A Glorious Return
Creeeak.
Oh Hyeon-seong stepped out of the dilapidated cabin.
He had spent a while in conversation inside, leaving Nihil's corpse with Noya before coming out. The point was to commission the crafting of a new artifact. Noya had been in need of good materials anyway, and he welcomed the arrival of top-grade ingredients after such a long drought.
"Then come back in about half a month. It will be finished by then, at the latest."
"I'll do that."
Oh Hyeon-seong nodded at the old man's words; Noya had insisted on seeing him off all the way to the door. Then he cast a slow sweep of his gaze across the surroundings.
"Nothing much has changed since last time, I see."
"There was no need for anything to change."
Noya said it with a faint smile. It was a shabby place by any measure for someone of his caliber. To be sure, the man seemed utterly transcendent where material desires were concerned, but even so, he hadn't always holed up in a backwater mountain valley as empty as this one. In fact, far more of his life had been spent in the great capitals of various nations, where he could receive proper support for his weapon crafting.
"Everything I need is right here inside."
"Except for people, isn't that right? Doesn't it ever get lonely?"
"If I could spend my days with kindred spirits, naturally nothing would be better. But I've been harried by people for so very long, you see." A bitter smile touched his lips before he continued. "These days I simply want a quiet, peaceful life — an environment like this, where I can devote myself to my craft and nothing else. It's a shame the miasma shrouding the mountain keeps me from a proper view of untouched nature, but even so, I could ask for no better place."
"...I think I understand exactly what you mean."
Oh Hyeon-seong chuckled at that and nodded. The circumstances that had brought each of them here were different in every way, yet he had come to see that the old man had a side strikingly similar to his own.
After exchanging final farewells with Noya, Oh Hyeon-seong made his way down the mountain. Unlike the climb up, there was no monster corpse weighing down his shoulders, and his steps felt that much lighter.
I handed it over, all right, but who knows how it'll turn out when it's finished.
His thoughts turned to the artifact to come. He had laid out the general direction he wanted, but how much of that would actually be reflected was anyone's guess. The higher the grade of materials used, the stronger the uncertainty became, or so Noya had said. In the craftsman's own words, the materials had a will of their own. The more power they held, the less they bent to their maker's intent — instead, they shaped themselves into the form they desired. Several of the artifacts from last time, too, had taken shapes quite different from what he'd imagined.
Honestly, either way is fine by me.
Chattergil's Dagger, sheathed at the small of his back right now, had turned out quite unlike anything he'd expected — and yet it had proven enormously useful for the farm. He couldn't dig up every crop with his own two hands, but at least anything of Epic grade or higher he made a point of harvesting personally, with that very dagger.
There it is.
A helicopter came into view, parked at the base of the trail. It was the National Security Bureau craft he'd arrived in.
"Thanks for waiting."
"We spent ten days together. This much is nothing."
Baek Ji-soo answered tersely, standing beside the helicopter.
"You could have come up and seen him yourself, you know."
"We're hardly on visiting terms, he and I."
Noya was someone Baek Ji-soo knew well enough by reputation. But unlike Oh Hyeon-seong, she had never once laid eyes on him during her days in the Special Task Force. She had never wielded a weapon of his making, never even coveted one. The long blade she now kept propped at a slant beside her was the artifact weapon she had always used — and since acquiring it, she had not so much as touched another sword.
"Besides, what would be the point? If I showed my face, he'd just get guarded."
Unlike the retired Oh Hyeon-seong, Baek Ji-soo was not merely active in the field — she sat at the upper echelons of a government organization. And the image carried by her very name was a problem in itself. Among Koreans she was regarded, at best, as an ally — a relief, nothing more. To hunters abroad, however, her notoriety was Immediate and unrelenting. In truth, Baek Ji-soo showed a comparatively merciful hand toward her own countrymen while showing no mercy whatsoever to foreign hunters — plainly enough that even Oh Hyeon-seong, who had run operations alongside her, had seen it with his own eyes. It was entirely possible, then, that Noya too had heard every ugly story about her and formed an equally poor impression.
"Well... if that's how it is, let's go."
There was nothing to see in that place but billowing fog, and the two moved to board the helicopter straight away. But at that moment—
She froze.
Baek Ji-soo stopped dead in her tracks.
"What is it?"
"There's something there."
A slight frown creasing her brow, she turned her head back. Any monsters that had once made their homes around Fog Mountain, Oh Hyeon-seong had wiped out personally long ago. He was still wondering what she meant when—
"...What is this?"
He turned toward the same direction. There he felt the movement of something that had tried, quite skillfully, to conceal its presence — and precisely because of that effort, stood out all the more.
Not this way either, huh.
A man muttered to himself as he picked his way through the underbrush. Pale irises, an unkempt growth of beard — a face that read as foreign at a glance. Killing his presence with practiced cunning, he walked on, scribbling something into a notebook clutched in his left hand.
But then—
"Wh-what the—?!"
The man staggered backward in shock. A woman had appeared soundlessly behind him and was staring intently at the very page he'd been scribbling on. He had never imagined he might run into another soul in a place like this, and his eyes darted wildly.
"Out for a hike?"
Russian, from Baek Ji-soo's lips. The man reflexively drew a dagger from inside his coat — but before the blade had cleared the sheath by even half—
Crack!
The blow caught him square in the face and he crumpled. Like a man felled by a tranquilizer dart, he went down without the slightest resistance, sprawling limply on the ground.
"He's not dead, is he?"
"Probably not."
Oh Hyeon-seong emerged from the brush and studied the man. That punch had not sounded ordinary. Drawing closer for a better look, he found that something had indeed been broken, but the man was breathing steadily enough.
Crouching down, Baek Ji-soo rifled through his belongings. She also photographed his face with her phone and sent the image off somewhere. Oh Hyeon-seong picked up the notebook the man had dropped. The important parts were written in code, but the rest was packed tight with Cyrillic script.
"It's been a while — it's all going foggy. What was this word again?"
"No point straining yourself. It's all cipher on your end too."
"At the very least, he's no civilian."
Before long, a reply came back to Baek Ji-soo. The language alone hadn't been enough to pin down his nationality with certainty, but the identity check confirmed it: the man had come from Russia.
"An agent of the Federal Security Service. Foreign intelligence directorate — and he was already on our watchlist."
"A man like that creeping around a place like this can't possibly be coincidence. Odds are very high he came after the old man."
"I'd say so."
Noya's ability to create artifacts outright was something that could profoundly influence the national-level strength of an entire country. The place where he lived looked like nothing more than a ramshackle cabin, but the artifacts stacked to the rafters in his storeroom were worth a fortune in themselves. Before the interests of a state, there was no nation to be trusted. In a world under invasion by gates and monsters, the hunter and artifact assets a country held were tied directly to that nation's very survival.
Whether Russia's dealt with him directly before, or the intel leaked out of some other country, I couldn't say — but this just became a headache.
Russian hunters were not inherently bad people. Oh Hyeon-seong had fought alongside them in China. Russia, like Korea, was a direct party to the China Front; they, too, had thrown their full strength into holding the line. They had been ground down at the front and still fought on longer than anyone, to the very end — and so he held them in fairly good regard.
Back then, they had been on the same side.
But when it came to outfits entangled with government institutions like the FSB, they could be called nothing but vicious. Those people stopped at nothing. They went beyond mere ruthlessness — they were, frankly, filthy about it.
"From the look of things, his location hasn't been fully compromised. But..."
If they were combing all the way out to Fog Mountain, it meant they were dead serious. It meant they had already searched countless far more suspicious places before narrowing in on here.
"At the very least, they've realized he's somewhere in Korea. They just haven't pinpointed the exact location."
Fortunately, Noya had veiled his hideaway with the effects of his artifacts. That was why the pursuer, having made it this far, was still blundering around without catching so much as a whiff of him. Even so, Baek Ji-soo recommended relocating the old man, if only for safety's sake.
"Relocate him where?"
"The most reliable option would be to make official contact with the government and come under our protection. We have a safe house in Seoul that we manage. If he wanted even more security, we could arrange for him to live full-time inside one of our facilities."
"..."
Oh Hyeon-seong fell into thought. Objectively speaking, it was a sound proposal — but something had been nagging at him for a while now.
"Is there any other way?"
His conversation with Noya just before. As a resident of Changyeong-ri himself, Oh Hyeon-seong understood perfectly what the old man wanted. All the more reason he was loath to shatter that hard-won peace — unwilling to shove him back into the very tangle of state institutions that had once left the man so disillusioned he'd fled into the mountains.
"...I understand what you're asking. We'll look into the situation on our end first."
"Thank you."
Hearing him out, Baek Ji-soo accepted the position. Her decision was not born of goodwill alone. Noya had already slipped away from other countries any number of times. Clumsily trying to pin him down would only raise the odds that he vanished somewhere else entirely, and from the government's standpoint, losing him outright to another nation was intolerable. Even if coaxing out any cooperation right away was a long shot, having him remain in Korea was by far the better outcome.
"Then go on ahead. I'll finish cleaning up here and follow."
Brushing the dirt from her knees as she rose, she looked at him and added, "You've got somewhere to get back to, don't you, senior?"
Under the bright, streaming sunlight, Yoo Eun-ha — straw hat perched on her head — threw both arms up into the air.
"All right! That's today's work done!"
Keeng-keeng!
At her spirited cry, the spirits around her scampered about in delight, hopping up and down. Chuckling at the sight of the little low-tier spirits so overjoyed, she led the lot of them across the field.
Amid a wheat field shimmering gold, Yoo Seung-su stood with the spirits.
"Is this spot not done yet~?"
"Nope, all finished here too."
The Yoo siblings had been tending Oh Hyeon-seong's fields in his absence. Vast as the land was, there wasn't much that needed managing — they only had to harvest a modest amount — so the work held no real difficulty. Best of all, the spirits pitched in every single time, and the job wrapped up in no time. For such tiny creatures, their workmanship was remarkably deft.
"Come on, let's eat!"
Keeng-keeng!
Between the rows of crops heavy with grain, the siblings settled onto the pavilion in the small clearing and began sharing out the steamed corn they'd brought along.
"Mmm~"
Every bite washed over them with a wave of deep, moving flavor. A snack after a hard morning's work was always special in its own right, but this went beyond that. It was corn that could be eaten nowhere else in the world.
"This is a problem. Eating stuff like this is starting to make our own crops taste bland."
"Then we just have to try harder. That's the whole point of what we do — developing natural produce until it can taste like this."
"Mm, I don't know about easy, though."
Yoo Eun-ha's gaze drifted casually to the side. There, gathered cozily together, the spirits were picking up kernels of corn one by one and munching away in bliss. Watching them work their little mouths so earnestly, laughter spilled out of her unbidden.
"Heehee, they're adorable."
In a world where even keeping pets was all but impossible, watching the spirits simply melted her heart. When she'd first come down to the countryside to farm, she'd missed the mangy village dogs of her memories — but these little ones more than made up for it. Just looking at them felt like pure therapy, really.
"By the way, Oppa still isn't back. And he said it wouldn't take long."
"Tell me about it."
It had already been more than ten days since he left. He had called to say things would run later than planned, but even accounting for that, it had stretched on quite a while. Having recently learned of his extraordinary past, she found herself all the more curious about where on earth he was and what he could possibly be doing.
Whump-whump-whump-whump!
"Huh...?"
A great shadow fell over the two of them. They tilted their heads back and stared blankly up at the sky — and their jaws dropped open.
"Wh-what... what even is that?"