My Brother Became a Hikikomori
Her brother had become a hikikomori — or so Cheon Se-ah had concluded, and having let her guard down on that careless certainty, she would never stop kicking herself for what a catastrophic mistake it turned out to be. In the month and more since Cheon Yujin's return, he had not gone out on his own even once. And every time the two of them had stepped outside together, there it was — that extreme, hair-trigger wariness toward everything around him. Judging by that alone, she had assumed a brother whose fear of people ran that deep would never dream of leaving the house by himself, and she had stopped worrying.
Of course, she hadn't left things completely unguarded. She felt genuinely terrible about it, but she had quietly activated the family-link GPS on his smartwatch — a privilege available only because she'd registered herself as his guardian. She had also needed to account for the possibility that her brother, whose personality had curdled into that of a scatterbrained goofball, might wander off without the watch entirely; his occasional fumbling with modern civilization, ten years out of date, played a part in that too. And so she had ended up spending a small fortune installing a GPS tracker in every single piece of Yujin's clothing.
Infantile regression, on top of a mind in an anxious state riddled with every symptom under the sun — that was Cheon Yujin now. In truth, though, the GPS hadn't been for his sake alone. Something she could never bring herself to tell her brother: Cheon Se-ah carried one trauma of her own. A nightmare she no longer had. Her brother in a soldier's uniform, being torn apart and devoured by a monster; flesh soaked through with blood. A nightmare that had run unbroken for ten years. And so the fear that her miraculously returned brother might vanish again at any moment had clung to her without pause, and whenever she couldn't be face-to-face with him, confirming his location — even just that — was enough to let her breathe.
And then—
Of all times...!
The worst possible timing. How, by any cruelty of chance, could disaster pick the single worst moment imaginable to strike?
By nature, Cheon Se-ah was one of the rare solo hunters among the 1st-Generation Hunters, and with no organization behind her, she'd had little reason to take on work in the first place. The fortune she'd banked over the years was enormous, and she had power and standing to spare — enough that she could have devoted the rest of her life to nothing but caring for her brother and never felt the pinch. The problem was Cheon Yujin's status as a Returnee. With Namgung Yerin, the hunter who had first stumbled onto him, she'd managed to muddlethrough, at least, and a hefty wire transfer had sealed the woman's lips beyond any doubt.
But the mouth of a government that had confirmed Cheon Yujin was a Returnee was not so easily shut. As a 1st-Generation Hunter she had cultivated meticulous ties with the state since the earliest days of the Gate crisis, yet real negotiation had still been unavoidable. The end result: she'd been saddled with a quota of gate cleanup tailored to the government's palate, no different from the state-run hunters on the public payroll.
That much she could swallow. If anything, it left a permanent ache of guilt where her brother was concerned — had it not been for her own standing as a 1st-Generation Hunter, the fact of Cheon Yujin being a Returnee wouldn't have cost anyone anything at all.
And then came today. She had originally been working gate cleanup jointly with the Iron Blood Guild, but the emergence of an Indefinite Gate had pulled them away, leaving her workload a touch heavier than usual. Monsters and dungeons kept piling up faster than she could clear them, and her head was a blur — all she'd done was skip checking her brother's location, the thing she normally checked every hour on the hour, for a few brief hours while she was buried in work.
“...You idiot. You absolute idiot...”
Self-recrimination, endless and bitter. Without even thinking to fix her disheveled hair, Cheon Se-ah gnawed at her fingernails and blamed herself all over again.
She had told herself it would be nothing, that everything would be fine. The moment she'd stepped out of the dungeon and checked her smartwatch, Yujin's location had pinged near the Sungmuryeon Guild — not far from home, so clearly just a short outing. Her brother had a peculiar fondness for the broadcasts starring Martial Arts Awakeners, so he'd probably simply wanted a look at the Sungmuryeon Guild building. She'd figured she would swing by soon, collect him, tear into him for leaving without a word, and confiscate his allowance as punishment. Problem solved.
And then the emergency call came. A terror attack on the Indefinite Gate — a request for backup from every high-rank hunter in the vicinity. The exact spot her brother Cheon Yujin's GPS was pointing to.
And so Cheon Se-ah had sprinted like a madwoman to where she now stood. What she found there was a warping of space ringing the point where the Indefinite Gate had been — a distortion standing guard like a barrier around everything within. And outside it, unable to breach in, waited Iron Blood Guild Master Kim Jinhu and his guild members.
Kim Jinhu, eyes fixed on the warped barrier, tapped at his smartwatch and popped the bubblegum in his mouth.
“A Superposition Phenomenon... The longest one on record held for exactly 22 hours, 37 minutes, and 14 seconds. No telling how this one will run.”
The Superposition Phenomenon was rarer by far than even the Indefinite Gate itself. It arose when a rift that had failed to ripen into a proper gate shattered for reasons unknown — which was why even Cheon Se-ah was seeing one with her own eyes for the first time. And its single most critical property: its duration was never long, but unlike a gate, entry from the outside was utterly impossible. If even this phenomenon had been engineered by whoever launched the terror attack, then it amounted to nothing short of a divine move — a perfect seal against all outside support.
Drowning in the helplessness of being able to do nothing, Cheon Se-ah buried her face in her knees.
“Hey, Cheon Se-ah. You've been acting seriously strange for a while now. You got some secret of your own you can't tell me about?”
“……………”
“Haa... My own people are trapped in there too, and it's driving me up the wall. What the hell is with you? This isn't like you at all.”
Perhaps it was because the one prodding her was Kim Jinhu — the last friend her own age she had left — that the dam finally strained. She caught herself on the last thread of her reason and stopped short of dragging her brother into it. But the sob swelling in her chest detonated anyway; she flung her head up from her knees and screamed.
“My family... my FAMILY is trapped in there! What more do you want me to do?!”
Kim Jinhu's brows knotted deep in sheer disbelief.
“Wh... what? Family? Hang on — since when do you have family besides Cheon Se-yul...?”
Then—
Kuuuum─
The warped shards of rift dividing this side from that. A gale of raw mana came howling in, and the distorted space dissolved like a mirage.
Kim Jinhu, who had been stammering through his sentence, went bug-eyed and jabbed a finger skyward.
“Hey— heyheyhey! It cracked— it cracked! Shit, what are you all lying around for! Prep for entry... Cheon Se-ah? Hey, Cheon Se-ah! You absolute luna—!!!”
Kim Jinhu lunged to stop her — but Cheon Se-ah had already left the Iron Blood Guild behind her, running flat-out for the coordinates on her GPS.
And there she found Namgung Yerin of Aegis — the hunter she owed a debt she could never repay for finding her brother before. And limp and unconscious in Namgung Yerin's arms lay Cheon Yujin.
“O—Oppa!!!”
That she'd forgotten, even for a moment, the need to hide who she was couldn't be helped. But as she pried Yujin from the woman's arms and hoisted him into her own, Cheon Se-ah's expression went rigid.
“O... Oppa...?”
A crust of dried blood under his nose. And on top of his head, a bump — straight out of a comic panel.
...A bump?
“...Huh?”
A red star embroidered across the night sky. The Blood Demon Star.
Mere moments after subduing Kang Mu-jin, the Blood Demon had turned his glare upon that brilliantly blazing star as a question surfaced unbidden. For a constellation inscribed upon the heavens was the very emblem of Transcendence — and the sheer existence of that constellation was a contradiction in itself.
“...Did that star not fall?”
That day, he had hurled the Blood Phoenix — fueled by the blood of the supreme masters of the two great Murim leagues — to knock upon the gates of heaven. But it had all been a trap the Heavenly Demon had laid across long ages. In the end, hounded to death's very doorstep, had he not withered away on the threshold of Transcendence, just as every demon-lord before him had? And thus he had come to be sealed inside this frail girl's frame.
“.........”
The place radiating that distant, aching longing was the Blood Demon's star, adorning the heavens. How could the constellation of the sky — proof of Transcendence itself — be shining so? If so, why had his link to the star of Transcendence been severed all this while, and why did he feel that longing now?
What flooded his body was omnipotence. Mind transcending flesh; no boundary left between inner and outer power; the mind leading, and the body following. The state of one who had smashed through the Transcendent Realm and thrown off the shackles of the flesh.
And yet the Blood Demon stared down at his thin palm with eyes gone dark and sunken. The paradox: the mind had transcended the body — yet the total strength he could draw upon did not reach even half of what he'd wielded in his prime.
Contradiction. Contradiction. Contradiction.
The Blood Demon's gut told him that the inexplicable cause of his infant-fresh body, too, was likely knotted into this same web of paradoxes.
But that was that. It was a question that would not unravel today — and there was a matter to settle first.
Shff─
The Blood Demon's form slid across the snow like a blade.
Namgung Yerin, who had been watching the whole spectacle in a daze, jolted violently as the crimson face popped up a hand's width from her own.
“Uh— ah— th, th-th-th... you're, um... a r-real... R-Returnee... then, aren't, you?”
Politeness had leaked out of her without her permission. Her pupils swam with nowhere to flee, her tongue trembled, and nothing came out whole.
Bewilderment. Confusion. Terror.
No — how could anyone be a genuine Returnee, let alone the actual Blood Demon or whatever the hell he was? The first thing that surfaced in Namgung Yerin's memory was the worst superhuman criminal in the nation's history — a mass serial killer of Returnee origin, known to all by the epithet “Power Hider.”
What if the Returnee before her was cut from that same cloth? But then why on earth hide his strength? No — fine, even granting that he'd hidden his power, why act like that? So what was this, a “Power-Hiding Baby”?
“W, we-ll... you caught Kang Mu-jin and all. S-so, um... what will you be... doing now?”
It was all she could scrape together under the pressure of that long, silent stare. She regretted it almost instantly.
Why had she asked that? What answer had she imagined she'd get? And if the reply that came back was one she couldn't bear — then what?
Heart slamming, the instant Namgung Yerin screwed her eyes shut—
—Cheon Yujin answered, smiling.
“World domination.”
“...!”
Terror — the kind born from the thought that it might genuinely be possible.
And then—
“I shall conquer the world and remake it into a hell for humankind, where one-piece desks alone exist!”
“...Pardon?”
Namgung Yerin blinked. She spent a long moment carefully reassembling what she'd just heard, word by word — and then pushed back.
“...Pah-pardon me??”
Cheon Yujin, the Blood Demon — finest under heaven. He had sworn his vow of debts and grudges before heaven and earth themselves, and he would never, ever forget it.
Number Three on the Death List: the desk.
Cheon Yujin declared.
“Every desk that dared to sting Bonjwa's hand each time Bonjwa brought it down in fury shall pay the price.”
“Um, hey, so, about that...”
He brought that on himself... didn't he?
“The foolish mortals shall bow their backs before Bonjwa and press their faces into the dirt, groveling in eternal submission!”
“W, we-ll...”
Wouldn't they just... be lying there collapsed, taken out by lumbar and cervical disc disease?
Ridiculous to the ear — and yet, on reflection, a genuinely horrifying hell. In a world where only one-piece desks existed, the very concept of 'sitting down' would become synonymous with agony.
Then Cheon Yujin reached out a hand.
“Namgung Yerin. Between you and Bonjwa lie both a debt and a grudge — do they not?”
“Y-yes? A g-grudge? Me? Against you?”
“Do you truly believe Bonjwa could forget those savage, merciless eyes — eyes that feasted with such delight upon Bonjwa's humiliation?”
Like I said, that one was self-inflicted—!
“I shall not kill you.”
“Kya— KYAAAAAAH...!”
The hand drew closer. Eyes screwed shut, Namgung Yerin let loose a scream that tore the air.
She screamed. She kept on screaming.
“AAAAAAH... ah... ah?”
...Kept screaming?
Namgung Yerin cracked her eyes open just a sliver.
Drip.
The fishy tang of iron spread across a tongue.
Cheon Yujin, entirely on reflex, lifted a hand and wiped between his nose and lips.
Bright red blood came away on his fingers.
“...Eh?”
Somewhere along the way the snowfield had vanished like a mirage at dawn, leaving the ordinary cityscape spread out as on any other night — and the brilliant starlight that had lit the sky was gone without a trace.
Legs quivering. A frail girl's body. And all that remained within that body was an unfinished martial art — the laughably feeble Forged Blood Art.
Their eyes met in the empty air.
“.........”
“.........”
Silence.
A handful of seconds that felt like an eternity settled over the scene — and then—
…Sniffle, sniffle.
“Sh-shall we... call it a draw...?”
“.........”
CLANG!