Chapter Text
Il-Hwan, breaking.
“Daddy…” Jin-Ah’s voice was thick and unsteady, on the verge of tears, as she tried to wrap him up in her arms like a child.
Il-Hwan had been called many things in his life. Weirdo. Loser. Asshole. Fuck-up.
That crazy force of nature, that absolute maniac that had turned his life inside out—Kyung-Hye—she had called him babe. No one had ever called Il-Hwan something sweet before her. And his little boy, Jin-Woo—he’d never been prouder than the day that Jin-Woo first called him dada. All too quickly, Jin-Woo had switched to calling him dad, but Il-Hwan’s little girl still called him daddy.
Only, he wasn’t really her daddy anymore, was he? He was just the pile of maggots that had eaten her daddy’s brain. And yet he wanted to be held by her anyway. He wanted to be wrapped up in her love and comfort like a giant maggot in swaddling clothes. Il-Hwan giggled at the thought, and even he could hear the sharp edge of hysteria in the sound.
Then the doorbell rang, and a plank broke inside Il-Hwan, as he was dropped down into a fresh new level of hell.
Jin-Chul, useless.
If there was anything good to be said about the level of tension in the room, it was that no one had noticed Jin-Chul was chewing his fingernails ragged. Well, except for Jin-Woo. Il-Hwan was clearly in first place in the race for who would have the first nervous breakdown, and Jin-Ah was solidly in second place, and yet, even so, Jin-Woo was still more focused on Jin-Chul than anyone else. It was thoughtful of him to keep healing Jin-Chul’s fingernails, but unfortunately that only gave Jin-Chul more opportunity to chomp them.
“Is it going to be safe to leave Il-Hwan here with Jin-Ah?” Jin-Chul whispered to Jin-Woo.
“Not even slightly,” Jin-Woo muttered. “But don’t worry, I’ve got someone coming who can keep an eye on him.”
Jin-Chul blinked a few times, and then his eyes widened. “You don’t mean—” Surely not Park Kyung-Hye. Even Jin-Woo wouldn’t really be so irresponsible as to drop a powder keg into the middle of a firefight. Right? Hadn’t they agreed to let Il-Hwan get settled first, before springing the news about his wife?
Oh, hell, who was Jin-Chul kidding? This was Sung Jin-Woo, and he didn’t know the word caution. A moment later, the doorbell rang, and in walked a tall, pretty woman with long, dark hair, wearing a flowing, knee-length skirt and a frilly top that showed off her generous bust. She’d looked so much like a living skeleton the last few times he’d seen her, that Jin-Chul had forgotten this woman was actually the sexy bombshell type. Now, she looked radiant with life and health—all except for a few lines around her eyes that spoke of some great ordeal she had endured.
Her aura was golden and spiky, as if it were made of tiny stinging needles. It was also S-rank. Jin-Chul fumbled to push it away from himself before he could get overwhelmed, but he couldn’t maintain focus with the current state he was in, so Jin-Woo had to push his mother’s aura away from Jin-Chul.
“Mommy!” Jin-Ah cried, dropping her father like a hot potato and moving to embrace her mother. “I thought you weren’t coming until tomorrow,” Jin-Ah said into her mother’s shoulder. “I missed you so much.”
“I missed you too, sweetheart,” Park Kyung-Hye said, caressing her daughter’s hair. But her eyes never left Il-Hwan, who was frozen with a horrified look.
“No,” Il-Hwan whispered. His eyes were wild, frightened and betrayed as they landed on Jin-Woo. “Why…why would you—your own mother?!”
“Before you start accusing me of murder, you should know that she was as good as dead already,” Jin-Woo said calmly. “Her brain was pickled in mana. This is the only cure for it,” he explained.
Il-Hwan shook his head vigorously. “No…I read about it, in their libraries…there’s an elixir, made from the Tree of Life…”
Jin-Woo sighed. “The Tree of Life is an entity that gives birth to new Rulers,” he said. “That elixir does the same thing I did.”
Il-Hwan seethed with fury. “But at least she wouldn’t have been your puppet, if you’d given her the elixir!”
Jin-Woo sighed again. Jin-Chul squeezed his hand reassuringly, since that was all he could offer at the moment.
Jin-Woo, bored.
Jin-Woo stared at his father. The man was vibrating like a piece of machinery that was about to explode, and the sounds he was making were teetering on the verge between laughter and sobs. Jin-Woo had wound many loops of invisible mana around his sister, lying flat against her skin and ready to shift her sideways and out of reality, just in case the precarious balance in Il-Hwan’s mind suddenly tipped towards violence. Even Jin-Chul’s stars had unconsciously begun to orbit around the pair of father and daughter, as if Jin-Chul too were poised to break them apart.
The room and all its occupants were poised on the brink of chaos, and Jin-Woo was…bored. He’d had enough of this story arc, and now he just wanted to take Jin-Chul home and play house with him. But no. First, he had to act out a few more scenes in this absurd and tawdry stage play.
Jin-Woo sighed mentally. A trillion miles away, a limb of himself that had been about to suck the plasma out of a star, gave the star a little punch instead, and made it explode, splattering its guts all over its system. But he couldn’t even take satisfaction in the Ruler equivalent of punching a pillow, because suddenly there was a burst of organized radio signals from a planet that had been orbiting the star.
Jin-Woo grudgingly blocked the barrage of burning star-stuff that was about to vaporize the damn dinky little rock. Intelligent life. That fucking shit was goddamn everywhere!
With a writhing of squid-like mana-tentacles that approximated grumbling, the far-off bit of Jin-Woo listened to the shrieking and wailing coming from the locals. Now, those folks had a justifiable complaint against Jin-Woo. He was going to have to transport their planet to another star system, and the upheaval was going to upend every religious and scientific belief they’d ever had. More than likely, it would spark so much chaos that they’d tear themselves apart in some sort of world war.
On the upside, they were getting the lightshow of a lifetime, what with the remains of their star raining down like a hail of planet-sized nuclear bombs on the shadow shield that Jin-Woo had wrapped around their planet. But he could hardly expect them to appreciate that. No, if those people were mad at Jin-Woo, he wouldn’t hold it against them. Blowing up their star and wrecking their society were legitimate things to complain about. Il-Hwan’s complaints, on the other hand…
Jin-Chul squeezed Jin-Woo’s hand, and Jin-Woo realized that he’d been glaring at his father. It was a good thing that Jin-Chul and Jin-Ah were here, because otherwise Jin-Woo might have resorted to Ruler-style persuasion tactics, like dangling Il-Hwan over the bubbling surface of the sun. And that would be the end of any hope of a relationship with his father.
Kyung-Hye, exasperated.
“All right, that’s enough talking about me while I’m standing right here,” Kyung-Hye said firmly, in a tone that brooked no nonsense. Everyone’s spines straightened a little, and Kyung-Hye’s baby girl reluctantly stopped clinging to her mother like a koala clings to a eucalyptus tree. Ah—that wasn’t quite what she’d wanted, but Kyung-Hye did need a clear line if she was going to tackle her dumbass of a husband, so she let Jin-Ah go reluctantly.
“I’m nobody’s puppet, and I’ve had enough of other people deciding what’s best for me,” Kyung-Hye declared. “I admit I’m new to all this Ruler…stuff…but Jin-Woo has shared his knowledge with me, and it’s my decision to stay under his protection,” she said to Il-Hwan. “And frankly, I don’t give a flying fuck what you think of it!” she added. “You lost the right to complain about me making decisions that affect all of us when you leaped through that first gate in the sky!”
Her beloved husband flinched as if she’d struck him.
“But there’s no need for us to argue in front of the kids, honey,” Kyung-Hye said magnanimously, advancing on him with her hands on her hips. “Let’s just go find a quiet spot, and we can sort things out.”
As she moved, Kyung-Hye looked Il-Hwan over from head to toe. He was wearing his original body, only it had grown stronger, taller, and even more beautiful from years of being soaked in mana. Yes, his body looked more delicious than ever, and Kyung-Hye could hardly wait to take it for a test ride, but his soul, on the other hand…
Well. It had grown, too. There was no way it couldn’t have, for he was certainly a Ruler now, and Rulers consumed all within their reach. (So Kyung-Hye had learned from Jin-Woo’s gift of knowledge.) But whereas Kyung-Hye’s soul had burst from its cocoon and spread its wings wide in triumph and joy to be alive, Il-Hwan’s soul looked like a tree that had grown inside a jar, warped and twisted to fit the limitations of its space.
Of course, Kyung-Hye didn’t know exactly what her beloved husband’s soul might have looked like before his imprisonment and conversion. The souls of humans were hidden within an intricate pattern of neurons and chemicals, and even Rulers struggled to fully understand them. But it couldn’t possibly have been this strangled and twisted thing. Il-Hwan had been like her. They had been like birds, the two of them, free to fly wherever the wind took them, no limits but the sky itself.
“It’s going to be okay,” Kyung-Hye said gently, approaching her partner and holding out her arms. “We’ll get through this together.”
She saw Il-Hwan shudder, and then—well, then, a lot of things happened all at once. But the important thing was that, in the end, she had her love in her arms again. And no one was going to take him away this time.
Lee An-Su, having afternoon tea.
Lee An-Su liked her living situation, for the most part. Her apartment was small and modest, but she knew the building super and all the repairmen, and more importantly, she knew their mothers. If one of An-Su’s pipes so much as dreamt of dripping, there would be three good Christian boys there in a jiffy to repair it.
The living room windows got excellent northern light, and the heating and electricity bills were low. The neighborhood was on the poorer side, but it was safe enough for an old lady like her. And nowadays, of course, no one would even dare to litter a cigarette butt in the street outside, because everyone knew that the strongest hunter in all of Korea was living in the building.
An-Su had given serious thought to moving out when she’d seen sweet little Jin-Woo on the evening news, but he’d always been such a nice boy, carrying groceries and holding elevator doors for her. Surely, he wouldn’t get up to any of the wild, building-shaking exploits that other hunters did? So she had thought, and she had been right.
Well, he did have his little oddities, like that blonde government hunter she had seen him kissing in the hallway once. She’d just gone upstairs to see if Jin-Ah wanted to have a cuppa together, and there they’d been, all twisted together like two octopuses, and then they’d disappeared in a swoosh of black fog. That was all right, though. Hunters practically weren’t human anyway, so what if they acted like animals? As long as they closed those unnatural holes that monsters came out of, and left good decent folks alone, An-Su said leave them to it.
But there was one thing she had forgotten. The two mild and sweet Sung children living upstairs had once been a family of four. And that family had been…decidedly unsavory.
It was one thing to hear a bedframe thumping in the night. The Sung parents were a young couple, very much in love, and that was to be expected. Why, you might even say it was their civic duty. After all, Korea was going to be unpopulated in a few years if people didn’t start to do a little more thumping of beds in the night.
But the dining room table, the washing machine, and even the kitchen cabinets—were these items that need to go bump-tee-thump at any hour of the day or night? Not to mention all the moaning and caterwauling! It was a wonder that the Sung children were so meek and well-behaved, with that wildcat of a mother and that dumb-as-a-bag-of-bricks father.
It wasn’t just for the sake of reminiscing that An-Su was sipping her tea on her outdoor balcony and contemplating the badly-behaved Sung parents. No, her nostalgia was being triggered by the sound of four muffled voices drifting down from the apartment upstairs. Two of those voices, she had thought long dead. But if anyone could summon unholy spirits from the Great Beyond, it would be Sung Jin-Woo, she supposed. She’d seen the footage of his assault on Jeju. It had been awe-inspiring, in the Biblical sense. She imagined that the Israelites must have felt as such, when the Lord God came down from the mountain in a hail of fire and lightning, with a voice like thunder that shook the earth.
Lee An-Su had continued to attend the same church she’d grown up in, even after the tribulations when the sky had been rent open, and all God’s people had been forced to come to terms with the existence of aliens. Her church’s position was that just like the orcs and centaurs and elves that sometimes came out of gates, hunters were not human, even if they had once been. As such, they would go to neither Heaven nor Hell, and were not capable of being Saved. God would deal with them all in His own mysterious manner and time, and since He hadn’t seen fit to give anyone revelation on the matter, it was no one’s business how He did it.
So it was, that when the events of that afternoon unfolded, Lee An-Su felt no need to step in and try to rescue anyone, nor to contact the authorities. It was all a matter for hunters.
First, there was a great crashing of glass, as if someone had jumped or been thrown through a window. Then a man’s body fell from above and past her balcony, flailing and pinwheeling his arms all the way. She scarcely had a chance to identify him. Next, there was a shrill female scream, and a great glowing purple hand, made of something like mist and with fingers the size of people, descended from above and snatched up the falling man. It wrapped him in its fist and lifted him up to the height of the upstairs balcony.
Lee An-Su was cowering behind her wicker chair by that time, but she peeked around the side of it and got a pretty good look at the man. It was Sung Il-Hwan, and it seemed like he’d lost a few marbles since she’d seen him last, what with all the spitting and cursing and clawing of the air he was doing.
Then a second figure leapt into the air from the balcony above. This one was a pale woman with long, flowing black hair. It was Mrs. Park Kyung-Hye, and she was flying on wings of lilac light, looking like a superhero in an American movie, except for the fact that her skirt was rippling in the breeze, and An-Su could see directly up it. Those sheer lacy panties were completely inappropriate. The woman hadn’t even the decency to put on safety shorts before giving the entire city a look! Lee An-Su tutted in disapproval.
Mrs. Park reached through the glowing purple hand and scooped her husband up in a princess carry. “It’s okay, Jin-Ah!” Mrs. Park called. “You can let go, I’ve got him!”
“I don’t know how to let go!” a shrill and frantic girl’s voice yelled back.
Oh dear, oh dear. Jin-Ah, too? That was the whole family now. And here An-Su had been, considering calling the KHA to rescue the poor girl.
“Let me go!” Sung Il-Hwan protested, wrestling with his wife now. She tried to get him in a headlock, and he flailed around wildly and elbowed her in the face.
With a yelp of surprise, Mrs. Park dropped her husband, causing him to sail past An-Su’s balcony again. Then she dived after him, and when she flew back up, Mrs. Park was now holding her husband by one ankle and shaking him like a maraca.
“You don’t hit your wife in the face, you IDIOT!” she shouted at him, giving him a violent shake with each emphasized word. On the last shake, she conked his head into the corner of the upstairs balcony, causing some bits of concrete to rain down onto An-Su’s balcony.
Lee An-Su squeaked like a mouse and dove inside her apartment. But she kept listening at the balcony door as more concrete rained down. How could she not? Just like Lot’s wife, she couldn’t look away from the violent chaos of destruction.
“Fuck—off—you’re not—her!” Mr. Sung yelled, in between being smacked into the balcony railing like a ragdoll. The screech of metal indicated that his body might be denting the railing rather than the other way around.
“If I’m not her, then you’re not him!” Mrs. Park shouted, making absolutely no sense whatsoever. She stopped thrashing her husband to shout at him some more. “So who cares?! If you don’t love me anymore, then don’t love me because you don’t love me! But not because I’m made of something different now! That’s stupid! I didn’t crawl out of a sea of black ooze just to come back and find you ten times stupider than when you left!”
“God—damn—fucking—shit—” Mr. Sung spat incoherently as he clawed at the air and tried to reach any part of her he could.
Mrs. Park repelled his every swipe with one of her pretty lilac wings. “Oh, you don’t like being dangled upside down and beaten by a woman?!” she taunted. “That’s the LEAST you deserve, you good-for-nothing deadbeat! You left us completely penniless! Jin-Woo had to become a HUNTER! Jin-Ah had to manage all the MONEY! And I didn’t get laid for FOUR YEARS!!!”
An-Su thought that Mrs. Park sounded distinctly more aggrieved about the last point than the others.
“RRRRRRARRRGH—I was protecting you!” Mr. Sung howled. “I was protecting everyone! But TYPICAL Park Kyung-Hye, all you care about is getting railed! You’re flashing your panties at the whole goddamn city right now, you—you—tart!”
Mrs. Park gasped in outrage, and her eyes seemed to flash. Then she began to leer like some sort of ghoul that had escaped from the lowest depths of Hell. She had mentioned something about black ooze, hadn’t she? Maybe she really was one of Hell’s denizens.
“Oh, you want to see flashing?” Mrs. Park demanded. She seized her shirt by the collar, and An-Su heard a ripping sound.
“No-no no-no no-no no-n!” Mr. Sung chanted, flailing more than ever and swatting at her legs. “Jesus Christ, Kyung-Hye! This is NOT the time!”
“Oh, I think this is exactly the time!” she snapped back. “If you want to stop me, then grow your own pair of wings and FIGHT ME, you COWARD!”
And with that, Park Kyung-Hye wound up like a pitcher about to throw a fastball, and hurled Sung Il-Hwan so hard that he flew across the street and almost collided with the next apartment building. At the last moment, however, wings of brilliant turquoise light exploded from his back, and then he was shooting through the air back at them, growling and hissing like a wild animal. He caught Mrs. Park around the middle, and then—
The pair of quarreling hunters dissolved in a swirl of black mist.
Lee An-Su waited for a long couple of minutes, but neither of the married pair reappeared. Hopefully, they had been banished back to Hell where they clearly belonged. She crossed herself and murmured a prayer. Then she quietly slid her balcony door shut, and locked it firmly. She got up to put the tea away, and to get out the makgeolli. And perhaps the real estate listings. It might be time to look for a new place.
Jin-Chul, exhausted.
When Jin-Woo brought Jin-Chul back to his apartment through the shadows, after they had dropped off a newly-awakened Jin-Ah with her friend Song-Yi, the first thing Jin-Chul did was stagger over to his sofa and collapse face down. He heard Jin-Woo following him, and a moment later he felt a hand stroking through his hair.
Something was poking Jin-Chul painfully in the chest, and he realized that he’d landed with his tie pin stabbing into his ribs. He fished around underneath him and yanked the tie pin free. He almost tossed it across the room in frustration, but—that wasn’t really his style. He reached out and set it gently on the coffee table instead. Still, the frustration was there. Why had he even bothered dressing up or trying to make a good impression? The Sung family had barely even noticed his presence, and he hadn’t been able to help them at all. All those years of experience talking down enraged and crazed S-rankers, and he had just frozen up like he was still in his first year on the job.
“Cnoo jnj me noo jmas?” Jin-Chul mumbled into the feather-stuffed cushion beneath his face.
Jin-Woo laughed softly. “Sorry, I don’t speak sofa. What was that?”
Jin-Chul turned his head and gave his boyfriend a look that some might have described as pouting. As a grown man in his thirties, however, he was certainly above pouting, so Jin-Chul himself would have described the look as…imploring. “Can you change me into pajamas?” he asked. “I can’t move.”
This wasn’t true in the strictest sense. Physically, Jin-Chul was in perfect health. Mentally, however, he felt like he’d gone ten rounds in a boxing ring. Jin-Woo flicked a finger, and suddenly Jin-Chul was wearing soft and cozy pajamas with fluffy socks, instead of a suit and dress shoes.
“Fnks,” Jin-Chul mumbled, turning his face back into the cushion.
“Should I put you to bed?” Jin-Woo asked, stroking Jin-Chul’s scalp gently.
Jin-Chul nodded with great effort. A moment later, he was lying face down in his bed, instead of on the sofa. Ah, having Jin-Woo as a lover was really such a convenience. He was completely spoiled for human men at this point.
Jin-Woo climbed into bed beside him and pulled the comforter over them both before snuggling up to Jin-Chul and rubbing his back lightly. “Want some dinner?” he asked.
“Oo ired,” Jin-Chul spoke into his pillow.
“I could, uh…put it directly into your stomach?” Jin-Woo offered.
Jin-Chul was exhausted, but he felt compelled to turn his face sideways so as to give Jin-Woo a look.
“Was that too weird?” Jin-Woo asked.
Jin-Chul nodded.
Jin-Woo shrugged. “As you like. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I didn’t think they’d be quite that bad.”
“You’re sorry you brought me along?” Jin-Chul asked, trying to clarify.
Jin-Woo hesitated. “No…I needed you there. I’m just sorry it upset you so much.”
Jin-Chul exhaled gustily. “I couldn’t help at all,” he said morosely. “I mean, I know I could never talk back, even today, if my father or my stepmother were to start yelling in front of me…let alone yelling at me, but…I didn’t think I would be like that with your parents, too.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Jin-Woo said, using his fingers to brush Jin-Chul’s honey-blonde hair back from his face, and tuck it behind his ear. “I never expected you to help with talking to them. I just needed you by my side.”
Jin-Chul’s brows furrowed as he pondered that. “That sounds very romantic and all, but…I have a feeling you don’t mean you needed me there for moral support. You mean something more like, you needed me there so you didn’t just get bored and fuck off halfway through. Right?”
Jin-Woo smirked. “You know me so well. It was more like, so I didn’t just haul off and launch Dad into the sun for being so irritating.”
Jin-Chul reached out slowly and smacked Jin-Woo very, very lightly upside the head. It was more like a tap than a smack, really.
Jin-Woo blinked at him, wide-eyed. “What was that?” he asked curiously.
Jin-Chul frowned. “I learned that this is how you get Sung men to listen to you. I did think it was strange when your sister kicked you down all those flights of stairs that time, but now I see where she learned it. I thought your mom was going to crack your dad’s skull like an egg.”
Jin-Woo laughed, eyes glittering with amusement. “We are a remarkably hard-headed family.”
“But I can’t hit you,” Jin-Chul said sadly, stroking the side of Jin-Woo’s head where he had tapped it, as if to apologize to the bit of Jin-Woo that he had assaulted. “I don’t…like to hit people.”
Jin-Woo stopped smiling abruptly, possibly remembering that Jin-Chul’s family had also used hitting as a way to get family members to listen. “It’s okay,” he reassured Jin-Chul. “You don’t need to hit me to get me to listen. I’ll always listen to you.”
Jin-Chul chewed on his lower lip. “But what if I have to tell you something you don’t want to hear someday?”
“I promise I’ll listen. I might not do what you want, but I’ll at least hear you out.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
Jin-Chul slid his arm down and around Jin-Woo’s shoulder, pulling him close. As he inhaled Jin-Woo’s scent and basked in his warmth, he could almost forget how terrifying and disturbing it had been—to see Il-Hwan throw himself through the sliding glass door and off the balcony—Jin-Ah’s scream and her sudden awakening in her desperation to save him—Kyung-Hye swinging Il-Hwan around and smacking him into things like a hammer—
And God only knew what the pair were up to now. Jin-Woo had teleported them away when it seemed like they were about to wreck Seoul with their fight. Jin-Woo said they were fine, that he was monitoring them remotely, but he claimed he didn’t want to look too closely in case he couldn’t ‘unsee’ whatever they were doing. Jin-Chul understood that. If he’d known he was going to witness spousal abuse today, he wouldn’t have gone along, no matter how much Jin-Woo claimed to need him.
Jin-Chul buried his face in Jin-Woo’s chest and tried to forget. After a while, he fell asleep, and dreamt of a world of endless blue skies, and buildings that glittered with gems and gold, which looked like castles, but were really prisons.