Tell Them I Love Them
"S-Seo In-hwa..."
I stood nailed to the spot. Was this what it felt like to see a ghost? To come face to face with a reaper? Yes. A reaper. The word drove itself into my skull and stuck.
Seo In-hwa. She had been my colleague.
She was the sharp, meticulous senior who looked after every member of the team without missing a thing. Team leader. An outstanding Hunter. That bright, unfailingly positive presence of hers had been a model for anyone who saw it.
The whole team adored her. Person to person, it was difficult not to respect her.
We must have been running missions together for about three years when the accident happened inside a dungeon. The truth was, on a mission you never knew when your head might come off. A Hunter wasn't some shiny new profession that simply paid well. It was a dangerous job—you staked your life hunting monsters. Back then things had been going so well that the thought had grown a little hazy.
One small mistake by a teammate collapsed the formation. The tanks' defensive line broke. The tide turned lethal with terrifying speed, and the dead piled up. It happened in an instant.
Only three people survived.
Team Leader Seo In-hwa. Me. And Han Gyeol.
"Gyeol, take Ha-jun and stand by. The moment I get back, trigger the dimensional shift pack."
That was what our senior said, in the middle of the crisis.
"Senior. Let me do it instead."
And that was how I answered.
"Eun Ha-jun...!!"
Of course Gyeol flew into a rage. I pretended not to see him. If someone had to be sacrificed, better that it be the most useless one among us. That was the rational choice.
"Don't get cute. Of everyone left, I'm the one with the advantage. Highest speed stat, and I thought it through. I'm the only one who can pull this off. You stay put until I set the ether energy charge and come back. And didn't I tell you to call me Team Leader? You little shrimp."
"But..."
She smiled the same way she always did and clapped me on the shoulder.
I wanted to ask. That ether energy charge she meant to set and come back from—did that model even have a timer?
In that moment I thought of the family she had left outside the dungeon. Her respectable, gentle parents. The younger brother she was close to. The childhood friend she had dated for nine years before marrying. And their two children.
But in the end I didn't ask. Watching Seo In-hwa's back as she ran toward the monster boss, I told myself she would never make a reckless sacrifice. No. She'd be fine. I simply hadn't known—of course it was a model with a timer.
"Ha-jun! Trigger the dimensional shift pack, now!!"
I heard her shouting it at me from atop the head of the boss—the Black Kraken, an upper-tier beast even among the monster fish. Ah. So my hunch had been right. She had lied. There was no way it had a timer.
"Hurry!!"
"But...!"
To smile in a moment like that. A person so magnificent it made me shiver.
I understood her shout in a single breath. Who those words were meant for.
I triggered the dimensional shift pack, and in the same instant I saw a flash burst outward from the kraken's head. That was the end.
In the end, the only ones who walked out of that dungeon were Gyeol and I. Just the two of us.
For a long while after, we didn't speak to each other. Like people with no right to open their mouths. Like the dead. We couldn't laugh, couldn't cry, couldn't eat, couldn't sleep.
When we were barely human anymore, In-hwa's husband came to find us.
"In-hwa wouldn't have wanted the two of you living like this."
Only when I saw that man—worn far thinner than either of us—could I break down and spill everything. That I had thought her last words were a lie. That I had known she wouldn't be coming back. That I still hadn't stopped her. Because I wanted to live. Because I was afraid to die. That I had rationalized it: surely our senior had a plan.
"In-hwa would have known you were thinking that, Ha-jun."
The man said it quietly.
"You know how smart our In-hwa was, don't you? You're smart too, so you know. In a moment when every second was life or death, she was probably grateful you followed the order without arguing. I'm hurt, and I'm bitter, that she was always like that—but she was just that incredible. That extraordinary. A special person ordinary people could never catch up to."
He bit his lip, forcing the tears back.
"The world In-hwa tried to protect. The world she wanted to build. Now you and Gyeol can protect it for her."
He said that, and smiled at us.
Afterward we slept again. Ate again. Cried, and laughed. Because we wanted to protect the world our senior had wanted to protect. Because we refused to waste the future she had wanted to live in, dragging ourselves through it like walking corpses.
And after that, the words that stuck to Gyeol's mouth were Don't let your guard down. In the end, we hadn't even managed that...
"Ha-jun."
Gyeol's voice, pressing at me from the side, snapped me back.
"Why are you crying."
"Huh?"
"Thought I was the only one coming apart. You're just as bad."
A faintly complicated look crossed his face. He glanced around, then went to the water cooler in the corner, pulled a tissue, and brought it over. Only after I took it from his hand did the spinning in my chest begin to settle.
Right. I regressed. This is before Senior In-hwa dies. I can change the future.
It felt like a bulb switching on inside my head.
So... about three years left, from now?
I looked at her face as she took in the Awakener Management Department with an utterly lost expression. I couldn't just walk up to her out of nowhere—but I at least had a rough sense of how she would move from here.
"Ha-jun?"
I stepped in beside her. Gyeol hurried after me.
"Hello."
"Yes? Oh—me? Hello."
She looked at me, eyes rounding in surprise.
"Did you happen to awaken yesterday?"
"Ah, yes. The two of you as well?"
"That's right. I know my way around this building. Want to come with us?"
She was a strange kind of directionally hopeless. Outdoors she found her way just fine; she only ever got lost inside buildings. Just as I'd expected, her face brightened at once.
"I'd be grateful. But is that really all right?"
"Of course. Follow me."
I answered as casually as I could manage and took the lead.
"Oh my, you awakened on the subway? That must have been a shock. Me, it happened while I was getting the kids ready for kindergarten, of all things."
"Are the kids all right?"
"Yes. Thankfully our whole family was inside the house. I heard a lot of people were hurt elsewhere. For something like this to happen out of nowhere..."
"I know. Did you go to a hospital and get checked?"
"Oh—no. I didn't even think of going to a hospital. Should I have gone there first?"
In the short time it took to climb the stairs, Senior In-hwa came at me with a storm of warmth.
"No. You can do a simple exam and the registration here, then go."
Trust settled a little deeper into her face.
"Meeting you and Gyeol is really lucky."
My heart stung at the brightness of her smile.
"..."
I glanced back. Gyeol, following behind, had his mouth clamped shut, the look of someone who didn't like any of this.
"Ah, there it is."
We climbed to the fourth floor of a building with no elevator, and at last the Awakener Management Department came into view.
Through the glass door, the place was chaos from the morning on. Or had it been going since last night? Phones rang without a pause. Civil servants bustled back and forth.
Then the man nearest the entrance spotted us.
"Oh! Are you Eun Ha-jun?"
He flung the door wide and forced a smile onto a tired face. An Awakener registration name tag hung from his neck.
"We got the call."
A call? The thought barely formed before it clicked. We'd come in Second Lieutenant An Eun-young's car, so of course someone on that side had phoned ahead. Come to think of it, hadn't Captain Seong Hyeon-jun said he'd put in a word?
"Aigoo, this place is a wreck too, what with yesterday. Please follow me for now."
"Yes."
"Uh, but that person..."
"We met her on the first floor. She says she awakened yesterday as well."
"Aha, I see. Well then, come along. The Awakener registration process is the same either way."
We followed the civil servant into another room on the fourth floor. A few cement-gray steel cabinets, a wide desk, a laptop on top of it with something like a printer hooked up, and several chairs. All of it more worn and modest than I'd expected.
"Please, have a seat. I'll need you to fill these out."
I took the papers he held out and stood there blank for a moment.
What is this paperwork.
After the first page for personal information came a page where you wrote your own stats and skills. After that, a page asking whether there was anything unusual, and for information already confirmed at a hospital.
We filled all of this out by hand? Did we... did we really?
It was a small shock. True, the management and investigation of Awakeners was still crude at this point in time. But with a system like this, you could write whatever you wanted and no one would ever know, could they?
Before I died—right before I regressed—stepping into a machine like an MRI let them scan an Awakener's approximate stats. A lie within the margin of error was one thing, but you couldn't fake the larger shape of your traits or abilities. Most people who tried were angling for a slightly higher rank, though honestly there was little point. The moment you walked into a field that didn't match your rank, staying alive became extremely difficult.
Right. That's basically volunteering to go die.
The ones who fake their stats are criminals, more or less. Thinking that far made me feel as if I were about to commit some enormous wrong—but I was doing this to save humanity.
Anyway, I understood now just how wretched the conditions were.
If it's like this, there was no reason not to spend Soul Points.
While I frowned, Gyeol and our senior were diligently filling the forms out by hand.
"Ah, we'll also need to pay out the reward for Eun Ha-jun and Han Gyeol's work suppressing the scene yesterday. May I see your IDs?"
Reward money. Right. This was what I'd been waiting for. How much were they going to give? I couldn't quite remember what they'd paid around this time, so it felt like a gift I hadn't thought to expect. I took out my ID in high spirits and showed it to him.
"Here."
"Just put mine with Ha-jun's."
"Ah, I'm sorry. It's paid individually, and we have to leave a record that both of you received it. It's a hassle, but I'll need each of you separately. These forms as well."
"Ah..."
Gyeol and I filled out the reward paperwork too. The civil servant took our IDs, scanned them, checked them on a fingerprint machine, and started entering this and that on the laptop.
"Roughly... about three million won per person. Not today—it'll take two or three days. Something like a Brave Citizen Award may be conferred, but that would proceed after the situation is brought under control..."
"We took down a boss monster, and the reward is only that much?"
The captain had said the amount was fixed, but it was far smaller than I'd expected. Killing a boss monster was practically the same as clearing a dungeon. Even this early, hadn't the payouts run into the hundreds of millions? Fine—it was only beginner-tier—but I'd still figured on at least several tens of millions.
"Ah... You killed a boss monster? Haa. The thing is, this part's a bit complicated. Monsters have never burst out of a dungeon before, you see. So the relevant law, at present..."
He scratched at his head as if it ached. I'd only awakened yesterday; showing off how much I knew felt wrong, and pressing him would make it look as if I'd done the whole thing openly fishing for a reward. It was hard to argue.
"I'll try reporting it up the chain."
He answered dryly, as if there was nothing he could do either. Disappointing, but I could understand it. Right—once I sold the items, money wouldn't be a problem anyway. With no other choice, I bent back over the Awakener registration forms.
"Wow! That's seriously amazing! Now that I think about it, you two were the ones on the news yesterday! So cool! How did you even think to save people in a situation like that? When I awakened, my head was ringing so hard I couldn't do a thing!"
Senior In-hwa whispered it, voice bright with excitement.
"No, well. The situation just turned out that way."
"What do you mean! It's really incredible. You're wonderful. Thanks to you, so many people were saved! It's the kind of thing worth looking up to. From now on, I want to use this power for people, the way you do, Ha-jun."
Looking into those sparkling eyes, I couldn't say another word. To hear something like that from her. Like me? From the day she died, Gyeol and I had tried so hard to live even a little the way she had.
My stomach turned. If I cried now I'd look insane, so I clenched down with everything I had and silently filled the blanks. She watched me for a moment, then went back to her own paperwork.
"All finished?"
Once the simple forms were done, the civil servant collected all three. He seemed to skim them, then started tapping something into the laptop on the desk.
"Han... Gyeol. S-rank. Wow. My god. What incredible luck. Eun—Ha-jun... You're, uh, D-rank."
Saying it, he sneaked a look at my face. What. What is it. Got a problem with D-rank? Ahem.
Truth was, D-rank sat in a very awkward place. Not especially useful, but you'd feel the lack if it weren't there. About that level. He was probably staring because the person the Monster Special Forces had contacted separately had turned out to be D-rank, and that struck him as odd.
"Seo In-hwa is A-rank as well. Wow, all of you are incredible. I'm jealous. Hahaha."
"Are we done."
Gyeol sounded offended. The edge in it was sharp. The civil servant must have felt it; he laughed awkwardly and tapped the printer-like machine.
"One moment. Look here. It's the photo for the certificate. You can smile."
Click. Click. Before any of us could quite process it, photos of the three of us were taken in turn.
Whirr. Whirrr. The machine rattled on for a long while, and then the cards came out. What even was this. It looked like a library checkout card.
"Your Awakener registration cards. You've been to the Awakener Department at Korea Hospital, yes? You'll need to go back and have a biometric chip implanted. Seo In-hwa, this works out well for you. If you go to the hospital, you can fill out the paperwork and get the chip done at the same time."
"Implant a chip?"