The announcement left a grim mood in the room, the palpable tension bubbling and threatening to boil over. Of the guests in the restaurant, most excused themselves back to their rooms. It was not too late to leave the island.

Troubled gazes were being exchanged by the couple in front of him. Shiwoon had found that the old were the ones who tended to trust most in the government. With the announcement saying that further instructions would be coming, the two seemed torn between waiting for the official notice to leave and getting a headstart on the monsters. It was only a C-rank threat after all. The casualties wouldn't be too great, so long as the authorities did not fumble their response.

Shiwoon too was waiting for an official notice. He wondered why nobody had contacted him about the collapse. It soon struck him that he had quit being a Hunter, and even if he hadn't, he had switched off his phone and stopped reporting his location to the Bureau. Even if they wanted to, they couldn't have known that he was so close to the site of the Portal collapse.

They happened every now and then, Portal collapses did. The Monitoring Bureau was far from omniscient, and the independent organisations were mostly concentrated in the major cities. There was not enough time or people to conduct a sweep of the natural environment regularly. As a result, Portal collapses inevitably occurred in places that were rarely visited.

The mountain was not an unpopular location for tourists, however. That a Portal collapse had occurred there was surprising, though he suspected it was partially because of the low rank of the Portal - and therefore the relatively short time before collapse - and partially because there existed parts of the mountain that were not quite so accessible.

C-rank. Shiwoon was confident he would be able to hold his own against one or two C-rank monsters, but if they appeared in a group, as they were wont to do after a collapse, he did not like his chances. He put his hand in his pocket, only to find that the phone he was fishing for was not there. Had he left it in the room? Shiwoon frowned.

"Ah, are you worried, young man?" The old man asked.

Shiwoon shook his head. "No, sir. I appear to have left my phone in my room, so I think I'll need to go back up. Sorry for leaving early," he stood up and bowed, "and thank you, sir and madam, for the meal."

"Oh. It's fine, we understand." The old lady said with a genial smile. "Please go. We wouldn't want to keep you around."

He bowed again as he left and then he ran to the lift lobby. All the lifts were on other floors and it did not seem like they would be coming down soon. Shiwoon sighed and pushed the door to the staircase open before dashing up to his room.

He was not panting and his breath felt only slightly faster than usual when he stepped into his room. He rustled through his luggage before finally finding his phone dumped below the pile of clothes he had packed in the duffel bag.

Turning his phone on led to a flurry of notifications. Messages, missed calls, and, of course, the emergency alert. Cursing under his breath, he began to dial the Bureau's number.

Wait. What was he doing? Shiwoon stopped himself from pressing the green call button. Had he gone mad? After quitting his job so recently, he was trying to go back? In any other industry, he would be mocked for trying to cross back over a bridge he had burned with his own hands.

Shiwoon set the phone down. It wasn't his job anymore. Besides, they were C-rank monsters. He would only get in the way if he went. All he could do, all he should do, was turn on the television and watch the real Hunters do their jobs.

The real Hunters were not stationed on Ganghwa-do, as it turned out. After landing on a news broadcast, Shiwoon listened to the cold, logical words of a television analyst who rationally laid out why Ganghwa-do would experience relatively high casualties for a C-rank collapse.

"In usual circumstances," the man said as the lighting around him briefly gleamed off his glasses, "the Empress would be rushing to the scene. However, she is currently preoccupied with an A-rank Portal that appeared in Ulleung-do. The other S-rankers are either overseas, in Portals in their respective wards, or simply retired. There are no organisations near Ganghwa-do, and by the time they arrive at the scene, the casualties could number in the thousands."

Thousands. The word felt like a finger stabbing at Shiwoon's chest, blaming him for not stepping out, blaming him for not stepping up.

There are others, he told himself, and they are not stepping up either. It is not my fault. I left that life behind me. Let Han Sungoh and his craven bunch save the day with the money they made from the sword.

The female host continued to speak in the background. "So, what do you think the government, or more specifically, the Bureau can do in this situation?"

"The truth is that it should never have been allowed to devolve into such a state. I believe that they should immediately issue an evacuation order to ensure more lives are not lost. For those near or on the mountain, we will have to treat them as a lost cause. A few hundred sacrificed for the lives of thousands more. And in the future, the Bureau should station more Hunters on Ganghwa-do. From what I hear, a single D-rank team is stationed there right now, and they are struggling to contain the monsters."

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"Which D-rank team is that?"

"They are named, very fittingly, the Ganghwa-dool. (Korean word for two) Both Hunters Lee Seunggyu and Kim Hyeonwoo are notorious for their defence-oriented Skills, and it should serve to reduce some of the casualties, but the issue is that they lack the firepower to actually kill monsters swiftly, which would result in more casualties."

Shiwoon had never heard of the pair and seeing their unfamiliar faces on the screen elicited no memories. If nothing else, that meant they were not a famous team.

"Do you know why Ganghwa-do doesn't have more teams, or even an organisation there?" The female host asked, curiosity glittering in her eyes.

"The main reason is simply that Ganghwa-do, like many of the other islands, is not big enough to justify an organisation. As we all know by now, given the randomness of Portal appearances, landmass is the only gauge we have of the probability of a Portal appearing. In most cases, even a collapse like what is occurring right now can simply be resolved by teams transported from nearby regions. The trouble is that the Hunters in Gimpo and Incheon are stuck in Portals of their own. If a team or organisation station themselves in Ganghwa-do permanently like Ganghwa-dool, they stand to lose a lot in potential earnings as a result."

It always comes back to money, Shiwoon thought with a bitter smile. He had heard enough, considering he wasn't planning to do anything. His heart did ache for those who would die, but the truth was that Portal collapses were just as much a natural disaster as an earthquake and sometimes there was just nothing you could do.

Is there really nothing you can do, a tiny, accusing voice whispered in the recesses of his mind, or are you just making an excuse?

He reached out for the remote to turn the television off before his thoughts could go further astray.

"This is live footage from a person on Ganghwa-do." The female host announced.

On the screen was a world painted by screams. There were people running hysterically down the mountain and away from it, with two men standing ahead with shields and what seemed like a cracked barrier in front of them. One of the men stretched out his hands in front of him while the other kept looking behind and yelling something the phone recording the video couldn't pick up over the surrounding noise.

There were many different kinds of C-rank monsters, but one of the more troublesome ones to deal with were the Vengeful Spirits. They had been named as such because of their excessive cruelty and their ethereal form, which rendered ordinary physical attacks harmless. You needed a Skill or to imbue your weapon with Aether to deal with them.

Whether it was because they were maintaining the barrier or because they couldn't, both members of Ganghwa-dool were simply standing there, preventing the advance of the Vengeful Spirits, even as the people who had not fled behind the barrier in time were ripped to shreds in front of their eyes.

The video zoomed in on a victim that had failed to get behind the barrier, a young woman who had gotten her eyes ripped out and who was presently shedding tears of bleed as she crawled towards and pounded on the barrier. A Vengeful Spirit suddenly crashed into the frame, scaring the person recording the video, and it ended there.

"...That was a disturbing video." The male analyst said, the color draining from his face.

The female host nodded. "Please, any Hunters near Ganghwa-do, please save the people there! They really need your help!"

Shiwoon swore as he scrambled to turn off the television. A new wave of guilt assaulted him after hearing those words.

'Please, any Hunters near Ganghwa-do, please save the people there!'

I couldn't even save myself, he thought, and now you want me to save them? He scoffed.

'They really need your help!'

And where were the heroes when I needed help, he thought. He had no obligation to save these people! None at all!

'But to me, the Kim Shiwoon who would feed the stray cats and dogs, who would stop the bullies from mocking the fat and the ugly and the unfortunate, who would carry a girl on his back when she broke her foot, was already a success.'

Once again, Park Sunha's face returned to him, along with the words she had said that night as they drank. She had a wistful smile on her face, as if she was mourning Kim Shiwoon when he was seated in front of her. But then again, that Kim Shiwoon she remembered had died somewhere along the way. He had died trying to live up to a promise that he had forgotten the true meaning of.

As his father's image popped into his mind, the doubts seemed to scatter. In some ways, he had forgotten the basic essence of the man he was trying to surpass.

Kind, genuine, happy. That was who Shiwoon's father was.

For so long, Shiwoon had locked away the memory of his father's funeral. So many undeserving people had come and they had cried and thanked the picture of his father. All Shiwoon could think was that he wished they did not cry and that they were not grateful and that his father was alive instead.

"Your father died after he went back to try and save my little girl from the burning car." One of the crying people had said, his eyes slightly red, his voice slightly shaky. "He had already pulled out four of us, but she was stuck in the back and he couldn't leave her. And the car blew when he went back and it killed them both."

He wasn't angry at the people who mourned. He thought that it was praise of the highest order for the life his father had lived. He wasn't angry at the girl who had been stuck in the car. He knew it wasn't her choice to die. But he was angry at the world for letting good people like his father die. Where was the justice, the karma? All he could see was a world that continued living without a single care for those who had been lost.

He was angry at his father. Why couldn't he have been more selfish, why couldn't he have walked away, knowing he was a hero who saved four lives? Did he not know that his death would damn the lives of four more, those in his family who could never move on?

As Shiwoon stood up and walked to the lift, he thought he could understand his father just a little better. He was getting just a little closer to being like his father, to surpassing his father.

There were people out there who needed someone to save them. That alone was all the reason in the world to step up. Death was not the worst thing that could happen to a man in life. Indifference was, because indifference meant losing the precious humanity that defined a man. In that moment of perfect clarity, as the lift took him down, he wondered how he had missed something so simple all along.

He ran to his car, and inside it he changed into his suit. The ring was still on his finger; it had never left. Starting up the car, he drove towards Mani Mountain.

Shiwoon's car was perfectly neat and, apart from the clothes that were folded into a tidy pile on the seat beside him, there was nothing superfluous in it. However, his room, be it in the hotel or at his house, was always left untidy. He rarely made his bed and he never really bothered to set everything in place. If his father was around, Shiwoon thought that the man would laugh and call Shiwoon a vain punk who cared too much about the optics.

It had been the same too, when he had first become a Hunter. It was all about appearances. But in that moment he could feel that something inside of him had changed.

It was not his job anymore. He didn't think he could still be a Hunter, not after what he had pulled with Han Sungoh. But if he allowed such things as jobs and rules to get in the way of his basic, fundamental duty to the world, if he let them stop him from doing the right thing, then he wouldn't be Kim Shiwoon anymore. Every concession, every inch he yielded to the frightening monster of cruel indifference, was one that would slowly destroy the man he was, was one that pulled him closer to the devil and further from his father.

That frightened him more than losing any job or title could.