Chapter 0—1. I Hereby Retire (1)
The ceiling.
A familiar ceiling. The hour, though, was another matter entirely.
Two in the afternoon.
Had there ever really been a time when I could sleep in this late?
“Haaahm…”
I gave an appropriately lazy yawn and pushed myself upright, scratching at my bedhead as I flicked on the TV.
“Man, how long has it been since I got to enjoy myself like this?”
It had already been twenty-six hours since I declared my retirement. I'd spent every one of those hours in dreamland, so naturally I had no idea what articles had run or what rumors were making the rounds. There was, however, one thing I could predict.
“…It's going to be one hell of a circus.”
Which was exactly why my phone stayed off. Switching it on now would unfold a grand pageant of missed calls and unread texts. The decision had been too abrupt for anyone around me to have seen it coming — and fair enough, since not even the me of yesterday had known it was coming. A decision made in the aftermath of an anomaly called regression… the world would find it jarring as hell.
Which was why the first thing I did was turn on the news.
Every broadcaster was already in an uproar over the Vice-Chairman's resignation. No embargo on this one, apparently?
“‘The youngest Vice-Chairman ever, at just twenty-three’… The organization's barely a year old — who cares about ‘youngest’ anything? And let's see… ‘resigned abruptly a mere seven months into his appointment.’ Huh. So it really has only been that long?”
Seven months, was it….
I seemed to remember pouring a fair amount of sweat into that Vice-Chairman's seat. And yet now, not a shred of it came back to me. Which said everything about how cheap the position had been — at least where I was concerned.
“…Phew.”
I swept my hair back once and shut off the TV. Whatever they were all nattering on about didn't truly matter. What mattered was what came next.
“No reckless stunts, no stepping out front, just keeping my head down and quietly… raising up successors.”
There was, in fact, something I'd already been turning over. The Association — an organ of the state — and the guilds, private enterprises in all but name. Those were the only two kinds of hunter organization in existence right now. The plan was to add a third player to that established landscape.
Establish a management company.
In the past, in the present… and in the future, too, hunter organizations would always come down to this same structure. Join the Association, or join a guild. The former earned you honor while working your body and mind to the bone; the latter was gentler on both.
“…Though honestly, I don't feel like I ever actually got much of that honor.”
One wrong move and all I'd reaped was a lifetime's worth of curses. Ah — had I swallowed so much abuse back then that my lifespan blew clean through its limit and forced the regression? Honestly, that was the most plausible hypothesis going.
“Fucking hell.”
Put that way, it really did sound rotten. And rotten it had been in truth — which was exactly why the guilds grew stronger by the day while the Association's standing lay flat on the floor.
At any rate, the management I had in mind was simple. Raise a full stable of hunters under the company's banner, then broker them out to guilds and the Association alike, tailoring the results to reflect each hunter's own demands as far as possible — and on top of that, provide training for rookie hunters, too. The more strong hunters a nation produced, the more its people stood to gain in the end — and I, officially retired, was now just one of those people.
“In other words, this is just profit wrapped up in more profit, isn't it?”
I'd become a national hunter because I wanted the honor. But think it through, and if the management business simply ran well, wouldn't an even greater honor come of it? And no abuse to swallow, either. My raw ability was what it was, but my experience was that of a veteran among veterans. The gates had been open for three years now, and I alone carried thirteen years' worth of it — hardly a surprise. If I personally took charge of their training, it would do those hunters a world of good. Turn out enough strong hunters, and the world grew safer.
“…A safe nation. Safe lives.”
Ah, damn it. That was the Association's own creed. I had gone completely, fully civil servant.
“Either way. Talentless me stays off the front lines — good. The citizens get safer — good. The hunters sign better contracts — good. This is a business with nothing but wins in it.”
The management business would help the individual hunters, help the world, and in the end, help me. Odds of it going under? In truth, none to speak of. There were the connections, the information, and the fortune banked over my stretch as Vice-Chairman — and this wasn't even the era when the ‘washed-up’ whispers had been at their loudest.
“The management business — this one's a guaranteed success, I'm telling you.”
Granted, there was another road: play the market off my memories of the future and loaf for the rest of my life. But that was just… how to put it… not right. A second chance had been handed to me — what kind of ending was it to live it out like a stray mutt and then die?
“…A stray mutt, huh.”
The thought surfaced unbidden. Why was I going this far, anyway? Was I simply, at my core, a righteous man? No — I didn't think so. This was just… something left unresolved. Regret, in a word.
I dredged up my memories from the very edge of death. Even then… I had been holding onto a will of my own. Even now, regressed, I was ten-thousand-percent willing to step back from the front lines — and yet that had never meant letting go of this work entirely. So where, exactly, did that feeling come from?
“…What if I'd gone back even further?”
All the way. Back to the very day I awakened — no, to before even that. If I'd had that…
Crack—
I smacked both my cheeks with my own palms. Thoughts like that only dragged a man under. Depression could do nothing for you; in the end, it did nothing but gnaw away at the heart.
“You idiot.”
I spat out that one word and rose from the bed.
“This really is doable. This time will be different.”
The list of things I regretted ran long. It would stay just as long even now, if I let it. But this time, everything would be very different. This was a venture pursued entirely for my own private gain. I had retired, and I was perfectly, completely free. So let me drive the stake in right here: everything I did from this point on would be what my heart insisted on — the things that would let it finally rest easy. And all of it would serve one further purpose: the safety of the man called Lee Jun. Whatever secondary things came trailing after that… I wouldn't dwell on them now.
First order of business: an inspection of my own body.
Whirrr—
The mansion I'd built by pinching every last coin was stocked with every convenience imaginable, and one of them was this underground training hall.
“Well, well. It really has been a while.”
This training hall — a build I'd wheedled and whined out of someone — proudly billed itself as the finest facility on Earth. And of course it was; it was a custom job from a very particular someone. If anything out there outperformed it, that something was, first of all, not of this world's technology.
“Let's see… if I raise this like so…”
Click—
Clang— clang— clang— clang—
Beeeeeeeep—
“Oh, it works.”
The only machine of its kind on the planet: a measurement device built for a hunter with no mana. A rig calibrated for one man and one man only — me, a man with neither mana nor aura. I couldn't even call up a status window; without this contraption, I couldn't so much as learn my own level.
“Now then… let's see what shape I'm in…”
Level: 110. Just before the regression I'd been around 170, so there was a considerable gap — and since the climb only steepened as levels rose, sixty levels was anything but trivial. And yet my overall condition was, if anything, far closer to my prime than it had been back then. For a man with no skills, a level-up mostly bought a sturdier body and quicker feet, after all… My current state, before it had all gone to ruin, was simply the better one.
Of course, all of this was approximation. Her craftsmanship or no, the device couldn't precisely measure the stats of a man without a single drop of mana.
“In other words… this is roughly where I stood around that point in life, huh?”
I didn't put much stock in the numbers either way. They were a single reference point, nothing more. They couldn't be measured properly to begin with, so there was no reason to whoop or sulk over them. And looked at on a global scale, the me of today still ranked in the upper tier. The very fact that people were calling me washed-up was proof enough that I wasn't top-of-the-top… but ‘upper rank’ still described me. The operative word there, of course, was still.
“Who cares about later? All that matters is a strong opening.”
By the time I had well and truly washed out, the hunters I raised would be hard at work making names for themselves. At that point, what would my own strength even matter? Prove my gift for training, and the visitors would never stop coming. And it would be even better once my decline was beyond all dispute — no one would be dragging me into two-man party runs to take down drakes on a lark anymore.
…Han Seol-ah.
The name snagged on something. She would be nineteen now, wouldn't she? Four years between us, so that sounded about right.
“Well… if fate brings us together, we'll meet again.”
In my present situation, going searching for that junior wouldn't accomplish a thing. Her talent was a once-in-an-era kind. Something like that would surface one way or another — and if I simply built the management business right, the two of us would cross paths eventually.
“Still… I suppose dying together really does plant a fondness in you. Haah.”
It would work out, somehow or other. If the thread was there, we'd meet; if not, we wouldn't. That was what I'd decided to think, for now. Because reaching into another person's life — that took a certain kind of resolve.
Meanwhile.
Exactly twenty-four hours after Lee Jun declared his retirement, Go Seok-gu — Chairman of the Korean Hunter Association — had passed beyond headache and into the realm of feeling his skull crack open.
“This is going to kill me…”
No, seriously — why the hell had that kid gone off the rails out of nowhere? It hadn't even been a year since he'd been over the moon about landing the Vice-Chairman post!
“He acts like a completely different person these days, I swear…”
But the immediate problem was not Lee Jun's abrupt change of heart.
Rrrring—
Beep-beep-beep— beep-beep-beep—
RIIIIIIING—
“AAAAARGH! Give it a rest already, you lot!”
CRASH!
Go Seok-gu brought his fist down on the desk with every ounce of boiling fury behind it. The wooden desk did not survive that ponderous blow; it split clean in two.
“Haah… damn it all.”
He didn't need to guess where the calls were coming from. Anyone who knew the kid — and knew him — was probably ringing in one after another. And yes, naturally, Go Seok-gu had done his damnedest to keep the articles about Lee Jun out of print. But heaven only knew how many press plants were burrowed into the Association's own ranks — less than three hours and the stories came pouring out anyway. Declare an embargo? With this much heat in the air? As if. At this particular moment, Lee Jun was a superstar driving fans and haters alike out of their minds. Right in the thick of peak ‘washed-up’ discourse, the man drops a whopper of a teaser like this? The usual Lee Jun would never have made that call. There was no believing the guy simply hadn't known the media would pounce — which meant he was aiming at something, clearly…
“What is it you actually want, you little…?”
Go Seok-gu found himself picturing Lee Jun back in his rookie days. Black hair, red eyes. And beneath the easy grin and the slouching saunter, that razor edge neither one could ever quite hide.
The truth was, the Association itself had been born out of that head. In the earliest days of the awakening, guilds raised by the conglomerates had fallen over one another scooping up hunters. Left that way, everyone chased private profit and nobody stepped up for the thankless work — when simply riding under a guild's banner rained wealth on you, how many would volunteer for the hard road? And yet even in that climate, there had been those who wished to serve the nation, and the Hunter Association had been created to rally them. That was why it had been built around the Initial Awakeners — and roughly a year had passed since. Onto land that had started with nothing at all, they had laid down gate-control systems and hunter statutes, one careful plank at a time. A band of nobodies growing into the governing institution that represented the nation — that feat, too, had been pulled off within that sliver of time. Only now, he'd thought, was the foundation finally taking shape…
“…Idiot boy.”
Thinking of his close young friend still trapped inside the past, Go Seok-gu set about clearing the wreckage off the floor.
And then, exactly three hours later — twenty-seven hours after Lee Jun's declaration of retirement — Go Seok-gu took the business plan Lee Jun had faxed over… and could only stand there wearing a blank, dumbstruck expression.
Moreover, upon reading the very last line, he laid his hand on the desk beside him once more.
— Honestly, there was no need to send this, but I'm sending it anyway. What do you think? Pretty good idea, isn't it?
“AAAAAAAAARGH! YOU LITTLE SHIIIIIT!”
KRA-KOOM!
In the end, two desks were destroyed in the Chairman's office that day.