Retire 291
by Cristae291 To-Do (4)
“I met a weird man today.”
During dinner, Woo I-rok spoke up, as if suddenly remembering something.
“A weird man?”
“Yeah. You know the name I used back when I was at the orphanage, before you came to get me?”
Park Jeongmin.
A name I’d rather not remember. As I frowned, I-rok mimicked me, narrowing his brow as well. The kid’s already picking up on things.
“He kept calling out that name.”
“You didn’t answer, did you?”
“What do you take me for? Of course not.”
I-rok pouted as he replied.
“The other kids told him there was no one by that name, too.”
“…And then he left?”
“He tried to grab me, saying something about being the director, so I did what you taught me.”
I nodded.
“We all yelled ‘kidnapper!’ together and he ran away.”
“Good job.”
“I didn’t get a picture of his face, but I did get one of his back.”
“Send it to me. And don’t go anywhere alone, all right? Always stick with your friends.”
“I know. How many times do you have to say it?”
“You know the Daseon uncle’s phone number, right? One of them will always be nearby, so call if anything happens.”
“Why are they always around me? Don’t they have work to do?”
…If I say that is their job, how will the kid take it?
I paused for a moment, then said,
“They have an office nearby. Why do you think sometimes it’s an uncle who picks you up instead of me?”
“Oh.”
“If that’s too hard, call the police.”
“Hmph.”
“Anyway, you did well to shout. Even if it’s not that, if anyone strange comes near you, always yell. Got it?”
“I said I know!”
I-rok snapped, getting up from the table.
Even so, the way he quietly cleared his dishes was both funny and endearing. Kang Tae-woo was still watching for cues, but this kid—well, with him it’s less about reading the room and more…
I wondered if maybe Tae-woo envied I-rok. His brother was always there for him. Sure, he looked after the other kids at the institute too, but even as a child, I could see there was a difference.
But that’s not quite the kind of security I mean. Maybe for Tae-woo, it was something he never even had.
“I-rok! Don’t go straight to the TV—brush your teeth first!”
“I was going to!”
I-rok yelled back, darting into the bathroom.
At his age, I never thought about security or anything like that. I just wished I had the strength to find my brother. I wasn’t as mature as Tae-woo.
I probably still don’t think much about it.
Even when I told him what to do if he saw someone suspicious, he just found it annoying.
Yeah. When you have a fence you don’t even realize is there, nothing really changes.
He doesn’t even know I’m not his real brother… Stupid kid… No, at this point, it wouldn’t matter if I really was his brother.
Honestly, I already think of myself that way.
“……”
Ding.
He must have been fiddling with something in the bathroom—he just sent me the photo he took of that strange man.
I checked the picture of the hurriedly retreating back with a blank face. It was the same man as in the photo sent earlier by the Daseon hunter watching over I-rok during the day.
I don’t think I-rok would start keeping secrets from me just yet… but you never know. Kids grow up fast.
I-rok has started a new school year. There’s been some change in his relationship with that girl—maybe a girlfriend, maybe not. He used to tell me everything, but now he’s busy hiding things. Time flies. Kids grow up so quickly…
Well, that’s a separate issue. You can hide things about friends at school, but you can’t hide the existence of a man calling out your old institute name and chasing after you.
So I wasn’t a dumb kid after all. If I-rok were dumb enough to hide something like that, it wouldn’t be my intelligence at fault, but his. There’s a reason they say no younger brother is like an older one.
[Did you find him?]
I sent a message to Lee Miseon.
She replied immediately.
[We found him staying at a motel nearby. We’re keeping watch for now.]
[Do you have an ID?]
[Still checking. Nothing in the database.]
I pressed my fingers to my brow.
Of course. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be an Ark bastard.
[If he’s not Korean, it might take longer to track him down. Make sure I-rok is extra careful.]
[Understood.]
[He said he didn’t recognize him, but if he remembers anything, have him tell us right away.]
“……”
No matter how I look at it, I feel like I’m the one being suspected of knowing more than I’m saying.
I sent a half-hearted reply to Miseon and looked at the photo again.
A wrinkled, worn suit. Shoes that didn’t fit, squashed on his feet. Glasses taped over a broken leg, barely hanging on his nose. Hair slick with sweat despite the chilly weather…
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t recall the face.
But that didn’t mean he hadn’t been at the institute. It was a long time ago—I couldn’t be sure I remembered everyone, and I certainly couldn’t say I’d known all the staff.
Even the researchers didn’t know everyone, and if he was a janitor in a mask like my brother, even less so.
…Not to be disparaging, but with a body like that, I doubt he was a janitor. Most janitors I knew were Awakened. They did a lot of physical labor, different from hunters but still demanding. It’d be hard to survive with that kind of physique.
So, then…
‘Said something about being the director.’
The last director of the River of Promise Laboratory had vanished without a trace. In the original timeline, Hong Seok-young had captured the director when rescuing the kids.
But this time, the lab had gone underground early. Gamble had spirited away the children, or Lee Miseon had tracked them down from orphanages.
It was good the kids were safe, but failing to capture the core members of the lab was a serious blow. Gamble said she didn’t know where they were, and Daseon had caught a few while chasing the kids, but it wasn’t enough. The quick ones were thought to have left Korea long ago. Some might have even joined Henry Lehmann.
I stared hard at the photo of the man who’d approached I-rok. Staring wouldn’t make an unfamiliar face familiar, but I needed to commit it to memory.
Anyway, it was a rare clue about the institute. Too valuable to let slip by.
“So, in a dungeon, it’s important to constantly check the mana concentration. You learned the rune, right? Draw it.”
“Huh?”
“Pop quiz.”
“There’s no such thing!”
“There is now.”
The kids groaned and started drawing runes. They knew by now that complaining wouldn’t get them anywhere with me.
Park Seo-hyun drew her lines without hesitation, while Oh Hyun-wook, trembling, tried to draw his rune. He seemed to be getting it right, but when he felt my gaze, his lines started to go astray. I shook my head and looked out the window. The monster’s corpse was still on the field. At least, for the sake of the kids’ minds and the view, Kim Chaemin had put up a tarp as a screen.
Under the tarp, blood that neither soaked into the ground nor decayed had pooled. Honestly, that was probably more of an eyesore than the corpse itself.
“…?”
But near the tarp, a man I didn’t usually see was hanging around.
Leather jacket, messy hair. Pink sunglasses.
It was Han Taekyung, who usually handled the students’ combat training at school, but with the field out of commission, he had nothing to do.
Han Taekyung was saying something toward the inside of the tarp. Maybe he’d suddenly gotten curious about the monster.
Meanwhile, Kim Chaemin had been in a foul mood lately, probably because the monster analysis wasn’t going well.
I was curious what they were talking about, but let it go—it was Han Taekyung, after all. He was probably going on about how clever his cat Chase was, or something equally pointless.
But when I went out to grade the kids’ runes and crossed the field, Kim Chaemin was wearing a strange expression. Her rubber gloves were soaked in blood.
“What’s with that look?”
“…Sorry? What did you say?”
“Why do you look like you swallowed something bitter?”
“Ah. No, it’s just…”
Kim Chaemin’s expression didn’t clear up.
She started to fix her hair, then stopped when she saw her bloody gloves. She blew a puff of air to move her bangs out of her eyes and spoke.
“Teacher Han Taekyung.”
“He’s always been weird.”
“…Well, sure. But it’d be scarier if he ever acted normal.”
She spread her hand flat and drew it horizontally through the air. Her mana formed a transparent wall around us, blocking sound from escaping.
“Are you sure Teacher Han wasn’t involved with the Ark?”
“Well…”
I didn’t know what she was getting at, but I answered as best I could.
“I can’t say for sure what he did when I wasn’t around, but as far as I know, he wasn’t involved.”
“As far as you know, but you didn’t know much, did you?”
“……”
“Sorry. That was a bit too on the nose, wasn’t it?”
She apologized with a face that showed no remorse at all.
“…He did travel to America often, so maybe Hong Seok-young gave him some assignments. I can’t say for sure.”
“I see…”
“Why?”
“So, can we trust Teacher Han?”
“If I didn’t trust him, I wouldn’t have let him near the kids.”
“In the future?”
“In the future, too.”
Kim Chaemin let out a short groan.
“Why Teacher Han?”
“It’s just… he said something strange.”
“Something strange?”
Finally, she took off her blood-soaked gloves and tied her hair back again.
“He said, ‘It’s rare for something like this to come out of a dungeon. Just what kind of… deal did someone make to bring it out?’”
“……”
I mulled over her words.
“…What?”
I didn’t need a mirror to know I was making the same face as Kim Chaemin.
Suspicious, uneasy, realizing something I’d never considered before.
“Totally suspicious, right?”
“Suspicious.”
“Should I call him over?”
“Go get him.”