The Reckoning
In the wake of Chaerin's blistering press conference, the articles and comment sections alike exploded into a frenzy. And among the flood, a handful of remarks stood out from the rest.
Like a dam bursting after years of pressure, the true face of the Musashi Guild began, at last, to surface.
"Those fucking bastards!"
The office of Sato, guildmaster of the Musashi Guild, was a wreck. Unable to contain his rage, he had hurled every object within reach, and there was precious little left that had survived the tantrum.
The phone rang. And rang.
The customer you are calling is unavailable.
Please try your call again later.
It rang again.
The customer you are calling is...
The same people who used to ring him at every idle opportunity had, all of a sudden, become far too busy to pick up. He tried dozens of numbers. The only thing that came back was that same mechanical voice.
A click.
After dozens of attempts, someone finally answered. But—
"Ah! I knew my brother would—"
"Musashi Guildmaster? I'm sorry, but the guildmaster is in an important meeting at the moment."
It wasn't the brother he'd been waiting for. It was a secretary.
"What? Hey! After everything between us? Put him on the phone right now!"
"Hey — why the hell did you pick that up? Are you insane? You trying to go down with him? Hang up!"
The voice of the man who used to call him brother, snapping at his own secretary, carried clearly through the receiver.
"Haah..."
The line went dead. A hollow breath slipped from Sato's mouth.
He slammed a mana-charged fist into the desk. For an A-Rank Hunter, the furniture might as well have been paper — it came apart in a single blow. His rage, however, did not.
"Aaaagh! What? A meal? You just ate together? Then I suppose you swallowed all that money with your food too, huh?"
A notification chimed. Another article about them had gone up.
"Heh heh heh. What a load of shit. Don't you dare act like you just found out. You knew. Every last one of you knew."
Familiar bylines stared up at him from the screen. As if no one had ever tried to dig into Ellinia after the victims came forward with their stories. The ones who made a deal had lived. The ones who stayed honest had died, or been buried by society until they might as well have been.
The same people who had been drinking with him yesterday, snatching up every scrap of graft he threw their way, were now pouring condemnation on him as if none of it had ever happened.
"Musashi Guildmaster, get out here!"
"Kill him!"
And outside, the citizens who had gathered around headquarters were doing more than shouting. Eggs and stones hammered against the building as a matter of course.
The door burst open. The vice-guildmaster stumbled in with a livid bruise blooming across his face.
"The hell happened to you?"
Sato stared at him, incredulous. He could no longer make sense of what was happening to the Musashi Guild. The vice-guildmaster of the almighty Musashi Guild, walking in having taken a beating? Somewhere?
"I've been looking for an escape route, as you ordered, but... they're checking names and faces. Thoroughly. They've got every way out sealed."
"Haaah... so that's why you came back looking like that?"
"The civilians I can handle. It's the hunters. There are too many of them."
Sato looked out the window. Sure enough, hunters with sharp, unblinking eyes held the front of the crowd in a perimeter so tight not a drop of water could have slipped through.
"How did it come to this?"
He raked his fingers through his hair, his face twisting. He was a king. People could call him crazy if they wanted, but he had ruled Ellinia by leaning on its geography, and he had ruled it absolutely. He hadn't been some two-bit back-alley thug. He had been a monarch.
"What about the guild members?"
"Well..."
"Spit it out. It can't get any worse."
"The moment Lee Chaerin's press conference ended, they all ran. Vanished in an instant."
Sato had been mistaken. Beneath the floor he stood on, there had always been a cellar.
"After everything I did for them. Huh? Those disloyal pieces of shit!"
The vice-guildmaster laughed at him, silently, behind his eyes.
Give me a break. He beat us whenever he felt like it... We only stuck around because the money was good.
The force that had held the Musashi Guild together all this time had been simple and brutally effective: money. And the moment the money dried up, the whole operation was stripped to its rotten bones. The vice-guildmaster himself was only still here because he had nowhere else to go. If he had, he would have been gone already.
"And what the hell are those bastards even doing?"
Sato glared down at the hunters encircling his guild. They had been standing in the same spots since last night, unmoving, as if they were laying siege to a castle. Whatever they had said to the furious citizens, the crowd was staying behind the cordon and nowhere else.
"Th-they're waiting for Hunter Lee Chaerin to arrive, sir. Word is she's going to smash the place herself..."
"Fuuuuck!"
The last unharmed thing in Sato's office — a potted plant — smashed through the window and sailed into the open air.
The mood among the hunters surrounding the building could not have been more different. Far from grim, they were almost cheerful, as if they had come out for a picnic.
"Whew. People are really pissed."
One of the hunters holding the perimeter at Chaerin's request glanced back over his shoulder and let out a low whistle.
"Can you blame them? After the shit those guys pulled? I got angry just hearing about it."
The hunters around him all nodded. And more than anything else, what truly made their blood boil was this: those people had dared to lay a hand on Lee Chaerin.
"They actually went after Hunter Lee Chaerin? Those balls of steel, or just no brains at all?"
"I heard she was going to save her brother with a Mandrake."
"Well, this is our chance to repay her. Works out for us."
Every hunter standing there owed Lee Chaerin something — from small favors to their very lives. The media liked to paint her as a savage, but they all knew better.
"Hahaha. She saved me while cussing me out. Told me to get the hell out of there."
"Right? She even went to visit the family of a hunter who died fighting alongside her. Paid the condolence money out of her own pocket."
"Honestly, among all the S-Rank Hunters, she's the only one who ever bothered clearing External Gates that much."
"A friend of mine who isn't even an Awakened is alive because of her."
Everything Chaerin had done to fulfill her brother's dream had been a seed. And now those seeds had bloomed, drawing hunters here from every corner.
"Hm? What's going on? It's getting loud back there."
"It's Lee Chaerin..."
A woman in a red supercar the same color as her hair. The face that had been plastered across every news outlet in the country. The moment the citizens saw her, they parted of their own accord, clearing a road straight to the Musashi Guild.
"Hunter Lee Chaerin! Please avenge my daughter!"
A middle-aged woman pulled a worn photograph from her pocket, waving it as she wept and cried out. Chaerin glanced at it, then gave a small nod. That was enough.
The car rolled to a stop at the front of the line, and Lee Chaerin stepped out.
"Welcome."
"Thanks for coming, all of you."
The hunters bowed their heads as she left the car.
"Not at all. We're only sorry we couldn't help you sooner."
"You couldn't have helped me then anyway. Now I get to have my revenge, thanks to you. I'll take it."
The guild badges pinned to the chests of the hunters standing at her side were a mixed collection. Some of those guilds were openly hostile to one another. All of them had gathered here for a single person: Lee Chaerin.
There was nothing left that could stand in her way.
The law? The police were busy enough just holding the civilians back. S-Rank Hunters enjoyed a kind of immunity, so long as public consensus allowed it.
Force? Don't be ridiculous. Never mind the hunters assembled here — Lee Chaerin herself was an S-Rank Hunter.
Public opinion? From the citizens to the guild members, the court of public opinion looked like this. Even the press, which never missed a chance to talk, had either gone silent or was flooding the airwaves with pieces in her defense.
"Are you really going in alone?"
"Yeah. If you lot come in too, this turns into a much bigger mess. I only asked you to stand here in the first place. And I'm not going in alone anyway."
Chaerin looked toward a particular spot and winked. From the darkness, a calico cat's eyes gleamed, and it waved a fluffy white paw.
"And that way of talking doesn't suit you. Just be yourself."
Chaerin snorted at that.
"Yeah, that was making my skin crawl too, you little shits. I'll be back. Keep the civilians from getting hurt."
As if she were heading out for a stroll around the neighborhood, Chaerin started walking toward the Musashi Guild's front entrance without the slightest hesitation — tracksuit, sneakers, and all.
"Come back safe."
Behind her, the hunters bowed their heads as one. Chaerin waved a hand and went inside.
The decorations that had once made the Musashi Guild's interior so ostentatious were all smashed. What remained was a building with a grim, hollow atmosphere.
"L-Lee Chaerin?"
The first person to greet her was a middle-aged man. His face, already drawn tight from days of crushing stress, went bloodless the instant he saw her.
"Hey there. Still hanging around inside the guild? Guess that makes you one of the ones who deserves to die."
The names Chaerin had so carefully compiled on her list were, without exception, human garbage. But if you followed the letter of the law, scum like this would never see a real sentence. A court that was halfway in the guild's pocket would find any number of reasons to go easy on them.
Her fist met his jaw with a clean, surgical crack and caved in his skull. The ones who came running at the noise had their heads broken in turn, one after another.
Chaerin's hair had never been red to begin with. She always fought closer than anyone else, and the crimson staining her now was nothing more than the blood of her enemies. That blood began to soak the Musashi Guild from the inside out.
"Aaaagh! Die!"
A few of them, having already given up, threw themselves at her anyway.
A wet, splitting impact.
Without fail, bodies burst and split and died. The category in which Lee Chaerin was truly considered strong was not war against monsters.
Her specialty was fighting people. A former infighter-style boxing champion, Chaerin's fists shone brightest when her opponent was human.
The ones still left in the guild were, fittingly, no less than mid-level managers and executives. Skilled, of course. And yet—
"I can't aim because of you! Get out of the way!"
"You... you bitch?"
They threw everything they had at her — weapons, abilities, all of it — but inside a narrow corridor, against a woman who kept driving inward, they were helpless.
"So you die by my hand. Got it?"
Something small rolled across the floor. One of the executives, dying and soaked in his own blood, had pulled it from his coat and sent it spinning to a stop at Chaerin's feet.
"A grenade?"
These lunatics even had these? Military weapons were supposed to be under the strictest control. Chaerin gathered mana into her feet, about to throw herself clear — and then a voice cut through the air.
"Stay right there."
A translucent film bloomed around the grenade and swallowed every ounce of the blast.
"Karen!"
Chaerin's face lit up as she saw the man who had appeared with the cat.
"Were you watching?"
"Yeah. You looked good."
Chaerin's movement had been so thoroughly efficient it was almost beautiful — and nothing at all like the way she fought monsters.
"Looks like we're done here. Shall we?"
"Yeah. A promise is a promise."
The guildmaster's door exploded inward.
"Hhk—!"
Sato toppled backward at the sudden knock, but Chaerin and Karen paid him no mind. They walked into the room as if they owned it.
"P-please! M-money! I'll give you money! Or Mandrakes? I've got them all right here!"
Sato wrenched the vault open. Inside, those precious Mandrakes sat in dozens of roots.
Neither of them said a word. Whatever he did, they simply looked at him.
"I'll give you everything! Huh? I'll hand over all of Ellinia... I'll give you everything I have! Just let me live, please."
"Don't need it."
"What is this? Hey—?"
Karen shaped a square, translucent prison around Sato's body, then dropped the whole thing into the vault with the Mandrakes.
"That barrier will shrink, slowly, over the course of a day. It'll crush you finger by finger — skin, bone, organs, skull — until there's nothing left of you but dust."
"Hhk—! Spare me! Please! No — just kill me!"
The mere description of that agony dropped Sato to his knees. He drove his forehead into the floor and begged.
"Samsaek. Close the vault."
A long, thin creak filled the room.
What the guildmaster heard was not mercy. It was the vault door, closing with a slowness so deliberate it was almost spiteful.
"Pl— please!"
Samsaek was shutting it with one small front paw, taking his time on purpose. Sato stared at the thinning ribbon of light with despair in his eyes, but Samsaek only wore a little smirk at the corner of his mouth, and in the end he closed the door all the way.
A heavy thud.
"No—!"
"Huh. The vault door's got pretty good soundproofing."
The guildmaster's scream cut off the instant the door sealed. Karen regarded the vault with a look of deep, quiet satisfaction.
"You're kind of evil, you know that? Are you sure you're actually a Spiritual Beast?"
"That one can die."
Samsaek licked a paw and smoothed the fur, his voice gone cold. He was fond of humans, true enough. But that thing in the vault was not a person.