Hypocrite
An eight-heads-tall silhouette. It would have been harder not to recognize him.
He saw me and didn't react at all. I'd have to be the one to speak.
"Been a while. Not even a flicker of surprise. Don't tell me you were looking for me."
He had been. He'd walked straight at me.
Back when I was still an active hunter running operations, he'd come in under me as a rookie—a comrade from the same battlefield, a year younger than I was. Later I became an instructor and left the field, and we drifted apart the way people do. Not long after that he made instructor too, and we were colleagues again, though the stretch didn't last.
His position in the active days: tracker.
His Core ability was a sense of smell that might as well have been magic. He could catch a scent from far off, so tracking jobs always put him out front. He would have known where I was long before he closed the distance. Years could pass. There was no way he'd forgotten my smell.
"Long time no see."
Still seasoning everything with English. Same old habit. That was how he talked with the others, so that anything said in the middle of an operation stayed unintelligible to anyone listening in. Not many people could actually hold a conversation in English.
It might have been a survival skill in the age before, but these days English was a language with no reason to learn. Education was a luxury. Public education, especially, was lost technology. Teaching yourself English in a world like this was, fairly enough, a bad hobby. With no proper schooling to be had, just speaking Korean well already made you gifted. Most people didn't even know what a loanword was. Half of Headquarters probably thought scanner was pure Korean—if a word was commonly understood inside the country, then it was ours. That was the logic.
The trouble was that even among hunters, almost no one could really use English. Every hunter got the bare minimum required to run an operation, and that much was nowhere near enough for actual communication. Clock-out Man had taught himself on the side, and come out of it with a command of the language far beyond the rest. Keeping up with his refined English had fallen to me. The Old Man had drilled it into me until I was sick of the stuff. If he hadn't, my vocabulary would have ended at ammo.
"I'll just break your legs and go. Work is work."
"Excuse me?"
"I don't have time. If it hurts, bear it a little."
Still reaching for the advanced vocabulary. Same as ever.
He was the mercenary in question. The one taking contracts from the raiders and carrying them out. One of the people who had set the settlements around here burning. I hadn't done anything that ought to have earned his grudge, which left exactly one reason that fit.
Somebody put a contract on me.
He was a model employee to the marrow, and at the same time an employee who did not know the meaning of compromise. That personality had stuck him with a famous nickname—so famous that no one ever called him by his real name, only the nickname. These days I could barely remember what the real one had been.
If he really took a contract, this just got annoying.
A mercenary, of all things. I'd never figured him for the sort who lived by granting other people's requests. He would do the work without compromise. If a job met the standard he'd set for himself, he wouldn't sort through them and turn any down, and once he took one he would never give it up. Even if he didn't believe he could beat me, it would be the same. For him, whether he could do a thing wasn't the point. Only whether it was his assignment.
He yanked the club from his belt and came straight at me.
In our sparring back in the active days, I had never lost to him once.
But that was years ago.
He'd quit the hunter life before I did and thrown himself out into the world. No telling how much he'd grown since. For now, I'd watch how he moved.
"Hah!"
A shout I hadn't heard in a long time. He closed to within a breath and swung the club up on a diagonal. I gave a light step back and let it pass. The flurry that followed was slower than in his active days.
Not growth. He'd gone backward.
I was thinking it would be easy when—
"Ha!"
The club came in from an angle I hadn't read.
What?
It sheared through the hair in front of my face and kept going. Not a fast attack, but one that had clearly read my movement. Had his eye gotten sharper? The dodge still landed. Even so, a man who had never once so much as brushed a hair of mine had just touched my hair. So he had grown after all.
"So easy."
Confidence cranked all the way up.
"My ass."
Time to show him properly. The dodging ended here. I switched my feet, shifted the weight I'd been holding back onto the front, and cut in all at once. He faded half a step and drove the club down on a diagonal. The pressure of that height was real—arms much longer than mine, and a club in hand besides. It still didn't matter. I let the club slide past my ear and took one step closer.
"Wow!"
Startled, and he still hadn't lost his ease. He'd grown up. This was as far as it went.
I drove my right shoulder forward and clenched the left fist I'd kept hidden behind it. He read the motion and snapped into a guard.
Still loves a counterpunch. Same habit.
Getting stronger in the body wouldn't save him. Keep the same pattern and you eat the hit. I never forget an opponent's habits.
"!?"
The left was a feint. I shoved my weight farther forward and crashed into him with the shoulder I'd already committed.
"Ghk."
He tried, too late, to tuck both arms in against the impact. He was driven back hard, rear foot skidding, his stance broken wide open—chin, solar plexus, groin, ribs, every weak point hanging there. I didn't waste it. I went in. A clean shot at any one of them.
Guard on the groin.
Those long legs set it high, which only made it easier to aim for. Steel underwear was a choice made for survival. A sad beast, punished for being tall. I ruled the jaw out too—too high—and drove my fist straight into his side.
The impact came back solid metal. Another piece of armor. Even that couldn't swallow all of the force. He rolled hard, putting as much ground between us as he could get.
"......The hell."
My fist throbbed. So the sluggish movement had been the weight of the protection. It was practically full plate.
"You still hit hard, and so fast! Why don't you get old?"
"Black hair means you speak Korean."
"Okay."
His weapon was a club. Draw the Backscratcher and the problem would be over. But he wasn't holding a club because he didn't have a gun. He'd said he was going to break my legs. The club must have been what the contract called for. Even in his active days, he'd thought about civil servants differently from anyone else. He wouldn't take a job that meant killing a Postman. So he'd accepted this one because it only went as far as injury. For the man he used to be, even that was an enormous change. He wasn't someone who would have harassed a public servant.
Even a man like that picks up dirt in the end.
Living by your convictions out in the world isn't easy. Someday he might be the one putting a bullet through a Postman's head. Either way, I didn't want to see his blood. Do that, and the nightmares would have me for a long while again.
Doesn't mean I can hand over my legs.
Worst case, the Backscratcher would have to come out. A sorry thing to say, but my legs mattered more than his life. How had he ended up like this, anyway?
"Who put out the contract?"
He didn't answer. He checked his wristwatch. That habit was intact, too. Fighting him meant knowing the time. I ought to look about now.
5:29.
Unfortunately, even the hour wasn't on my side. Nothing for it. I'd have to beat him down.
I set my stance. He reset his grip on the club. He knew better than anyone that he couldn't beat me. Hardheaded, front and back.
Fast. Finish it. Go for above the neck, where the armor wasn't, and end it there. Veins stood rigid along the right arm locked on the club. His chest didn't move, as if he'd stopped breathing. His eyes flicked over my limbs in quick passes. And when the space between us had closed to a single step—
Clocking out?
Before I could even drop my stance, he seated the club back at his waist.
"Whew. Lived hard again today."
"Wasn't quitting time six?"
"That was ages ago. I moved clock-in and clock-out up half an hour forever back. You been all right, hyung?"
The famous Clock-out Man. No one called him by his real name.
A place that looked ready to come down at any moment, so almost no one ever went there. We took the roof of a sprawling commercial building that was halfway to collapse. It looked dangerous, but I'd checked it over more than once, and the odds of it actually falling were low. Whenever I needed a place to rest in the area, this was where I came.
"Wandering the outside alone, you run into a lot of dangerous shit. Kind of have to wear it."
What he had on his upper body was armor made of thin metal plates layered over one another.
"How do you get it off?"
"I don't."
So the smell hadn't been my imagination.
"What was that earlier? You read my movement."
All he'd managed was a clip of my hair, but even that was a startling improvement. Against me, it put him in the upper ranks of hunters.
"Secret."
Looked like he'd picked up something he hadn't had before.
"You've gotten cocky."
"Here. Have a drink."
He pulled out a small metal flask, poured me a cup, then put the whole thing to his own mouth. Right after that, a cigarette went between his lips. Doing all right for himself.
"Making good money, I see."
"These past few days, yeah."
"I heard the rumor. Hired on with a raider crew?"
He let out a short laugh, bitterness thick in it.
"I'm not in any position to pick and choose the work. You want to survive out there, you don't get a choice. There's a lot I still have to do if I live. Saying there's a lot sounds weird, I know—anyway, it matters to me, and to do it I have to stay alive. If that's wrong, I've got nothing to say."
"Who said anything? You're the one getting defensive."
"Damn."
"Speak Korean."
"Okay."
He was strong on strategy and tactics, the product of a long time running as a tracker in the field. Chasing a target on that near-magical nose alone couldn't carry an operation home. Pulling in as much information as the scent would give him, then putting it together to read the other side and predict how they'd move—that had been his everyday work. It made him good at finding an enemy's weak points and reading their tactics. Helping the raiders would have worked the same way. He'd have walked into a settlement pretending to be a drifter, gathered what he could, and turned it into the best raid plan he had to offer.
"Still, I don't work by throwing my humanity all the way out. There's a line I keep."
"Swinging a club at a Postman already crossed it, didn't it?"
"I don't kill civil servants. Raiding settlements, either......"
His voice trailed off.
"You only drew up the tactics. You didn't join the raid yourself."
"Obviously."
"What else."
"I left them a fast way out, so the body count would stay as low as it could."
So that was why the settlement billowing black smoke had held no corpses. A commendable little mercy. If he hadn't helped the raiders in the first place, he wouldn't have needed to build them an escape route at all. Then again, talking morality out in the world was a joke too.
"Even Clock-out Man's a hypocrite now."
With him, though, I was allowed to talk morality. The belief system of the Clock-out Man I knew had definitely included it.
"I'll take the scolding. Calling me a hypocrite is a bit much."
"Am I wrong?"
"If I hadn't taken the job, someone else would have. There was no getting around their raid. The settlers kept their lives because I was the one who handled it."
That might even have been true. But—
"That's what they call hypocrisy."
He drove the empty flask into the rooftop. It bounced and sailed off the edge.
A brief silence. From somewhere below, the echo of it tumbling rolled out. ...clank... clank.
"Scary."
"Go on. Curse me out some more. See what happens."
"I didn't curse you. I said hypocrite."
"Fine. Call me whatever you want."
"Hypocrite."
He bit down on a fresh cigarette and lit it hard, dragged deep, and spat the smoke back out in a rush. He wanted to beat the hell out of me. It was beyond him.
"You can talk like that because you're still a civil servant with an easy life, hyung."
"You're the one who walked out because you didn't want to do it."
"Same goes for you."
"I'm still a civil servant."
"Right. A hunter instructor in name, and you slunk off to the army without a scrap of pride."
"Does pride put food on the table?"
"Couldn't hack the army either, so now you're just a Postman."
"A hypocrite doesn't get to sneer at Postmen."
"At least I don't live by leeching off Headquarters."
"You leeched off the raiders' pockets."
"They were the ones leeching off me."
"Parasites parasitizing each other."
"Think whatever you want."
"Hypocrite."
"Fuck! If you weren't you—"
"A hypocrite, and he ate his manners for breakfast."
Clock-out Man burned through the cigarette in hard, angry drags.
It wasn't that I couldn't understand him. Staying alive meant doing things you couldn't help. The only reason I could refuse to compromise with the world was that I had the ability to back it up. If I didn't, could I still live like this? Nothing worth a damn to my name, and a blade at my throat? I could still refuse, if the will was there. But—
In the end, you can't stop the blade from coming.
He'd only kept it off by agreeing to compromise. Everything was a matter of choice.
Conviction, morality, law. All of it comes down to what you choose.
In that sense, the outside world was a place that had achieved equality in the truest sense. There were no absolute values. You pursued the ones you'd chosen, and that was enough.
Justice once for every person, and law once for every settlement. That's the outside.
Seen that way, there was nothing incomprehensible about what he'd done. He'd thrashed to stay alive, and along the way he'd saved a few lives, even if only by way of hypocrisy. But even so, there was a reason I kept the moral pressure on him.
"You've changed a lot."
"......"
I knew it was his fatal weak point.
"If you don't want to talk to me, you don't have to."
"Sorry for the cursing."
"Drop it."
This wasn't about mocking him, or making him see the light. It was only one piece of my operation.
Clock-out Man is in contact with the raiders.
The plan to take them all at once was already in place. What remained was driving them into the trap. He was going to have to play that part.
Hm?
His watch had gone off again. The red light blinking on it was an ugly one.
"Hup. Time to work again."
Clock-out Man rose slowly from where he sat.