WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Arsène

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◈ How an A-Rank Hunter Lives ◈

Chapter 40: S-Rank Hunter Kang Junchi - [3]

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Kang Jun-chi, twenty-eight years old. His face often appeared without his consent on Korean-pride YouTube channels, but Kang Jun-chi himself was openly anti-Korean.

More precisely, Kang Jun-chi despised all three countries, Korea, China, and Japan, but hated Korea the most.

According to Kang Jun-chi, the Japanese were monkeys who could hardly be considered human, as anyone could see from their history and social culture. Korea and China, which had lost to those monkeys, were insects too embarrassing to even classify as mammals. Chinese people were cockroaches based on their numbers alone, while Koreans were on the same level as Chinese people, except there were fewer of them, so they were basically sea roaches.

The fact that Kang Jun-chi had personally made all those remarks after becoming famous showed just how much resentment he held toward Korea.

Kang Jun-chi had not always hated Korea that way.

His internet history from high school showed that he often posted insults about Japan and China in communities with strong nationalist leanings. Back then, he had simply been an ordinary Korean who hated neighboring countries.

Korea was added to the list of countries Kang Jun-chi hated after he finished his military service.

According to an old post he wrote himself, Kang Jun-chi's mother had left home when he was young, and his father died when he was fifteen.

Thinking of himself as an orphan, Kang Jun-chi never expected to be eligible for active-duty service.

After graduating high school, Kang Jun-chi had been learning welding while working. When he learned that he had to enlist as active-duty personnel, he was horrified. He had to terminate his studio lease early by paying an extra two months' rent, leave all his furniture and belongings with a relative he was not even close to, then enlist.

His back was ruined during his service. After being discharged with a damaged back, Kang Jun-chi was furious to learn that the relative had thrown away everything he had left with them before enlisting, that his back hurt too much for him to keep welding, and that despite all this, he received barely any compensation from the country.

So Kang Jun-chi began posting insults about Korea alongside China and Japan in the community he normally used.

After getting kicked out of that community, he devoted himself to studying for the civil service exam with the money he had saved, trying to somehow find a way to make a living. He passed within a year and became a civil servant.

Yet civil service was nothing like the peaceful life he had imagined, one that was boringly regular and rational, with leaving work on time as the norm.

He suffered under the bad customs and overwork unique to public offices, posting about suicide on community sites every day. He especially complained that even after telling one senior civil servant his back was bad, that person kept making only him move things. Then a Gate opened, and Kang Jun-chi awakened.

At the time, Kang Jun-chi had planned to work loading and unloading delivery trucks, not become a Hunter or remain a civil servant. He seemed to think he could use his force-field ability to earn a safe and steady income.

But reservists were mobilized during the national emergency. Kang Jun-chi had to carry a rifle again, and in the middle of all that, a fellow civil servant reported him, revealing to the state that he was an awakened person suited for combat.

In the end, he became a specially managed individual and was dragged from operation to operation.

There was one thing neither the state nor Kang Jun-chi himself knew at the time. His supernatural ability was practically on the level of a natural disaster.

As both the state and Kang Jun-chi learned that through repeated operations, their positions reversed.

Kang Jun-chi, who had been pushed around by Korea until then, began throwing his weight around in return. He also began sadistically relieving all the stress he had accumulated.

There were legendary true stories about him barging into the home of the senior civil servant who had reported his awakening and treated him unfairly during his civil service days whenever he was bored. He would demand that the senior civil servant prepare a feast for him or call their parents over to give him a massage, tormenting them until they attempted suicide and ended up in intensive care. There were also stories of him storming into the Veterans Affairs Office and tormenting the civil servant assigned to him until they attempted suicide too.

According to one rumor, the reason Korea did not conscript awakened people and instead gave them the Hunter title and paid them handsomely to put them to work was because of Kang Jun-chi. When there had been talk of proposing military service laws for awakened people, Kang Jun-chi had supposedly declared that if they did that, he would truly overturn everything. Apparently, that had affected national policy.

Because of all that, I felt a great deal of affection for Kang Jun-chi even though I had never met him.

He had grown up in an unfortunate home like mine and was an anti-patriotic rebel like me. I felt a deep sense of kinship with him, and I could even get vicarious satisfaction from watching the videos he uploaded.

He was also in a league of his own as an awakened person, so it was not strange that I had idolized Kang Jun-chi.

But the Kang Jun-chi I met in person seemed different from what I expected.

I had thought he would be armed with a rebellious spirit against the country and society, but he was more ordinary than I had expected.

No, he was ordinary to an unnecessary degree. Even the sight of him whining that he was going to die after getting hurt by a mere Deathclaw was far removed from the majesty of the awakened king I had imagined. That disappointed me.

“Wait a moment. I'll find the nearest hospital...”

Kang Jun-chi shook his head at my words.

“The nearest hospital? No!”

“What do you mean, no?”

“If I wanted to get to the nearest hospital quickly, I would have called an ambulance. Why would I call you, all the way in Incheon?”

“Come to think of it, was there a reason you did not call an ambulance?”

“Because I'll die if I go to a hospital in Seoul!”

I had been listening sullenly, but then I raised one eyebrow.

“Die?”

“Those doctor bastards will kill me. On government orders...!”

I demanded a detailed explanation. Kang Jun-chi said,

“I'm a threat to the democratic system. I'm roughly a corps-level military force, and what makes me particularly dangerous is that I can reach the capital in a single taxi. The country does not have much money, so why do you think it does not forcibly draft awakened people during a national crisis and instead pays them huge sums to work as Hunters?”

“I heard it was because you declared you would overturn everything if they did.”

“No. It's because they're afraid powerful people who are hungry and dissatisfied with society will not stay quietly at home, but will try to overthrow the country. They give us wealth and honor to keep us satisfied because they do not know what we would do otherwise.”

Kang Jun-chi claimed that every country that failed to give awakened people wealth and honor had been devoured by awakened people. In those countries, awakened people had taken all the positions, including generals and presidents.

He also claimed that even China, known for its oppressive policies toward awakened people, gave awakened Hunters enough money and honor to prevent that kind of thing. It was a strategy to fill their bellies first because those in power feared that awakened people would try to overturn the system.

Kang Jun-chi continued.

“You know there are a lot of countries these days where awakened people are the ones in charge, right?”

“I heard that mostly happens in the Third World.”

“It happens in countries people have heard of too, not just the Third World. You know about that recent coup in Indonesia? It was reported like a military general succeeded in the coup, but an S-rank awakened person and several other awakened people helped make it happen. Now the awakened people are the real power behind the scenes.

“Do you know why North Korea has been producing tactical nuclear weapons lately? Because it's hard to take out someone with a force-field exoskeleton using ordinary firepower, so they are trying to make sure they kill them by detonating tactical nuclear weapons. Do you think Korean politicians would feel at ease in this situation?”

“I suppose they'd be nervous.”

“And I'm the kind of guy who's always raising hell about how much I hate Korea and the Korean government. If the people at the top are given a safe opportunity to get rid of me, there's no way they'd let it pass...”

He added that this was why he could not even call an ambulance. If he did, government agencies would learn that he had been seriously injured, and he had no idea what they might do during surgery, so he could not possibly risk it.

That was why he needed to call someone he knew personally. Puzzled, I asked,

“Weren't you close with Stonehead Youth on Huntweb? The rock ability user, Seok Jangsil? I heard you two addressed each other like brothers. Why didn't you call him...”

“That bastard Jangsil won't work. I can't trust him.”

“Why not?”

“The country already knows he's close to me. How do I know they have not contacted him behind my back and set something up?”

This level of suspicion was an illness. Even though he said he was in so much pain that he might die, he also talked so damn much that I was starting to doubt whether it was really an emergency.

More than anything, it was hard to believe his claim that the government wanted to get rid of him.

As I had seen in the hallucination, was Kang Jun-chi not Korea's powerful shield, capable of driving away even gigantic Monsters?

On top of that, Kang Jun-chi's contribution was more than enough to earn him appearances on Korean-pride YouTube channels. Ignoring the threat of sea Monsters and sea elementals, he kept Korea's container ships safely traveling to countries around the world. Some even claimed that Korea's situation was better than other countries not because of the government's price-control policies, but solely because of Kang Jun-chi's efforts.

And yet the government would go out of its way to kill him? Did that make any sense?

As far as I could see, Kang Jun-chi was simply suffering from a kind of persecution complex.

The things he normally did in the name of relieving stress were all practically criminal, and he was aware that he had gone too far, so he must have felt preemptively guilty. He had probably convinced himself that the country hated him, then gotten scared on his own when he found himself in danger.

“Then how can you trust me?”

I was starting to get annoyed when I asked that.

Kang Jun-chi's answer surprised me.

“I... can trust you.”

“Why?”

“Because I've watched every one of your interviews. You proudly said that even if Incheon could not be abandoned, you could sell out the country, did you not? It was obvious you did not have a shred of patriotism, and I liked that. After that, I kept hearing news about you and made sure to read every interview you gave...

“I even heard you said you had a criminal record for beating up the school discipline teacher and a training-camp drill instructor. When I enlisted, I wanted to beat those training-camp instructor bastards until they became disabled too. I only kept it as a fantasy, but learning that someone had actually done it made me feel a growing sense of closeness.”

I flinched at that. For an extremely similar reason to why I had felt kinship with Kang Jun-chi, he had been feeling close to me.

It also felt strange. While I had been watching every one of his videos, he had been following my interviews. I had been his fan, and it felt like he was revealing that he had been mine too...

I asked,

“So you think I'm trustworthy because you feel close to me?”

“No. You obviously look antisocial, and you even have a criminal record, so I figured you were the real deal... Even if the country recruited awakened people, they probably would not recruit an antisocial lunatic like you.”

“It's not like I wanted to be antisocial. I just was not raised properly. Both my mother and father were fucking terrible.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Even while claiming he was in pain, Kang Jun-chi grinned and asked,

“Do you know what kind of fish a Jun-chi is?”

“There's a saying that even rotten Jun-chi is still Jun-chi, so Kang Jun-chi must be...”

“No, it's a fucking awful fish. It stinks, tastes like shit, and has too many bones to eat. Even when you catch one, it does not put up a fight, so fishermen hate it every time they hook one. A total dud of a fish.”

Kang Jun-chi snickered and continued.

“And my dad was such a fishing addict that he'd close his shop and go fishing whenever he felt like it. It's not hard to guess what a piece of trash like that felt when I came out of his wife's belly for him to give me a name like that, right?”

It was hard to explain just how much closeness I felt from the unfilial way he called his own father a piece of trash without hesitation.

To put it simply, the kinship I had felt when I first learned about Kang Jun-chi's past filled my chest again. Then Kang Jun-chi asked,

“Come to think of it, how old are you?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Same age. It feels weird for only me to keep speaking casually when I'm the one asking for help, so let's drop the formalities... Good, friend? Like I said, help me.”

By this point, I had promoted that friend to a best friend of ten years in my heart. I asked,

“How exactly do you want me to help?”

Footnotes:

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