Chapter 4-2. Not More, Not Less (3)
The first thing Lee Jun saw when he opened his eyes… was Freya, calmly standing on top of him.
"Oh, you're awake."
Thump― thump―
Even as she said it, her foot never stayed still.
Every time Freya pressed down on his chest, the energy inside his body seemed to surge and roil.
To be precise, the wave started from wherever her foot touched and spread out to the farthest reaches of his limbs.
Was she… doing something to him?
"…I think you owe me an explanation here."
"That's not my area of expertise. Ain? Do the honors."
"Haah…."
Ain, abruptly put on the spot, let out a sigh.
So being a secretary really was an extreme profession.
Come to think of it, Go Seok-gu's secretaries had all been ground down by mountains of paperwork, hadn't they.
"Very well. I shall explain."
With Lee Jun's pitying gaze fixed on her, Ain adjusted her glasses and continued.
"It may look as though Lady Freya is performing some act of peculiar fetish at first glance, but that is not the case."
"I see. I nearly misunderstood."
"What nonsense are you spouting, ye brat! Explain it properly!"
Pre-eek―
The moment Freya flared up, her toes dug in harder.
Look, if anyone else walked in on this, they really would think exactly that.
"Still, it is indeed a treatment, so please do not worry. She is guiding the new abilities you've acquired so they settle properly into your body."
Freya possessed eyes that could pierce through to the essence of anything.
And she also had a hammer capable of drawing that essence out into the open.
This bizarre foot-thumping was a method that employed both at once.
"I used the hammer to lull yer surface consciousness and summon up yer deep consciousness, weakening yer defense mechanisms. That's why even now I can guide the energy this easily."
And that was exactly what had happened.
The Hammer of Vanity had drawn out the consciousness buried deep within Lee Jun, and thanks to that, his unconscious guard had loosened naturally.
Then, with Styx's Shard and Silhouette's shadow left undefended, she had worked on them freely.
Honestly, once that first step was handled, anyone could do the rest.
In a way, it was the same method Lee Jun had used when he drew out the Ten-Thousand-Year Ice Essence's power to treat Seo Yoon.
The only difference was that Freya could see the flow of energy with her own eyes, which simply made the job easier for her.
Which was why she could pull it off with her foot.
And that wasn't a figure of speech—it really was with her foot.
"Be honest now. You only put up the curtain because you'd be embarrassed to be seen by others, right?"
"Ha! Do ye think this body gives a damn about such things? This is all to limit the scope of yer consciousness―"
"I'm right, aren't I?"
"Hmm… well, I told ye it's not, so it's not."
It was, of course.
For all her bluster, deep down she was rather… delicate, would that be the word?
Well, whatever. Freya had that side to her too.
"In any case, most of yer tangled energies are untangled now, so using yer strength will be easier than before."
"Thank you. But next time, at least warn me first."
"That'd be, er, what do ye call it—a surprise."
"Sure it is."
With that, Freya finally lifted the foot she'd been pressing down with.
The whole treatment process was finished.
He'd have to test things to know exactly how much better he was, but his body certainly felt lighter than before.
Lee Jun sat up and moved around, stretching here and there.
He couldn't tell any dramatic difference, but the dull heaviness that had dogged him now and then was gone.
Watching him, Freya spoke.
"Yer constitution simply can't store mana. So the mana ye take in with each breath can't circulate properly and ends up clumping in one place. If ye don't release it periodically, it'll hurt like hell."
"It's because of that clumping that my body's this sturdy at all, though."
"Which is exactly why that method of yers is wrong. What ye're doing now is forcibly cramming mana into every corner of yer body."
In an environment like this, where the air itself carried ambient mana, absorbing it was unavoidable.
And there lay the fundamental problem.
Lee Jun's body simply could not accept mana in the first place.
Ordinarily, any mana he inhaled would drift around inside him a while and then simply leave.
But something different happened with Lee Jun.
Because he'd been through every nightmare imaginable from the earliest days of the gate crisis, the mana accumulated in his body was enormous.
He hadn't gone through ordinary gates—he'd deliberately picked out nothing but Reproduction Gates, one after another… in a sense, it was a miracle he hadn't developed full-blown mana poisoning.
"Couldn't be helped, could it? Back then."
Lee Jun let his mind drift back to those days.
The hell that deserved the word catastrophe.
Every Initial Awakener who lived through the gate crisis and scrambled desperately across its ruins could never forget the sight of that day.
Gates tearing open, unfamiliar script floating before their eyes, knowledge they'd never possessed flooding into their heads.
Lee Jun had never seen a status window himself, but… the rest of it he shared with the others.
Words from languages they'd never studied spilled from their mouths as fluently as a mother tongue, and monsters that belonged only in games and comics walked and breathed right in front of them.
The person standing beside them died; they were drenched in blood.
Crushed under that oppressive dread and terror, they still had to fight the monsters to survive.
Shitty experiences, every one of them.
The Initial Awakeners still alive today were the ones who'd clawed their way through all of that.
And… far, far more people had died during the gate crisis.
Lee Jun himself had nearly had his name added to the list of those who fell in its very first days.
If not for Kyle, that department store would have become Lee Jun's grave.
"Aye, I know it was a horrifying time. The wreckage I saw when I came over told me as much."
Freya had come to Earth only after the gate crisis itself had quieted down.
The mess was a mess, of course, but most of the surface monsters had been dealt with by then.
"And yet, thinking on it again, it's a marvel. How did ye survive that with an ordinary civilian's body?"
"Good luck, I suppose."
"Well… if it meant getting to meet ye, then aye, I suppose ye could call it fortune."
During the gate crisis, Lee Jun had truly been no different from any ordinary man.
He'd never been exposed to mana before then.
Having received no power whatsoever, the Dimension System's awakening was nothing short of a curse to him.
Gates had erupted across the entire world simultaneously, and mana spread rapidly through what had been an ordinary atmosphere.
And Lee Jun, as a member of Arcana, had personally trekked after those living clumps of mana—the gates themselves.
Still, that was precisely how mana had seeped between his skin and muscles, reinforcing his body.
But there was a catch.
"Mana is poison to yer body, lad. Keep this up, and one day it'll harden yer flesh and rot ye from the inside."
Sincere worry rang in Freya's voice.
From a woman who brushed off almost anything with a barked laugh, no less.
Was his condition really that serious?
Well… nothing went wrong last loop.
Even now, nothing felt particularly off.
His body moved fine.
He got something like muscle aches occasionally, but… for a working hunter, that was nothing.
In fact, if you judged him purely on condition, he was at his absolute peak.
It was no exaggeration to call it his prime.
Though, granted, that was all thanks to Styx's Shard and Silhouette.
"Judging by that face, ye're planning to brush this off again."
A mind-reader, like I said.
At this point, he half suspected that eye of hers could see straight into his thoughts.
"Take care of yerself. Ye were never meant to be an awakener in the first place."
"Hmm… but if I release it periodically, I'll be fine, right?"
"Then come find me now and then, ye fool!"
Freya snapped and smacked him square on the back.
It didn't hurt, of course.
If anything, it felt… affectionate.
To put it into terms, like the way a grandmother whacks you when you visit the countryside for the holidays—
"Hey."
At this point, is she actually using telepathy?
With that thought, Lee Jun gave a single resigned shrug of his shoulders.
Freya glared at him, rolled her eyes, and promptly heaved a deep sigh.
"Haah… yer problem is that ye treat everything like a joke. I was being dead serious. Do ye understand me?"
"Understood. I'll stop by regularly."
"…Hmph, that's not quite what I meant. But still! If ye do come, I'll welcome ye properly."
Freya looked rather pleased with herself as she said it.
So transparent, for someone of her towering reputation.
Then she retracted the curtain that had been spread around them.
Ain rose from her seat in sync with her, which meant their business here was done.
"Right. If ye head off today, next I'll see ye will be at the event."
"Probably, yes. Assuming nothing goes wrong between now and then."
"Tch. Don't jinx it, ye brat."
She replied while fiddling with the device that had unfurled the curtain.
Shwaaak―
At last the curtain vanished entirely, and the familiar living room came back into view.
"Well then, business is done. Off ye go."
Freya looked somehow lighter as she said it.
Was this what they meant by a worry shared being a worry halved?
Or maybe she was just happy at the prospect of cutting out the tumor lurking in her union.
Lee Jun saw her to the door and said his final piece.
"Oh, right."
"Hm?"
"Now that I think of it, didn't you say you came to give me some words of blessing?"
"Hmm, that was just an excuse, if I'm honest…."
"Well, since you're here, give me one before you go."
"Hmm…."
After a moment's thought, she answered with a mischievous grin.
"Kyahahaht! I'll give ye yer blessing after this event's over!"
"…Whenever someone says that, the outcome is never good. That's basically the default."
"Bah, don't spout nonsense."
With those parting words, Freya winked, turned on her heel, and left.
Beside her, Ain gave an apologetic little bow and followed.
From the front door to the car they'd arrived in—across that short stretch of distance, he could see that fluffy blue hair bobbing along.
"The 23rd, huh…."
October 23rd.
A quick check of the calendar showed it was a Thursday.
An awkward date on an awkward day of the week—so very like the Craftsmen's Union, really.
Still, for Lee Jun it wasn't a bad window at all.
"This time I actually have some breathing room."
He'd been running nonstop since the regression.
This time, once he cleared everything on his plate, he'd have roughly two weeks to himself.
He'd use that time to prepare, step by careful step.
"Phew…."
But first—today, he'd take the very first step of it all.
Two in the afternoon.
Standing in front of a high-rise building in Seoul, Lee Jun tilted his head back with a relaxed expression.
"Damn, that thing is absurdly tall."
How much money did it take to put up a building like this?
So this was what the Big Four guilds could do.
"You've come."
A neatly dressed man approached him.
A sharply tailored suit, hair combed immaculately into place.
And most striking of all—those narrow, slit eyes.
"You said you'd be dropping by suddenly, so we were quite surprised."
"Haha, a deal this enormous deserves a face-to-face before anything gets decided."
Kim Seong-hyun, Vice Guildmaster of HIM.
With Yoo Ha-eul currently away clearing the gates in her assigned territory, he was the highest-ranking person in the guild present.
"Given your positive outlook, we'll take that as a favorable response on our end."
"That's something we can decide after a detailed conversation. Negotiations, after all, never go quite the way anyone expects."
Words with a razor-sharp blade hidden beneath their polite surface.
It felt as though a bitter cold snap had swept through the space between the two men.