Retire 440
by Cristae440 Hunter and Teacher (5)
After Daniel’s statement, no one in the conference room found it easy to speak.
I glanced around, wondering if I had somehow misunderstood. Even Kim Chaemin and Gamble, who had been carrying on an engineering discussion I couldn’t follow just moments before, fell silent. Even Hong Seokyoung was blinking in confusion, his mouth open in a dumbfounded expression.
So…
That is to say…
If he meant physical removal…
“It’s a tricky method, but for now, it’s the only way to slow the progression. Honestly, I’m not sure how much longer the runes will hold,” Daniel continued, apparently oblivious to our reaction.
…Is he insane?
Did he just suggest physical removal so casually?
It was a mistake to have assigned Yoo Hyeun to Daniel. No matter how valuable the talent, an agent is still an agent. He couldn’t even clearly state what agency he belonged to. Who knows what he’s really up to behind the scenes?
“It’s had some effect in the U.S., but the safer the method, the better. So…”
Where is the “safe” part in physical removal?
I was about to say something when—
“…Excuse me?” Daniel finally noticed the strange atmosphere.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“What do you mean, what’s wrong?”
My tone sharpened. Daniel looked around in confusion, but no one came to his aid.
Even Gamble, flustered, managed to speak up.
“Y-you—you just said that…!”
“Yes?”
“How could a person—!”
“Yes?”
Daniel clearly didn’t understand what we were saying, but as he sensed the hostility around him, at last he fell silent.
Well, humans do have intelligence.
Let’s try to see things from his perspective.
It wasn’t even his own problem, but he’d crossed the Pacific to Asia to clean up someone else’s mess.
…But I still couldn’t understand.
No, how could anyone so casually suggest physical removal? Wasn’t there something wrong with him? Even if a healer is more like a mage than a Hunter, did he have to think like one, too?
Even if he’d broached the subject cautiously, saying it was the only option, it would have been hard to accept.
“What… did I say?” Daniel asked.
“You don’t know what you just said?”
“No, I mean…”
He looked at us, genuinely bewildered.
What is wrong with Americans these days? Not that he represents all Americans, but there’s definitely something off.
“What did I say?”
“You should know better than anyone.”
Maybe it would be better to send him back and handle this ourselves. If we tapped all of Hong Seokyoung’s and Lee Miseon’s connections, we could find a trustworthy healer, and if we put Kim Chaemin and Gamble to work, they’d find a way to solve the problem without physical removal.
No matter how advanced prosthetics are these days, for a Hunter, they’re only good for daily life at best. Look at Pyunes. He gave up entering dungeons after his injury.
“…But we have to treat it, don’t we?”
“That’s treatment?”
Gamble’s voice was rising.
“Treatment… Fine. I know it’s hard to call this proper treatment—it’s more like an emergency measure. But what we’re doing now isn’t enough! It’s spreading!”
“How is cutting off a leg an emergency measure?!”
Unable to contain himself, Gamble shouted.
“…What?”
Daniel stopped.
Silence fell again.
Daniel looked at Gamble in confusion, then glanced at each of us in turn. His gaze finally landed on Hong Seokyoung.
Hong Seokyoung just smiled and waved at him. Daniel’s jaw dropped.
“When… did I… say something like that…?”
“When do you think?!”
Gamble turned to Kim Chaemin and me.
“He did, right?!”
“He did.”
“He did.”
Daniel’s head moved from one to the other, then back to Hong Seokyoung.
Hong Seokyoung added, “That’s how it sounded to us.”
“…What?”
“Maybe you should explain more precisely. About this ‘physical removal’ method.”
Only then did Daniel seem to realize how his words had come across.
His eyes wavered. Flustered, he waved his hands.
It was both funny and absurd. Maybe this is why people shouldn’t become Hunters—when you get used to violence, your thinking tends to become extreme.
I sighed.
“Then please explain it properly this time.”
“…That physical removal,” he said.
“Yes.”
Daniel, now on high alert, answered quickly.
“I meant removing the parasite-like parts, not, um, removing the whole thing.”
“Haha, you should have said so from the start. You had us all confused,” Gamble said, laughing awkwardly, perhaps feeling bad for shouting.
“Ah, yes… I didn’t realize it could be taken that way.”
“Still not used to Korean? Maybe you should have said it in English. We’d all understand. Or would it have sounded just as bad in English?”
It was odd to hear that from a foreigner, but neither he nor anyone else seemed to care. I shrugged, thinking it was all fine, and mulled over Daniel’s explanation.
So, a proper explanation.
“…Well?” I asked.
“Just a moment,” Kim Chaemin said, still poring over the report Daniel had handed her.
It would be a while before I got an explanation I could understand.
“So… the problem is contamination?” I asked.
“That’s one way to look at it. When high-density external mana mixes in due to an explosion…”
“Sorry, but I’m not a mana engineer.”
“You don’t need to think about it that way. Teacher Woo, you’ve seen it before. Sometimes, when too much magic is used in a dungeon, the mana inside reacts strangely, right?”
“Oh… Mages always complained about their mana getting more sensitive.”
“Exactly. Think of this as a more extreme version of that.”
Mana engineering was still a bizarre, difficult field, but as a Hunter who’d gone in and out of dungeons, you picked up some things through experience. And if you combined what I’d heard at the Administration with what I knew about magic…
……
I still didn’t get it.
According to Daniel, who tried to put it in terms Hong Seokyoung and I could understand, the problem with Hong Seokyoung’s leg was less poison and more contamination.
So it wasn’t a matter of detoxification, but removal.
That’s why he’d brought up parasites. The mana inside the dungeon had mixed with the poison, the Hunters, and the mana bombs, turning into something entirely new. At first, everyone thought it was just monster venom.
But the mud and other things Kim Chaemin and Gamble had analyzed suggested a new possibility. It wasn’t just poison—there was a separate carrier, and what looked like poison was actually the effect of that “something” that had invaded the body.
The monster in the dungeon where Hong Seokyoung was poisoned was a toad. So there was a lot of water in the dungeon—a swamp deep enough to slosh up to your knees.
Each dungeon has its own unique ecosystem. Some are frozen in time, never changing, but others evolve like real ecosystems. Plants grow, monsters breed.
The toads were no different.
The toads in the dungeon tried to reproduce.
Whether they actually produced offspring is unknown. But, true to their name, the toads laid eggs in the mud—tiny, invisible eggs.
And these eggs entered the bodies of the Hunters in the dungeon at the time. Daniel speculated that they may have entered through wounds.
Since Hong Seokyoung had no wounds, there must have been another route, like latching onto the skin. In any case, the mutated eggs became toxic and harmful to the body.
I wasn’t sure what this had to do with the mud dungeon analysis, but Kim Chaemin nodded, apparently understanding the report from America.
“Why do you need the mud sample?” she asked.
“As clean a sample as possible… is needed. To use as a control to filter out the toad eggs.”
“Magic?”
“Any method is fine. According to the report, what’s been tried so far is physical… that is, removing the skin.”
“So it might not be a wound infection.”
Kim Chaemin knew about Hong Seokyoung’s ID tag. She couldn’t have missed the possibility I’d thought of.
“But since they’re invisible and the mana itself is twisted, it’s hard to distinguish them. They’re trying to modify surgical equipment to do it…”
“Hm.”
Kim Chaemin crossed her arms and nodded.
“We’ll get the mud first… I have some ideas to try here, too.”
“…What kind?”
I was startled by her words and looked at her.
Honestly, I hadn’t understood half of what Daniel or Kim Chaemin had said, and I wasn’t even sure I’d grasped what I thought I understood.
This was about my father, of all people. Frustration and helplessness pressed in on me, but I couldn’t show it in front of Daniel.
Unable to contain my anxiety, I just clenched my fists. But I trusted that Kim Chaemin would find a way. I believed in her.
“Ah… right. If the Americans wrote the report properly… It’s not perfectly safe, but, or maybe it is? Anyway, it’s worth a try.”
Gamble, who had been flipping through the report, chimed in.
If even Gamble was saying so, I could trust it.
“I know someone with a rather… unusual item.”
An item?
Kim Chaemin slowly raised her hand, as if to signal something to me.
It was a perfectly ordinary gesture. But she tilted her head slightly and scratched the corner of her eye with two fingers as she looked at me.
“We’ll have to test it, but that item might help.”
“What kind of item?”
“I can’t tell you.”
She meant eyes.
My eyes?
No.
I’d seen Daniel change Hong Seokyoung’s bandages many times. I hadn’t noticed anything strange.
But there was one other person besides me who could see what others couldn’t.
I nodded.
If it was Han Taekyung’s eyes, they might really help. There was only one way to find out.
Just grab him and have him take a look.
“I’ll check with the owner, and if they say it’s okay, I’ll let you know.”
“There’s a good chance they’ll say no.”
Even if it was just an item, it didn’t seem wise to mention Han Taekyung’s name.
Daniel didn’t press further.
Gamble, who had been staring at the report, finally spoke up.
“I… might be able to try something, too. I’m not sure, but if your people try anything new, please let us know right away.”
Gamble didn’t send a secret message like Kim Chaemin, but his thoughts were clear enough.
Han Taekyung… well, that was just how he was.
As for the retired fairy lost in dramas, I wasn’t sure if we’d be able to use him for this.