Hero Hunter is on Parental Leave C33

Chapter 33

“Thirty-nine point five degrees…”

Yeongung’s voice trembled as he checked the thermometer. Jaehee had always grown more slowly than other children his age, which worried him, but apart from that he had been a healthy child who rarely fell ill. Faced with something like this for the first time, Yeongung plunged straight into panic. The man grasped his shoulders, trying to steady him as his face turned white as paper.

“Hunter Yeongung. It’s all right.”

Yeongung violently shook off Won Iheun’s touch and shouted.

“All right? How is anything all right? The kid… my tiny baby is in pain and crying…!”

The child, exhausted from crying, let out a hoarse metallic rasp.

“We need to go to the hospital. Now.”

Yeongung hurriedly wrapped the child in a blanket, grabbed his car keys, and headed for the door.

His hands were trembling so badly that the keys slipped from his grasp. Won Iheun picked them up in his place and led the way toward the parking lot.

“I’ll drive.”

Once inside, he fastened the seatbelt over Yeongung and the child in his arms, then began driving with the ease of someone who already knew the route by heart.

“Wait—! Let me put the ER address into the GPS. Hold on.”

“You forget that I am a Searcher.”

“Oh…”

Living on an isolated island where gates never appeared, after quitting the hunter job long ago, he had momentarily forgotten that the man beside him was one of the world’s greatest searchers. Holding his feverish child close, Yeongung called Lee Chahyeon. Seeing the dried tear marks on his baby’s face tore at his heart.

“Haaam… Ung-ah, why are you calling at this hour…”

Glancing over, Iheun switched the call to speaker through the car’s Bluetooth.

“We’re on our way to the emergency room.”

“What? The ER?! Did you get into an accident? Is someone badly hurt?!”

“Jaehee… my baby is sick… His temperature went up to thirty-nine point five, so we’re rushing to the hospital. Chahyeon ah, Jaehee will be okay, right? Please tell me he’ll be okay.”

“Ung-ah, it’s okay. Once he is admitted, they’ll give fluids and antipyretics. His fever will go down quickly.”

The calming tone softened Yeongung’s panic little by little.

“Don’t worry too much. And just in case, tell me which hospital you’re going to. Even if it isn’t an awakener hospital, I can contact someone through the private medical association. I know Jaehee’s condition better than anyone. I should speak to the doctor myself.”

“Thank you. Really… thank you.”

He was struck by how much authority his friend wielded as a physician—yet deeply relieved.

“If the guardian is anxious, the child feels it all. Keep telling him it’s okay. Soothe him. Hold him.”

“Mm. I’ll call when we arrive.”

“All right.”

After the call ended, Iheun tightened his grip on the steering wheel and spoke.

“So the person who knows Jaehee best… is Director Lee Chahyeon?”

His tone was calm, but the tension in his forearms betrayed him. Unlike him, Chahyeon had calmed Yeongung instantly with a few words. That meant Yeongung trusted him deeply.

“That’s right. He’s been Jaehee’s doctor ever since I found out I was pregnant.”

“….”

“I was missing, and I couldn’t exactly walk around with my belly showing. If not for Chahyeon, I don’t know what I would’ve done. It was pure luck that someone I trusted from the orphanage turned out to be a hospital director.”

“He must have formed quite a rapport with the child, if he calls him Youngjae as a pet name.”

Cradling his heat-flushed son close, Yeongung murmured softly.

“He had to. They saw each other often. I don’t know if you noticed, but Jaehee… he grows more slowly than other kids. So he had every test imaginable, even obscure ones, and everything came back clean. No abnormalities.”

Iheun offered quiet reassurance, though the tension in Yeongung’s expression only deepened.

“I heard children grow at their own pace.”

But the darkness in his face did not lift.

“Chahyeon kept telling me not to rush it—that time will take care of it. But I can’t. Because I went into gates with him in my belly. I cut down monsters. I fell into caverns filled with poison. I did all that while he was inside me.”

He looked down at his palm, covered in tiny scars, and spoke bitterly.

“I never once regretted awakening as a hunter… until then. Even though I didn’t know I was pregnant, if something ends up wrong with Jaehee, I’ll never forgive myself. Not even on my deathbed.”

The lighthouse beyond the breakwater came closer. Under its glow, the guilt on his face showed clearly.

“Don’t blame yourself like that. There is no proven link between your hunter work and the child’s slow growth. Do you think you’re the only one who unknowingly entered a gate while pregnant? Absolutely not. Statistics already show many cases. There is even one where someone gave birth inside a gate.”

The mention of such statistics startled him.

“The baby born inside the gate… what happened to them…?”

“They naturally…”

Holding his breath, Yeongung swallowed hard.

“…grew up healthy. And now they’re living an ordinary college life.”

“They grew up healthy… thank goodness.”

It wasn’t even someone he knew, yet he felt relieved as if it were his own child. And at Iheun’s unexpectedly gentle way of comforting him, a small laugh slipped out.

“You’ve changed. For real.”

“Do you think I’ve changed?”

“You have. You, who never cared about anyone’s emotions, are now pulling out statistics to comfort me.”

Wiping Jaehee’s forehead, Yeongung studied Iheun’s face.

“So surviving death really can change someone…”

Iheun fell silent at the words disguised as musings. Meanwhile, their car left the coastal road and headed toward the town center, where public offices were clustered. Thanks to his searcher shortcuts, they reached the hospital district much faster than usual.

“Five minutes.”

Like most small island towns, Muhaedo was pitch black at night, without a single streetlamp along the shore. Once the lighthouse and fishing boats disappeared from view, the road was swallowed by darkness. Only the old light above the emergency room flickered on and off. Seeing that wavering glow, Yeongung felt it resembled Iheun’s unfathomable heart—visible one moment, gone the next.

Staring out the window, he spoke.

“Won Iheun.”

Romantic push and pull had never been his thing. When Iheun pushed, he stayed still; when Iheun pulled, he followed. That was the way he loved him.

He still didn’t know what Iheun was hiding or why he had changed, but he decided to stick to his own way.

“What were you so afraid of?”

At first, he had hesitated to say anything that might shock Iheun, who had just woken from a coma with memory issues. That was why he hid the pregnancy and even made that ridiculous “memory recovery cooperation contract,” planning to seek consent once the man’s memories returned.

But plans changed the moment he overheard a conversation between Iheun and Lee Rubin while trying to sabotage them. Iheun’s harsh tone then had made him fear the man might force him to get rid of the baby. And so he ran.

“Bba…”

The little fledgling in his arms wheezed softly, searching for his father. Yeongung held the hot little head close.

“You’re doing more than well.”

Iheun placed his large hand over Yeongung’s rough one, fingers interlacing gently.

For the entire month they lived together in Room 303, Iheun had always given his best to the child. He soothed Jaehee with pheromones when he wouldn’t stop crying, cooked nutritious meals from scratch, went all the way to the mainland to buy TinTinPing merchandise, and even transformed their room into the child’s world.

The scale finally tipped.

Everything he had seen so far told him that Iheun would never harm his child.

Instead of believing the cheap things Rubin had said, he would trust what he had seen and felt with his own hands.

So Yeongung finally spoke the truth Iheun must have suspected from the moment he first saw the child in Muhaedo.

“You remember I said I had something I was struggling with?”

With a resolute expression, he confessed:

“Jaehee is your child.”

Screech—

At that explosive confession, the car carrying the three of them skidded to a halt in front of the emergency room. The tires screamed so loudly that the on-call doctor rushed outside in alarm.