Misjudgment
‘He was that guy?’
Even as her slip of the tongue sent me into a coughing fit, my eyes stayed fixed on Seo Jinwoo. But Seoyeon and Jinwoo were already lost in their own little world, oblivious to everything around them.
“No way? You're Robang?”
“Ro-Romantic Shield Soldier. shortened to Robang,” Jinwoo replied, his face flushed red as a tomato as he faced Seoyeon.
In that instant, memories of the guy showering Seoyeon's stream with gushing devotion flashed through my mind. Sure, everyone wears a mask online, but in his case, the gap between the two personas seemed a little extreme.
“Amazing. So that Robang was Seo Jinwoo. He was always saying weird stuff, so I just assumed he was some middle-aged guy.”
“Haha... D-did I really say things like that a lot?”
Jinwoo wore a goofy, lovesick smile as he answered her. Watching this impromptu fan meeting unfold, I simply shook my head and looked on.
But honestly, it didn't worry me as much as I'd expected. That dense fool didn't seem the type to pull anything shady, and I had no intention of meddling in my fully grown niece's romantic endeavors anyway.
“Sect Leader. I've returned, having completed your orders.”
It was precisely that moment when my brother-in-law and Samsik walked back into the house.
“...Brother-in-law, who's this?”
The problem was that his gaze just had to land on Seoyeon chattering away happily with Seo Jinwoo.
“Ah, that's Seo Jinwoo. A friend I brought along.”
“It's an honor to meet you, Hunter Choi Taemin. I've admired you for a long time.”
At my introduction, Jinwoo bowed with a rather respectful posture. The problem was that my brother-in-law's eyes as he looked Jinwoo over were anything but friendly.
‘Ah, right. That daughter-doting old man exists.’
**
“Guh! The place where the Sect Leader was born really is on another level! How does food like this even exist in this world...”
“...Samsik. Don't talk while you eat.”
I said it while watching him shovel food into his mouth like a man starving. Not that I couldn't understand his situation. He'd sprinted all the way from China to Korea on a whim, and this was his first taste of modern chemical seasonings — of course it would taste like heaven's own cuisine to him.
The real problem was the strange tension that had settled between my brother-in-law and Jinwoo, and it was showing no signs of dissipating.
“So. You watch Seoyeon's streams often, do you?”
“Yes. Yes, sir. That's right, sir.”
“...Isn't 'sir' going a bit far?”
I could only laugh at the absurdity of it all as I watched my brother-in-law press down on Jinwoo, his eyebrows twitching.
“N-no! I didn't mean it that way — ah, I'm, I'm sorry.”
“Dad, what on earth are you doing? You're embarrassing yourself.”
“S-Seoyeon, you—”
I just chuckled awkwardly at the scene playing out beside me. The whole world had been thrown into chaos by the sudden Tutorial Termination message, yet somehow our house felt leagues away from all of it.
“By the way, brother-in-law. Where will this young man — and that one over there — be staying from now on?”
At his question, I looked over at Jinwoo and Samsik. They had nowhere to go at the moment, but having them stay in this house posed any number of problems.
“Are there any vacant units in this building?”
“There should be a few empties. Why? Planning to buy?”
I nodded at my brother-in-law. The Blood Heaven Guild still held a number of properties, but it seemed better to stay close by if we could. And money was hardly an issue. The funds we'd brought from the Blood Cult remained untouched, and we'd stockpiled plenty of mana stones in the meantime.
Of course, they'd need to be liquidated soon, but that was a job for Kang Iseol or Jang Yeongsu to handle.
“Oh, come to think of it, you wouldn't even need to buy one, brother-in-law. That guy over there—”
“Kang Samsik. Just call me that.”
“Right, Samsik. Just the mana stones that guy picked up today would be enough to buy not a house, but the entire apartment complex — with change to spare.”
I gave Samsik an intrigued look at my brother-in-law's words. I'd known he'd put on a decent show out there, but I hadn't expected to hear that coming from my brother-in-law's mouth.
“Mmmmmph! Th-this is the stuff!”
Not that Samsik, busy having an epiphany over a Vienna sausage, seemed to have a thought in his head.
**
That evening, news channels and internet communities around the globe descended into absolute pandemonium.
The Tutorial Termination. That single message that had appeared before every Awakened's eyes had completely upended the entire world.
Monsters that had once simply lunged at Awakened humans on pure instinct now moved with cunning, calculating agility, as though they'd suddenly gained intelligence. And bit by bit, stories were spreading of boss monsters breaking their old patterns, emerging onto the field, and hunting the hunters themselves.
Even the major guilds — the ones that had treated gates as nothing more than a moneymaking scheme until now — were being exposed in broad daylight, utterly incapable of mounting a proper response to the sudden shift.
Naturally, domestic and international online communities were being plastered wall to wall with fear and despair.
Korea's situation was especially grim. It was one of the nations most widely dismissed as having weak hunter forces compared to its peers, and even that much was being run in a slapdash, seat-of-the-pants fashion with nothing resembling a unifying core.
But the atmosphere of despair shifted the moment someone uploaded a single video.
When the post first went up, people assumed it was just clickbait. With South Korea barely fielding a handful of official S-ranks, the idea that a hunter of some never-before-heard "Out-of-Gauge" rank had suddenly appeared out of nowhere simply defied belief.
But everyone who watched the video couldn't help but doubt their own eyes.
In it, a man in a tight-fitting T-shirt was carving through hundreds of orc warriors in a one-man war, a slaughter of truly mythic proportions. Without a shred of equipment, relying on nothing but the raw power of his body, the man was massacring orcs.
Frankly, watching that footage alone, you couldn't tell which side was the monsters.
Worse still, the tide of orc warriors wasn't spilling out in Korea alone, so the video had no choice but to spread at blistering speed.
A tiny misunderstanding or two crept in along the way, but there was no denying that the man in the video dealt people a profound shock.
Frankly, every Awakened who'd been strutting around until this point now looked utterly unremarkable next to that one man. Even the other Korean Awakened captured in the footage were staring at him with their souls visibly leaving their bodies — so it wasn't exactly a wrong assessment.
And in a moment thick with anxiety about the future, it was only natural for people to erupt in fervor at the appearance of an overwhelmingly powerful figure.
The video swept past Korea in the blink of an eye, igniting Reddit in the US and WeiBo in China, then rolling across every major community on Earth. On the very day humanity had tasted a catastrophic defeat through no warning of its own, an unimaginable powerhouse had burst forth from a country called South Korea.
It went without saying that the leaderships of every nation and the guildmasters of every major guild took an interest in that video.
And naturally, that included China's Sword Emperor, Namgoong Hwi.
**
Beijing, China.
“We will keep a tight lid on the casualty figures. We cannot show a great nation's weakness to the rest of the world. We will announce that we brought the Tutorial Termination crisis completely under control and successfully defended our territory.”
A party official seated at the head of the conference table delivered the briefing to the returnees of the Moorim Branch Association. The truth, however, was that China had been one of the nations to suffer the most staggering losses in the entire Tutorial Termination crisis.
Its sheer landmass meant the number of gates alone operated on an entirely different scale from other countries. The only reason the situation had been contained at all was thanks to the Murim returnees and the sheer volume of Awakened proportionate to China's population.
Certainly, countless Awakened had been harmed in the process, but to men who prized the nation's face above all else, such sacrifices were merely something to be ground underfoot and paved over.
Plenty of countries were still failing to clean up their own messes, so China loudly insisting it had held the line wasn't entirely absurd.
‘Fools. What matters now isn't that pitiful international reputation.’
Seated to one side of the conference room, the Sword Emperor, Namgoong Hwi, clicked his tongue inwardly. The party officials were focused on having doused the immediate fire, while Namgoong Hwi was focused on the fact that this was only the beginning.
And then there was the gate that those troublesome Blood Cult dogs came and went through.
When he considered that gate, there was no law saying Earth and other worlds couldn't be connected.
“Th-then, you all need to see this for a moment.”
It was then that the Director of the Special Affairs Bureau, seated at the edge of the room, spoke up. Without waiting for anyone's reaction, he worked his laptop and threw a video onto the main screen.
What appeared was footage of a single man in a tight T-shirt butchering a massive orc army barehanded.
[Kya-hahahahaha! Too slow, you pigs!]
Namgoong Hwi shot to his feet without meaning to. The face of the man on the screen was far, far too familiar to him.
He wasn't the only one to react, of course. Every Murim returnee in the room was watching the video with grim, severe expressions.
‘Now you finally see it, you idiots?’
Unless one's eyes had been replaced with knotholes, no one could fail to grasp the enormity of what the man in the footage was accomplishing. No — if anything, the Murim returnees were bound to feel the greater shock as they watched.
“Wh-where on earth is that...?”
“South Korea.”
“D-don't tell me. Is that the one the Sword Emperor mentioned before...?”
The Sword Emperor slowly nodded at the man questioning him. The real problem, however, was why the Director of Special Affairs had played the video.
“Why are you showing us this so suddenly?”
“The ripple effect of this video cannot be ignored. Ignoramuses are running their mouths, claiming that because this man merely took down C-rank orc warriors, Korea might become the world's next hunter superpower. Which means, surely, we must stamp the weed out before it grows?”
“What? Are you suggesting we send assassins?”
The Sword Emperor asked it with his brow deeply furrowed. He had already dispatched a pursuit team — and contact had gone completely dead — but that was hardly something he could announce in this room.
“No. There's no need to go to such lengths. After all, he was only dealing with C-rank orc warriors.”
‘This man is profoundly, dangerously mistaken.’
That was Namgoong Hwi's thought as he watched the Director of Special Affairs wear a relaxed smile. He could roughly follow the logic. The man was treating the orc warriors as nothing more than monsters out of a C-rank gate, and the Murim returnees in this room, it seemed, had convinced themselves they could each manage a feat of that scale well enough.
And crucially, the man had no idea that the figure on that screen had come out through the gate in Beijing. That was because Namgoong Hwi and every Murim returnee present had all kept their mouths firmly shut about the matter.
The problem was that, contrary to the man's delusions, not a single one of those Murim returnees could have demonstrated that kind of force against that many orc warriors.
“Our purpose is to prove the Motherland's standing to the world, is it not?”
“...Just tell me the method. Stop dancing around it.”
At the Sword Emperor's displeased expression, the Director of Special Affairs spoke with a chuckle caught in his throat.
“As it happens, there is a stage perfectly suited to proving a great nation's dignity.”
“A good stage?”
“North Korea.”
The Director of Special Affairs worked his laptop again and threw a second video onto the screen.