Psychopath (1)
“Wake up! Oh, co on, team leader!”
Soone was calling desperately. Team Leader? It had been a long ti since I had heard of such a thing that it took so ti to recall the word’s aning. It was a word that had been used until Earth’s civilization collapsed entirely.
“Wake up already!”
A light began to flicker over my closed eyelids. It felt like my body’s sensations had started to assert themselves little by little.
Wait, sensations?
Sothing felt weird. The texture felt unfamiliar as I tried to move my fingers. I seed to be lying on a very soft mattress. But would such a thing still exist on Earth? No, above all, what was this power that I felt throughout my body?
“Oh, you don’t think I know you’re already up? Like I didn’t hear your breathing has changed? It isn’t sothing that will be solved by pretending to be asleep now! The guild leader told to bring you right away!”
The sharp senses and the vitality that I had lost as I had gotten older…it had been a while since I felt this way. It was indeed a foreign sensation. I felt a sense of incongruity, as if I were wearing clothes that didn’t quite fit .
“Oh. Byeong-ho… let’s be patient. You can’t get mad anymore. Now, calmly… don’t get carried away. If you want to give up, let’s think about these. This month’s rent…allowances for the kids…communication bills…also, utilities…health insurance…National Disaster Pension Insurance…Welfare Fund for the Aged…Special Defense Tax…Urban Reconstruction Fund…Community Stabilization Fund…”
The person who uttered the words like a mantra soon beca impatient and started yelling.
“Wow, are you now waking up?! Your dad is calling you, and he is super pissed!”
The next mont…
Buzzz!
A pain that seed to split through my head went through , eliciting a pained moan.
“Kah!”
In this situation where all my senses felt unfamiliar, a pleasantly familiar ssage resonated in my head.
-There is a discrepancy between the mories preserved in the soul and the mories recorded in the biological brain!
-Forced tuning has been initiated by the system.
It was the system ssage that followed from the mont I had awakened as a hunter. However, its content was confusing.
“Gaah!”
A moan burst from . The voice that ca out of my mouth wasn’t familiar to my own ears.
“Ahhhhhhhhh!”
It was a tornt unlike any other.
“Oh, fuck, that’s a surprise. Why are you yelling and flailing around?!”
The person who kept talking next to had begun to curse in shock. Hot liquid overflowed from my nose and mouth, and I could barely open my eyes. A man was looking down at with a distant expression; his two dark eyebrows seed like caterpillars gathered in the middle. He began to mutter as if he was frustrated.
“Oh, damn it! It looks like sothing is wrong with you this ti. You weren’t faking an illness..”
I began to struggle.
“Ahhh!”
The mories of soone other than , Choi Seung-Hyun, were mixing out of order and lting into my head. Countless scenes flashed past . However, before I could recognize each one, the mories ran away, and new mories flew in. As each raindrop’s shape couldn’t be recognized, each mory couldn’t be properly observed as the heavy rain of mories struck and trampled my skull.
“Ah, hello? Yes, I think you need to send soone soon…no, it’s real this ti. He is vomiting blood from his nose and mouth, and it’s a ss. Is it self-inflicted? No, would you have the talent to bleed through your nose without lifting a hand? No matter how promising he might be, he’s just a person who hasn’t even awakened.”
As the man hurriedly made a phone call, ssages from the system that he could not hear kept reverberating within .
-The mory match between the soul and the body…is 0%!
-Confirmation of violent rejection between spirit and body. ntal collapse is imminent.
-To protect the user, the skill [The Successor’s Eyes (Rank: EX)] is activated. There is no mana consumption due to skill activation.
The pain that felt like it was about to tear up both my spirit and body began to subside gradually.
-The effect of the skill [The Successor’s Eyes (Rank: EX)] weakens the physical mory’s influence on the soul and slows the sync speed.
-The skill [The Successor’s Eyes (Rank: EX)] helps the soul’s mory take over the self instead of the biological brain.
Indeed, as the ssage said, a third person’s mory, not Choi Seung-Hyun, and the speed of the scenes approaching slowed down gradually. Thanks to this, I was able to observe the mories and, finally, I realized whose mories they were. Fighting the pain, I raised my upper body up to a seated position.
“Alright!”
Thanks to the unique skill that let rember what I saw once, I revived the contents I saw briefly in the past as a clear ‘mory of Choi Seung-Hyun.’ the contents of the docunt and much of the information I had just witnessed in the stranger’s mory coincided with mine. My body trembled as I clenched the bedsheets. I then shouted in a hoarse voice.
“This is Seo Jin-wook, this is Seo Jin-wook!”
The fragnts of these mories that popped up in my head belonged to a man nad Seo Jin-wook. The man on the phone looked at with terror in his eyes. Then, he talked to the other person over the phone.
“···Did you hear that sudden self-introduction? ‘This is Seo Jin-wook,’ he says, not even ‘I am Seo Jin-wook.’ He does crazy things like that regularly, but this ti is a little different. I’m telling you that the adult man who will be nineteen is destroying the grammar that even a five-year-old wouldn’t get wrong? Send the doctor in, quickly.”
I turned my gaze and looked at the large mirror on the wall. Instead of the older man Choi Seung-hyun’s face, a youthful young man stared back at with a pale, bloody face. It matched with the photos I had seen in my mories. Seo Jin-wook. He was the successor of Seo Gyu-cheol, leader of the Celestial Dragon Guild, Korea’s first S-rank hunter. However, there was one problem here.
“Seo Jin-wook is…”
Seo Jin-wook was already dead, long before the collapse of the SSS-class dungeon.
*
The person on the other end of the phone seed to be reluctant to send a doctor. A doctor ca only after the man began to scream at his cell phone in a threatening manner. During the check-up, my stomach continued to feel nauseated, so I ran to the bathroom several tis to vomit.
“Blargh!”
The doctor, who had endured the process patiently, left an ambiguous diagnosis that even I could have made up. Then, only two were left in the room. It was , and the one who had been with from the beginning, which the doctor called Secretary Kim. He was trying to take to Seo Jin-wook’s father as soon as possible. Before anything else, I thought I had to stop such an attempt.
“So, Secretary Kim, do you understand, since you heard the conversation I had with the doctor?”
Secretary Kim’s expression distorted.
“Well, huh, temporary mory loss due to a concussion?”
There seed to be such an effect from vomiting several tis.
“Yes, as you said, my mories are jumbled up. It would be a little too difficult to see my father right away.”
I replied as I stared at the man with an indescribable expression.
“Secretary Kim Byeong-ho? That’s your na, right?”
“That’s right.”
Secretary Kim frowned while fiddling with the crude ring on his index finger. Looking at the mana pattern, it was seed to be a pretty useful artifact. He then spoke in a suspicious tone.
“Well, this is awkward. You calling Secretary Kim…and calling by my full na.”
I searched the mories of Seo Jin-wook, the original owner of the body, but it was still a jumbled up ss, so it wasn’t easy to draw out the desired ones. It would take more ti from now on to organize the mories.
“Then, how did I used to address you?”
Secretary Kim didn’t change his reluctant expression, and without hiding it, he began listing uncomfortable and inferior profanities with his mouth. Most of the words were a wordplay using his na, ‘Byeong’ and ‘Ho.’ As I tried to gather my soul, stopping it from leaving my body, I stopped him before he could fold all ten fingers.
“Oh, that’s it. That’s enough.”
“Dumbass, Idiotic Bastard, Crazy Pumpkin Head…oh, should I stop?”
“Yes.”
I sighed a little. Listening to the phone call, Seo Jin-wook would soon be having his 19th birthday. Seo Jin-wook’s birth year, as confird from the old docunts, was 2019. That ant that, during this mont, as he and I were talking, it was the year 2038.
‘2038.’
‘I’m going crazy.’
As Choi Seung-Hyun, I had summarized all of Seo Jin-wook’s biography as I rembered it. Unfortunately, he was a person in the past that was out of my interests, and the data I encountered was neither detailed nor abundant. Therefore, all I knew about Seo Jin-wook’s life were only a few big events. Before his 19th birthday, he was in charge of the 6th exploration support team leader of the Celestial Dragon Guild.
‘He was a team leader without even awakening as a hunter.’
However, I didn’t exactly know what kind of situation Seo Jin-wook was in. For example, how was his relationship with his father and guild leader looking right now? Was the position of 6th exploration support team leader a display of his father’s favor for being the eldest son, or a test, or a punishnt? Moreover, although the docunt comnted that it was an unconfird rumor, a strange evaluation of Seo Jin-wook was added.
It wasn’t very clear. The mories left in Seo Jin-wook’s brain weren’t yet properly organized, so I wasn’t sure how to deal with the current situation.
‘I need more information.’
I then looked at Secretary Kim.
“Are you busy now?”
“Yes, I am busy. As you know, the guild leader is not fond of waiting. We have to run soon.”
“Well, can’t you make an excuse to delay? You just heard the doctor. I have mory loss due to a concussion.”
“It wasn’t a definite diagnosis; he suspects it.”
The doctor went out to report it. The report must have already been delivered to the guild leader. He said that I to lie down due to the shock to my head.
“Concussion, what happened?”
Secretary Kim replied like a sigh after glancing about, with eyes that said it was hard to believe he couldn’t really rember.
“There was an ungentlemanly dispute between team leader Seo Jin-wook and Exploration 2 team leader. Of course, there’s a reason why it’s called ungentlemanly, and it was added that you started it…”
He reached out his finger to point at .
“You’re saying I provoked him? The Exploration 2 team leader…”
Celestial Dragon Guild. Exploration 2 team leader. Naturally, the na ca to mind. It wasn’t dependent on pure human mory but a function of the skill.
“Park Chang-hee?”
“Yeah. You rember that.”
If it was the hunter Park Chang-hee, he was an A-class hunter who survived for a long ti and had made a na for himself. On the other hand, Seo Jin-wook had gained his position as the Support team leader thanks to his position as the guild leader’s son, but he was a non-awakened person who had not yet qualified as a Hunter. However, apparently, I had been in a fight.
“If it was a dispute, how? Why?”
“In the eting, Team Leader Seo spoke to Team Leader Park to lower his eyes because you didn’t like how he stared at you…or so I heard?”
“…”
At the mont, I was dizzy, as if I were going to faint again. My stomach was swirling in nausea.
“Our team leader Seo, who was angry when the team leader Park Chang-hee ignored those words…”
“Did I curse at him?”
“No, you didn’t swear.”
“I’m glad I didn’t.”
“Listen until the end. According to witnesses, you, Team Leader Seo, kicked your seat away and stood up. Riding on that montum, you jumped onto the giant rectangular table in the executive’s conference room, kicked away the docunts and naplates, and sprinted. After that, you gave a flying kick to the Team Leader Park Chang-hee, seated at the far end…no, you tried to kick him. They said.”
Non-Awakened against an A-Class Hunter…with a flying kick? I buried my face in both hands.
“I’m glad I survived.”
I once again recalled the worriso phrase describing Seo Jin-wook, written on the papers I read during Choi Seung-hyun’s days.
-Rumored to be suffering from a severe borderline personality disorder, impulsive control disorder, delusional disorder, and schizophrenia. Still, it wasn’t confird until the ti of his death.
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