VSP 42

“Then at least they can protect Seo Sejun if something happens, right?”

-……Are you really Cha Dogyeong?

Na Yookyung was startled, it was something she never expected to hear.

“You would not want to see that guy die either, noona.”

-Well… that is true. It is not like we have only known him for a year or two. But the nuance of what you are saying sounds different from that, Dogyeong.

Dogyeong did not bother to reply to Na Yookyung’s words. He thought she would not understand even if he explained.

“Anyway, talk to them so the rotation can be changed back if possible.”

-Oh just talk yourself. What is so different between you and me! Just go complain to Sehyun!

That is what I hate.

Dogyeong did not say that out loud. He had never gotten along well with Ryu Sehyun. Maybe it was because of the age difference, or their different personalities, or because both of them had to stand above others in different ways.

That must be why they had been together for so long and still never became close.

And when he thought about how Ryu Sehyun would casually eat alone with Seo Sejun or take care of him like an escort, his stomach twisted for some reason.

Dogyeong knew. He knew it was not normal to feel that way. But before rational judgment, Dogyeong was not the kind of person who endured what he wanted to do.

-You are strange these days? Now that I think of it, I heard you are not meeting women lately?

“How do you know that, noona?”

-How could I not know? Even if I am not interested in information, I can still know who you are meeting.

“I am a superstar.”

Unlike Sejun’s superstar jokes, Cha Dogyeong’s superstar line was said with full sincerity. And unlike Sejun’s case, people did not deny it.

Na Yookyung closed her mouth. She realized no matter how much she probed or poked, Dogyeong was not going to give her a proper answer.

In the end, she sighed and chose to change the subject.

-Haa, anyway I do not know how long this team will last, but let’s work well for now.

“Got it.”

-And, Dogyeong.

“Yeah.”

-……Dungeons are not normal these days. You know that too, right?

Dogyeong stayed silent.

-It feels a bit different from the Final Dungeon we fought, but it is terrifying that an assimilated dungeon suddenly appeared too.

“What are you trying to say?”

-The quick ones already know. Something abnormal will happen again.

The Final Dungeon or the Infinite Dungeon at had existed before the corrupted former Association President by those names. Because it was like the closest thing to a final battle.

The difficulty was enormous. It was a miracle-level fact that not a single S-rank hunter who joined the raid at that time had died.

After that dungeon disappeared, the frequency of new dungeons appearing decreased a lot. Someone even gave it the ridiculous label “The Enf of Dungeons,” but hunters who actually worked in the field knew the truth.

The dungeons only decreased, they never disappeared.

And like it was starting a second round, the dungeons these days were getting more and more similar to the messed-up state of the dungeons that had started revving up before the Final Dungeon appeared.

-You may be fine, but be careful. The monsters inside dungeons are not stupid, and they are always itching because they want to annihilate humans.

“……Yeah.”

The call ended.

While heading to wash, Dogyeong threw off his clothes like shedding a skin, but before he knew it he was standing still in one place, not moving.

His chest felt stifled.

Dogyeong, who was about to set down his phone that had grown hot, opened the messenger app. He ignored the countless messages piled up from people and clicked on Sejun’s profile among the many names.

“Seo Sejjun”

Then a selfie of Seo Sejun smiling with sunglasses on appeared, and the background photo showed the Ferris wheel at the amusement park they had gone to last time.

When did he take this?

No wonder he came a bit late that day. Realizing it late, Dogyeong laughed and tossed his phone roughly onto the sofa, he finally went into the bathroom to wash.

It was the first time he laughed since the news about the rotation change, but Dogyeong did not notice it himself.

•••

The joint operation with the twins came faster than expected.

It was only a few days after the team rotation. Not much time had passed since the last incident, with more than a day of cooldown still left for the sub-mission, when a message ordering a call-up arrived.

An A-rank dungeon, well, it was not strange for one to suddenly appear.

But right now there were three S-rank hunter teams monopolizing A-rank dungeons, and since the rotation had reset the raid order back to Team 1, it was not the right time for Team 3’s trio to be dragged in. So Sejun tilted his head.

But that call-up was not because of an A-rank dungeon.

“What? A dungeon overflow?”

A B-rank dungeon had overflowed in the provinces.

A dungeon overflow, even if dungeons were disasters that appeared suddenly, was something that did not happen often in recent times.

At least not in Seoul and the capital area. But in the provinces with smaller populations, it was not unheard of.

No matter how large the Association was, it was still a private organization, and its reach was hard to extend outside of Seoul and the capital area.

Big cities in the provinces were manageable, but once you went into provincial areas where the population was decreasing, the situation was different.

[After the dungeon incident began, the disappearance of provincial populations only sped up.]

It was already well known that the depopulation of Korea’s provinces was serious, but after the dungeon incident began, the degree became much worse.

In Seoul, the capital area, and the big cities in the provinces, places where people did not live were rarer, so whenever there was a sign a dungeon might appear, the Association could give warnings in advance around possible dungeon entrances or evacuate people, but it was not like that in the provinces.

Especially at the beginning, the elderly who were slow to receive information suffered a lot of damage from overflowing dungeons.

At that time there were many places where the Association’s eyes did not reach, and if those places also had few people, dungeon discovery was delayed, so dungeon overflows happened frequently, and incidents where people lost their lives to monsters pouring out of the overflowing dungeons happened often.

So people abandoned small rural towns one after another and began to gather together.

Because of that, compared to the past, now it was hard to find people living outside the big cities.

Experts appeared on TV, shouting about how if more people crowded into this small country the economy would suffer, but those words meant nothing to people whose right to survive was immediately under threat.

Politicians openly held back the Association instead of helping it, so the reality was that about the frequent dungeon overflows in the provinces, they blamed the Association or gave solutions like “Live where there are many people.”

“So where is it?”

Because of this situation, this kind of event was not something completely unfamiliar. Of course, that did not mean it was frequent.

[Busan.]

The problem this time was that the place where the dungeon overflow happened was not a depopulated rural town, but Busan, a metropolitan city. On top of that, it was very far from Seoul.

[It is near an abandoned industrial complex in Gijang County. Nobody knew until it overflowed, because there is almost no moving population there.]

“What about the people?”

[Right now people are being evacuated, but the monsters spread throughout all of Busan and it is chaos. Since there might be people who could not evacuate, Busan requested support saying it must be handled as fast as possible.]

For this kind of job, it made sense that it would go past Teams 1 and 2 and end up with the Choi twins and Sejun.

Choi Hangyeol’s specialty was probing human psychology and scouting the surroundings, and Sejun could also help with searching the area if he used spirits instead of Hoya.

It was not that there were no hunters in Busan, but if there was a hunter who could perform wide-area detection together with them, the work would become easier. In this case the one who could do that was Choi Hangyeol, so he was called, and Sejun and Choi Yerin were just bonuses.

“How long does it take to get to Busan?”

[Well. Even if you go as fast as possible, it will take 4 hours. Do you want me to check train routes?]

“If that is faster.”

While the system immediately searched for the fastest route, Sejun’s phone ringed with another notification sound.

When he checked, it was a message from Choi Hangyeol.

“Sejun-hyung, do you want to meet in Busan or go together?”

The message came with a photo of Choi Yerin in the passenger seat looking in front of herindifferently, and Choi Hangyeol in the driver’s seat raising a V sign and greeting.

What is this bastard doing again?

For Sejun, the option of going to a dungeon with the Choi twins did not even exist. Just imagining it made it hard to breathe.

Since he had never once contacted them personally, Sejun looked confused, but his fingers moved naturally and tapped out a reply.

“I’m going alone.”

Sejun immediately closed the screen. It seemed another message was coming from Choi Hangyeol, but Sejun did not check it.

Even without looking, he could already hear Choi Hangyeol’s laughter.