The Story of Those Left Behind
The Dang Clan I returned to after so long an absence was somehow a different place. A cluster of brand-new buildings had risen among the old, and laborers who showed off their bronze-tanned skin swaggered back and forth hauling materials.
"Not over there! Where in blazes do you think you're going!!!"
And in the thick of it all stood the Financial Hall Master, roaring at the top of his lungs and waving his arms like a general directing a battle. For a gentleman who'd long since earned every one of his gray hairs, where in the world did he keep a set of pipes like that?
In any case, as I stood there blinking at the construction site sprawled across the grounds, wondering what on earth had happened in the half a year I'd been gone, Dang Mulin opened her mouth to explain.
"Apparently a good number of those grave goods you all hauled back last time turned out to be worth far more than anyone expected. So the Clan Head figured now was the moment to replace every last thing that had gone old and creaky — and this is the result."
"Uh... sis. So you sold off everything we brought back?"
"What? No. They kept nearly all the elixirs — it's the gold ingots and the assorted jewels... and the swords that got sold."
"You sold all the swords?"
"Yep... is something the matter?"
"Sold is sold, I suppose. It's nothing..."
It was true I'd once given Namgung Han my word that I'd send her a few blades from the Peng Clan's stock, but really — how big a deal was that? The Financial Hall Master, who'd been in daily torment over walls that kept crumbling on him, was that happy these days.
"Oh! Muyeong, my boy, so you've arrived at last? Go on inside and rest, now. You must be worn clean through, trekking back and forth all that way."
"Ah... yes, sir."
Confronted with the Financial Hall Master coming out to greet me, beaming from ear to ear the instant he spotted me, I trudged inside with an embarrassed look on my face.
Why was it that my bed, after so long an absence, felt so unbearably welcome...
Flop—
"Haaah... the world outside the blanket really is a dangerous place."
Granted, I'd faceplanted on top of the blanket rather than beneath it — but still. How blessed a thing it was, finally being able to rest without a care in the world.
And so I dropped off to sleep right where I'd collapsed... From then on the routine ran: wake, eat, take a brief stroll, shuffle back to my quarters, smoke one cigarette after another, then drop off to sleep again...
I know, believe me. I know perfectly well what a lost cause I'm being...
But what can you do? When nothing comes along to set my blood properly ablaze, I am, by nature, simply this lazy...
"Ssssiiiip... haaaaah....."
And so my quarters filled, little by little, with a pale gray haze.
A hand gripped a doorknob, trembling.
"Hoo... what in the world am I supposed to report..."
The man heaved sigh after sigh, screwing his eyes shut for a long moment... then gathered himself one more time and opened the door.
"Khoff... khoff....."
Just how long had cigarettes been burning in that sealed room? Even a single breath of the air felt as though it would rot a man's lungs on the spot, and he coughed again and again, flapping a hand before his face.
"What. What is it now?"
The speaker was half-swallowed by the smoke — nothing but a silhouette, like the composite sketch of some wanted criminal — and his voice was gray with exhaustion.
"Kheh—khoff... it's, well, the thing is....."
"You found him? You did find him, didn't you? Which means you opened that door yourself and walked in here of your own accord — that's what happened, isn't it?"
"W-we... didn't find him."
Crash— Before the words had even finished leaving his mouth, the ashtray came flying and shattered against the wall.
A shard must have skimmed across his cheek, because he could feel a bead of blood trickling down it.
"If you've got time to walk in here and spout useless garbage, then you've got time to get back out there and KEEP LOOKING!!!"
"Team Leader, but we've already tried every method we have—"
"Then get out there and pound the pavement, then!"
"We did that too, didn't we? But there's no CCTV footage... and not one witness who claims they saw a thing..."
Still parked in his chair, puffing away on one cigarette after another, the man rose with the nameplate reading Otherworld Countermeasures Team Leader — Kang Baek-ho clenched in his fist...
KWAAAAANG— and brought it down on his own desk, splitting it clean in two. The desk and the nameplate, that is — both of them.
When the man who'd come in through the door flinched at the sight, Kang Baek-ho advanced on him slowly, crushing in his grip the surviving half of the nameplate — the fragment that still read DER KANG BAEK-HO.
"T-Team Leader. We really, honestly did our absolute best, but..."
"Hoo... Ho-seong."
"Yes....."
His team member's legs had apparently given out somewhere along the way, because the man had sunk down onto the floor. Kang Baek-ho took him by the shoulders and scratched at his own head with the nameplate as he spoke.
"While you people were out there busting your humps looking for 'it,' do you have any idea what I've been through?"
The man called Ho-seong, terror-stricken by the murderous glare of his team leader, could only shake his head.
"Me? I've been catching calls from the Association President, from the Blue House... from the United States, China, Japan, Germany, Britain — from every embassy under the sun."
Tap— tap— tap— tap— Even with his cheek being patted, Ho-seong would not stop trembling, and Kang Baek-ho ground his teeth and pressed on.
"People who haven't made a phone call in their entire lives were all dialing me up... What the hell was I supposed to say to people like that?"
"W-we're... looking... into it..."
"Right — they know that much. 'We're looking into it as we speak, so please don't worry yourself too much'... But Ho-seong... turn it around. Put yourself in their seat."
"W-what... what do you mean..."
The nameplate had been flung aside at some point; now he stretched up a single finger and pointed at the sky.
"Sooo, word from up top — the seal at the North Pole is coming apart... But the American bastards say there's no problem at all, they can reseal it, so everybody relax... Would you relax?"
The seal at the North Pole he spoke of was humanity's last-ditch containment, thrown up a dozen years prior around a wellspring of annihilation said to have appeared only seven times in the whole of human history — the thing locked inside its gate, whole. If the creature that had already flash-froze its own home dimension made landfall on Earth, what exactly did anyone think would happen...
The answer was too obvious to say aloud, and Park Ho-seong wrenched his head sharply left and right, letting the shake stand in for his reply.
"Obviously you'd start cursing too, wouldn't you?"
"Y-yesyes. Of course!"
"Well, I took the whole lot of them — near enough a WEEK of them, nonstop!!!"
They say a man grows into his name — and confronted with a team leader unleashing a roar worthy of the white tiger he was named for, Ho-seong could only quiver where he stood.
"Now get out there and find me 'The Immortal'!!!"
At those parting words, Park Ho-seong bolted for the door, wobbling like a newborn impala taking its first steps.
The moment he was gone, the phone began shrieking again — rrrring, rrrrring — and Kang Baek-ho snatched up the receiver, swearing a blue streak.
"Yes, this is Kang Baek-ho, Team Leader of the Otherworld Countermeasures Team. Ah... Chief Secretary. What can I do for..."
"Yes... yes... please tell him not to worry too much. We're doing everything we can on our end... Yes... I'm very sorry... Yes... yes, understood."
Click.
The call — its content, that a Certain Very High Someone was deeply worried and hoped for a swift, tidy resolution; its seasoning, a generous helping of four-letter words — came to an end, and he sank back into his chair, lighting one cigarette off the last as he muttered:
"Ha... where in the hell did this bastard even go? I'd honestly rather he'd just crawled through some gate to the other side....."
Ten days earlier.
Clunk— A door swung open, and a team member burst into his office, her face gone paper-white, and shouted.
"T-t-t-Team Leeeeader....."
"Hana, what is it?"
"Th-the-the Immortal has dis-disappeared...!!!"
Stammering the words out, she looked precisely like someone who had just watched a news bulletin announcing that a nuclear missile was falling on Seoul...
"What did you just say?!"
They were words he could not possibly have glossed over, and Kang Baek-ho heard himself shouting before he knew it.
"We just got a call. The Immortal is gone..."
"Shit! Round up every last one of the kids and FIND HIM!!!"
Gates that had simply appeared in the year 2000, and the people who awakened just as suddenly alongside them... and the seven calamities observed over the thirty-odd years that followed. Of course, three of them had been verifiably wiped out; one was sealed away at the North Pole; two more sat in Africa and the United States respectively. And the last one had been the thing in South Korea known informally as 'The Immortal.'
Unlike the one that had remade Africa into a place where nothing at all could live, the calamities in America and South Korea were comparatively docile — they'd even pitched in to help a time or two.
But docile or not, they were still monsters that had swallowed their own worlds whole...
Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease.
To put it another way: a walking apocalypse, overflowing with the potential to deliver an Earth-annihilation scenario if things went even slightly sideways.
Yes, there had been episodes — during the Behemoth subjugation, for instance, things had worked out because he'd gone over in person and begged and pleaded his case... But show me one person who wouldn't worry if a nuclear bomb up and vanished.
And so, praying with everything he had that this whole affair would fizzle out into a farce, Kang Baek-ho spent some three days hunting for it, sparing neither method nor means.
But 'The Immortal' — that bastard — left not so much as a single strand of hair to be found...
And as if that weren't bad enough, the story leaked; from that day on he sat clutching the receiver all day, every day, fielding the calls that came flooding in.
And back to today...
He was praying, desperate and fervent, that the man had at the very least gone off on a little overseas vacation... Because if that was how it played out, things would at least wrap up with him swallowing a nice hot serving of abuse and turning in his badge. But what if the bastard had genuinely gone to ground because he was off committing some fresh atrocity? Best case, a country dies. Worst case, the planet does.
After all, the only reason Africa had become a land of death where nothing lived was that one of those things had taken up residence there — so what made South Korea any different?
As for the possibility that it had been snatched by some organization, or killed outright — that never even made the list. They hadn't stuck the name 'Immortal' on the thing for nothing; no amount of effort would ever kill it or pin it down.
And so he found himself praying to gods the world over — gods he'd never once spared a glance for in ordinary times...
"God, Buddha, Allah, Lord Vishnu, Grandfather Dangun, Lord Odin, Lord Zeus..... Huh?"
Then, out of nowhere, a certain thought caught up with him — and his brain froze solid on the spot.
If that bastard's gone... does that mean...?
BANG—
"Hey, you son of a bitch! Just what the hell have you been doing about this?!"
But that train of thought never got to finish its journey — not with the Association President kicking the door down and roaring.
"Agh... it itches. Somebody out there talking trash about me, are they?"
Dang Muyeong, for his part, was picking lazily at his ear as he aired out the room, its air gone a soft, smoky gray.