Chapter 196: Instinct (1)

TL: SHW

“Henry is….”

Hope tilted his head for a long while before finally finishing the sentence.

“Cute.”

Though what came out was completely unexpected.

“Sem was kind of creepy. But Henry is cute.”

“Um, excuse me, but that's not my opinion.”

“Don't worry. I won't get that part mixed up.”

I pressed hard against my temples.

Hadn't the atmosphere been pretty serious just a moment ago? How strange.

Was it my fault?

No way.

“Henry's cuter to look at, too. He's all round and looks like a potato.”

“Round?”

“He looks like a squashed bell pepper.”

I glanced at Hong Seok-young. Maybe treating Hope so gently because he'd completely fallen for that talk about family had been a mistake. No, it wasn't that Hong Seok-young's softheartedness itself was the problem. If he'd killed Hope then, we might never have heard about Noah Michel, or….

This time, I glanced at Gamble.

If we'd dug into Alex Hope's background, we probably would have learned about Sandra Gamble too. But we wouldn't have known that these two were this close.

We had eliminated the possibility of a genius remarkable enough to be hailed as the salvation of humankind slipping through our fingers and even ending up hostile to us, so it hadn't been pointless.

Maybe I only wanted to believe that. Still, there was nothing wrong with thinking positively.

I just.

Just… didn't like this situation. The fact that we were relying entirely on Hope for every piece of information.

“Bell pepper or whatever, explain in more detail. Are you saying that guy really is the boss of Ark?”

“No, the real one is Noah.”

“That's not what Hunter-nim is asking, Shanshan.”

“Huh…. Ah. He means whether he's the guy from the rumors! I'm getting pretty good at understanding things now, aren't I?”

It was good that Hope was giving us information. Right now, we knew far too little about Ark. Anything we could learn was an advantage in itself.

But just look at the list of Dungeons Hope had given us and told us to investigate. As long as Myeong-dong and Bangi-dong were on that list, we had no choice. We absolutely had to enter those Dungeons.

“I did a few jobs with Henry too, so that must be what got around. I'm not really interested in stuff like that, so I told Henry to handle it himself. Did Noah order him to?”

“What the hell does that woman want to do with you?”

“Obviously she wants to kill me, right?”

“…Tell her not to even try if she isn't confident she can kill you with her own hands. Go tease her again.”

“Should I? But she knows I'm here right now, so she's probably already plenty pissed off. She's probably smashed another bunch of teacups. She regrets it every time afterward, but she never learns.”

And what about America? Whatever that guy Henry was doing over there, as long as there was a connection to Noah Michel, we had no choice but to investigate.

Alex Hope was rattling off information as if he were doing us some grand favor, but just look at where it would lead. We would end up moving exactly the way he wanted, as though we were taking orders from Alex Hope himself.

And we still hadn't even heard the most important information.

Why Noah Michel wanted to bring monsters outside the Dungeons.

What Alex Hope had asked her to postpone while his family was still alive.

I caught the smell of something burning. Was her goal to wipe out humanity? Or?

We had made a lot of progress since I first woke up in Myeong-dong. We even knew now about the people responsible for the end of the world, something we'd once had no clues about whatsoever.

Positive. Think positively.

“Anyway… which toe did you say it was? Was it the right one?”

It was both funny and a little pitiful to hear Lee Mi-seon spout something so ridiculous. It felt like a sign that Hope had already drawn her into his pace.

“Henry? Henry is… Sandra, which toe did I say he was?”

“You don't actually think she asked because that was important, do you?”

“Uh….”

I'd only actually spoken with Hope a handful of times, and even then, we'd been in hostile situations. Yet Mi-seon had lowered her guard this much. Had Lee Mi-seon always been this full of openings when her nephew was still alive….

“…….”

“Ahaha.”

Hope laughed out loud at Lee Mi-seon. His clear voice sounded cheerfully out of place in the suffocating atmosphere.

Well… right. Thinking about it wasn't going to give me an answer anyway. Maybe once in a while, it wouldn't hurt to just let things flow however they would.

“Whether it's the right or the left, what's this Henry person's last name? Nationality? Height? And he is a man, correct?”

“Hmmm, what was his last name again? As far as I know… where was it? France?”

“Germany.”

“Ah, right! Germany, Germany. He's a man, and he's about… this tall?”

“Are you certain?”

“I held my hand up about this high, so probably?”

All this worrying started to feel pointless.

The atmosphere was loosening again…. Like a rubber band that had been stretched taut and, when released, instead of snapping back into shape, had stayed stretched out and sagged awkwardly.

Somehow, even staying tense started to make me feel stupid.

Right. We were making progress. Slowly like this… one step at a time.

“………….”

No.

Nononono.

Wait.

My thoughts were going somewhere strange. Wasn't this too peaceful? What was this?

We were just going to gloss over everything like this? When we were talking about Ark? Hong Seok-young, that old man too. He'd had his hackles up just moments ago while talking about his brother-in-law. It turned out Hope and Gamble hadn't been messing around with corpses, but… wait. We hadn't finished that conversation either. The subject had changed right after Gamble said she was unhappy about the money leaking out of Ark in America.

Even if it wasn't the worst possible crime of ‘killing people inside Dungeons and trafficking Hunters' corpses’, the things Gamble herself had confessed to weren't matters that could simply be brushed aside either.

But why? No, right. The toe information was important too, it was important, but!

“…….”

“Hwijae-gun?”

“Hunter Woo-nim?”

“Wait.”

Driven by the anxiety that this couldn't go on, I shot to my feet. Naturally, everyone's eyes turned toward me.

I saw their bewildered faces. I took a deep breath and forced my turbulent thoughts to settle.

Think clearly. This wasn't home. This wasn't a gathering with friends after work.

This was an extension of work. It was almost midnight. Overtime.

Did anyone know how infuriating it was when everything stayed quiet all day, only to get busy right at quitting time, leaving no chance to breathe as work continued straight through the night?

And no matter how much work got done, the media would curse us for taking taxpayers' money while doing nothing, and people swept up by it would pile on without even bothering to check the facts.

Fuck, had any of them ever been called in by an emergency alarm at two in the morning? Had any of them ever had to tell a Raid Team that had been trapped inside a Dungeon for an entire week that, instead of getting any time to rest, they needed to go straight into the next Dungeon?

None of them had ever had a rare vacation ruined by a Dungeon Break, either!

“You!”

“Hunter Woo-nim?!”

I grabbed Hope by the collar. His light body came up easily with my hand without the slightest resistance.

“What did you do?”

“Hm?”

“I asked what you did.”

“What?”

Alex Hope was human.

But what was inside him, as he'd admitted himself, was a monster. More precisely, a member of the Fairy Species Hong Seok-young found so tiresome and regarded with extreme caution.

Beautiful faces and high intelligence. Because of the cruel nature that seemed so at odds with those qualities, Dungeons containing Fairies were notorious even in Europe, where they appeared most often.

Hope had come outside a Dungeon. His body was human, but whether he considered himself human was another matter. Even if his love for his parents had given him an identity as a human, that didn't mean he couldn't use the abilities of a Fairy. His habit of tapping his foot. The Runes he drew with the tip of his foot. His ability to evade an Archmage's magic and escape.

…Monsters had abilities humans did not possess.

Whatever Hope thought of himself, to me, he was a monster.

It was a fact that would never change, no matter what happened from then on.

“Just now.”

“So, just now. What?”

Hope widened his eyes as though he had no idea what I was talking about and instead questioned me in return.

“I'm trying really hard to explain things properly, you know. Sandra chewed me out a lot last time.”

What did that have to do with me?

If I'd been in Gamble's position, I would have put a muzzle on Hope and made absolutely sure he could never open his mouth.

“…….”

I gritted my teeth. My grip on Hope's collar nearly loosened, but I barely managed to keep hold of him.

“Just now, too.”

“Huh? Just now?”

“Was it magic?”

“Magic?”

“Something that lowers people's guard, or… fuck, stop it!”

Hope offered no resistance and simply swayed wherever I shook him. That made it feel even worse. It was like I was holding a doll instead of a human being.

“…….”

Hope's innocently blinking eyes narrowed. His ordinary brown pupils turned to slits in an instant. They began to gleam with an ominous gold.

“…I'm the one who wants to ask.”

“…….”

“What the hell are you?”

“What?”

“Are you really human?”

“What are you….”

“It's not anything like magic… It's Survival Instinct. It isn't something I can control.”

Hong Seok-young, Lee Mi-seon, and the others were still staring at us with expressions that said they didn't understand what was happening.

That made it feel even more alien. As though I'd fallen into another world. This moment felt stranger than being sent twenty years into the past.

“Survival Instinct…. Even if the shell is human, the inside isn't, so people feel something's off, right? It eases that. I'm trapped inside an unbelievably fragile body, so I need at least that much of a safeguard, don't I?”

Hope smiled loosely. Goosebumps rose over my skin as if ants were crawling across it.

“The more someone dislikes me, the better it works. Last time, there wasn't even the slightest room for anyone to develop any fondness for me, so it didn't work…. Maybe it's because this time we're sitting down to talk properly? I was surprised too.”

“…….”

“It's the kind of thing people build resistance to, so the more often it happens, the less it works. And once someone notices, they can overpower it through sheer will. See? It isn't working on you anymore.”

It felt as though ants had started at my feet and were slowly crawling up, taking over my body. Disgusting. Was the thing in front of me a human? Or a monster? Both? Or neither?

“I didn't think there'd be a human who noticed this quickly.”

“What are you scheming….”

“No, I told you, it's Survival Instinct. Can you stop breathing? Would you be fine never breathing again?”

“…….”

“It's instinct. I'm telling you, I can't control it either.”

Hong Seok-young's face hardened, perhaps because he'd begun to realize from our conversation what had happened. That old man would have noticed immediately how his own emotions had been forcibly cooled.

“Did you do that to your parents too?”

“I did become the ideal child they'd always dreamed of, the kind they could never bring themselves to abandon. That's instinct too. Ah, but that doesn't mean I just did whatever my instincts told me to! If it made Mom happy, that made me happy too!”

“…….”

Lee Mi-seon realized it too, though later than Hong Seok-young. Gamble….

Gamble merely let out a deep sigh. Judging by her lack of surprise, she had already known.

Hadn't we just been completely played?

***

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