The Hunting Dog of the Prestigious Family Has Returned Chapter 70

Shk!

The sensation of something tearing through his insides.

Seong Ryeoun stopped the scream rising in his throat and slowly lowered his gaze.

A sword that had run through his chest.

Blood spilled from his mouth.

“Kuh, hah……!”

His eyes were filled with shock and bewilderment.

What had pierced through the Defense Commander’s ribs was the hwando of my bodyguard, Mooyoung.

Old and twisted as he was, still a phase power wielder.

This was the most efficient way to kill him.

“What do you think you’re doing…!”

Yoo Sanghyeon, startled out of his wits at Mooyoung killing the Defense Commander without a word, clenched his jaw and cried out.

Mixed into that gaze were bewilderment and a trace of anger.

But I was composed.

The reason I had told Mooyoung to kill Seong Ryeoun was simple.

From what I had seen of Yoo Sanghyeon’s character here, he would obviously end up saying something like sparing the man’s life, leaving a loose end behind.

“Don’t forget, General. We are preparing a revolution.”

I warned him in a sharp voice, and Yoo Sanghyeon, silent for a moment, gave a slow nod.

Looks like I’ll have to let him give me an earful later.

“……I instructed him to pierce the liver. Until the sword is pulled out, there will still be breath in him, so a last conversation should be possible.”

This was the last act of mercy I was offering.

Yoo Sanghyeon approached slowly, and the shoulders of Seong Ryeoun, collapsed on the ground, rose and fell.

“Defense Commander.”

“Ha, haha…!”

Seong Ryeoun, addressed by name, laughed in a sound like sobbing.

Blood that had surged up was staining his teeth red, but he made no move to spit it out.

“You’ve come all this way in person. I have nothing to offer you.”

The smile of a man who had already made his peace.

No, beyond making his peace, it was closer to a self-mocking sneer.

“Since when.”

At Seong Ryeoun’s question, Yoo Sanghyeon’s gaze wavered.

“……Since I took Arin to Hanseong.”

“The reason?”

“Because I nearly died at the hands of the nobles.”

Yoo Sanghyeon said it plainly.

At that short sentence, the corner of Seong Ryeoun’s mouth twitched.

“And so? You intend revenge?”

Seong Ryeoun’s eyes gleamed with a dull light.

Swallowing a dry cough, he asked, as if reproaching Yoo Sanghyeon.

“Like your soldiers said once. You’ve decided to kill all the aristocrats in Hanseong? Have you?!”

“I only wished to protect my daughter. My people.”

“Protect? Protect, you say? Hk…… hk hk hk……!”

Hearing Yoo Sanghyeon’s words, Seong Ryeoun let out a scornful laugh for all to see.

“You haven’t forgotten, have you? That you were the first one who tried to abandon the Northeast Frontier and go to the capital.”

His face twisted.

As his blood-soaked lip curled up, Yoo Sanghyeon’s pupils wavered.

“What? You want to deny it? You want to say you never did any such thing, that you always intended to stay with the people of the Northeast Frontier?! You can’t. Because you were exactly the same as me!”

And then that sneer turned into mockery.

“To pull your own daughter out of this hellish north! That’s why you went crawling to Hanseong, fawning all over those nobles! Isn’t that right, Iron Tiger General, sir? Kha-haha-!”

“……Yes. I did.”

Yoo Sanghyeon answered briefly and accepted the truth without flinching.

A better environment. A better life.

Because he had wanted to give those to Arin, he had sought to leave the Northeast Frontier.

But beneath that, there had also been the desire to escape his duties as Iron Tiger General and spend his remaining years in peace.

In the end, all of it had been his own selfishness.

“But. I came to understand something there.”

And then, in the next moment, the look in his eyes changed.

“That the nobles of the Administration and I could never share the same sky.”

“……!”

At those sharp, cutting eyes, Seong Ryeoun’s mouth fell open for an instant.

Only then did he understand.

Yoo Sanghyeon was no longer the affable man he had once been.

The eyes of a man who had made a resolution.

The face of a man who no longer hesitated.

He had the eyes not of a man, but of a tiger.

“What are you planning to do.”

Seong Ryeoun asked one last time.

His voice cracked roughly.

“Like that Secret Royal Inspector said, are you truly plotting a revolution? Do you and the Iron Tiger Army truly intend to make Joseon your enemy?!”

“No. I will do nothing.”

Yoo Sanghyeon stared down at him for a moment, then slowly shook his head.

“I will simply do as I always have. Guard the wall, and protect this country, Joseon.”

“……!”

“But.”

The moment Seong Ryeoun’s expression began to contort.

“Arin is different.”

Yoo Sanghyeon cut him off and spoke with resolve.

Arin? Was he speaking of his adopted daughter, Yoo Arin?

Why was that child’s name coming up here?

Receiving that puzzled gaze, Yoo Sanghyeon continued.

“When that child’s power reaches a certain point, and she comes to understand what she truly is, history will begin to move whether we wish it to or not.”

“History, what do you mean by…?”

“That is our Yoo family.”

Yoo Sanghyeon paused for a moment, then looked directly at the Defense Commander’s face and spoke.

“The promise to the old king that the Iron Tiger General must keep.”

“A promise. To the old king?”

The Defense Commander forced his mouth open with effort.

Even as he repeated those words, his expression was that of someone who could not bring himself to believe it.

Yet his eyes were already those of a man who had placed the final piece of a puzzle.

“For the people of this place, the word ‘promise’ is not a simple word.”

Seong Ryeoun repeated it, gasping for breath.

Without even wiping the blood trickling from his mouth, he called to mind the history he had been told.

Centuries ago, when King Gwangjo had driven back the monsters and built an absolute defense line here, in the north.

The Great Defense Wall, which stood at the center of that defense line, was not a simple defensive structure.

It was the foundation for closing the Great Rift that had erupted across Manchuria and recovering the lost territory.

Iron Tiger Fortress had originally been a Forward Base prepared for that expedition.

“The great king knew that day would come eventually, and he made a pledge to the Iron Tiger Army and the people of the Northeast Frontier.”

He murmured in a voice that was fading.

“That one day, without fail, he would destroy that Rift and bring light to the skies of this place. That he would reclaim the lost land of Manchuria and make it a home they could build anew.”

But that promise had never been kept.

The Rebellion of Crown Prince Yi Chieon.

The great king, whose heart was run through by his own son’s sword, could not rise from the throne where he sat in Geunjeongjeon Hall.

With his death, that promise too was buried in history.

And so the Northeast Frontier was forgotten.

Iron Tiger Fortress had to endure, day by day, in this barren land, neither fully dead nor fully alive.

And yet….

“Then, that child…?”

Seong Ryeoun strained to raise his head and asked Yoo Sanghyeon.

Seong Ryeoun’s voice was trembling.

He understood.

And because he understood, he did not want to believe it.

“Yes.”

Yoo Sanghyeon nodded and said with conviction.

“That child is the royal bloodline that we tigers have been waiting for, across hundreds of years.”

“Ha…… haha……!”

He twisted his blood-soaked lips upward and laughed.

It was the moment so many questions resolved themselves.

Why Yoo Sanghyeon had changed so much after returning from Hanseong.

Why he had sent a child who hadn’t even come of age to the battlefield, and yet in front of him had always refused to show it.

“Was that it. That child…!”

Yes. Now everything made sense.

Because if he had found out about that child’s existence, he would have handed the information to the Administration without a second thought.

If he had found out about her power, he would have sold that child out without any hesitation at all.

So this man had been raising that child without anyone knowing.

The bloodline of a new king.

A spark of war that could shake the foundations of Joseon’s power structure from its roots.

“Foolish.”

But the surprise passed quickly.

Seong Ryeoun muttered toward Yoo Sanghyeon, as if laughing at him.

“That ancient promise…. a paltry pledge three hundred years old, and you still intend to keep it?”

Yoo Sanghyeon said nothing.

But unable to contain his feelings, Seong Ryeoun immediately cried out.

“The king abandoned us long ago!”

His eyes were red with blood.

“The king who settled onto that throne never came back, and the world of the nobles shows no sign of ending even after centuries! Those monsters out there keep multiplying without end, and we tigers are locked in a cage, just waiting for the day we die!”

“And so you fell this low? To escape your cage, you tried to sell out the other family members locked inside it?”

“Yes!”

Seong Ryeoun felt that his voice would no longer come out.

His voice was cracking.

But Seong Ryeoun wrung out the last of his strength and screamed with everything he had left.

“The world will never change…! We, all of us, were abandoned long ago…!”

Resentment, grief, bitterness.

A final cry gathering all of those things sliced through the cold night air and scattered.

“…….”

And then what followed was a terrible silence.

Some time passed, but the fallen old body did not move.

Defense Commander Seong Ryeoun breathed his last.

“……Huu.”

Yoo Sanghyeon said nothing.

He simply gazed at the man who had once been his comrade with a cold expression.

But after gathering his thoughts for a moment, Yoo Sanghyeon walked slowly toward him and closed the eyes of the dead Seong Ryeoun.

“More than a corrupt official deserves.”

“Is that so? From your perspective, perhaps.”

Changwoon, watching from the side, said with a sardonic tone, but Yoo Sanghyeon opened his mouth quietly with a weary smile.

“He may have fallen this low now, but the Defense Commander was not corrupt from the start. The 3rd Forward Base was once the finest elite of our Iron Tiger Fortress.”

“…….”

Looking at the unit badge of the 3rd Base pinned to the Defense Commander’s chest, the tips of Yoo Sanghyeon’s fingers trembled, ever so slightly.

Corrupt and fallen as he was, he had been a comrade who had fought together for decades.

Before being broken in by despair and rotting away, he too had been a tiger, born and raised in the Northeast Frontier.

“The reason he fell. His feelings too, I can well imagine.”

Yoo Sanghyeon said quietly.

“Perhaps beating against a world that will not change is also a futile thing. I am a dull man, a foolish soldier.”

“…….”

“And yet. Who can say what kind of world Arin, and the generation after her, will live in.”

Yoo Sanghyeon closed his eyes as if mourning his old comrade, then opened them again.

The brief mourning ended there.

Yoo Sanghyeon gave a short gesture, and the Hahoe agents who walked up on either side of him brought flamethrowers to bear on the corpse.

Bodies slain by monsters must be burned.

A regulation that was perfect for destroying evidence.

Whoosh!

Yoo Sanghyeon looked up at the cold night sky.

The sky of the Northeast Frontier, stained black.

Acrid smoke and the smell of burning flesh carried on the wind.

Through the dense dark clouds, the sun was slowly rising.

“And so, we will change the world.”

He murmured quietly.

“And we will make those who drew their swords on us first pay the price.”

Yoo Sanghyeon’s gaze gleamed cold.

He no longer hesitated.