The Hunter’s Gonna Lay Low Chapter 9

Meanwhile, in the narrow alley near the house, two men wearing identical long padding jackets had entered. The man holding a radio muttered.

“I think this is the target’s house? But there’s no particular movement.”

“What, Min Gijeok warned us so much… For all that, it’s kind of anticlimactic? Maybe he just went to sleep?”

The man sitting on the trash can lid, chewing gum with a smacking sound, hunched his body. As the streetlight poured over his back, the white letters “PADO” written on the back of his long padding jacket shimmered and revealed themselves.

“Hey, it’s cold. Let’s wait just 30 more minutes… If there’s no movement by then, let’s head back.”

“Got it.”

“Let’s buy some fish-shaped bread on the way back too.”

“Sounds good. Ugh, what kind of fate is this, doing overtime that isn’t even in my destiny.”

“I know, right.”

The last bit of agreement was in a voice they had never heard before. Before the two startled men could even react, a plastic bag was suddenly thrown over their heads.

Whack! Something heavy struck their stomachs. The man holding the radio let out a “keuk” and doubled over. It was such a hard hit that cold sweat poured down from a single kick. Damn… it hurts so much! But the pain was too great for him to thrash around carelessly. The unfamiliar voice muttered.

“This much should be…”

“Kuk, w-who…”

“Oh, sorry.”

Thwack! This time a strong pain came to the back of his head. In the consciousness fading to black, the unfamiliar voice sounded gentle.

“I hit too weakly.”

‘Fuck, you said we just had to watch…’

Who hits one more time saying they hit too weakly? I don’t need this kind of kindness. With that thought as his last, the man rolled his eyes back and lost consciousness.

“…Done?”

Wijae checked the condition of the two fallen men. Pulse… beating fine. Breathing… seeing the plastic surface flutter up and down, they were breathing fine. After confirming they were properly unconscious, Wijae peeled off the ‘Family of Delivery’ plastic bags he had put on them before the crime.

He thought one hit as weakly as possible would do it, but perhaps because they were Awakened, they were tougher than expected and he had to hit them one more time. Wijae squatted next to the men and muttered.

“Sorry. I’ll search your wallets.”

After asking for understanding from the men who couldn’t hear him, he rummaged through the long padding pockets. Fortunately, without needing to use more force, he found a wallet in the first long padding pocket he searched. Do they have business cards? As Wijae rummaged through the contents, he grinned. There it is.

Pado Guild Combat Support Team 1

Rank B Woo Changhyeok

‘A Pado Guild…’

Seeing that “PADO” was also written on the long padding the men were wearing, it didn’t seem to be a fake business card. It was also a name familiar to his ears, having come up several times from the regular hunter customers at the hangover soup restaurant.

Wijae first carefully put the wallet back in the pocket, then placed the business card he had taken out on the ground. And taking a ballpoint pen from his apron pocket,

Click. He wrote crooked letters with his left hand.

Touch them and you die

Where should he put it so they’d see it right away? Wijae, looking around, decided to just place it in the man’s hand. He sat the two unconscious men side by side leaning against the wall, then leisurely left the spot.

∞ ∞ ∞

Returning to the shop, the old clock was already pointing to 11:45.

“Ah, time is tighter than I thought.”

Because of the uninvited guests who had come one after another, he had to busily prepare from now until the shop’s opening time. Fortunately, Wijae didn’t need much sleep, so staying up all night wasn’t a big problem. After putting on a hygiene cap and hygiene mask, he suddenly looked down at the apron he was wearing.

The damn logo was proudly showing off its white presence right in the center. Lee Sayoung’s rude appearance automatically rose in his mind.

“You saw everything, you fuckin’ apron.”

“The ladle too.”

…Damn it. Wijae irritably threw off the fuckin’ apron. Instead, he took out an apron with a cute toad drawn on it and put it on, then slapped both his cheeks with his palms hard enough to make a sound. It was a race against time until the shop opened. Wijae washed his hands thoroughly three times before taking out the meat he had soaked to drain the blood.

While mechanically carrying out the familiar work, the end of all his thoughts headed toward Lee Sayoung, who had suddenly rushed in like Pado. What was the reason he had bothered to tell him his name? Confidence that they would meet again? An expression of intent for him to look him up? Either way, he didn’t like it.

Wijae shook the skimmer with a dubious face.

‘Somehow it feels like I’m losing.’

Moreover, he had expected him to keep clinging annoyingly, but it was also strange that he let him go so easily. Was it confidence that he could find him wherever he hid?

‘Search all you want. See if you can find me.’

He had already had a tail attached once, but that place was the house where the grandmother and Haeun mainly lived, so he just wouldn’t go there except when absolutely necessary.

Surely he wouldn’t think he was boiling hangover soup at a hangover soup restaurant. Wijae drained the blood water and shook off the moisture. What was important to him now was gathering information. You have to know your enemy to find a way to deal with them.

Wijae, filling the pot he had drained the blood from with fresh water, spoke in clear, precise pronunciation.

“Hey Nexby, search Lee Sayoung.”

—Searching the internet for Lee Sayoung.

Before long, Nexby displayed the search results on the phone screen.

“…What?”

Is this really a search for Lee Sayoung? Wijae stared at the screen for a long while, eyes wide, mechanically moving only his hands. The search results were so numerous that the scroll bar had become endlessly small. What the hell is this bastard’s identity!

“Korea’s third S-rank Awakened is born!”

“New Ranking 1st Place Lee Sayoung, Who Is He?”

“[Chun Soojin’s Column] Can the New No. 1 Fill J’s Void?”

“Lee Sayoung speaks for the first time since awakening… ‘Pado Guild will be run as a small elite group'”

No… He was this famous?

Wijae paused his work for a moment and carefully scanned the article and post titles one by one.

“Unshakeable No. 1 Lee Sayoung, Controversy Over Attitude at Official Events…”

The fact that the cocky gas mask concept-obsessed guy was an S-rank hunter matched what Wijae had felt with his whole body, so it wasn’t surprising. But, he’s the current No. 1 in Korea?

‘Why did I have to run into the No. 1 of all people?’

Wijae pressed his forehead with his wrist instead of his water-soaked palm. No, why was the guy who’s supposedly the strongest in the country beating people up in a back alley? Is life that leisurely?

The old Cha Wijae would have thought, ‘If a bastard like that is No. 1, Korea is fucking doomed!’ but now his own fate was so wretched that he had no time to think about Korea’s future. In fact, Korea 8 years ago was more ruined than now.

‘At this level, it’s become quite livable.’

He had planned to quietly boil hangover soup and live out his remaining years. Was the problem that it wasn’t just any hangover soup restaurant but specifically one with many regular hunter customers? Wijae traced his memories toward the root of all evil, like salmon swimming upstream against a flowing river.

No, who would have known so many hunters would come to this hangover soup restaurant? Wijae had simply gone there after seeing the “Hiring Restaurant Auntie” notice on the door of his benefactor grandmother’s shop. If the problem was that he went even though he wasn’t an auntie, he had nothing to say.

It was somehow strange that every customer coming to the shop was a hunter, so he searched it up, and there were more than one or two posts about it being a famous restaurant among hunters. He should have searched in advance. By the time he regretted it, he had already been reborn as a master of hall serving sent from heaven. After this incident, Wijae developed the habit of searching anything on the internet.

“My luck is dirt poor too.”

Actually, Wijae felt wronged. He hadn’t known the hangover soup restaurant he got a job at to hide his strength and live ordinarily would be a place like this, and he couldn’t even imagine that the opponent he revealed his carefully hidden strength to would be the current No. 1. Why does the coincidence of being struck by lightning while walking down the street only happen to him?

Letting out a deep sigh, Wijae took out the meat according to the timing and rinsed it in cold water. Thoughts about Lee Sayoung naturally led to today’s events. As Wijae retraced the day in his mind, he suddenly paused.

‘The guy that shoots thorns, and the No. 1 coming to an alley like this to deal with it.’

There was more than one or two questionable points. Wijae paused his work before trimming the other ingredients and brought his phone.

Even after continuously entering keywords like thorns, hedgehog, etc. into the search engine, the content he was looking for didn’t appear. The thorns were clearly not a size or shape that could be hidden by hiding, yet not only were there no eyewitness accounts, but not even similar search results appeared.

If so, it was one of two things. Either information was still circulating underground, or information was being controlled from the top.

Either way, it was familiar to Cha Wijae. An era where hunters become the nation’s military power. When a hunter’s information was judged to be related to national interests, it was quite common for everything related to them to be treated as a national secret. He didn’t need to look far—J himself was that very person.

Wijae’s head spun quickly.

‘The current risk factors are… Lee Sayoung finding me, and the safety of the grandmother and Haeun being threatened.’

For the latter, it did bother him that Pado Guild had found out the address of the house where the grandmother and Haeun lived in their attempt to find him. But Pado was, thanks to Guild Master Lee Sayoung’s name value, more famous than expected, and with many eyes watching, they wouldn’t recklessly touch regular people. They were also under the surveillance and checks of the Awakened Management Agency.

‘Well, I gave them a warning too.’

Then all that remained was Lee Sayoung finding out his whereabouts. Wijae let out yet another sigh while cutting the radish in half. Fortunately among misfortunes, his face was more than half covered because he was wearing a mask, and he hadn’t told him his name either.

All that guy knew was… Wijae blankly looked at the fuckin’ apron he had hung up. Just that damned apron and the ladle he had used at the hangover soup restaurant for over 5 years—which had gloriously died in Lee Sayoung’s hands today.

‘There’s a possibility he could extract information through Haeun, but since we’re not blood family, nothing would come up on paper either.’

But by some coincidence, by some chance… if Lee Sayoung came to this hangover soup restaurant? It wasn’t that the thought didn’t occur to him, but Cha Wijae just grinned.

“As if that would happen.”

A brat walking around wearing a concept-obsessed gas mask wouldn’t walk into a hangover soup restaurant on his own two feet, a place where those who have tasted the alcohol of life go crazy for, right?

Wijae filled the large pot with water and gazed at the pitch-black darkness of dawn.

It had only been a few months since he hid his strength, and already a crisis was coming. Life really doesn’t go the way you want it to.