8 The Pain of the Strangers

Right after the end of that bloody fight, after the sacrifice of the brave healer, Sen walked out of the dungeon all alone. He came out with a hand in front of his face due to the intense light emitted by the portal. Once he was out, he was instantly faced with the rest of the team members. They too had seen better days.

The leader came forth and grabbed Sen's arms, shaking him up. Weirdly enough, Sen couldn't hear anything they said.

'Their mouths are moving though...What...What is happening to me ?' Sen wondered. He had that feeling again as something had just happened and yet he couldn't remember it. This was really starting to get on his nerves.

The team leader and the shadow mage continued to talk to him while the male healer looked behind the damaged porter. The terrified healer mage tugged on the left sleeve of his leader's suit and said something, something that shook the other members of his team.

Sen wasn't exactly an expert at reading lips, but the healer had spoken with clarity, carefully wording the words as if they left a bitter taste in his mouth.

'Sung.....Jimin. They...both d-dead.'

That's what Sen could gather from reading on the younger man's lips. A tear escaped the right eye of the shadow mage as she continued to shake Sen who was nothing more than a stringless puppet at the time. He couldn't hear anything and he couldn't feel the touch of the woman's hand on his arm.

As for the team leader, he simply frowned. Contrarily to his two crying subordinates, he didn't allow any emotion to appear on his face other than anger.

Seneos' senses came back to him once an unknown hand touched his shoulders and a powerful voice calmed the team as a whole, or rather what was left of it.

"I would like to have a word with every one of you please. You'll get to discover the details of what went down after you left, in my men's report after WE are done with this hunter." The newcomer said as three men wearing black suits and glasses arrived. Their suits all had little pins on the collars, pins in the shape of a snake biting its own tail.

Seeing those pins, the members of the team instantly stopped their show of emotion. To be more exact they merely tried to hide their sadness while they were led away by the suit-wearing men.

Sen turned around and faced the much taller figure who had just appeared. It was a 2 meters tall man wearing a pinstripe yellow and white suit that went well with his own yellow eyes and white hair. He was so colorful it hurt Sen's eyes a bit.

The man's aura screamed one thing to Sen.

'Deranged'

That's what the man seemed like to Sen. Perhaps he wasn't in the best position to say this. No, in fact, he knew he wasn't for reasons that only and the rare friends he had, knew. However, this man still looked like he could be a serial killer.

The man didn't talk to Sen, he merely looked down at him, smiled, and then went on his way. He had a skip in his steps, as though he was in the best mood possible. He was the only one who felt like this.

The general mood in the area wasn't exactly a good one. A high-ranking team had come back looking like they went through a war, and now everyone learned that two of them died. Though Sen remarked something.

'As I thought, something is weird with this team. I was never really aware of what is going in the hunter society. I don't know a lot about who is powerful, who is popular, and all that. But usually, in such situations, the high-ranking team would have a lot of fans or haters at them, there aren't that many here though. Yet this dungeon was a world-type dungeon, an entire world instead of a simple cave with random monsters. It must have taken that healer girl at least half an hour to go back to the entrance even if the throne room was in the middle of the dungeon and not at the end. ' Sen thought bitterly. Just thinking about that girl gave him nausea. To think he had been saved by a kid who was ten years younger than himself.

Yet he could only feel one thing as he looked around himself and saw the tall buildings of the civilization. He was happy to be back. That had been a brief but painful experience. He looked to his left and spotted someone brooding on a bench of the playground.

It was the fire mage, Hojosa. He wasn't as roughed up as his teammates, but he still had one huge gash on his neck. A wolf must've clawed at him.

'God knows there were a lot of wolves in that dungeon.....And of course, those damn wolves didn't attack us when we entered. They only attacked when they sensed that we were weak.'

His chain of thoughts continued to go deeper in resentment as he approached the mage. Since the others were being interrogated, there was only Hojosa left. And Sen had something to deliver to the team, after all, so he had to see the man. He really didn't want to though, especially after he saw the shaking of the man's eyes, as though he was having a crisis inside his mind.

Before Sen could even sit on the bench, a plume of fire left the man's nose and he looked up.

"I am surprised those damn agents of the KHG didn't take you with them. Those fucking suckers were like goddamn scavengers on us. We called them and they arrived only a few minutes after, quicker than my dear superiors are at licking my balls whenever they can. I swear they would have teleported their edgy 'Black Clad Mysterious Agents' asses somehow if they could. They really hate leaving information to the press." Hojosa said as he pointed at a few reporters who were getting pushed back by the agents of the Korean Hunter Guild.

Seneos offered him a friendly smile and sat down beside the red-headed man. He could see Hojosa's hands closed into fists, crimson liquid running down and hitting the ground every two seconds. There were little wisps of fire crackling all around the man, rage was building up inside of him.

This was anger beyond what Seneos had ever seen. This was the anger of a powerful hunter, someone who could back his barks.

Sen once again tried to start a conversation, but Hojosa beat him to it. He looked at Sen with his glistening eyes.

"Sung...The tank.....What happened to him ? "

The question was worded with such a shaking voice, Sen had to swallow before he answered. Not only was the man angry, so it was already scary for the porter, but seeing the previously joking and brash man like that was weird. He hadn't known those people for long, but he saw more emotions in them in the last hours than there ever was in that cold best friend of his. He didn't know why he was thinking of her now, perhaps it was to find a semblance of security in that situation.

"He...He was crushed to death. That thing walked over him times and times again. It was so..." Sen stopped himself as he realized he had perhaps given a little too much details. His words weren't many, but this was enough to make the porter sweat due to the heat that came off of the fiery mage.

"And....Haha, fuck...And Jimin? That healer girl? That minor we should've never even recruited, but did so nonetheless because we are bottom-feeding, power-hungry, fucking leeches?" Hojosa asked, a wide smile on his face. His whole head was trembling due to how much he had to contain himself.

Right after asking how the healer girl had ended, Hojosa started to flare up.

The heat began to spread all over the playground and all the agents of the KHG turned around in panic, guns at the ready. Seneos saw a bit of steam leaving the eyes of the hunter, he thought perhaps those were the tears that just wouldn't fall. They couldn't, with how over-heated he was.

'The KHG uses guns ? That's...Weird. I thought they didn't like to use violence or something. I gotta answer quickly though before I get turned into a Kentucky Fried Porter' As Hojosa continued to descend into a cold fury, himself the likes of which no one in the vicinity had ever faced, Sen thought to himself.

"She....She sacrificed herself to save me. The wolves were after us and her legs were too damaged for her to go fast enough. She was d-devoured by those beasts. That kid gave her life for mine...She also gave me another thing." Sen whimpered as he took out the envelope and handed it out to Hojosa.

Because of the rage he couldn't control, the man touched it with one of his fingers and accidentally burned the envelope. The many bills it contained started to slowly fly towards the ground as Hojosa watched them.

His frozen expression, his eyes that followed the paper and hoped for them not to touch the sand of the playground, Sen could recognize despair when he saw it.

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