Chapter 775
Sometimes, my true feelings slip out before I even realize it.
Like right now.
“You’re talking bullshit. Utter bullshit.”
And yet, despite my biting tone, Michael Silbert showed no particular reaction.
Instead, he greeted me with an expression still carrying the afterglow of joy.
“You came earlier than I expected. I was waiting.”
“What, were you rehearsing for a musical all by yourself?”
“A musical?”
Michael Silbert thought for a moment, then let out a quiet chuckle.
“Well, that’s not entirely wrong. In the end, this place today is just one act in a musical. Directed, produced, and starring one man alone.”
“My mother used to say this all the time: if you eat anything and everything without care, you’ll definitely get sick.”
“No need to worry. There won’t be any trouble, and this stage is guaranteed to be a success.”
“That line you delivered earlier was pretty cliché. Are you sure it’ll be a hit?”
“Although it was merely a rehearsal before the main performance, I’ll take your opinion into consideration.”
His relaxed attitude and that faint smile lingering at the corners of his mouth.
With every step that brought his face closer, I felt my insides twist.
Every time I exhaled, it felt like a thick needle was stirring around inside my stomach.
Was it the effect of [Broken Body], or was it because I was facing the madman standing before me now?
Maybe it was both.
“Did that friend come with you?”
“Figure it out yourself.”
“That’s not a bad idea either.”
Michael Silbert, who had been staring blankly past my shoulder at the firmly shut door, nodded.
“I’ve confirmed it. You brought them here well.”
To an ordinary civilian watching this, it would have sounded like nonsense,
but at least I wasn’t one.
Whoosh.
There was no sound, and no shape.
But I felt it clearly.
The moment he found the target he wanted, the Energy Wave he had released was withdrawn back into his body in an instant.
A natural, masterful technique, closer to a supreme master of Murim than an ordinary Hunter.
Someone who had already surpassed the level of every Hunter I had met until now.
At the same time, the fact that I still could not easily gauge the extent of his unrevealed true strength complicated my thoughts even more.
But… I couldn’t show the slightest trace of that on my face.
As a brief silence fell between us, I suddenly opened my mouth.
“We came together.”
“Hmm?”
“It’s not that I brought them. We came together.”
Michael Silbert looked at me for a moment with faint puzzlement in his eyes, then burst into laughter.
“Well, if the person involved says so, perhaps it is different. But in the grand scheme of things, what difference does it make?”
“A huge difference. A man like you wouldn’t understand it even if you died and came back to life.”
“No. What matters is the fact that you and that friend are here. If there’s anything more important than that…”
The voice entering my ears suddenly sank low.
“It’s your intention.”
“Intention?”
“Yes. Your intention in coming here today.”
With suspicious eyes, as if he had expected this from the start, he looked at me, and after remaining silent for a moment, I opened my mouth.
“Let me ask you one thing.”
“Although I’m the one who should hear the answer first, fine. I’ll allow the question.”
“What is your intention?”
“What?”
“The intention behind committing all these absurd atrocities until now. What it is you’re trying to obtain, even while sacrificing so many people and pushing this entire world into a pit of fire.”
Step.
The distance between us, no more than a few paces, closed.
We were so close our noses practically touched, and I could vividly feel the tiniest details of him. His minute expressions. The fine hairs on his skin. Even the breath leaving his mouth.
Human.
Considering everything he had done until now, it was unbelievable, but Michael Silbert was undeniably human, just like me.
A human made of blood, flesh, and bone.
Then why?
“Why did you do all of this? For what exactly?”
From the very first moment I faced Michael Silbert, the emotion I felt toward him had always been anger. But not now.
Now I was genuinely curious. Genuinely unable to understand.
The more clues I uncovered about him, the deeper my questions became.
“Born March 18, 1994, in the 10th arrondissement of Paris. His father ran off before he was born, and the alcoholic single mother he lived with died in 2012.”
The life story of one man, which I had dug up piece by piece, slipped from between my lips.
I turned my back on Michael Silbert and began to walk.
Step. Step.
One step, then another.
Right now, as I walk, I am retracing someone’s past.
Crossing the First National Assembly Building, now a World Cultural Heritage Site, I followed in the footsteps of his life.
A childhood that was upright and exemplary despite a miserable family environment.
But after his mother’s death, the delinquency that belatedly began. The few criminal records that naturally followed.
And finally, the event that overturned his entire life.
“In 2020, when the Great Cataclysm began, he Awakened in his mid-twenties.”
I came to a stop.
Lifting my head, I saw stained glass on the wall depicting a young man standing alone in tears amidst countless piles of corpses.
Beneath it was a short line.
[2020. 12. 25. The Great Battle of Paris.]
It was said to have been one of the fiercest battles of the entire Great Cataclysm, counted among the top ten.
Instead of bells commemorating Christmas, screams and roars had echoed through the streets, and the thousand Hunters stationed in Paris had fought urban warfare against tens of thousands of monsters.
For an entire week.
Without reinforcements. In the truest sense, utterly cut off.
And after seven days and nights had passed, and the last light of 2020 had been completely extinguished,
the reinforcements that arrived late, after finishing battles elsewhere, found a single young man standing amid countless corpses and seas of blood.
“That was you, wasn’t it.”
I slowly turned around.
There stood the face of the young man in that painting, the one who had survived alone in a ruin trembling with the stench of blood and gore some thirty years ago.
“Michael Silbert.”
At my quiet call, the man who had been listening in silence finally opened his mouth.
“First, I praise your effort. You must have worked very hard. The records from before my Awakening could not have been easy to find, considering they had already been erased.”
“More precisely, you were the one who erased them. There was nothing good about it becoming known that you had a criminal record.”
“I won’t deny that. I thought those records might one day block my path. The world was in chaos at the time, so it wasn’t difficult to take action.”
Michael Silbert replied calmly, then stared intently at me.
“But… if that’s all you found, it’s a little disappointing.”
“What?”
“The 10th arrondissement of Paris, where I was born, was a shithole. Fights broke out several times a day, and gunshots rang out every night. The walls of the alleys I walked through on my way to and from school were always dark red. But no one bothered to wipe the blood away. The next day, they’d only be red again.”
“That was my hometown. During the day, gangs of every race roamed the streets, and at night, the neon lights of the entertainment district shone brightly. Ah, did you call my mother an alcoholic?”
Michael Silbert asked offhandedly, then answered himself.
“You probably didn’t know she was a drug addict too. Every time I came home after class, she was always sprawled across the worn-out sofa, swaying. Along with some man I’d never seen before.”
Everyone has a painful past.
But surprisingly, as Michael Silbert recalled his own, a faint smile formed at the corners of his mouth.
“A man who was only a father in the sense that he sowed his seed and ran away, and a woman who was only a mother on paper because the law said so. And the child born between them, growing up in a life stained with assault and theft. That was me. But at the same time, I am also the Hero who saved Paris twice, and the pioneer who first raised his voice for people facing a crisis.”
“Long ago, this past of mine was shameful. But not anymore. From slum brat to hero of the world. Isn’t that excellent marketing?”
For a moment, I couldn’t say anything as I looked at Michael Silbert.
What kind of life does a person have to live to end up worn down like that?
The clock of his life, which probably hadn’t stopped for a single moment since the day he was born, looked less like it had run for sixty years and more like six hundred.
Along with his heart.
And at my gaze, the smile at the corners of Michael Silbert’s mouth deepened.
“That’s the look of someone staring at a monster. Have you started to fear me now as well?”
“As well?”
“Everyone who knows me carries both fear and respect in their hearts. You’re not the first to look at me that way.”
“Some of them are probably already dead.”
“If they don’t bow of their own accord, then you break them by force. They were immature.”
That was not a statement about enemies from the past who no longer existed in this world.
It was directed straight at me.
A demand that I bow my head before him before he is forced to break me by any means necessary. That meticulousness, wanting to confirm that even the tiniest possibility of something going wrong had been erased.
Quietly taking in Michael Silbert’s face, I broke the brief silence that had fallen between us.
“Half right, half wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re right that I see you as a monster now. But this isn’t fear. It’s pity. You could even call it disappointment…”
“…I just wanted to ask. Before irreversible sacrifices are made, if there was still a way to resolve this. Whether even a fragment of humanity remained in this madman. And…”
I continued in a deeply sunken voice.
“It’s a little disappointing. That you thought I would try to stop you with nothing more than a few criminal records.”
“What?”
Leaving Michael Silbert behind, his face stiff with incomprehension, I turned around and stretched out my hand.
Whoosh. Creak.
The force pouring from my fingertips gently pushed open the tightly shut door.
At the same time, beyond the two doors swinging wide, I could feel the presences slowly approaching up the stairs.
Tilting my head toward Michael Silbert, whose face had hardened, I spoke.
“Stop making busy people wait and start your damn Inauguration Ceremony, you fucking bastard.”
===
“Hasn’t even transferred the deed yet, and he’s already acting like the owner and running his mouth. Damn bastard.”
Ignoring Michael Silbert’s frozen, icy stare, I leaned back and dropped into the nearest seat.
The die had already been cast.
And before long, it would be decided whether the number on that still-spinning die would be a one or a six.
Along with who would die, and who would live.
And I had not the slightest intention of dying in a place like this.
Especially not at the hands of a monster.
Not a human.
Step. Step. Step.
At last, the sound of hundreds of footsteps entering the conference hall, now gone quiet.
The first page of the New World Hunter Federation, destined to be recorded in history, was turning.