Hurt from Mercury
Yeonhwa — The Black Sun Guildmaster (POV)
The man tied to the chair had already lost three nails.
He was looking at the fourth with a kind of dazed affection, like he’d never appreciated it properly before today.
“Last chance,” Yeonhwa said.
Her voice came out calm. It always did.
“Say it again.” I tilted my head. “Slowly this time. Maybe I misheard.”
“I–I told you,” he babbled. “Han Si‑woo is dead! The Association announced it! ‘Neutralized during capture’—those were the exact words. Ask anyone, it’s all over the boards—”
Crack.
His scream bounced off the concrete walls.
The pliers clattered back into the metal tray.
She stared at the little strip of bloody keratin and felt nothing.
“Association reports,” she repeated. “You actually trust them? Those disgusting snakes.”
He gulped, sweat dripping down his temples.
“Recently, they did a joint operation with Red Dragon,” he cried. “Everyone saw! There’s footage of him being dragged out, covered in blood—”
“Show me.”
He swallowed.
“I don’t… have it,” he said. “It’s classified, I heard it from—”
She grabbed his face.
He flinched, expecting another nail to go.
She just turned his head and forced his eyes to meet mine.
“Listen,” I said. “You’re not dying today because I enjoy it. You’re dying because you’re wasting my time.”
Mana stirred around my fingers. The lights flickered once.
“Jin‑hee,” one of her called from the doorway, voice careful, “we found something.”
She let go.
The man slumped in the chair, sobbing.
“What,” she asked without looking back.
“The file,” she said. “Han Si‑woo’s case. It was closed by Red Dragon.”
That made her turn.
“…Closed,” She repeated.
She nodded, eyes wary.
“Guild Master Cha submitted a ‘neutralized’ report within twenty‑four hours,” she said. “No body requested. No follow‑up. Association just stamped it and shelved everything.”
Wasn’t that too fast and suspicious?
“For a traitor who knew all her insides,” I murmured, “she let them close it without a show.”
Her lieutenant hesitated.
“There’s more,” she said. “Red Dragon’s basement levels. The mana seals were reinforced last week. Internal access only. No outsiders.”
Ah.
There it is.
It made sense now.
The bastard in the chair made a wet noise.
“C‑can I go?” he whispered. “I told you everything, I swear—”
She walked over, picked up the pliers again, then changed my mind and set them down.
He relaxed.
Then my hand closed around his throat and twisted.
The crack was small. Neat.
His eyes bulged for a second, then went dull.
She stepped back, wiping my fingers on his shirt.
“Clean it up,” I said. “Send his friends the bill.”
“Yes, Boss.”
She headed for the stairs.
“Stay here, Yeonhwa” His voice echoed from years ago. “Don't come out until I'm back. I'm going to steal some food.”
They were orphans from a dungeon break.
That was the pretty way to say their parents got eaten in front of us and the Association paid for our funeral with a line item on a spreadsheet.
The slum didn’t care about the pretty way.
It cared that after the monsters left, there were two kids with no house and no family standing in the bloody street holding hands.
Running toward trouble, even when his shoes had holes.
He dragged her under ruined staircases when the gangs fought. Shared stolen bread. Split his blanket in winter.
When the recruiters came for awakened kids, he went to the test.
“You should come with,” he’d said.
She’d laughed in his face.
“Me?” She asked. “I can’t even read your name properly. Hunters are for people who can.”
So he went alone.
He got in.
He walked out of the slum one day wearing a borrowed training uniform and a stupid smile. Said he’d send money back. Said once he made it big, he’d get us a place where the windows had glass.
I watched him chase the sun.
He was always bright, too bright for her.
She stayed in the darkness.
She had to make them pay the price for all the chances the world never gave ‘us’.
He joined a guild.
While, she joined the underworld.
Years later, when they met again, he was in Red Dragon. Smiling beside her, Cha Eun-ha.
By then, she was already swallowed by the darkness known as the Black Sun.
He’d frowned at my coat.
“Yeonhwa! You’ve let them swallow you whole,” he said.
She brushed his hand away. “They didn't swallow me. They shielded me while the Association was hunting me down. Where were you then?”
He never had an answer for that.
But then, a few weeks ago.
He walked into Black Sun’s lobby as a hunter, not as a kid asking for me, I almost thought She had fallen asleep
He stood there in front of the receptionist, wearing that same annoying calm from the old days, as if he wasn’t stepping into the building half the city called a sewer.
“I want to see your boss,” he’d said.
“Which one?” the receptionist had asked. “We have a few.”
“Highest,” he’d said.
When they brought him to my office, he smiled like when we were kids.
“Hey,” he’d said. “Got room for a stray?”
I didn’t ask why he’d come.
Whether Red Dragon had used him up. Whether Cha Eun‑ha had driven him into the ground.
Whether he’d finally remembered that the two of us belonged together.
I just thought:
Finally.
Finally, you stopped crawling toward the sun.
You came back to me.
He slept on my office couch more than once.
She watched him breathe sometimes.
Pathetic.
I never touched him.
Didn’t feel like she was allowed.
He’d tried, once, to pull me out.
“Yeonhwa, can you still change,” he’d said back when we were teenagers. “Let me talk to someone. You don’t have to stay here forever.”
I’d laughed then, too.
“Look at me,” I’d said. “Do I look like I belong in your pretty Association pamphlets?”
Black Sun Guild Master. She had buried herself in that hole.
No ID card for that one. Just blood.
He came back to the bottom to find me.
It made her happy.
Then, three days later, an Association raid cut through one of our branches. Red Dragon dogs at their heels.
They said they took him.
They said he died.
They stamped NEUTRALIZED on a file and closed it like he was a case of illegal mana stones.
She didn’t believe it.
So I started opening people instead.
Informants. Brokers. Minor guild rats.
“How many bodies?” Jin‑hee had asked quietly after the fifth night.
“As many as it takes,” I’d replied.
Tonight, she finally saw him.
Not in a raid photo. Not in a blurry capture log.
In person.
Walking out of a hole‑in‑the‑wall restaurant arm‑in‑arm with Cha Eun‑ha.
He laughed at something she said.
When they reached the mouth of the alley, he lifted her hand and pressed his lips to the back of it like he’d done it a hundred times.
She broke the concrete ledge unconsciously.
You left me for her again.
Once when you walked out of the slum toward the test centre.
“home.”
You’re down there.
Kissing the hand of that woman who put you through hell
she could have forgiven you for dying.
But, She cannot forgive him for living like that.
Her chest hurt.
Not the dramatic, clutch‑your‑heart kind. More like wet cement was hardening behind her ribs, slow and cold, making it impossible to breathe.
Of course he went back to her, some bitter part of her said.
She didn’t deserve him.
She traded the slum for a bigger sewer with nicer carpets. She cut people open for information. She sells awakened kids to labs and calls it “contracts.”
He tried to pull me out once.
I bit the hand he offered and stayed where the mud felt familiar.
What did you expect, Yeonwha?
That the boy who liked staring at the sky would choose the rat who refused to climb?
Down on the street, she said something.
He answered.
They looked… happy together.
Like this was their alley, their usual restaurant, their world.
Like the years she spent in drains and back rooms and boardless apartments didn’t count.
She bit the inside of her cheek until I tasted iron.
“They don't look good together.” I said.
Jin‑hee, standing a careful two steps behind me, flinched.
“Yes, Boss,” she said.
“…Yes.”
“I spent the last week tearing out nails,” I went on. “The Association said ‘neutralized.’ Do you know what that word means?”
Jin‑hee stayed silent.
“It means they didn’t bother to bring the body,” I said. “It means on paperwork, he doesn't exist...”
She watched him. The way his shoulders sat. The way he tilted slightly toward her when the crowd pushed.
She laughed.
It sounded wrong in her own ears.
“And now look,” I said. “He’s alive. Wearing her colours in his eyes even without the coat.”
She touched my chest.
It still hurt.
Doctor would call it stress.
It felt more like rot.
“He’s too clean for me now,” I said softly. “Is that it?”
No one answered.
Maybe they knew better.
Maybe there wasn’t an answer.
“He knows who I am,” I said. “What I’ve done. What I do. Yet, 'he still came back last week to me'.”
She smiled, small and sharp.
“I was happy,” she admitted. “Stupid, right?”
“You weren’t stupid,” Jin‑hee said carefully.
“I was,” I said. “I thought, ‘Finally. He’s tired of the sun burning him. He came back to the dark where it’s safer."
She watched him lean in to say something to her.
Watched her look up like he’d hung the moon personally.
“But no,” I murmured. “Turns out, I was just the place he stopped to catch his breath before running back to her again.”
The cement in her chest cracked.
Something nastier leaked through.
“He must be disgusted,” I said. “With what I am now. With what I’ve always been.”
She flexed her hand.
Dry blood flaked from under my nails.
“I stayed where the blood was,” she said. “He chased the sky. Of course he’d pick the woman who wears 'sunlight' on her shoulders.”
Jealousy was too small a word.
Hatred wasn’t the right one either.
It was both.
It was neither.
“If you love her that much,” she whispered, “then die with her.”
