Retire 384
by Cristae384 Tied Feet (2)
Hong Seok-young is strong. No one can deny that.
But when it comes to the question of just how strong Hong Seok-young is, there’s inevitably a degree of subjectivity involved.
Is Hong Seok-young the strongest in the world?
He would be the first to deny it.
Yet people love to rank things, and whether online or in the real world, there is always talk about who the strongest hunter is. For over a decade, Hong Seok-young’s name has never once been absent from those discussions.
Many claim that Hong Seok-young is the world’s strongest hunter.
Their reasoning is always the same.
“Just look at how often Hong Seok-young gets injured.”
You can count Hong Seok-young’s injuries on one hand. Think back to the uproar when he was taken to the hospital after the Siren Dungeon incident.
Hong Seok-young doesn’t get hurt. Not since he obtained the identification tag and learned how to use it.
The identification tag absorbs damage in proportion to its user. The stronger the user, the more damage the tag can block. There aren’t many monsters capable of wounding Hong Seok-young, so of course, no ordinary attack would ever leave a mark on his tag. That only further shaped public perception of him.
Even I had never seen my father injured.
“Teacher Hong, are you really using crutches right now?!”
Kim Chae-min spoke, his voice full of concern.
Though he’d heard about the identification tag from Hong Seok-young, Kim Chae-min probably didn’t know exactly what it did.
My father always wore the tag around his neck. There was nothing that could hurt him. The time he was hospitalized last year was just to fool the Ark’s gaze; he hadn’t actually been injured.
If he’d needed to fake it again this time, he would have had plenty of time to tell me.
The identification tag, engraved with my father’s full name. The tag.
The tag.
The collapsed management office.
The dead monster.
The tag Yoo Ji-eun handed me.
The funeral.
To say that someone had hurt my father meant there was someone out there who could fill every space on that tag with his name and more…
“You’ve had a rough time,” Hong Seok-young said.
He spoke to the man who had been sitting in the driver’s seat. A white man with bright brown hair stepped out of the car after him, dressed in a black suit, standing with an oddly precise posture.
He was unarmed, of course… but he had to be an Awakened. Considering what Hong Seok-young had been doing in the U.S., he was most likely an agent from some intelligence agency or a soldier.
Kim Chae-min and I approached Hong Seok-young cautiously. When he saw us, his expression changed. He smiled, quite literally, like a child.
Only then did I realize how deeply fatigue had been etched into the face that had been smiling so easily just moments before. Only then did I notice the tension in the body leaning on those crutches.
He was welcoming us with his whole being. No, that wasn’t it. Hong Seok-young had come home. At last, he was somewhere he could truly rest.
While I hesitated, unsure what to say, Kim Chae-min stepped forward.
“You’ve been through a lot!”
“Ah, as expected of you, Mr. Kim. Did you have a good trip to France? I heard there was some big incident over there?”
“It wasn’t that big a deal. Just a nuisance, really.”
“But at the end, that spider… or whatever it was, caused quite a commotion, didn’t it?”
“Marseille’s a big city, so there’s plenty of water even without a lake. It wasn’t awakened properly; it was just a last desperate outburst, so it was easy. No casualties, either.”
“With all those mages gathered there, it would have been a bigger problem if there had been casualties. Not to mention the archmage.”
“Oh, Michel helped a lot.”
“Is Michel about your age, Mr. Kim?”
“Yes.”
Hong Seok-young and Kim Chae-min laughed together, swapping stories of what had happened.
Even though they’d already talked about all this by text, I couldn’t understand what was so funny. But I let them be. It was probably no different from when Woo-ilok and Sophia came home and chattered about what had happened at school.
I stared intently at Hong Seok-young’s crutches and let out a sigh.
His gaze turned to me.
I probably said the words Hong Seok-young—my father—most wanted to hear. This man deserved to hear them.
“You’ve finally come home.”
“…Yes. I’m home.”
Hong Seok-young smiled like a child.
“Are you really hurt?”
“It’s complicated.”
“…You’re either hurt or you’re not. What do you mean, complicated?”
Hong Seok-young headed for the conference room with the foreign driver in tow. He propped his crutches carelessly against a chair and sat down, the weight of fatigue settling over his shoulders once more.
Only then did he introduce the driver to us.
“This is Daniel. Just call him Daniel.”
“Hello. I am Daniel.”
His Korean was awkward.
“He’s a friend I worked with for a long time in the States.”
He had an earpiece for translation, but just knowing he could speak some Korean was enough.
That was all the explanation Hong Seok-young gave. I didn’t think he was hiding anything from Kim Chae-min or me. It just meant this was all he could say in front of this man.
I nodded lightly to Daniel, then turned to Hong Seok-young.
“Will he be staying with you from now on?”
There are some things at this school that can’t be shown to outsiders. Like Alex Hope, for instance.
“Not for long,” Hong Seok-young replied, shaking his head as if he understood what I was worried about.
“I need to take care of this first.”
“This?”
“This.”
He shook his leg, encased in a cast.
I frowned.
“What happened?”
I scratched my neck, fingering the leather cord. The identification tag.
“You’re… hurt? How bad…?”
“I’m not really hurt.”
Still, Hong Seok-young’s answers were vague. He seemed frustrated with himself.
It wasn’t that he was reluctant to explain—he just didn’t seem to know how to put it into words. But he spoke up anyway.
“I made a mistake.”
A mistake.
“I got taken in, big time.”
“…By whom?”
“They always had a knack for perfect timing, so it’s not like I thought it was impossible this time, but… Ha. I was impressed, honestly. It’s not as if I let my guard down. This time, I really got caught.”
“Wait, so what happened?”
“The American mages couldn’t figure out exactly what this is.”
“Mages?”
Despite Hong Seok-young’s ambiguous explanation, Kim Chae-min seemed to realize something before I did.
“…Take off the cast.”
Kim Chae-min’s face had gone rigid.
“Take it off. You can, right? I thought something was strange.”
“I figured, with you here, Mr. Kim, we might be able to figure out what this is.”
Humming softly, Hong Seok-young slowly began to unwrap the bandages. The moment he removed the pin holding them in place, a surge of mana began to leak out. Mana? Why would there be mana here?
I narrowed my eyes at the bandages. I couldn’t see with the naked eye what kind of pigment had been used. But faint mana glimmered on the inside of the bandages. Runes.
Runes were inscribed densely across the bandages.
Hong Seok-young knew exactly what Kim Chae-min and I were seeing. Calmly, he continued removing the bandages. Even the plaster beneath was covered in runes. The runes on the plaster were much easier to make out than those on the bandages.
Right now, rune commercialization was only just beginning. Most mages still looked down on runes. That’s why the mana pen had been introduced at the same time. Once hunters started using them, runes would become essential for dungeon raids, and then mages wouldn’t be able to ignore them.
But even before that, runes hadn’t been unused. In certain fields, they had long been essential. For contaminated monster mana, for instance. For delaying the symptoms of hunters poisoned in the line of duty, runes were indispensable.
When the fastener was removed, the plaster split in two. At the same time, a smell that should never come from a human body filled the air.
The stench of rotting flesh.
Blackened, dead skin was visible. Swollen, the flesh split and peeling away, pus oozing out.
“Shit.”
Kim Chae-min cursed, his voice choked.
“It only looks bad. It’s not as serious as it seems.”
“…This isn’t serious?”
“It doesn’t really hurt, either. The cast just makes my leg feel numb, which is uncomfortable because I’m not used to it. It’s been a while since my body felt this heavy, so it’s actually kind of interesting.”
Hong Seok-young spoke with utter composure.
I wanted to shout at him—Are you kidding? How can you be so calm?—but the words wouldn’t come. I just… I just sat there, watching Hong Seok-young.
I covered my face with both hands. Don’t forget to breathe. Inhale, exhale.
If the person himself was calm, I couldn’t be the one to break the peace. Hong Seok-young had said it himself: with Kim Chae-min here, we might be able to figure it out. He’d said he’d been caught off guard. By what? Why had Hong Seok-young gone to America again?
Calm down. Breathe. Just breathe.
The words Hong Seok-young left unsaid were the same as mine. If he’d fallen into a trap while chasing the Ark or Atlas, then it made sense for him to come back to Korea. In America, there was no telling where information might leak from. There was no one he could trust. Here, at least, he didn’t have to worry about people. Much as I hated to admit it, there was Gamble and Hope, too. As Kim Chae-min said, more brains were better than none.
“Teacher Woo?”
I gasped for breath, then finally managed to speak.
“…I’m fine.”
I knew my own condition. This was the first time I’d ever seen my father hurt. I didn’t want to know that even my father could be wounded like this. I didn’t want to see that Hong Seok-young was human.
I didn’t want to feel again the weight of a tag engraved with his full name.
I raised my head.
Hong Seok-young, in the middle of rewrapping his leg, was looking at me with concern.
“Don’t just trail off with vague words. Tell us what really happened. What exactly did you go through?”
“We’re assuming it’s poison.”
At last, Daniel spoke up.
He glanced nervously between me, Kim Chae-min, and Hong Seok-young, then pulled a small glass vial from his pocket.
“The dungeon was in such chaos at the time… It was difficult to get a clear picture of what happened.”
“This is?”
“A sample of the poison found in that dungeon.”
Inside the vial was a thick, dark purple liquid. When I tilted the glass, it sloshed sluggishly. It was viscous.
“I think I mentioned it once before,” Hong Seok-young began, slowly.
“Hunter corpses are showing up on the black market.”
It was for this reason that Hong Seok-young had first started chasing the Ark. To recover the body of his wife’s younger brother.
“No matter how much enforcement there is, you can’t monitor everything that happens in a dungeon.”
He finished rewrapping the bandages and straightened up. The stench of rotting flesh still clung to my nose.
The runes on the cast suppressed the flow of mana. If the runes on the bandages had the same effect, then that cast wasn’t just slowing the symptoms of the poison—it was nearly freezing them. That was the best the American healers could do.
“So that was more of a post-mortem measure… But something happened in one dungeon.”
“Something?”
“A hunter who’d been attacked managed to escape and called for help.”
Hong Seok-young, who happened to be in America at the time, joined the rescue team.
“It was an S-class dungeon with giant toads.”
“Were those toads poisonous, by any chance?”
“Yeah.”
Hong Seok-young nodded.
“As Daniel said, by the time I went in, the dungeon was already a mess. Can you guess how the survivor managed to escape?”
He gave a short, bitter laugh.
“Both the raid party and the illegal Awakened were wiped out by the monsters.”