Hunters Seeking Wheelchair Inspiration (1)
Han Gyumin, the External Cooperation Director of the Jecheon Guild, still couldn’t stop his hands from shaking an hour after he left the conference room.
By the time he’d made it out of the Association building and into his car, he still hadn’t managed a single word.
The driver glanced at him through the rearview mirror.
“Director, are you feeling unwell?”
Even then, Han Gyumin couldn’t answer.
If it had been his usual self, he would have been dissecting the meeting results by now, calculating his next move. If the negotiations had collapsed, he’d have prepared another card; if that card didn’t work, he’d have lined up one more after that.
That had been his way of surviving twenty years at guild negotiation tables.
But today, nothing came to him.
His mind was empty.
He couldn’t speak.
In that conference room, he had absolutely felt death.
The sound of a paper cup being set on the table.
And then, immediately after, an invisible blade had swept across the back of his neck.
Nothing had actually touched him.
And yet every cell in his body had screamed.
Run.
If you stand in front of that thing, you will die.
The fact that his legs had given out and sent him to the floor hadn’t been a matter of will. His body had surrendered before his mind could.
Han Gyumin wasn’t a hunter.
He was a businessman who had spent his entire life in suits, handling contracts.
Mana, killing intent—those were just broadcast words to him.
But today, he had experienced those broadcast words closing around his own throat.
No blade, no gun, no magic. Just an old man setting down a paper cup.
That one trivial motion had brought the pride he’d built over a lifetime crashing down all at once.
The problem was that no one else had seen it.
To the other executives, he must have looked like a man who’d suddenly seen a hallucination and collapsed.
After all, that wheelchair-bound old geezer hadn’t lifted a finger.
What was he supposed to report to the higher-ups?
The wheelchair-bound old man set down a paper cup, and I nearly died.
The moment he said that, he’d sound insane.
Han Gyumin lifted his trembling hand to his phone, then lowered it again.
The legend of the Grand Hall twenty years ago.
Baekjeong, the Butcher, who had stopped a tide of monsters with an invisible wall.
Han Gyumin had always dismissed that story as exaggeration.
Something polished into myth from the era before the System even existed.
Since entering the guild industry, the first generation had been nothing more to him than old stories used for marketing.
A symbol of wasteful, brute-force incompetence, printed on the first page of rookie training materials.
A convenient contrast meant to make modern, System-guided hunters look superior.
So in that conference room, he had called that old man a cripple.
He had meant it.
Because how threatening could some outdated relic in a wheelchair possibly be?
Only today did he understand.
The legend hadn’t been embellishment.
What he’d received had been, at most, a single strand—less than one ten-thousandth of the power Baekjeong possessed.
And with that single strand, he had seen death.
He had learned, through his own throat, that the first generation he had spent his life mocking as the model of inefficiency was in fact a monster who could not be touched by a hundred men like him.
On that evening, a short directive circulated through the Jecheon Guild’s internal messenger.
Strictly no contact with Kang Taehyun at the Hunter Association Civil Affairs Office until further notice.
No provocation under any circumstances.
No reason was written.
It couldn’t be.
The other executives who saw it tilted their heads in confusion.
It had been Han Gyumin, the very same director who’d attacked that old man most aggressively in the meeting, who had issued a no-contact order the moment he returned.
Someone asked what had happened during the meeting, but Han Gyumin never answered.
That night, he went home and stood in front of his mirror for a very long time.
There was no wound on the back of his neck.
And yet that spot still felt cold.
For the first time in his life, the man who had always measured the world in numbers and contracts had stood before something that couldn’t be measured at all.
He had no choice but to admit it.
Meanwhile, at the same hour, over in the Gaon Guild, External Cooperation Director Yun Sojin found herself newly satisfied with the decision to keep her mouth shut throughout the meeting.
While the other guilds had been pushing that old man around, she hadn’t added a single word.
She’d used the excuse that she was observing carefully.
But it hadn’t been caution, not really.
It had been calculation.
The reason a reporter like Seo Jingyeong had been able to get her hands on sealed documents had nothing to do with persistence alone.
A lock that had sat untouched for twenty years wouldn’t open unless someone turned it from the inside.
A few days earlier, Yun Sojin had replayed one video dozens of times.
The live broadcast of Gaon’s ace, Im Taejun, being utterly crushed by Baekho’s rookie Jin Seojun in a variant gate.
The guild’s poster boy had spent an hour being toyed with by a mutant, then Jin Seojun had taken it down in three moves with his eyes half-closed.
The clip had been cemented as Gaon’s black history, and Im Taejun had been kept off the air for a while afterward.
Ads had been pulled one after another, and merchandise sales had been cut in half.
Gaon’s PR team had spent weeks trying to bury the clip, but once humiliation had been nailed down, it never came out cleanly.
And yet if the master teaching Jin Seojun was Baekjeong—
then the story changed completely.
Im Taejun hadn’t lost to some outdated old man’s disciple.
He had lost to someone trained by the legend who saved the city twenty years ago.
The shame of being beaten by a washed-up relic would be transformed into the glory of having learned one thing from a legendary heir.
Yun Sojin’s lips curved.
Even the meaning of defeat changed depending on who had handed it to you.
If a neighborhood thug beat you up, it was humiliation. If a champion did it, it became a war story.
So Gaon had no reason to deny the article.
On the contrary, they wanted to strengthen it, quietly if possible.
The more certain it became that Baekjeong was alive, the more Gaon’s face would recover.
She sent Im Taejun a short message.
During the next interview, drop in a remark about respecting the hunter who defeated you’s master.
Casually.
Im Taejun replied almost at once.
What the hell are you talking about?
Why the hell should I respect that old man?
Yun Sojin didn’t answer.
A hunter only needed to know how to fight.
It was the office workers in suits who did the thinking.
Im Taejun wouldn’t know how the company planned to turn his humiliation at the hands of Baekho’s rookie into glory.
All he had to do was casually let one line slip, and a few days later the headline would change.
Gaon’s Ace Pays Respect to the Heir of Baekjeong Who Defeated Him
Even losing was a skill.
If you picked the right person to lose to, defeat itself became a product.
On that point, Yun Sojin was one step ahead of the other guilds in the meeting room.
While everyone else was scrambling to deny Baekjeong, Gaon was already preparing to uphold him first.
In the end, turning a crisis into an opportunity came down to who bowed their head first.
And Gaon, thanks to having been humiliated once already, was used to bending.
Daeseong, Cheongryong, and Geosan were doing a much simpler kind of math.
The executives from those three guilds had each phoned their superiors the moment the meeting ended.
The core issue was simple.
If the heroic narrative wavered, the stock price would drop.
The major guilds had been built on the myth that they had defended the Grand Hall themselves.
If that myth shook, then investment, merchandise, and advertising would all shake with it.
The stock market had already started to react.
The day after the article broke, the share prices of all three guilds fell in unison.
At the mere suspicion that the heroic narrative might be a lie, hundreds of billions of won in market cap evaporated.
The trouble was that no one had a plan.
If they tried to bury the article, the old man wouldn’t cooperate. If they tried to remove him, there was no one to target, since on paper he almost didn’t exist.
What made matters worse was that Baekho kept treating that old man like something precious, and that was deeply irritating.
One Cheongryong executive complained to a Daeseong executive over the phone.
“Why is Baekho protecting that old man in the first place? They’re not hiding some agenda, are they?”
“How should I know? Their vice-guild leader came out personally and took his side.”
“What if Baekho’s trying to recruit Baekjeong into their guild? Then aren’t we just the dogs chasing after a bone?”
The Daeseong executive went silent for a moment.
That silence was the sound of someone realizing he hadn’t thought of that possibility.
From there, the guilds’ true feelings began to drift apart in subtle ways.
One wanted to bury the article. Another said they should recruit the old man first. A third insisted they should pressure Baekho before anything else.
The coalition that had come together to apply unified pressure was already cracking before the meeting had even fully ended.
A single old man in a wheelchair had, without lifting a finger, split a giant guild alliance apart from the inside.
That night, Hunter Gallery erupted once again as word of the meeting leaked out.
Comments [1,118]
In the Baekho Guild vice-guild leader’s office, Docheol was chuckling to himself as he scrolled through the gallery post, his prosthetic leg propped up on the desk.
It was a little absurd for a vice-guild leader to be reading the gallery, sure, but lately there hadn’t been anything this entertaining.
A story about the executives of the major guilds swarming some old man only to come back with nothing to show for it.
His secretary came in and asked cautiously, “Vice-Guild Leader. The other guilds are asking for Baekho’s position. They want to know whose side we’re on regarding Director Kang Taehyun.”
“Whose side? The side that says don’t mess with Kang. That’s Baekho’s position.”
The secretary hesitated.
“But the other guilds are wondering why Baekho is protecting a mere civil affairs clerk so fiercely. Some are even speculating that Baekho is trying to recruit Baekjeong……”
“Recruit him? That old man?”
Docheol snorted.
He spun his chair around and looked out the window.
The leg resting on his prosthetic was a remnant of that hell from twenty years ago.
“Office suits don’t know what kind of man that old bastard is.”
Docheol had been one of the few survivors who crossed that hell together with Kang Taehyun.
Outside the System, with nothing but their bare bodies, they had torn through calamity as first-generation hunters.
So he knew.
Baekjeong’s power wasn’t a myth polished into legend.
If anything, the legend was failing to keep up with reality by a long shot.
At the Grand Hall, Docheol had moved evacuees behind the wall Kang Taehyun had raised.
He would never forget the sight of that tide of monsters freezing in place beyond it.
He had lost one leg that day, but without that wall he would have lost his life too.
The killing intent Jecheon’s director had received in the conference room.
Docheol knew at once how much of it there had really been.
What Kang Taehyun had let slip was truly only a thread.
And a single thread had made some suit buckle at the knees.
If Kang Taehyun had shown any real intention, no one would have walked out of that room alive.
The other guilds had trembled before Baekjeong alone.
But that was because they didn’t know Baekjeong, not because they did.
Baekho was different.
Baekho had another first-generation hunter who had stood shoulder to shoulder with that Baekjeong sitting in the vice-guild leader’s seat.
In other words, Baekho possessed two cards no one else did.
One was Baekjeong.
The other was a first-generation hunter who truly knew Baekjeong.
“The fact that the other guilds are too scared of the old man to touch him is Baekho’s biggest asset.”
Docheol poured cold mix coffee into a paper cup.
It was the same Mocha Gold Kang Taehyun always drank.
“There’s a difference between not touching someone because you can’t, and not touching them because you choose not to. Baekho’s the latter.”
He took a sip.
Sweet.
“That old man probably just wants to get off work, but look at the world. It keeps turning on its own.”
The secretary asked carefully, “Then what does Baekho plan to do with Director Kang?”
“Do? Nothing.”
Docheol lowered his prosthetic leg from the desk.
“If you poke him, that old man gets annoying. Leaving him alone is the best Baekho can do. He’ll raise disciples on his own, clean up the guilds on his own, and we’ll just bring him coffee from the side.”
The secretary withdrew at last, still wearing the expression of someone who hadn’t fully understood a word of what he’d heard.
That was only natural.
The old man’s true weight was something only those who had crossed the same hell could understand.
Beyond the window, the city lights were beginning to come on one by one.
Somewhere among those lights, in a corner of the Hunter Association’s civil affairs office, an old man was probably brewing cold coffee and waiting for quitting time like he always did.
Jecheon feared him, Gaon was scheming to venerate him, Daeseong, Cheongryong, and Geosan were fighting among themselves over him, and the gallery was chattering about him all night long.
And even with the world making such a racket around him, he himself had done nothing at all.
He had merely made coffee, thrown pebbles at his disciples, and waited to leave work.
Without lifting a finger, the world had gone ahead and started circling around him anyway.
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