All Three Together (1)
Everything that followed moved at breakneck speed.
The very next day, Choi Jeong-hyeon was cleared for discharge.
Which was only natural — her body had already been fully healed, after all.
And the moment she left the hospital, she signed the management contract on the spot.
"Are you sure you don't want to think it over a little more?"
"...Yes. This is the best choice I could make."
Not just the best option available — the best. The absolute best.
With that kind of faith in me, I'd better make sure to repay it somehow.
"First of all, you can choose whether or not to live in the company dormitory. What would you like to do?"
"Hmm... I think staying at the dorm would be better. My family home is in Anyang, so..."
"Alternatively, I could find you a place near the dorm. How does that sound?"
"Ah, no! You really don't have to go that far...! I'll just take the dorm!"
It really wouldn't have been any trouble, though.
Thanks to my life-hazard allowance, money was hardly in short supply.
But piling too much generosity on her this early probably wouldn't do our relationship any favors, so I simply nodded along for now.
"Next up... equipment, I suppose. I'll give you a catalog so you can take your time picking things out. Hmm, what else..."
One by one, Lee Jun went down the list of things Choi Jeong-hyeon would need.
In broad strokes, gear related to her hunter work; in fine detail, the personal odds and ends for dorm life.
By the time they were riding toward the dormitory, a simple round of questions and answers had settled most of it.
Which left just one last thing... that, I suppose.
"And... about your right arm, Jeong-hyeon."
"...Yes."
"I'll be entrusting the prosthetic to the best maker in Korea — no, on the entire planet. You don't need to worry about that part at all."
"Thank... you."
The moment the subject of her lost arm came up, she visibly darkened.
Well, of course. Her feelings about it would still be raw.
For a hunter, the single most valuable asset was ultimately their own body.
Equipment could be swapped out, and in this world, skills could be bought as scrolls if you had the money.
But a body trained over years and years couldn't be bought back for any fortune.
The experience you'd accumulated, layer upon layer, shaped your combat style, and your body grew accustomed to moving that way. Losing an arm meant... in a sense, potentially having to rebuild everything from scratch.
That said, there was one hopeful angle: if Choi Jeong-hyeon truly did class-change into the paladin line, her entire combat style would have to shift roughly 180 degrees from her old one anyway.
Assuming the Talent Stone results were accurate, of course.
Well — for now, best to think as optimistically as possible.
After that, no more conversation passed between them.
Truthfully, she might still find Lee Jun intimidating.
Until just recently, he'd been the Vice-Chairman of the Association, after all.
He'd held no actual power worth mentioning, but on paper he was the number-two man among Korea's hunters.
"......"
"......"
Lee Jun, for his part, deliberately didn't make small talk either.
Her head was bound to be full; the least he could do was let her sort through her thoughts during the drive.
So some time passed.
Before long, the two of them arrived at their destination.
"Here we are."
As Lee Jun stepped out of the car, he used Styx's Shard to open the passenger door for her.
With no right arm, that door would have been tricky for her to manage.
Come to think of it, modern cars open with a single button press — maybe I should get a new car myself sometime.
"Ah, thank you."
"Not at all."
Apparently Choi Jeong-hyeon simply took it for some standard feature.
Well, naturally — the fact that Lee Jun had absorbed Styx's Shard had never been made public.
As far as she knew, he still had zero abilities whatsoever.
I'll have to surprise her with it one of these days.
Somehow, the thought filled him with anticipation.
Going by this, the hypothesis that all S-Class hunters were eccentrics apparently included Lee Jun himself.
{Why do you think I said it was a good thing?}
He let Silhouette's snide remark slide right past him.
And so the two of them arrived at Lee Jun's house — which doubled as the S-Class Hunter Management dormitory.
Choi Jeong-hyeon stared up at the enormous two-story house, openly astonished.
Right, this is the normal reaction.
After months stuck beside Seo Yoon, even these small, honest expressions of feeling felt oddly refreshing.
"You'll be staying here for now, so take your time moving your things over from your family home."
"Understood. I think that's for the best."
Then came the grand moment — stepping inside.
The instant they entered the front hall, a figure popped out abruptly from the direction of the kitchen.
"Boss, you're back."
"Yes, I'm home."
It was Seo Yoon — the first time he'd seen her in days.
"Feels like it's been a while."
"It has, in fact, been a while."
"Haha. Training been going well?"
"Yes. I have performed the manual perfectly, every single day."
"That's our Seo Yoon for you."
Despite being alone, she was as impeccably put-together as ever.
Hair pulled back into a single tight ponytail, a crisp white shirt.
Fluffy slippers worn over properly fitted socks — not a single detail out of place.
Again, very Seo Yoon.
And the long-awaited reunion wasn't only between those two.
"Hello."
"Ah — hello."
The two women were old acquaintances.
Lee Jun and Seo Yoon had first met in Choi Jeong-hyeon's party, so in a way, that party had turned out to be quite the fortuitous combination.
Which meant this reunion, for the two of them, was an even longer-overdue one than Lee Jun's.
"......"
"......"
And then the conversation died.
Awkwardness flooded the air in an instant.
"......"
"Ah... um..."
Choi Jeong-hyeon made several attempts to break the silence, but ultimately failed.
Unable to watch any longer, Lee Jun spoke up in her stead.
"You two will be living together as trained hunters for a while yet, so you'll have plenty of time to get close. Jeong-hyeon, I'll show you around the dorm — this way, please."
At those words, Choi Jeong-hyeon hurried after him with impressive speed.
Apparently the awkward atmosphere had been genuinely uncomfortable for her.
Lee Jun decided to start with the second floor.
The first floor had nothing special to it, and the real highlight was the basement training hall anyway.
"Wow... it's so spacious?"
"There's a row of rooms up here, so just pick whichever one you like and make it yours."
As he was showing her the vacant rooms one by one, Lee Jun eventually came to a stop before the very last door at the end of the hall.
His own room.
A thought had just occurred to him, so he left Choi Jeong-hyeon waiting outside for a moment and returned carrying something.
"Why don't you wear this for the time being? It's better than nothing."
"This is...?"
What Lee Jun had brought out was a prosthetic arm.
A crude-looking iron contraption, with intricately woven mana roads visible between its segments.
"Why do you have a prosthetic...?"
"It's equipment I used briefly, long ago. I have no use for it now, so it's just been sitting in storage — but for something basic, it's not half bad."
Don't let the look fool you — this was a special-order piece from the Bureau Chief of Technology.
A brainwave-linked prosthetic whose responsiveness was nearly identical to a natural limb.
And since Lee Jun himself had no internal mana, it even came with a built-in free mana capture function.
"It absorbs mana from the surrounding air to move itself. If you want, you can also pump your own mana into it and cause an overflow. That feature was useless for me, but since you can handle mana, it might come in handy in an emergency."
Not that I expect her to run into any actual emergencies wearing this thing.
Well, you never know how the world will turn out.
Who's to say a gate won't just open up right in front of her on some random street someday.
"You used to wear this, Vice-Chairman?"
"That's right. Quite a while ago, but I wore it for a good stretch."
"Then does that mean your current arm is..."
"Ah, no — this one is a real arm. It was necessary because of a gate gimmick."
Once upon a time, one of the gimmicks in a Reproduction Gate had required erasing parts of your body until the clear condition was met.
Every party that entered was assigned a certain weight value, and you had to eliminate body parts exceeding that threshold.
The saving grace was that the weight was distributed across the entire party.
Non-combat members could end up shouldering a disproportionate share of it, so back then, Lee Jun had sacrificed both arms to take on a heavy load himself, letting the rest of the party clear it comfortably.
Among the others, Yelena had given up toes, Kyle an ear, Jeanne an eye.
Because they'd shared the burden evenly, with no one left out, they'd cleared the gate without any real damage.
And to ease Lee Jun's discomfort afterward, the Bureau Chief of Technology had thrown this prosthetic together from materials scavengeable inside the gate.
Of course, hastily-made or not, the craftsman being who he was, its performance was top-of-the-line.
The only catch was that it had been fitted to Lee Jun's body, so the length might not suit Choi Jeong-hyeon.
"It's a little old, but it'll outperform anything the big conglomerates put out."
"Thank you so much..."
Choi Jeong-hyeon accepted the prosthetic with a deep bow of gratitude.
She turned it over in her hands, examining it — then suddenly tilted her head.
"What is it?"
"Oh, nothing. It's just... this place feels more like a home than a dormitory, somehow."
"Well, it should. It used to be my house."
"Wh-what?!"
Choi Jeong-hyeon shouted, startled clean out of her wits.
The commotion was enough that Seo Yoon poked her head up from the bottom of the stairs.
"Is something the matter?"
But Choi Jeong-hyeon couldn't spare her so much as a glance.
She had a far more gripping topic on her mind.
"Your house? Then you two were living here together? The — the two of you?"
"Yes. Why?"
A look of pure shock spread across Choi Jeong-hyeon's face.
Seo Yoon, meanwhile, had climbed the stairs in her usual composed manner — and stood there beside a visibly flustered Choi Jeong-hyeon.
The contrast could not have been starker.
It was... a genuinely novel two-shot.
And while Lee Jun was busy savoring the spectacle, Choi Jeong-hyeon ventured a careful question.
"Then the two of you... are you perhaps... seeing each other...?"
"I'm...? I'm sorry, what?"
"Oh — or n-not...?"
Where on earth did that come from?
"Obviously not!"
"...Obviously not."
Seo Yoon, too, showed emotion — a rare sight indeed.
Her eyes narrowed into slits, wearing an expression of profound, wordless absurdity.
"The only reason this is the dorm at all is that circumstances at the time made finding proper housing in a hurry impossible."
Seo Yoon simply hadn't had a home.
Until she found a place of her own, she'd had nowhere to go — so she'd just started using Lee Jun's house as her dorm.
And the house itself had been designed from the ground up to accommodate around twenty people, after all.
"So... it's really not...?"
"Of course it isn't. Don't go telling that story anywhere, or there will be real trouble."
Let a spark like that fly, and you've got an instant full-blown scandal.
The house sat on a completely isolated cliffside, with no CCTV nearby and no other buildings in sight.
That was the only reason no rumors had ever spread.
"...Come to think of it, I suppose I should start looking into building an actual dorm."
"I am satisfied with my current living arrangements. Above all, it is comfortable and efficient."
"If you say so, Seo Yoon..."
The agency's roster was small for now, but it wouldn't stay two trained hunters forever.
Sooner or later it would exceed what this house could hold, and building a proper dormitory would become an inevitability.
I should start scouting land, then.
The sooner the better — if only to eliminate any needless misunderstandings.
"I never even imagined that kind of misunderstanding."
"N-no, please don't worry about it...! It was thoughtless of me to say..."
Choi Jeong-hyeon waved her hands in frantic denial.
The tips of her ears had flushed the same red as her hair.
Hmm. Right.
So this is the kind of person she is.
That much, he could roughly read.
Which meant he'd need to think about how best to treat her going forward, too.
Her personality was of a remarkably ordinary type — and yet, curiously, it was a category Lee Jun had never once encountered among the people around him.
What on earth was wrong with everyone I've ever known...?
It struck him anew: not one of them had been normal.
Lee Jun let himself drift through a few old memories.
He pressed down on the feelings that welled up unbidden.
And simply savored this space, these people, this moment.
The feeling, truth be told...
wasn't a bad one at all.