The Old Man’s Hideout Got Raided (2)
Today was the first time I learned what happens when you try mountain climbing in a wheelchair.
The answer was simple.
You don’t.
"Heave, heave."
Docheol hauled my wheelchair on his back and climbed the steep mountain path.
Each time he planted the prosthetic leg, his foot gave off a dull thud against the rocks.
"Put me down. If we go rolling off a cliff, are you going to take responsibility?"
"Shut it. You’re heavy."
"Heavy? I’m pretty skinny, actually."
"I’m talking about the wheelchair. If you’d bought a magic-powered wheelchair, it would’ve been lighter."
"Charging it would’ve been a pain. And how are you supposed to charge a magic wheelchair on a mountain? You think the outlets grow on trees?"
"...You always have a way with words."
Docheol huffed and puffed his way over another boulder.
I clutched the box of Mocha Gold tightly on my lap.
Even after coming up the mountain, I wasn’t letting this go.
Bouncing along in the wheelchair, I mulled over how I’d ended up in this ridiculous state.
For starters, I hadn’t wanted to come at all.
I’d held out for three days.
Even when Docheol came by every day with Mocha Gold in hand, I didn’t cave. Even when he dragged out the excuse of my disciples, I still didn’t cave.
And then on the fourth day, Docheol showed up waving an official business order in the Association’s name, and that was the end of it.
For a civil servant, a business order was basically a death sentence.
"This is cheating, you know. How exactly is the Association drafting me? Variant investigations are a Baekho thing, not an Association thing."
"I sent in a cooperation request under the Baekho vice-guild leader’s name, and the Association president stamped the draft order right away."
"... "
For all its talk of being a national institution, the Association had long since become the kind of place that handed over its own staff without a peep at a single phone call from a big guild vice-leader.
It had been reduced to little more than a subcontractor that watched guilds’ faces for a living.
Even I, who technically worked for the Association, knew that one word from Docheol carried more weight than the entire organization.
"That old man really does know how to foist off the work."
"Look who’s talking."
The pretext sounded reasonable enough.
Reports had come in from somewhere in Gangwon-do: wild animals were fleeing the mountain in droves.
The System’s Gate detection hadn’t picked up anything, but the beasts were running like mad.
"It’s a sign of a Variant. Something the System can’t catch."
Docheol said it between gasps for breath.
"That’s why we’re going to see Do Hagyeong. That’s the mountain she lives on. If the System can’t catch it, her senses already would have."
"Why not just call her?"
"You think she’d answer the phone? She’s the kind of woman who feels like her head would split open from a single bar of signal."
That part was true.
Do Hagyeong.
A woman who’d once been the eyes and ears of our unit twenty years ago.
She could hear even the faint sound of a demonic beast catching its breath beyond a Gate and read every ambush before it happened.
There were no shortage of survivors in the unit thanks to those senses of hers.
The problem was that those senses had never shut off, even after the war ended.
City lights stabbed at her like blades. Traffic noise scraped at her skull. The smell of people flooded over her until she felt sick.
What was ordinary everyday life to everyone else was torture to her, every second of it.
So she ran to the mountains.
To a place with no sound, no light, no smell.
After another hour of climbing, we reached an isolated hut beyond the ridge.
There was no sign of anyone.
Still, neatly stacked firewood out in the yard and carefully laid-out mountain greens drying beneath the eaves made it obvious someone lived here.
No electricity. No running water. No signal.
A one-pyeong slice of the world carved completely out of civilization.
Docheol set me down on a flat rock and, after catching his breath, cleared his throat.
"Hagyeong. It’s me, Docheol. It’s been a while, so I thought I’d stop by and see your face—"
He didn’t even finish.
Ping.
Something came flying out from the hut’s shadows.
A stone the size of a fist.
Its trajectory was dead-on for Docheol’s forehead.
He jerked his head aside in a panic.
The rock sliced past his ear and buried itself in the tree behind him.
There came a heavy thunk.
"Hey, this woman doesn’t even take a greeting!"
"Still the same charming welcome, I see."
The moment I muttered that, a second stone came flying.
This time it was aimed at me.
Right between the eyes.
For something thrown by a person who’d lived on a mountain for seven years, it was absurdly fast.
I didn’t reach for my back-scratcher. I didn’t even twitch a finger.
The stone stopped a handspan from my face as if it had hit an invisible wall.
My mana, scattered through the air around me, had seized its motion and held it in place.
No dramatic light. No sound.
Just a rock hanging there, frozen as if nailed to the void, before dropping to the ground with a soft tap.
Only then did a person step out from the hut’s shadow.
It was a woman wearing layers of old quilted clothing and thick earmuffs.
Dark-tinted glasses covered the area around her eyes.
She looked no older than her early twenties, but the look in her eyes belonged to someone who had spent a long time alone in the mountains.
It was Do Hagyeong.
She stared at me through her glasses.
"...So it’s you."
Her voice was hoarse.
The kind that comes from not talking for a long time.
"Baekjeong. You’re... quiet. Still."
Do Hagyeong walked toward us slowly.
She’d thrown a rock at Docheol, but with me, she’d dropped her guard.
"Why don’t you throw one at him?"
Docheol asked, looking wounded.
"You’re loud. Your heartbeat, the smell of your sweat, the rustle of your collar—everything hits me at once. It feels like my head’s going to split."
Do Hagyeong frowned, adjusting her earmuffs.
Then she pointed at me.
"But he’s different. He’s... like a lake. Deep, but still. There’s no sound at all."
I let out a bitter laugh inside.
I had no mana core.
My whole body was a mana circuit, so unlike other hunters, I didn’t leak mana into the world.
While everyone else blazed around like torches, I just sank quietly like still water.
To most people, that looked like the incompetence of someone below F-grade.
But to Do Hagyeong, whose senses had gone mad, it was the only kind of peace she could stand near.
Come to think of it, it had been that way twenty years ago too.
When the rest of the unit found it hard even to stand near her, I was the only one she ever leaned on.
She said it was because the space beside me was the quietest.
Back then I’d thought it was no big deal. Now I knew better.
What it meant to have even one quiet person beside you when the whole world’s sounds felt like blades.
"You don’t have to come inside the hut. You won’t be able to stand it in there."
Do Hagyeong pointed to a low wooden platform off to one side of the yard.
It was a blunt sort of hospitality, hardly what you’d call welcoming, but it was her version of it.
Up close, I could see her fingertips and the skin around her ears trembled faintly.
Apparently, just having the two of us nearby was stimulation enough for her to endure.
Even with the earmuffs on, she occasionally frowned at the sound of Docheol’s breathing, and whenever the wind shifted direction, she pinched her nose.
I wondered how someone like that had ever survived in the city, then realized I already knew the answer.
She hadn’t survived. That was why she’d come here.
For someone for whom every sensation in the world was a blade, this silent patch of mountain was the only painkiller.
Docheol sat on the platform and got to the point.
"Hagyeong. A Variant has moved into this mountain. The beasts are running, aren’t they? You must’ve felt it too."
Do Hagyeong’s expression hardened.
She slowly turned her head and looked somewhere down the mountain.
The eyes behind her glasses trembled, narrowing as they followed something invisible.
"...I felt it. Three days ago."
Her voice sank lower.
"It’s underground. Very deep. Something’s been slowly ripening in a place the System’s detectors can’t reach."
"A Gate?"
"Something worse than a Gate."
Do Hagyeong slipped off her earmuffs for a moment.
Then she closed her eyes and stood still, as if listening to the entire mountain.
"The Variant creatures you’ve seen so far have only been the kind that trick the System, right? Pretending to be dead, avoiding alarms. But they were still born within the System’s framework. That’s why your disciples could still manage to catch them once they sharpened their senses."
She opened her eyes again.
"This is different. This thing is... being born without ever going through the System. From the very beginning, it’s outside the System. Just like us first-generation hunters."
In an instant, the air in the mountains turned cold.
The joke vanished from Docheol’s face.
Even I found myself tightening my arms around the Mocha Gold box without realizing it.
We already knew there were more and more Variants the System couldn’t catch.
But something that was being born without ever passing through the System at all—that was on another level entirely.
"You sure?" Docheol asked.
"Why else do you think the mountain animals are running? They don’t look at the System. They know it by instinct. They know whatever’s coming up from below is something they can’t handle."
Do Hagyeong pointed down the mountain.
"I’ve lived on this mountain for seven years, and I’ve never felt anything like this. It’s not a demonic beast, not a Gate, and not quite a Variant either. Something about it feels wrong."
"When’s it going to break loose?"
I asked.
"I don’t know. It could be a month. Could be half a year. But..."
Do Hagyeong looked at me.
The look in her eyes behind the glasses was serious.
"When it does, not a single hunter who fights by turning on the System will survive. It’s a test with no answer sheet at all. Only people like you from the old days can deal with this."
At that, Docheol glanced at me sideways.
There it was again.
That look that meant, in the end, you’re the only one, the kind right before someone starts exploiting you.
"No."
I cut him off immediately.
"I haven’t even said anything yet."
"Your face said enough. I’m not doing it. I’m going to teach my disciples and get off work on time."
"That’s because they can’t handle it, didn’t you hear?"
"... "
When I had nothing to say, keeping my mouth shut was still my best strategy.
"Be honest."
Docheol stood up from the platform.
"If your disciples stand before that Variant and die, could you really sit there and do nothing? Yu Seoa. Jin Seojun. If something appears that even the things you taught them can’t handle—"
I looked down at the box of Mocha Gold.
I didn’t answer.
Because if I did, it would obviously go exactly the way Docheol wanted.
Do Hagyeong listened to the two of us bicker in silence, then let out a snort of laughter.
It sounded like the first time she’d laughed in a very long while.
"You two haven’t changed at all in twenty years. Docheol pushes, and Baekjeong complains, but in the end you still do it all."
Turning back toward the hut, she said, "I’m not going down the mountain. I can’t stand places with too many people. If I stood in the middle of the city, I’d go insane and die within ten minutes."
She paused for a moment.
"Still... when the thing’s ready to burst, I’ll tell you first. You, Baekjeong. You’re quiet, so no matter how far away you are, I can find you."
"You said you don’t take phone calls."
"Not by phone. I have another way."
For the first time, Do Hagyeong gave a faint smile.
"I’ll send it on the quietest night you’ve got. You’ll know what it is when you receive it."
With those words, Do Hagyeong disappeared into the hut.
She hadn’t made it onto any list.
Still, it was as if a spring alarm hidden in the mountain had raised its antenna toward us.
For a woman who had cut herself off from the world for seven years to be the first to reach out, maybe that was even more valuable than the list Docheol had been after.
Docheol wore a satisfied look as he grabbed the wheelchair handles.
"See? Not a wasted trip, was it?"
"You’d be happy, sure. I only climbed the mountain twice."
"Twice? Please. Once on the way up, once on the way down. That’s one set."
"That still makes it twice."
Before the sun set, we headed back down the mountain.
Descending was worse than climbing.
While Docheol slid down the slope with my wheelchair on his back, I nearly tumbled off more than once.
I couldn’t even hold the handles properly because I was busy protecting the Mocha Gold box.
"Pick a side—either toss the coffee or take care of the person."
"Coffee. Obviously."
"...You’re unbelievable. If you go rolling off, don’t expect me to know."
"If I do, the wheelchair you’re carrying will break first. It’s Association property, so you’d have to pay for it."
"... "
Halfway down the mountain, I suddenly thought back to what Do Hagyeong had said.
Something born without ever going through the System.
Like the first generation.
I had a rough idea of what that meant.
That only made my mouth taste all the more bitter.
The fact that Do Hagyeong had raised her antenna toward us for the first time in seven years, too, was ultimately proof of just how dangerous this thing was.
When we reached the parking lot at the foot of the mountain and I turned on my phone, dozens of missed-call alerts flooded in.
Most of them were from Yu Seoa and Jin Seojun.
And above them all was one urgent message from the Association’s public relations office.
It had come a full week earlier than expected.
Seo Jingyeong.
So the reporter had said she’d hold off for another week, but apparently she’d changed her mind.
Or maybe she’d only said that in the first place to catch me off guard.
While I was up in the mountains dodging stones, her pen had turned into print and spilled itself into the world.
My phone vibrated nonstop with gallery notifications from the other side of the screen.
I stared at that vibration for a long moment, then shut the power off.
"We’re screwed."