Broadcast
"Hmm... I'm not sure I follow. Do you mean something like a news broadcast? Haha."
"Oppa..."
It was already painfully obvious I'd been caught, and still I was doing everything I could to play dumb. She watched that sorry performance with open disappointment.
As her older brother, I couldn't afford to look any more pathetic than this. In the end, I owned up.
"...Well, yeah. A little. As a hobby. But... how did you know?"
"The streams you used to do got pretty famous a while back, didn't they? The ones you filmed going into dungeons. A staff member said there was someone promising these days and told me to take a look, so I did... and it was just you."
"......"
Was that really the sort of thing a person could simply tell?
I wondered—and then thought that if it was Seol Hee, maybe she could. Her abilities were pretty sharp in their own right. Her instincts had always been quick, even back then.
Was there something in the way I talk that even I don't notice?
Mm. Even so, getting found out by my little sister was embarrassing. I'd done the whole thing without ever once considering that family might be watching.
"Well... I don't know why you'd go out of your way to hide who you are, but if it's something you want to do, I'm not going to give you a hard time about it. Still..."
Kind as ever, she didn't press me any further about the stream. Seol Hee fidgeted with her fingers, stealing glances at my face, and asked something else instead.
"...You still have no intention of properly working as a Hero, do you?"
"Nope."
The answer came out at once. Playing the Hero... what Seol Hee meant was surely stepping up in earnest and living as a Hero in full.
Not under the alias of Snow, the number-one Hero, but with my identity laid bare—showing my face not only when the world stood on the brink of annihilation, but for matters of far lesser scale as well.
Right now, unless it's a real catastrophe... I'm just some young guy who streams all the time.
Day to day I kept the name Snow buried, and with my skill, Status Window Manipulation, I got by pretending to be an ordinary Hero somewhere around rank 800.
The result, as I'd already seen in the lobby earlier, was being treated like a rather pathetic older brother living off his successful little sister... anyway.
Either way, I had no particular desire to step to the forefront as Snow.
"...If I went out and worked like that, what do you think would happen? If I solved every last thing for them?"
It was an obvious point, and a question I'd been turning over for a long time. What becomes of people when an overwhelmingly powerful superhuman appears? My conclusion was that they would end up depending on that superhuman for everything.
Even problems they could solve on their own, they would grow complacent, trusting the superhuman to handle them... and grow weak. I was already feeling a little of it, just from operating as Snow. Yesterday, during the EX-rank Dungeon Break, not a single top-ranked Hero had stepped forward.
"I don't want a future like that."
That conviction had never once changed. The Heroes of the Republic of Korea had already risen to a remarkably high standard, and most problems were being handled perfectly well without me. There was no need for me to step in. Other countries had their own top-ranked Heroes, after all.
"And when something truly comes up that they can't handle among themselves, that's when I step in, isn't it?"
And that was the truth. Yesterday had been the same. Strangely enough, for a country with so many Heroes, there were just as many major incidents to match, so I found myself stepping in more often than I'd expected. Of course, that wasn't the only reason I held back. It wasn't a subject for this conversation, so I said no more.
To that answer of mine—
"Ugh... I don't like it, but if that's what you think, there's nothing I can do. Still, if you change your mind, tell me."
"All right."
Seol Hee looked unsatisfied, but she accepted it for the time being. She grumbled and clicked her tongue, sure, but she really was kind. Feeling a little guilty, I smiled at her as I spoke.
"I'll come by more often from now on."
"Hmph. How generous of you to say so."
My little sister clearly didn't believe a word of it, and it left me thinking I ought to drop by a few more times for a while and see whether there was anything I could help with.
"Anyway... Oppa. The reason I asked you to come is that you pulled off another pretty big job yesterday."
"I did."
I nodded readily. The colossal monster I'd put down yesterday—the one they called the Cosmic Whale. Even inside the dungeon it had apparently been infamous as a boss monster almost no one could stand against, and once it burst out into the real world, it was no joke at all.
Other countries almost never had this sort of thing happen. Why did it keep happening only in the Republic of Korea? Was the Korean Peninsula simply ill-fated ground, as far as the world of the Gates was concerned?
I was midway through that irreverent thought when Seol Hee opened the laptop on the desk and spoke.
"Anyway, the thing scattered an enormous amount of magic stones... The Association is taking all of them, the way you asked, but the Association President says his side can't keep the whole share, so he's routing it to you indirectly. About... this much?"
The screen she turned toward me displayed a fairly large sum. Something about it being passed along, somehow or other, through my sister's guild... honestly, I didn't really follow the finer points of the method.
"Got it. Tell him I'm grateful."
"Yeah. Honestly, no matter how hidden your identity is, you're the one who caught it. It doesn't make any sense for the Association to keep all of it! Anyway..."
With that she closed the laptop again. Talking about yesterday must have brought it back; she clutched her own arm and spoke, trembling faintly.
"I was really scared yesterday, too. I was far away, and I could still feel the mana rolling outward... wow. Even knowing you'd take care of it, it was terrifying. What would we have done if it hadn't been you?"
Our Seol Hee, saying something sweet for once?
"Shouldn't this country build you a temple or something?"
"...Huh?"
"Honestly, if someone just said let's do it, I bet people would pool their own money and build the thing. Hmm..."
I soothed my little sister before she wandered off in a strange direction, and barely managed to steer the conversation elsewhere.
How the guild was doing these days, whether our youngest was getting along all right, how everyone else was living—we talked about this and that, until—
"Oh, right. There's one thing I want to ask you... do you happen to have time?"
When Seol Hee asked that while watching my face, I answered at once.
"What is it?"
After everything Seol Hee had done for me, what wouldn't I agree to?
"This time our guild is planning to recruit new Heroes for the first time in a while. You could call them rookies. So..."
"Ah. That thing from last time?"
From the way she put it, I caught on immediately.
She wanted me to take a look at the people her guild had picked, and see what sort they were.
I had the ability to pry open other people's Status Windows, so I could check whether they were quietly sitting on anything they hadn't made public. And at roughly my level, I could tell who was who well enough. She wanted me to look the rookies over and evaluate them—whether this one would amount to something great, what that one was like.
In the end a guild was run by the people gathered in it, so people mattered most of all. Take in the wrong person, and there'd be no saving it.
So the last time she'd asked, I'd gone and taken a quick look, telling her who to screen out and pointing out the ones who would go far.
"Sure. I'll do it."
It wasn't anything particularly difficult. A person couldn't stay shut up at home every single day. Now and then you needed to step outside, get some air, and do something productive.
"Really?! Thank goodness... ahem. Thanks, Oppa."
She lit up so openly at those words that I smiled without meaning to, watching my little sister beam. She'd said the day after tomorrow... right. Look over the rookies at her guild during the day, and turn the stream on at night.
I left with nothing more than that idle thought, bidding my sister goodbye on the way out, and I had no idea.
That this would be the day of a meeting that would change the rest of my life.
After Seol Woon had gone.
"Haa..."
Left alone again in her office, Seol Hee sank back into her chair as if collapsing into it.
What occupied her thoughts was, of course, worry for her older brother.
"Haa... Oppa..."
Would he be all right? Smoothing a hand over her white hair, Seol Hee murmured it while gazing into empty air.
She didn't let it show much on the surface. In truth, Seol Hee liked her older brother very much. From childhood he had always been reliable, always grown-up. It would have been stranger not to.
Couldn't we all just live in one house...
Couldn't the three siblings simply live together? She still had thoughts like that, even now.
And because she was that sort of person, it was also true that she worried over the brother who, after a certain incident long ago, had cut off contact with everyone and remained only in his own house.
Strongest in the world, rank one, whatever it was. To Seol Hee, he was nothing more than her older brother.
She had the same silver hair and sky-blue eyes as he did, yet unlike her brother—who felt somehow leisurely, even mysterious—Seol Hee was someone people sometimes feared at a glance, calling her cold, calling her detached.
It's still pretty chilly out... I wonder if he's sleeping under a blanket. He really mustn't catch a cold.
She was soft enough with her family to worry like this, in complete earnest, about an older brother who was an archmage.
In any case, Seol Hee was quite satisfied with this talk.
Using a request for help as an excuse, she had managed to call him outside again, and he seemed to be doing better than before.
A stream... huh.
Perhaps it was because of that stream he had been doing for some time now. Seol Hee didn't know why her brother insisted on hiding his identity to do such a thing, but if starting it had brightened him, she thought that was for the better.
Pouring his time into streaming wasn't something she liked all that much. Even so.
However.
"But... why is it that every single time I look, he's only doing some weird fishing stream?"
Had Oppa liked fishing...?
Even to Seol Hee, family who had watched Seol Woon for well over ten years, that was something she simply could not understand.