Chapter 45
“You’ve got a face that makes me want to deck you, if nothing else,” he said.
“Knew it.”
“So that’s a no?”
“A pretty obvious one.”
Hadn’t he said it himself?
That he had no conscience.
People without boundaries were impossible to trust. How was I supposed to form an alliance with people like that? Even if we did, I’d spend the whole time worrying about betrayal and wondering when the knife would come out.
Seo Ji-hyeok kept the corners of his mouth lifted as he replied, “Aren’t you being a little harsh? We ended up fighting Crowd because of you.”
“Call it the price of picking a fight with us. Especially with me.”
“That’s a rather large price for change, then.”
“Not my problem.”
I shrugged as I said it.
I heard Choi Ki-jeong grind his teeth.
He probably didn’t like me much.
I had no interest in making him like me, so that was fine. I didn’t exactly like them, either.
“...A shame.”
He glanced at his subordinate for a moment, then continued. Choi Ki-jeong gave him the slightest bow.
Judging by how quickly he dipped his head, he hadn’t expected the sound of his own teeth grinding to carry that clearly.
“If we formed an alliance, we could wipe out Crowd’s people with ease.”
“Ah, speaking of wiping people out, do me a favor and try not to kill them if you can help it.”
“What? Why should I do that? Don’t tell me you’re a pacifist like Baek Do-hee?”
Pacifist...
People often misunderstood that about her.
She was the country’s best healer, and she never killed even the worst scum. So naturally, everyone assumed she was some kind of saint.
The truth was simpler than that. It wasn’t that Do-hee was a pacifist.
It was that killing people came with penalties to her healing skills.
It was just a misunderstanding born from the truth she had hidden in order to maintain her White Saint image.
Only Tae-cheon and I knew that. Not even Han Jae-im, Tae-cheon’s right hand, knew.
“What nonsense are you spouting? If you’re determined to kill them, bring them to me.”
“Hm?”
Keeping the Balance Guild and Crowd in check was fine. If they were busy watching each other, they might forget about me.
But Seo Ji-hyeok personally taking their lives would complicate things.
“Bring them to you? And why would I do that?”
“Because I’m the one who’s supposed to end their breathing.”
Seo Ji-hyeok stared at me in silence for a few seconds after I said that.
Then he asked Choi Ki-jeong a question I hadn’t expected at all.
“Choi Ki-jeong. Is that woman really that beautiful?”
“...For a blacksmith, she is a beauty. If anything, that tends to make people underestimate her skill.”
“Silly. You’re saying such silly things.”
“That’s exactly what I mean. It isn’t easy to rank among the top hundred blacksmiths in the country.”
“Hmm. So that’s the ridiculous misunderstanding those Crowd bastards came up with, then. I should meet her face-to-face.”
“...Hey, that’s not what this is about.”
“Then why insist on killing them yourself?”
“Because—!”
I shut my mouth tight, suddenly without an answer.
The reason I wanted to kill Crowd personally was because they were the targets of my quest.
I’d only put down two so far, which meant I still needed eight more for the best reward.
If Seo Ji-hyeok killed them, he’d only get in the way of me clearing the quest.
I didn’t even know how many of them there were, so I couldn’t just let him kill them off carelessly.
The problem was, I couldn’t exactly tell him that.
I was trying to think of some reason to give him when Seo Ji-hyeok let out a small laugh.
“Fine. I can’t promise anything, but I’ll be as lenient as I can.”
“...Right. Really, thanks.”
“Master.”
“Hm?”
Choi Ki-jeong called to Seo Ji-hyeok and whispered something into his ear.
I couldn’t hear the details, but it probably meant they had to go. As soon as Choi Ki-jeong stepped away, he relayed that they should be leaving.
Before he said it, though, he looked somewhere else first.
As if he had noticed someone watching us.
“...That concludes our business, so we should be going.”
“Sure. Good idea.”
I waved them off as if telling them to get lost already.
A circular magic circle drew itself under their feet in an instant.
It was teleportation magic.
He’d activated it in just a few seconds. Choi Ki-jeong was more impressive a mage than I’d expected.
Seo Ji-hyeok looked at me like he still wanted to exchange parting words.
“See you again.”
“Would rather not.”
“And think over the alliance, too.”
“I said no. If you really want an alliance, bring me Jeon Myeong-hwan’s head or something.”
“Haha, sure. I’ll do that.”
Still smiling, Seo Ji-hyeok vanished with Choi Ki-jeong in an instant.
The magic circle on the ground disappeared without a trace as well.
Left alone, I looked toward the direction Seo Ji-hyeok had been staring.
I could only see the industrial complex buildings standing beneath the sunset.
What he’d noticed was probably not the building itself, but whoever had been tailing me.
I knew Do-hee and Tae-cheon well enough to be certain of that.
“So it really was the shirt I got drenched in this morning, huh?”
My blood-soaked clothes must have flipped Do-hee’s worry switch.
As always, that worry had likely gone in the wrong direction and ended up involving people being assigned to shadow me.
I looked carefully around the buildings, but couldn’t sense any sign of a tail.
So I asked Saessak, who was more sensitive to attention than I was.
“Saessak, do you feel any eyes on me?”
World Tree Sapling reports that it does not sense any eyes on Manager Baek Do-woon.
Saessak hadn’t noticed anything, either.
Maybe it couldn’t pick up on it because the gaze wasn’t hostile or contemptuous.
Or maybe they were just too far away.
Of course, it was also possible there was no one tailing me and I was acting like an idiot for nothing.
Either way, I needed to confirm whether there was someone there first.
If there was a tail, I might as well make use of it.
＊＊＊
“Yes, Hunter Baek Do-woon, Rank B. Everything checks out.”
“Thank you.”
I accepted the license from the gate attendant and thanked him.
Hunter Baek Do-woon, Rank B.
It had a pleasant ring to it, and it made me grin like a fool.
It couldn’t compare to being called an A-class hunter after presenting a forged license.
Back then, I’d only worried about being found out because it was a lie.
“I guess I should only use Ji-on when I’m doing something weird from now on.”
I tucked my hunter license into my wallet and entered the Boramae Park Gate.
The Boramae Park Gate was a swamp where lizardmen lived.
The individual monsters weren’t especially strong, only around Rank B, but they lived in an organized, almost military structure that made soloing them difficult.
Because of that, the hunters gathered around the gate and at its entrance were mostly in parties of three or four.
When they saw me, they started talking.
“Is that guy alone?”
“He’s going to clear this place by himself? At night, too? Is he crazy?”
“Hang on, his face looks familiar. Isn’t he a famous hunter?”
“Hmm, really? I don’t know him.”
“Oh, it’s that guy! You know, the one who was just trending live search the o—”
Comments like that drifted over.
As they said, taking on nocturnal lizardmen at night wasn’t a smart idea.
That was fine.
What I was about to do was perform a dramatic collapse after fighting the lizardmen anyway.
If anything, acting in a way that wasn’t smart would make it easier to fool the people tailing me.
They were the ones Do-hee had sent because she was worried about me.
If I played the part of someone who’d been caught off guard, they’d definitely approach to check on my condition.
“Found them.”
How long had I been walking through the swamp, maybe a few dozen minutes?
I spotted a group of lizardmen with fin-like ridges rising from their necks, like a horse’s mane.
There were roughly a platoon of them.
Most of them gripped bone halberds, though a few had bows as well.
Good. I could already picture the script.
I used Warm Touch and charged straight at the lizardmen.
“Kyarrrk!”
The lizardmen mocked me for rushing in so stupidly.
I dodged their halberds and tapped each of their heads once with both hands.
A simple flick of my fingers was enough to make their skulls explode and kill them, and the lizardmen’s laughter vanished.
Yes, that was the reaction I needed. It made the act feel real.
The largest lizardman at the back gave the order.
“Kyaruk...!”
“Kyaruk!”
The lizardmen who had been laughing at me shut their mouths and rushed forward.
They definitely knew how to use numbers to their advantage.
Ten of them thrust their halberds at once, and the others followed with more strikes. The ones with bows filled the gap by loosing arrows.
It felt less like fighting monsters and more like fighting humans.
“Kyarrruk!”
By the time four or five more had fallen, the lizardman leader stepped forward.
He wasn’t carrying a halberd in either hand.
Instead, perhaps to show his rank, he was holding a massive axe.
It was about time for me to go down.
I took the giant axe sweeping through the air and caught it with my body, which had activated a mana shield.
Then I deliberately fell back with exaggerated force.
“Ugh!”
“Kyaruk?”
The lizardman leader realized the axe hadn’t dealt a fatal blow.
The lizardmen around him, seeing me collapse, assumed the leader had won.
He looked back and forth between his cheering subordinates and me, sprawled on the ground.
Then, in the end, he raised a shout with the rest of them.
“......”
I lay still as if unconscious and waited.
A few of them approached.
Their hands were blocked by the mana shield and couldn’t touch my body.
Only then did they seem to sense something was off, tilting their heads in confusion.
I wanted to tilt my head like them, too.
Because even though I was lying here looking half-dead, nobody had shown up.
Was I seriously just being an idiot by myself right now?
Just as embarrassment started creeping in and I was about to get up, I heard a lizardman scream.
“Damn it! He’s not dead, is he?”
“No way, that can’t be!”
It was Kim Sang-cheol and Lee Jae-wook.
Do-hee must have asked them to keep an eye on me.
Thank goodness.
I’d almost added another night of kicking off the blankets in my sleep to my life experience.
The two of them, veterans of Rank B hunting, cut down the lizardmen in an instant.
After finishing off the leader as well, they hurried straight to me.
“Team Leader!”
“Are you alrigh—”
“Hello.”
I lay there with my hand raised and greeted them as casually as if nothing had happened.
The two men who had been rushing toward me froze where they stood.
Moments later, they must have realized I’d been pretending to be injured, because their eyes grew wider and wider.
For what it’s worth, they were already kind of cute-looking.
“Huh...!”
“Y-you were fooling us?”
“You know I recover fast even when I get hurt.”
They’d seen me heal even when I got injured fighting Jeon Myeong-hwan, and they still got fooled?
Well, from the way the two of them started bickering, it didn’t seem like they hadn’t considered the possibility.
“See? I told you it was a trap!”
“Told you? What are you talking about? You agreed to come check it out, too!”
“Agh, what do we do now?”
“We got caught on the very first day she asked us to help...!”
They had thought about it, but concern for me had still come first.
They’d come out just in case.
That was a little touching.
All right. I needed to give Kim Sang-cheol and Lee Jae-wook some hope in the form of what you might call “persuasion.”
First, I needed to confirm something.
“Did you report the people you just met?”
“Huh? Ah, well, not yet—”
“I can’t tell you that!”
Lee Jae-wook smacked the back of Kim Sang-cheol’s head the moment he started to answer.
Kim Sang-cheol glared at him as if ready to protest the blow, then clapped a hand over his own mouth with a startled “Huh!”
Too late, though.
He’d definitely said not yet.
Heh. Then it was settled.
“Then from this moment on, we’re allies.”
“Pardon?”
The two of them tilted their heads, completely lost.
I stood up and walked toward them, then asked, “What do you think happens if I tell Do-hee that the two of you got found out like this?”
“Please! Please don’t do that!”
“Then our older sister Do-hee will really tear us a new one!”
Lee Jae-wook and Kim Sang-cheol panicked.
Do-hee, just what did you do to these two?
They were barely new recruits in the guild, and they were already terrified of her.
Two years ago, she’d been the type to worry people because she was recklessly innocent...
How had things ended up like this?
“So now we’re allies, right? And you won’t report the people we just met, either.”
“Ah...”
“But if Do-hee nuna—”
“It’ll be fine.”
I put a hand on Lee Jae-wook’s shoulder, then said in the most solemn voice I could manage, “As long as we don’t get caught.”