Chapter 205: Home
TL: SHW
“Ugh. What? You’re not going to America?”
“Why are you the one disappointed?”
“Of course I’m disappointed! If Henry dies too, Noah’s gonna be seriously, unbelievably pissed!”
“I doubt she’ll stop at being pissed...”
Hope caught Gamble’s quiet mutter and nodded exaggeratedly.
“Exactly!”
“Whatever the reason, just know that’s how things stand.”
There was no reason to spell out every detail of our complicated family situation. Hope stuck out his lower lip.
“Fine. But I do have to tell Noah what I did here, you know? Even if I don’t want to, she’ll ask.”
“Record the call and tell her you had a good time here before leaving.”
“...But you’re still going to catch Henry, right?”
“Why?”
“Hey, I’m a victim too.”
Hope quickly backed down under Hong Seok-young’s sharp glare.
“I at least need to warn him to stop going around using my face...”
I looked at Hong Seok-young. He nodded. Hope’s face lit up.
“Great, great! Then I’ll really get into telling you about Noah!”
***
“And then Noah said...”
For exactly nineteen hours, Alex Hope rattled off an endless stream of information about Noah Michel’s life that somehow seemed useful and useless at the same time.
It stretched over roughly three days. We even kept to reasonable working hours. Fed him, too. The working conditions were far better than at the Ability Management Agency.
On the first day, I let him keep talking because I wanted to see what he had to say. From the second day onward, I let him continue because I wanted to see just how far he could take it.
The fact that he had nineteen hours’ worth of material was terrifying in more ways than one.
He readily answered the questions we threw in here and there, so it didn’t seem like he was doing this because there was something else he didn’t want to talk about.
He just...
“When else am I ever going to get to talk this much about Noah!”
Anyone listening would think he and Noah Michel couldn’t live without each other.
To be fair, “couldn’t live without each other” wasn’t entirely wrong. They were both doing their best to kill the other. Wasn’t that beautiful? People naturally knew more about the people they hated than about themselves or their friends. After all, they had to know their enemies well if they wanted to know exactly what would get under their skin.
Maybe one day even that kind of information would come in handy. Though even I had no idea where or how I was supposed to use the fact that Michel had once gotten indigestion from French fries and had disliked potato dishes ever since.
“You know what?”
Still, no one knew where life might lead or how things would turn out. Maybe one day Noah Michel would drop dead of a heart attack while eating French fries.
“Did you know Noah likes popcorn? She thinks it doesn’t fit the image she wants people to have of her, so she pretends she doesn’t like it... Isn’t that hilarious?”
Right. Maybe I could dream of assassinating Noah Michel with popcorn...
“And Sandra and I don’t really know much about that... Magic Association, was it? I don’t know much about that kind of stuff. Sem followed Noah around like she was her apprentice or something, so that’s how she ended up getting to know me too...”
“So we have no way of getting information on their factions or political infighting. We aren’t mages.”
“Yeah. That’s why I’m just telling you everything. Just because we don’t know doesn’t mean you guys don’t, right? You’ve got the Archmage too.”
Hope pointed at Kim Chae-min’s magic, which was still lingering around us.
“There might be something useful in all this.”
“......”
“Isn’t that why you’re recording this?”
The recording function was running on the phone sitting on the table. I had indeed left it there so I could play it for Kim Chae-min later, so I merely shrugged.
Of course, Noah Michel wasn’t the only thing we talked about.
“Noah Michel is one thing, but...”
“Hmm? Something else you want to know?”
“Monsters.”
“Monsters?”
“The monsters inside the dungeons.”
Hope tilted his head from side to side as he asked,
“You want me to tell you about the monsters who rode the Cradles?”
“What other monsters would I mean?”
“Umm...”
Hope scratched his cheek, looking troubled.
“I told you, even I don’t know who rode in them.”
“Did anyone ask you to tell us about every last one?”
“Oh. You didn’t?”
“Let’s start with your species.”
“Eek.”
Hope hunched his shoulders. Hong Seok-young showed him no mercy.
“That guy they call the king is a Fairy too, isn’t he?”
“Hmm...”
Hong Seok-young had spent a long time capturing Fairies who claimed to have come from the future. Unable to bring himself to ask outright about the part he must have been most curious about, he instead singled out one of the beings at the root of this entire mess.
“There are a lot of you, I hear? I’ve met quite a few myself.”
“All you did was meet them?”
“Would you like to share your friends’ fate?”
“No thanks.”
Hope grinned and shook his head.
“Let’s see... From what I know, Hunters were the reason people started calling us Fairies in the first place.”
Hope frowned. It wasn’t as if he would suddenly hesitate to talk now... He seemed more like he was searching for the right word.
“Still, I guess we’re no different from the fairies in the folklore around here when it comes to having rotten personalities!”
“That applies to you too, doesn’t it?”
“Come on. Where else are you going to find someone as nice as me?”
Needless to say, neither Hong Seok-young nor I agreed. Even Gamble looked unconvinced.
“But you’re asking later than I expected. Honestly, I thought you’d ask about this before Noah. I even spent ages before bed thinking about what I should tell you.”
“......”
“Were you that curious about Noah? I mean, she did like playing the mysterious type. Ah, seriously. I was starting to panic because I’d nearly run out of things I knew about her!”
“......”
Gamble squeezed her eyes shut.
Right. At least one of his guardians had a sense of shame.
***
And then.
November 7.
Woo I-rok and I left the pension.
I used the car Hong Seok-young had given me to move the few belongings we had. A few changes of clothes and Woo I-rok’s books were about it. Woo I-rok sat with the carrier containing Joker the cat on his lap and watched the scenery outside the window.
“Do I have to transfer schools?”
Woo I-rok’s biggest worry at the moment was whether he would have to change schools.
I had told him over and over that he didn’t have to, but he still seemed worried. I’d have been in trouble if I had gone ahead and transferred him without asking.
“I told you, you don’t have to. You’ll just need to wake up a little earlier in the morning.”
“...How much earlier?”
“Twenty minutes?”
He would spend ten of those minutes dawdling in bed anyway, so I deliberately padded the estimate.
“Eek. That much earlier?”
Woo I-rok immediately scowled.
“I have to go to work anyway, so I’ll drop you off at school on the way.”
“Work? At that pension?”
“Yeah.”
Once the Pilot High School building was finished, we would relocate there.
“Then wouldn’t it be easier for you to just keep living there?”
“That place is too badly damaged now. They’ll have to start repairs soon, so we’d have to move out anyway.”
Still, just in case, I asked.
“Why? Do you want to keep living there?”
“Not really.”
“Okay.”
“...What about the others?”
I looked quietly at Woo I-rok. For him, that was surprisingly honest.
So he really had gotten pretty attached after all.
“I haven’t seen them since Chuseok...”
Maybe I should have taken him over there to hang out at least once. Yoo Ji-eun usually showed up to harass me before I ever had time to miss her, so it had never occurred to me that Woo I-rok might be the one who missed them first.
“It’s the same for them. That pension was always just a temporary place to stay while the school building was under construction.”
“Temporary?”
“Yeah. Once the school is finished, everyone will move there. Why? Do you miss them?”
“......No.”
Woo I-rok pushed out his lips in a pout.
“I was just wondering if No. 3 got kicked out again.”
So that had been bothering him. No. 3 was at least someone he knew, so despite pretending not to care, he must have been worried in his own way.
Come to think of it, from what little I remembered, Woo I-rok had gotten anxious when No. 3 disappeared from the laboratory. If No. 3, who had been there for so long, could suddenly vanish, there had been no guarantee the same thing wouldn’t happen to him.
“He is studying hard too, just like you are.”
“......Hmph.”
Woo I-rok snorted, stuck a finger through the carrier bars, and started teasing the cat.
I couldn’t decide whether he was cute or not.
“When are we getting there?”
“We’re almost there. See over there? That apartment building.”
“Hmmm.”
He glanced out the window with a sullen look, but his excitement was obvious. I made a point of ignoring the familiar roads. Hong Seok-young’s apartment. Home.
The place where we would be living from now on.
Long story short, Woo I-rok loved the new place.
“Whoa!”
He had been excited from the moment we got into the elevator, and as soon as we stepped inside the apartment, he went thundering from one end to the other. I honestly couldn’t see how that was any different from a cat tearing around like a lunatic in the middle of the night.
...This was his first time living in an apartment, wasn’t it? I was about to tell him he couldn’t run around like that, then decided to let it slide for a little while. He was acting like a kid for once. Surely a few minutes wouldn’t hurt.
Watching him pant as he inspected every nook and cranny let me forget the troublesome reality awaiting us for a moment. Right. A break once in a while made it easier to focus on work.
I left Woo I-rok to explore to his heart’s content and looked around the apartment myself. I had already come by once to inspect it, leaving Hope with Hong Seok-young. I couldn’t exactly bring Woo I-rok here without even knowing what state the place was in.
“......”
Though I already knew what it would be like without looking.
Nothing had changed. More precisely, everything was exactly as Hong Seok-young had arranged it.
The same home as the one in my memories.
Even before I got the address, I had... sort of expected it.
This was the first home I had lived in with Father. That was back when Father was still primarily working as principal of Pilot High School. Unlike Woo I-rok, though, I had attended an elementary school about a ten-minute walk from here.
The people living here now were somehow the same and yet different, but the room Hong Seok-young had prepared for Woo I-rok was exactly as I remembered mine. Still, since Woo I-rok was a year younger than I had been, there were a few more colorful things around. Mostly the cat plushies Han Tae-kyung had given him... When did those get moved over here?
It was a three-bedroom apartment. One room was Woo I-rok’s, the largest was my bedroom, and the remaining room was the study.
After thoroughly inspecting even the bathroom, Woo I-rok came over to me.
“There are a lot of books in here. Do you read all of these?”
“Who knows...”
Maybe Hong Seok-young really had been telling the truth when he said he had originally intended to use the study himself. It looked exactly like Father’s study, which now remained only in my memories. Well, he was the same person.
We had given up this apartment after the Ability Management Agency was established and we moved to Seoul. In other words, this truly was a home that existed only in my memories.
“Ugh. They look boring. Who even reads books like these?”
“They’re not exactly books you read for fun.”
“Gate Occurrence Status Report... 2020?”
“That’s last year’s report.”
“Do you use all of these?”
I looked over the bookshelves in the study. The shelves covering an entire wall didn’t contain a single general-interest book. Every volume was a report stamped with a government seal. There were even reports from other countries. Things like these were hard to even get...
Then again. This was Hong Seok-young.
“I use all of them.”
“Seriously? Some of them are even in English.”
“Just because you can’t read them doesn’t mean I don’t use them.”
“...I can read them, you know?”
“Really?”
His pride apparently wounded by my smile, Woo I-rok began laboriously sounding out the title of one of the foreign-language reports.
Just because something was written in the Latin alphabet didn’t make it English. He was frowning fiercely as he struggled through French, and I found it too funny to correct him.
When was he going to realize that wasn’t English?
***
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