A Reason Like a Reason (1)
Choi Jeong-hyeon wore a dazed expression.
She was startled, of course.
Well, I would've been too, in her shoes. Objectively speaking, she was a hunter even fledgling guilds wouldn't bother recruiting.
Not that our management agency currently had worse infrastructure than a brand-new guild, but… let's go by the world's assessment for now.
S-Class Hunter Management.
It was a name that sounded like something out of a scam ad, but the track record, at least, wasn't bad.
No—"not bad" undersold it. We were actually doing rather well. Barely a month and a half after our founding, we'd cleared an S-Class gate—not single-handedly, granted, but cleared all the same.
The performance Lee Jun had put on during the gate auction was still making the rounds in the press and across hunter communities. As for the clear itself, it was classified, so the public filled the vacuum with speculation and gossip—which was only natural, given that it had become an open secret that a bet had been made between Lee Jun and Yoon Seol.
Lee Hyeon-ah spread that one for me. Much obliged.
Word was also quietly getting around that Lee Jun had won that bet. The information had leaked from Lee Jun himself. They'd moved first, so no harm done, right? This kind of turnabout misfortune always came with a peculiar little pleasure.
It's only been two months. At this rate, it's not just enough—it's overflowing.
Clearing an S-Class gate and making Seolwon, one of the Big Four, drink our dust had proven our competence. The dominating performance at the auction house had gathered hype on top of that. Even viewed coldly, the numbers were good.
And then—
Piled on top of all that were Lee Jun's sudden retirement announcement, the founding of the management agency, and the assorted eccentricities since, generating one hell of a synergy. The internet was currently a tangled mess of people lifting Lee Jun up and knocking him down.
Whether the noise was true or not didn't matter. What mattered was that Lee Jun kept resurfacing in the headlines—unforgotten by the public, forever on their tongues. Achieve that alone, and the management business was more than half won.
Why?
Because right now, we had concrete results to shove in people's faces. In this position, the praise could be wrapped in the word potential, and the hate stayed exactly what it was—hate, nothing more, nothing less.
Cleared an S-Class gate, so what? He just rode Seolwon's coattails? Then how'd he win the bet?
Like that. All I had to do was keep feeding the so-called Lee Jun fans the ammo they needed to win every argument.
Yes. A superstar who drives fans and haters absolutely insane. That position was ideal.
At least for now.
So, what was the public image of this "S-Class Hunter Management"? Nine out of ten people probably saw it something like this: a company founded by South Korea's only S-Class hunter and former vice-chairman of the Hunter Association, which managed one big show right out of the gate—fitting for a man of his caliber.
What Lee Jun had to turn that into was this: the company whose former vice-chairman's guidance produced the most S-Class hunters in the country.
And for that… I need to grow our ranks aggressively.
According to the memories of the previous loop, a new S-Class hunter would be born within five months. S-Class would no longer be the exclusive domain of the Initial Awakeners. The gap between early and late S-Classes would be glaring, of course—but the significance lay in the wall itself coming down.
And Lee Jun's leverage lasted exactly until then. If the S-Class title on his name stopped being unique, he'd gradually be filtered out of relevance.
The first promotion happens in America. And a month after that, Korea's first new S-Class will be…
Samhwa Guild's master, Yoo Tae-sung. With that man at the front, three of the four great guildmasters would eventually hang the S-Class title on their doors.
So I have to make this agency into a solid mid-tier company at minimum before then.
Only then would I have any way to wriggle through. Which meant that for Lee Jun, today's recruitment was the trigger point for the next stage.
Seo Yoon and Choi Jeong-hyeon. He would raise the two of them with everything he had, and then—forge ties with neutral organizations like the Association, the Magic Artificers' Union, and the Old Market, and build cooperative relationships with the pro-Association giants like Taesan.
He already knew every organization's leanings from the previous loop. Using that knowledge, he planned to back the guilds that best served gate clearance and humanity's survival—not just friendly ones like Taesan or HIM, but even Seolwon, the Samhwa Group, and Tamra, whose aims ran opposite to his own.
So long as their convictions were straight and just, Lee Jun would help them.
Though a few of them I'll need to keep firmly pressed down.
Seolwon especially. Yoon Seol took precious little interest in running her guild. If Lee Jun didn't periodically knuckle Lee Hyeon-ah right on the crown of her head, that place was one misunderstanding away from a catastrophe.
So Lee Jun understood his position for this loop perfectly: one that shifted fluidly between support and restraint—while leaning closer to the supporting side. He wouldn't clear gates himself; instead, through raising successors and keeping the hunter organizations in check, he would contribute indirectly to both gate clearance and the maintenance of society.
Especially that last part. Weakening and reining in the guilds' power was essential. The previous loop had taught that lesson in bone-deep fashion.
And… while he was at it, he'd get to skip out on gate raids, too. After a certain point, Lee Jun would die just from walking inside one. In the previous loop, there'd been more than a few times he'd dragged himself into a gate and been hauled back out as a corpse-in-waiting. And despite that, he'd crawled in again and again, until he finally died for good.
Even a god watching must have smacked his forehead. How does a fool this stupid exist?
So it was better for Lee Jun to do the work that could be done from outside the gate.
It was absolutely, definitely not because he was afraid of dying again.
"Hmm…."
Really, it's not.
"Sure you are. That's exactly why I'm saying it."
……?
What was that supposed to mean?
"It means you ought to start treating your own body with a little more care."
What are you on about?
Of course I treasure it. That's the whole point of all this—not dying.
"Anyway… there's that."
And with that, Silhouette breezily ended the conversation. This one had a habit of dropping cryptic nonsense like that, out of nowhere.
Regardless. About two minutes had passed since I'd brought up the contract. I'd finished sorting through my thoughts, and by now Choi Jeong-hyeon must have done at least some thinking of her own. So I returned to the situation in front of me.
"Feeling flustered?"
"Y-yes…."
"Wondering why someone would want to contract with a D-Class hunter like you. Whether there's some hidden catch."
"Er…."
"And at the same time, you're wondering if this might be an opportunity. While also feeling anxious—because you're not used to… being in that state yet."
"……"
Lee Jun glanced once at her arm, then met her eyes again. She flinched and looked away. Still, for someone whose eyes had opened so recently, a reaction like this meant she'd overcome it soon enough.
"Miss Choi Jeong-hyeon. I'll be honest with you."
"…Yes."
"Recruiting you carries absolutely no risk for me."
"……"
"So there's no need to worry so much. At the very least, I'm not running a con."
"I-I never worried about that…!"
She jolted and raised both hands to wave the accusation away—then quickly realized only one hand remained, and lowered her arm again.
Seeing that… it stung a little, somehow.
"Then I'll take it you're thinking positively about the contract?"
Bob-bob—
She nodded furiously, as if afraid his mind might change if she didn't.
"Good. Then I'll draft the contract and bring it to you soon. Take your time reading it—deciding later won't be too late."
"……"
"But you should at least get a taste of it. Shall I give you a preview of a few of the terms?"
"Yes…?"
"The big one: the prosthetic arm made by the Technical Bureau chief, fitted for you, with lifetime maintenance and repairs—everything free of charge. Naturally, room and board are fully covered for as long as you're with the agency. On top of that there's a living stipend, and for hard-to-find gear or elixirs, I can pull them from the Old Market or auction houses under my own name. If we go hunting together, the byproducts get split N ways."
"Uh, uhh… I'm sorry, wh-what? R-really? No—really…?"
Choi Jeong-hyeon's pronunciation slipped, as if her tongue had tripped over itself in shock.
Understandable, really. Benefits on this level would eat the Big Four's offers alive.
The benefits alone, that is. Even so, it still fell short of joining a major corporation….
But for Choi Jeong-hyeon, this much was evidently more than enough. For an instant, she even seemed to look at Lee Jun with concern in her eyes.
"Um… why would you go this far for me…? I-I know it might sound rude, but… no matter how I think about it, I can't see any reason for you to do this…."
She had a point. Getting a prosthetic made by the Technical Bureau chief was already lavish treatment for a D-Class hunter—that one item alone would be worth years of unpaid servitude. And on top of that, Lee Jun had promised a mountain of additional perks. From her position, it was half suspicion, half anxiety.
Suspicion: was it really right to receive this kind of support? Worry: was she really worth an investment this excessive?
Well… I don't lose anything. Money's the one thing I have in surplus.
Training one raised hunter or two made little difference. Lee Jun used to manage over twenty at a time—two was a light load. And as she'd said, if she truly had problems as a combat hunter, he could always put her to work elsewhere in the agency. He'd need to start hiring instructors and office staff soon anyway, if the business was going to expand. No losses meant this much was obviously worth investing.
And there was a small hope, too. The results of her Talent Stone test.
If it really was a warrior-class aptitude tied to holy power… she would become a hunter unique in all the world.
Judged purely rationally, recruiting Choi Jeong-hyeon on the strength of that alone was a complete gamble. A class that had never existed before meant an unscratched lottery ticket. First prize or dud—you wouldn't know until you scratched.
Holy power combined with a close-combat warrior….
Being an unprecedented class, there was no predicting what her abilities would look like. Would holy power grant tanking advantages? Utility advantages? Or neither—and would she turn out an absurdly broken hybrid of both? Or failing all that… would she become a decorative trinket, useless at everything?
Still, the risk isn't that severe.
"Oh, really?"
…….
Fine.
Honestly, even weighing all of the above, recruiting Choi Jeong-hyeon was inefficient. A businessman should obviously seek out talent whose output dwarfed the investment. That was how you turned a profit, and reinvested that profit. It wasn't a matter of good or bad—it was simply the attitude any executive ought to have.
But.
Lee Jun's management philosophy was a little different.
How could a person live by efficiency alone? Lee Jun believed that precisely these irrational judgments were the most human choices there were. If your heart moved, you followed it. That was what he'd learned across all those lost years.
And besides—raising an S-Class from scratch, who in their right mind calls that an ordinary undertaking? So here, a gamble was mandatory. The potential Choi Jeong-hyeon had shown. Lee Jun was betting on it. Humans were not creatures that ran on logic and reason alone.
If they were, there'd be no gambling addicts left in the world. And Ebra would have starved to death ages ago.
"Are you sure this isn't just pity?"
Once upon a time, it had been.
But now, it was a little different. When he'd first decided to recruit her, yes—pity had played its part. But the situation had changed since. The potential she had shown. He was investing because he'd seen it.
Should he lay all that out for her, systematically? These are the reasons, and because of those reasons, I'm hiring you… something like that. Explaining it point by point, laying out her promise and latent ability in a tidy logical sequence.
"The reason I want to contract with you is…."
And yet, somehow—he didn't want to.
He knew exactly why. Because bringing Choi Jeong-hyeon in had never been about those logical reasons at all.
"…I just want to recruit you. You've been working so hard, after all."
"Ah…."
From a purely contractual standpoint, that line was a clear mistake. Who on earth says something like that to a recruit? So unprofessional….
And yet—even if this moment came around again. Even if, by some impossible chance, he regressed one more time.
Lee Jun was certain he would say the exact same thing.
"I'm the CEO, you see. If the CEO wants to hire someone, he hires them. Wouldn't you say?"
He said it with a smile. Trying to slide past the awkwardness with a bit of humor before the mood could curdle—then shot to his feet with practiced speed.
"Well then, rest up! I'll come back tomorrow! Ah—well, it's past midnight, so I guess not tomorrow. Anyway, I'll see you in the morning! Sleep well!"
Screech—
Rattling off the words without giving her so much as a chance to answer, he pulled open the hospital room door and swept out.
"……"
Choi Jeong-hyeon said nothing at all. She simply watched his back as he stepped out of the room.
Click—
The sliding door of the hospital room closed behind him, and Lee Jun walked down the long, unbroken stretch of white corridor.
"So? Feeling good about how the gamble'll turn out?"
…….
Lee Jun didn't answer.
Yes—everything he'd said back there was an excuse. It could serve as a justification, of course. But in the end, it was all reasoning bolted on after the decision had already been made.
The reason he wanted to take Choi Jeong-hyeon with him… was probably that he'd seen his old self superimposed over her.
"Hoo…."
But whether that was true or not didn't matter anymore. What mattered was that the S-Class Hunter Management family was about to grow by one.
Seo Yoon and Choi Jeong-hyeon. He would care for the two of them well, raise them into exceptional hunters, and then broker their way to wherever they fit best.
That was all he was ever meant to do, in the first place.
"…Things are about to get busy again."
Soon he would have to attend the auction house one more time. There was a great deal to have in place by then.
"Really… busy."
Murmuring it for no particular reason, Lee Jun walked on down the corridor.
His back looked somehow bitter.