Retire 390

390 Inside (2)

“A missing police officer.”

“Police?”

Hope’s eyes widened, as if she hadn’t expected that answer.

“She was a police officer who went undercover inside the Ark and then lost contact.”

“Oh…”

Hope let out a sound that was somewhere between a sigh and a murmur of awe, then walked further in. She stopped in front of the crow mask, gazing down at it in silence before speaking softly.

“Did you know her?”

“Personally? No.”

“But she infiltrated the Ark, right? And you didn’t know her?”

“That crow mask doesn’t belong to her.”

I paused for a moment. Hope waited for me without pressing.

“It wasn’t the police officer I knew… but someone else. The owner of that mask.”

I hadn’t lied. Not really.

It was true that I knew the person who always wore that mask, and also true that I didn’t know Kim Yuhwa.

All I’d done was overlay the facts with the reality of the present. When a story is left with gaps, the listener tends to fill them in with what they know.

“I wanted to leave the Ark together with them.”

If we had succeeded, Kim Yuhwa’s body would never have been left in this damp cave, and that well-worn mask would never have been abandoned.

Hope stood there in silence. Han Taekyung, too, seemed to have understood and stared quietly at the ground.

“They both disappeared before I left the Ark. The police officer was someone Mr. Hong knew… Both he and I wanted to at least recover the body.”

Even if we couldn’t give her a proper funeral.

“One of them still hasn’t been found.”

“So the reason you came back here…”

“Partly to collect mud, and partly to see if there was anything I missed. I thought maybe Mr. Han might be able to see something I couldn’t.”

Hope slowly turned around. The only source of light in the pitch-black cave was the flashlight in my hand.

With Hope’s movement, the beam wavered. The long, drawn shadows looked almost like fluttering wings.

“Those eyes.”

Hope looked straight at Han Taekyung.

“If you’d changed them by choice, I wouldn’t have let it go.”

As far as I knew, this was the first time Hope had ever spoken about Han Taekyung’s eyes.

Until now, whenever I or even Gamble had asked, she’d simply repeated that it was fine. Gamble had been more frustrated about it than I was. But Hope just kept saying it was okay… and since she really did get along with Han Taekyung, Gamble eventually gave up.

“Someone else paid the price… It was a clean deal, wasn’t it?”

Gulp.

I could hear Han Taekyung swallow.

The shifting shadows felt especially inhuman. If it hadn’t been for that bloody, writhing mass of mana on the infirmary floor, I might still have thought of Hope as a monster, not a human.

“You got something precious, so use it well. You know that better than anyone.”

“……”

Gulp.

Han Taekyung swallowed again.

Even so, his mouth was dry; he worked his jaw before finally asking me,

“Um, senpai.”

“Yes?”

“Our junior… wasn’t just any junior, was she?”

“You’re only realizing that now?”

“So she wasn’t hired through the usual process, like in other guilds?”

“What fun would it be if a guild master’s team was ordinary?”

“…Seriously?”

“Surprisingly, yes.”

After all, the vice master came from the future. Then there’s an archmage, and a magical engineer hailed as a genius of the century.

It takes at least a monster-turned-human to count as distinctive.

If anything, Han Taekyung was the only one who was too normal. Just having unusual eyes isn’t enough.

Han Taekyung seemed torn between wanting to know more and fearing that knowing would just give him a headache.

Normally, I’d have let him stew a bit longer, but I didn’t want to stay in this dungeon any longer than necessary.

I snapped my fingers in front of his eyes.

“At any rate… it’s going to be harder to enter dungeons so freely from now on.”

“…Ah. The new dungeon management system? They said it’s going into effect soon.”

“Right. So if there’s anything here that would be problematic if someone else found it, we need to check and deal with it.”

“Problematic? Like what?”

“…There used to be a body here.”

Han Taekyung’s neck creaked as he turned, making a strangled sound.

“R-right. I figured as much…”

“There were even some clever traps set up—if the missing person’s body was found, it would trigger an explosion.”

“…Whoever did that was pretty skilled. Was it a mage?”

“No.”

They just had runes and some handy items.

“That’s all it was.”

“Even so, I don’t really get it, senpai!”

“Just try to get the gist. If not, we might have to consider closing the dungeon. Anything suspicious?”

“Nothing I can sense,”

Hope answered quickly.

Han Taekyung, still looking conflicted, answered with a grimace.

“Me neither…”

“Let’s check further inside, and look at the other areas too.”

“Okay.”

This dungeon felt both wide and cramped. The crocodiles below the ravine were terrifying, and the stench was horrible. I didn’t even know how far the crocodile-filled ravine stretched.

But there weren’t many places a Hunter could actually stand. The only paths were the ones where rainwater and mud had washed in. Given the size of the dungeon, there were a fair number of such caves. We’d come in through the entrance closest to the gate.

With what I’d heard from my sister, the raid itself wasn’t difficult. But for some reason, I didn’t feel like searching for and destroying the core. Not because of any sentimental reason—like this being Kim Yuhwa’s grave—but because there was still something about this dungeon that felt unresolved.

Why had Yoo Ji-eun said she’d found the sword here, of all dungeons?

Kim Yuhwa’s body had been burned by the flames of that sword. If I’d found the sword beside her, I could have accepted it.

But the sword wasn’t there. Yet my sister claimed she’d found it here.

Why?

If she’d obtained the sword through some mysterious event in an unknown dungeon, there were plenty of other suitable places.

Was this dungeon just “suitable”? But then, there was the matter of Kim Yuhwa’s body.

Ah, damn it. If you were planning to send me back to the past with nothing, you should’ve just been honest about it. You live to torment me, even now.

“I’ve never seen a dungeon like this.”

“The smell’s hard to forget, isn’t it?”

“…Yeah. Right. The core isn’t hidden among those monsters, is it?”

I just smiled silently.

Han Taekyung recoiled in horror.

“I’m not going in there!”

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t care if you’re my senpai, you can’t ask a person to do something like that!”

“Have you ever seen a dungeon care about things like that?”

“Even if the dungeon doesn’t, people should!”

“Look at his face, senpai. The core’s not in there.”

I turned to Hope, who’d been teasing Han Taekyung.

“What’s with you? You call him ‘senpai’ but still speak informally to me?”

“What? I do?”

“Hey.”

“I’m Australian, I don’t know about that stuff!”

Unbelievable…

I was annoyed for a different reason now, but at least my mood had improved.

I still didn’t know how Kim Yuhwa had ended up here. Whether my brother had moved her body here after she died, or if she’d died here after being wounded.

To honor a police officer who died alone, in a place no one knew, with no one to remember her—that’s what makes a death meaningful.

In the original timeline—or rather, in the last attempt—Father and my sister had failed. But this time, we would succeed.

When it’s all over, Kim Yuhwa will no longer be listed as missing, but as deceased—a courageous decision that saved countless lives, recorded with pride.

“…Uh.”

Han Taekyung, who had just been boasting about his experience as a senior, suddenly fell silent with a sigh.

“Mr. Han?”

Han Taekyung, still stubbornly wearing his sunglasses even in the dark, took them off. Today’s sunglasses were a bright pink.

His eyes, usually hidden, gleamed gold.

“Uh, uh?”

“What is it?”

“I just saw… something?”

“I know this scene. In horror movies, the first to die always says something like that.”

“Yeah, people who see things they shouldn’t usually end up dead.”

“Don’t say creepy stuff like that!”

Han Taekyung grumbled, but narrowed his eyes and peered into the darkness.

For Han Taekyung to take off his sunglasses, he must have really seen something. I watched the direction he was looking, but all I saw was pitch black.

I shone my flashlight.

“Kiiik!”

A baby crocodile leapt up.

Maybe we were near the nest. Before I could catch it, Hope moved first.

She snatched the baby crocodile out of the air. It squirmed frantically in her grasp.

“Why’d you catch that?”

“…Good question.”

Hope scratched her head.

“I don’t know, it just jumped out and I reacted… What should I do? Should I let it go?”

It wasn’t much use, but it was still a monster, and the thought of letting it go didn’t sit well with me. It wasn’t like it could do anything special, but since we’d caught it, killing it would at least give me some peace of mind.

Just as I was about to say so—

“Wait!!”

Han Taekyung interrupted.

“Wait, wait. Let me see that.”

“…You know this is a monster, right, senpai?”

There he goes again, calling me “senpai.”

“Turn it over for a second. I need to see its belly.”

“The belly?”

Hope looked confused, but did as Han Taekyung asked, flipping the struggling baby crocodile over. It wasn’t easy, given how much it thrashed.

“Damn!”

In the end, nearly getting bitten, Hope slammed the crocodile against the wall.

Bang!

That was definitely not a sound you should hear when a crocodile hits a wall.

“Still not knocked out? Tough little thing.”

“This is an S-class dungeon.”

“True, but still…”

The baby crocodile’s resistance faded. It was still twitching, but Hope managed to flip it over more easily. Unlike the tough, plate-like skin on its back, its belly was much softer.

Han Taekyung leaned in, almost pressing his nose to the crocodile.

“Careful, you’ll get bitten.”

“…Do you know where these things come from?”

“If you go a bit further in, there’s a small hollow in the wall. That’s where the eggs are.”

“……”

Han Taekyung straightened up and put his sunglasses back on.

“You can kill it, junior.”

“Did you see what you needed?”

“I just wanted to check.”

Han Taekyung shrugged.

“I’m not sure, but the place with the eggs? We should check it out.”

“Not sure?”

“It was too faint to see clearly. But there was definitely something…”

He waved his hands, struggling to find the right words.

“Something… like dust? There was some kind of residue, but I can’t tell if it’s naturally occurring in the dungeon or artificial.”

Han Taekyung strode forward energetically.

“Let’s go see what’s there.”