Clocking Out on Time Flew Away on Live Broadcast (3)
The woman spoke first.
"Kang Taehyun, Senior Clerk of the Comprehensive Civil Affairs Office at the Korea Hunter Association."
She recited my personal details, crisp and deliberate. Meaning she'd already dug up everything there was to dig.
Behind me, Seoha clutched her injured shoulder and watched the whole mess unfold. The moment we stepped out of the gate, the swarm of reporters had boxed us in so tight I never got a chance to slip away with her.
"What you just used—that power didn't register on the system. No mana response at all. How does an F-rank take something down like that?"
The microphone shot straight at my mouth. Behind it, several cameras still trained their red recording lights on me. The live broadcast hadn't cut yet. From the networks' point of view, this unscripted disaster made for far juicier footage than any planned segment.
I looked at the woman for a moment.
Seo Jingyeong.
The same reporter who'd barged into my civil affairs office not long ago and shoved a sealed name in my face. Threats hadn't worked on her then, and neither had my usual nonsense. Today she had live footage in hand—there was zero chance she was backing down.
The picture she wanted was obvious. All I had to do was panic, deny it, or try to run. Then the juicy exclusive would write itself: Who is the old man in the wheelchair from civil affairs?
I had no intention of giving her that picture.
"Listen, reporter."
I opened my mouth at a leisurely pace.
"Someone nearly died just now. Is this really the time to dig into some aging public servant's personal history?"
"That aging public servant just took down with a single gesture what even an S-rank couldn't catch."
She had a sharp tongue. Of course she wasn't going to roll over easy.
"Gesture? Please. That thing just keeled over on its own. Everything looks that way when you're old."
"Hundreds of thousands of people already watched the footage. It didn't look like it 'just keeled over.'"
She plugged every exit hole one by one. This woman was certain. Shaking that certainty would take more than clumsy denial.
I let out a sigh. Head-on collision would only mean dancing to her tempo. So I needed to flip the board—turn a situation where I was the biggest story into one where I was the smallest.
Luckily, I had exactly the material to do it.
That thing I'd just turned into a bead.
To a reporter, an unknown monster that rattled the system would taste far better than some mystery wheelchair grandpa. Human nature always pulled toward the bigger story.
"Fine. I took it down. But that's not what matters."
I jerked my chin toward the spot where the mutant had been. All that remained now was scorched black ice and a shattered floor.
"You saw what that thing was just now, didn't you?"
Seo Jingyeong's eyes wavered for a beat. Not the direction she'd expected. She'd come to pry into an identity, only for the identity himself to point somewhere else entirely.
But she didn't look completely clueless either. Word of mutants had already been circulating in this industry. Monsters that slipped out of gates without the system catching them. Hunters who claimed to have seen such things. All of it had been pure rumor—witness accounts with no proof, nothing the Association ever confirmed, nothing the networks ever touched. Everyone dismissed it as drinking-table ghost stories.
Until they saw one with their own eyes.
"The system can't catch those things. No rank pops up. No weak points. Stare at the window all you want and all you get are three little words: Unmeasured. That system you people put so much faith in goes blank the moment it faces one of those."
I kept going.
"You know what that means? It means the system doesn't know what they are. And if the system doesn't know, then the hunters who grew up trusting nothing but the system don't know either. So when they run into one, they end up just like that Baekho kid a minute ago."
The cameras were drinking in every word. I knew it, and I kept talking anyway. Precisely because I knew it.
"That kid got lucky today. Happened to have an old man like me nearby. But next time? The time after that? You think there's going to be some geezer around every single time?"
I flicked a glance toward Seoha standing behind me—the S-rank who had nearly died minutes earlier, blood still seeping through her shoulder.
"Even Baekho's ace only bought herself half a beat because she'd learned how to sense things outside the system. Without that, she'd already be dead. How many hunters these days do you think have that kind of sense? Nine out of ten fight with their eyes glued to a window."
Seo Jingyeong stood frozen with the mic in her hand, words briefly gone. The other reporters had fallen quiet too. The whole scene that had been boiling over the wheelchair grandpa's identity was starting to tilt in a different direction.
Exactly the picture I'd been aiming for.
I could feel Seoha staring hard at me from behind. She would have figured it out—that I was deliberately diverting the spotlight. That even with my identity about to be laid bare for the entire world, I was trying to bury it under talk of mutants. She started to say something, then shut her mouth again. Smart enough to know that jumping in now would only wreck the board. Quick on the uptake, that one.
"Those things are multiplying lately. Every gate. Every dungeon. They hatch in silence, right in places the system has stamped as safe. Then they burst out like today, and the hunters who trusted only the system die."
That much was true. The sound Yejin had heard in a C-rank low floor, this gate today—same story. Things born outside the system were quietly growing in the cracks of the world. Exactly what Dohagyeong had warned about from the mountains. Creatures that never passed through the system at all. And now they had sown their seeds even in a broadcast-ready gate.
It wouldn't be long before days like this started erupting everywhere. And there was no chance an old man like me would be nearby every time.
Not that I was spouting all this out of concern for the world. Purely to bury the story about me. The second this reporter realized that mutants made a far bigger exclusive than the identity of some wheelchair geezer, the cameras would chase the mutant instead of me. Then I could quietly slip away and go drink some cold coffee.
That was the only calculation.
But once the words were out of my mouth, a strange sincerity had mixed in. Thinking about kids who would die trusting nothing but the system didn't feel entirely like someone else's problem. Of course I had no intention of showing that sincerity. The moment I did, I'd keep getting dragged into world-saving nonsense.
"So then…"
Seo Jingyeong finally found her voice.
"You're saying today's incident wasn't a random accident? That things like this are going to keep appearing…"
"Those aren't my words. You saw it with your own eyes just now."
I shrugged.
"I'm just an old man who got annoyed by the noise on his way past and cleaned it up. What that thing is, what happens next—you experts can figure that out yourselves. I don't care."
The "I don't care" was half sincere and half performance. It wasn't that I truly didn't care—it was that if I looked like I cared, people would keep calling me. Nothing was more of a pain than dragging a wheelchair grandpa into the business of saving the world.
But this woman was no pushover. Her face said she'd already clocked that I was trying to redirect the spotlight. She knew she'd come hunting one identity and ended up biting into something bigger. And still, her expression said she couldn't refuse the bait. That was a reporter's instinct for you.
Mutants were the scoop of the century. News that struck at the very foundation of this era's faith that the system was absolute safety. Until now, people had treated a hunter's death as simple personal misfortune—bad luck running into a strong mob, or a mistake. But if there were beings the system itself couldn't catch? That shook the entire foundation of the hunter industry. And the evidence for that scoop had just been captured cleanly by a dozen cameras.
Seo Jingyeong glanced at me, then at the cameras, then back at me. In that brief moment I could see the scales tipping inside her head—the exclusive of the wheelchair grandpa's identity versus the exclusive of a mutant that shook the system. Which one was bigger? The answer was already set. No matter how you looked at it, the latter won.
At last she adjusted her grip on the microphone. The mic that had been pointed at me swung toward the spot where the mutant had been. She'd taken the bait.
"What you just witnessed is an unknown entity the system failed to measure."
Seo Jingyeong began speaking to the cameras. Her voice was taut with a tension it hadn't held earlier.
"How has the Association been managing an entity that even an S-rank hunter from Baekho Guild could not subdue? Why can't the system detect it? We at Truth's Eye will begin our investigation."
The moment those words went out live, the world could no longer write this off as an unlucky accident. Until yesterday, mutants had been drinking-table ghost stories. Plenty of people claimed to have seen them; no one had ever officially acknowledged it. But just now, in front of broadcast cameras, a reporter had put the word in her mouth.
An unknown entity the system failed to measure.
With that single phrase, a ghost story became fact. Even the same existence carried different weight when it was just circulating as rumor versus when it landed in a news chyron. You could ignore the former. The latter was a disaster the whole world had to start preparing for. Hundreds of thousands of people had watched with their own eyes as an unknown being an S-rank couldn't catch appeared. A crack had just run through the belief that the system was absolute safety.
No matter how many kids I taught, I could only ever save a handful of individuals. One broadcast from that reporter had just fired a warning shot at the entire world. And of course, for me, the scattered attention was a pure win.
I exhaled in quiet relief. Done. The cameras had started chasing the mutant instead of me. Now all I had to do was take the injured Seoha and quietly get out of here.
That was what I thought as I started to turn the wheelchair.
Then Seo Jingyeong, still facing the cameras, added one last line.
"And regarding the unidentified individual who single-handedly subdued this entity just now…"
The wheel I had been turning stopped.
"…we will be investigating that as well."
This woman had bitten both hooks after all. The mutant and me. My calculation to divert the spotlight had only half succeeded.
I let out a low sigh and looked down at the halted wheel. Looks like the peaceful mixed-coffee life had well and truly ended today. Mutants had been officially recognized by the world, and the name Baekjeong had risen back to the surface. And the reporter holding both of those in one hand clearly had no intention of letting me go from this day forward.
She lowered the camera and looked straight at me.
"Senior Clerk. Could we speak privately for a moment?"
Her eyes said there were things the live broadcast couldn't hold. She meant to dig out that sealed name somewhere without cameras.
I desperately wanted some cold coffee. Mutants, a reporter, and an identity leak—all in a single day. Three headaches had rolled in at once. A day like this was a genuine first in my life.