61. The Road Home
It was a scene that defied belief.
Yet Oh Hyeon-seong instinctively absorbed the details of his surroundings, cataloging everything at speed.
Corpses sprawled in every direction.
Judging by their attire, however, these were no government hunters.
Terrorists? Then what were they doing here?
Behind the bodies, a dark, murky energy rippled faintly in the air.
He recognized it at once as the residue of Yoon Seol-ha's ability, and from there the deduction followed on its own. If that many people could infiltrate a building without a single soul noticing, there was only one way it could have been done.
But then why would she have let the terrorists inside — and having done so, why kill them?
"You're my senior after all. Thank goodness."
"What are you doing here?"
"What do you mean, what am I doing..."
Yoon Seol-ha staggered back a step and looked down at her own sword.
She flicked the crust of dried blood from the blade, then raised her eyes to Oh Hyeon-seong.
"We need to move, senior. They're already on our tail."
"What on earth are you talking about?"
"There's no time for this. The target's getting away."
Yoon Seol-ha swayed on her feet and tried to step out of the bathroom.
But Oh Hyeon-seong planted himself in her path.
"Target? What's that supposed to mean?"
"You came all the way here without hearing anything?"
"That's right."
"I'll explain later, so for now, while we're moving—"
BOOM!
Oh Hyeon-seong flung his arm out and blocked her.
Face to face at arm's length, the two of them stared into each other's eyes.
"How did you come back alive?"
"Came back alive... what is that supposed to—"
Yoon Seol-ha looked at him as if she couldn't make sense of any of it.
Her expression, which had been steadily crumpling, washed over with bewilderment, and she took a step back from him in her confusion.
At that very moment, a colossal explosion swallowed the building.
Thick, acrid smoke and a ringing in his ears sharp enough to split them open.
Oh Hyeon-seong punched his way through the wreckage of the collapsed ceiling and walls, spitting out the powder-clogged dust that filled his mouth.
"Damn it... insane terrorists."
Once free of the ruined bathroom, he took in the first-floor lobby, reduced to a wasteland of rubble.
The sudden blasts had come in a chain, and not just this floor — the entire lower section of the building had taken the full brunt. Fortunately, it hadn't been enough to bring the structure down, but the wounded lay scattered everywhere.
Still, they hadn't come all this way just to set off fireworks.
Their objective is the president's assassination. But as long as the bodyguards are in the way, explosions like this don't come remotely close to killing him. All this noise is just a diversion — a sleight of hand.
Oh Hyeon-seong hurried out of the building.
Even back on the frontline he'd felt it: humans were, at all times, every bit as much of a headache as monsters. A calculating enemy you could simply outmaneuver, but people who acted this drenched in madness had a way of slipping clean past any prediction.
And along with the explosions, Yoon Seol-ha had vanished.
She and IAE had nothing in common — nothing that should ever have brought them together — but there had been something unmistakably wrong about her just now. At the very least, their appearing together could be no coincidence.
Whatever the case, I have to find her. Fast.
Oh Hyeon-seong set off after her trail, Merz at his side.
After the summit had ground to an abrupt halt, the French president's convoy was racing away from the site.
But mid-flight, the ground beneath them suddenly gave way, and the vehicles plunged downward. Not any natural collapse — a pit carved out by the power of an Awakener, lying in wait.
Fortunately, the bodyguards shielded the president from the fall, and though the vehicles crumpled viciously around them, he emerged unscathed. The trouble was what came after.
The terrorists who had dug the trap began their assault from every direction at once.
Even so, the bodyguards fought back and actually succeeded in subduing every last one of the attackers.
Then a single figure appeared, and the situation flipped on its head.
"Gah... kgh—!"
THUD!
A bodyguard, his throat seized, crumpled to the ground unconscious.
And not just him — every guard around lay collapsed and unmoving.
All of it, in a matter of minutes.
"Ha... hahaha... a monster, just as they said."
The man slumped against the wall murmured in a daze.
A member of IAE, he looked up at her with eyes brimming over with awe.
"How could a being this superior ever kneel beneath the unawakened..."
Shhk!
The man's body split cleanly in two.
Cut apart with the very skill he'd worshipped — neat as a prayer.
And yet the man sprawled behind his own lower half kept twitching as he died, a grin plastered across his face.
Thud. Thud.
Yoon Seol-ha approached a car crushed against the corner.
It was a specially built vehicle designed to withstand a direct hit from even a mana bomb, but she simply carved the door out of its frame and tore it free.
Inside lay the French president, unconscious.
Without a word, she raised her sword and brought the blade to his throat.
"Stop!"
At the sudden shout, Yoon Seol-ha flinched to a halt.
She turned to find Oh Hyeon-seong standing there, having descended at a dead run.
"If you kill that man, you're finished too."
"What are you saying, senior? It's our mission. We finish it and go home — that's how it works."
She glanced around restlessly as she spoke.
In truth the space around them was desolate and utterly silent — but inside her ears, a pounding filled every inch, as if the air itself trembled.
The roaring, the screams that had always flooded the frontlines, even the keening of monsters.
"Any moment now the monsters will come swarming. They'll start bombing the nest overhead, and if we don't get back quickly we'll be torn to ribbons. Haha."
As I thought — she's not in her right mind.
Yoon Seol-ha's wide, bloodshot eyes trembled with unease.
The raw, unfiltered energy rolling off her told the same story: psychosis had already devoured half of her.
As a hunter, she had already passed the point of no return.
But... she's definitely different from back then.
In the past, she'd been thrown onto the battlefield with no care, no support at all, and the psychosis had swallowed her whole. Not a shred of her reason had survived; she'd been beyond even recognizing the people in front of her.
Now was different.
Unstable, yes — but conversation was possible. She remembered him, and she hadn't simply attacked on sight.
...Then there's still hope.
Everything was different from before.
Her condition, and the power he now held.
Shiiing!
Yoon Seol-ha leapt backward, sword half-raised.
Ice had bloomed up from the ground, barring her path to her target.
"Senior... what do you think you're doing?"
"I don't know what's happened to you all this time, but wait just a little longer. I'll pull you back out of it."
Oh Hyeon-seong drew his sword.
If she caused any more wreckage here, the situation would spiral beyond anyone's control. With a foreign head of state entangled in it all, this was no longer something a few well-placed connections could flatten. He had no choice but to use somewhat drastic means.
"Kgh... hahh... hahh..."
Gasping, she clutched her head.
The whispers that never stopped in her mind were growing louder and louder.
Visions flickered before her eyes. A briny tang of blood filled her nose, and the screams of the violated rang in her ears.
Deep in a lightless pit, she was standing once more in that hell of a battlefield — and the Oh Hyeon-seong who had stood before her only moments ago was gone without a trace.
In his place, the only thing standing before her was the horrific monster that had devoured her comrades.
Killing intent at this level... it's been a while.
Oh Hyeon-seong's mouth twisted at the professional-grade bloodlust that pricked at his skin from mere proximity.
Among the agents, Yoon Seol-ha — the peerless master of close-quarters combat — was, without exaggeration, the deadliest assassin the Special Task Force had ever produced.
SHNK!
She vanished and was before him in an instant.
The moment sword met sword with a violent clang, the dagger that had appeared in her opposite hand was already darting for Oh Hyeon-seong's throat.
He snapped his head back, and just as he moved to retreat out of her reach—
The saw-toothed dagger hurtling toward his neck switched direction in a single beat, hooked his blade, and shattered it.
CRUNCH!
Crazy...!
The sword he'd taken from a mercenary was torn apart before his eyes.
He'd had his doubts about it from the start, but he hadn't expected it to break apart quite so easily.
He'd accounted for the possibility of a sword breaker among her weapons, but he never imagined that technique alone could shred hunter-grade equipment built for extraordinary durability.
When they'd sparred in the old days, the worst she could manage was pinning a blade.
Even with a twisted counter she rips it apart with raw force... yeah, she's on another level entirely.
When psychosis manifested, the rampage traded reason for a drastic surge in the body's physical capabilities. A frame weakened by years of fighting the precursor illness would transform, in a single breath, as if it belonged to someone else entirely.
The strength and speed she was wielding now exceeded even the Yoon Seol-ha of old.
No wonder a whole stretch of the China Front had once been scorched flat by her rampage alone.
PAHK!
Bladeless and defenseless, his vitals lay open — but at that instant, a colossal fist materialized and knocked her away.
Beside him, Merz had already transformed into his massive golem form, radiating presence.
Unlike the other spirits, the spirit of earth could project direct physical force in his true form.
Yoon Seol-ha wavered once, then vanished into the darkness like a mirage.
Against her, visual information meant nothing.
Of course, standard detection was every bit as useless.
And yet her movements lay perfectly bare to him.
She could erase every trace of herself — but she couldn't erase the memory of the earth that Merz was reading.
SHNK!
Her sword, aimed flawlessly at his blind side, was swatted aside by Merz's arm, and Yoon Seol-ha flinched, startled into a reaction.
Nothing was landing. The realization had thrown her off balance.
"If we'd been strangers, I might've actually struggled. Unfortunately for you, we've sparred together thousands of times."
Oh Hyeon-seong knew Yoon Seol-ha.
And Yoon Seol-ha knew Oh Hyeon-seong.
They'd deployed on countless operations together, synced their blades in life-or-death rhythm, run through sparring matches beyond counting. How could they not know each other's abilities?
Even down to the way she set her grip on a sword, to the tiny habits of her footwork — he remembered them all, vivid as yesterday.
But the Yoon Seol-ha of now knew nothing about him.
Which meant that against Oh Hyeon-seong, it wasn't her rampage-strengthened self that was the greater threat — it was the Yoon Seol-ha of ordinary days.
Shallow tricks she'd have cut through in her sleep were, to her current self, brand-new variables she couldn't answer: the spirits.
KWAAANG!
She shattered the golem's massive arm and came charging straight in.
Oh Hyeon-seong let out a short sigh and closed his eyes.
"Retired and still getting dragged through hell like this."
He'd washed his hands of the industry; whatever happened in the world was no longer his business. Honestly, if every president on the planet got blown up by terrorists on the spot, it would change nothing about his life. Maybe strawberry prices for his market deliveries would wobble a little, and that was it.
And yet he stepped forward, willingly.
For one very simple, very clear reason: Yoon Seol-ha was his junior.
A comrade who had shared life and death with him across countless battlefields. From the days when they were green and didn't know a thing, hauled off by their country to brave death in the field again and again — in the end, the ones who remained at his side were people like her.
He had saved Yoon Seol-ha's life more times than he could count, and he owed her his own just as many.
So this time, too, he was simply adding one more light to the ledger.
They might snarl at each other now and then, drift apart now and then — but these were old comrades who had traded things thicker than blood.
"Hey. Junior."
As the distance between them collapsed to nothing, a burst of searing light exploded outward.
A brilliant radiance born from Alisa, the spirit of light.
It blinded them both in an instant — and the only one who could move inside that heartbeat of white was him.
"Let's go home."
KWAAANG!
Driving straight in, Oh Hyeon-seong brought his fist down with every ounce of strength he had.