother-in-law back.
It felt ridiculous to say this after I'd come here to crack their skulls open, but I didn't see why I needed to spill more blood on a good day.
That wasn't the only reason, either.
‘From what I remember, if you go around killing everyone, the game just falls apart?’
A memory from before I'd fallen into Murim suddenly surfaced.
As an utterly ordinary high schooler, I'd played a lot of games, and one of them was a Romance of the Three Kingdoms title.
It was a game where you picked a hero, alternated between domestic administration and warfare, and expanded your territory — and the problem came when you captured an enemy.
When you took an enemy soldier captive in that game, there were exactly four options.
Recruit. Imprison. Release. Execute.
And of those options, I had used Execute the most by far.
Honestly, it was only a game — but whenever I thought of allies who had died because of an enemy officer, it only seemed right that a bloody reprisal should follow.
‘Come to think of it, maybe I suited the Blood Heavenly Cult better than Master did.’
Anyway, killing every officer I captured was all well and good — the problem was what came after.
No matter how much land I conquered, there were never enough officers to govern the castles, and the game itself collapsed on me.
And that situation was strikingly similar to the one I found myself in now.
‘Our "Guro" forces are, what, Seoyeon, my brother-in-law, and me. That's it.’
We were, quite literally, a perfect family guild — the problem being that three people managing an entire district came with any number of complications.
Granted, my brother-in-law, who had actually run a guild before, was back now, so given time he might well set up a new one himself.
But leaving Yangcheon-gu in a power vacuum in the meantime was another problem entirely.
‘I mean, normally other guys would just move in and seize the opening, right? Back in Murim, that old schemer Hyeolnoe handled all of this for me.’
"Tch."
I clicked my tongue briefly and looked back and forth between Jang Yeongsu and Yoon Jiseok.
One of them was physiognomically built like a man who could scheme rather well, and the other looked like he could throw around a decent amount of raw strength.
In other words, my gut said I could slot them into the back office and put them on management duty.
Of course, I knew perfectly well.
That all of it was nothing but excuses, and that deep down, I simply didn't want to kill them.
It technically brushed against the principle of repaying kindness and grudges in full — but even by that measure, things were ambiguous.
It was true they had targeted my nephew, but it didn't seem their intent had been his life.
So if that was the case, why shouldn't the price be paid in something other than their lives?
"Starting now, I'm giving you a choice."
At my words, the two men looked at each other and swallowed hard.
I drew two small drops of blood from my body and floated them right up to their noses.
As the drops of blood hung suspended in the air, I could see the men's gazes trembling uneasily.
"Option one: you both die here and now, clean and simple. Option two: from this moment on, you obey my every command without question."
"When you put it that way... obviously the latter."
"Same here."
At my words, both of them chose the latter without a moment's hesitation.
Fair enough. I'd have done the same.
Even rolling in a ditch of dog droppings, being alive was better — that was simply a fact.
Hadn't I endured even that wretched Murim, and eventually gotten to see my family again?
"Then open wide."
The men anxiously opened their mouths, and at the same instant, the drops of blood I'd made were sucked straight down their throats.
"So... what is this? No, I mean... what is it??"
"Ah, that. It's a technique called the Blood Soul Binding Art."
I said this to Jang Yeongsu, who asked me carefully.
Just as I suspected.
This, too, was one of the things Master had created.
Not "nagging arts" because it scolded well — the ‘gu’ meaning to seize and the ‘bak’ meaning to bind. In other words, a martial art — or more precisely, a technique — with the deeply chilling name of "seizing and binding with blood and soul."
"Nothing complicated. From now on, if you defy my word or go needlessly scheming behind my back, you'll be on your way to the afterlife that very day. If you don't believe me, feel free to test it."
Looking at Jang Yeongsu, who gazed at me with an uncertain expression, and Yoon Jiseok, who looked distinctly dissatisfied, I let out a crooked smile.
I couldn't say whether they believed my words — but there hadn't been a single shred of a lie in what I'd said.
"Oh, and one more thing."
"Yes?"
"Those toys over there are useless to you now, so I can take them, right?"
In response to my question, Yoon Jiseok simply nodded slowly.
The press briefing room of a hotel near the Hunter Management Bureau.
As dozens of camera flashes fired in rapid succession, Park Jaehyun, standing at the podium, kept wiping the sweat streaming down his forehead.
"W-we will now begin the official briefing regarding the Yeouido Gate clearance that occurred yesterday morning."
As Park Jaehyun's voice rang through the microphone, the room fell into a deathly hush.
That silence made Park Jaehyun's heart pound even more madly.
Frankly, a matter of this magnitude would normally be briefed at minimum by a bureau director-level official, or someone even higher up.
But the higher-ups, terrified of incurring the displeasure of the returnee who had appeared out of nowhere and cleared the Yeouido Gate, had dumped the entire thing onto the responsible officer — Park Jaehyun himself.
‘Honestly, they should've handled it with a little more grace.’
Information about the returnee had already been passed along to most of the guilds in Korea.
"I will be direct. The Yeouido Gate, which had remained unresolved for the past ten years, has been confirmed cleared as of yesterday morning."
"Which organization cleared it?"
"They have no guild affiliation at present. The clearer is a returnee who recently completed hunter registration."
At Park Jaehyun's calm announcement, the murmuring among the reporters swelled.
"A returnee, you say?"
"Could this be connected to the recent collapse of the Blood Heaven Guild?"
"At the clearer's own request, no questions concerning his personal circumstances will be taken."
A few reporters threw some genuinely sharp questions, but Park Jaehyun declined to answer any of them.
Instead—
"And with the successful clearance of the Yeouido Gate, I have one more piece of good news to share."
"Good news?"
"Hunter Choi Taemin, who went missing four years ago during the attempt on the Yeouido Gate, has returned alive."
The moment Park Jaehyun's briefing hit the airwaves, South Korea was turned utterly upside down.
The clearance of the previously unconquerable Yeouido Gate was shocking enough — but then the fact that it had been achieved not by any particular guild but by a returnee, and on top of that, the news that Hunter Choi Taemin, missing for four years, had come back alive.
Each and every one of them was earth-shattering news that shook the foundations of conventional wisdom.
Korea had, until now, maintained a delicate balance with its mid-to-large guilds each guarding their own territories.
Into that picture, a returnee had suddenly appeared, and Choi Taemin — rated the strongest of all second-generation hunters — had come back. The ecosystem of the Korean hunter world had, for all practical purposes, been blown to pieces overnight.
The instant Park Jaehyun's briefing went live, Korea's internet communities and hunter-related sites began to burn properly.
BANG—
"What kind of pathetic excuse is that?"
Heukchi Guild headquarters, Mapo-gu.
Jin Dohyuk — guild master and one of the handful of returnees in South Korea — smashed his tablet with his fist and breathed out roughly.
Jin Dohyuk's face was twisted full of rage and disgust, though the truth was that he, too, had deliberately been keeping the new returnee down.
‘Damn it. How the hell did he clear that place? Alone, no less?’
When Jin Dohyuk had first returned to Earth, he'd genuinely believed he had become the protagonist of the world.
He'd been ground through that godforsaken otherworld for a full five years, and in exchange had gained power strong enough to look down on the Awakened like insects.
So the first thing Jin Dohyuk did after his return was challenge the Yeouido Gate.
The hero who saved South Korea.
He coveted that title more than anything.
But those crazy vampire bastards inside the gate were endless — kill them and kill them, and it never ended.
No, the problem began with the mist that swirled inside the gate itself.
Visibility was poor to begin with, and strangely enough, the longer he stayed inside that mist, the faster his strength drained away.
And that wasn't all.
The vampires that emerged within the gate possessed an almost cheat-like ability to instantly recover from most damage while inside the blood-red mist.
No matter how highly he was rated as an S-rank, he had limits in the end.
Three hours after entering the gate, Jin Dohyuk had no choice but to escape it outright.
That was when it started.
That was when Jin Dohyuk stopped chasing the hollow title of "hero" and began pursuing practical power and pleasure instead.
Jin Dohyuk crushed the surrounding guilds with his own strength and built up Heukchi.
Thanks to that, even if he couldn't be treated as a hero, he could at least reign like a king within his own domain.
‘If I can't clear it, no one can. Simple as that.’
That faith of Jin Dohyuk's had been shattered to pieces today, by that very news.
The moment Jin Dohyuk's eyes began to bleed crimson was exactly then.
He couldn't gauge how strong the man was, but it really might have been a matter of matchup.
The Yeouido Gate's main monsters were vampires, so if the guy wielded something like holy power, a favorable matchup was entirely plausible.
‘I have to kill him. No question.’
Jin Dohyuk thought this, grinding his teeth.
A strong man who could threaten his life at any moment?
The otherworld Jin Dohyuk had endured was not some naive place where you could just sit back and watch that kind of thing happen.
A law-of-the-jungle world where you had to drag down whoever was above you, trample them, and climb over their corpse.
Having survived five years in that place, this was simply Jin Dohyuk's way of life.
And he had his own confidence, too.
He possessed a special ability that no one in the world knew about.
"Right. Cheongseol — those guys."
Recalling the grudge between that returnee and the man called Jang Yeongsu of the Cheongseol Guild, Jin Dohyuk immediately dialed Jang Yeongsu's number.
The strange thing was, even after the line rang for a good while, the other end never picked up.