The Genius Assassin Who Takes it All

Chapter 394: Fight Club (1)

Around that time.

Having more or less finished tidying up his old dwelling, Celestial Assassin was preparing to return to Korea.

There were no particularly important ties left in China, and spending time with his disciple mattered more.

There were overwhelmingly more things he wanted to do in Korea.

There were more than one or two places in North Korea he wanted to visit with Kang-hoo right away, and there were also plenty he wanted to teach.

“Can’t you reconsider? Sinwol still needs you.”

“What’s with you today? Normally, once I refuse, you’re the type who never presses again....”

“You know just how desperate it is.”

“Are you planning to work me until I die? Ihwa, you’ve suffered plenty too. That’s enough.”“Just a little more.”“No. I’ve retired now, so let me rest. I’m already exhausted. I’m just an old sinner with too little time left to atone.”

“Is that your true feelings?”

“What have you been listening to all this time? I won’t repeat myself. I settled this long ago.”

“Then... I guess it can’t be helped.”

When Ihwa raised her hand in a signal, a group of hunters appeared from all directions.

Calling it a “group” was understating it—their numbers were larger than expected. By rough count, there had to have been over twenty.

Even though they were hidden fairly close, neither Celestial Assassin nor Ju Haemi had noticed them.

One of Ihwa’s abilities completely erased presence and prevented the target from even recognizing it.

It was also the ability that kept her fed, so it was only natural that the two had been caught off guard.

“Fuck, what is this now.”

Celestial Assassin spat a curse. Every one of the hunters who appeared was Ihwa’s hand and foot.

Among them were quite a few familiar faces. All of them were elite. It meant Ihwa’s “persuasion” had been sincere.

And here, that “sincerity” also meant that if the other party did not accept, it would turn into “force.”

As the hunters narrowed the distance, Ihwa lifted a hand to restrain them.

Ju Haemi stood perfectly still, as if frozen. Her eyes never left Celestial Assassin.

Ihwa spoke.

“The higher-ups only allowed your retirement as a courtesy because you were diagnosed as terminal.”

“Bullshit. I’m choosing my own life—why does ‘permission’ even exist?”

“Because it’s Sinwol.”

“Tell them to go to hell.”

“Don’t react emotionally.”

“What do you want?”

“It’s such a waste to throw away someone like you, so convincingly molded into a plausible villain. Your life has its own charm—just as much as the redemption story through Haemi.”

“So you’re saying you’ll recycle me?”

Ihwa nodded.

The next moment—

Fwoosh!

Celestial Assassin launched himself forward.

Ihwa’s subordinates, anticipating his escape, moved in unison along his expected routes.

They had already analyzed most choke points and corridors in advance, so their movements were tightly coordinated.

But they were wrong-footed.

Celestial Assassin headed not for an escape route, but for where Ju Haemi was standing.

He shoved a book he pulled from inside his clothes into the hands of a flustered Ju Haemi.

“Haemi. Don’t look back—run as far as you can. And go to Cheongdo and find ‘Songnim.’”

“Songnim.”

“Yeah, Songnim. We’ll meet again!”

“A-ah! Father!”

Before they could exchange more than a few words, Ju Haemi was suddenly swallowed by a passage that opened beneath her feet and fell.

It was too narrow for both of them to enter—only Ju Haemi, with her slender frame, could barely pass through.

With his broad shoulders, Celestial Assassin would have gotten stuck right at the entrance; it was that small of a passage.

Shaaah!

Along a chute whose destination she could not possibly know, Ju Haemi’s body was carried downward for a long while.

Tears streamed endlessly, but she had not been completely unprepared.

Because Celestial Assassin had told her that something like this might happen someday. It had just come sooner than expected.

If there was any silver lining in the misfortune, it was that her father, Celestial Assassin, would not “die.”

Sinwol was the organization he had once belonged to.

And with Ihwa—an old friend—there was, paradoxically, safety. Even if the situation had tangled into something complicated.

Songnim (Pine Grove).

Knowing what the promised word meant, Ju Haemi bit her lip hard and waited for the passage to end.

A clean escape.

That was the only thing she needed to think about right now.

Clunk. Clatter.

Kugugugugugu.

Soon, the structures forming the passage collapsed and vanished without leaving even a trace.

At this point, it seemed Celestial Assassin had secured Ju Haemi’s safety. There was nothing left to regret.

Sssiiing.

Celestial Assassin leveled the tip of his dagger at Ihwa.

Whoooosh!

The killing intent flaring from him was enough to make even Ihwa and all her subordinates shrink back.

“Either kill me and take my corpse, or you all die here. Decide for yourselves. I’m not going quietly.”

Making it clear there would be no negotiation, he spoke. Ihwa, as if she had expected it, nodded and issued the prepared order.

“Subdue him.”

The resting place of Celestial Assassin—where even the frenzied bloodstains had been washed away by time—began to be dyed red again.“Kang-hoo!”

“Ayane.”

“I missed you...!”

In front of Incheon International Airport, Ayane spotted Kang-hoo and ran to him in a straight line, throwing herself into his arms with all her strength.

She hugged him so suddenly and tightly that Kang-hoo’s body actually rocked from the pull.

After burying her face in his chest in silence for a long while, Ayane looked up at him and said softly.

“I wanted to breathe this in—this scent.”

People had their own distinct “blood scent,” for better or worse.

Someone as hypersensitive as Ayane was especially sensitive to things like body scent.

And what she smelled from Kang-hoo was unmistakably a “fragrance”—a faint musk-like scent.

“So you didn’t die, and now I get to hug you like this. Back then, couldn’t you at least have told me you were leaving?”

“I didn’t want to owe you even a little. Just knowing you understood what I was about to do could have weighed on you. Even if you tried to ignore it, it would still have occupied a corner of your mind.”

“That’s such an Ayane way of thinking.”

“Anyway, it’s a happy ending, so it’s fine! I tied up what I started.”

Ayane’s expression looked genuinely relieved—like her heart had finally unclenched.

It seemed that even if she had not shown it, Hayabusa Guild tailing her relentlessly had been bothering her.

“So what’s the situation like now, with things redefined with Hayabusa Guild?”

“No problem. I won’t get tangled up with them again. Looks like blowing Kikuchi Jiro’s head off worked.”

“Of course. The boss of Fukuoka Liberation Area—and the guild master—dying violently would do that.”

“The liberation area got dragged back into fighting right away, so they won’t have the breathing room to worry about me.”

“So the hunt started.”

“Yeah. Either way, the leader being dead means the most troublesome enemy is gone.”

“You worked hard.”

“Hard work, my ass. Maybe because of this, my gigs have been picking up again lately. I think I’m going to get busy. For a mercenary, the greatest happiness is attention, right?”

“An unchanging truth.”

Kang-hoo nodded.

A mercenary without work was a dead mercenary. The more you were buried under jobs, the more valuable you were.

Ayane had always been the latter, but she seemed about to get even busier now. The same went for Kang-hoo.Before departure.

Inside an airport café, the two held a pre-briefing based on the information Lars Abel had passed along.

Since this job required exploring inside the dungeon and filling in the blank parts of an incomplete map.

The key was discussing a route based on what they had secured so far, and how to respond to sudden contingencies afterward.

Most of it would come down to improvisation, so the pre-briefing was essential. Otherwise, everything would turn into chaos.

‘If it’s a dungeon where I can profit from the Golden Triangle, that’d be nice. If I can get even just a zero-grade item....’

Just thinking about it made his mouth water.

Even Kang-hoo did not possess a zero-grade item.

In pure monetary value, it easily exceeded the trillion range. It was a different world from grade-one items.

The “complete the dungeon’s internal map” request he received from Lars was not a problem for Kang-hoo.

If needed, he could use the constellation Trickster Traitor, like he did in the dungeon he tackled with Park Dong-jae, and resolve it that way.

The real key would be how ruthlessly he could squeeze the dungeon for its real substance.

A dungeon first discovered by the Stark Guild—Lars Abel’s guild—and never once cleared inside.

Not only would it be a first-run dungeon, the level range was said to be high, so expectations for rewards were enormous.After takeoff.

Ayane fell asleep first.

Partly to conserve stamina, and perhaps because with Kang-hoo beside her, her mind felt at ease and sleep came naturally.

Kang-hoo, too, had relaxed—inside an airplane there was no training to do, no battle to fight.

So he reclined the seat fully to 180 degrees, pulled a blanket over himself, and closed his eyes. Sleep felt close.

Suddenly.

A memory surfaced.

It was from when he had lived as the original author. He did not know why it came to mind now.

Back when he had just started the serialization, a reader had left a comment. Later, that person became a loyal fan he was grateful for.

Why is the title “A Villain’s Survival Handbook After Becoming a Savior”?

In the early stages, it had been a question he could not answer. It contained important developments.

It was because, in the early-to-mid portion of the story, the protagonist Jang Si-hwan was misunderstood by people as a “villain.”

After the midpoint, he would be revered as a savior and hero—but until then, it was a chain of misunderstandings.

It had also been an intentional strategy by the villain who served as Jang Si-hwan’s main adversary in the early-to-mid arc, and there were many intertwined episodes.

‘They were the reader who supported me to the end.’

Even when the final chapter was flooded with criticism and insults, that reader had defended him.

They read the intent and meaning embedded in the ending, and said they looked forward to the author’s next story.

He wanted to thank them, at least—but there was no longer any way to return to that life.

‘The one question is.’

Lately, there was one question that kept tugging at his thoughts. It was still an unresolved theme.

This world, where he had possessed the body of Shin Kang-hoo—Kang-hoo judged it by dividing it into three domains.

First was the domain of the original story.

A domain he understood so perfectly that he could not only know it, but foresee the future.

Second was the domain of the unconscious.

Memories he had not written into the original story, but had thought about at least once, or drafted and then abandoned.

So even if he first felt unfamiliar, he could soon recall it and fill in the gaps.

The problem was the third.

Things that were not in the original story and that he had never even thought about—yet they still existed, filled in.

A representative example was the “Eyes.”

Kang-hoo had never even imagined such beings in the original story. In the first place, it was not a novel that traveled the entire world.

‘So the question is: who filled this in?’

A question about something fundamental.

An answer to that seemed difficult to obtain—now, and likely in the future as well.

Unless some unexpected clue fell into his lap as if it had been waiting, this would remain an unknown domain.