82. The Road Home

Two men, reunited in a place neither of them had ever imagined.

Im Jaebaek stood frozen, his mouth hanging open.

“They’re the ones who saved me.”
“We were only carrying out Lord Yujin’s commission.”

The mercenary answered Im Jaeyeong’s introduction curtly.

Before he’d donned his debtor cosplay, Yujin had placed one more commission with the Madam.

‘That sibling of his. Put in a commission to have him rescued within the week.’
‘To pull him out without a clash, you’d need a 5th Rank at minimum. A Hunter skilled in concealment, they say.’
‘The cost?’
‘You’d want to budget four billion won at the least.’

And that assumed a Hunter was even on hand to take the commission straightaway, the caveat the Madam tacked on at the end.

‘A great calamity is going to befall the Seagulls before long.’
‘Hoho. You say such terrifying things as if they were nothing at all.’
‘In that case, could you line up a Hunter to take the commission at once?’
‘If I lower the hurdle to 4th Rank… I’ll float the offer to a friend of mine I know personally.’
‘The price?’
‘I’ll set it at around one-point-five billion won, they say.’
‘I could weep, I’m so grateful.’

The Madam’s eye for personnel was unerring. Slipping into the Seagulls to assassinate someone was no great trouble, but extracting a prisoner alive? The target was a civilian with no abilities to speak of, which multiplied the difficulty of the job several times over.

‘To find me someone capable of pulling this off for one-point-five billion.’

Truly. The woman’s resourcefulness alone was something to behold.

He was curious about the mercenary’s particulars too, but to ask here would be a breach of etiquette.

“Um, my benefactor.”
“Call me Yujin. The other’s embarrassing.”
“That offer — that you have need of me. Does it still stand?”

Im Jaebaek wore a serious expression he hadn’t shown before.

“Even without knowing what it’s about?”
“Either way, Lord Yujin had need of me. Why else would you go to such lengths?”
“Right. I need your ability.”
“I don’t know what it is you saw in me… but I’ll work under you, Lord Yujin.”

Im Jaeyeong, startled, grabbed hold of his brother.

“B-Bro. What in the world is going on?”
“That man over there is the one who saved us both.”

While Im Jaebaek explained what had happened to his younger brother, Kronos, silent until now, quietly sent over a thought.

‘I told you. I have it all figured out.’

Kronos, unlike his usual self, was making astute observations. Im Jaebaek’s resourcefulness might be remarkable, but at this point in time he was, put generously, a young entrepreneur who’d made good in his own neighborhood, and no more than that. He’d turned up in a regional newspaper once or twice; that was the extent of it.

‘True. It’s a fact that I overplayed my hand.’

‘He’s quick with figures, so he’ll factor it in well enough.’

Yujin slowly shook his head.

‘Whatever else he may be, Im Jaebaek is a man clear about debts of kindness and grudges.’

The Executioner Im Jaebaek had one firm guiding principle.

A kindness, and a grudge, are always repaid in full.

By the standards of Korean society, he was a criminal who dealt in private vengeance instead of legal punishment. And yet a fair number of people backed the Executioner Im Jaebaek from the shadows, precisely because he held to a clear standard.

‘His brother’s alive now, so he won’t go around killing criminals the way he used to.’

Even so, a person’s fundamental nature won’t change. And the fact that Yujin had invested heavily, staking even his own life, to save Im Jaebaek didn’t change either.

Why had he made an investment of that scale? That no longer mattered.

‘It is.’

‘I’m well aware of that.’

Yujin didn’t sneer or anything of the kind; he answered with a grave nod.

Kronos was a great Constellation who had once ruled over time. Few beings understood the concept of ‘time’ as deeply as he did.

Yujin might tune him out whenever he launched into one of his unfunny hymns to heroism, but counsel as sincere as this he’d do well to take to heart.

‘A Constellation’s intuition is more incisive than any objective metric or data, after all.’

It hadn’t even been half a year since the regression, and already the future had diverged sharply from his memory. Jang Miseon, who should have died in an Arahan Guild trap without so much as a corpse left to recover, was alive. And Song Myeongseok, who was meant to become one of the Guryongbang’s Nine Heads, had been raised as undead and made into Yujin’s faithful(?) subordinate.

‘Even just this, and I can’t begin to guess how far the ripples will reach.’

The head-on clash between Arahan and Phoenix had been moved up, for one. And there was the blowback of Vice-President Baek Seonghyeon marking Yujin as someone to watch.

Even so, he had no regrets. They were enemies he’d have to fight anyway, and the faster Yujin grew strong, the less it mattered that he’d moved up the timetable for bringing Arahan down.

‘There’ll be more changes to come.’

From here on, leaning on his knowledge of the future alone could ruin everything. Yujin wasn’t about to let Kronos’s warning go in one ear and out the other.

“Escort these two to the Galaxy Pub.”
“And the client?”
“Something’s come up. I’ll go separately.”
“If the terms of the commission change midway, an additional fee applies.”

So said the stiff-necked mercenary.

An acquaintance of the Madam’s, and a man who hated having the terms of a job changed midway…

‘It’s that guy.’

Yujin had no trouble guessing the identity of the hooded mercenary.

Just as I thought.
So this is around when he first hooked up with the Madam.

“I’ll add ten percent. That work for you?”

Suspicion he couldn’t quite hide lingered over the mercenary’s eyes. He’d be wondering, of course. Dropping a passenger made the job lighter, and yet rather than press for a discount, the client was all but forcing extra pay on him without a word of complaint.

‘Looks like you’re getting the read on him right away now too, Constellation.’

Kim Seongyu.

The Madam’s hitman, the one who’d made aggressive use of his concealment-type Unique trait. Before the regression, his level had reached 5th Rank.

‘He died early in the all-out war between the Galaxy Pub and the Red Spider.’

‘I heard he wounded the Red Spider boss, who’d reached the 7th Rank.’

The seventh Stellar Rank was the second great wall. The moment a Martial-line Hunter crossed it, they could unleash the Aura Blade, a formidable supernatural power that let them impose their will upon the world, and by pushing the mana within their body outward, they could perceive their surroundings more surely than with the five senses.

‘Ambushing a 7th-Rank powerhouse is all but impossible.’

Pulling off that near-impossible feat was proof enough of the curt mercenary’s potential.

‘That guy only has eyes for the Madam. And I don’t know any angle to recruit him by, the way I did with Im Jaebaek.’

Planting a favorable impression of himself would be enough. As long as he could pay the price, he could put Kim Seongyu to work as much as he liked by commissioning him through the Madam. There was no need to keep the man at his side.

“I’ll see you later.”
“We’ll talk business a few days from now, up top. The pay won’t be bad.”

The Humvee kicked up a fierce cloud of dust as it pulled out of the village. Yujin watched it go, fixing the image on his retina, then boarded the fishing boat moored at the shore.

“Let’s go.”
“Kaoooo!!”

The Scylla weren’t very bright. Modification had reborn them as 4th-Rank, mid-grade undead, but being fish by nature they could carry out only simple commands. Taking them all the way from the East Sea down to the South Sea, then around to the West Sea and on to Yeonpyeong Island, was flatly impossible.

‘Good thing I stocked up on provisions, at least.’

Between his stockpiled armaments and the sub-space pouch he’d borrowed from Lee Seongmin, he could handle whatever surprises the voyage threw at him. Yujin took in the endlessly unfurling horizon with an optimistic eye.

’…There was a time I thought that too.’

Yujin sat slumped on the deck, his face drained of color.

The passage up to Gyeonggi Province along the South Sea hadn’t gone anything like as smoothly as he’d expected. The first problem was the distance. He’d assumed going by sea meant no detours, but no such luck.

“Shit! Why are the waves this damn rough?!”

— Splash! Splash!

The moment he got even a little way from shore, the waves turned every yard of progress into an ordeal.

Across his past life and this one both, this was his first time at sea. Naturally, sailing was hardly the simple business of picking a heading and pushing forward.

Even granting that the Scylla bulled through the waves by sheer strength, the fishing boat lashed behind them kept snagging in the currents and getting flung this way and that.

— Kwaaang!

Once, the boat flipped clean over and plunged into the sea. Only Yujin’s physical capabilities, on par with a 3rd-Rank Martial-line Hunter, had kept him in one piece.

— Sssp.

Just thinking about when the boat capsized brings the taste of brine back to my mouth.
‘Pteh, pteh. I am never sailing again as long as I live.’

‘Aren’t you just delighted.’

If only you’d drink some seawater and drop dead — then the Constellation couldn’t spout his nonsense.

Thanks to keeping all the spare provisions stored in the sub-space pouch, nothing was lost even when the boat ran aground. Truly.

Thank goodness I got my hands on the sub-space pouch early, courtesy of the Arahan Guild.

‘Thank you, Arahan Guild!’

He was still smiling at the thought of the Arahan Guild, forever handing him fortuitous encounters at every turn, when black smoke caught his eye.

‘So it is.’

Black smoke climbed over the pale, hazy mist hanging along the shoreline of Yeonpyeong Island.

‘Have the Kaesong man-hunters made their move?’

Yujin’s gaze swept the area and caught on a single spot: a cargo ship near the island. Monsters swarmed across its deck, where shipping containers should have been stacked.

‘Yeonpyeong Island shouldn’t have a place for a cargo ship that size to dock.’

Even with a docking point secured ahead of time, putting in to shore would be a tall order. So the man-hunters didn’t force the cargo ship in too close.

Instead.

— Sploosh! Sploosh!

“Insane.”

Towering monsters like Ogres and Trolls hurled themselves fearlessly into the sea, throwing up sprays of water.

The West Sea might be shallower than the other seas, but it was still where countless rivers came to an end, deep enough that even large monsters couldn’t touch bottom.

“Kroooar!”
“Guurgh, guuurgh.”

Even big-bodied monsters like Ogres and Trolls couldn’t cope with the depth of the sea and thrashed their arms and legs.

“Don’t be afraid. Move!”

The man-hunters drove the monsters on, some standing on the deck and cracking whips to stoke the beasts’ fury. Thrashing all the way, the monsters pressed on toward Yeonpyeong Island, though only about a third of those that had leapt from the deck ever reached the shore.

— Worn-out monsters for opponents? How utterly dull!

Fafnir charged in with a great roar. The Revenants followed at his back, while the Skeleton Mages held a single line, keeping watch on the distant cargo ship.

‘A good call.’

The Skeleton Mages sat at a mere 2nd Stellar Rank. Magic that low couldn’t deal much damage to large monsters, and flinging firepower around at random would only waste mana. Better to keep them posted at the shoreline, deterring the cargo ship from drawing closer.

‘No. It’s just as effective for them, too.’

‘They can just catch more monsters near Kaesong.’

Monsters were one thing the borderlands overflowed with. A gate core fully assimilated with the land absorbed the mana of the air and the earth-veins, and because it disgorged monsters at regular intervals, beasts of differing species kept warring among themselves, regulating their own food supply and numbers.

‘They hold their real main force in reserve and throw in freshly captured beasts to whittle down the enemy’s strength.’

Tsk.

Yujin clicked his tongue. So before the regression, they must have used this very method to bring Yeonpyeong Island down. And where on earth they’d procured a cargo ship capable of hauling monsters, honestly.

‘Looks like you’ve got the wrong idea.’

Yujin chuckled at Kronos’s words.

‘The ones in checkmate are those guys.’

“Kaoooo!!”

The distant ancestor of the Genocide Salmon.

I have seventy-nine Scylla — undead crafted by awakening the origin of the demon-beast Bakunawa.
In a sea battle, you couldn’t lose if you tried.

“Go. My minions.”
“Kaooooo!!!”

The Scylla, who had ignored every creature they crossed on the voyage and kept their savagery leashed the whole way, charged the cargo ship in a chorus of shrieks the instant Yujin’s order dropped.