I’ll Retire After Saving the World

TL: SHW

Before I could even react, Hong Seok-young moved.

Killing Intent exploded outward, making my skin prickle. In the blink of an eye, Hong Seok-young had Alex Hope by the throat and lifted him off the ground. Hope grabbed at Hong Seok-young's hand, legs flailing.

"Gack, w-wait!"

"How did you get in here?"

"Well, I flew?"

"I'm not in the mood for jokes."

"Neither, am, I!!"

Thud.

Hong Seok-young dropped Alex Hope. Hope rubbed at his neck, where angry red handprints were already forming, and let out a pitiful whine.

"I warned you!"

"You were also the one who saved him."

"Who told you not to kill him? You should've killed him in the dungeon and been done with it! Then I wouldn't have had to deal with any of this hassle either, and everyone would've been happy!"

Alex Hope grumbled, his face scrunched up in a deep scowl.

"What's done is done. Let's forget the past and look to the future. Humans are into that kind of thing, right? 'Let's march toward the future!' Stuff like that. Yeah?"

"That's meant for humans getting along with each other."

"Then that works out perfectly! I'm human too!"

Hope clapped his hands and laughed out loud. Hong Seok-young's Killing Intent was still going strong, but the guy had guts.

Unable to just stand by and watch, I called out to Hong Seok-young.

"Um."

"Hm?"

The Killing Intent vanished.

I blinked. Hong Seok-young was smiling that lazy grin of his, same as before he'd seen Alex Hope.

I forgot what I'd originally meant to say and just expressed how I felt.

"Could you please stop that?"

"Stop what?"

"That... that thing."

"What thing?"

Hong Seok-young smiled slyly. He knew exactly what he was doing. I kicked him in the shin.

"Stop smiling like that!"

"What, my own son is..."

"Shut up!!!"

He noticed after all!

"No need to be shy."

"Who's being shy!!"

Still, the smile didn't leave Hong Seok-young's face. So annoying...

"Ahem. Ahem ahem."

Meanwhile, Alex Hope cleared his throat a few times before waving both hands in a big gesture.

"Excuse me? I don't exactly have a lot of time here? I need to get back before my squad leader notices I'm gone."

Hope scratched his head.

"So can we just get to the point?"

*

"...This isn't the kind of point I had in mind."

"Shut up."

"But when did you become that man's s..."

"Shut up."

"Didn't you say you were his apprentice at the forum?"

"I said shut up. While I'm still being nice."

"Aw, come on. I heard there's some kind of agreement that says hostages have to be treated humanely. The Jerry-something agreement. You know it?"

"The Geneva Convention. That's about prisoners of war, not criminals."

"Close enough, isn't it!"

Alex Hope had been bound by Kim Chae-min, who'd been hastily called over. She was already looking at him with an expression of utter disgust. She'd belatedly heard about how he'd gotten on everyone's nerves throughout the entire forum.

On top of that, Kim Chae-min's pride was wounded.

"How on earth did you sneak in without me noticing? I was keeping watch for intruders, no matter what. There's no way I could have missed it..."

It seemed that Hope being discovered casually lounging inside the pension had struck a blow to the Archmage's pride. The look on her face said she'd love nothing more than to dissect him and find out how he'd done it.

"Oh, that's easy."

But Hope smiled without so much as a change in his expression. Even with a bruise on his neck that had already turned purple, even trussed up tight by the Archmage.

"Sem is a poor little Hybrid, but me, if you want to get technical, I'm a Pureblood. My specialty is Skip. Slipping through gaps in mana is as easy as breathing for me, at least!"

"Ah, is that so."

"Could you at least try to sound a little more impressed? You have no idea how incredible this is, do you? Sandra's the same way, why does everyone..."

Hope stopped mid-sentence and his eyes went wide.

"Sandra!"

"What?"

"Sandra, I'm talking about!!"

"Who's Sandra?"

"Next time we talk, Sandra said she'd handle it herself, and she told me to call! She said I'm prettiest when I keep my mouth shut, so I should keep it shut as much as possible."

Sandra. That was a name Alex Hope had mentioned from time to time. Hope grunted and squirmed with both hands tied behind his back.

"Hey, my phone's in this pocket right here. Can you take it out for me?"

"......"

Kim Chae-min looked at me, and I looked at Hong Seok-young.

Hong Seok-young stood with his arms crossed, deliberating with a stern expression, then gave a nod. With permission granted, I walked over to Hope and took out his phone. It was a battered old phone weighed down with accessories that looked heavier than the phone itself, its back plastered with stickers. The model looked like it should be the latest by current standards, but the cracked screen made it seem at least a few years old.

"No passcode. Look through the contacts and you'll find Sandra."

Just Sandra, no last name.

When I tapped the name, a number starting with 1 came up. The country code for the United States.

It was a well-used phone, to say the least, but there was no telling what Hope might have done to it. I copied the number displayed on the screen to my own phone, then sent a text to Lee Mi-seon.

[Look into this number. It belongs to the bastard who can give orders to Alex Hope]

The reply came quickly. We'd left in a hurry, so she must have been swamped with cleanup, and yet.

[Do you realize you're becoming more and more like Hong Hunter-nim, Teacher Woo?]

How could she say something so harsh.

[Am I supposed to hear what happened with the kids from my own people?]

That... she had a right to be angry about.

[Some of us have been sitting here worried sick, just waiting for a call, and out of nowhere all you do is dump work on me?]

[And the U.S., no less?]

[I work at the Korean branch. I don't know anything about U.S. affairs!]

[Do you have any idea how much legwork it takes to find something like this???]

I wasn't anything like Hong Seok-young, but I had watched from the sidelines how my father used to assign work to Lee Mi-seon.

[So you're saying you can't do it?]

Lee Mi-seon didn't reply for over a minute.

Then a single, curt message came.

[Who says I can't]

Surprisingly easy to handle.

"Ugh, come on! I'm telling you to call Sandra!"

Hong Seok-young and Kim Chae-min said nothing about watching me text with Lee Mi-seon, but Hope cried out with a frustrated look on his face. Seeing him roll around on the floor thrashing like a child, I felt a strange sense of emptiness.

Had I really been rattled by someone like this all this time?

In any case, Hope insisted he couldn't say anything without going through this person called Sandra. I carefully pressed the call button. Could I bill the international call charges to Hong Seok-young?

A flat dial tone rang out. I switched to speakerphone. Hope's face lit up.

Was this person Hope's superior or something? If so, she'd be connected to the Ark, right?

...Looking at Hope's face, "superior" didn't seem quite right, though.

-Hello?

If it were me, I wouldn't answer an international call from an unknown number, but this woman did. Her voice was cautious. I couldn't gauge her age from her voice alone, but she didn't seem very old.

"Sandra!"

-What the FUCK did you do again?!!

The moment the woman heard Hope's cheerful voice, she raised hers.

"Aw... Sandra, dear. Come on."

For the first time, Alex Hope whined with a genuinely sheepish expression. His English was every bit as fluent as the Korean he'd been speaking with us so naturally. Come to think of it, he was Australian, so of course he'd speak English natively. Obviously.

The woman didn't fall for Hope's sweet-talking. If anything, her voice grew even more irritated as she fired off a rapid barrage of profanity.

The perpetual grin on Hope's face gradually turned beet red. Well, at least I'd gained the knowledge that the bastard was capable of feeling shame. That was something.

"Sandraaaa..."

Eventually, Hope glanced around at us and switched to Korean.

"You said you'd handle it, so I called like you told me to... Shouldn't you be praising me for being good?"

-.......

The woman went quiet.

Maybe she didn't understand Korean. But if Hope had a brain and was capable of something resembling thought, he wouldn't have switched languages in the middle of a perfectly good English conversation.

Had this woman learned Korean like Hope and Sem Bloom? I wasn't even sure it was possible to speak a language that fluently just from studying it. At least Hope, being half-Taiwanese on his mother's side, could arguably pass as half-Asian, but Sem Bloom was just an ordinary Dutch person with no such excuse.

...Come to think of it, what had happened to Sem Bloom? Hong Seok-young hadn't brought him along.

I decided to ask about him later. The immediate headache was Alex Hope.

-Th-there.

Surprisingly, yet unsurprisingly, the woman answered in Korean.

-Are there other people there too?

But she wasn't as fluent as Alex Hope or Sem Bloom. Well, she was good, but her accent wasn't. You could clearly tell she was a foreigner who'd learned Korean.

"Why else would I have called?"

-I thought you lost your phone again and were calling me to buy you a new one!

"Oh, come on. When have I ever asked you to buy me one? I make plenty of money."

-The one you're using right now, I bought that for you in France!!

"Ah... did you?"

-Fu...!!!!

The woman let loose another string of curses.

I finally spoke up, unable to listen any longer. At this rate, it would never end. I'd been thinking she might be someone higher up than Hope in the Ark, but listening to her talk to him, that didn't seem like the dynamic at all.

"So who are you?"

-Oh. Uh. W-wait.

The woman, who'd just been hurling profanity at Hope with such ferocity, suddenly stumbled over her words in apparent panic.

Then she abruptly hung up.

"......"

I looked at Hope.

"Sandra's just shy!"

I looked at Hong Seok-young.

Hong Seok-young looked at Kim Chae-min.

Kim Chae-min looked back and forth between me and Hong Seok-young, then scratched her cheek with an awkward expression.

"Should I hang him up?"

"Wait! That's a bit much, don't you think, mage!"

"If we leave him dangling outside for a few days, he might tell us things he wouldn't otherwise..."

"I said no!"

He'd gone on about how easy it was to slip through gaps in mana, but even someone like him seemed frightened by the Rose Vines growing steadily thicker.

Fortunately for the panicking Alex Hope, my phone rang. A number starting with country code 1. It was that woman's number.

I answered. The screen changed.

-Ah, there we go! Can you see me? Am I visible?

Along with awkward Korean, a Black woman who looked to be in her mid-twenties at most appeared on screen.

Behind her, I could see complex blueprints, machinery, and tools. I blinked and leaned in to peer at the screen. Hong Seok-young watched me with a puzzled look, then seemed to realize something and nodded.

He'd caught on that I recognized her.

I clenched my jaw. Should I have figured it out from the name Sandra? But it was a common name. How was I supposed to guess that Sandra Gamble had any connection to Alex Hope just from a first name! If I could do that, I wouldn't be here doing this; I'd be laying out a mat and reading fortunes for a living!!

The genius who would one day be called the mother of Mana Engineering greeted us with a bashful expression.

-H, hello? I'm Sandra Gamble, and I'm, well... the external hard drive of human decency for that pretty-faced idiot over there!

***

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