***
Hong Tae-hwa.
Those three syllables left a bloody metallic taste on the tip of my tongue.
The red-haired young man had buried himself in the old leather sofa, wearing a worn-out headset and moving to the rhythm.
Each time his head bobbed, the sound of tearing metal music leaked from the gaps in the headset.
It was not easy to believe that the owner of that pathetic-looking back would one day become the Red Blood Alliance’s field commander, the Raging Demon who would slaughter thousands of Hunters and quench his thirst with their blood.
But my senses could not be deceived.
My heartbeat thrashed irregularly.
It was not because of fear.
It was the vicious disgust crawling up my spine, and the murderous intent that made me want to twist that neck off right now.
Fragments of memory stabbed through my mind like sharp shards of glass.
The stench of blood from that day, vibrating inside a collapsed C-Rank Gate, in an enclosed space where there was not even ventilation.
Among the corpses of my comrades piled in layers, that bastard had been dancing as though enjoying a festival.
He had no interest in the Mana Stones.
All he wanted were screams, and that unpleasant vibration of blades splitting muscle and scraping bone.
'I should have ended him at that scene.'
But the one who had burned more fiercely than I did was Tae-yoon.
Kang Tae-yoon, the Guildmaster of Blade Guild and the only Sword Saint in Korea.
The moment he heard that the recruits who were like his own children had been violated by the Red Blood Alliance, he did not even wait for reinforcements and charged into enemy territory alone.
That day, the Red Blood Alliance branch in Korea was literally wiped off the map.
Hong Tae-hwa did not run.
Rather, he trampled over the severed limbs of his subordinates, soaked in blood, and charged at the Sword Saint while giggling.
What a mad dog needed was not a club, but a beheading.
A flash-like sword path cut through the air, and Hong Tae-hwa’s arms drew strange arcs through the sky as they fell away.
And now, that same bastard was alive before my eyes, with all four limbs intact.
I lowered my gaze.
His fingers were visible below the sleeves of his leather jacket.
They were smooth hands without a single callus, still retaining the warmth of a human being.
Before long, those hands would become tools that dug through human entrails and squeezed hearts.
If I snapped those slender wrists right now.
If I grabbed that red hair and slammed him into the floor, the gruesome serial killings of the future would never happen.
The joints of my fingers turned white, and veins bulged.
Even though I was not holding a sword, my palm burned hot.
“Tae-hwa. You skipped the second week of your welcome class lecture again, didn’t you? How many times have I told you that you won’t get your high school diploma if you don’t complete it?”
Kim Dae-han’s voice broke the silence.
It was a voice that was overly kind, and in a way, affectionate.
Like an uncle coaxing a nephew who would not listen.
Hong Tae-hwa did not even answer.
He merely tapped the floor with the tip of his foot, keeping time.
An irregular, nervous rhythm.
His unstable inner self seeped out fully through that small movement.
“······.”
I clenched my fist tightly, then slowly opened it.
In my head, I coldly calculated the time.
The Raging Demon, Hong Tae-hwa, would begin spreading his infamy in earnest two years from now.
At present, he was still only a "monster in waiting," and legally, he was a minor with no crimes to his name.
Applying future crimes retroactively and condemning the boy of the present would be a leap in logic beyond even private punishment.
But my instincts were warning me.
A beast merely endured hunger.
It did not learn vegetarianism.
“Team Leader, let me see you for a moment.”
I lightly tapped Kim Dae-han’s shoulder and led him into the corridor.
He followed obediently, looking as if he had no idea what was going on.
In a corner of the corridor, before an old vending machine humming as it ran, I stopped him.
Even to my own eyes, my gaze reflected in the vending machine glass was cold.
“What is that bastard’s identity? Why is a ticking time bomb like him sitting in a City Hall office?”
“Ah, Tae-hwa?”
As if this were familiar to him, Kim Dae-han inserted coins and got a paper cup of coffee from the machine.
With a thud, the paper cup dropped, and the scent of cheap sugar coffee rose from it.
He blew over the hot steam and answered calmly.
“He looks like just some punk playing around, doesn’t he? With that hair color and all.”
“He looks far more dangerous than that. It feels like you put a wild animal in a cage.”
“You are exactly right. Tae-hwa is under probation. I stood as his guarantor and brought him here.”
“Probation?”
“Yes. The story is a bit long and complicated. He’s an early Awakener who Awakened in middle school.”
Early Awakening.
Usually, a human’s mana circuit was completed in adulthood, after the body finished growing.
But very rarely, there were people whose circuits were forcibly opened in their early teens.
The problem was that the minds of children who had not yet fully formed their egos could not endure massive destructive mana.
It was no different from a dump truck with a broken steering wheel driving through an elementary school playground.
“He was raised by his grandparents. His parents weren’t around, and he grew up under his grandfather. There was no adult around him who could help him control that power or guide him onto the right path. In the end, an accident happened... he made one of his classmates explode in a high school classroom.”
“Did you say explode?”
“Yes. His emotions ran high, so his mana flowed backward and was released externally. Rather than an intentional attack, it was closer to a mana rampage. The victim suffered third-degree burns over his entire body and is still undergoing treatment, and Tae-hwa was sent to a juvenile detention center exclusively for Awakened.”
Kim Dae-han took a sip of coffee with a bitter expression.
The fluorescent light in the old corridor buzzed, casting shadows over his face.
“But he could not adapt there either. His personality was so rough that he was judged uncontrollable and was about to be transferred to a regular detention facility. At the time, I was the officer in charge of his case, and after interviewing him, I brought him out.”
“Why did you take such a dangerous gamble? Having nowhere to go is his circumstance, not an excuse.”
“You are right. But even if that bastard looks like that, he really is alone. Before the world defined him as a monster, I thought I had to give him just one more chance to live as a human.”
A hollow laugh escaped me.
A school violence perpetrator, a juvenile detention center inmate, and an offender with a record of mana rampage.
To bring such a monster into a public institution like City Hall.
I could not help suspecting that the goodwill this man Kim Dae-han possessed was so excessive that it had paralyzed his sense of reality.
“You trust people too much, Team Leader.”
“Pardon?”
“That kind of person never changes. A beast that has tasted the absolute power of mana will eventually start hunting again. Rehabilitation and reformation are fairy-tale stories told by administrators who have never bled at the scene.”
I knew Hong Tae-hwa’s future.
How cruelly he would fall, and how many innocent lives he would take.
He was not a lost lamb that the social system needed to embrace.
He was the alpha wolf who would one day lead a pack of wolves and attack the village.
Kim Dae-han did not avoid my cold gaze. He met it head-on.
“You may be right, Mr. Do-jin. No, in terms of probability, your side is far higher. But I trust my instincts. My nose is surprisingly sharp.”
“Is that your only reason?”
“I went through the victim student’s investigation records again. On the day of the incident, that kid had insulted Tae-hwa’s grandfather. It was the kind of family insult that should not be put into words. On top of that, there had been continuous bullying for over a year. Tae-hwa exploded because he could no longer endure it.”
He downed the rest of the coffee in one gulp.
The sound of the paper cup crumpling echoed through the corridor.
“Of course, violence cannot be justified. But no one taught him how to use his power. Society only forced him to suppress it, hide it, and live as if he were dead. If someone taught him how to release it in the right direction, could that bastard’s life not change?”
A hopeless idealist.
He had no idea what disaster his goodwill would bring back one day.
No, perhaps he knew and was looking away from it anyway.
“Mr. Do-jin, I must look like a very strange person to you.”
“Yes. Very much so.”
“Trust me just this once. My gut feeling has not been wrong very often. And······.”
Kim Dae-han tapped my shoulder and continued.
“If Tae-hwa really tries to cross the line, then please stop him, Mr. Do-jin. I am saying this because I think you can.”
He did not wait for an answer and headed back to the office.
I remained alone in the corridor, listening to the vending machine’s cold hum.
My decision hardened.
I would watch him.
The moment Kim Dae-han’s goodwill conceived disaster, I would cut that umbilical cord with my own hands.
The instant Hong Tae-hwa Awakened as a villain would be the day of his funeral.
I had gained one more reason to remain on this team.
***
When I returned to the office, Kim Dae-han placed a thick stack of documents on the desk.
On the cover was the grand title [Civil Complaint Response and Patrol Guidelines for Gate Areas Within Jurisdiction].
A quick skim was enough to reveal it as a spectacle.
Assisting with crackdowns on illegal parking, monitoring illegal dumping of trash around Gates, receiving noise complaints from nearby residents······.
This was not Hunter work.
It was a list of community center odd jobs.
“Is this all? What about the approval line for the department head or higher-ups?”
“Ah, our team does not have a separate department head. On paper, the Administrative Bureau Director holds the position concurrently, but he probably does not even know our faces. In practice, I handle all operations and responsibility.”
Kim Dae-han introduced the team members, counting them off on his fingers.
“Me, the team leader; Appraiser Chu Jae-hee; and Hong Tae-hwa, the social service agent you saw earlier. Now that you have joined us, that makes four. Ah, on paper, we do have two more Hunters, but······.”
He scratched the back of his head and trailed off.
“What does it mean that they are only there on paper?”
“Mm, well······ it would be easier to think of them as ghost members. They come to work whenever they feel like it, and they do not answer their phones well. They are outside my control, so I have half given up on them.”
A rabble.
There was probably no better word to define this team.
Then Kim Dae-han clapped his hands as if something had come to mind.
“Ah, you may have seen one of them earlier in the first-floor courtyard. The white-haired foreign elder happily dancing among the grandmothers.”
“······Pardon?”
I froze for an instant.
That bizarre foreign old man who had been mingling with the elderly and stepping strangely in front of the cultural center earlier?
“That man is a Hunter?”
“Yes. He is a first-generation Hunter. I heard he was once a legendary figure, but now, well······ as you saw, he is a free spirit.
“You may know him just by hearing his name, Mr. Do-jin.”
A first-generation Hunter.
Pioneers who had explored Gates with only their bare bodies and intuition in the early days of the Great Rift, without the system’s support.
If there was someone among them worthy of being called a "legend," he had to exist in my memories.
But during the golden age when I had been active, most of the first generation had already retired, or had met their ends inside Gates after reckless expeditions.
There should not have been any great figure left in Korea, dancing in the yard of some outskirt City Hall.
'Were my senses mistaken?'
I thought back again to the faint tremor I had felt when I passed by the old man earlier.
A vague sense of déjà vu, not even enough for me to remember his name.
It was the instant I tried to shake it off.
JINGLE—!
The old bell attached to the door sharply cut through the office air.
The heavy iron door opened roughly, and the cutting wind of midwinter blew in.
The warmth from the heater scattered in an instant.
“I’m here.”
It was a low and languid voice, but one that strangely grated on the nerves.
A woman strode into the office.
Her visuals lacked any sense of reality.
Long, dark-blue hair had been roughly pulled through the back hole of a baseball cap and tied, and she wore large sunglasses that covered more than half her face.
What drew the eye most of all was her outfit.
Outside, it was a bitter cold of minus ten degrees Celsius, but she was dressed in a short crop top that revealed her waistline clearly and leggings that plainly showed the muscles of her legs.
The only thing she had thrown on over it was a thin padded vest.
She looked like someone whose sense of cold itself had been paralyzed.
Like a model walking down a runway, she crossed the center of the office with elegant, spare steps.
Even though she wore sneakers, her footsteps made almost no sound.
It was proof that the physical control unique to Hunters had been ingrained into her body.
She did not even look at me.
I could not tell where her gaze was directed beyond the sunglasses, but her attitude thoroughly erased my existence as if with an eraser.
Each time she passed by, a cold metallic scent mixed with the faint smell of perfume brushed the tip of my nose.
“Fuck! Close the damn door! I’m freezing to death!”
Hong Tae-hwa, who had been sleeping while buried in the sofa, sprang up like a coil and screamed.
The cold wind had woken him, and his eyes were bloodshot.
He growled as if he would charge at her any moment, but the woman did not even twitch an eyebrow.
Swoosh.
She silently raised her right hand toward Hong Tae-hwa.
Then she slowly extended her middle finger.
It was extremely polite and disciplined.
“You crazy bitch, seriously······!”
“Why, want me to kill you?”
The woman tossed out the words without stopping.
Hong Tae-hwa clenched his fist and tried to rise, but the woman had already reached the attendance terminal.
BEEP—
The mechanical signal sound of her clocking in rang out.
And without a single second of hesitation, she turned around.
“I’m leaving.”
“Ms. Se-hee! There is a regular audit next Wednesday, so you absolutely have to be at your seat then!”
Kim Dae-han shouted urgently, but instead of answering, the woman waved her hand once carelessly and disappeared through the open door.
She had clocked out exactly forty seconds after entering.
JINGLE—
The cheerful bell rang once more, and only the cold wind filled the place where she had been.
I stared blankly at the closed door, then asked Kim Dae-han.
“······Who was that woman just now?”
As if used to this, Kim Dae-han let out a deep sigh and rubbed his dry face.
“That is Ms. Jeong Se-hee. Another Hunter on our team. She is registered as F-Rank, but······ as you can see, her personality is rather full of individuality.”
“Does she have some story too?”
“Is there anyone without one? But Ms. Se-hee is a rather unusual case. Well, you will come to know slowly later.”
The Raging Demon, Hong Tae-hwa.
A dancing first-generation old man.
And Jeong Se-hee, who clocked out in forty seconds.
At this point, the fact that this team was operating at all felt like a miracle.
***
3:00 p.m.
Hong Tae-hwa disappeared somewhere before Kim Dae-han could even begin nagging him, and only I, Chu Jae-hee, and Kim Dae-han buried in piles of documents remained in the office.
Sitting still made my body itch.
When I looked around, a sigh escaped me on its own.
Under the desks, unidentified wires were tangled together, and in the corners, clumps of dust that looked years old were rolling around.
With my personality, sitting still after seeing such a state was torture.
I rose from my seat and found a broom and mop in the storage room.
“Uh, Mr. Do-jin? I’ll call a company for that later. Please just sit down.”
“Now that I have seen it, I cannot. It does not suit my temperament.”
Ignoring Kim Dae-han’s attempt to stop me, I began sweeping the floor in earnest.
Sweep, sweep.
The regular sound of friction rang through the quiet office.
Even though I was simply cleaning the floor, a strange sense of stability came over me.
The sensation of sweeping while smelling dust instead of the stench of blood on a battlefield felt unfamiliar, but not unpleasant.
“Um······ should I help too?”
Chu Jae-hee, who had approached at some point, asked carefully.
He pushed up the frame of his glasses and picked up a rag lying nearby.
“Please do. I will sweep this side, so could you wipe the window frames over there, Appraiser?”
“Yes! Understood!”
Unexpectedly, Chu Jae-hee was serious about cleaning.
He projected his occupational habit fully even onto cleaning.
He wiped away every small foreign substance stuck between the door gaps with the precision of picking it out with tweezers, and arranged the disorderly documents on the desks at precise angles, as if measured with a ruler.
For a while, we focused silently on cleaning.
An hour later, the office had become so pleasant that it was hard to find any trace of its previous state.
The red sunset seeping through the window reflected off the cleaned floor and warmly lit the office.
“Wow, it really got clean! Mr. Do-jin, even your cleaning is Hunter-Rank.”
“Anything that uses the body is similar.”
“Ah! Please have this. You worked hard.”
Chu Jae-hee smiled shyly and handed me canned coffee from the vending machine.
Only when the feel of the cold can touched my palm did I realize that the day was finally coming to an end.
Quitting time, 6:00 p.m.
I packed up briefly and left the building.
The cold air dug deep, but I felt far lighter than before.
As I was going down the annex stairs, a sour, stale smell stabbed my nose from somewhere.
It was the smell of alcohol.
And specifically, the fermented drunken smell unique to cheap makgeolli.
I frowned and turned my gaze in search of the source.
In a shadowed corner below the stairs, someone was crouched on top of an old cardboard box.
Loose white hair, and a modernized hanbok with stretched-out knees.
It was the foreign old man who had been dancing in the yard during the day.
He was pouring a paper carton of makgeolli straight into his mouth without even inserting a straw.
The sight was bizarrely incongruous.
A blue-eyed white man drinking makgeolli with a more rustic air than a Korean countryside elder.
My instincts judged that getting involved would bring me nothing good.
I was about to hurry my steps and pass him by.
“Hey, handsome friend over there.”
A rough voice caught my heel.
I stopped.
The old man slowly raised his head and looked at me.
My expectation that his gaze would be unfocused from drunkenness was thoroughly wrong.
The old man’s blue eyes, holding the light of sunset, were chillingly clear.
No, beyond clear, they were transparent.
“Pardon me for being rude at our first meeting.”
He shook the empty makgeolli carton and grinned.
“If you have some money, buy me one bottle of soju. This makgeolli fellow is nice when drinking, but it is too bland to quench my thirst.”
His Korean was far too fluent.
His accent and word choice were those of a native who had rolled around this land for decades.
But the real reason I had stopped was not his way of speaking.
A chill.
And a spine-crawling pressure.
Deep within the old man’s eyes, a massive beast was lurking.
It was hidden beneath the smell of alcohol, but the sharp presence of a blade could never be concealed.
It became clear that the source of the overwhelming aura I had felt from afar earlier that afternoon was this drunken old man right before my eyes.
He was not hiding his power.
It was just that his power was so vast that even the fragments overflowing from it were warping the surrounding air.
“······Please wait. I will go buy it.”