Team-Building Retreat (1)
Baek Seo-ha is using 'Darkening'.
It would have been a lie to say I wasn't excited.
SS. A rank that's never been discovered before.
Granted, I personally had SSS-rank Dantalion and the EX-rank Limit Break Program, but that was purely because I was a special case.
It might sound like a cheap jab, but still.
Before my regression, there simply hadn't been a rank beyond S — not for items, not for skills, nothing.
Which made Baek Seo-ha acquiring an SS-rank skill a genuinely surprising turn of events.
With this, Baek Seo-ha is going to be several times stronger than she was before my regression!
My heart was pounding.
She'd already opened up paths to surpass her old self in a dozen different ways.
So if the power of an SS-rank skill piled on top of that, how far could she climb?
Shaaah!
The power of Darkening washed over Baek Seo-ha.
Her snow-white hair began to bleed black from the roots down.
At the same time, a dark current swirled faintly around her, lending her an air of quiet menace.
"So this is... my new skill...!"
Baek Seo-ha looked visibly overwhelmed — in a good way.
"How is it? Anything else going on?"
"I feel like I'm overflowing with power. At this rate, I could probably take an A-rank gate solo."
"What else?"
"Hmm..."
Humming in thought, she raised her sword.
Then she drew out the forms of the Blue Dragon Seven Forms.
Shaaaaa!
The shape of a dragon bloomed to life behind Baek Seo-ha.
Except it wasn't the azure-scaled blue dragon she used to manifest.
A black dragon!
A pitch-black dragon, eerily similar to the dark mark in her heart, coiled along the sword's trajectory like ink poured into water.
And that's not all.
The power running through the blade was fundamentally different from the Blue Dragon Seven Forms, too.
The sword forms themselves were nearly identical — and yet.
The principle driving each form has changed.
The Blue Dragon Seven Forms were a ruler's sword.
They focused on towering over an opponent and cutting them down where they stood. The black dragon's sword was something else entirely.
In it, I felt a ferocious tenacity and obsession — the will to latch onto a single opponent and hound them to death, no matter how long it took.
To think the same forms could be given such a wildly different variation.
On top of that, its raw power had climbed dramatically.
Which made perfect sense, really.
A sword that could cut down a hundred people at once, now being poured entirely into one.
Swish!
From the first form through the seventh.
And then her own personal eighth form on top of them all.
Having run through every single form, Baek Seo-ha flashed a grin.
"I like this skill."
"Glad to hear it. By the way, did you know your appearance changes too?"
I turned on my phone's camera and showed it to her.
"Oh. My hair went black."
Using the camera as a mirror, Baek Seo-ha turned her head this way and that, studying herself. Then, out of nowhere, she asked:
"What do you think? This look."
"Huh? Well, it's fresh. It suits you."
"Don't give me a wishy-washy answer like that."
Baek Seo-ha took one big step closer.
"What do you think?"
Wh-what's with her all of a sudden?
"The black hair suits you too."
"Is it pretty?"
"...Huh?"
"Black hair. Is it pretty? Is it your type?"
Okay, seriously, did she eat something bad?
Out of nowhere, she's asking questions she'd never normally touch.
"If you like it, should I keep my hair black from now on?"
"N-no, that would be a bit..."
"You don't like it? My original color is better, then?"
"Why are you suddenly...?"
"Why am I what?"
She tilted her head as if she genuinely had no idea what the problem was.
"Why are you suddenly asking me which hair color is prettier?"
"If it's pretty, that's a good thing, isn't it?"
"It's your hair. Do whatever you want with it."
"...What matters more to me is whether it's to your taste."
Something, something had gone wrong here.
Bzzzt-!
Right on cue, a phone call came through at the perfect moment.
"Whew, I've got a call coming in, I should take this. I'll tell the kids outside it all got resolved. It was fun — yeah."
"...Who is it?"
"Wh-what do you mean?"
"The person who's calling you..."
Crack!
Baek Seo-ha's head turned with an unsettling smoothness.
"Who is it?"
"Uh, well. You see, people are entitled to a certain amount of privacy..."
Snap!
In an instant, a flash of black light.
The phone in my hand flew straight into Baek Seo-ha's palm.
Incoming Call — Awaiting Answer
Caller: Seong Ju-ah
The moment she saw the name on the screen, the corner of Baek Seo-ha's mouth twisted upward.
"Ha! That shameless little...!"
Words she would never have said in her right mind slipped straight out of her mouth.
"Why is she calling you?"
"...How would I know that?"
She hadn't even answered it yet.
Call Declined
Having hung up without a shred of permission, Baek Seo-ha stepped right in front of me.
Close enough that I could feel her breath.
A woman this breathtakingly beautiful, standing mere inches from my face — and yet.
What in the actual hell...!
All I felt was terror.
"Tae-hyun. Don't get tangled up with other women in front of me."
"......"
"I don't know why, either. But when I see that kind of thing, it just makes my blood boil."
I didn't know why either.
Why you were suddenly acting like this.
"Promise me. Got it?"
"Uh... um..."
"Answer."
I wasn't about to make a mistake I'd regret for the rest of my life, was I?
Just as I was desperately racking my brain—
The duration of 'Darkening' has expired.
The skill had run out.
Her blackened hair began searching for its original color again.
"...Huh?"
At the same moment, the sharp edges of Baek Seo-ha's glare softened back into something docile.
"Just now, that was..."
As she quietly replayed her memories, Baek Seo-ha's face gradually flushed the red of a ripe tomato.
"A... aaaaargh!"
"L-look, um..."
"Shut up! Don't say a single word!"
Practically on the verge of tears, she clamped both hands over my mouth.
"Mmph-mmph-mmph!"
"This is, um...! It's a s-side effect of the skill! It says right here that using Darkening... forcibly changes your personality! Yes! Anyway, that's what it is!"
Whatever you say.
After flailing around on her own for a good long while, Baek Seo-ha suddenly went limp and lost her balance.
"Ah...?"
When I caught her, she gritted her teeth and averted her eyes again.
"Transformation-type skills tend to burn through stamina fast like that. Don't overuse it."
"...Yeah. Okay..."
And so we spent a long, excruciating stretch of time marinating in the awkwardness.
In the days that followed, I spent the week clearing out the backlog of work that had piled up.
First, I checked on the progress of Ji Yeon-ha's research.
"The analysis of the fragment is nearly wrapped up. The results will be in by next week at the latest."
Once the analysis of the mutant creature's fragment came back, we would use it as the launching point for a full-scale search.
After all, that fragment was tied to the Advent Church — and through them, to the Iron Blood Monarch.
"On that note — is everything I asked you for coming along well?"
"Hehe, of course."
She pulled a stack of blueprints from her desk and spread them out.
"This one, and this one... and especially this one, I have high hopes for! They're bound to sell like hotcakes!"
"That's promising to hear."
I'd made the right call handing this job to her.
Magic item design and development.
Being a mage herself, she knew exactly what mages desperately needed — and exactly how those things needed to work — better than anyone.
"Please keep it up."
"Isn't that a given? In a way, you could call this my own project!"
And so my check-in with Ji Yeon-ha came to a close.
Next, I visited the Hunter Bureau and finished up a mountain of paperwork.
Being a guild master is a exhausting job.
Still, once it was done, I wouldn't have to touch it for a while. Supposedly.
"I'll have it all done in a single day."
"...All of that?"
The gate clearance reports from every gate Shin Guild had cleared in recent months, plus all the other guild-related filings.
It was a tedious, mind-numbing process — tedious enough that I honestly considered just dumping the whole thing on the clerical team.
"As much as I'd love to help with that, it would technically be illegal..."
Seong Ju-ah handed me a coffee with an awkward smile.
"Have some coffee while you work."
"Ah. Thank you."
Gulp.
One sip in, and a hideous liquid that seemed to have compressed every bitter flavor on the planet assaulted my tongue.
"...People actually call this coffee and drink it?"
"At this point nothing less will even register, you know."
Seong Ju-ah downed that stuff like it was water.
It made me realize, all over again, just how much of a black-company operation the Hunter Bureau really was.
To grind a person down until they could drink that without flinching...
"Back in the day, I used to brew it even stronger on account of you, Tae-hyun."
"Ahem."
Instead of chatting, I should finish at least one more page.
It was nearly dawn by the time I finally worked through every last item on the schedule.
"Hoo-rah! Done!"
"Great work."
Seong Ju-ah said, sipping her seventh coffee of the night.
At this rate, wasn't her stomach going to turn inside out?
"Whew."
Tidying the paperwork away, I ran through the bigger picture.
For now, the most urgent fires were put out.
The fragment analysis was coming soon, and I'd organized the major events of the future and drilled most of them into my memory.
Seong Yong-ho and Manabu, though...
Unfortunately, they were out of reach for now.
When an awakened person commits a crime, before anyone weighs the severity of the offense, their movements are completely restricted and they're taken into custody.
These were the days of countless superhumans wielding every manner of skill.
There was no telling what ability someone might use to break out, so the authorities couldn't exactly let just anyone come visiting.
I'll have to wait, at least until the investigation wraps up.
Which meant that, for the time being...
There was nothing major demanding my attention.
Maybe I'd dive into a few gates and grind Rir's levels for a while.
Woof!
Rir barked from within my shadow.
I could stand to dig deeper into my class skills, too.
I was in the middle of sorting through all these thoughts when—
"Are you doing all right?"
Seong Ju-ah cut in abruptly from beside me.
"Doing all right with what, exactly?"
"You look a little worn out."
...Me?
Worn out?
There was no way.
"It must be your imagination. Or maybe the paperwork just doesn't agree with me and the fatigue snuck up on me all at once."
"I'd be relieved if that's all it is."
Dropping her empty coffee cup into the trash, she went on.
"Sometimes resting matters too, you know. From where I'm sitting, Tae-hyun, you never seem to give yourself any slack."
"You're the one with less slack, Ju-ah..."
"Hey! Not that kind of slack!"
Somehow, the dark circles under her eyes looked even deeper than before.
"Every time I watch you, Tae-hyun, it's like you're sprinting at full throttle. Eyes locked on the goal, never resting, just barreling ahead."
"...Do I?"
"You do. And I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but..."
Seong Ju-ah stepped back into her office, a faint smile on her lips.
"Every once in a while, it's not so bad to stop and take in the scenery."
"......"
She wasn't wrong.
Still, I had no need for rest.
If that was what I was after, I'd had more than my fill of it before my regression — until I was sick to death of it.
I've been given the chance to run again.
I couldn't very well slog along at the same half-hearted pace as before, could I?
I was grateful for Seong Ju-ah's advice, but now wasn't the time.
"All right, Rir. Starting tomorrow, it's hunting season in the gates."
Woof woof! Hah hah hah!
The little rascal. He's thrilled about it.
ON STRIKE
"...Huh?"
Exactly two characters, stretched huge across a banner.
And beneath it, the members of Shin Guild — Ah Seo-ah at the front — were sprawled out in a neat row.
"We cleared gates without a single day off! Guild Master, we demand vacation days!"
"We demand them!"
"We demand them!"
"...When did I ever tell you not to rest?"
I hadn't even assigned them gate quotas. I'd let them off the leash entirely, telling them to clear whatever they wanted, as much as they wanted.
So these brats finally went and bit the hand that fed them, huh.
Just as the sting of betrayal had my whole body trembling—
"The strike is just an excuse, actually."
Shin Min-woo sprang up from his spot and said,
"Ever since the guild was founded, we've never actually done anything together outside of gates and meetings, have we? And you never even join us in the gates, hyung."
Well... that part was true.
"So we decided we should have a team-building retreat!"
"Excellent! And if we're doing it, somewhere spectacular overseas, something luxurious—"
"I'm fine either way, but Min-woo just wouldn't stop nagging me..."
And that was how.
We set off on a team-building retreat that had never been on anyone's agenda.