#22
“I told you we should change locations.”
“We did change.”
Ha-seong let out a deep sigh and looked around. This was a large coffee shop in the middle of Gangnam. Usually when someone suggests changing locations, common sense would dictate going somewhere quiet, somewhere out of people’s sight, wouldn’t it?
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“How am I looking at you?”
“Like you’re looking at some really weird person.”
“You know yourself well.”
At least he has some self-awareness, Ha-seong thought as he stirred the americano in front of him.
“You don’t use sugar?”
“I don’t. Then you drink that stuff because you hate bitter things?”
Ha-seong responded curtly while looking at the coffee in front of Do-hyeok, topped with loads of whipped cream.
“Yes. I hate bitter things.”
No, more importantly, now wasn’t the time to be talking about bitter and sweet things. Now wasn’t the time for them to be sitting together like this, getting to know each other’s coffee preferences like they were on a blind date.
“But is this the only place available? You have your guild building too…”
“There are other hunters there too. For secretive conversations, this kind of place is actually better.”
People are too busy with their own conversations to be interested in us. Do-hyeok added that explanation. But does this guy really not know? That everyone in this coffee shop is looking in their direction?
“Isn’t that Cha Do-hyeok?”
“Wow, but who’s the person sitting across from him? A fellow hunter?”
“That guy’s handsome too, but why haven’t I seen him before?”
While pretending not to, people were looking at them like they were monkeys at a zoo. What? This kind of place is better for secret conversations? That might apply to other ordinary people, but would it work for a celebrity like you? Ha-seong was about to snap at him but stopped. He no longer had the energy for even that.
Ha-seong sighed helplessly and opened his inventory, taking out a snail shell-shaped item. He pressed the button in the center of the shell and placed it down on the table with a thud.
[Item ‘Silence Snail Shell’ is being used. For the next 2 hours, your conversations will not be audible to people within a certain radius.]
When this item is used, people can’t hear Ha-seong’s conversations. More precisely, it makes conversations sound like muffled murmuring, preventing the words from being heard clearly. It was an item Ha-seong frequently used during his hunter days when secretly hiding with colleagues to hunt monsters or when having important conversations at the association.
“So you’re not planning to hide things from me anymore.”
Do-hyeok playfully rolled the shell Ha-seong had placed down. Ha-seong, possessed by the spirit of a mother telling someone not to play around, smacked his hand away.
“This is just an item, you know?”
“I’m sure it is. The problem is that it’s a rare item that’s hard to obtain.”
Yoon Woo-bin would really like this. Do-hyeok muttered this while not stopping his fidgeting hands.
“Who’s Yoon Woo-bin again?”
“He exists. The Hunter Management Bureau mascot.”
Hunter Management Bureau mascot? What’s that supposed to be? Anyway, he wasn’t curious about that story at all right now. Ha-seong got straight to the point and opened his mouth quite seriously.
“So those eyes of yours…”
“What do you mean by eyes?”
“Ah, right. Sorry. What are those eyes?”
Do-hyeok just made a low rumbling sound with his throat and stirred the remaining whipped cream on his coffee. This guy was still hesitating even now when the situation had reached this point. He was probably thinking about whether he should say this first or not.
“Hey, do you know how many times I’ve been jerked around by you? If you’ve played around that much, you should stop too.”
Ha-seong’s voice was thick with fatigue and irritation. Then, as if his words finally got through, Do-hyeok slowly nodded his head.
“I can see them.”
“See what?”
“Other people’s status windows, monsters’ characteristic windows.”
Ha-seong narrowed his eyes. He had thought something was off, but those really weren’t ordinary eyes.
But seeing other people’s status windows – wasn’t that an incredible skill? No, calling it a skill was ambiguous to begin with. Ha-seong asked just in case.
“Is it a skill?”
“No. I just became like this at some point.”
Saying this, Do-hyeok briefly explained his past and the changes to his eyes that occurred simultaneously with his awakening.
“That’s amazing.”
Well, maybe it’s like a perk you get for manifesting as S-rank. If that’s the case, give me some too. Then I could have killed monsters more efficiently and saved my colleagues. But that was a completely meaningless thought now.
“So you secretly peeked at me using my skills?”
“Yes.”
“Sneaky bastard.”
“That’s kind of hurtful to hear. If we’re talking about being sneaky, wasn’t hyung more sneaky from the beginning, going around acting like a purifier when you can’t even do ‘real’ purification?”
This guy speaks more logically than he looks. Ha-seong couldn’t find anything particular to say in response to Cha Do-hyeok, who only picked the right things to say.
“Then it’s my turn now. Are you really S-rank?”
Honestly, before coming this far, Ha-seong had planned to somehow wriggle out of it if there was any gap he could exploit. But having felt the strangeness in Cha Do-hyeok’s eyes and learned about the ability those eyes possessed, it seemed impossible to hide from that guy at least.
“Yeah.”
“…Then another question. What exactly are you, hyung?”
If he had awakened as S-rank, the country should have been in an uproar again. But among the hunters registered with the Hunter Management Bureau, Do-hyeok was still the only S-rank, and Do Ha-seong wasn’t even registered as a hunter in the first place. Before bringing Do Ha-seong in as a purifier, Do-hyeok had instructed Han Shin-woo to extract information from the Hunter Management Bureau. The instructions were exactly two things:
Do Ha-seong’s personal information.
Whether Do Ha-seong was registered as a hunter.
But the information Han Shin-woo brought back was all useless. The personal information he found was utterly ordinary information. Literally ordinary information about an ordinary person. That was all. The second was the same. When they input Do Ha-seong’s personal information into the hunter registration database, there was no matching information at all. So there were more than one or two questions arising from this.
Who exactly was he? It couldn’t be explained unless he had suddenly dropped from the sky.
“Don’t ask about that.”
But Ha-seong cut him off decisively. His attitude was firm, as if he had no intention of resolving those questions. Do-hyeok’s brow furrowed sharply. He was showing his displeasure all over his face.
“Even if you make that face, I’m not planning to tell you. And is that important to you? Whether what I am, what my identity is, is important? From what I can see, what you want seems to be something else.”
This person really has good instincts. Not only that. His combat sense that he’d seen several times in the dungeon. The way he deflected the sword demon’s attack like swinging a baseball bat with a sword that looked like it would break at any moment. How he enhanced his tamed monster to avoid the risk of his identity being revealed. These were actions and judgments impossible without considerable experience.
And that was also what Do-hyeok wanted right now.
“Hyung has good instincts.”
That’s probably why you’re still alive. If it weren’t for his unusually developed instincts, Ha-seong would have died early like his colleagues.
“Then I’ll change the question. What’s hyung’s purpose?”
Why did he pretend to be a purifier when he was an S-rank hunter? Why was he going around doing such suspicious things? Do-hyeok was slightly suspecting whether this person called Do Ha-seong might be connected to the perpetrator of the incident from 10 years ago. Although the investigation results showed it was unlikely, he still had lingering suspicions.
“My purpose?”
“Yes. Hyung, are you by any chance a criminal?”
“What do you take me for…”
Ha-seong opened his mouth wide with an incredulous expression. Calling him, who had lived so virtuously while only working, a criminal. Of course, he did have a history of secretly farming in dungeons that others had already cleared while pretending to be a purifier when he was actually a hunter, and selling the loot, but that wasn’t committing a crime. It wasn’t against the law anyway.
“You do suspicious things, and you could be a real scammer. Well, if not, never mind.”
“Uh. I’m not.”
“Then tell me. What exactly have you been doing, hyung?”
Right, what have I been doing? Ha-seong thought the answer was actually quite simple and clear, but wondered how to explain it. But well, Ha-seong’s purpose wasn’t really suspicious or strange, so did he really need to choose his words carefully?
“To make money.”
“What?”
“You asked what my purpose was. My dream is to be a rich unemployed person.”
“…”
If I were to describe Do-hyeok’s expression, it was exactly this: ‘What is this person saying right now?’ But what could he do? It was true.
“A rich unemployed person?”
“Yeah.”
“Do those two words go together?”
“Why wouldn’t they go together? Put them together and they go together just fine.”
“That’s hyung’s purpose?”
“Yep.”
Ha-seong’s confidence. More precisely, his clear eyes without a trace of deception left Do-hyeok momentarily speechless. Those eyes were hardly the type that said ‘I’m lying to you.’ So that kind of purpose was real… At words he never could have expected, Do-hyeok felt intense bewilderment and absurdity for the first time in his life.
“I told you my story. So now you tell me yours too.”
“No, I still can’t accept…”
He was still dumbfounded by the talk about dreaming of being a rich unemployed person, but Ha-seong turned the arrow of questioning toward Do-hyeok as if he was done with what he had to say.
“So what do you really want from me? Your purpose, I mean.”
“…Will you listen?”
“Let me hear it first.”
Ha-seong slurped down the rest of his coffee. The sound of ice cubes hitting the glass rang pleasantly in his ears. The onlookers didn’t leave their seats and struggled desperately to hear the two men’s conversation. But thanks to this snail’s sacrifice, there was no worry about the conversation leaking out. Not only that, it also had the function of blocking surrounding conversation sounds to some extent, so right now it felt as if only Ha-seong and Do-hyeok were in this cafe.
“I want hyung to help me.”
“With what?”
“My revenge.”
In the space that was quiet yet not quiet, Do-hyeok’s voice struck strongly into his mind.
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
