Old Man and the Sea (1)
Lee Chun-bae, who lived in Suyeong District, Busan, was already bustling around before dawn.
He started up his 2.75-ton boat, which had slept through the night, and set out for Minrak Port.
With the red lighthouse seeing him off, the bow cut toward the sea.
Lee Chun-bae bit down on a cigarette with his wrinkled lips. He was seventy-two this year.
“Huff.”
The smoke drifted into the air, and with it came a flood of old memories.
Ten years could change the mountains and rivers, they said.
It’s changed too damn much.
Gates—or whatever they were—opened like the dimensional rifts you only saw in movies, and all manner of monsters poured out into the world.
The things people called monsters slaughtered human beings without mercy.
Lee Chun-bae had lived through the Korean War, but even he had been shocked by the carnage.
Without warning.
Without reason.
Monsters tore people apart and killed them.
His wife had been one of them.
“Honey!!!”
He could still see her final moments, when she shoved him aside and was swallowed whole by a monster.
After she died, Lee Chun-bae lost the will to go on.
He gave up on everything, bought a bottle of soju and a charcoal briquette from the neighborhood supermarket, and headed home.
Then, just as he reached the front of the house with heavy, dragging steps, someone was standing there.
It was a boy with a schoolbag on his back and no smile on his face.
“Who are you?”
“Kim Geon-woo. Ah—no, Lee Geon-woo now, I guess.”
So he was one of the Lee family too.
Was that a coincidence?
The face of the boy he had never met didn’t feel unfamiliar at all.
Lee Chun-bae’s only daughter had cut off contact after divorcing her husband.
I heard she was pregnant, though…
He could roughly guess who the boy was.
Staring at the child’s blank expression, Lee Chun-bae asked,
“Why are you here?”
“...I was hungry.”
Lee Chun-bae felt his face burn.
Before that small life struggling to survive however it could, he was ashamed of himself for having tried so easily to end his own.
He hid the plastic bag with the charcoal briquette behind his back.
That was the day it began.
The day the old man went back out to sea.
Lee Chun-bae stubbed out his cigarette.
Breaking free of his memories, he faced the salty wind blowing in off the water.
Everything had happened long ago.
The grandson who carried on the Lee surname had already grown into a respectable middle school student.
For two men to make a living, there was no room for laziness.
Lee Chun-bae, who had once captained a large vessel, was far too old now.
A boat this small—more like a dinghy, really—didn’t seem like it could do much. But life, as it happened, didn’t let grass grow in the mouths that were fed.
With practiced hands, Lee Chun-bae put on his life vest.
There had been a time when he had no attachment to life, but that was different now.
The words painted in blue on the hull said it better than he could.
— Geon-woo Ho.
He mostly fished in the nearby waters.
Watching the sun rise from far off in the distance, he felt a tug on his rod.
Lee Chun-bae’s eyes lit up as he reeled in the line.
His anticipation quickly soured into disappointment.
All that came up was a wet plastic bag.
No luck.
Lee Chun-bae took out a paper cup and poured himself a drink of makgeolli.
His original dream had been to become a poet.
He had wanted to enter the Korean literature department, enjoy a campus life full of romance, and show the poems he wrote to the public.
Holding the paper cup, Lee Chun-bae murmured,
“One cup for the you who’s gone. Another for the eternal love I had with you. And another for the me who’s already grown shabby.”
It was a farewell poem for the wife who had left him.
“The last one’s for our grandson.”
He knocked back the remaining makgeolli and took the wheel again.
How long had it been?
The rod had grown heavy, and this time it felt different from the rest.
“Well, now. It was worth the wait.”
Lee Chun-bae moved his hands gently, like he was soothing a child.
He couldn’t rush this.
If he applied too much force too soon, the prey would get away.
“Please come up. I’ve been wanting to see you for a long time.”
At last, a reddish creature broke the surface of the water.
It was a large octopus.
“That’s it!”
Octopuses were normally caught along the East Sea, but since the Gate incidents, the climate had changed so drastically that they were now being hauled in from the waters off Busan as well.
Humming to himself, Lee Chun-bae slipped the writhing octopus into a net.
“Come on home with me, you little rascal.”
He’d caught at least one, so today’s rice money was secured.
Only then did a sense of satisfaction wash over him.
With a far lighter heart, he cast the line back out.
Maybe the octopus had been the sign that things were starting properly, because red sea bream, blue-lined seabream, and darkbanded rockfish came in one after another.
It was a full hold.
“Now that’s what I call a lucky day!”
Just then, a fishing boat nearby began to approach Lee Chun-bae’s vessel.
The boat’s name was Roby Ho.
“Hey! Grandpa Chun-bae!”
It was a man in his thirties with dark skin.
His name was Roby Rompis.
He was a young man from Indonesia.
The spaces left by Koreans were naturally filled by foreigners.
There were already more than a hundred foreign crew members working out of Minrak Port.
Lee Chun-bae waved back.
“Roby. Caught a lot?”
“No. Not so much catch.”
Life at sea was hard, but Roby, a young man from Indonesia, had endured five years of squid fishing in silence.
“Want a drink of makgeolli?”
“Yes! Thank you!”
Geon-woo Ho and Roby Ho came alongside each other.
The old man and the young man swallowed fermented liquor from wrinkled paper cups and eased the aches of laboring through life.
“Roby. When are you heading home?”
“A little more, then I go.”
“No, I mean when are you going to see your family?”
“Ah. Next year I go back. To Sulawesi!”
Roby mentioned the island in Indonesia.
“Ah… how beautiful is the back of the one who knows when it is time to go.”
Lee Chun-bae recited a line of poetry for Roby.
“Not much longer, then. Let’s have a soju together at the harbor before you go.”
“Okay! Chun-bae!”
Just as they were about to part ways—
“Hmm?”
Roby tilted his head.
Somewhere in the vast spread of the sea, bubbles were boiling up.
“What’s that?”
The moment Lee Chun-bae turned his gaze in the direction Roby pointed,
a giant tentacle erupted from beneath the water and shot up toward the sky.
As it lunged downward, Roby Ho was smashed apart.
“Roby!”
Roby, thrown into the water, flailed helplessly.
Lee Chun-bae hurriedly tossed him a spare life vest.
“Grab this! Hurry!”
Roby reached out for it.
But the tentacle wrapped around his body faster.
“Ghk!”
Like a vine climbing a tree, the tentacle crept over his entire body and soon reached the top of his head.
The tip split open with a wet crack, revealing sharp teeth.
“Huh? Huh?”
Lee Chun-bae and Roby met eyes.
Sensing his doom, Roby muttered with vacant eyes,
“...Maya.”
The gaping tentacle swallowed Roby’s head whole.
Crunch, grind—
Horrific chewing sounds, as though bone itself were being crushed and swallowed, rang out in the middle of the sea.
Is this a dream?
Lee Chun-bae felt as if he should cover his ears.
Sometimes Gates opened beneath the sea.
But most of the time they appeared deep underwater, in the abyss, and monsters that managed to emerge into the open sea would die instantly, unable to adapt to the vastness of the water.
This was the first time he had ever seen a monster swimming freely like this, hunting human beings.
Worse still—
“Ptoo. Tastes... bad...”
Like a parrot mimicking human speech, the monster was definitely speaking Korean.
The tentacle shot away at astonishing speed.
Only Roby’s body, now headless, floated helplessly on the surface.
Lee Chun-bae’s legs gave out, and he collapsed where he stood.
“How many times do I have to say it!”
Lee Chun-bae slammed his hand on the desk, frustrated.
He was at Suyeong District Police Station.
The police officer lazily answered with half-lidded eyes.
“So let me get this straight. A thing that looked like an octopus showed up, smashed your boat to pieces, killed the captain, and... talked? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes.”
Lee Chun-bae nodded.
“Then why did you come here? What exactly do you expect us to do?”
The police station was a law-enforcement agency meant to ensure public safety, but it had no means of fighting monsters.
Even if they sprayed .38 revolvers wildly, the monsters wouldn’t so much as flinch.
And if they went charging in, they’d only die like fools.
“You need to go to the Hunter Association.”
For medicine, go to the pharmacist. For an illness, go to the doctor.
For monsters, you had to leave it to the specialists.
“They’ll handle it for you there.”
After hearing the officer out, Lee Chun-bae stormed out of the station.
He headed straight to the Busan branch of the Hunter Association.
The beginning was already a rough one.
“What brings you here?”
“Well...”
After he explained the whole story, a staff member led him to the civil complaints office.
The place was a riot, like a fish market just as an auction had started.
“Bring my son back! Bring him back!”
“Ma’am. You can’t do this here.”
“A monster destroyed my shop! How am I supposed to keep doing business? Pay me back!!”
“You’ll need to take that up with your insurance company.”
“I’m scared. I’m scared those bastards are going to come back again...”
Lee Chun-bae could only stand there, swallowed by a wave of helplessness.
He was far from the only victim.
After standing there a long while, Lee Chun-bae dragged his heavy feet home.
“I’m home from school.”
Geon-woo, looking brighter than before, came over to Lee Chun-bae, who was sitting on the sofa.
“Grandpa. Have you eaten?”
“No. I’m fine.”
He had no appetite at all since Roby died.
Roby’s family still hadn’t been able to enter Korea.
They hadn’t even been able to hold a proper funeral.
That bothered him.
Lee Chun-bae took something from his pocket.
It was a photo Roby had kept against his chest.
In the crumpled picture, Roby stood smiling brightly at the camera with his wife and two daughters.
The “Maya” he had muttered at the very end was his wife’s name.
“Grandpa. Did something happen?”
Geon-woo, who had come closer without him noticing, looked at the photograph in his hand.
“...Ah. That’s Mr. Roby.”
Even his grandson had already heard the news.
Lee Chun-bae let out a deep sigh.
“Sigh. Was it just me meddling where I shouldn’t? There’s nothing I can do for him. Nothing at all.”
Geon-woo, who understood his grandfather’s heart better than anyone, fell deep into thought.
Then he took a notebook out of his schoolbag.
“Grandpa, what about this?”
“What about what?”
“In the Republic of Korea, there are three major guilds. Jincheon, Superior, and...”
With an expression that said he wasn’t especially keen on it, Geon-woo held up three fingers.
“And, well, Diokaios too, I guess. Those three.”
“So?”
“Why don’t you write them a letter? Only to the S-class hunters! Then maybe one of them will deal with it?”
It was a middle-schooler’s idea.
He wasn’t some commoner beating the “Appeal Drum” to protest an injustice, and even if he did make a request to an S-class hunter, would they care?
For people who fought monsters every day, it would surely just be one small matter among many.
Lee Chun-bae’s gaze drifted to the photo frame on the table.
Inside it was a younger Lee Chun-bae and his wife.
His wife, who stood with her arm linked through his, always used to say the same thing.
“Honey. Let’s live generously, even if we lose a little.”
In the end, it had been Lee Chun-bae’s wife who suffered the greatest loss.
She saved him and met death herself.
Something in his heart twitched, and his mind made up.
“Go bring me a pen.”
Lee Chun-bae wrote the letter in crooked, uneven handwriting.
“Uwaaagh!!”
Na Sang-min said indifferently, watching him vomit all over the floor.
“Clean up your own puke.”
He panted, fighting for breath.
...Feels like I’m going to die every time.
It had been a month since he’d seriously started learning Ilcheon-illyu.
Na Sang-min had not shown him a shred of mercy, driving him through brutal training without a single reprieve.
On weekdays, he underwent special training under Na Sang-min; on weekends, Simon taught him Ganro-ryu.
Two more months.
That was all the time he had left before being dispatched to Busan.
“That’s enough for today. I need to shower and change.”
“Where are you going?”
Na Sang-min shrugged.
“A blind date!”
“...”
That heartless bastard was going to meet a woman?
Somehow, it was hard to picture.
“What? Why the hell are you making that face?”
“No, sir. I hope it goes well. Fighting.”
“Do you have a girlfriend? ...No, of course you don’t. It’s a nice day, so stop swinging your sword all the time. Go out and date somebody, punk.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Tch. What a mouth on you.”
Just then, the training room door opened and an operative came in.
“Hunter Na, the approval documents for this month are here. Could you sign them, please?”
“Ugh. What a pain. What now?”
“Your call sign is going to be decided soon, so please check this over. And this is next month’s mission contract. Also, this is...”
While Na Sang-min was listening to the explanation and signing repeatedly, the operative said,
“Ah, right. A letter came for Lee Chun-bae. Do you know him by any chance?”
The operative held out a white envelope to Na Sang-min.
“Lee Chun-bae?”
“Yes. It was addressed to Dio Guild S-class Hunter Na Sang-min, so I brought it here first.”
S-class hunters had celebrity-level recognition, so fan letters often arrived at guild headquarters.
But Na Sang-min was a little different.
“Forget it. It’s probably just another death threat, anyway.”
He didn’t even glance at the letter and simply crumpled the envelope and tossed it aside.
As if Dio Guild’s reputation wasn’t bad enough already.
On top of that, Na Sang-min had the personality of a mad dog, so he had more haters than fans.
“More importantly, Chief Kim. I’ve got a blind date today, so pick out some clothes for me.”
“Me? I’m not really sure about fashion eith—”
“Ah, come on. Choi Yongki. See you tomorrow. Before you clock out, practice the technique I taught you today a thousand times.”
Having finished speaking, Na Sang-min left with the staff member.
“Hup.”
I got up and picked up the mop.
While I was cleaning the spot where I’d puked, something snagged on the mop head.
It was a crumpled envelope.
Without thinking much of it, I picked it up.
I didn’t have the hobby of secretly reading other people’s letters.
And I wasn’t particularly curious, either.
But then the sender’s address caught my eye.
Busan?
Maybe there really was such a thing as a sixth sense.
Just that one word made me think it might be connected to whatever threat was coming.
I hurriedly tore open the envelope and checked the contents.
To S-class Hunter Na Sang-min.