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“Chief Woo speaking,” he greeted efficiently.
“Chief Woo! There’s um… dungeon related emergency!” the panicked voice over the phone said.
Jin-Chul watched coordinates show up on his phone. A D-rank dungeon that had an issue getting kicked up to him?
“What happened?”
“The hunters say that there’s another dungeon within the dungeon. They were going to explore it-” opportunistic brats “-when one of their members collapsed as they approached a door. They say he physically changed and was in pain and brought him out. The dungeon shows no signs of closing.”
Okay so it was more an anomaly than an emergency. But it was urgent and, if true, weird enough that he would want to observe it himself.
“Understood. I’ll be there with agents shortly, relay to the hunters that everyone who doesn’t need a hospital should be there when we arrive.” Jin-Chul hung up before she could respond. He made sure his subordinates were well trained enough to do what they were supposed to, panicked or not.
A possible double dungeon though… that was concerning.
Jin-Chul went straight for the group of people nervously fluttering around one spot, unconcerned with the gate right next to them, as soon as he got out of the car, enough magic saturating the area that he refused to believe the dungeon was really D-rank.
“Pardon me. I’m from the monitoring division,” he greeted the hunters as he approached briskly but calmly, “please explain the situation.”
Multiple members of the group burst into nervous chatter before they eventually turned to an older man, who was able to explain coherently.
“We thought we cleared the dungeon, it’s very small, but we didn’t get a clear. We found a tunnel that was different from the rest of the environment. We went down the tunnel, but after about twelve minutes of walking, hunter Sung collapsed. His body seized and morphed, it was like he went through an entire growth spurt in fifteen seconds. When he calmed down, he was still unconscious, so we immediately came back out and contacted the Association,” the man explained calmly.
“Hunter Sung?” Jin-Chul prodded.
The man who had explained turned a little, nodding his head down towards the ground.
“Ah! He’s waking up!” a voice called, sounding relieved.
It wasn’t… unfamiliar. But Jin-Woo couldn’t place it.
He pried his eyes open to see Lee Ju-Hee leaning over him.
Why was-
A hand showed up on Lee Ju-Hee’s shoulder, pulling her away. It was accompanied by a very familiar presence.
“Ms. Hunter, please, allow me to talk to him,” Chairman Wo- no. Not chairman. That hadn’t happened yet, wouldn’t happen.
Wait… why did Woo Jin-Chul look so similar? Why did he still have magic thrumming through him?
“Hunter Sung, yes? I’m Woo Jin-Chul from the monitoring division. I need to ask you some questions.”
Jin-Woo barely registered the words as he realized that there was plenty of magic to be sensed all around him. Ruler flavored magic too.
Those damn useless bastards!
Jin-Chul watched the man switch from an openly nervous face to a closed off, stormy expression as he mentioned the monitoring division. He sighed internally. This would be a hard one, almost no hunters liked the monitoring division. Hopefully Jin-Chul wouldn’t have to pull too many teeth to get the man’s cooperation.
“Do you remember what happened to you?” he started with.
It was a vague question that could be taken a couple of ways. Which fit the situation since Jin-Chul wasn’t sure if he should treat the newly grown hunter – really grown, the picture on his license would have made him guess the two were related but never the same person – as something suspicious or a pitiable person who needed help.
“What’s the date?” Sung Jin-Woo asked after a moment, voice carefully even.
“December sixth,” Jin-Chul responded, his brow furrowing.
It was a question that made him lean towards suspicion, especially with the young man’s attitude, but it honestly confused him much more than it raised his suspicion. If something had… infected Sung Jin-Woo inside the dungeon or something, what use would it have for the date?
“Year?”
“Pardon?” He wanted to know the year too?
Sung Jin-Woo looked around nervously, eyes flitting between his raidmates before settling on the gate a few meters from them.
“The dungeon…”
Alright, he at least seemed to remember that. Jin-Chul could work with that.
“Yes, you were in there earlier. Do you remember what happened inside?” The young man suddenly breathed in deeply, tensing. “You and the other hunters found another dungeon inside the dungeon and were approaching it when you collapsed. We’ve sent the White Tiger guild in to clear it, but-”
“The White Tiger guild?!” the hunter asked, face whipping back around to face him, clearly panicked.
“Yes, they reported finding a set of doors and have begun their raid. They’ll also help us figu-”
“Shit!”
The person on the ground beneath him cut him off, clearly unintentionally, with the expletive as he pushed himself up halfway and then disappeared.
Jin-Chul barely caught a blur of color heading towards the gate.
“Damnit.” He muttered as he stood. “Everyone stay put!” he ordered as he followed the hunter.
Given how unlike the E-ranking Sung Jin-Woo the hunters had told him about the person had just moved, and the clear lack of injuries in the high-level movement, Jin-Chul decided he would officially treat the man as suspicious with no pity, with all the scrutiny and doggedness that entailed.
Sung Jin-Woo was out of sight as soon as he entered the dungeon. But the dungeon really was small, so it was easy to find the passage to the double dungeon – especially with the thickest of the magic clearly being down that tunnel – and follow the man.
What did Sung Jin-Woo want with the White Tiger guild? This was concerning.
There was a carved doorway, empty of any actual doors, ahead of him. The inside was dark and full of magic, and Jin-Chul could hear the thuds of a stone-breaking fight.
He dashed inside, drawing himself up short as he entered so as to not get hit.
There was… he’d never seen a battle like this. Statues. First of all, the monsters were statues. Second of all, there was a black blur tearing through them while the White Tiger guild was scattered throughout the room in various states of injury, out of the fight.
There was also an upright insect-like shadowy figure moving around the nervous looking hunters, apparently healing them.
Jin-Chul wasn’t sure which absurd anomaly to focus on.
So, he focused on Baek Yoon-Ho instead, sprinting over to where the man was watching the fight warily, cradling his arm.
“Master Baek, what is going on?!” he asked. The man’s eyes, transformed, were glued to the blur of black moving around the room, his expression looking vaguely shell-shocked.
“I… The statues… I could barely scratch them-” well that was absolutely horrifying “-we were trying to find our way out, retreat with info so we could properly plan. Or at least survive. It looked like we wouldn’t even manage that when that guy came in and started tearing through the statues. The uh… the ant came out of his shadow and is healing our members,” Baek Yoon-Ho explained, sounding understandably shell-shocked.
So, he had wanted to save the White Tiger guild. Not fight them. That was… good.
This was all still very suspicious, but at least it didn’t seem like Sung Jin-Woo had turned into a monster hell-bent on attacking humans.
Still though, he had turned into some sort of monster, apparently. Jin-Chul watched him smash through the statues that Baek-Yoon-Ho could barely handle like a toddler charging through a sandcastle.
One of the statues that had been staying still, and one of the few still intact, winged and robed and holding a written-on tablet, burst forward in a flurry of movement. It shrieked, ear-splittingly, in the monster tongue that only the highest-ranking monsters could manage.
It swung the tablet at a still Sung Jin-Woo, who was glaring at the statue in a way that made Jin-Chul shudder just from seeing it from the side.
Sung Jin-Woo disappeared into a black blur that destroyed the tablet and one of the statue’s shoulders as easily as a cat attacking a Jenga tower. He was practically suspended in air as the statue whipped around, weapons appearing as it shrieked out more monster gibberish.
It didn’t get a chance to launch any attacks before it was pushed into the ground, half crushed.
Sung Jin-Woo stood on the statue’s chest, and a second later Jin-Chul felt something in the air twist. The waves of magic in the room fluctuated and Jin-Chul wasn’t sure he would be able to stay standing, he felt like a little boy at a trip to a beach again, the one where a storm had rolled in, and he had walked down a dock and felt the storm’s gust try to tear him into the ocean without care or notice.
Some of the magic ebbed, dispersing. The statues around them finished crumbling into rubble. Most of the magic remained.
The ant suddenly appeared beside him and Baek Yoon-Ho, making Jin-Chul flinch.
“Are there any more of your subordinates who require healing assistance?” the ant asked in perfect, if old-sounding, Korean.
Jin-Chul felt a headache coming on.
“Uh, no. Thank you,” Baek Yoon-Ho responded stiltedly.
The ant nodded and… dissolved, Jin-Chul supposed, into shadows, which flowed back to Sung Jin-Woo, who was still standing over the pile of rubble that had been a statue.
Jin-Chul felt the telltale fluctuation of a dungeon closing. But it would take an hour to close and they would only need five minutes at most to evacuate, with the speed of everyone here.
“Hunter Sung Jin-Woo?” Jin-Chul tried. Anything could happen in a dungeon. Sometimes, he knew, people would talk more in them.
But was whoever or whatever he had called Sung Jin-Woo even a person? Jin-Chul had never seen a human capable of what had just occurred, even after almost a decade of dungeons and hunters.
Sung Jin-Woo looked over at Jin-Chul, opened his mouth to respond, and then paused. After a second, he lifted a finger, as though asking for them to wait a minute.
The shadows around Jin-Woo rose, enveloping him until there was a solid looking pod of black surrounding the man.
Jin-Chul heard the muffled sound of frustrated yelling, a noise he was unfortunately acquainted with himself.
Things must not have gone the man’s way, in some way.
The yelling stopped, but the pod remained. The White Tiger members looked between it and Jin-Chul and their guild master after a few seconds of stillness, clearly concerned.
The shadows collapsed, falling down into regular shadows and leaving Sung Jin-Woo standing in the same place as before, posture relaxed from long-term exhaustion.
“Yes, Chief Woo?” the man asked, responding politely.
Jin-Chul honestly didn’t even know what to begin to ask about in this situation.
“Could you please explain what’s going on?” Go big or go home, after all.
He really wanted to just go home and not have to deal with whatever mess this was.
“Um…” Sung Jin-Woo looked around, his gaze settling on the rubble beneath him for a moment before looking back up at Jin-Chul, “I killed the Architect.”
Jin-Chul took a few moments to process that before giving up on figuring it out.
“Could you explain your explanation?”
Sung Jin-Woo scratched the side of his face, looking almost abashed.
“Do you want the vague answer that makes sense or the Earth shattering – ha, Earth shattering-” Sung Jin-Woo did not sound happy about his own nonsensical joke “-explanation that tells you everything and you won’t be able to believe?”
Yep. Jin-Chul was definitely going to have a headache by the end of the day.
“I would like as much information as you’re willing to give,” he responded calmly. Sung Jin-Woo was cooperating. It was suspicious, the amount that he seemed to be willing to cooperate now that there weren’t S-class monster statues about to kill people. But Jin-Chul also wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth and ruin the man’s cooperative mood.
“Okay so… to summarize. About a year from now, the Rulers and Monarchs have a war here on Earth. And the Rulers won, but we lost most life on Earth and a lot of the nonliving stuff was destroyed too. I got the Rulers to use the… cup of reincarnation or whatever to send me back in time to prevent the war – because all of the gates and monsters are actually just a precursor to the war. But instead of sending me back ten years, before the gates, like I was supposed to, I only got sent back one. Because the Rulers are useless at actually protecting anything.”
Jin-Chul did not believe in time travel. But Sung Jin-Woo’s annoyance seemed very real and Jin-Chul was good at interviewing people for information.
“Who are these Rulers and Monarchs?” Jin-Chul asked.
Sung Jin-Woo was casually walking towards them now, and Jin-Chul was pretty sure the man looked amused, like he knew Jin-Chul didn’t believe him and was trying to keep him cooperative. “Cosmic powers, made by an Absolute Being who the Rulers killed. Rulers were made to protect, Monarchs to destroy. After the Rulers had killed the Absolute Being, the two groups had another war that spit them out near Earth. They decided to have their final battle here and humans have been paying the consequences.”
It sounded like a Saturday morning action cartoon setup.
“Wait the protectors killed their creator? Not the destroyers?” Baek Yoon-Ho asked from beside him.
This time Sung Jin-Woo was definitely giving them an amused smile.
“I didn’t say the Monarchs were good at their job either.”
“And you… time traveled back to stop this war,” Jin-Chul prodded as Sung Jin-Woo came to a stop, about a meter from them. Close enough for polite conversation but not crowding them, not getting threateningly close.
“I told you you wouldn’t believe me,” Sung Jin-Woo said, sounding vaguely amused still, not a bit of judgement or anger in his voice.
“Well…”
“It would explain what happened today, at least.” It would, it really would. Especially if the Sung Jin-Woo of this supposed war had gone through a reawakening. But… “But believing what I tell you is much harder than believing what you saw.”
There was still no anger in the man’s voice, but there was a bit of wistful sadness.
Jin-Chul sighed out a small breath through his nose. This Sung Jin-Woo, impossibly different from his hunter registration and frighteningly powerful, had shown no hostility so far.
“Would you be willing to come to the Association and answer more questions?” Jin-Chul asked.
“Of course,” Sung Jin-Woo said politely.
“Chief Woo,” Baek Yoon-Ho intoned from beside him.
“I’ll keep you as up to date as allowed. This might end up above me,” Jin-Chul placated.
Baek Yoon-Ho nodded and called his guildmates to move out. Sung Jin-Woo walked forward, allowing himself to be surrounded, escorted next to Jin-Chul.
Jin-Chul was practically certain that Sung Jin-Woo could escape the escort, or even defeat them, if he wanted. Given how tense the White Tiger guild looked, it seemed they were well aware as well.
“I’m going to need at least a few minutes before your interrogation to convince my sister I’m not dying,” Sung Jin-Woo commented idly as they walked back through the tunnel.
It… sounded almost like a request. Directed at Jin-Chul.
It was honestly one of the most suspicious things about this. Sung Jin-Woo, aside from dashing away from Jin-Chul’s questions earlier to save the White Tiger guild from apparent certain doom, had been polite and courteous to him. Jin-Chul was tempted to call it deferential.
It really was suspicious. But Jin-Chul found his cautious suspicion of assessing threats was giving way to a niggling suspicion that the person who could defeat S-ranked unheard of statues… respected and was, in some way, even fond of him.
Jin-Chul hadn’t, as far as he knew, ever done anything to earn that from this person. He didn’t understand it as much as he didn’t understand the rest of the day’s absurdities and Sung Jin-Woo’s tale of planetary destruction.
He still wouldn’t really understand it later. Even after Sung Jin-Woo would call down a Ruler when he met with the Chairman and argued with the being. Even after he would be convinced of time travel and Sung Jin-Woo’s first timeline. Even after he would help coordinate Sung Jin-Woo’s campaign against the monarchs. Even after he would watch blurry camera footage of Sung Jin-Woo pushing Antares from above the ocean into space as he covered up the disturbance as unusual weather patterns.
Even when Sung Jin-Woo would find a way to share his memories with Jin-Chul, let him see how Sung Jin-Woo had come to know him in a different timeline, Jin-Chul still wouldn’t understand it. He would get to know Jin-Woo, the man’s abilities and habits and likes and dislikes and thought patterns.
But even years down the line, Jin-Chul would still find himself more baffled than not at how much respect and affection Jin-Woo had for him.
But well… there would be a very much intact world to put back to rights and Jin-Woo would want to continue helping from the shadows when he wasn’t relaxing and Jin-Chul would be doing his part to ensure both those things and in the end, did it matter that he would be confused by Jin-Woo’s regard? Jin-Woo would continue to like Jin-Chul no matter how little Jin-Chul understood why someone like Jin-Woo felt that way about someone like him, and Jin-Chul would appreciate it and the much safer, more peaceful world regardless.
He maybe wouldn’t ever completely understand why Jin-Woo felt the way he did. But Jin-Chul would at least come to understand how much gratitude the world owed Jin-Woo, and how little of it the man would receive, largely by his own design.
Jin-Chul would just have to consider himself lucky that Jin-Woo did like him enough to let him attempt to shower him with that gratitude in the rest of Earth’s stead.