In the end, getting Park Taehan to leave had been a failure. He stayed by my side until the very last, listening to the doctor’s diagnosis alongside me.
I didn’t particularly mind. If anything, I couldn’t understand why Park Taehan had come rushing to find me in such a panic to begin with.
“……”
In front of the hospital entrance, Park Taehan stood in a daze. The rain hadn’t let up, and drops fell steadily onto his shoulders, soaking them through.
I opened the umbrella I’d been holding. Then, after a brief hesitation, I turned to him and asked.
“Don’t you have an umbrella? Want to share?”
With mana control, I could probably block out rain this light entirely. But I asked out of courtesy — in exactly that spirit and nothing more.
No answer came.
I watched Park Taehan standing there with his head bowed for a moment, then stopped waiting and started walking.
One step. Two steps. Three steps.
The only thing that grew clearer was the sound of rain falling against the umbrella. The distance between me and Park Taehan slowly widened with each drop. If I kept going like this, we’d just part ways here. That was what I thought.
And then.
“Cha Inhu…”
A voice so small it was nearly swallowed by the rain slipped from his lips.
“Cha Inhu…!”
I stopped walking. Slowly, I turned around to look at him.
“What?”
Park Taehan still had his head bowed. Rainwater ran down through his hair, and beneath it, his lips trembled almost imperceptibly.
“…Why are you…”
He hesitated for a long moment, then finally lifted his head. Dark eyes, wet with rain, looked up at me.
“Why do you look like it doesn’t even affect you?”
“What doesn’t?”
“…You’re dying.”
Park Taehan bit down hard on his lip. The voice that slipped through was just as drenched as the rain falling around us.
“You’re going to die in a year…!”
“……”
I couldn’t find an answer right away. There was nothing to say. And for good reason — this death was a necessary step toward returning to my original body.
That wasn’t all. Death had always been close to me. I couldn’t even properly count how many times I’d nearly died while working through the quests.
But what lay ahead of me now was different. It was simply the death that would come after finishing all the quests — the one that would send me back to my real body. What could possibly be better than that?
Still, I couldn’t just tell him that directly. I chose my words carefully.
“If I weren’t okay with it — what would change?”
“……”
Park Taehan bit his lip again. The silence stretched on in the rain, him standing there without a word to give back.
Instead, he slowly moved through the rain toward me. Those shoulders that had always seemed broad and solid looked, in this moment, unusually drawn in.
One step, then another. A hesitant, halting movement — and then Park Taehan carefully reached out a hand. And just like that, he pulled me into his arms. I blinked once, thrown off. It was a touch I hadn’t seen coming.
“No. I don’t want this.”
“……?”
It was baffling. He was someone who had always been intensely averse to any physical contact between men. The fact that this same Park Taehan had pulled me into his arms made everything feel even more surreal.
“Don’t die… Cha Inhu…”
His voice, still soaked through, brushed past my ear. Something warm and damp — rain, or breath, I couldn’t tell — pressed against my skin. The arms wrapped around me tightened, little by little.
“Please… hyung…. Don’t leave me behind.”
I couldn’t make sense of the situation at all. I did my best to push Park Taehan away, but a C-rank in front of an S-rank was no different from a paper doll.
The rain just kept falling, covering the two of us.
In the end, I brought Park Taehan — who had gone so far as to cry — back to my place.
A man over 190 cm tall stepped into my small single room, and the whole space felt instantly full. The air seemed heavier too, and there was an almost suffocating sense that even the room to breathe had shrunk.
I handed him a towel without a word.
But Park Taehan just stood there, still. He showed no intention of drying himself off. Rainwater dripped from the ends of his wet hair and pooled on the floor, but he didn’t seem to notice even that.
A sigh escaped me before I could stop it.
In the end, I took the towel back and dried his hair for him. Only then did Park Taehan lower himself slightly. Seeing that reaction, he didn’t seem to have completely lost his mind.
“……”
“……”
The silence ran unusually long today. I dried his hair and shoulders well enough, then tossed the damp towel into the laundry bin.
“What do you want to drink?”
Even as I asked, I was already making hot chocolate. He looked like the type who’d down a bitter espresso without blinking — but I’d long since known that wasn’t actually the case.
To be precise, this was a preference I had created for him.
I thought back to the night Park Taehan had hunted his first monster. A seventeen-year-old boy, trembling with fear and covered in blood and dirt. That night, a single cup of hot chocolate I’d offered without thinking had been the beginning of his taste for it.
“…Hot chocolate.”
“Alright.”
An answer I’d been expecting. I nodded toward the floor — a wordless gesture to sit down.
Worn wallpaper and an old lamp. A neatly folded blanket in the corner and a small table. Park Taehan stepped into the space and carefully settled himself in. Outside, the rain was still loud.
Thud. I set a mug of hot chocolate down on the small table. Sweet steam curled slowly upward from the cup. I took a seat as well.
“Have you calmed down a little?”
Park Taehan said nothing. He wasn’t much of a talker to begin with, but tonight the silence was stretching too long even for him.
Was the fact that I’d be dead in a year really that much of a shock to him?
I could’ve died at any point…
After possessing this body, death had never been a special event for me — it had been close to ordinary life. I had assumed Park Taehan understood that too.
I rested my chin in my hand and watched him. Each time I blinked, the old lamp flickered ever so slightly. The room dimmed for a moment, then came back. In those brief flashes of darkness, his face changed, little by little. Like someone in the middle of falling apart.
“…Why are you still living here?”
The question that broke the silence came from a direction I hadn’t expected at all.
“It’s not like you don’t have money.”
Just a C-rank. But a C-rank who was one of the Hunters who had saved the world.
The wealth and recognition I’d accumulated were on par with any S-rank. He was right that money wasn’t the issue. I simply had no reason to move somewhere better. More precisely — I never felt the need.
I said it plainly.
“It’s not like I’ll need it much longer anyway. What’s the point in moving?”
Crack. The handle of the mug Park Taehan had been holding snapped clean off. The sharp sound rang out as the pieces hit the floor. The hot chocolate that had still been steaming spilled slightly over the rim.
Seeing that, a short noise escaped me.
“That was one of my favorites, you know.”
“Ha.”
Park Taehan exhaled quietly. Too rough to be a laugh, too compressed to be a sigh. He stared down at the broken mug for a moment, then slowly raised his head.
His brow was deeply furrowed.
“You care about a cup like this, and yet…”
The words cut off there. He pressed his lips shut, said nothing for a moment, then opened his mouth again.
“…How is it that you don’t…”
The unfinished sentence dropped into the middle of the room and just sat there. The incomplete words felt sharper than the broken shards of the cup.
“What am I to you, exactly?”
“……? A comrade, obviously.”
“A comrade…”
Of course, comrade didn’t refer to Park Taehan alone. Every Hunter who had saved the world alongside me was my comrade.
Park Taehan turned the word over slowly. He seemed to roll it around in his mouth several times before finally letting out a short, bitter scoff.
“You call this how you treat a comrade?”
“……”
This time it was my turn to frown. I had no idea what Park Taehan was actually trying to say.
“A comrade… that means someone who values the other person more… doesn’t it?”
Park Taehan paused. As if catching his breath, or pressing something down. Then, in a low, sunken voice, he added,
“And it wasn’t anyone else who taught me that… it was you. You were the one who told me.”
“I do value all of you.”
That wasn’t a deflection.
Honestly, without their help, I never would have finished the quests. We had fought together, trusted each other’s backs, and survived to the end. I genuinely cared about them, and I carried a real sense of gratitude on top of that.
That much was certain.
“Then why did someone like that hide being sick?”
“…I wasn’t really hiding it.”
I paused for a moment, then added steadily,
“I was going to say something once I got the official diagnosis — cough—!”
At that moment, bright red blood came up with the cough. I clapped a hand over my mouth and reached out for some tissue.
