Chapter 5

Chapter 5

A scrawny body, a grimy face that showed how long the child had gone without washing, and thin, worn-out clothes that did not suit the early spring weather.

Lee Seong-ha frowned without realizing it.

But Go Gyeol, after confirming that the child looked exactly as he remembered from before his Regression, naturally knelt on one knee and met the child’s eyes. The child’s outward appearance was so pitiful, but Go Gyeol knew. He knew the warmth hidden inside this child, and the vicious rebelliousness that stood in stark contrast to it.

“We came to pray for your grandmother. Is she inside?”

Lee Seong-ha’s eyes widened.

“This rude bastard can use a gentle tone like that?”

The child’s wary eyes rolled over to scan Lee Seong-ha in his cassock. Feeling that gaze, Go Gyeol lightly tapped Lee Seong-ha’s leg. Only then did Lee Seong-ha come to his senses and force the benevolent smile he wore at church onto his face.

“Th-the priest is going from house to house to pray for people. Is your grandmother here?”

The child hesitated for a moment, then nodded.

“…She has… a cold… so she’s sleeping.”

“Then may we just pray for her and leave?”

The child stared at Go Gyeol again, then soon stepped aside from the door with a small nod. Lee Seong-ha reluctantly followed Go Gyeol inside.

A cramped room that was not even three square meters. Faded newspapers had been pasted on the walls like wallpaper, and in one corner, a portable gas burner and an aluminum pot holding moldy rice lay scattered.

In a corner without even a window, someone who seemed to be the child’s grandmother was lying beneath a single thin blanket.

In air as cold as the outside, the grandmother’s complexion was pale.

Go Gyeol swallowed a sigh and sat in front of her. When he took her hand, as expected, there was no warmth at all. It was hard, as though rigor mortis had set in.

“…Um, Grandma’s sleeping….”

At the child’s voice, Go Gyeol composed his expression.

“When did your grandmother fall asleep?”

Instead of answering, the child only shifted their eyes.

“Lee Seong-ha. Pray for her.”

Having grasped the entire situation from Go Gyeol’s low words and the grandmother’s complexion, Lee Seong-ha sat in his place and set a hand on the grandmother’s forehead. Without minding the cold touch, he closed his eyes and made the sign of the cross.

The child quietly knelt beside Lee Seong-ha, clasped their small hands, and closed their eyes. Go Gyeol watched the sight in silence, then stepped outside and reported it to both 119 and 112 at the same time.

Before long, the faint sound of sirens came from far away.

Go Gyeol confirmed the lights of the police car and ambulance that had reached the entrance of the alley, threw the phone he had used for the call into a corner, then went back inside the house.

The prayer was over, and the child and Lee Seong-ha were staring blankly at each other.

Without hesitation, Go Gyeol picked up the child.

“Let’s go.”

“Wait! What are you doing?!”

At the sudden action, the child struggled and shouted. But Go Gyeol paid no attention and stepped outside. Lee Seong-ha, who usually had plenty of questions, followed after him without saying a word this time.

“Let me go! What if Grandma wakes up?!”

“Kang Hoon.”

Go Gyeol called the child’s real name.

“It’s all over now. You don’t have to live like this anymore.”

At that moment, the child—no, Kang Hoon’s body went stiff. And in the next moment, he broke free from Go Gyeol’s arms with all his strength.

“Hup!”

Taking advantage of the instant Go Gyeol let his guard down, Kang Hoon landed on the ground and dashed toward the alley behind them with the speed of a beast.

“That crazy little brat!”

Lee Seong-ha shouted in shock. It was an unimaginable speed. Faster than a D-Grade monster.

A faint smile touched Go Gyeol’s mouth.

“As expected. His talent is still the same.”

“Lee Seong-ha.”

“Huh?”

“Catch him. Don’t hurt him.”

Instead of answering, Lee Seong-ha kicked off the ground and vanished. Kang Hoon ran through the narrow, tangled alleys of the shantytown as if they were his own living room. But even so, that was all it was.

---

When Kang Hoon reached a dead end and hurriedly turned around, the one blocking his path was Lee Seong-ha.

“Caught you, brat.”

“Move!”

Kang Hoon tried to slip past Lee Seong-ha’s side, but the moment Lee Seong-ha’s hand lightly touched his shoulder, Kang Hoon’s body was hit with pressure that seemed to sink him deep into the ground. He could not move.

In the end, Kang Hoon was caught by the two of them and forced into the back seat of the car.

The car slipped smoothly out of the shantytown.

“Please let me out.”

Kang Hoon, who had been sitting quietly after being caught, opened his mouth.

Go Gyeol glanced back through the rearview mirror and pulled the car over to the shoulder.

“Seong-ha. Sit the kid next to you.”

“Huh? Uh.”

With a bewildered face, Lee Seong-ha sat Kang Hoon in the seat beside him. That was when it happened.

—Crack. Crack, crack.

With a sound like bones breaking, the child groaned and curled up.

“Huh? What’s wrong with him!”

Unlike the panicking Lee Seong-ha, Go Gyeol threw the blanket he had prepared in advance into the back and shouted.

“Cover his body with it!”

“Hurry!”

At Go Gyeol’s urging, Lee Seong-ha hurriedly covered the child’s body with the large blanket. At that moment, the small shape beneath the blanket began to grow as if swelling. Arms and legs lengthened, and black bobbed hair turned red and grew down to the waist.

—Riiiiip.

With the sound of clothes tearing because they could not handle the body’s shape, a long, slender hand slipped out and wrapped the blanket around the body. Lee Seong-ha covered his mouth with his own hand without realizing it.

“What… what the hell is this….”

“Hoo….”

The voice that came from beneath the blanket no longer belonged to a child.

Kang Hoon, who had become an adult in an instant—no, a boy—looked at Go Gyeol with a frown. He was gaunt, but his sharp rebelliousness filled him from within.

“Who are you people?”

“Kang Hoon. Age, eighteen.”

One sentence.

“Trait, curse-type ‘Witch.’ Right?”

At that voice, Kang Hoon’s face hardened like stone.

In the place where contempt and rebelliousness had vanished, there remained only shock and fear toward the person who had seen through all of his secrets.

The touch of the cold leather seat was chillingly vivid. The man in the seat beside him had introduced himself as “Go Gyeol.” His upright face, just like his name, seemed unreal, but the words that came out of his mouth were cruelly real.

“Wh-who are you?”

His voice came out cracked. Without realizing it, Kang Hoon shifted his body toward the car door handle.

“Go Gyeol. And the person who’s going to raise you into a Hunter.”

“Lunatic.”

Together with the curse that slipped out reflexively, Kang Hoon was about to open the car door. But as if the man did not care at all, he threw out one decisive line in a languid voice.

“You placed the curse because of your grandmother, didn’t you?”

It felt as if all the blood in his body had frozen solid.

Creeeak.

Kang Hoon turned his head, stiff enough to make a sound.

“Don’t say you didn’t. The way you look right now. You become a child every time you use your ability, don’t you?”

Without realizing it, Kang Hoon chewed at his lower lip. It was a truth he could not deny. With his head bowed deeply, an excuse barely flowed from his mouth.

“…It was Grandma’s wish.”

Lee Seong-ha, the other person in the passenger seat, looked silently at the black crown of Kang Hoon’s bowed head, then quietly asked,

“Who was the target of the curse?”

Kang Hoon was silent for a long time. The voice that finally broke the silence inside the car was soaked with moisture.

“……The drunk driver who killed her son.”

To him, his grandmother had not been just an old woman from the neighborhood. She had been his old friend, the only person who had treated him like a human being after he was left alone in the world.

Everything had begun in his second year of middle school, on the day he Awakened as the curse-type “Witch.” One day, in an empty house, after wandering the night streets without realizing it in search of human warmth, he met the grandmother. Unlike her shabby appearance, she was a warm person, as if she had gathered all the warmth in the world into herself. She was the precious person who had first shared a warm meal and warmth with him without asking for anything in return.

That was why, before she died, he wanted to grant the final wish she uttered.

“Hoon-ah… just one last time… I want to see my son’s face….”

He did not care what cost the curse demanded.

But he could not bring the dead back to life. That was something no Hunter could do, so instead, he decided to punish the person who had killed the grandmother’s son.

In the exact same way he had killed him.

“Ah.”

After Lee Seong-ha’s short sigh, a heavy silence settled inside the car.

“Do you think I was wrong? Do you people think I’m like a monster too?”

His head was still bowed, but his voice was as sharp as a shard of broken glass. It was the last thorn he had left to protect himself.

Go Gyeol looked at Kang Hoon through the rearview mirror. Then he answered as if it were nothing.

“If you think you weren’t wrong, then that would be the answer.”

It was neither affirmation nor denial. It was a statement that returned the full weight of the decision to Kang Hoon. It was a form of acknowledgment no one—not even his parents—had ever given him.

Kang Hoon slowly raised his head. His eyes, once full of venom, were now brimming with transparent tears.

Lee Seong-ha quietly reached out and placed his hand on Kang Hoon’s head. At the unexpected warm touch, Kang Hoon’s shoulders flinched.

“I don’t usually do this for unbaptized bastards… but I’ll just call it confession and pray for you.”

A low but steady voice echoed through the air inside the car.

“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit….”

As his prayer began, the tears hanging precariously at the corners of Kang Hoon’s eyes fell, drop by drop. They were tears he had never shed, not when his grandmother’s breath stopped, and not even on the day his parents abandoned him. The guilt and loneliness he had never been able to confess to anyone, which he had been forced to swallow alone, helplessly melted at the sound of a stranger’s prayer.

---

“By the way… why did you people come looking for me?”

Perhaps embarrassed after crying for so long, Kang Hoon sniffled and asked while pretending nothing had happened.

“Then what, did you think we came for fun?”

At Lee Seong-ha’s playful reply, as if he had not just comforted him, Kang Hoon abruptly frowned.

“Why did you look for me?”

“I told you earlier. I’m going to make you a Hunter.”

“What did you see in me? What do you know about me?”

Thwack!

Lee Seong-ha lightly smacked the back of his head.

“Ah!”

“Fix your tone. You’re rude.”

“What’s wrong with the way I talk! Ow! Why did you hit me!”

“Be respectful.”

At the sight of Lee Seong-ha shaking his fist, Kang Hoon pouted and asked,

“Why me, of all people? Aren’t Hunters a dime a dozen?”

The Republic of Korea was a Hunter powerhouse. He was asking why, out of all those many Hunters, they had chosen someone monstrous like him.

“Because there’s a skill only you can use.”

At Go Gyeol’s single sentence, Kang Hoon’s eyes widened.

Before his Regression, Go Gyeol had seen it clearly. Kang Hoon, standing in the center of Myeong-dong after it became a cursed city, extinguishing the life force of every living creature. That horrific skill that had taken fifteen hundred victims had to be guided in a different direction in this life.