37. It Doesn't Matter
Knock knock knock!
"Oppa! We're here!"
In front of Oh Hyeon-seong's front gate, the Yoo siblings had dropped by for a visit — their first in quite a while. Ever since farm work had picked up, he'd stopped by their place often enough, but with them coming all the way to his house like this, he greeted them with a wide grin.
"Well, look who it is. The busiest people I know."
"We're officially retired bums now, sir. All the busy stuff is behind us."
"So I see. You two are practically glowing."
Only recently the pair had looked utterly worn down, but now they radiated vitality. Seung-su in particular — the sickly pallor he'd worn since the whole strawberry fiasco had been wiped completely clean.
"Come on in."
Hyeon-seong ushered them inside. The weather had turned properly cold of late, and he couldn't very well leave them standing outside. The siblings crossed the yard — where the spirits were scattered about, hiding here and there — chatting as they went.
"Ever since the wild strawberry thing blew up, demand for naturally grown crops has absolutely exploded. Hankyung Department Store was the biggest beneficiary, and since we're one of their existing suppliers, we've been riding that wave pretty nicely ourselves."
"They keep expanding the natural produce corner too, so now they're practically breathing down our necks asking if we've got more stock."
"I did think about expanding our facilities to capitalize on it, but I've put that on hold for now."
"Hold on — you were that busy, and you were still thinking about growing your operation?"
Hyeon-seong reacted to the siblings' story with an arched brow.
"Things are going well as it is. Why push it that far?"
"Because we came into this with ambition! Of course we have to succeed!"
"Mm-hmm!"
At Seung-su's declaration, his sister nodded along in firm agreement. From everything Hyeon-seong had observed, the brother was the more devoted one when it came to the business — but her own ambition was hardly small either. Paying off the loans they'd taken out to start the venture wasn't going to satisfy her. Faced with such burning drive, Hyeon-seong could only shrug.
"All well and good, just keep it safe this time. Don't do what you did before."
"We're going to be way stricter about risk management. We learned our lesson. If you hadn't stepped in, Hyung, recovery wouldn't even have been possible."
If they'd collapsed at that point, there would have been no coming back from it — nothing left but bankruptcy, drowning in a mountain of debt.
Meanwhile, Eun-ha had been glancing around behind them as if searching for something, and now she asked, "By the way, where's Ji-hye?"
"Ji-hye? Why are you two looking for Ju Ji-hye here?"
"You said she came out for a visit. I heard everything."
Eun-ha announced this with great ceremony. Puzzled, Hyeon-seong listened as she explained that she'd run into Ju Ji-hye while the actress was out on an errand to the village supermarket. Having heard none of this himself, Hyeon-seong could only blink — ah, so that had happened. Unfortunately, the timing was bad.
"Ji-hye already went back up to Seoul."
"Huh? Why?"
"Something urgent came up because of a gate."
"Ohhh, so that's it. She did bolt out mid-conversation like that — it was a gate."
"N... no way."
Despair settled over Yoo Seung-su's face. He planted both hands on his knees and hung his head. At this completely unprompted reaction, Hyeon-seong turned to Eun-ha.
"Why is he like that again?"
"Well... he's been over the moon since before we even left. He was so looking forward to this."
Seung-su was a rabid Ju Ji-hye fan — the kind who'd plastered her bedroom wall with posters from every single work she'd ever appeared in. And now it turned out that this same Ju Ji-hye knew Oh Hyeon-seong personally. Worse, when he learned she was actually staying at his house, he'd nearly fainted on the spot and had come brimming with towering expectations. But now there was only despair. To have his chance to meet his favorite actress snatched away like this, right at the finish line.
"Oppa, but how do you even know her?"
"I've got connections, you know. Working here and there, I ended up getting acquainted with a few hunters."
"Wait, that makes no sense? You're not even from the Bureau — what kind of work gets you rubbing shoulders with hunters? Come on, tell me the truth, right now! I'm dying of curiosity here!"
"No idea what you're talking about."
He fended off Eun-ha as she pounced at him with the desperate obliviousness of a man pretending not to hear, and picked up the remote. Thankfully, a few more rounds of interrogation met the same wall, and the conversation drifted on to other things. The siblings chattered away, catching up on everything that had piled up between visits.
Then, inevitably, they unpacked the snack bundle they'd brought along.
"Huh, this looks serious... Eun-ha, since when can you do pastry and baking?"
"Obviously. I'm the real deal, thank you very much. If you want to learn, just ask later — I'll teach you kindly. And the taste? It'll be incredible, so look forward to—"
"...It'll be something, all right."
The three of them ate through the mountain of cookies and bread spread across the table while the TV played some drama. The flavors were unavoidably muted, but it wasn't unpleasant. If anything, he found himself enjoying it enough that he'd gladly have eaten even worse cookies. No grand spectacle, no great event — just the simple pleasure of trading idle talk with neighbors who understood him, savoring a peaceful day. Having crossed so many perilous years, he knew exactly how precious moments like this were. And that was precisely why he refused to let anything disturb them. Especially not anything from out there.
Beeeep—
But just as the drama sprinted toward its climax, the screen went black. The broadcast cut over to an emergency live feed. As the anchor's voice led into the report, the camera showed the site shrouded beneath a massive gate.
"Hah... hah..."
Deep in the darkness, Ju Ji-hye drew ragged breaths and put one foot in front of the other. Her face, her skin, her clothes — everything was drenched in blood, and she was white as a corpse. But the stains hadn't come from her.
"Hah!"
Her hands were wrapped around two sets of legs. Song Tae-han and Go Jin-young — both men were scraping along the ground, being dragged along behind her. From a distance it might have looked almost comical, the way their bodies tumbled this way and that, but Ju Ji-hye had no presence of mind to notice. Her own two legs were trembling so violently they threatened to give out beneath her at any moment.
"That's enough."
The one who stopped her blind trudge was Lee Ha-ye, her teammate from Aegis. As Ju Ji-hye tried to wrench her wrist free, Lee Ha-ye gripped her by the shoulders and spun her around.
"Snap out of it! We've come far enough."
"...Huh?"
Ju Ji-hye flinched and looked around wildly. Only then did her eyes fall on the two men she'd been dragging. In her right hand, Song Tae-han — one ankle cleanly severed, unconscious. And on the other side, the corpse of Go Jin-young, long since dead.
"Gahk...!"
At the sight of Go Jin-young's headless body, Ju Ji-hye staggered backward. Only now did she understand what she'd been hauling along all this way. She'd been so deep in panic that she hadn't even registered she was dragging corpses — with all reason stripped away, pure instinct alone had carried her here.
"I don't know exactly where we are, but I haven't felt the monsters moving for a while now. Let's rest here. We need to get a proper look at the wounded, too."
Lee Ha-ye gently lowered Kim Jun-seok, who'd been strapped to her back. He, too, had been run through the abdomen and had lost consciousness. Both casualties had received nothing more than basic first aid to stop the bleeding, so Lee Ha-ye belatedly set about treating them in earnest.
"Wh-what on earth happened back there? Suddenly, all of that..."
"I don't know."
Lee Ha-ye's face was frozen hard. Even she — the one who'd watched everything unfold from the very rear — couldn't begin to fathom it. Death and chaos, sweeping in in an instant. What on earth had that thing that emerged from the darkness been? She couldn't even guess.
Even a hunter of Grade 10 or higher could die at any moment inside an S-Rank gate. It was the worst enemy that had once driven humanity to the brink of extinction — the colossal disaster that, even at this very moment, claimed more human lives than anything else. But what had just happened was fundamentally different from anything they'd ever been through.
Ju Ji-hye stared blankly back down the path she'd walked. The passage of the cave lay buried in deep darkness. Nothing stirred, nothing could be seen — and yet, even now, she couldn't shake the feeling that something was watching her from beyond it.
...I'm scared.
She hunched herself up against the wall. Even after the wounded had all been treated, they couldn't move. The monsters, having sensed the hunters entering the gate, had grown active, and hauling two casualties through this place was out of the question. Above all, with the thought that that unknown presence might still be lurking in the darkness ahead, none of them dared budge.
But hours slipped by, and the rescue team they'd been counting on never came.
"Communications were still working right up until the ambush. The outside world would have known something went wrong here. If reinforcements were coming, they'd have come by now — and the fact that we've heard nothing means..."
Something had gone wrong out there. Lee Ha-ye swallowed the rest of the sentence. It was all too likely that this gate carried a special pattern — the kind that blocked external access entirely. Which meant no help would be coming from outside, ever.
Ju Ji-hye pulled a prettily wrapped strawberry from her bosom and stared down at it. Just the one, brought along on the off chance. For some reason, it was Oh Hyeon-seong who surfaced in her mind — not her CEO, not anyone else. But she soon shook her head. Before she'd left, he had encouraged her, yes — but he'd also made one thing unmistakably clear: if anything happened inside the gate, there was nothing he could do for her. A retired hunter couldn't simply show up at every scene out there. And he had never been her guardian to begin with. Sitting powerless wouldn't save her. She would have to find a way out herself.
Vwoooom!
But at that very moment, a pitch-black darkness came crashing in around them. The sight of that suffocating dark — the same as before — sent Ju Ji-hye jolting to her feet in terror. And yet not one of the hunters around her, Lee Ha-ye included, moved a muscle. As if time itself had simply stopped.
Twitch!
Out of the darkness, a pair of blood-red eyes opened. Under that gaze, it felt as though insects were crawling all over her skin. Ju Ji-hye instinctively flung out her arm, trying to seize it with telekinesis — but nothing caught. It wasn't resisting her mana; it was as if the thing simply had no form at all, and her grip closed on empty air.
"...!"
At the low voice rolling through the cavern, Ju Ji-hye froze in shock. An existence that couldn't possibly be human — and yet it had spoken. A monster capable of human speech existed nowhere in the entirety of recorded human history, as far as she knew.
"You... what... are you...?"
Ju Ji-hye raised her sword with a trembling arm. But the dark apparition slid straight through the blade, drew close to her, and spoke.
"They can't get in? What is that supposed to mean, all of a sudden?"
Eun-ha muttered gravely. The emergency news had been running for a while now. Whether to contain the gate's outpouring or brace against it, the controlled perimeter kept widening, and there wasn't the faintest sign of resolution on the screen.
Hyeon-seong watched the TV in silence. He didn't know the exact reason, but it was obvious even through the broadcast that the hunters didn't dare set foot inside.
"Oppa, isn't that actually really dangerous? What do we do?"
"There's... nothing we can do about it anyway."
It sounded like worry from Eun-ha, but his answer was firm. If the Deputy Director of the Bureau herself had gone out to the site, then Han Su-yeon would handle it. During the five long years of his absence, she had held the front lines with her own two hands. She was an expert on recent gate crises without equal — this was no place for anyone to force their way in.
Last time, with the lurker-type monster, I only intervened because it had invaded the land I live on. But this is out there.
He was a hunter of the past — a man who'd already turned his back on the field. More than that, when he'd come to the countryside, he'd decided not to care about whatever happened out in the world. He was a retiree who'd taken up farming, nothing more. Ju Ji-hye had grown dear to him, so of course she weighed on his mind — and yet still, he could not easily move.
Because of my foolishness and my selfishness, the spirits were destroyed. I can't throw them back into that hell again.
Head lowered, he slowly pushed the sound of the TV out of his mind. But it only lasted a moment.
Squeak!
Out of nowhere, the otter was standing beside his chair. It looked up at Oh Hyeon-seong with bright, alert eyes. The water spirit Alvern — another of his own victims, from the battlefields of the past. For more than five years, he'd believed it annihilated completely, and only now had fate granted them a miraculous reunion. With his old partner, the one whose soul had once been shared with his own.
Tap.
Alvern placed a tiny, adorable hand on the back of his own. Normally the spirit would follow his word without question, whatever it was — but the look in Alvern's eyes right now was unmistakably resolute.
...You're telling me not to hesitate, aren't you.
Alvern's form melted away like mist. Its fading silhouette flowed into Oh Hyeon-seong. What truly mattered — that much was obvious to anyone. He stared down at the back of his hand for a long moment, then shot to his feet.
"I've got to step out for a bit."
"Huh...? Where are you going all of a sudden?"
"Up top. I left something behind."
He snatched up his coat, threw it on, and strode out the door.