The Avenger's Return
"Hero… are you really… going back to your original world?"
The spirit Fairy hovered at his shoulder, her tiny translucent wings trembling as she asked the question — as if she still couldn't believe it, or as if she needed to hear it one last time. Regret and hurt clung thick to her voice.
"Yeah. It's all right now. I took care of that Demon King bastard, so…"
Lee Dongwoo flicked a finger gently against Fairy's minuscule head and smiled, soft and easy.
"I miss my family. I want to see them."
The long, grinding war against the Demon King was over. Peace had settled across the world, and everything had found its proper place — everything except the Hero himself. Lee Dongwoo had never belonged here. He had somewhere he needed to return to.
"Hnnngh… it's going to be so boring without you, Hero… but… I really was happy you were here!"
A young mage girl who barely came up to Dongwoo's waist cried out, enormous eyes swimming with unshed tears. She looked ready to burst into sobs at any second, and the way she fought to smile anyway was almost too much to bear.
"I had a great time with all of you, too. I really did."
Dongwoo stroked the girl's hair, his voice warm.
"But I have to go. My family's waiting for me."
There was no wavering in him. These were the comrades he had fought beside, laughed with, wept with — and still, the longing for his own world ran deeper than any of it.
The others did not try to stop him. They had weathered too many hardships at his side not to understand a Hero's heart better than anyone.
"Yeah… it's the Hero's decision. Who are we to stand in the way?"
"Be happy over there, Dongwoo. Promise us."
"Think of us once in a while, okay?"
Genuine blessings poured out through the ache of goodbye. Dongwoo felt the heat rise behind his eyes as he committed each of their faces to memory.
"Thank you. All of you. I mean it… thank you."
He offered his last farewell and turned slowly around. Before him, a portal shimmered open in rippling blue light, a gateway home. Beyond that surface — still as a quiet lake — the landscapes of the world he missed seemed to flicker, faint and far away.
He stepped through without hesitation. Blue light folded around his body, and in another breath he was gone, swallowed whole by the glow.
The portal lingered a moment longer, then slid shut as if nothing had ever been there. In the space the Hero left behind, only the peace he had won and the longing of his comrades remained.
Inside the blue portal, chaos reigned. Colors of every kind bled and flared before his eyes; strange noises and violent tremors rattled through him. Lee Dongwoo staggered, his sense of direction gone for a moment — then, as if settling into something familiar, he closed his eyes and let the past rise up.
Having his money stolen had been a daily ritual. They would drag him around, beat him, make him a laughingstock. Once they even locked him naked in a bathroom stall and took pictures.
The more he resisted, the worse the bullying became, until at last he gave up on everything and simply grew used to being crushed underfoot. Every day was the same nightmare, looping without end.
…But it's different now.
Dongwoo clenched his fist. The power he had gained in the Other World was overwhelming. Even the Demon King had been no match for him. With this strength, no one would ever trample him again. No — far from being trampled…
I have to be a good son to Dad. And… I have to take care of Minji. She's my only little sister. I have to treat her right.
Recalling that dark, damp past only made his resolve for the future burn clearer. He was strong now. He could protect the people who mattered.
A warm home-cooked meal. His father's face after so long. His little sister, always a nuisance, always tagging after her big brother in the end. The images drifted before his eyes, and a warmth gathered in his chest as the portal's light slowly faded.
Familiar air. A familiar landscape. When his senses returned, he was standing in front of his own house — a shabby two-story home, worn but dear. Everything was just as he remembered. Relief and excitement tangled together as he turned the front-door handle. Even the creak of the hinges felt like a welcome.
"I'm ho—"
The rest of the word never left his mouth. Dongwoo froze where he stood.
In the center of the living room ceiling… his father was hanging.
A body gone cold. Limbs dangling slack. Eyes that held no focus at all. In a silence so complete it felt as though time itself had stopped, Dongwoo forgot even how to breathe. He could not accept that the scene before him was real.
How long he stood there, he couldn't have said. His gaze drifted slowly downward. At his father's feet, on the old dining table, lay a single sheet of white paper.
He forced his shaking legs to carry him to the table. The tips of his fingers trembled beyond any control. What he managed to pick up was written, without any doubt, in his father's hand… a suicide note.
"Ah… ah… Dad…?"
Hot tears struck the paper in heavy drops. Nothing remained of the Hero who had felled the Demon King. He was only a son watching his world collapse.
He could not hold back the sobs that tore out of him, raw and choking. A homecoming packed with hope had, in a single instant, become a despair he would never climb out of.
The paper in his hands grew damp and heavy. He couldn't tell whether it was his own tears or the ones his father had already shed across the page. With a shaking gaze he followed, character by desperate character, his father's final words.
The note was short. The hell packed inside it was not.
Dongwoo, after you disappeared… Minji… even Minji… those kids wouldn't leave her alone…
His heart dropped like a stone. Even after he had been summoned to the Other World, his only sister, Minji, had been left behind to endure that same horrific abuse alone.
Day after day of violence and humiliation — torment that may well have been worse than anything he himself had suffered — and under it, Minji had slowly come apart.
In the end, Minji… left her dad first. I'm sorry I couldn't protect her… I'm sorry, Dongwoo…
Minji's suicide. And their father, left alone. Faced with a vanished son and a dead daughter, he had not broken. No — he had not been allowed to break. He had gone to the school. He had screamed for the truth, demanded that those responsible be punished.
The school stayed quiet. The delinquent kids who had done it kept their heads down for a while, bowing and scraping in front of their father. They were sorry, they said. They were reflecting. Behind his back, a far more cunning and vicious revenge was already being planned.
They sent underage kids into the shop and had them order drinks. Even forged IDs… A report went in, and I got hit with a business suspension.
Someone with pull must have been involved, because a food-safety inspection stormed in and tore the place apart.
They showed up every day to raise hell, drove the customers off… smashed the merchandise…
His father's little shop was destroyed without a prayer of fighting back. Against power and money and every dirty trick in the book, an ordinary small-business owner could do nothing. In less than a year the shop closed its doors, and their father lost everything.
I fought alone. I tried to hold on somehow. When you and Minji came back… I didn't want to be a father you had to be ashamed of… but I'm so tired now.
— Dad
The last sentence had been scrawled as if the strength had gone out of the hand that wrote it. The deep despair that comes at the end of a lonely fight. The pain of a father who had lost every last hope and been driven to take his own life came through the paper as if it were still warm.
"Kh… Aaaagh… AAAAAAAAAAH!!!"
A scream tore out of Dongwoo like something from an animal. The hand clutching the note shook so hard it convulsed. Hot tears ran from his eyes like blood. His father's face, his sister's face, and the faces of the animals who had tortured them all swirled and flickered before him.
He had believed that coming home with overwhelming power would make everything all right. He had believed they could be happy. But while he had been fighting in the Other World, the hell of this one had never ended.
It had only grown deeper and darker. Being a good son? Happiness? All of it had been smashed to pieces. What remained was a grief that cut to the bone, and a hatred hot enough to burn the world down.
Dongwoo dropped to his knees before his father's cold body and wailed. There was no Hero's homecoming. There was only the birth of a thing that wanted revenge.
As if he meant to crush it to dust, Dongwoo clenched the suicide note in his fist. The pain of paper edges biting into his palm was nothing beside the agony gouging out his heart.
The tears that had poured down so hot were already cooling, drying on his cheeks. Hollow eyes turned toward the corpse that had gone so thoroughly cold. The choking sobs faded, and in their place a whisper rose — low, and unnervingly calm.
His voice was wrecked, but the hatred inside it was iron.
"Your revenge… and Minji's, too… those fucking pieces of shit… I will make them pay. I swear I will."
His clenched jaw trembled. The faces of the ones who had destroyed his father and Minji — faces he could no longer even see as human — rose and vanished, rose and vanished, behind his eyes.
The despair his father must have felt. The terror and shame Minji must have known. He felt it all as if it were his own.
"I'll make them crawl to your grave and beg. I'll make them say they're sorry. Yeah… that's what I'm going to do."
Dongwoo looked down at his father's slack, hanging feet. The grief in his eyes was no longer alone. A killing madness had begun to gleam there. The bloodlust honed against the Demon King in the Other World twisted together with the hatred of this world and bloomed into something far more vicious, far more powerful.
He crushed the crumpled note even tighter. His knuckles went white. All that remained to him now was a single thing: revenge. He would show hell to the ones who had stolen his family.
Every power he had gained as a Hero, every scrap of experience — he would pour it all into vengeance alone. A cold resolve filled the hollow in his chest. The Hero who had come home was gone. Only an avenger who had swallowed tears of blood stood before his father's corpse.