Chapter 2-11. The Ant and the Grasshopper (6)
Lee Jun quietly watched the robot as it kept glancing around at its surroundings. Come to think of it, this might have come on a little too abruptly. And so, to help her understand, he posed a question.
"So — does this thing have combat functions installed or not?"
"Whoa, you summon me out of nowhere and THIS is your opening line?!"
The Director's voice came through, laced with mechanical static. The robot buzzed about on furiously spinning propellers, and at the expression flashing across its display, a laugh slipped out of him. Somehow, he had a feeling that was exactly what her real face looked like.
"It's been a while since we did something like this, hasn't it?"
"What? I'm asking what the situation even IS right now?!"
She still didn't seem to have a grasp on things, so for the Director's benefit he offered a brief summary of the current state of affairs.
"You're about to burn every last one of those things to a crisp."
"Meaning what, exactly...?"
Meaning what? It meant that within the hour, everything in this nest — right down to the Queen Ant herself — would be dead.
"That's the situation."
"No, that explains absolutely nothing."
He'd stashed this thing in his Pocket right after Yelena came by his place. He hadn't wanted to find out what she'd tease him about if she ever caught sight of it — though as it turned out, he'd been right to keep it on him all along.
"Anyway, there's no one nearby right now."
(@_@;)
No one around — and the instant Lee Jun said it, she spoke again.
"Ah— ah, can you hear me?"
"Yeah. Loud and clear."
It was a clear voice with not a trace of mechanical distortion — so clear he could almost believe she was speaking right beside him.
And yet, still no sound of any explosions. At Seo Yoon's pace, she should have long since passed that fork in the tunnel. It seemed she wasn't going to press the button after all. As expected of her — she might look cold on the outside, but the woman had a deep well of warmth underneath.
"Well then. Shall we get to work as well?"
"Honestly, really now. What would you even do without me?"
"What would I do? I'd manage somehow, I suppose."
"Ugh, what's that supposed to mean...."
But even as she grumbled it, anticipation was thick in her voice. Come to think of it, how long had it been since they'd fought side by side?
Clack— clack—
Whirrrrrr—
As if to demonstrate that anticipation firsthand, all manner of ominous sounds came pouring out of the robot.
"See, this is what 'good comrades' is for. Moments like this."
"Hmph. You never call me any other time."
But for all her complaint, there was no real resentment in her voice. Her engine had apparently already turned over completely — revved on pure anticipation for the fight. And it made sense. In all the time since she'd risen to the Director's seat, she hadn't once joined a gate raid. No — to put it precisely, she hadn't been able to. The Association's Director of Technology had far too many duties to spare.
"First raid in a while for you, huh?"
"You've been here once before. Doesn't count as a raid, does it?"
"...Are you still moving the CCTVs around however you please?"
"Th-the dungeon's internal security falls under my purview too, you know...!"
Apparently, he'd been found out about the Ant Nest long ago. Well... it wasn't as if she was the type to go blabbing to anyone about it....
"Don't worry. I'm the only one who knows."
"And the records?"
"Wiped, naturally."
Then there was nothing to worry about. Where machines were concerned, no one on Earth surpassed this woman. Of that, he was certain — her unique ability had been specialized for exactly that sort of thing from the very beginning.
"So? Not bad, right?"
"Great. The mapping work's done, for starters."
"...Already?"
"Yep. I launched nano-drones earlier and seeded them all through the nest. Scanned the entire terrain with them."
"...Sometimes yours is the scariest ability of them all, you know that?"
Honestly, on the modern Earth of today, if this woman turned against a nation, its downfall would take her mere moments. Or failing that, a return to the Stone Age. At her level, burying any single individual was probably no trouble at all. Lee Jun — an ordinary small-time citizen if ever there was one — couldn't have opposed a force like that even if he'd wanted to.
When his thoughts ran that far, he felt he ought to treat her a little better.
"...I haven't done anything to get on your nerves, have I?"
"Why? As if there'd be anything like that."
"It's just — all this asking you for help. It's debt piling up, that's all."
"Hardly. There's no such thing as debt. If anything... it might be the other way around."
"Sorry?"
"Ah— it's nothing!"
(°□°)
o(≧□≦)o
(◑﹏◐)
＼(°□°)／
Spinning the robot around in circles, she deflected the question with practiced ease, while cute little emoticons flitted back and forth across the display.
"What do you mean, 'other way around'..."
A debt she'd marked down in reverse...? Oh. Was that what this was about?
Now that he dug back through it, there was that one incident from the old days. Of course, Lee Jun didn't consider that a debt either. Right — this was what they called the bond between comrades.
Anyway. Now was no time for trips down memory lane. Getting out of here came first — which meant there was something he needed to ask of her right away.
"Let's see, then—"
"Got it. I'll carve out her way back first."
She'd read him perfectly, as always.
"I'm counting on you."
"Hmph. This one's going on your tab."
"What happened to 'no debts'?"
"Only you get to be debt-free."
At that prim, smug expression, he could only marvel — so the robot could render even this.
"Well... pile up as many debts as you like. I'll pay back every last one."
"...You'd better keep that promise."
"Of course."
Lee Jun gave the back of the robot's head — the one flitting about him — a couple of friendly taps. Hmm. Did robots even have a back of the head?
In any case, he turned his gaze to the ants strewn before and behind him.
"First things first — what do we do about those?"
He drew a pistol in one hand and a dagger in the other as he spoke. But the words that came next stopped him mid-motion.
"What do you mean? I already got them all."
"...?"
What?
"I said I got them all. Species: Giant Ant. Total count, 488. 487 eliminated. I left the Queen Ant alive, just in case."
Lee Jun could only stand there, dumbfounded. What on earth was this supposed to mean?
"Shall I explain in a little more detail?"
"...Yeah."
"It's simple. While I was doing the mapping, I killed every ant in the nest. With poison."
Poison? Armea never used to touch the stuff....
And there had been no sign of her doing anything, either. Case in point — the Giant Ant that had been standing directly ahead of them this whole time hadn't so much as twitched. Not so much as twitched—
Thk—
Crack-crack— THUD—
Scarcely had the words ended when the Giant Ant's body collapsed. Every segment of it had melted clean through, as if to prove precisely where the poison had been injected.
At the sight of it, Lee Jun lost his words entirely.
"What the... hell."
"So? Amazing, right? Is the urge to shower me in praise just welling up inside you all at once?"
For a split second, goosebumps all but sprang up on the back of Lee Jun's neck. The Director had always preferred the opposite style of fighting — manipulating her heavy-weapon-equipped robots at will and crushing enemies beneath overwhelming firepower. This kind of covert approach had never been to her taste. No — setting preference aside entirely, this technology hadn't even existed before.
Then why, in this cycle...?
Events flowing in a different direction than the last cycle could naturally be laid at the regression's door. It only stood to reason: a branch had to split before anything could change. Even if Lee Jun himself hadn't influenced it directly, the regression had provided the cause. And the span of that time was a mere two months. From July 3rd, 2025 — the day of his regression — to today, September 6th, 2025. In that short a window... she had developed technology on this level?
"Unbelievable..."
Right. This was what a genius was.
"Hehe. So? Practical enough for you?"
"...Obviously. You've just told me you could massacre every low-grade monster in existence from your laboratory with a single click of a button."
"Oh, pulling off something on this scale is no small feat, of course. Today was a special experiment — I poured in every drop of the poison I'd been stockpiling. A performance like this won't be possible again until I've spent another few months gathering."
"And you used it. Right now."
"Yep."
Why?
The question circled round his head. And whether she'd read it right off him or not, she added in a voice steeped in a smile:
"Because you asked me to."
And in that moment, Lee Jun thought: I really am one blessed bastard.
Screeeech—
He dragged out the simple folding chair in the hospital room and sat down. Choi Jeong-hyeon had been rushed straight to the hospital and given treatment, but regrettably, her arm could not be regenerated. Had they recovered the severed limb, perhaps things might have been different. They hadn't — so there was nothing to be done. The one mercy was that her acid-eaten right eye and face had been fully restored.
Lee Jun gazed at her unconscious form, let his mind drift back over what had passed with the Director — and from there wandered further back still, into the cycles before.
There was one topic that never left the front page of the hunter community forums: the relationship between talent and effort. The "Ant Theory" versus the "Grasshopper Theory" — that sort of thing. Named, as anyone could tell from that much alone, after a fairy tale everybody knew.
A fairy tale was, by definition, a story built on a child's innocence, written so that children might read it. Didn't the very name give it away? A child's tale — a tale told for a child. In substance, though, they were often startlingly cruel. Plenty of famous ones, after all: Snow White, Cinderella, Kongjwi and Patjwi....
So let us take The Ant and the Grasshopper as our example. All summer long, the grasshopper sings, idle and carefree. The ant, watching it, labors away without rest. And when winter arrives, the grasshopper — its larder empty — stretches out a begging hand toward the ant. Then the ant says: You sang all summer long, so dance away the winter. "Dance" being a barb — a sneer dressed up in a single word, meaning: go and shiver in the cold.
And what became of the grasshopper, you ask? Did it even need saying? It died, of course. Which was exactly the point: fairy tales are cold-blooded more often than not. Presumably, for the sake of the lesson.
Now then — let's look at reality. This tale can be read from two vantage points. The ant's and the grasshopper's. And the one drawn in parallel with people. Transpose the story onto human beings, and the grasshopper probably ate and prospered right up to the very end. Set summer as the first half of a life and winter as the second: to squander your first half in play and still survive into your twilight years meant, above all else, that you were a person of exceptional talent. People like that generally kept thriving in their later years, too. As for those who ruined themselves by doing nothing — regrettable as it was — their talent was simply mediocre. Insufficient.
Lee Jun had observed the Initial Awakeners — hailed as a living treasury of every talent imaginable — from closer than anyone else alive. Those 1,000 Initial Awakeners. Even among them, talent had its gradations, and those who had survived until now were the ones who'd possessed its very finest. It was purely a difference of that degree. Nothing more.
Really.
Was it really, truly, though?
Then this time, let us fit the tale to the real-world ant and grasshopper instead. It was this fable that had dragged the grasshopper's image into the gutter — before it, the insect had been celebrated as a paragon of diligence. What's more, a grasshopper was never built to live to see winter in the first place. Suppose summer were the season of hardship, and winter the season of enduring that hardship and meeting its fruits: the grasshopper never faces that season of harvest — the season of spending what was gathered — at all.
Yes. Before the regression, 98 percent of the Initial Awakeners died. They gave everything they had — and in the end, they simply could not hold out. For the ones who came after. For the ordinary citizens. They shielded them and bought them time. Did that make it enough?
"...A safe nation. Safe lives."
Lee Jun recited the Association's creed. Hunters existed to protect the world. And awakeners? Not every awakener became a hunter. Some walked down the road of crime, and some simply buried their power and lived out their days in quiet. That much came down to personal choice. The former were, without question, sons of bitches — but the latter, he could not condemn. Because he knew better than anyone how terrifying, how agonizing, a thing it was to become a hunter and step through a gate. That was why most hunters never reproached those unregistered awakeners. The bitter irony was that ordinary people were the ones who did.
Lee Jun still couldn't settle on what he was supposed to do now.
Then—
Rrrrk—
The hospital room door slid open, and Seo Yoon stepped inside.
"How is Ms. Choi Jeong-hyeon?"
"Her condition seems stable for now. What did the attending physician say?"
"As for the arm... I am told it will be difficult."
"I see."
Of course, not so long ago, Lee Jun himself had received the very same verdict where his wrist was concerned. They'd declared it could never be reattached — and look how that had turned out.
But he understood that this time was a different case. A mechanical prosthetic would most likely be the better road. That much, Lee Jun could arrange for her. But anything beyond that....
"...In cases like this, what do hunters usually do?"
He asked Seo Yoon. No one alive knew the answer better than he did — and precisely because of that, he wanted it confirmed.
"Most likely... they would retire, sir."
"I see."
Yes. That was the usual course — in truth, their skill would decline sharply. And even hunters whose skill barely wavered, mages and the like, mostly chose retirement in such cases. Which was to say, it had never been a question of ability at all. It was the trauma. Or the crumbling of one's faith in oneself. And past even that... it was the pain. Walking into a gate again. Facing monsters again.
Lee Jun turned the question over in his mind. What was management, really? Finding the talented and raising them up? Yes, that was all well and good. But... think it through. The untalented were awakeners and hunters all the same. A hunter — whatever their talent — was someone who carried pride and responsibility in what they had become, and shouldered the duty that came with it. And the further one fell on the untalented side of the line... the more that was true.
Lee Jun had always carried one conviction with him. That he himself had no talent. An objective fact, no matter who examined it. Among the Initial Awakeners — armed with talents that were cheats upon cheats — he alone had received nothing whatsoever. No system corrections. No mana. Not even that most commonplace of things, a status window. Nothing at all.
So how had Lee Jun survived until now? To that question he could answer with perfect certainty, without a single moment's deliberation: his comrades. It was thanks to them. They had taken in a man with no ability to speak of, kept him at their side, passed down every last trick and technique they knew, looked after him — and divided the byproducts of every raid fairly, down the line. Had they done any of it with a ledger in hand? No. Never. In the first place, there had been nothing Lee Jun could give them. He might help keep their minds steady, perhaps — but that was the whole extent of it. Anyone in the entire world could have filled that role.
And so, a decision like this one was simply a matter of course.
"Seo Yoon."
"Yes, sir."
She seemed to have a fair idea of what was coming. Well — a month and a half together was enough for anyone to take his measure. The kind of man Lee Jun was.
"How would you feel about bringing one more person into the agency?"
Lee Jun hesitated. What if she minded? Given Seo Yoon's personality, she would never say so to his face — but the grievance could still take root somewhere out of sight. Then how would he smooth things over? Then... he would....
But Seo Yoon answered without a single flicker of change in her expression, just as she always did. Perfectly composed. And perfectly certain.
"I have no objections to your decisions, sir. Not ever."
"...Thank you."
Right. He really was this blessed of a bastard.
Disgracefully so.