A Secret Deal (1)
Two days had passed since the Gangnam Station multi-gate incident.
As always, humanity rebuilt the shattered city and mourned those who had been sacrificed to the monsters.
And meanwhile, the Dio Guild was in the middle of a meeting.
Lee Yu-seol continued her report, flipping through slides on the presentation screen.
“Adding up all the guilds involved, the total number of dead—including hunters and agents—is 216. The severely injured number 73, the lightly injured are still being confirmed, and the missing……”
Someone slammed a hand down on the table.
“Just report on our company. Why are you worrying about all the others?”
It was Go Pil-hun, newly installed at the top of the Dio Guild after his older brother’s death.
At his sharp rebuke, the room fell silent.
Lee Yu-seol let out a quiet breath.
“Yes. Understood. Within the Dio Guild, there are eight confirmed dead……”
Go Pil-hun yawned as he listened.
He didn’t care who died or how many.
All that mattered to him was money.
What he wanted to know was how much profit this whole mess had produced.
“Enough about the damage. So, what did we make?”
In a calamity that had sent so many people to their deaths, was there really such a thing as profit?
Surprisingly, yes.
Just as arms manufacturers and weapons dealers made fortunes whenever war broke out, someone always fattened their pockets from behind the scenes, even if the world had been turned upside down.
Lee Yu-seol changed the presentation window.
“We recovered eight artifacts, twenty-five relics, seventy-nine new weapons, and 368 mana stones from monster corpses.”
Gates were horrific exits from which monsters poured forth, but they were also entrances into unknown worlds.
Even in the middle of war, the Dio Guild quietly gathered resources.
Those records were treated as company secrets and withheld even from the government under the pretense of confidentiality.
“The biggest prize is Orc’s Box.”
“Oh?”
Go Pil-hun formed a little O with his mouth.
“Wasn’t that the thing that went up for auction at Sotheby’s in London last time?”
He had once been a B-class hunter himself, so he knew plenty about items from inside Gates.
“It sold for 16 million dollars back then. We expect it’ll fetch an even higher price this time.”
That was more than 21.6 billion won.
“Ha!”
Go Pil-hun stroked his chin, satisfied.
“However.”
Lee Yu-seol lifted her gaze from the data screen.
“The hunter who obtained Orc’s Box has said he intends to return part of the proceeds to society.”
Hunters affiliated with a guild split the profits from items acquired inside a Gate by percentage.
For rookies, it was seventy-thirty, hunter and guild.
Exclusive contracts were eighty-twenty.
S-class hunters often took ninety or even the full hundred percent.
Since the guild provided gate intelligence, various equipment, and general hunter care, it was a reasonably fair arrangement.
“Return it?”
Go Pil-hun tilted his head.
Everyone else fights tooth and nail for every last penny. What kind of lunatic does something like that……?
He thrust out his chin and asked again.
“And who’s that?”
“Hunter Choi Yongki.”
To them, it was an unfamiliar name.
Only Lee Yu-seol and Go Pil-hun exchanged faintly different looks.
“The one who closed the main gate during this multi-gate disaster was also Hunter Choi Yongki.”
Go Pil-hun frowned.
“Not Na Sang-min?”
“That’s right.”
A Dio Guild intern.
And, what was more, an F-class hunter.
So a rookie had accomplished what even an S-class hunter could not.
It was nothing short of a tremendous feat.
“The official articles will be published tomorrow by all major outlets. The candidate headlines are as follows.”
“The Hero of Gangnam Shuts the Door!”
“The Hero of the Dio Guild!”
“The Man Who Saved Thousands of Lives”……
A corner of Go Pil-hun’s mouth lifted.
Right now, with the Dio Guild in desperate need of an image overhaul, a figure like Choi Yongki was exactly the kind of character the public would eat up.
Go Pil-hun remembered their first meeting.
A man drenched in blood, glaring at him.
A man who had seemed like an untamed wolf.
He snapped his fingers.
“Good. Do it like this.”
He sprang up from his chair as if struck by inspiration and started pacing around the conference room, speaking quickly.
“First, give Hunter Choi a fat reward. The government’s handing out subsidies for the multi-gate incident anyway.”
“Understood.”
“Take his profile photo, put it on a magazine cover, and run him through interviews with every major outlet.”
“……Yes.”
“And, ah, also……”
Lee Yu-seol checked the time.
“Representative. Sorry to interrupt, but you need to leave for your next appointment.”
Go Pil-hun blinked.
“Ah, is today the day? Then let’s wrap up the meeting here.”
He clapped his hands a couple of times, and everyone stood, bowed, and filed out.
By the time the conference room emptied, only Go Pil-hun and Lee Yu-seol remained.
“Has the investor arrived?”
“He should have landed by now.”
Go Pil-hun rubbed his hands together.
“The heavens are on my side. The timing couldn’t be better.”
Go Pil-hun had been secretly plotting something.
He planned to sell the entire Dio Guild to an overseas guild.
If the plan succeeded, he would make an astronomical sum of money, and the Dio Guild would no longer belong to the Republic of Korea.
But Go Pil-hun, who had already acquired American citizenship, didn’t have an ounce of patriotism to begin with.
“You have to sell when the price is at its peak. Right, Team Leader Lee?”
“……Yes, Representative.”
“Let’s go!”
Unlike the excited Go Pil-hun, a dark shadow had fallen across Lee Yu-seol’s face.
Inside the office, after everyone had left work, I was alone with a single sheet of paper.
Salary Statement
￦784,380,112
One, ten, a hundred, a thousand……
Like a little kid just learning to count, I went over the numbers again and again.
￦784,380,112.
“Seventy-eight million…”
Even saying it out loud didn’t make it feel real.
After all the deductions for taxes and various charges, my take-home pay was still well over 700 million won.
I can hardly believe it.
Everyone desperately wanted to become an Awakened.
If you became a high-ranking hunter, you could make a very handsome salary.
Even so, this was a bit much.
This is insane.
How could a rookie hunter be paid this much?
Because I’d been an intern, my base pay wasn’t very high.
I had gone into a Gate for my first real operation and wiped out the boss monster inside the dungeon.
There had been life hazard pay and bonuses, but nothing truly eye-opening.
The real money was elsewhere.
My eyes fixed on one line.
Main Gate Suppression Activity Bonus
￦1,100,000,000
That was the bonus for my contribution in stopping the Gangnam Station multi-gate.
“Eleven hundred million…”
I couldn’t exactly argue with it.
If the main gate hadn’t been closed in time, the damage would have been beyond imagination.
The monster wave would have spread like wildfire in every direction.
Had we been even a little later, not only hunters but a great many ordinary civilians would have died.
So closing the main gate was no different from cutting off the enemy commander’s head in the middle of a brutal battle.
“Anyway, it feels like I hit the lottery.”
In my previous life, I’d worked for nearly thirty years and saved about 1 billion won.
I had earned that amount in a single month’s pay.
The feeling was so surreal it was almost numb.
Of course, the process hadn’t been easy.
I’d skirted death several times while fighting monsters, and the scene where bats had surrounded me and squeezed the breath from my lungs was still vivid in my mind.
Guess I’m lucky I didn’t go insane.
The Dio Guild had seized the opportunity and sold me hard.
They slapped a “Hero of Gangnam Station” frame on me, pushed me out front, and flooded the media with every kind of sensational article they could.
In a special documentary, they reenacted what had happened on Yanghwa Bridge and turned me into a hero.
I refused every interview.
Being in the public eye had never been my thing, and I hadn’t done this hoping for fame.
Come to think of it, the inflated paycheck wasn’t entirely free.
The swarm of reporters who showed up at my front door was a pain in the ass, though.
Even after putting up with that, I’d still made more money than enough to make it worthwhile.
The comments under the articles were like this:
The sudden fame was a little overwhelming, but I decided to just let it flow as it would.
Why?
Dio Guild
￦12,560,000,000
I checked my banking app on my phone, and a red line in the deposit history caught my eye.
One hundred twenty-five hundred million won.
At this point, my sense of reality was starting to fall apart.
The Dio Guild had liquidated the Orc’s Box I’d brought back.
The auction price had topped 20 million dollars.
That was a staggering 27 billion won.
I hadn’t kept it all to myself.
After taxes and the guild’s cut, I took only two-thirds of my share.
The rest went to Bang Su-hwan, Lee Ji-jun, and Ha Se-na—the intern team I’d gone into the Gate with.
All of them had narrowly escaped dying at the hands of Instructor Nike.
If it hadn’t been for them, I wouldn’t have made it out of the Gate in one piece either.
And there was one more share.
The hunters who had been sacrificed while we were suppressing the multi-gate.
More than two hundred hunters died in that incident.
Comic-book heroes unleash flashy powers and battle villains with style.
They’re cheered and applauded by the people.
But what real heroes are waiting for is nothing but a tragedy too grim to look at straight on.
Someone’s father.
Or someone’s family member had become one more star in the sky.
For them, I gladly paid up.
The Dio Guild made heavy use of my actions as a public-relations tool.
“Hunter Choi Yongki Donates 10 Billion Won for Bereaved Families and Facility Restoration!”
“The Nation’s Hunter Has a Warm Heart”
“Good Deed After Good Deed! A Donation Angel Appears”
Spending hundreds of billions of won on other people instead of lining my own pockets.
In my previous life, I couldn’t have imagined doing such a thing.
I used to scrape together every last ten won coin I could.
I was a miser so vicious I wouldn’t spend money on anyone—not even myself.
I even attended the funeral services for the hunters who had died at Nike’s hands.
They had been the interns I’d lived and fought alongside.
I also delivered donations to the members of other guilds who had lost their lives on Yanghwa Bridge.
If they hadn’t existed, my own heroic accomplishments wouldn’t have existed either.
That was how I saw it.
Maybe giving away money without asking for anything in return was my way of soothing my own heart.
Someone opened the office door and came inside.
A silhouette emerged from the darkness.
A woman with short hair and a slender frame walked toward me.
For a moment, she looked to me like a black cat.
“Lee Yu-seol.”
At the sound of her name, the black cat came to a stop.
Beyond the window, the city’s neon lights glittered brilliantly.
“Mr. Choi Yongki. Or should I call you Purple Devil?”
It was a provocative line.
But she wasn’t picking a fight.
As proof of that, Lee Yu-seol kept her distance and swallowed hard, her face tense.
She’s afraid of me.
Right in front of Lee Yu-seol, I had massacred Seo Gwang-pal and the agents with him.
I had dragged her along as a hostage and stormed their headquarters to kill Go Ju-hun.
To Lee Yu-seol, I was both an enemy and the Dio Guild’s adversary.
“Did you come here for revenge?”
Why had I wanted to become a hero so badly?
The helplessness of spending my entire life floundering in the swamp of poverty and failing to protect my family.
The self-loathing and guilt over failing to protect my younger brother.
I wanted to stand against all of that.
I wanted to live bravely, holding on to my own convictions.
Some people say revenge only breeds emptiness and destroys the self.
I disagreed.
“Revenge can be a pretty good motive. It gives you a reason to live.”
If Lee Yu-seol were to rush at me here to kill me, then I would also—
“I’ll take you seriously.”
I set the salary statement down on the desk.
After watching me for a while, Lee Yu-seol spoke at last.
She raised both hands as if to show she was surrendering.
“Forget it. I didn’t come here to fight. And I don’t want to die either.”
She continued.
“I admit it. There was a time when I resented you, but not anymore. I want to be on the same side as you.”
They say yesterday’s enemy can be today’s ally.
All of a sudden, Lee Yu-seol wanted to stand on my side.
“Hard to believe.”
“Yongki. Make a deal with me.”
“What kind of deal?”
Before I even heard the conditions, I wanted to know what she was really after.
Lee Yu-seol gritted her teeth and said, with naked anger in her voice, “Let’s push Go Pil-hun out.”