Chapter 106 - The Rookie Everyone Talks About (3)

Did he think everyone in the world was like him?

When I shot him an incredulous look, Yun added dryly,

"What do you think an exam is for?"

"To assess your abilities."

"Right. The promotion exam is a process to determine whether you can pull your weight as a Badger."

Yun pulled up a chair and sat down.

"Which means that if you're already good enough to pull your weight, there's no need to worry about the exam."

"But I still need to know what they test you on."

"It's all things I'll teach you before the exam anyway. Shooting, swimming, parachuting, climbing, and so on."

I'd already fail at shooting.

One nice thing about talking to Yun was that he could read my expression and knew exactly what I was going to say. That relentlessly practical man took one look at me and gave me the precise answer without waiting for a question.

"Your shooting will be good enough to pass by then, too."

"... Will it? I'd still like to know more about the exam."

"I'm telling you, you don't study right before an exam. You're supposed to study regularly, then use the exam to assess your abilities."

Yun really did say some spectacularly stuffy old-man things.

Even the elders couldn't compete with that level of stuffiness. But just as I reached the end of my patience and was about to tell him how much he'd sounded like an old windbag, my training officer changed his tone.

"Though Yehyeon gets angry whenever I say things like this, too."

His little shrug was funny.

"I suppose it really is that irritating to hear?"

"You were aware of it? Good God."

"But I don't understand why you're worried about the exam in the first place."

Having said something absurd, Yun crossed his legs.

"Soon I'll be the one who has to learn from you. What are you so worried about?"

It felt like a blow to the back of the head.

I stared blankly at my training officer, mouth hanging open. I was too stunned to react.

We were in the private hospital room I'd grown so sick of. The only sound was the whirring of medical robots traveling up and down the corridor.

Only after the sound of their wheels faded did I come to my senses.

"What are you talking about?"

I couldn't help stressing the word "what."

Yun gave a little snort, apparently amused by my reaction.

"Why so surprised?"

"How could I not be?"

"I think that every time I teach you."

Did this man want a favor from me?

What had gotten into him all of a sudden? Why was he buttering me up like this? He wasn't the sort to heap praise on someone just to make them feel good.

Ah.

Was this groundwork for getting me onto his operating table?

"I'm not getting on your operating table."

"I ought to open you up before you recover your full abilities."

Yun deftly let my words go in one ear and out the other, saying his piece instead.

Judging by the hand that moved toward his pocket before retreating, he'd apparently been about to smoke, then remembered he was in a hospital room.

Instead of slipping a long cigarette between his fingers, he folded his arms, his sinister smile widening.

"You already come close to taking my head off in training sometimes."

"I haven't managed to put so much as a scratch on you."

"Because your body is still sluggish. I don't know where you were or what you were doing for those decades, but you don't easily make up for that many years of idleness."

Something tightened inside me.

That gap of several decades. The time between where my memories cut off and when I'd fallen out of the portal.

I had no idea where I'd been or what I'd been doing during that time.

But before I could get lost in my feelings, Yun landed a succession of heavy blows.

"There have been several times when you'd have taken my head off if you'd just been fast enough. You have quite a talent for radiating bloodlust without any malice."

"... Why are you being so out of character?"

"I'm stating facts."

Then he held out his phone.

I took it and looked at the screen. It displayed a phone number and the name of its owner.

[Shit Dad]

... I stared at that for a moment before saving the number.

"... Thank you."

"Lee Seunghyeon is the most capable human combatant alive."

I slowly raised my head.

Then, reflexively, I looked around. The hospital room was still quiet. As Yehyeon had said, there would be ears everywhere outside the office, but I doubted anyone other than the elders was listening.

Choi Yun wasn't that careless.

"The elders' chief agents are roughly equal in overall ability. In other words, the redhead and the blond at that platinum-haired pervert's side have to work together to do as much as Lee Seunghyeon alone. Put Jaeyeon in the ring with him, and Jaeyeon would lose by a narrow margin. But outside a fair fight, Jaeyeon often gets the better of him."

I see.

I remembered Lee Seunghyeon being exceptional. No, he had certainly stood out among the humans I'd taught. So much so that we'd hardly had time for personal conversations.

But...

I blinked, then asked,

"Where do you stand?"

"Me? I'm about on par with Jaeyeon."

What?

He was that good, and he was saying things like "Soon I'll have to learn from you"?

"Yehyeon is a little better than me, but his learned helplessness leaves him unable to do anything against Jaeyeon."

"I think I'm a long way from catching up to either of you."

"For now, yes."

Then Yun looked at me and lifted one corner of his mouth.

"Which is why I'm advising you to be careful when you visit, esteemed elder, lest you suffer the humiliation of being beaten by your own pupil."

A chill shot through me.

I nearly dropped the phone I was holding. Frozen in place, I stared at my training officer's nasty grin.

Lunatic...

Trembling, I barely managed to squeeze out a reply.

"Please don't speak so respectfully to me."

He raised an eyebrow.

"Please. I'm begging you."

Naturally, Yun gave me no answer.

* * *

I went to see Achille.

I visited as soon as I was discharged. His discharge was a day later than mine. He'd originally been scheduled to leave sooner, but apparently his condition had taken a turn for the worse at one point.

Fortunately, he looked perfectly well now.

My senior, who said he could leave right now but had to wait until tomorrow because of the formalities, watched me enter his private room.

His blue eyes narrowed.

"How are you feeling?"

He tossed out the question the moment I sat in the chair.

"I heard you had a chest-tube insertion."

"I'm fine now."

Achille didn't seem particularly convinced.

So I sat there and talked him through everything that had happened. How the surgery had gone, what I'd done during my subsequent hospital stay, and precisely what condition I was in now.

I also told him how things had turned out with the arena.

Our presence there had been erased from the news reports.

Instead, the reports said the arena had collapsed after the creatures went on a rampage. The police's willful inaction, the existence of Green Dream, and the fact that Black Badgers had entered the arena were all buried, accompanied by a public consensus that anyone involved in something so illegal deserved to die.

"He's good."

Achille muttered the words.

He meant Yehyeon. He would assume suppressing the media had been entirely Yehyeon's doing.

I didn't correct him.

Instead, recalling the emcee who had recited our pasts in such detail, I replied,

"It's a relief the rumors haven't spread."

Achille turned from the window.

"I'm sorry I heard about your past without your permission, sir."

I wanted to offer Riccardo the same apology.

But he'd already returned to duty and gone outside the core, leaving me just one message: "See you at the year-end party~"

I wondered whether he'd gotten enough rest.

As I frowned, thinking of the senior who must have suffered without anyone knowing, a gruff reply came.

"Most people know about it anyway. Don't worry about it."

I see.

"I'm the one who should be sorry. The Mafia must have come up with that plan because we kept getting assigned to that mission and became a thorn in their side."

Well, that was probably true.

Mari had likely whispered a tempting proposal to the mobsters whose resentment toward the Badgers had been building: she had some Green Dream to spare, so why not shoot them with it?

There was no way the Mafia could have refused such a tempting offer.

But that wasn't my seniors' fault.

I doubted arguing would get through to him, though.

I changed the subject.

"By the way, may I ask you something?"

"What is it?"

Achille looked as though a question mark were hovering over his head.

I went straight to the point.

"Why did you grab Yun by the collar?"

His expression grew strange.

He remained silent, a complicated look on his face.

After a long while, he said quietly,

"You remember that cop."

Jaeyeon.

"Yes."

"He killed the police commissioner right in front of me, then disappeared."

Just as I'd thought.

"I kept trying to track him down afterward, but got nowhere. Every photo, video, and report with him in it vanished, as though I'd had some strange dream."

Of course they had. No record of Jaeyeon was permitted to exist.

I knew there was a dedicated team that erased his digital traces from security footage, cameras, and the like. Paid by Colton, they did nothing else all day. I'd heard there were also people who removed his biological traces. Hair, fingerprints, saliva, and so on.

A mere detective could never have found him.

"That's why I became a Badger, too."

"I see."

"Even after becoming a Badger, I couldn't find any trace of him for a long time."

That was only natural, too.

How could an ordinary Black Badger possibly track down Jaeyeon...?

"Until I saw Choi Yun coming out of the A-Tech building with him."

Huh?

Ah. Understanding suddenly flashed through my mind.

So that was it.

That was why he'd gone to Yun the next day and seized him by the collar.

"I looked into it. There'd been a shareholders' meeting that day."

"... Aha."

"Yun didn't look happy, but in any case, they came out of the building in suits, talking to each other, and left. I stood there stupidly staring at Jaeyeon until they were out of sight, so there's no chance I was mistaken."

"Why didn't you question him separately?"

Even allowing for the fact that Yun had knocked him out with a blow to the back of the neck the day he'd grabbed him.

He could have asked reasonable questions the following day instead of coming to apologize. Especially if this was someone he'd been searching for so desperately.

At my question, Achille's brow furrowed slightly.

Still frowning, my senior glared at the rail of his hospital bed.

"The commander-in-chief told me to drop it."

"What?"

My voice rose stupidly.

Wait, he'd gone straight to Yehyeon?

"He said that, as I'd probably already guessed, this wasn't someone I could bring in."

His willingness to act was insane.

He really was a quietly passionate man. He'd probably barged straight into the senior leadership's office, too. I could vividly picture him charging inside, ignoring everyone trying to stop him.

The flustered secretaries, and Yehyeon blinking in surprise.

He didn't tell me exactly what they'd discussed there, but Achille admitted that afterward, he'd more or less given up on putting Jaeyeon behind bars.

Until they'd met again at the colosseum.

"Once I'm discharged, I'm going to report to the boss."

Go right ahead. Though Yehyeon would already know.

"But you should forget about it."

Forget what?

Jaeyeon?

When I gave my senior a puzzled look, Achille stared back at me, his face serious.

His next words were laden with sincerity.

"You're perceptive, and you have a good grasp of situations for someone so young, so you'll understand why I'm saying this. Put everything about that cop out of your head."

"Ah."

"Listen to me. It's too dangerous."

The former detective spoke firmly, his expression anxious that I might not listen.

"Forget you ever met him."

If only I could.

I swallowed the words back down.

* * *

Time passed smoothly.

Center Core steadily took on the atmosphere of the year's end. Cold air that turned people's breath white. Coats and padded jackets fastened shut. People bustling about late into the night.

Stores shone with Christmas decorations, and carols rang out everywhere.

It was a busy season, with restaurants booked solid for year-end parties.

I stood in front of a drab apartment building.

"Are you here to visit someone?"

As I stood blankly in the apartment lobby, a security guard approached from inside.

"Which apartment are you visiting?"

An expensive apartment building in the heart of Center Core.

I was visiting a building so old that talk of redevelopment apparently never stopped.

Even where he lived was just like him...

I looked down at my phone to answer.

"Apartment 2102."

"I'll connect you to 2102 on the intercom."

"No, he says he's not in right now."

I spoke with my eyes fixed on the curt reply.

It was a message that seemed to carry a low, cold voice, different from Choi Yun's. Time had changed many things, I thought, but apparently it hadn't changed that.

"He said he's on his way, so he should be here soon. I'll just wait in the lob—"

"I'm here. Let's go."

Make some noise when you walk, would you?

I raised my head at the voice behind me.

Then I slowly slipped my phone into my pocket and turned.

A familiar face met mine.

A man with fine contours and neat features, yet a prickly, exacting air. The arrangement of his features was just like Yehyeon's. Seeing his face up close made forgotten memories spring back one after another.

My old pupil.

Lee Seunghyeon.

The most exceptional pupil I'd ever taught was now the father of my highest-ranking superior.

"It's been a long time."

"Let's go upstairs."

He replied in that unchanged voice and headed inside.

"We're both busy."

His personality hadn't changed either...

Marveling at that, I followed him.