Adjusting After the Return (1)
Leaving Kang Juhyuk behind, I kicked the building door open and stormed out.
Now that my body was satisfied and every last craving had been sated, my physical instincts had gone completely mute and vanished without a trace. If reason ignored the body’s reactions and kept pretending the desire wasn’t there, that bastard would surface again soon enough—but for now, after receiving that thick release deep inside me, my body had chosen reason over instinct.
My head had never felt clearer. Female orgasms were supposed to burn slower and fade slower than a man’s, so I should still have been drowning in aftershocks, but the return of my reason—and with it, my Blessing—had crushed every one of those mental weaknesses flat. It was almost like sensory shutoff. My body, which should still have been writhing in the aftermath of climax, had been dragged back into combat readiness in an instant by that power. Every disorderly reflex of pleasure settled down, and I snapped back into a cold, ordinary state.
The outside of my pussy was soaked with arousal and his cum, and the inside was still full of Kang Juhyuk’s mess, but I wasn’t producing any more fluid. It was as if only what was already there was leaking out. In other words, my body had been liberated from lust itself.
Fuck.
That didn’t mean the emptiness, the helpless lethargy of post-nut clarity, the humiliation of having debased myself, the rage at my own body, or the bitterness I felt toward reality had gone away.
Of course not. I’d just been raped, hadn’t I? By some bottom-of-the-barrel D-rank loser who wasn’t even an alpha male, some pathetic piece of shit.
Did I give permission? The only thing I’d agreed to was letting him spill his cum so I could get off. I got swept up in the mood and let him penetrate me, sure, but now that I thought about it, maybe penetration hadn’t even been necessary. Wouldn’t it have been enough for him to jerk off and spray it there? Or was that not enough? Would the stack not have built up that way?
No, fuck it. I don’t know. I don’t care. It was still rape. Kang Juhyuk is a rapist bastard.
For a moment I even wondered if maybe it had counted as consensual sex, but what the hell kind of consensual sex was that? He’d charged at me, forced his way on top of me, and pinned me down when all I’d said was to stop calling me Nuna. He threatened to make me tell him my name, threatened to kiss me, and even when I said he couldn’t get any deeper, he shoved in harder anyway, pressing against my womb.
He kept pounding into my pussy, and when I told him to hurry up and finish, he pouted because I still hadn’t told him my name, then held himself back just to keep going. He was trying to prolong the sex while forcing himself to endure it. All because he got angry when he saw me looking for a condom in my pocket. Because he thought I was some woman who always carried condoms around, some slut who threw herself at men other than him all the time.
Jealous. Sulky. Wanting to possess me.
...Ugh.
Disgusting.
Disgusting...
Disgusting!
Anyway, disgusting!
Still, he was a disgusting rapist bastard—but not entirely useless.
I couldn’t ignore the merit of what he’d done. After all, he’d tried to save me even when I was in that alley, one wrong step away from being killed by that beast.
Even if that beast had gone after me, I wouldn’t have died, but I wouldn’t have been able to keep my wits about me either. It wasn’t an exaggeration to say that the reason I’d recovered my reason now was Kang Juhyuk.
Of course, the instincts in my body had been the ones to link me with Kang Juhyuk in the first place.
But I hadn’t known what would happen if I kept ignoring my body’s sexual drive. Without Kang Juhyuk, things might actually have been more dangerous. If I’d wasted just a little more time inside the Gate, if my body’s need had crossed the point of no return...
Even if I’d been rescued later, what would Ha Yujeong have thought of me then?
My reason, now cooled down, could understand that much. Right. That was it.
This is a perfectly good reason not to kill Kang Juhyuk. He deserves death, sure, but he also did save me.
No, wait. What the hell do I mean, “a perfectly good reason”? This was right. It wasn’t some excuse I was forcing together. It was a real reason.
And sure, the sex had felt good—but that was just because this body was built that way. It would’ve felt the same if some virgin bastard had fucked me instead of Kang Juhyuk.
Fuck. What is wrong with me? The instinct is gone, so why is even my reason wavering?
Choi Eunho, get a grip. No, that’s not right. Chae Eunha. Wait. Or is it Chae Eunha?
Ugh, whatever. I’ve decided not to kill Kang Juhyuk.
I’m not going to think about the rape that happened earlier.
Let’s just think about going back.
Just the Gate. Just the job.
A professional mindset.
I pushed through the upper levels.
Once Kang Juhyuk was out of the way, dismantling the Gate became a matter of moments. Instead of walking, I vaulted across the ruined city tens of meters at a time, and before long even that vast wasteland inside the Gate had been crossed.
The beasts in the upper layers had little to do with the core of the Gate. I ignored the ones that appeared as I drew closer to the nucleus and simply charged straight ahead.
Well, I didn’t bother paying much attention to the beasts I collided with and smashed apart while running, either.
In less than two hours, I reached the deepest part of the city—the highest castle, the heart of the Gate’s core.
Within that space wrapped in white fog, the source at the Gate’s center moved like a heart.
Among those low-level beasts that were considered “large” if they merely reached four or five meters, there was one that towered over ten meters and looked almost like a dinosaur.
“Kraaaah—agh—!”
The gigantic monster screamed, and its roar was big enough to shake the whole castle.
But I didn’t have the luxury of trading blows at leisure.
Crack.
One punch.
The fist I threw as I flew tore straight through the beast’s swinging arm and bored deeper into its body, shattering bone, ripping flesh, spraying blood, and punching through the core of the otherworldly thing that made up this realm.
With all the mana in my body, I drove through and destroyed the dense knot of magic and transference fused together at its center.
One charge. One flight.
I kicked off the ground, turned myself into a shell, killed the boss, shattered the core, and buried my fist deep in the beast’s flesh.
That was me.
A hunter who could kill beasts that even A-class hunters would have had to gather to handle.
Born of blessing. S-class hunter Chae Eunha—no, Choi Eunho.
Not someone to be crushed helplessly beneath the weight of the world. Not someone whose role was to submit.
I was the one who made others submit.
...Something this easy. And it took this long?
As I tore my way back out through the beast’s muscles, bones, and hide, I muttered the words in a hollow voice. If I hadn’t cared about survivors, this mission could have been finished in a few hours.
I had never intended to listen to Ha Yujeong’s advice in the first place, but if I had... maybe I wouldn’t have ended up being forced into sex so pointlessly. At the very least, I might have picked my own partner.
I looked up at the collapsing sky.
It was breaking apart like glass and falling to the ground. The space itself was coming undone. The laws of this other world, the ones that had invaded and consumed everything here, were disappearing, and the gate of the incursion was vanishing with them.
Beyond the shattered裂? cracks—beyond those splintering seams—I could see the night sky of the original world.
As the Gate collapsed, the outsider who had intruded into it—in other words, Kang Juhyuk and I—were slowly expelled from this alien realm and transmitted back to the world we belonged to.
It’s over.
At last.
Twenty-six hours had already passed since entry.
Ha Yujeong bit her lip as she glanced at the clock. It was already the fourth day, or almost there, since the Gate had first appeared.
If that woman had truly been Choi Eunho, there was no way it should have taken this long.
Is it real, or is it fake?
In truth, if there had been no contact for even twelve hours after entry, she had been ready to assemble an additional dismantling team right away. Letting it be discovered that Choi Eunho had gone missing would have been enough to earn Ha Yujeong a round of criticism for not handling things properly as a manager—but no, more than that, how was she supposed to catch an S-class hunter if the woman had just vanished?
If she threw a strange woman into the Gate and didn’t send an extra dismantling team, the situation would become truly disastrous. And this was near the capital, in an area where people passed through often, so it couldn’t be left alone.
The reason Ha Yujeong had decided to trust the woman and wait a little longer was that, not even half a day after she entered, four of the five people from the advance dismantling team had safely returned.
Even then, she still said the rescue should come before dismantling...
Ha Yujeong sighed a little, but still. If it was Choi Eunho, then yes, that sounded exactly like her. Among S-class hunters, she was infamous for never listening to anyone. Still, if she had brought people out alive, then as long as the Gate was dismantled safely, it could even count as a good result.
Besides—
“Yes. She threw that huge sword like a boomerang and saved me.”
“She’d already taken out dozens of beasts by herself. The way back was safe too.”
According to Park Geon, the B-class hunter who led the first dismantling team, that woman had come to them covered in blood after beating to death beast after beast all by herself, almost like Choi Eunho herself.
There weren’t many hunters who fought that brutally. Especially not at S-class level.
And there was one more piece of reliable information.
Yesterday, through the Association, she had requested that Shin Jaecheol, the A-class mage, trace Choi Eunho’s mana wave, and the answer had come back.
“At present, there is no hunter by the name of Choi Eunho on the Korean Peninsula.”
No matter how she looked at it, there was no chance that Choi Eunho had suddenly, without a word, and without leaving a trace, gone overseas overnight. Either a Gate incursion had suddenly appeared inside the capital where Choi Eunho was and caused a transference phenomenon, or the woman who had entered the Gate yesterday really had been Choi Eunho. Those were the only two possibilities.
Sure, it was possible in theory that she’d secretly slipped out of the country by boat through a broker, but the wealthy Choi Eunho tossing aside all that fame and money and suddenly sneaking out like a criminal? The odds of that were zero.
So even Ha Yujeong didn’t know how to judge the situation.
Still, if the woman had the ability to call herself Choi Eunho, then... well. Given the circumstances, she decided she’d at least have to believe it for now.
But why was it taking so long?
According to the Association’s detailed analysis, it was an A-class Gate. Three A-class hunters should be enough to break through it, so if it really was Choi Eunho, she should have been able to finish it in half a day.
What in the world...
But thankfully, a sign finally appeared that made it seem Ha Yujeong’s anxiety might soon end.
“The Gate is collapsing! Everyone, back away from the area around the Gate!”
The rift in the dimension—the hole opened in a world where wind should have been blowing—began to collapse slowly.
The swirling distortion in space reversed itself and started restoring the original shape of the world.
At the end of that hole, something could be seen walking out.
“The Gate is collapsing. Something’s visible. Something is walking out.”
“One of the dismantling team members was said to be dead. It must be the corpse and the hunter who entered twenty-six hours ago.”
“...It isn’t one person. Two people are coming out.”
“Two...?”
At the word two, Ha Yujeong sounded faintly puzzled.
“Two people? Is one of them a man?!”
As soon as the hunter guarding the Gate entrance said there were two people, Park Geon, the B-class hunter who had been resting in the emergency tent, sprang to his feet.
The rest of the team he had brought had all been transported to the hospital, but he had stayed here, lying in the makeshift emergency tent, consumed by responsibility for Kang Juhyuk.
As the Gate finally collapsed completely and the distortion of space settled, the two figures stepped out onto the grass of reality with a soft, crisp sound.
A woman.
And a man.
Two young people who looked to be in their early twenties.
It was the moment they finally returned to reality.