Junior and Junior
"How... how are you even here? Is your body... all right?"
"You can see for yourself, I'm perfectly fine. Well enough to go about my daily life, anyway!"
"...Still, that's a relief. I never heard a word about you being discharged. When did it happen?"
"A while ago now. What about you—have you been doing well?"
"Of course I have."
Choi Jeong-il nodded.
His features had changed somewhat, and his appearance was worlds apart from how it had been back then, but his particular way of speaking was exactly the same.
"Does no one else know you've been discharged? No—surely Director Han would have known."
"Right, I was in a hospital under the Bureau's jurisdiction. Su-yeon did come by the house once. She hasn't gone around telling anyone, so the others probably have no idea. Though it seems you two don't keep in touch yourselves."
"We're both far too busy. The last time I saw her was at an official event the year before last."
The conversation continued between Oh Hyeon-seong and Choi Jeong-il.
But in that room, one presence had been completely forgotten.
Ju Ji-hye—someone who drew every eye in the room wherever she went.
Under ordinary circumstances she would have been shrieking about nepotism, but as she watched the two of them, her mouth had been hanging open ever since.
"No way... why... how do they know each other...?"
Ju Ji-hye muttered in a daze.
At that, the two men who had forgotten she was there turned to look at her.
"Ah, Ji-hye. Come over here and greet him properly."
"Greet him? What exactly is the relationship between the CEO and this man?"
"He's my senior. That reminds me, things looked pretty heated earlier—don't tell me you caused some kind of trouble in the meantime?"
"Wh—no, that is, I..."
Ju Ji-hye's expression twisted into one of profound discomfort.
She had, in fact, already caused a colossal one, and Choi Jeong-il, catching on, let out a long sigh.
"If you've been rude, apologize at once. And put your heart into it!"
"Hold on a second. You're telling me this man is really your senior? I've never even seen his face anywhere. How does that make any sense?"
"He is the senior I respect most in this world. Are you trying to smear my face along with yours?"
"The... the most...?"
What era did she think she was living in?
This was an age where a single unusual constitution could make you a rising star—your name and face marketed across the nation—even without a single gate clear to your credit.
And Ju Ji-hye had categorically never seen Oh Hyeon-seong anywhere.
His presence was indistinguishable from an ordinary civilian's, and she'd assumed that if he was a hunter at all, he was some third-rate nobody whose face no one knew.
And yet he was not only a 1st Generation hunter who'd worked for the government back in the day—he was the senior whom that very CEO Choi Jeong-il respected above all others.
Th-this is impossible. It makes no sense.
Ju Ji-hye's face turned a mottled shade of green and red.
As she stood there stammering, unable to get a word out, Oh Hyeon-seong stepped in.
"That's enough. Let's leave it at that."
"...We'll talk later. Stay out of this for now—go wait outside."
Choi Jeong-il said, furrowing his brow slightly.
And Ju Ji-hye's chest seized up.
Stay out of the way, go wait outside? In her entire life, she had never once been treated like this.
"I'm Ju Ji-hye! I built the very foundation of your company, CEO! And this... this nobody thinks he can just—! Hic...!"
Words spilling out of her in a torrent, Ju Ji-hye fled from the room, choking back tears.
With her gone in a flash, the two men stood in silence for a moment.
"...Ah, youth."
"You said it."
The office was a complete wreck.
Choi Jeong-il, seemingly familiar with the scene, unearthed an instant coffee mix from the floor and prepared two cups with water from the water purifier—the lone survivor in the corner.
"My manager contacted me in a panic saying Ji-hye was about to cause trouble, so I came straight here—and even so, I never imagined she'd already managed it. This rudeness was committed by one of my own, so allow me to apologize in her place."
"Don't worry about it. It's not even my office."
"Haah... I'll have to compensate the department store and see to their silence as well. Was anyone else hurt?"
"Thankfully, no injuries. One employee got caught up in it, so I'll have her apologize to him separately."
"I'll see to it."
Choi Jeong-il handed over the well-stirred coffee mix with both hands.
Amid the wreckage of the office, the two men leaned against the wall and sipped their coffee.
"...So you took up farming."
"It's not bad. You should think about it too, once you retire."
"I'll give it serious consideration. Though I honestly never imagined you of all people would move to the countryside, sir."
"Su-yeon said the same thing."
Oh Hyeon-seong chuckled.
"But the feeling's mutual. Of all the news I heard from the outside world, nothing surprised me more than yours."
"You mean the hunter management business?"
"That's right. When the team was disbanded, I assumed you'd naturally go into the military. I never dreamed you had a talent for business."
"It just... ended up this way. Even now it feels strange sometimes, sitting here like this."
Choi Jeong-il downed half his coffee in one go.
"I started the company to raise successors before I retired. Turns out raising young hunters is harder than I expected. I'm stretched too thin—these days I can barely make it out into the field."
"Isn't that an exaggeration? I keep hearing about you clearing S-Rank gates and making a name for yourself."
"Not that it compares to the state of your body after what you suffered out there, sir... but I'm not the man I used to be either."
Swish.
Choi Jeong-il removed the eyepatch from his left eye.
A pupil turned bone-white, staring blankly ahead with no focus in it at all.
Oh Hyeon-seong's expression darkened in shock.
"You...?"
"As you can see, this eye is completely blind. It wasn't an injury from a monster, either. The strain accumulated over the years until the side effects finally burst through, and the vision never came back."
Oh Hyeon-seong fell silent.
Choi Jeong-il's unusual constitution was an ability that placed enormous strain on his eyes.
Even back then, he had always worn an eyepatch over his left eye whenever he wasn't actively using his power.
But if the eye was fully blind now, that meant his unique ability was gone for good.
"Hunters are consumables. Society uses them up, and eventually they break. The more battlefields you see, the more injuries accumulate, your recovery hurtles toward zero—it's an inescapable fate."
Choi Jeong-il said it matter-of-factly.
"That's why I came out into society and started raising the next generation. I wanted to build an environment where they could work in better conditions than we did—where they wouldn't be devoured by overload."
"Then you succeeded. Thanks to the business you built, the hunter industry has become a comfortable place."
"It was always bound to head that way eventually. All I did was hasten it a little. And in essence, nothing has changed."
Choi Jeong-il stood still for a moment, lost in memories of the past.
The comrades dragged into the training academy without knowing a thing, the seniors and juniors thrown onto countless battlefields.
The hunters of the past—the ones now called the 1st Generation.
With his excellent memory, he could summon the faces of all those people vividly. But of the ones still alive today, there were almost none.
"I don't believe this peace will last forever. Sooner or later, another calamity like that one will come crashing down on us again. For someone already on the downhill slope like me, all I can do is raise the generation that comes after."
"To keep humanity from being destroyed by the gates?"
"Naturally, that's the first goal. But it's also so that even if we hold back the crisis, the hunters won't be recklessly expended in the process. I refuse to let them be ground up by manpower shortages and overload the way we were."
Choi Jeong-il said it curtly.
Oh Hyeon-seong, who knew exactly what the man had been through, chose not to press further.
A brief silence.
But soon his mind turned back to what Ju Ji-hye had done at the department store—and since the farmer she'd been searching for was none other than himself, it occurred to him that this could become a serious problem if it ever happened again.
"What was Ju Ji-hye doing, raising hell at my place? Did she genuinely just want to eat the strawberries that badly?"
"Ah, that... where do I even begin."
Choi Jeong-il clicked his tongue, organized his thoughts for a moment, and began.
"Ji-hye has always been a temperamental girl, but she was never unable to control her emotions like this. If she had been, I never would have signed her to the company. Everything changed after she was injured clearing the S-Rank gate that appeared in Busan a year ago."
"PTSD? Or some lingering aftereffect on the mental side?"
"No formal diagnosis, but she's been suffering from neurasthenia. Intermittent anxiety, trembling hands, excessive fatigue—and worst of all, chronic insomnia. But recently, she told me her insomnia improved after eating strawberries from Hankyung Department Store."
"What...? Her symptoms eased just from eating strawberries? Isn't that a mistake? A placebo or something!"
"At least, that's how she experiences it. She's hot-headed, but she's not naive enough to misjudge the state of her own body."
Hunters are acutely sensitive to their own physical condition.
Partly because of their naturally sharp senses, but more importantly, because a hunter who failed to properly monitor her own body was likely to end up as monster food out in the field.
"In any case, something has clearly changed in her recently... but a scientific approach has turned up absolutely nothing. As you know, these things happen often enough in our industry. But left as she is, she won't hold out much longer. She knows it too—that's why she's gotten so desperate."
"Hmm..."
Oh Hyeon-seong hummed thoughtfully.
Hunters complaining of mental problems despite making a perfect physical recovery from severe trauma—he had seen plenty of those himself.
So she wasn't simply an insolent brat; there was more to her story after all.
But what troubled him far more was the matter of the strawberries.
Eating strawberries from my farm eased her symptoms... honestly, I have a hard time believing it myself.
Especially since these weren't even the originals—just the downgraded version that had been released to the market. A disease-like condition recovering from those?
If a phenomenon like that were happening on any wide scale, there would have been absolute pandemonium by now.
He had never heard even a rumor of such a thing. And by Choi Jeong-il's account—a man with connections throughout the entire hunter industry—this effect had appeared in Ju Ji-hye alone.
But come to think of it, my own body did improve to a remarkable degree. And that improvement is still holding. Could it actually be connected to the crops the spirits helped grow?
He had walked all the way here on two legs that should have been crippled, and felt no pain.
At most, a slight tingling.
Until now, he'd simply attributed it to how good the clean country air and the leisurely pace of rural life had been for his health.
But if—even in the remotest possibility—the spirits' crops had some kind of effect on a hunter's body, that would be no ordinary matter.
I need to look into this.
Oh Hyeon-seong spoke with Choi Jeong-il and had Ju Ji-hye called back in.
"What... what now? If you two get along so well, why don't you just keep chatting without me."
Ju Ji-hye said as she reentered the office.
She affected complete indifference, but there was no hiding the slight puffiness around her eyes.
Not that either of them cared.
Oh Hyeon-seong strode straight up to her and asked.
"Hey. Do you want to get better?"
Amid the buzz of chatter, the crowd filed out of the conference room.
Han Su-yeon, lingering in her seat for a while after the NSC meeting chaired by the President, finally heaved a deep sigh and rose to her feet.
As if he had been waiting for exactly that moment, a man who had been watching her strode over.
"Director Han, you've worked hard."
"I'm a Deputy Director, Prime Minister."
"Heheh... who doesn't know that? You said you haven't eaten—come have a meal with me. I know an excellent place."
The Prime Minister flashed a genial smile.
But Han Su-yeon declined politely.
Naturally, the offer didn't end there—she had to refuse him again and again as he clung on with dogged persistence.
This is the only skill that ever grows in a place like this.
Meals here so rarely ended as mere meals.
"Then, I have an appointment. I'll be going now."
"Next time, you owe me a meal—no excuses!"
Shaking her head wearily, Han Su-yeon climbed into the back seat of her car.
On any ordinary day, this would have been the hour she stopped off at an expensive restaurant to fill her stomach. But these days, such a schedule was unnecessary.
Back at home, she shrugged off her heavy formal wear and changed into something comfortable.
"What should I make tonight?"
Han Su-yeon headed for the veranda with a lightness in her step.
And even a faint smile crept onto her face—the kind no one at work would ever have been allowed to see.
"Huh...?"
But the moment she opened the box, she froze.
An empty box, with nothing inside but a scattering of crumbs.
Han Su-yeon's face crumpled.
"The potatoes... I'd used them all up."