Homecoming
Miel could not kill Yurin. If she did, the brainwashing she had woven into Seona might unravel.
And if she killed Yurin now — with the brainwashing already coming undone — reconditioning Seona's trauma would take far longer still.
Miel cast her mind back to the first time she had broken Seona.
On the second day, watching him reduced to a wreck by the patrons, she had decided she wanted that man for herself alone. From the third day onward, whenever Seona collapsed from exhaustion after servicing them, she began to touch his memories.
Once the Yin Crest was carved into him, it became even easier. Seona always fell asleep before she did, so after he drifted off she would slip into his dreams and nudge his unconscious mind, piece by piece.
She rewrote his memories so that hatred for Yurin would surface as if it had always been there, and she polished every recollection of herself until it shone. From their first meeting all the way through the sickening work of selling his body to other monsters — she had labored over every detail, erasing whatever might turn him against her.
Sexual pleasure and genuine affection never mapped onto each other perfectly. She had simply used a succubus's power to make him love her, and to sour every feeling he held for Yurin, his original girlfriend.
That was how she had claimed him for herself.
All that remained was to send Yurin back to Earth through the Gate. Then Seona would be hers forever.
Forever…
The sense of wrongness that had been sleeping inside Seona began to stir and come loose.
No matter how good the pleasure felt, there was no world in which a man suddenly hated the girlfriend he had loved and fell for the succubus who had branded a Yin Crest onto his body. He was not someone who could throw away a bond fifteen years in the making — and yet here he was, living out this absurdity.
He wanted to spit that rage out somewhere. He went looking for Miel.
Miel stood before the open Gate and beckoned Yurin and Seona closer.
She had a gift for toying with other people's emotions. Reading them, steering them, even invading the unconscious to rewrite memory and feeling — she could do all of it to some degree. Seona had thought himself exempt from that talent. He had been the one she used it on most savagely of all.
Miel's face settled into a look of mild regret.
"Haa… Looks like I'll have to start from scratch. I'll send little Yurin back to Earth for now. It was fun while it lasted, Yurin. I couldn't kill you anyway — not with Seona's brainwashing at risk of breaking. He begged me so desperately, you know. Treat him even a little kindly and he falls right into your lap. My man is far too easy. Honestly, it's worrying. I'll have to remodel him properly into the kind of man I like."
With the dissonance stripped away, Miel's madness stood naked. She was a demon who played with other people's hearts as she pleased.
"First I'll shove Yurin through the Gate, then I'll fix Seona up. Make him into the man I want."
With that, she seized Yurin and began dragging her toward the Gate by force.
"No — Seona! Seona! Aaaah… no!"
Yurin stretched her hands toward him with the face of someone who could not bear to lose him — but Seona was afraid of her too.
Miel and Yurin. Both of them had made him suffer. One had given him physical agony; the other, a madwoman who inflicted pain on the mind. If Yurin was a psychopath who struggled to read other people's feelings, Miel was closer to a sociopath who understood them all too well.
He wanted neither of them.
Why was every woman he met like this? The thought rose unbidden. Overwhelmed, Seona tried to run.
Having finally shoved Yurin through the Gate, Miel set off after him. The gap in physical ability was absurd. She caught him almost at once.
And then she began carrying him back to the room filled with "happy memories."
After ninety-eight days, Yurin returned from that hell.
This was Earth — that much was certain. The street signs told her she was not far from the Gate through which they had first been taken.
She was still wearing the demon maid uniform Miel had forced on her. It would draw stares, but that hardly mattered. After ninety-eight days of humiliation in the Demon Realm, this barely registered as shame.
The place where Seona was still being held. Miel was a sociopathic demon who toyed with human hearts. In her grip, Seona would already be a doll — twisted this way and that, reduced to a plaything.
Yurin could not forgive that.
She knew now that the demons could open a path to the other world. All that remained was to find a way to save Seona.
Yura, once an executive and founding member of the Hwaryong Guild, was now its guildmaster.
The previous guildmaster had retired from the front lines a month earlier and handed the position to Yura. As the guild's most senior member and the last of the original founders still standing, the succession had always been inevitable.
She was an A-rank Awakened, but a guildmaster was not chosen by rank. The role belonged to whoever could run the guild well. Yura knew the guild's internal affairs better than anyone and had hands-on experience with nearly every one of its ventures. That she had taken the seat surprised no one.
After losing her daughter to a Gate, she had thrown herself into gate-clearing operations as if the portals themselves were her sworn enemies. Within a month, most of the Gates near the Hwaryong branch had been cleared. There had been a few casualties, but in the hunter trade, deaths barely ranked as major incidents.
Those who knew the truth behind her drive had taken to calling her the Avenger.
Right now she was racing home, stunned by a phone call from her husband.
Her husband had once been a regular at social gatherings, but the shock of Yurin and Seona vanishing into a Gate had kept him shut indoors. Over the phone, he had told her Yurin was back.
Yura was so startled she left her secretary with nothing more than a hurried word that she needed to go home — and then she was gone.
Joy at her daughter's survival and a deep, bitter resentment warred inside her.
The daughter she had seen in that video had been a merciless rapist who had violated Seona without restraint. They shared blood — and yet Seona, who was family in every way that mattered even without it, had been left in that state because of her. Barely two months ago, Yura's fury over that had been absolute. She still could not forget it.
She opened the front door.
In the living room, her husband held Yurin in a tear-soaked embrace. Yurin was wearing a strange outfit — something like a maid costume.
Then where is Seona?
Yurin and Seona had vanished together. Yurin would never have left him behind. Seona should have been at her side.
The question of Seona's whereabouts outweighed even the relief of her daughter's return. A cold mother, some would say — and they would not be entirely wrong.
"Where's Seona?"
The first words out of her mouth, the moment she saw her own child, were about someone else's son. She knew it was wrong as a parent. But she also knew what Mina and her husband were going through, and it was for their sake that she asked.
"…I couldn't bring him back. From the other… world."
Yurin spoke only after a long silence.
Yura's fist flew before she knew she had thrown it. Her knuckles drove into Yurin's face with a heavy crack, and Yurin crumpled to the floor. Struck full-force by an A-rank hunter, she lay trembling as if concussion had already set in.
Useless girl…
She couldn't even protect her own man. A disgrace to the family. Yura felt sick with shame that she had ever planned to marry this child to Seona.
A woman was supposed to protect her man. That was the baseline. Women were physically superior; guarding the man who belonged to you was the most natural thing in the world. What good was that strength if you couldn't keep even one person safe? And Yurin was an Awakened.
Rage surged through her. Every scrap of hope she had carried on the way home shattered to pieces.
She had no idea what she would say to Mina and her husband. Their own child had come home alive — while Seona, Mina's son, was still trapped among monsters and had not returned. Who could possibly deliver that news? Once they heard it, they might hate Yura's family even more.
Two months ago she had already felt the weight of an unforgivable sin. Now that sin felt heavier still. The one who had cast Seona into hell had come home, while kind, gentle Seona was still lost inside it. What Mina and her husband would do if they learned that — no one could say.
Yurin came to and stared up at her mother with the face of someone who had never expected to be hit.
"I went to the house you and Seona lived in. I saw the videos of everything you did to him."
Yurin's face went white.
"…"
She said nothing — mute as a fish with a bone in its throat — and her eyes dropped weakly to the floor.
"And you still call yourself human? You're worse than a beast! If you couldn't bring Seona back, you should have died right there with him!"
With that, she seized the sofa beside her and hurled it at Yurin. The sofa crushed her beneath it; her body went limp. Awakened or not, she could not withstand the strength of an A-rank Awakened like Yura.
Yurin blacked out.
And then, heavy with guilt, Yura picked up the phone and called Mina and her husband.
Her conscience would not let her hide this.