TDLHRH 2

20XX, Quebec, Canada.

Fairmont Le Château Frontenac Hotel.

The long, beautiful Saint Lawrence River, bordered by the antique hotel, had a gaping, pitch-black hole torn into it. Neither a single rat nor any tourists remained in the hotel or on the streets. The only living beings present were humans armed with military weapons. Clutching sharp swords, spears, and ornate staffs, they stood motionless, staring at the ominous hole in tense silence.

{…Can we survive this?}

{Who knows? If we make it back alive, it’ll be the kind of miracle you only hear about in stories.}

{For 100 years, there hasn’t been a gate of this size. Could this really be the beginning of the end?}

A woman twirled the cold, gleaming blade of her spear in her hand as she let out a dry laugh in response to the man holding the staff.

{Cowardly Maki, you’re a gate-apocalypse believer now? You used to say not to compare this to an A-class gate, claiming to be an A+ hunter yourself. Was that all just bravado?}

{Don’t tease me! Rosalyn, you’re thinking the same thing! That aura is so ominous… Maybe the Demon Realm we only hear about in legends really exists.}

{You do realize that the monster under your bed is more plausible than the existence of the Demon Realm, right? Or is it because you’re near death that you’ve turned into such a sentimental guy?}

Though Rosalyn teased with a voice full of laughter, her face was set in a grim expression. While the two in the rear exchanged words, the armored individuals standing guard ahead were as still and silent as statues.

Just as Rosalyn was about to crack another joke to ease the tension, the sudden tremor of the gate shattered whatever composure the expedition had managed to maintain, plunging their faces into despair.

{Tanks to the front! Hold the line at all costs! If even one monster breaks through, it’ll mean the death of the entire expedition! You die holding the line; that’s an order!}

{Yes, sir!}

The air was thick with tension. Warriors poured mana into their weapons, readying for combat. It was Mark, a mage squinting hard, who broke the moment.

{Wait a second! There’s someone there. Looks… very young… a girl.}

{Mark, seriously. Did you get high or something?}

{No, I swear! There’s really someone there!}

Frowning deeply, Mark waved his staff, and a large water droplet floated into the air. As if projecting the scene before them, an image appeared on its surface. Just as Mark had claimed, a person—someone who looked like a young Asian girl—was reclining lazily atop a massive black skeleton. Even Rosalyn, who had been mocking him moments before, fell silent.

{I told you! It’s a person!}

{It… it doesn’t make any sense. Could it be bait? A hostage?}

{Even if it’s a dragon, that’s just a pile of bones. It’s undead! It couldn’t have the intelligence to come up with such a plan.}

{Then… what on earth is that girl?}

One of the expedition members muttered in disbelief, prompting Rosalyn to snap at him.

{A catastrophic gate of unprecedented size opens for the first time in 100 years, a bone dragon emerges, and there’s a person riding on top of it? It makes more sense to think it’s a monster wearing human skin!}

Grinding her teeth, she layered buff skills upon herself, the very ones that had earned her the title of an A-class lancer. The Exploding Lance. True to its name, the skill multiplied her attack power severalfold upon impact, saving her life on more occasions than she could count. But this was a bone dragon. She would need to multiply her attack power tenfold—no, twentyfold. Resolving to give it everything, Rosalyn gripped her lance so tightly that her palms threatened to burst as she gathered mana.

When she suddenly dashed forward, Mark was startled out of his wits but instinctively swung his staff to support her. Leaping from one airborne platform to the next, laid out by Mark, Rosalyn soared through the air until she thrust her blazing lance toward the bone dragon. Just as the weapon made contact, amidst the thunderous roar, a clear and childish voice rang out.

“What is this?”

Then, Rosalyn was flung back even faster than when she had charged forward by a sudden barrier of black magic. Thankfully, Mark, who had been watching her closely, caught her with a spell, so she wasn’t injured. However, she appeared utterly dumbfounded, as though she had been struck by some kind of mental magic.

{Rosalyn, are you okay? Snap out of it!}

{That… that…}

Rosalyn, finally regaining her senses, shouted at Mark, who was endlessly casting healing spells.

{It’s a person! A Korean! A Korean, I tell you!}

{What are you talking about all of a sudden? Korea? You mean that place next to China?}

{Yes! I heard them talking just now—it was definitely Korean. I heard it loud and clear!}

Mark was left speechless, staring at Rosalyn as she shouted with veins bulging in her neck. As unbelievable as it sounded, he couldn’t help but feel a sliver of doubt. After all, Rosalyn herself was of Korean-Canadian descent. There was no one in the expedition who would know Korean better than her. As he held the shaken Rosalyn in his arms, Mark finally jumped to his feet and called out to the expedition leader, Sebastian.

{Captain! Rosalyn says the person on that bone dragon might be Korean! Try talking to them!}

Sebastian, who had been consumed by thoughts of inevitable death after witnessing Rosalyn’s failed attack, found a faint glimmer of hope in those words. Turning on the translator earpiece in his ear, he raised a necklace-like magical device imbued with amplification magic to his mouth and began to speak, silently praying to every deity he could think of—Jesus, God, Buddha, and more.

“Hey, you! Person on the bone dragon! Are you Korean by any chance?”

The phrase, distorted slightly through the translator, made Baek Horang let out a dry laugh. Hearing the term “bone dragon” translated into such a mundane name felt utterly ridiculous, almost comical. Feeling unexpectedly amused, Horang muttered aloud, not caring if the bone dragon beneath her heard.

“What the heck is a ‘bone dragon’? Seriously? That sounds so lame…”

Horang patted the bone dragon’s back a few times as though consoling it. Perhaps noticing her actions, the man yelling from below raised his voice again.

“Can you hear me? Person on the bone dragon!”

“My name is Baek Horang! Call me that one more time, and you’ll regret it!”

Being referred to repeatedly as “person on the bone dragon” when she had a perfectly fine name was enough to annoy Horang to no end. When she shouted back using amplification magic, cheers erupted from below for some inexplicable reason.

“What’s wrong with them?”

Creaaak… creak…

“…Wait a second. Are they… speaking Korean? Korea? Korea?”

Creak…

“Oh, for f***’s sake. Hey!”

Standing precariously on the dragon’s bones, Horang suddenly jumped off without hesitation. Seeing her plummet like a streak of lightning, the expedition members, who had just been laughing in relief at their survival, turned pale with fear.

{Mark! Magic! Use magic to soften her landing!}

{Hold on! Let me focus!}

Unfortunately for Mark, by the time he began casting, Horang had already landed gracefully on the ground. The expedition members could do nothing but gape at her, unable to utter a single word. First of all, the very idea of someone riding a bone dragon through a gate was incomprehensible. Then she had effortlessly blocked Rosalyn’s desperate attack. And to top it off, she had just leapt from midair and landed without a scratch. Though she looked human and spoke like a human, they couldn’t shake the nagging thought: Could she really be human?

As the tension in the air slowly eased, their hands subconsciously tightened around their weapons. At that moment, Horang took a deep breath and shouted loudly.

“DO YOU KNOW KOREA?”

***

The absurdly clear pronunciation jolted them back to their senses, and they quickly began introducing themselves. Most of them said they were hunters affiliated with the Canadian government, while a few had volunteered simply to protect their hometown of Quebec.

Horang raised an eyebrow at that. The hunters, who had been chatting casually as they surrounded her, instinctively swallowed hard when the seemingly unshaken and carefree woman expressed dissatisfaction for the first time. As her perfectly smooth lips slowly parted, they strained their ears in tense anticipation, wondering what she might say.

“So… where is Canada, anyway? Is it far from Korea? Do you know Korea? Huh?”

{Of course, we know. It’s very far. It would take over ten hours by plane. But more importantly, are you really Korean?}

“Yeah, I guess. But, you know, I’ve been somewhere for, like, a few thousand years, so I’m not sure if there are still records of me.”

The casual tone of her response left the expedition team bewildered. A few thousand years? They thought. But the first gates had appeared on Earth only about a hundred years ago. And a few thousand years ago, the city of Quebec hadn’t even existed.

Rosalyn and Mark exchanged looks, hesitating before cautiously speaking to Horang.

{Um, excuse me, but it seems like the timeline of your world and ours is vastly different.}

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

{It’s only been a hundred years since gates first appeared on Earth. So how could you have existed thousands of years ago…?}

Before Mark could finish his sentence, Horang grabbed him by the collar in an instant, sending a chill down his spine. Despite being a head shorter than him, the sheer intensity of her earlier actions left him too terrified to protest. Or perhaps it was the cold, murderous glint in her eyes as she glared at him that robbed him of the courage to speak.

As Mark mentally prepared to draft his last will and testament, Horang’s mind was racing at full speed. A hundred years? Did they just say a hundred years? When I was sucked into the gate, I’m sure it was the 90th year…. That was one of the few memories still vividly etched in her mind.

Back then, Horang had just started college, only to decide it wasn’t for her.

She’d flunked her first semester and taken a leave of absence in the second. The following year, she began preparing to retake the college entrance exam. She remembered scolding her younger brother—who couldn’t give up gaming even in his final year of high school—and then heading out grocery shopping with her parents. In the car, she had been reading a reference book, one that ironically recounted the history of gates.

The line she’d been reading said something about gates first appearing 90 years ago. That detail had stuck in her memory for a simple reason: it was the last thing she read before the car flipped over, ejecting her into the gate.

Does that mean… it’s only been 10 years since I left Korea?

She had returned to Earth with the simple resolve to die in her homeland if she must. She had assumed her family was long dead, that her own life was essentially over. At least, the version of “Baek Horang” born and raised on Earth was dead.

But now… now there was the possibility that her family—those whose faint memories had kept her clinging to life—might still be alive. This wasn’t the time to idly think about what she would do once she returned to Korea.