A Trick of Fate (1)
Sunlight slipped through the window and made me blink. Dust drifted lazily through the air, and my head felt fogged over, as if someone had stuffed it full of cotton.
...Where am I?
Someone shook me.
“Boss. Boss?”
It was Karki.
I slowly looked around. I was lying on a bed made from cardboard laid over Styrofoam crates. We were in a warehouse inside the factory.
I checked the clock hanging on the wall.
3:48 p.m.
...How many hours did I sleep?
As soon as I tried to sit up, a searing pain tore through my entire body.
“Ghk!”
Every inch of me screamed as if I’d been beaten senseless all night.
“Boss! You okay?”
“...”
I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten here. The only thing I could vaguely recall was the rain—pouring down in sheets.
Karki had shoved me into the back seat of his car and driven like a madman.
Karki slipped an arm under me and helped me sit up.
“We were gonna go to hospital, but Boss said absolutely no, so I bring you here!”
My body was a mess. If I’d gone to a hospital wearing the Purple Devil suit, my identity would’ve been exposed immediately.
“How did you find me?”
“Saw signal get weak, then run here right away!”
Karki pointed to a device near my chest.
So that was it. He must have checked my heart rate and confirmed my condition remotely.
“I nearly freak out when I saw you collapsed in the alley, soaked by rain!”
I’d somehow staggered out of the Dio Guild building, but after that I’d lost consciousness almost immediately.
I stared blankly at the floating numbers in the air.
₩985,231,157
The amount was smaller than it had been last night. Regeneration must have kicked in even while I was unconscious.
Karki looked up at me with a face full of worry.
“Boss! You almost die! Seriously, almost!”
He wasn’t wrong. If I hadn’t had a hero ability, I might already have ended my second life right there.
“What about work? Aren’t you supposed to be at the factory?”
“Work is problem right now? Boss look like this! I stay, okay!”
Karki ran off somewhere and came back with a bottle of water.
“Boss! Drink!”
I gulped down the water, the dryness in my throat finally giving way. As the cold rush slid down my esophagus, it felt as if one cell after another in my body were waking up.
“Haa. Feels like I can live again.”
Going head-to-head with an S-class hunter had been suicidal. I’d survived only because luck had, somehow, been on my side.
I really did come back from a miracle.
Leaning against the wall, I watched Karki chatter away.
“Yeong-cheol guys bury all Dio Guild corpses on back hill. Now everybody scared ghosts, no one go back hill!”
So that was it. Yeong-cheol had cleaned up after the chaos the Purple Devil had caused.
“How’s the factory?”
“Well...”
Karki scratched his head.
“Dormitory burn to ashes, all of it!”
The factory had taken a huge hit in the Dio Guild raid. Most of the Yeong-cheol Suho-dae who fought them were badly wounded, and the foreign workers’ shelter had burned down in an instant.
A deep sigh slipped out of me.
“...Damn it.”
In comic books, a hero appeared in a crisis and unleashed omnipotent power. But reality wasn’t a comic book. I couldn’t save everyone perfectly.
As my gaze dropped, Karki spoke up.
“Boss. Don’t blame yourself. Because of Purple Devil, nobody died! If not, at least few people would die for sure!”
His attempt at comfort eased my chest a little.
The twins hired by the Dio Guild had come for Factory 7 with killing intent. If I hadn’t stopped them, there would have been a massacre.
“Boss. Look this.”
Karki held out his phone.
Last night, Go Ju-hun, the chairman of the Dio Guild, was found to have made the extreme choice of ending his own life.
While the exact cause has not yet been confirmed, investigators are currently treating the death as a fall from height...
I knew better than anyone that this article was a lie.
Why are they going to such lengths to cover this up?
I grabbed the phone and searched for “Go Ju-hun.”
On the stormy night of yesterday, Go Ju-hun, an S-class hunter and the representative of the Dio Guild, brought his life to an end.
Why would a man so young, with wealth and fame in his hands, make such a tragic choice? According to those close to him, Go Ju-hun had been suffering from severe depression...
Mourners continued to arrive at the funeral hall in 00 Hospital, where the late Go Ju-hun's body has been laid out.
Assemblyman Kim, who came as a representative of the ruling party, said, “A shining star in the hunter world has gone dark,” expressing deep sorrow. Meanwhile, Go Ju-hun's fan café also posted tributes...
“Boss.”
I looked up at Karki’s voice.
He was staring straight at me.
“Boss kill him, right?”
I nodded without saying a word.
“Hmm. Yep. Figured.”
Karki’s brow furrowed into a serious line.
For a moment, I wondered what he was thinking. I had wiped out the Dio Guild goons who’d ambushed the industrial complex, then charged straight into enemy territory, severed the head of their leader, and come back.
The short version was simple: I had killed a man. And Karki was looking at that killer right now.
What would he say to me?
Even if he’s scared of me, even if he condemns me, I won’t have anything to say.
In my last life, we’d just been coworkers—reasonably close, but nothing special. But in this life, because I’d gone around shouting that I was going to be a hero, he’d accidentally become an accomplice to murder.
My head filled with possibilities for what he might say next.
“You did great! That bastard deserved to die!”
Karki shot me a thumbs-up.
“That rotten little bastard! That trash piece of crap! Wasn’t he the one who got hauled in for bribery last year, then came back out after getting acquitted? If we leave scum like that alive, of course the country ends up like this!”
Somehow, the Nepalese Karki seemed more worried about the future of this country than I, a Korean, did.
I couldn’t help snorting a laugh. Talking with him always made me relax without meaning to.
“By the way.”
Karki reached out and rubbed my back.
“What happened, exactly? You beat an S-class hunter. Boss really that strong?”
I flexed a little, trying to look cocky.
“I’m insanely strong.”
The moment I tried to put force into my arm, my side pulled so badly I quietly lowered it again.
“I almost crossed the River Styx.”
I fought Go Ju-hun in the middle of a typhoon, dragged lightning down onto myself, and took it straight through my entire body. The whole thing had been so absurd it all felt dreamlike now.
“Hoo...”
Sweat had already broken out on me, and a yawn followed. Even after sleeping that long, drowsiness still washed over me. The strain on my body had left a very real aftershock behind.
This confirms it.
The hero abilities are strong enough to stand against an S-class hunter.
But my body still can’t support them yet.
I need to expand the vessel. I need training—enough to tear myself apart if I have to, enough to push harder than I ever have before.
I flopped backward again. My stomach rumbled.
“...I’m hungry.”
“Boss! Rest! I go buy food!”
Karki opened the door, then hesitated.
“But Boss. What if Dio Guild bastards come find us again?”
No matter how strong a monster was, if it lost its head, it lost all ability to move. Dio Guild had lost its leadership.
“I doubt anything like that will happen right away.”
“Then what you do from now on?”
At Karki’s question, I suddenly remembered the thing I’d been putting off. There was a rite of passage every Awakener had to go through.
I stared up at the ceiling and muttered, “I should register as a hunter first.”
One week later.
Go Ju-hun’s death hit the Dio Guild like a nuclear bomb.
An emergency board meeting was called.
“Representative Go committed suicide? Do you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds?”
“Shouldn’t we be starting with a proper investigation?”
“Unbelievable. In all my years, this is the first time I’ve heard of an S-class hunter taking his own life. Say something, would you!”
Arrows of accusation rained down on Lee Yu-seol, who sat at the center of the U-shaped table.
Lee Yu-seol bowed her head and said nothing. She still hadn’t recovered from the shock.
Every time she closed her eyes, the nightmare of that day came back with terrifying clarity.
She knew the truth too well. Representative Go Ju-hun was not the kind of man who would ever commit suicide.
The man she had admired would never treat his own life as something worthless.
After Go Ju-hun died, Lee Yu-seol rewrote every detail of the case and manipulated public opinion.
Under her direction, every CCTV recording in the information team was deleted. The mangled corpse—struck by lightning so violently that it had been horribly disfigured, with the head missing entirely—was quickly cremated.
Lee Yu-seol then teamed up with the police officers she had bribed for years and rushed the case to a close.
“Hey! Team Leader Lee! Are you even listening to us?”
“Are you ignoring us? What is this?”
“Keep this up and you won’t keep your seat either!”
Lee Yu-seol gritted her teeth.
Knock, knock, knock.
Someone knocked on the meeting room door.
“What is it? Who is it?”
“What’s Security doing? We said no one was to be let in during an important meeting!”
Whether they liked it or not, the door swung open.
The moment the newcomer appeared, the board—so loud a moment ago it sounded like a marketplace—fell silent as if someone had poured ice water over it.
“Apologies. I’m late.”
It was a man with his hair slicked back in pomade, dressed in a neat suit.
He looked somewhat like Go Ju-hun, but the long beard on his chin and the sunglasses over his eyes gave him a looser, more unrestrained air.
His name was Go Pil-hun.
He was the executive director of the Dio Guild, and Go Ju-hun’s younger brother.
“My seat. Let’s see...”
Go Pil-hun casually sat down at the head of the table.
With the number-one seat vacant, he was now, in effect, the one in charge.
He stroked his hair with a smug little motion.
“Wow. I don’t even know how many years it’s been since I was in Korea. The traffic on the way here was unbelievable! Honestly, Gangnam traffic is still as bad as ever. Right?”
The board members exchanged looks before one of them finally spoke.
“Sir, this isn’t funny.”
“The chairman is dead!”
“We’ve only just finished the funeral...”
Bang.
Go Pil-hun slammed a hand on the table. The room went silent at once.
A vicious aura rose from his body.
Unlike his brother, Go Pil-hun wasn’t a particularly capable hunter. At best, he was only B+ rank.
But in terms of the manic cruelty inside him, he wasn’t all that different from Go Ju-hun.
“I’m not done speaking yet.”
With a trembling hand, Go Pil-hun took a cigar from his chest pocket and lit it.
The meeting room was a no-smoking area, but no one dared stop him.
“...Damn it. What a fucking mess. What the hell do you people know?”
Go Pil-hun was crying.
He was letting tears fall in drops while his body trembled all over, but his mouth was curled into a smile all the same—a grotesque, unsettling sight.
“I was the closest one to my brother. We shared blood! So shut the hell up!”
He snatched up the cigar, huffing and puffing as he glared around the room.
Then he rose and walked over to Lee Yu-seol.
Standing before her, he looked down at her.
“Team Leader Lee.”
“Yes, Director.”
“Did my brother really kill himself?”
“Yes. That is...”
“There’s a weird rumor going around.”
Go Pil-hun patted Lee Yu-seol on the shoulder, circling around her as he spoke.
“People are saying my brother was murdered.”
Lee Yu-seol thought, Blood really does run thicker than water. To think he can act so naturally without so much as blinking...
Go Pil-hun went on.
“There’s a rumor floating around the hunter world. That the Purple Devil killed Go Ju-hun!”
His shout left the room in stunned silence.
The man who had concealed Go Ju-hun’s death and had Lee Yu-seol fabricate the case was none other than...
“Really? Seriously?”
Go Pil-hun, acting all innocent and casual right in front of Lee Yu-seol.
He was Go Ju-hun’s half-brother.
They shared the same father, but Go Pil-hun was the son of a mistress.
Raised in a branch family, Go Pil-hun had endured every kind of discrimination and contempt since childhood. Because of that, his heart had grown twisted with resentment toward his direct family.
Besides, he and Go Ju-hun hadn’t been close anyway. His brother cared about nothing except his own superiority and success.
Go Pil-hun saw this as his chance.
The time had come to prove himself as the bastard son.
Lee Yu-seol finally spoke.
“It’s just a rumor.”
She had followed Go Pil-hun’s instructions for two reasons.
First, it was a kind of mourning.
Go Ju-hun had been a man with a strong pride. To have him reported as having been killed by some lunatic...
Lee Yu-seol bit her lip.
It would be no different from insulting the dead.
Second, the sixth sense of her Sense ability was screaming at her with ferocity.
They were not to provoke the Purple Devil any further. If they were forced to face him again...
Dio Guild might disappear from history altogether.
In his lifetime, Lee Yu-seol had held special feelings for Go Ju-hun. “Admiration” was too vague and too direct a word. It was probably closer to respect than anything else.
Dio Guild had been the kingdom of the Go Ju-hun she had respected so deeply. Watching that world collapse so pointlessly...
I can’t just stand by and watch it happen.
Lee Yu-seol straightened her back.
“The representative did commit suicide.”
Go Pil-hun glared at her as though he were offended, then gave her a wink when no one was looking.
Unaware of that, the rest of the board waved a hand toward him.
“Director Go, please calm down and take a seat.”
“That’s right. It’s understandable that you’re upset, but we need to think about the guild’s future too.”
Truthfully, none of them were genuinely grieving Go Ju-hun’s death. What they cared about was money.
They had to choose a successor fast. Only then could they stop the stock price from tumbling all week long.
Go Pil-hun sighed.
“Hah. Fine. We’ll do it this way, then.”
He returned to his original seat.
“From now on, I’ll be in charge of the Dio Guild.”
No one in the board dared oppose him.
If they offended him now, they’d probably vanish without a trace before the day was out.
“Team Leader Lee.”
At Go Pil-hun’s call, Lee Yu-seol lifted her head.
“What was my brother’s will for the Dio Guild?”
Lee Yu-seol paused, then answered carefully.
“Merit above all else. He wanted to recruit and train talent purely on ability, regardless of character or background.”
Go Pil-hun nodded.
“Heh. That sounds like him.”
He crossed his legs and picked up the half-smoked cigar.
“Okay! Start recruiting new hunters right away. I don’t care about personality or anything else. Just bring me the strongest rookies you can find!”
He swept his gaze over the board and exhaled a cloud of smoke.
“If someone stronger than my brother shows up, I’ll resign as representative and hand the guild over to him. Any objections?”
Silence fell over the meeting room for the second time.