The Idol and the Human Domino
The guild master's office at Iron Blood.
Whenever the strongest martial arts awakeners in the country came up for debate, one name was always counted among the top three: the first-generation hunter Kim Jinhu, the Iron Blood Sword.
He had been nothing more than a seventeen-year-old high school student when the very first Gate opened and he awakened the Iron Blood Sword Art. From the survival camp that formed around his school-turned-shelter, he had begun his first struggle to stay alive, and by the time the years had passed and he came to his senses, he was somehow the guild master of a major guild that people called a corporate giant.
The early Gate crisis was, in truth, less a crisis than a war, pandemonium so absolute that only the word "war" honestly fit it. And on that battlefield, together with his high school classmate, the hunter Cheon Se-ah, he had served as "sword and shield," stacking up victories without number until the pair was practically a living legend of invincibility.
Where Cheon Se-ah had remained a solo hunter all this while, avoiding the camera and the media, Kim Jinhu had operated in the open as master of a major guild, and to the young hunters of the new generation he was nothing short of an idol. The hero of the Gate era. The object of every martial awakener's longing. That very idol of the hunting world, Kim Jinhu, sat in his office chair, kneading the eyes that dark circles had stained pitch-black, and cursed the world.
"No, I'm saying... all we did was stand guard together. What more do you want us to do here? Yes?"
"...........!!!"
Kim Jinhu genuinely wanted to cover his ears against the scream pouring out of his smartwatch. What kind of martial art had this woman learned that her voice carried like a war drum?
Drawing a deep breath, he continued. "We gave testimony. We signed the paperwork. We've done everything we can, so good luck with the rest of the hearing schedule. I'm hanging up now?"
"............!!!!!"
Click.
To dam the lion's roar that seemed ready to punch straight through the smartwatch, Kim Jinhu cut the line in one motion.
"Ah, damn it..."
A dull throb pulsed through his skull. He had reinforced his eardrums with mana, and they still stung; if he had met her in person as she demanded, his eardrums would probably have burst.
Kim Jinhu flashed a self-mocking smile at his waiting adjutant, exhaustion dripping off his face. "Honestly, that Sungmuryeon guild master... I swear the woman has lost whatever eyes she used to have. Now she's chewing me out too."
"Well, with the lawsuits and hearings turning every single day into a disaster, I'd lose my mind too if I were her."
"Seeing her this far gone, I'm starting to think she really didn't know anything. It's hard to call."
Kim Jinhu propped his legs up on the needlessly luxurious rosewood desk and blew a rough bubble with his gum.
The Indefinite Gate terror attack carried out by Sungmuryeon Guild's Kang Mu-jin. Iron Blood had been holding part of the Gate's defensive line at the time, but casualties had been smaller than feared. The same went for Aegis Guild, which had been sharing guard duty. And, laughably, the party that had taken the greatest damage from the whole affair was Sungmuryeon Guild itself. Most of the hunters in Sungmuryeon coats who had carried out the attack turned out to be unidentified hunters wearing the disguise and nothing more, while the real Sungmuryeon hunters had mostly died or vanished. In the middle of all that, the Sungmuryeon guild master had taken a direct hit from a barrage of lawsuits and hearings, and the fallout left the guild facing a long slog through the swamp of stagnation. If it had been any guild smaller than Sungmuryeon, it would have been dismantled several times over. By this point, you could almost believe Sungmuryeon had been the target from the very start.
"So that incident's been on your mind? Is that why you've been so tired lately?"
"No, that's not it."
Kim Jinhu denied it flatly. Annoying, certainly, but Iron Blood had come out of it nearly unscathed. And as a first-generation hunter, watching a returnee like the Sungmuryeon guild master end up in that state did sting a little. But.
Kim Jinhu recalled another strange event from the Indefinite Gate terror attack and let out a sigh steeped in fatigue.
"Hey. So... this is a bit of a private question..."
"...?"
"How on earth is a person supposed to look after a kid who can't even walk properly...?"
"...I'm sorry? What?"
The Indefinite Gate terror attack. During the operation to rescue the survivors and the injured, Kim Jinhu had found a survivor buried in the debris of a collapsed building. Not just any survivor, but a naked little girl. What on earth could have happened for a naked girl to come out of that rubble? A girl with hair bleached snow-white and exotic blue eyes. He had dug through every record he could find for anything about her identity, but she was a complete unknown. Kim Jinhu had been through plenty of bizarre Gate-related incidents, and on a strange gut feeling he had decided to take the girl in himself. And then...
"I was out of my mind."
Kim Jinhu stared blankly at the view outside the window. The girl looked to be in her mid-teens, yet strangely she could not understand a word of Korean. Like a newborn, she could not manage proper speech and only mumbled, and for more than a month now she had not even managed her first steps...!
A man only in his mid-to-late twenties had been made to feel like a brand-new father, and every single day was agony. This world was cursed. What was it about responsibility, anyway? Who could have known he would end up the poster child for joyless obligation...!
"Haa... Never mind, forget it. Weren't you coming in to report something?"
"There seems to be a problem with the routing for the hunter license exam and the new recruit intake exam, sir."
Kim Jinhu, who had been lazily blowing his bubble gum, narrowed his eyes.
The hunter license exam. To keep from infringing on hunters' autonomy and freedom, license distribution had been handed over to the guilds, but if every guild could administer the exam, the license would lose all coherent value, and if only one guild could, it would wreck fairness outright. So after a backroom process of bargaining between the government and the first-generation hunters, a bizarre system had been locked in place: any guild above a certain size would take turns hosting the exam under the banner of "cooperation with the government." And this time it was Iron Blood's turn.
Kim Jinhu looked over the materials his adjutant handed him and snorted a laugh. "Oh. So that's what this is. The two routes just overlap for a bit inside the guild building."
"I thought it might become a problem."
"It's a little insulting that nobody paid attention to the details, but that's partly on the bureaucrats... I can let this much slide."
The adjutant followed his lead, a mischievous smile tugging at his mouth. "Handle it that carelessly and you'll get plastered all over Hunter Gallery again for never letting go of that shitpost mentality."
Kim Jinhu chuckled at the joke and waved a hand. "The people coming to take the exam are adults, not kids. You think a few minutes of overlap is going to cause an incident? Still, better safe than sorry. Have everyone stay as careful as possible."
That was how Kim Jinhu laughed.
Beep.
His smartwatch chimed, and he checked the incoming message.
Scrrrape.
"...Why are you suddenly getting up, Guild Master? Where are you going?"
Kim Jinhu smiled. In a slightly different sense than usual.
"...Going to make lunch."
And so it came to pass.
I, Bonjwa, the Blood Demon Cheon Yujin.
My awakener registration had failed, yes, but the road to becoming a hunter was not yet closed. I was merely classified as unawakened. It was not that I lacked mana or internal energy; this body was, for all practical purposes, no different from a martial arts awakener's. Something as trivial as earning a hunter license posed no problem whatsoever...!
It was, in a word, a flawless plan. I called to mind every perfect scheme my incomparably meticulous brain had ever devised.
I went out for tonkatsu and got dragged to a hospital. I tried to make a name for myself giving pointers and drew no reaction at all. I set out for Sungmuryeon and ended up at an Indefinite Gate. I went to register as an awakener and arrived at the hunter license exam.
"...?"
Had... not a single one of my plans ever gone the way I drew it up?
"N-no, wait...!"
Man proposes, heaven disposes...! I had defeated Ma-noe, the finest strategist in all of Blood Heaven Castle, at the baduk board, which made my brain nothing less than the greatest schemer under heaven. My plans had been perfect. Heaven's fortune had simply refused to follow my will...!
The exam site was Iron Blood, a major guild whose name I had heard often enough online. Since Sungmuryeon had required a change of course, this was effectively the first hunter guild headquarters I had ever set foot in.
"Hunter license exam candidates! We will now move to the designated area!"
I rose from my seat, following the mana-laced voice carrying from far away. Se-ah could not follow me into the exam site, so I had spared no effort in shielding this frail body's hypersensitive reactions. A thick hood that would hide my hair completely. A huge mask covering my face. With these, I could more or less keep this body from bawling like an infant the moment it crossed a stranger. Better still, Se-ah had spent a small fortune having it mana-treated, a top-of-the-line piece with built-in cooling that could be worn even in midsummer...! Truly, the power of capital. With cooling built in, dressing this heavily was no problem at all...!
"Hahh, hah... hahh..."
Heat. Heat. Heat. I let my tongue loll out and panted, trying to scatter the heat pooling in my face.
What is this. The hood had cooling, and the guild building had its air conditioning blasting the way any self-respecting corporation's would. Then what, in the name of everything, was this crushing density of people and this heat...!
Too many. There were too many people, far too many. And the trouble was that this cursed body did not even reach half the height of an adult man. Ahead of me, people's backs. Behind me, people's legs. North, south, east, and west, nothing but person after person, until I could not even tell which way I was going. The only thing my field of vision could reach was the ceiling overhead.
"...!"
I looked up and froze in horror. What in the world was that pale haze hanging beneath the corridor ceiling...! Through the gaps between the crowd I had glimpsed people wearing everything from coats to full armor in the middle of summer.
"...! ...moving now!"
Because I had been gaping at the haze and the armor, I had missed the announcement a second time. Just as I stretched my neck out to catch the voice...
"Huk...!"
My body slammed into a man walking right beside me, made a strange sound, and bounced sideways.
"Oof! Sorry, I didn't... huh? What did I just hit?"
The man looked around in bewilderment without ever lowering his eyes. Only then did I understand. Yes, this was a crowd moving in proper formation, following the guidance. But the space was packed so tight that everyone else's vision was badly limited too. For someone built far smaller than the people around her, this space was nothing short of hell...!
"Wh-what? I hit something..."
"There was no presence at all...? Too faint to be a person...?"
A domino run of one. The moment I bounced off, I began careening into people left and right, losing all sense of direction. For most adults, this density was merely moderately uncomfortable. For this frail body, it was something else entirely. With nowhere left to stand my ground, wave after wave of innocent, mindless pressure rolled over me.
"Huk, hik, hikyak!"
Swept along by the crush of the crowd, my back bent like a drawn bow.
"Ogogok...!"
I, Bonjwa, the Blood Demon Cheon Yujin. At this rate I was going to be pressed into jerky...! Why did this cursed body have to face a crisis before the exam had even begun!
"Bonjwa is... not jerky...!"
In truth, I could still bear it. What I absolutely could not bear was having become a vending machine that dispensed absurd noises with every collision.
Forged Blood Art. Running it at full power, searing heat came pouring off my entire body. And that heat...! It could grant everyone around me the overwhelming warmth of standing face-to-face with an electric heater in the middle of summer...!
"Ow, ow! What the...?"
"Hot! It's hot!"
At last a gap opened, and beyond it my eyes caught a space that looked at least somewhat roomier. Without a moment's hesitation, Bonjwa lowered her stance, unleashed a ghostlike footwork, and hurled herself at the gap.
Shashashashashak!
...In any case, it was a ghostlike footwork!
"Hahh, hah..."
To keep any trace of embarrassment from showing, I steadied my breathing as quietly as I could inside the mask. Only now, barely recovering my usual breath and composure, I glanced around at the crowd without thinking.
The spacing was looser than before, far less uncomfortable. Just as before, my view cut off above everyone's waist. The ratio of coats and armor seemed to have grown, but I was simply relieved to have escaped being pressed into jerky, and went toddling along in the wake of people's backs.