Even a Runaway Palate Comes Home
"What do you mean, a deal?"
"Exactly what it sounds like. If a favor alone won't do, then I'll give you whatever you want—so reconsider."
"And you think you know what I want?"
"That's what I'm about to find out. So, is there something you want?"
"Ha. Using the negotiation tactics I taught you, on me?"
"The National Security Bureau can grant at least anything within its power. Domestic or overseas, even into extralegal territory."
"That's a frightening thing to say."
"That's how serious we are on this end."
At Baek Ji-soo's earnest words, Oh Hyeon-seong let out a dry chuckle.
He had a good idea of where her so-called seriousness was pointing.
But even so, nothing was going to change.
"Then this negotiation is over."
"Why?"
"Because the things I want right now are things the you of today can neither understand nor give me."
"What is that supposed to—"
Just then, Baek Ji-soo's gaze snapped away.
A hideous killing intent was pressing in from outside the house.
And it was closing in on them.
Clack!
"Sunbae, get back."
Seizing her long blade, she shot up from her seat.
With her senses honed to a razor's edge, she advanced toward the wooden porch, felt the opponent across from her, and drew her sword in a single breath.
CRACK-BOOM!
The door split apart like tofu.
It shattered outward as if torn paper, yet the tip of her blade caught nothing.
And in that instant, an explosion of light slammed into her.
Its range was fiercely compressed, but all the faster and more powerful for it—a single strike that could rip the arms and legs clean off a high-tier hunter.
Yet Baek Ji-soo twisted her blade mid-motion to accelerate, and sheared through the explosion itself—all dozens of bursts of it.
Then came two hunters, tangled together.
KA-RAAAANG!
Baek Ji-soo drove her opponent into the wall.
But the sword in her hand was knocked flying as well, burying itself in the opposite wall.
"Baek Ji-soo, I told you not to pull any of your nonsense. And yet here you are, crawling in after all."
"Ha...? Since when did you outrank me? Besides, I got the Deputy Director's clearance to visit—my sunbae just got out of the hospital."
"To see his face? You only move when it benefits you. You think I can't tell you came sniffing around a retired man trying to work some angle?"
Han Su-yeon said, her eyes full of contempt.
But Baek Ji-soo only sneered back, utterly unbothered.
"And if it is an angle, what are you going to do about it?"
"What?"
"If two people each need something, they can trade. What's so wrong with that?"
"You're saying that to someone who's already left the industry?"
"That's for Sunbae to decide for himself. Or do you actually think you're the only one allowed to circle around Oh Sunbae? You still haven't dropped that obsessive habit of yours, not then and not now."
Han Su-yeon let out a hollow laugh, then a sigh.
"You really are a selfish, disgusting woman."
"And you're a fucking hypocrite. What did you do last year when your own subordinates were dying? Standing around with your hands clasped behind your back, playing noble between the President and the politicians."
"Baek Ji-soo!"
Thick layers of killing intent coiled through the room.
Just as Han Su-yeon drew up the mana inside her body, and Baek Ji-soo reached for the dagger at her chest—
PA-ANG!
Both their heads snapped back.
"Ugh...!"
Han Su-yeon and Baek Ji-soo collapsed where they stood, clutching their heads in unison.
They looked back to find Oh Hyeon-seong staring down at them, cold as ice.
"Everyone, heads down."
"Wh... what on earth is going on here?"
Ju Ji-hye stood in the yard, staring blankly at the house.
She'd come outside when she suddenly felt monstrous killing intents flaring from beyond the walls, and this was the scene that greeted her.
"Tell me about it. What a mess. A complete mess."
Oh Hyeon-seong shook his head.
Wind whistled through the door, shredded to ribbons, and one whole wall had been punched clean through by Baek Ji-soo's impact.
On top of that, as if the house had been left so hollow it needed decorating, the sword that had gone flying now hung dangling from the opposite wall.
It was a small mercy that the household belongings had mostly escaped unscathed.
"Fine, my fault! You people are grown adults—nobody ever taught you not to demolish other people's homes? All you learned was how to lop off monster heads!"
he shouted, rummaging for tools in the storage shed.
Marching out in long, deliberate strides, he found three hunters lined up in a row, awaiting punishment.
"Wh... why me, though?"
"Collective responsibility. You should've kept better watch over your sunbae."
Choi Jeong-il lodged his protest of unfair treatment, but it fell on deaf ears.
He'd come strolling in radiating killing intent from outside and had done nothing but watch—guilty of aiding and abetting.
Elites of this industry, every one of them, so even a single bow of their heads was a marvel to behold. One might wonder why someone of their caliber should be groveling in a single yard like this, but with an overwhelming justification pressed into their hands, they had no choice but to obey without a word of complaint.
'...What on earth am I looking at right now?'
Ju Ji-hye gaped at the sight.
She could hardly believe Choi Jeong-il was groveling there—but the members flanking him on either side were harder to believe still.
Especially Baek Ji-soo of the dreaded National Security Bureau, who until moments ago had been pressing her forehead to the dirt of the yard.
>No matter how many times she rubbed her eyes, she was not seeing things.
"...Sunbae, I'm sorry. We'll clean everything up before we go. We'll call in a company to handle repairs, too—"
"You think a repair crew is going to come out here, at this hour, to the middle of nowhere?"
THWACK!
A pile of tools clattered down in front of them.
"Clean it all up yourselves. Then go."
The tools and materials left behind by the house's original owner were remarkably varied.
Perhaps he'd had a hobby in this area.
They'd gone almost entirely unused, but from the day Oh Hyeon-seong first arrived they'd been filling one corner of the storage shed to the brim.
The door would need to be propped up with something to block the wind and replaced with a new one later, but thanks to the stockpile, the damage to the remaining walls could at least be patched up as a stopgap.
"..."
Crouched on the floor, Baek Ji-soo slapped wallpaper onto the wall with brisk strokes.
Back in her Special Task Force days, she'd done every manner of grueling grunt work on operations, but never anything like this.
Every time her clumsy hands left the wallpaper crumpled and puckered, a deep fury welled up inside her.
"And whose fault is it that we're doing this?"
He turned to see Oh Hyeon-seong approach and hand her a glass of water.
She took it meekly and drank, then fixed her eyes back on the wallpaper.
Still clumsy, but focused.
"Well, since you're not giving up and quitting, I'd say you can manage it just fine."
"You're one to talk, Sunbae. Country life seems to suit you. You look like you've done this forever."
"It does, actually. The quiet life agrees with me more than I expected. Maybe there was a side of me even I never knew about."
After a moment of concentration, she spoke up.
"...By now, Choi Jeong-il must have told you, Sunbae."
"What are you talking about all of a sudden?"
"You know about takgi. That the takgi we all thought was safe has, in fact, been accumulating in our bodies all along."
The remark hit dead center, and Oh Hyeon-seong fell silent for a moment. As he turned the question over in his mind, she spoke first.
"I'm not going to hold what you said against him. But don't go spreading it anywhere else. It won't end at a level that's merely inconvenient for me—or for you."
"I was curious about that anyway, so good timing. Why are you two keeping it locked down?"
"You'll remember, Sunbae, but in the early days the government did everything it could to control the awakened and fold them into the existing institutional framework. Back in our day, anyone who showed promise got dragged off to the training camps by force."
"I remember."
Oh Hyeon-seong, along with every first-generation hunter present, carried careers far heavier than their ages would suggest.
The reason was simple.
They had all been singled out early in their minor years, conscripted into the training camps, and—precisely because they were exceptional—deployed into the field even sooner.
Something that would be unthinkable today.
"Then the governments of each country started raising hunters' status and tolerating their emergence into the open—and even that was because the old methods had hit their limits. Raising every awakened person themselves had efficiency problems and clear ceilings. The system only changed after they'd been through a crisis and were forced to recruit more and more personnel."
She continued.
"But if this problem ever comes to light, all those plans collapse at once. The existing hunters would refuse to deploy, retire even earlier, and the supply of new hunters would dry up."
The glamorous face of the hunter profession has always concealed the fact that its members court death with every mission.
But the money, the honor, and the pride that came with it were what drove hunters willingly into the jaws of the battlefield.
Each of them accepted death gladly, for their own reasons.
The mass media fanned those flames further, and hunters became the objects of admiration they are today.
But if the real truth ever got out—that accumulated takgi meant hunters were running, inevitably, toward their own deaths—
the blow to the supply of hunters would be nothing short of catastrophic.
"There's plenty of debate about the right degree of disclosure, but there's no way today's social safety net could be maintained. The northern defense lines, where takgi exposure is worst, would spring leaks everywhere—and Special Operations Command wouldn't want that either."
"But is keeping it suppressed forever really the answer?"
"All I'm saying is that, for now, this is the best we can do."
They couldn't drop a bomb like this with no countermeasure in hand.
But to Oh Hyeon-seong, it seemed that if they kept it sealed up this tight, a real solution might never come at all.
"So am I going on the National Security Bureau's list too?"
"I haven't put your name forward yet... but from the moment you recovered your strength, Sunbae, you became subject to regular reporting."
Baek Ji-soo shrugged, as if to say it couldn't be helped.
For an agency charged with managing and controlling information, the National Security Bureau had to keep track of Oh Hyeon-seong's existence, now that he knew a critical secret.
Besides, an awakened one who had once possessed that degree of power and had now regained it was, by definition, someone who demanded attention at the national level.
Just as Ju Ji-hye's name, a Grade 10 high-tier hunter, was routinely filed with both the Management Bureau and the Bureau as a matter of course.
'But that's the one thing I'd rather avoid.'
Making the list wouldn't mean wiretaps or round-the-clock surveillance, but the very idea didn't sit well with him.
And Baek Ji-soo wasn't the type to quietly strike a name off the list out of some fondness for an old senior.
Naturally, using that "deal" from earlier to smooth the whole thing over was out of the question.
'Hmm. Good idea.'
Oh Hyeon-seong sprang up from his seat.
A short while later, he returned from the kitchen carrying a tray.
"What's that?"
"Eat first. Then we'll talk."
Oh Hyeon-seong declared with pride.
Operation Bribe, as it were.
Baek Ji-soo was a consummate gourmand.
Her palate was so demanding that she bore no comparison to Oh Hyeon-seong or Han Su-yeon, who had never cared a whit about food.
The problem was that it bordered on pathological—even while starving to death mid-operation, she wouldn't let so much as a military ration touch her lips.
Oh Hyeon-seong had force-fed a few meals past those lips of hers, but without him there'd been no one to rein in such eccentricity, and so she'd never abandoned her gourmet streak to the end.
Which meant the moment she tasted something genuinely delicious, her eyes were bound to roll back.
"This meal is... this is it?"
Baek Ji-soo asked, dazed, accepting a single lonely bowl.
"Ah, right. This is called bibimbap."
"I know what it is."
A perfect single bowl: steaming white rice crowned with fresh vegetables and an array of seasonings.
It was a dish utterly dependent on its ingredients—meaning it was nothing short of a cheat code for Oh Hyeon-seong.
And without a word, Baek Ji-soo picked up her spoon.
"That's a surprise. I figured you'd refuse to even touch it."
"Food you make is rare, Sunbae. And I... I'm not picky anymore, the way I used to be."
She began to eat.
Her spoon moved without a flicker of expression.
Oh Hyeon-seong figured she was deploying her poker face—her signature skill—here as well.
To eat something this delicious without letting out a single gasp, she had surely reached some profound mastery of the art.
But astonishingly, it wasn't an act.
Clunk.
Her bowl—less than half finished—was slid aside.
The first leftover rice of his (very short) cooking career.
"What the—"
For a moment, Oh Hyeon-seong lost his composure entirely.
Having been so utterly certain, the shock landed all the harder.
And to him, Baek Ji-soo said, tapping the scar on her cheek:
"Sorry, Sunbae. I can't taste anything."
Ever since that day, when half her jaw had nearly been torn away—
she had lost her sense of taste.