Reunion
Oh Hyeon-seong was filling his days with quiet diligence.
He farmed alongside the spirits, occasionally wandered down to the village to mingle with the locals, shared meals with Gwon Gyeong-min's family, and even stopped by the Yoo siblings' farm to lend a hand.
Back home, he'd enjoy a delicious meal, and on rainy days he'd lounge around lazily taking in the view.
Leisurely, yet fruitful days.
But once the day's routine was finished, without fail and without exception, he carried on with his training.
With every session of rehabilitation, his body improved, and so far he hadn't hit any kind of ceiling.
Thanks to that, his physical condition had climbed considerably.
Padadadak!
"Whew!"
Coming to a stop, Oh Hyeon-seong glanced down at his left leg.
He had just sprinted hard up the mountain behind the house. His muscles ached dully, but at least the strength no longer gave out on him at random the way it used to.
If he was willing to push through a certain amount of pain, he could now build up a decent pace while running.
Even holding his balance through explosive movements that had once been impossible had become far easier.
'At this level, I could fight if I had to. Not that I'll ever get tangled up with gates or monsters again.'
Oh Hyeon-seong was more than content with his current life.
The thought of returning to the blood-soaked battlefields of a hunter's life never once crossed his mind.
That said, it was still better to be capable of protecting himself, at the very least.
The world might not be as chaotic as it had been in the early days of the gates, but it remained a turbulent place all the same.
No matter how established the system became, it could hardly compare to a world with no monsters or awakened at all.
Though if there was one place that seemed a step removed from all of that, it was this village.
It was as endlessly peaceful as ever—so much so that a former hunter like him sometimes wondered whether he was really allowed to live like this.
Creak.
Oh Hyeon-seong returned home.
He set down the firewood he'd gathered in a corner of the yard.
Firewood for burning in the fire pit, stocked up ahead of winter.
A little embarrassing to admit, but it was a small romantic dream he'd carried since childhood.
Having tidied up more or less, he dusted off his hands and turned around.
"Oh, you're here?"
There stood Ju Ji-hye, shuffling sluggishly onto the porch of the annex like a sloth.
At the sight of her, Oh Hyeon-seong gave her an incredulous look.
"I saw a car outside, so I figured you'd be around... You've really settled in, haven't you."
"It's cold out. Waiting in the car would've been a bit much, don't you think?"
"So why are you here all of a sudden? I told you when you ran out of strawberries, just call and I'd ship some right over."
"I didn't come for strawberries! The location for my latest regional shoot just happened to be close by. I finished filming and drove straight here."
Ju Ji-hye said with a beaming smile.
"This shoot was a huge hit! The drama premiere is coming up soon, so make sure you catch it live. It's going to be a guaranteed smash."
"Confidence is good, I guess. So basically, you just dropped by because you were in the neighborhood?"
"Partly to show you how much better I'm doing. Two birds with one stone. I don't toss and turn unable to sleep anymore. All thanks to you, Teacher."
"I told you to stop calling me Instructor, and now it's Teacher?"
"Oh... um, would 'Mister' work better?"
"No, just drop the title altogether."
Leaving her behind, Oh Hyeon-seong headed for the storage shed.
Ju Ji-hye poked her head out after him and called out.
"Have you been well while I was gone? I brought you a present, too."
"Been fine."
"What about Teacher Su-yeon? She's not here."
"She's always busy, that one. She left the same day you did."
"Ah, so she hasn't been back since then. I was just curious because of that news, actually."
"What news?"
"You know, that terrifying rumor that's been going around. About how it wasn't the prosecutors who tore Daesung Group apart this time—it was the Bureau, deliberately, and with intent."
"Ah."
At Ju Ji-hye's words, Oh Hyeon-seong nodded.
He'd heard about the Daesung Group scandal that had set the news ablaze recently.
The whole affair—committing every manner of illegal crime to sabotage Hankyung's food business, right up to the chairman's indictment.
'They never named the exact target, but given the timing, it was probably the strawberries I was supplying. I didn't expect them to come out swinging that hard, though. They must have been pretty desperate for business. That could have gotten really annoying.'
A conglomerate's hunter forces were nothing to sneeze at.
It wasn't just about deploying a few dozen operatives from headquarters—many corporations established separate private security firms to run full-scale hunter units.
In an era like this, whatever business you were in, the demand for hunters only kept growing.
Had Daesung's hunters moved with real intent, Oh Hyeon-seong would have found himself in quite the nuisance indeed.
Of course, there was no need to worry about that now.
Every hunter who had taken part in the crimes had been subdued by the Bureau and thrown into a holding cell.
Whether the chairman would actually serve prison time remained to be seen, but going up against the likes of Han Su-yeon meant they'd been clutching a handful of weaknesses and forced into a humiliating settlement.
Daesung wouldn't so much as glance at the strawberry problem again.
'As expected, the potato effect is real.'
Oh Hyeon-seong nodded with satisfaction.
He'd made the request a while back, so she'd have set things in motion within Hankyung Group as well—raising security clearances and the like, not just targeting Daesung.
With her watching his back, there was no need to worry about leaks.
"Heh heh. To think my connections include someone who can crush a chaebol chairman underfoot."
"You're already bragging about connections? Seriously?"
"We shared a deep, intense bond over those seven days, after all. The kind only comrades-in-arms can know..."
THUD!
A heavy sound rang out from the storage shed.
Ju Ji-hye's whole body flinched, trembling on pure reflex.
"How's Jeong-il doing?"
"H-he's doing well. He seemed overjoyed when he saw I'd recovered. He usually never lets anything show on his face, but lately the CEO actually seems a bit brighter..."
"Good to hear."
Oh Hyeon-seong returned from the shed carrying the weighted pouches.
At the sight of that unforgettable training equipment, Ju Ji-hye flinched and backed away.
"Relax, these aren't yours."
Oh Hyeon-seong strapped the pouches across his entire body.
The weight was far heavier than when he'd first started, and Ju Ji-hye's eyes went wide watching him.
The numbers written on them were anything but ordinary.
"You're going to wear that?"
"I'm in rehab too, you know. I've been training nonstop since you left. Thanks to that, I'm already up to five Ju Ji-hyes in weight."
"Wh-what is that? Why is my name being used as a unit of measurement?!"
Inhale—!
Oh Hyeon-seong began his training as he always did.
He couldn't just skip a session because a guest had shown up.
But Ju Ji-hye's gaze as she watched him was anything but calm.
'That's impossible. He's carrying that much weight on his whole body, and he can still hold those forms that cleanly?'
It wasn't just the weight.
Every single movement was stripped of waste—not a trace of unnecessary motion. He hunted down the exact points of stimulation, without so much as a tremor.
The kind of precision of a machine in motion.
'A hunter who retired years ago can really move like that...?'
An unused body inevitably rusts.
People called hunters superhuman, but in the end they were no different from ordinary people.
Stay off the field, and your senses dull of necessity; an untrained body decays.
That was why the gap between active and retired hunters was truly immense.
And yet the intensity of the training Oh Hyeon-seong was putting himself through right now wouldn't have been outmatched even if they'd brought in a top-tier elite hunter.
'Even if you dragged in every combat specialist in Aegis, only a handful could keep up with that.'
All she'd known was that he was Han Su-yeon and Choi Jeong-il's senior.
She'd never heard about his achievements or history as a hunter, never had occasion to see his skill firsthand—which made it all the more shocking.
Which raised the question: why was there nothing left behind about Oh Hyeon-seong at all?
A far bigger question was blooming in Ju Ji-hye's mind.
"Hold it right there!"
At that moment, Oh Hyeon-seong, in the thick of his training, came to an abrupt halt.
He turned, and his eyes met Ju Ji-hye's.
"Why are you just standing there watching?"
"...I'm sorry, what?"
"You're not fully cured yet, are you? You think you get to eat strawberries and skip training until every last aftereffect is gone?"
"Wh...? B-but... it's been a while since I came down..."
Ju Ji-hye's face went white as a sheet.
She waved her hands frantically in protest, but of course, that wasn't going to fly.
"Uuuaaagh..."
Gripping the wall, Ju Ji-hye gagged.
Her legs shook so violently she looked like a newborn fawn.
"If you're going to throw up, use the bathroom. Puke here and you're running another full lap."
"There's... there's nothing to bring up anyway."
Ju Ji-hye barely managed to lower herself onto the porch.
The world was spinning before her eyes; she couldn't move a muscle.
With weights heavier than last time and Oh Hyeon-seong's relentless tempo to keep up with, she genuinely felt as though she'd taken a quick tour of the afterlife.
Oh Hyeon-seong, on the other hand, still had stamina to spare.
On a normal day, he'd have launched straight into the next cycle to burn through even that remaining energy completely.
But this time, he stopped here.
THUMP!
The weighted pouches strapped across his body hit the floor with a dull clatter.
Feeling the sudden lightness of his frame, he settled down where he stood.
'My condition's been raised to a decent level, so it's about time I started working on my mana.'
Mana rippled around Oh Hyeon-seong.
Keeping his breathing calm and steady, he slowly began to circulate it.
Sprawled on the floor, Ju Ji-hye shot upright and stared at him.
'Huh? I thought he didn't have any mana?'
Her eyes went wide with astonishment.
And no wonder—hunters could sense mana.
Not just the mana they used themselves, but the mana others had accumulated and stored—they could feel it and read it.
When hunters spoke of "reading each other's presence," this was what they meant, in most cases.
The classic weakness of power-type ability hunters, for all their overwhelming firepower, was precisely that their presence was easy to read.
The greater a hunter's mana reserves, the harder it was to conceal them.
Compared to combat-type hunters, who held far smaller stores of mana and relied on raw physical ability, it was a clear and obvious disadvantage.
And Ju Ji-hye had never sensed a single scrap of mana from Oh Hyeon-seong.
This wasn't a momentary suppression of his presence—they had lived under the same roof for a full week. Deceiving her for that long was simply impossible.
Yet the amount of mana she felt from him now was far beyond anything a combat-type hunter would carry.
VMMMM!
'The feeling of mana flooding into my body... it's been a while.'
Oh Hyeon-seong was neither a combat-type nor an ability-type.
During his active years, he had belonged to neither category.
After all, if he'd had no mana at all, he could never have maintained contracts with hundreds of spirits.
The reason Ju Ji-hye had sensed nothing was that he had been keeping himself in a state where his mana was entirely depleted.
Oh Hyeon-seong had sealed away all of his mana except for the amount allocated and consumed through his contracts with the spirits.
The reason was simple.
His body, weakened by injury, could no longer contain it.
With his physical condition unable to recover past a certain threshold due to his aftereffects—
If he had kept the vast reserves of mana he was born with stored inside his body, it would have placed a crushing strain on him.
In a word: to keep his weakened body from suffering, he had deliberately left himself empty.
But that was no longer the case.
His body had improved enough to handle a certain amount of mana, and now he was drawing out a portion of what he'd sealed away.
"Whew."
Oh Hyeon-seong stopped the circulation and exhaled.
He could feel the mana settling into his body.
Having formed a single ring in his dantian, he now carried a comfortable reserve of mana that would put most ability-type hunters to shame.
'Granted, the spirits currently contracted to me are all ones without combat ability, so I can't put it to any special use—but there are plenty of ways to make use of even basic application. Better to have it on hand.'
His body was stable.
Thankfully, there was no need to spit the hard-won mana back out.
But in that very moment—
VMMMM!
"Huh...?"
Both of their gazes snapped around at the same time.
Ju Ji-hye, jaw agape, was one thing—but even Oh Hyeon-seong hadn't anticipated what was happening.
The air all around them suddenly chilled as if frozen solid, and amid the pouring white frost, mana began to swirl violently.
And then, from within it, a hazy figure took shape.
"You... you're..."
Oh Hyeon-seong's voice trembled with shock.
The water spirit, Alvern.
His old partner—the one he had believed utterly destroyed—revealed himself once more.
KEEEDONG!
At the blare of the sudden alarm, the staff on duty sprang into motion.
It was an anomaly caught by the Bureau's gate detection system, and the alarm that had just sounded was nothing like the routine alerts.
Sure enough, the moment the technician checked the screen, his face drained of color.
"Wavelength detected beyond measurable range! S-Rank... it's an S-Rank gate!"
He grabbed the microphone in a panic and reported the situation.
Rushing about in a daze, he soon turned his eyes back to the screen.
But then he had to doubt his own two eyes.
The overwhelming signature that, only moments ago, had blanketed the entire map—was gone.
"...It vanished?"
For the first time in the history of the Bureau's observation corps, the technician could only stand frozen in place, staring blankly at the screen.