WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Arsène
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◈ How an A-Rank Hunter Lives ◈
Chapter 107: Returnee - [2]
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“We should start heading back to Korea soon, right?”
When I said that, Kang Jun-chi hesitated instead of agreeing right away.
“Right now?”
I wondered what was wrong with him, but Jun-chi suddenly changed his tune. He started spouting all sorts of things he hadn't said earlier.
He said he was tired today and didn't want to move, asked what the rush was...
It was almost absurd when he even said it might be dangerous to head back without thinking it through.
After dragging things out with all that nonsense, Jun-chi casually asked,
“Come to think of it, how's Seoul been since I left? Is it the same as usual?”
He acted indifferent, like the thought had simply occurred to him, but I saw through it.
How was Korea after he left? Could it be that he hadn't even imagined the Behemoth incident?
No. That couldn't be it. There was no way he hadn't expected it.
Jun-chi wasn't like me, with my prophet's intuition. He was the sort who constantly made ridiculous guesses, but he wasn't completely stupid.
There was no way he didn't know Behemoth would appear if he left. During the bus protest, hadn't he seen Behemoth crawl out of the Gate with his own eyes only hours after he left Seoul?
Then why was he asking that now?
He was pretending not to know anything about what had happened in Seoul, but why?
Because he had anticipated what would happen after he left and wanted to avoid responsibility. He was acting as though he hadn't expected anything to happen after his departure.
At that moment, I became certain of one thing.
This bastard Kang Jun-chi had claimed he couldn't return because he was lost. That had probably been a complete lie.
I could guess what had happened after Jun-chi entered a Gate and crossed into Soweol.
At first, blinded by rage, he had probably gone as far away as possible, thinking he wanted everything to go to hell.
Then, once his anger cooled, he must have realized he couldn't handle the consequences of running away.
He had probably guessed that Behemoth had already devastated Seoul, then stayed here because he couldn't bring himself to return to Korea.
It was also easy to guess why he had waited for Korea to come looking for him first. He wanted to see how the Korean delegation reacted before deciding whether he could return. And he wanted Korea to be the one begging him to come back, rather than coming back with his head bowed after what he had done...
Jun-chi was a petty little man among petty little men, but people like that could be more shameless and cowardly than anyone.
Even so, I couldn't reveal that I had seen through him and give him some scathing rebuke. That wasn't why I had come.
“How's Seoul? It's bad.”
“How bad?”
I told him everything I had seen and heard without hiding anything. About Seoul's condition and the people who had died.
As I spoke, I watched Jun-chi's facial muscles stiffen.
“Ah... Really? It's that bad...?”
Looking at Jun-chi's bloodless face, I wondered. Was this an act too? Was he pretending he had never expected this?
No, this time it didn't seem like an act. He looked genuinely shocked.
It seemed he had expected Seoul to be devastated, but hadn't imagined it would be this bad. Or perhaps he had expected it, but hearing it directly still hit him hard.
“Then... is it really okay for me to go back to Korea like this?”
I answered his question with one of my own.
“What would stop you?”
“Public opinion...”
“Public opinion? Why would you care about public opinion, Kang Jun-chi?”
I snorted.
Jun-chi looked at me as I continued.
“Your ability wasn't given to you through democratic procedures. It wasn't created with the people's taxes either. You didn't get it through a majority vote or a survey. You just awakened on your own... So why the hell should you care about public opinion?”
“Um...”
“As an awakened person, Koreans have no right to demand anything from you. Whether you leave or stay put, nobody has any right to ask anything of you. And do Koreans have the power to force their demands on you? Even less so.”
I wasn't saying that just because Jun-chi wanted to hear it. I meant it.
Who had the right to hold this man accountable?
Who could claim he had any obligation?
Even if Jun-chi did have some obligation, if nobody could force him to fulfill it, then that obligation might as well not exist.
At the same time, it was also true that I was angry about Jun-chi's decision that day.
Instead of leaving Korea just because he was angry, Jun-chi should have overturned the National Assembly, the government, all of it.
And if he truly wanted to leave, he should have at least given people he knew, including me, some warning. But this bastard just left. As a result, countless lives were lost.
Of course, I didn't say that out loud either.
I had no more power to force anything on Jun-chi than anyone else did. That also meant he had no reason to follow my opinion, just as he had no reason to follow the opinions of other Koreans.
“So why care about public opinion? You don't need to at all.”
Even after I said that, though, Jun-chi still seemed concerned about public opinion.
“Still... how are Koreans reacting right now? Aren't they saying things like, ‘Catch that bastard Kang Jun-chi and kill him’...?”
“Some might be saying that. But most people want you to come back as soon as possible, don't they? Like those 'banished from the party' stories that are popular in Japan. Something like that...”
I could feel Jun-chi listening closely, so I went on.
“The government has already explained in detail why you left, too. They revealed the wiretapping and everything else. So people might think the government is more at fault than you...”
That was probably what Jun-chi had wanted to hear. It was why we were finally able to head toward Korea a little later.
The three of us stepped onto the cargo lift Jun-chi had used as an elevator while living underground. It seemed to be used as his transportation in Soweol.
“Hold tight to the railing. I'll put a force-field structure around it, but it'll disappear the moment I lose focus. Just in case...”
Jun-chi babbled out his warning, then moved the cargo lift we were riding.
Using his force field, he moved all of us at a speed that was almost too fast to see.
He still seemed relaxed enough to keep talking.
“Should I slow down? You probably won't get to see this scenery again, so take a look...”
I shook my head.
“Why bother?”
There wasn't much to see in Sword World. It was all desert or jungle.
Having traveled around myself, I knew there wasn't much in that scenery either.
“We traveled all over the place these past two months, and there was really nothing to see. It would've been less boring if we had at least run into Monsters, but all we saw were Goblins. We saw a Deathclaw once in a while, but that was it.
“They said Soweol was the Monsters' home, so I thought there'd be all kinds of Monsters we'd never seen in our Hunter careers. Not at all...”
Baek Dambi was right.
The density of life in Soweol was low. Both the number and variety of living things in any given area were absurdly low.
I already knew why.
There was a farmer.
Not a modern farmer who used every kind of agricultural machine and chemical fertilizer without restraint, but one who lived alongside nature, like premodern farmers did.
This farmer raised dozens of water buffalo. Instead of buying feed for them, he led the herd into the forest and let them eat the grass growing there.
Once the buffalo had eaten their fill, he gathered fallen leaves and branches from the forest and took them home. He burned what he brought back and scattered the ash over his fields as fertilizer.
It was a lifestyle that seemed deeply friendly to nature, but I doubted nature felt the same way.
The farmer was destroying the forest slowly but surely.
When the water buffalo ate the forest's grass, left the forest, and defecated outside it, all the nutrients in that grass left the forest with them. The farmer taking fallen leaves and branches out of the forest to use as fertilizer was the same kind of act. Nutrients that should have decayed in the forest and returned to the soil were leaving it.
All the nutrients that should have been consumed by life in the forest or absorbed back into it flowed outside.
A forest subjected to that for a long time might look lush and green on the surface, but it would slowly lose the nutrients it held and its ability to sustain itself.
You could destroy a forest from within without clearing it for a golf course or spraying it with poisonous chemicals.
That was what Sword World's Monsters had been doing for thousands, tens of thousands of years. Killing the land's vitality and its ability to sustain life.
The predators of Soweol were bizarrely fast and powerful. With hunting abilities so exceptional that prey couldn't survive, they wiped out every creature around them.
Once they lost their prey, the predators should have died too. But Soweol's Monsters didn't simply starve to death after their prey vanished. They entered Gates and postponed death.
They didn't return the nutrients that made up their bodies to nature. Even when they died, they simply remained inside Gates, where their bodies did not decay.
For countless years, only predators survived this way and accumulated inside Gates.
That was why Sword World had become a place where even those powerful Monsters struggled to live. The Monsters lurking inside Gates were horribly numerous even by the standards of Earth's billions of people, but the only life wandering Soweol itself was small animals and tiny Goblins.
That was likely why Behemoth was a legendary Monster in Soweol. Behemoth probably hadn't dared leave a Gate and roam Soweol.
Considering Behemoth's size, it must have consumed an enormous amount of nutrients whenever it moved. Given Soweol's barren environment, how could it have filled its stomach even if it went hunting?
The human settlement of twenty thousand at least had a giant king roughly in the same weight class as Behemoth. So Behemoth had no choice but to stay buried inside a Gate for thousands of years.
The more I thought about Monsters, the more I could only conclude that they were horrifying bastards.
Not only did they harm people, they even ruined the land they needed to live on...
The more horrible Monsters were, the clearer it became that Hunters who hunted them were the greatest profession in human history, and awakened people who stood above all other Hunters were the greatest people in human history.
How long had we flown like that?
I saw people below us waving their hands.
They were Koreans. They must have crossed the Gate to search for Jun-chi.
“Ah! Mr. Kim Geuk! And...”
The coordinates of Sword World and Earth corresponded one-to-one. Moving in Soweol meant moving the same distance on Earth.
We had flown this far, so Korea was no longer far away.
The feeling that filled me when I realized that wasn't happiness.
Regret... Deep regret filled my head.
* * *
Several hours later, we came out of the Gate and found ourselves in Korea.
The collapsed buildings around us and the roads cracked and twisted beyond recognition showed that it was Seoul, too.
Jun-chi's gaze wavered violently as he looked around.
“What is this...?”
Seeing it himself seemed to shock him even more.
But the agitation in Jun-chi's expression and voice disappeared the next moment. His face turned cold.
The civil servants must have been waiting for us after receiving word. They came running toward us breathlessly.
“Mr. Jun-chi, you're back!”
“Mr. Kim Geuk, Ms. Baek Dambi? Thank you for your hard work!”
Jun-chi looked uncomfortable for a moment as the gazes of passing citizens and gathered civil servants all fell on him. Then he shamelessly demanded,
“Give me a phone.”
Jun-chi took a smartphone from a civil servant and fiddled with it for a while.
Then he stopped fiddling with the phone and cursed, making everyone flinch in surprise.
“What the fuck?”
The civil servants froze as Jun-chi started shouting.
“Who deleted the video I uploaded before I left? I was checking how many comments it got, and it's gone! Didn't I clearly say I'd kill all of you if you deleted my video?”
The civil servants kept bowing and groveling, while Jun-chi continued to snarl.
What was that about now? He had looked shocked just moments ago...
Ah. The brazen counterattack strategy.
Seeing him act like that the moment he returned to Korea made it clear that Jun-chi's guilt was even greater than it seemed.
Wasn't he the kind of person who relieved his usual stress by filming videos of putting people in their place? The moment he saw Seoul in ruins, he must have felt guilt too unbearable to endure. So he was trying to relieve both that guilt and the stress it caused by shouting at everyone.
I shared some of Jun-chi's negative emotions too.
Seoul was an evil city that dared claim to be Korea's capital, but it was hard to feel pleased when I saw it in ruins.
The entire city was dark.
Not just in atmosphere. The city was literally dark.
Too many buildings had no lights on. Behemoth had destroyed Seoul's buildings, not its power plants, so why was it like this?
Seoul couldn't have lost electricity after only two months. It was probably because of the economic recession caused by half the city being destroyed. There must have been more than a few shops and companies that had shut down since that day.
* * *
Before long, news of our arrival seemed to spread across all of Korea.
Baek Dambi and I were surrounded by reporters and asked all kinds of questions.
When they asked how I had persuaded Jun-chi to return, I answered,
“Jun-chi really didn't want to return to Korea. He said that instead of living in constant anxiety while being watched and wiretapped, he'd rather stay in Soweol, where he could live in peace.”
I wasn't lying to exaggerate my role in bringing Jun-chi back. Jun-chi and I had agreed on this beforehand. He wouldn't want to reveal that he had been desperate to return to Korea either.
“No matter how much he disliked Korea, I earnestly begged him to return for the sake of the friends and people he knew living there.”
As soon as I said that, the reporters and civil servants gathered nearby all applauded. “Clap clap clap...”
I enjoyed their reaction as if it were only natural. Baek Dambi looked embarrassed but happy as she enjoyed it too.
I answered the many questions that followed.
Most were about Jun-chi, but quite a few reporters were interested in our journey through Sword World as well.
“What kind of place was Soweol?”
Baek Dambi squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them and answered the reporter.
“It was horrible... It was such a horrible place.”
At the same time, I smiled and answered,
“I thought it was amazing. It was seriously incredible!”
* * *
Footnotes:
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