The Hunting Dog of the Prestigious Family Has Returned Chapter 49

The smile I’d been wearing nearly cracked in an instant.

Insane. Insane. Insane!

How on earth had he found out?

Where had I slipped up?

That thought lasted only a moment.

I stole a glance at Kim Jungheon’s face, and understood at once.

‘No. He hasn’t found out.’

It was nothing more than a hypothesis built from inference and deduction. There was no evidence.

Having made my assessment, I opened my mouth immediately and answered Kim Jungheon.

“It was I who brought Young Master Hyunwoo to that building, yes…. but I did not lay a hand on him myself.”

“…….”

It wasn’t a lie.

The one who killed Jo Seonghwan was Mooyoung, not me.

Apparently failing to catch my meaning, Kim Jungheon furrowed his brow slightly and asked again.

“Your reason for drawing Hyunwoo into this?”

“Because there was a command from Young Master Hyunwoo to report Young Master Jo Seonghwan’s wrongdoings.”

“That is false.”

A single decisive word.

With it, Kim Jungheon’s gaze began to bore straight through me.

“That Hyunwoo fool knew nothing. Not that Jo Seonghwan had been breeding monsters, not that he had opened a rift. Not a single one. He merely raided the research facility on your word, and detected the rift there.”

“…….”

“However, according to the investigation by the family’s informants, you had been running his errands and playing his dog right up until the moment all this happened. It would have been the ideal position from which to orchestrate the whole affair.”

A faint pressure of phase power began to weigh down on my body.

As though this were the last chance, Kim Jungheon looked at me again and asked.

“Speak. Why did you scheme this.”

Right. Here is where it truly begins.

I gathered a mind that felt on the verge of collapse and spoke toward Kim Jungheon.

“Because I knew in advance that the Pungyang Jo clan was going to wage a factional war against the main family.”

“Internal conflict?”

For the first time, a crack crossed Kim Jungheon’s face.

I had deliberately used the phrase “internal conflict” instead of “treason.”

The reason was simple.

Fine words about cutting down traitors were nothing but a justification.

What mattered most to him was the safety of the family.

“Jo Seonghwan was operating a research facility inside Hanseong, secretly refining monster cores without the Administration’s knowledge. He was plotting to arm his guards with weapons created from those cores, break through the royal guard, and strike at the main family.”

This was information I had not even shared with Kim Hyunwoo.

A final card I had prepared in anticipation of this situation being exposed.

“Do you have evidence?”

“I do.”

I produced a monster core I had prepared before entering.

One of the 120 monster cores I had stolen from the Pungyang Jo clan’s research facility.

Kim Jungheon received it and examined it carefully for a moment.

“A monster core with no serial number engraved.”

Apparently sensing the phase power flowing from the monster core, Kim Jungheon’s face darkened.

“Jo Gangwoon. So he had been scheming this far.”

“I understand that it is right to avoid conflict between noble families as much as possible. However….”

“If they had moved first, then the story is different. Your actions were not wrong.”

Kim Jungheon sat lost in thought for a time without speaking.

But that too was brief.

“The conflict with the Pungyang Jo clan was unavoidable, then.”

Kim Jungheon, who had been looking at the monster core in his hand, set it down on the table and spoke.

“I will not ask why you did not report this directly to me. It was surely Hyunwoo who silenced you. He would have had no thought to spare from building up his own faction.”

“I am sorry.”

I answered with my head lowered, but Kim Jungheon seemed uninterested and continued to say what he wished.

“Have you decided to become Hyunwoo’s instrument?”

“I have no connections within the family. If I can work at Young Master Hyunwoo’s side, what greater honor could there be.”

“I see.”

What on earth was he thinking.

After looking at me with those inscrutable eyes, Kim Jungheon slowly opened his mouth.

“How old are you this year.”

He didn’t even know his own child’s age.

I swallowed the hollow laugh that rose to my lips.

“Fifteen.”

“Fifteen…. fifteen.”

Kim Jungheon murmured my age again as though turning something over in his mind.

Then, as though he had decided something on his own terms, he nodded and rose to his feet.

“Fortuitously appropriate.”

“Pardon?”

I asked back in confusion, and.

“When the time comes, I will send word.”

“…….”

“I will send court robes along with the message. Upon receiving word, you are to enter the palace.”

A single offhand remark, and my head grew complicated.

Enter the palace?

What in the world is this nonsense?

Not understanding what he meant, I stood bewildered, and Kim Jungheon looked my way and slowly opened his mouth.

“I will petition His Majesty to bestow an official post upon you.”

---

Brrrrraaaah!

The large-caliber minigun mounted on the gunship opened fire.

Tracer rounds pouring down to earth in cascades of red flame.

What received that hail of armor-piercing rounds was a creature that could not by any means be called human.

“Grwaaaahhhh!”

An exoskeletal body composed of dark red carapace.

Claws that sliced through third-grade artificial bodies like tofu, and eyes that held no trace of reason.

“Monsters,” the culprits that had spread from the Rift Incident three centuries ago to reduce seventy percent of the world to wasteland.

“Flying Tiger Unit Three is suppressing the monster cluster at the front line!”

“Regroup the front line! Evacuate the wounded and the rest follow me! Now or never!”

The surging monsters, the heavy weapons holding them back, and the augmented soldiers loaded thick with prosthetics.

Not one without scars, not one with a body still intact.

Men of steel, each carrying different wounds and patched together with different artificial bodies.

Yet they moved as though one body, with thorough coordination and division of labor, succeeding in herding the monster cluster into a single location.

And in the next moment.

“Spotter!”

“Target designation complete! Headquarters commencing artillery barrage! Time to impact: 3…! 2…! 1……!”

Before the spotter’s signal had even finished, cluster munitions rained down on the gathered monster cluster.

BOOM!

An explosions, acrid smoke, and the lethal sight of unexploded submunitions scattering in all directions.

And among all that, the monsters being crushed, screaming and spurting yellow fluid.

This place was the Northeast Frontier.

The front line defending against the monsters surging from the contaminated zones of Manchuria pressing into Joseon.

“Is this true? The one who arranged what happened in Hanseong was….”

The temporary command post established in the middle of that front line.

Yoo Sanghyeon, who had been studying the battle map, asked toward the voice coming from the radio.

-Young Master Kim Changwoon and ourselves. Thanks to the monster the general sent us, we were able to accomplish great things.

“Ha….”

An eerie voice modulation that produced a different voice for each word and syllable.

Hearing that voice, Yoo Sanghyeon swallowed a disbelieving laugh.

“A single female monster, in surplus out here on the Northeast Frontier, utterly demolished the great Pungyang Jo clan.”

-We were surprised as well. We hadn’t anticipated things would develop to this scale.

“That’s true, come to think of it. It was the same when he rescued Arin and me.”

Having muttered that, Yoo Sanghyeon recalled the boy he’d met in Hanseong.

Moving everything within reach like pieces on a board game.

An unwavering certainty, and a boldness to throw himself personally into the heart of danger.

He had met countless people on the battlefield, but never before had he encountered someone with those qualities.

‘No. It is the opposite.’

Kim Changwoon. What that boy wielded was conspiracy.

Loading meaning into each and every action, hiding himself behind a smile, lacing each word with a blade.

For someone who had spent a lifetime on the battlefield, it was a capability he could never possess.

He was a warrior, not a politician.

-General?

“……Ah. My apologies.”

At the voice of ‘Imae mask’ coming from the radio, Yoo Sanghyeon snapped back to attention.

-We will contact you as new information comes from Hanseong. Maintaining the connection too long is dangerous, so I will take my leave.

“Please do. The conversation was a pleasure, thanks to you.”

Communication terminated.

Yoo Sanghyeon looked at the Choraengi mask in his hand, then turned to his adjutant and asked.

“Arin?”

“Infiltrated the contaminated zone with the third battalion. Jumped in at coordinate 310, the position corresponding to the core. The battle by now should be…….”

Just as the adjutant was spreading the tactical map and about to continue explaining.

Thud!

A sound that shook the earth rocked the barracks once.

A massive impact that shook the entire front line.

It was an explosion generated by phase power.

“Battle… over.”

The instant Yoo Sanghyeon recognized that.

The adjutant, who had been looking at the tactical map, muttered with an astonished expression.

“Rift response has completely vanished from that coordinate.”

Hearing those words, Yoo Sanghyeon immediately pulled back the tent flap of the temporary command post and looked at the smoke rising from behind the defensive line.

Beyond the monsters’ defensive perimeter, where the infiltration unit had headed.

The location of the rift’s core. The battlefield where Arin had been deployed.

“Confirmed destruction of the core stone at the rift’s depths! The monster army is retreating! We’ve won!”

“Yeeaaaaaah!”

Simultaneously with the radio operator’s cry at receiving the report, the soldiers holding the defensive line began to cheer.

The dark clouds that had formed from the rift cleared, and the bright blue afternoon sky revealed itself.

A sky without a single cloud, perfectly clear.

A sight from the Northeast Frontier impossible to see in Hanseong.

“I told you to raise her strong.”

Yoo Sanghyeon murmured quietly, looking toward the horizon where Arin would be.

“So that no one could ever harm that child. And so that someday, she could change her own world by her own hand.”

The blue sky with the dark clouds swept away.

A transport helicopter approaching, cutting through that blue sky.

Feeling Arin’s phase power aboard it, Yoo Sanghyeon thought.

The power to push back an entire front line at twelve years old.

The real combat experience given by the harsh conditions of the Northeast Frontier, and his own instruction on top of it.

If she took all of this in…….

“It will be as you said.”

That child Changwoon had saved.

Would become the hero to change Joseon.