The Transfer of the Century
“Cough!”
The moment I finished off the Avatar, Moss caught me as I started to plummet straight toward the ground. He glided down gently and lowered me onto the earth.
“Ugh….”
It felt like I'd squeezed every last drop of strength out of my body. If I let my focus slip even for a second, I'd pass out right then and there. My whole body trembled like a scarecrow caught in a windstorm.
Since my regression—no, even counting the time before it, I could count on one hand the number of times my body had been pushed this close to its limits.
“Tae-hyun!”
Baek Seo-ha, who had been nearby, rushed over and quickly steadied me.
“Th-this dragon….”
“No need to worry. It's a child like Rir.”
Moss snorted once, then returned into my shadow. I decided to deal with that business later.
“…….”
I walked over to the woman sitting slumped against the wreckage as if she were already dead. Faint traces of breathing still reached my ears—she was alive, at least.
A few minutes at most.
She had pushed herself one time too many from a state that was already beyond the worst. The mutated mana would be parasitizing her entire body by now, draining whatever life remained in her.
“…Miss Ayase.”
At my words, her head lifted with visible effort. Pupils that had once been clear as gemstones were now completely clouded over. She wasn't merely seeing things blurrily anymore—her entire field of vision had been stolen from her.
“Ah….”
And yet, as if she could somehow still see me, she smiled faintly and answered.
“Tae-hyun… nim….”
She called my name. Not 'Yamamoto'—my true name.
“The dragon….”
“Thanks to you, we subjugated it without incident. Nothing threatens Tokyo anymore.”
Not just Behemoth—the Advent Cult trafficking the Moon Fragments and the mutated hunters carrying them had all been pulled up by the roots and exterminated this time.
And I dealt damage to Elpiros's soul as well. Nothing would be arising for her to worry about for quite a while.
“Ahaha… that's a relief. Really.”
Ayase's body went limp. Whether sitting upright had become impossible or not, she slowly lost her balance and collapsed onto the ground.
“Tae-hyun-nim… I… I don't think I can live much longer….”
She quietly told me her story. And at the end, she revealed that she'd been suffering from a Mana Tumor—that it was killing her.
I showed no particular reaction and kept my composure. Because I already knew all of it.
“But… I think meeting you at the end, Tae-hyun-nim, was my good fortune….”
“If you hadn't met me, you might have lived longer. Maybe a miraculous cure will be developed in the meantime.”
I laid out the thought I'd been carrying all this while.
“If I were you, Miss Ayase, I would have resented me.”
“Me? Puhuhu…!”
Ayase burst into a small laugh, as if I'd just told an outdated joke.
“I know myself best of all. Even without this battle, I wouldn't have lived much longer.”
“But still….”
“Even if I'd lived on and become a World Ranker. This emptiness would have remained all the same.”
World Ranker—the goal Ayase had pursued—was never what she truly wanted. It had been nothing more than a child's curiosity about something an old friend had once admired.
“Now I… can understand it. That child's feelings are something I never could have comprehended just by becoming a World Ranker.”
Looking up to someone, admiring them, and then thinking, I want to become like them. For Ayase, who had lived her whole life as a genius, that would have been difficult to grasp.
“But at the very end, I came to understand. You… Tae-hyun-nim taught me. What it means to want to be like someone. What it feels like to want to stand beside them.”
“…….”
“How could I… resent someone like that?”
The corners of her mouth lifted with effort. Across that small, bloodless face bloomed a smile more full of life than anyone else's.
“If only… I could have met you sooner, Tae-hyun-nim….”
Her tone itself sounded relieved, but her every trailing word was soaked through with lingering regret and sorrow.
She had finally been freed from her past. She had finally found her own path. And nothing beyond that one thing was permitted to her.
Because death was already standing right before her eyes.
“Miss Ayase. You said something before we fought Behemoth, didn't you?”
“Yes…?”
“That if we won, I'd join your guild.”
Ayase's guild would be Amaterasu—Japan's largest, a heavyweight recognized around the world.
“I'm sorry, but I don't think I can honor that request. I have a guild of my own to answer for.”
It went without saying—I had no intention of abandoning Shinseong for Amaterasu. If it ever came to that, I might genuinely have to change my family name to Yamamoto.
“So instead, let's change the terms a little.”
“…?”
“You come to my guild, Miss Ayase.”
“Wha…?”
“We're not much of a guild in scale yet, but our potential is higher than wherever you are now. Before long, we'll be the best guild in Korea, in Asia—no, in the world.”
The contract terms were more than sufficient. Amaterasu might be rolling in money, but compared to Shinseong, they were the corner store down the street.
“It's not a bad deal. You wouldn't be a founding member, but at this stage you'd count as an early member.”
“…Puhuh! Just like the rumors say… you really are… a strange man….”
“Will you transfer?”
Ayase slowly closed her eyes. Like murmuring a final will, she whispered a few quiet words.
“I want… to go too… to Tae-hyun-nim's… guild….”
I carved those words firmly into my memory.
“No take-backs. And no cancellations.”
I opened a subspace pocket and drew out a bell made of bronze—a single bell that still shimmered, its light not yet spent.
Using the Bronze Bell.
Target: Ayase Karin
Consume one bell to fully restore the target's body?
This was no longer petty sympathy, nor some presumptuous act of salvation. It was an investment—to recruit Ayase Karin, Japan's number one hunter, an S-rank.
And if that was the case, there was no reason to hoard resources. When it came to acquiring talent, I was the type to pay any price.
Consuming a bell.
The Origin of Requiem has been activated!
A cerulean current flowed out from the last remaining bell and poured into Ayase. Bit by bit, her wounds knit themselves closed, and her deathly pale skin began to flush with a healthy warmth.
Pa-ah!
Warm light flared brilliantly, burning away every trace of the mutated mana lurking inside her body.
After a short while, Ayase opened her eyes again.
“Uh… uunn…?”
The clouded eyes had returned to their original clarity.
“Wh-what's going on? I was sure everything was over….”
Flustered, she hurriedly checked her own body.
“Huh…? Wait? Wha—?!”
Her eyes went wider and wider, shock written across her face.
Is that reaction the natural one? After all, far from dying, even the vicious pain that had tormented her all this time was gone.
To Ayase, who was rolling her eyes as though she couldn't make sense of it, I extended my hand and said:
“Miss Ayase. Welcome to Shinseong Guild.”
And just like that, with a single item, I'd acquired top-tier combat power.
A monster terror incident had broken out in Tokyo.
And because it had happened in the capital of Japan, the news spread like wildfire.
Dozens of buildings had been vaporized whole, and the city was ravaged on a scale that beggared description. And yet, miraculously, not a single civilian casualty had occurred.
The Japanese Hunter Bureau wasted no time releasing the full account of the incident: a guild that had been manufacturing and distributing illegal elixirs had attempted to raise a gate boss in captivity, failed, and the creature had gone berserk.
What's more, the illegal elixir known as the Moon Fragment was dragged into the open as well.
One problem remained: with current technology, it was difficult to capture hard evidence that the Moon Fragment's side effect was monster mutation.
And that was precisely why the corpses of the mutated hunters proved so crucial. Every one of them had taken the Moon Fragment, and by making that public, the authorities could formally declare the dangers of the elixir being traded in the shadows.
It wouldn't solve the problem at its root. But it was enough to light the fuse.
Spreading public awareness about the illegal elixirs alone would cut casualty cases down by a wide margin.
And there was one more reason this incident drew so much attention.
Because the man deeply entangled in this incident was Lee Tae-hyun himself. In the best possible way, of course.
As the central figure of the whole affair, Lee Tae-hyun's name couldn't be hidden no matter how hard anyone tried. So rather than fight it, they chose to lay it all out in the open—he had gone all the way to Japan to root out the illegal elixirs flowing into Korea.
It wasn't entirely wrong, and so another wave of praise swept across the internet. In particular, the flood of testimony from people who had evacuated in the early stages of the incident sent his reputation soaring even higher.
“He swung his spear once and the ground just split apart, and the dragon let out this skreeeee—anyway, it was insane.”
“He was throwing fire around, apparently? But they said he's not even a mage-type hunter?”
“Thanks to him, my children and I made it out alive. Truly, thank you.”
He'd drawn the dragon's attention away to minimize casualties. He'd swung his spear with a last letter tucked against his chest, ready to die. Rumor begat rumor, and the stories kept swelling.
As Lee Tae-hyun's image climbed, so too did the reputation of Shinseong Guild—and by extension, Shinseong the company. This affair had sent its stock soaring once again.
And then came the next earth-shattering headline.
“A… Ayase… you're serious…?”
“Yes, I'm serious.”
“Think it over again! There's going to be a massive backlash! Things are already loud enough with the Tokyo incident…!”
“The restoration is nearly complete, isn't it? And there were no civilian casualties.”
“Ggh! Did we do something to upset you? If so, we'll fix anything! If the contract terms weren't enough, we're prepared to concede as much as you like!”
“That's not it. Even now, I'm deeply grateful to you, Guild Master. You were the one who recognized my worth, after all.”
“Then why—!”
Ayase pulled a mischievous expression.
“Because I've found something… I want to achieve!”
Japan's Rank 1 hunter. Ayase Karin's withdrawal from Amaterasu.
And then—
A transfer to a Korean guild.
It was the moment the new Shinseong began to kindle its own light.