I’ll Retire After Saving the World

TL: SHW

"Wea... what was that?"

"I'm weak, aren't I."

In a voice I'd never heard from him before, Han Tae-kyung spat out words I'd have sworn could never come out of his mouth.

Only one thought came to mind.

...Why is he telling me this? Hong Seok-young is right there. Does he actually think I'll mentor him just because he calls me sunbae? Hong Seok-young is right there!

The only reason I swallowed the words rising up my throat was that Han Tae-kyung looked awfully serious. Even if the man standing in front of me was that Han Tae-kyung, the face asking whether he might be weak looked sincere enough in its own way. Never mind that the sunglasses covered most of it. Even so, I couldn't just leave a person in that state to his own devices. A hunter in anguish is no different from a time bomb. There's no telling where or how he'll go off.

No matter how thoroughly a hunter lives on his own arrogance, as long as he's human, he's bound to hit a wall sooner or later.

I never went through a phase like that, of course. I'd never wanted to be a hunter in the first place, so I had no reason to feel dissatisfied with my own ability. That was why, when Yoo Ji-eun trotted out her personal war stories under the pretext of giving me some useless advice, I laughed at her with real enthusiasm. Her face went red, the veins standing out in her neck as she screamed her lungs out at me.

'Hey!! You'd better listen up right now! You never know when you'll need this!'

Indeed.

There's no telling how a person's life will turn out....

Yoo Ji-eun's advice came in handy later on, whenever I felt like mocking the Agency's hunters. It worked beautifully. If I prefaced it with, 'This is something Hunter Yoo Ji-eun once told me', then no matter what nonsense I spouted, the hunters found it perfectly plausible and nodded along with awestruck faces.

Aside from the half-witted hunters who occasionally drifted through the Agency corridors, cracking open the skulls of hunters who'd hit a wall was mostly Yoo Ji-eun's work. Remember, I said training the new hunters was her department.

Yoo Ji-eun cracked the recruits' heads open with great diligence. In fact, she cracked plenty of places besides their heads.

And afterward she always said the same thing.

'You think you're weak? Good eye. You're fucking weak.'

Yoo Ji-eun was the kind of person who believed a building had to be raised on top of shattered ruins.

A hunter who'd recognized his own shortcomings and sunk into despair?

She'd smash him, wall and all, and raise him however she liked. Said it was much faster that way.

That was Yoo Ji-eun.

'Hey, Woo Hwijae. Remember just one thing.'

'What.'

'The one with no confidence outlives the arrogant one.'

I hate to admit it, but she was right.

I didn't know much about Han Tae-kyung at this point in his life. By the time I first met him, he already wore the face of a man who considered a wall a fine thing to run into.

That confident smile, without a single doubt about his own ability. That self-assurance that no matter what bizarre stunt he pulled, my father would never cast him out.

They said he fell far short of my father.... But once Han Tae-kyung reached about forty, that was a different story. At that age, he could fight my father to something close to even. With their lives on the line my father would win, naturally, but in Sparring done for sport, at least. That was why my father kept him on at the Agency even after that incident, wasn't it.

To begin with, fighting on whatever whim struck him without ever settling on a proper main weapon is simply not possible with any ordinary level of skill.

"Why...."

Maybe it was because I'd only ever seen Han Tae-kyung smiling. Seeing him this dejected gave me goosebumps.

I cleared my throat and asked.

"What makes you say that?"

"Well, that's...."

Han Tae-kyung shut off the faucet. The water dribbling from the hose stopped almost at once.

He busied himself needlessly with the car-wash supplies. Part of me wanted to just turn around and leave, but there was a certain fondness built up from all our time together, so I stayed put.

...Hadn't I settled that debt already, by not killing him yet?

"...I couldn't, do it."

"Couldn't do what?"

"……."

Han Tae-kyung chewed on his words for a moment, then pushed his lips out in a pout.

No, seriously....

It gave me goosebumps.

Enough that I started to wonder whether someone was impersonating him.

...Kim Chae-min's magic was working properly, wasn't it?

"I couldn't do anything."

If he wanted to consult me about something, I'd have appreciated it if he spoke clearly.

Competent as I am, I don't have the knack for reading people's minds.

Besides, Han Tae-kyung and I... weren't exactly close, were we? The Pilot High School kids might be taking turns crying in front of me one by one, but at least with them it was easy to tell what the problem was.

Wait, so I have to look after Han Tae-kyung too now? My original plan had been to beat him into a human being who could speak more or less like a normal person.

I quickly checked his face. His eyes were hidden behind the black sunglasses, but at least he didn't seem to be crying.

"Even with the Archmage's magic backing me up, I couldn't stop a single intruder properly."

"Ah."

"I'm completely useless, aren't I? Mr. Ho, no, the Principal said he brought me in because he thought highly of my skill, but here I am...."

"Teacher Han, what's your rank again?"

"Huh? A."

It's usually when hunters become able to shoulder a heavier Passage Tax. That is, they tend to feel the wall when they enter a Dungeon one grade above the ones they normally go into.

I say that, but it's mainly when A-rank hunters gain access to S-rank Dungeons that a great many of them fall apart.

The more Passage Tax paid, the stronger whatever waits inside the Dungeon. Dungeon grades only go up to S because no Dungeon demanding more than that has ever been found. Which means what's inside isn't necessarily... only a little stronger than the monsters in an A-rank Dungeon.

There are some a cute little word like 'slightly' would still cover, sure. But there could just as easily be monstrously powerful ones, or Dungeons where every hunter who entered died, leaving the monster's identity a mystery.

Hunters who breezed through A-rank Dungeons and came to believe they were the finest thing in the world tended to crumble the moment they met something off the scale. Maybe Han Tae-kyung had gone through an experience like that somewhere I didn't know about.

"He looked like some kid, and I got taken apart by a freak like that, helpless?"

Not a mad mage attached to some cult, who'd rolled in from God knows where.

"So while I was at home this time, I did some thinking."

"...Thinking."

"About whether I might actually be fucking weak."

Why was that the conclusion....

"No, obviously I know there are plenty of people weaker than me. But, uh. Maybe this man called Han Tae-kyung is a lot more feeble than I thought he was...."

"Because the intruder got the better of you?"

"I'm still a guy the Principal himself approved of. Getting beaten by some chicken-brat with feathers on his arms makes no sense."

"……."

I could sort of... see where he was coming from.

If I had to name it, the matchup with Sem Bloom was simply bad for him. Had it been a Dungeon instead, Han Tae-kyung would have done fine.

I hate to praise him, but Han Tae-kyung was a hunter with a real gift for improvisation. His Team 1 handled Dungeon Raids well enough, but their strengths leaned more toward exploration. With a team leader capable of coping with just about any situation, they had a talent for going into freshly opened Gates and gathering information.

Since I'd been supporting the Agency's Dungeon Raids, I knew Han Tae-kyung's fighting style and his weaknesses inside and out. The greater the gap in weight class between him and his opponent, and the wider the space he had to work with, the more his true worth showed. Against a human who was essentially in the same weight class, inside a cramped building, his movements were only hemmed in.

And Sem Bloom, who kept his attacks going under those conditions by darting in and out to slip past Kim Chae-min's magic, was practically Han Tae-kyung's natural predator. On top of that, he'd had one enormous piece of baggage with him at the time, by the name of Woo I-rok.

...Ah.

"Excuse me. Teacher Han."

"So that's why... yes?"

"Things were too chaotic at the time for me to say anything, and afterward you went off to escort the kids, so I never got the chance."

It stung my pride to say something like this to Han Tae-kyung, but this wasn't the lunatic who spent every other day filing Incident Reports. For a junior colleague who was babbling about being weak and whatever else... I could manage to be a little kind.

Hmm. Maybe I should just do it as though I were Yoo Ji-eun. She did raise the recruits well, after all. Every year on her birthday, a whole crowd of hunters would turn up carrying carnations and enormous flower baskets and the like.

Yoo Ji-eun. Yoo Ji-eun, huh....

'What have you got in that head! Is it decoration? Is it just for show?! Fine, I'll trim it up nice and pretty for you. Go wash your neck and wait.' [TL: "wash your neck and wait" is a threat, meaning "get ready to be beheaded".]

…….

A slightly kinder version of Yoo Ji-eun, then.

'This year's recruits are truly remarkable. I can't believe it. How did we end up with nothing but such pretty ones? They carry such pretty things around on their shoulders. So perfectly, beautifully empty.'

...Well, I'd think about that later. First things first. Whatever else my father taught me, he was adamant that I never skip a proper thank-you.

"Thank you for helping I-rok."

"...Sorry?"

"You keep saying you're weak, but if you were really weak you couldn't have saved my brother. I heard about it from I-rok. He said you threw yourself in and pulled him out right away."

No lie, Han Tae-kyung jumped a good meter into the air.

"Uh. Ah. Well."

The hunter who had wrapped his arms around a kid and taken an attack with his own body to save him kept his mouth clamped shut for a while, then blurted it out.

"...I, uh, that's the first time anyone's ever thanked me."

"Is that so?"

"Well, they say you hear it if you work the cleanup after a Dungeon Break, but I'd rather be going into Dungeons...."

Somehow, Han Tae-kyung's tone had grown considerably calmer as he spoke.

...Aha?

I wasn't sure why, but it seemed I'd found the way to handle Han Tae-kyung.

For some reason, Park Seo-hyun's face overlapped with his as he stammered along. The only things they had in common were two arms, two legs, and black hair, but there was this, the way they both responded to praise.

Even an adult who's plenty old enough needs a compliment now and then.

Maybe I should do what I'd done for Park Seo-hyun. Her future was a sure thing, so praising her had been easy. Han Tae-kyung was... similar, wasn't he? Though if I just praised him indiscriminately, he'd probably get insufferably full of himself.

"Hmm."

I looked at Han Tae-kyung, scrubbing at the back of his neck.

"So you think you're too weak?"

"To-too weak might be pushing it, maybe just slightly...?"

"There's no 'slightly' when it comes to a hunter's skill. Weak, and you die. Strong, and you live. Those are the only two."

"……."

When a man has decided he's weak, the people around him can talk until they're blue in the face and none of it will reach his heart. An egg only means something if it's broken from the inside.

He might still be only A-rank, but he was plenty serviceable. Park Seo-hyun hadn't had the skill for this, so half of it had been me praising her and the other half Kim Chae-min raising her, though.

With Han Tae-kyung... a rather more extreme method seemed acceptable.

And as it happened, I had just the job for it.

"Teacher Han. How about you and I Raid a Dungeon together?"

"A Dungeon?"

How many Dungeons had I gone into in Han Tae-kyung's place all that time? It was about time Han Tae-kyung Raided one in mine.

***

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