The boss was angry.
A voice brimming with murderous intent spilled out from where he stood.
"Who… leaked the information…?"
Bang!
The boss slammed the desk in a fit of temper. His tightly clenched fist trembled.
I glanced at Jang Yijung standing beside me. His face was as expressionless as always, but I could see his nape was damp with sweat. And this despite the room being downright chilly.
Well, given the circumstances, Jang Yijung did look like the culprit who'd leaked the information. He actually was the culprit, too.
If the boss calmed his temper even a little, he'd catch on soon enough. And then this guy wouldn't be walking out of here in one piece.
A perfectly cornered situation.
In other words, it was the ideal opportunity to put Jang Yijung in my debt.
I could've pinned it on some other guy, but cheap tricks like that wouldn't work on a man this consumed by his sense of justice. Not if I wanted to pull him onto my side.
Maybe he noticed my gaze, because Jang Yijung's eyes turned toward me. Since they'd met anyway, I shot him a little smirk, and the composure he was straining to maintain wavered.
Yijung… feeling pretty cornered?
Hyung'll save you.
I took a step forward.
"…I think this was my mistake."
The moment the words left my mouth, the boss's chilling eyes pierced through me.
"Mistake?"
The boss lifted his hand from the desk, crossed the wrecked floor, and came right up to me. I felt a stinging gaze on the back of my head. I opened my mouth calmly.
"I'm sorry. A while ago I let a repairman in, and I think that guy must've been the spy—kg!"
"So it was you…."
I'm not done talking yet….
I wanted to protest that, but all that came out of my mouth was a strangled choking. The hot-tempered boss had seized me by the throat.
The boss ground his teeth. True to his control-freak nature, he was furious that his plans had been thrown off even a little.
"You… how dare you…."
Thwack!
Taking the blow straight to my stomach, I crumpled to the floor.
"Khak… kgh…."
For a moment I clutched my belly and shuddered at the dull pain.
Barely keeping the corners of my mouth from curling up, I checked my status window.
[Karma: 53022(-8)]
…As expected.
What kind of pain was that just now? Why, it was the very pain that would lead me to happiness!
To lower my karma, I had to get beaten up more.
"Boss—"
In the middle of all this, Jang Yijung opened his mouth without reading the room.
"I'm sorry… kgh, it was my oversight…."
I cut him off in a hurry. My eyes met Jang Yijung's. Seeing his flustered face, I felt a faint surge of pride.
Sticking close to him wasn't a waste after all.
To think I could rattle a spy who'd come in fully determined to kill us all this much.
Looking around now, the only ones left in the room were Jang Yijung, the boss, and me. The rest had already gone.
I went to the trouble of helping you, so don't get in the way—take the hint and disappear….
I tilted my chin toward the door, putting all that meaning into the gesture.
"…."
Jang Yijung, who'd been opening and closing his mouth with an ashen face, whipped around and fled as if chased out.
As I stared at the door left slightly ajar, an ominous voice called out to me.
"Where are you looking?"
"…I'm sorry."
I held back the corners of my mouth as they tried to rise out of habit. No matter how I looked at it, the mood wasn't one for smiling. Clutching my throbbing stomach, I got to my feet.
"Seo Sinwoo."
"Yes, boss."
"You've disappointed me in many ways."
Ah, here it comes.
The boss's fist—and the grand reckoning of my karma.
A gate opened.
Beneath the dark night sky, a pitch-black abyss devoured humans as it expanded.
There was a man walking alone toward the gate, against the crowd that screamed and fled. As he strode leisurely through the chaos, the man suddenly grabbed someone's arm. A passerby who'd been about to trip over someone's foot.
"Whoops."
"Th-thank you."
"Don't mention it."
The man smiled brightly. A crisp suit, an unfading smile, and gentle eyes.
If there was anything unusual about him, it was perhaps that his brooch and tie pin were lavishly decorated with jewels.
In any case, his appearance was more than enough to inspire trust.
Add to that the way he'd walked confidently toward the gate, and the passerby reached a single conclusion.
"Um, are you by any chance a Hunter?"
"A Hunter?"
"You are a Hunter, right? Please help me! My friend is in there—!"
The passerby twisted around and clung to the man. One might've expected him to be startled by the sudden contact and shake the person off, but the man didn't panic. He simply stared intently at something.
Taking that as agreement, the passerby clung even more persistently. The man, who'd been listening to the pleas without any reaction, abruptly spoke.
"This ring, it's sparkling."
The man's gaze was fixed on the passerby's finger.
"What?"
"Is this amber? But the way it's been cut is a little unusual…."
Sensing something was off, the passerby drew back step by step. The instant he tried to pull away, the arm still gripped by the man was yanked hard. The passerby leapt up like a fish forcibly thrown onto land.
The man raised his other hand and gently stroked the shrunken fist.
"I've never seen amber sparkle like this before."
"L-let go. Let me go."
Maybe it was because he couldn't break free no matter how hard he pulled his arm. The passerby, muttering in a flustered voice, gave a small struggle.
Just as the feeble resistance was building into thrashing, the passerby felt a prickling sensation in his hand and stopped moving. It seemed static electricity had sparked where their skin brushed.
Meanwhile, the man didn't seem to care in the slightest whether the other person resisted or not. He was still staring at the ring as if to bore a hole through it. The sight of him not even blinking was terrifying.
The passerby looked around frantically. But somehow the surroundings had emptied out. The Association's painstaking, thorough disaster-safety education had paid off.
In the end, the passerby began to shake his head as he watched the gate that had drawn even closer. It was the gesture of someone consumed by terror.
"Hmm…. I really do want it, this thing. What to do."
"…!"
"If the boss finds out…," the man muttered, words of no clear meaning, and put strength into the hand gripping the passerby's forearm.
"Kgh…."
"By the way, do you work out? Your arm's pretty firm."
That was the end.
Crackle—.
The corpse, dead before it could even scream, sprawled across the ground. To an ordinary person, it would've been a sight to faint over.
But there wasn't a single soul here to pay any attention to another's death.
Only the man standing before the corpse felt a vague unease and scratched his head. It wasn't some sentimental reaction like guilt over killing a person.
"Something's strange about this…. Don't you think?"
Words tossed into empty air.
The man turned his head and stared behind him as if someone were there. At that, the space rippled and the shape of a person emerged.
Soon a sharp reply came back.
"Strange? What's strange about it…! The strangest thing in this whole situation right now is you, Seo Sinwoo!"
"Huh? Haha."
"I went to the trouble of laying my power on someone, and you go and grab a random passerby instead…!"
Beneath the brim of a cap, the corners of a mouth crumpled in irritation. Watching the mole at the corner of that mouth twitch, the suited man—Seo Sinwoo—smiled shamelessly.
"The ring kept catching my eye. I couldn't help it."
"Ugh…."
Seo Sinwoo crouched down in front of the corpse with a grinning face. He was after the ring. The young man in the cap stared at his back and chewed his lip.
It wasn't that he didn't know Seo Sinwoo's nature—the way his eyes rolled the moment he saw a jewel he liked. He knew the man's nature, all right. But still.
"If any witness reports come out, it's all your fault. I did nothing wrong."
"Yes, yes."
Seo Sinwoo, who'd lightly risen to his feet and turned back toward the other, lifted the ring with his fingers.
"In exchange, I'll be keeping this."
"I wasn't even going to ask for it, you know?"
"Good for me, then."
"A ring pulled off a corpse's hand, how ominous…."
Unbothered by the remark, Seo Sinwoo slipped the ring onto his index finger and admired the sparkling jewel. At his utterly unruffled manner, the young man flared up and pressed him to hurry, saying they had to leave at once.
Unable to resist the urging, Seo Sinwoo was stepping over the corpse when he suddenly felt a gaze. He looked down at the body. The face glimpsed through the disheveled straight hair was pale. The pupils, slightly out of focus, were staring fixedly up at him. Probably because death had come without even a moment to close the eyes.
"…."
Even though he couldn't shake the sense of wrongness in his heart, Seo Sinwoo left the corpse behind and approached the gate. Right now there was something more important than identifying the source of that unease. And he was satisfied, having gotten what he wanted.
The young man asked in a tense voice.
"How long until the Hunters arrive?"
"Who knows. Five minutes at most?"
Glancing to the side, Seo Sinwoo smirked and threw an arm around the young man's shoulders.
"Why are you so stiff? I told you, just trust me and follow along."
"It's because you're so unreliable, Seo Sinwoo…."
"Do you think I've been doing this job for just a day or two?"
At the confidence-laced tone, the young man bowed his head and muttered.
"Whether we should even be doing this behind the boss's back in the first place…."
"Honestly. What's an illegal Awakened saying that for? You're not scared of the country, but you're scared of the boss?"
The young man shut his mouth. Seo Sinwoo didn't stop, his voice taking on a teasing edge.
"Don't tell me you're going to chicken out after coming all this way?"
"…."
"Didn't you say you needed money? Just shut your eyes, go in once, come back out, and you can earn big. It's the same thing you always do anyway."
He muttered low, a laugh threaded through his tone.
"What, now that it's time to actually do it, you're scared?"
The young man clenched his jaw, knocked the arm off his shoulder, and stepped into the gate.
"…So young."
Seo Sinwoo grinned and grinned as he followed that retreating figure into the gate. Not knowing that he was walking into a trap on his own two feet.
There couldn't have been many people who'd fallen into the gate, because the inside was cleaner than expected. Torches mounted on the walls flickered, casting light over the two of them.
Fortunate or not, this dungeon wasn't in a wild state.
A wide corridor stretched out before the gate. As if to prove it was a space created by an intelligent being, the architecture was intricate.
Round pillars stood at regular intervals along both sides of the corridor. There seemed to be rooms between the pillars. Though it was too dark to see clearly.
Seo Sinwoo brushed his hand down the pure-white stone wall without much thought and remarked,
"Well, finding the artifact'll be easy."
The young man beside him shot back,
"And getting spotted by the Hunters'll be easy too."
"Haha. There's a master of concealment right here, so what's there to worry about?"
At the way the man instantly went soft and clingy, the young man was at a loss for words. He just jerked his head away and slowly pushed off the jewel-obsessed man's arm where it had crept onto his shoulder. Seo Sinwoo didn't yield obediently and held his ground.
Not realizing that Seo Sinwoo, having confirmed his ears had gone red, was deliberately acting more mischievous, the young man pretended to be calm as he spoke.
"Judging by how everyone died in that short window, there really does seem to be a monster around."
"Hmm…."
Seo Sinwoo looked down at the corpses and pulled up the corners of his mouth.
"You're right. But the Hunters'll kill it for us."
He gripped the young man's hand tightly and whispered softly.
"Let's just grab a ton of treasure and get out quick."
The moment those gentle words finished.
Snap.
The sound of fingers snapping rang out.
And without warning, his arm burst apart, starting from the fingers.
"…!"
"Aagh!"
What burst was Seo Sinwoo's arm. The scream was the young man's beside him.
The young man, struck head-on by Seo Sinwoo's blood and the remnants of his arm, reflexively recoiled, opening a gap between them. Seo Sinwoo gritted through it, doing everything he could not to fall.
When he hastily turned around, the passerby he'd thought was dead was crossing through the gate. Long straight hair, enough to be mistaken for a woman at a glance, fluttered.
The instant that scene burned into his eyes, a single realization tore through his head.
Ah, the ring.
At the same time, a single regret surfaced.
Should never have ignored my instincts after all.
Who? Why me? Such questions didn't even occur to him.
Over the course of his life, there had been countless things he'd done to earn resentment. There were just as many vermin raging to kill Seo Sinwoo. Well, none had succeeded. But maybe today one might.
The attacker approached Seo Sinwoo as he clutched his shoulder in agony.
"Didn't your mother ever teach you not to just take and swallow whatever a stranger gives you?"
Seo Sinwoo faced the attacker and smiled brightly.
"…Sorry, but I don't have a mom."
With those last words, he swiftly attempted an attack with his other hand. But the attacker dodged it easily.
Seo Sinwoo clicked his tongue. With one arm gone, his body's balance had collapsed and aiming wasn't easy. Close combat wasn't his specialty, and on top of that the opponent was far too strong….
To tell the truth, Seo Sinwoo had never much liked moving his body in the first place. Using his ability solved most things.
After a brief standoff, his remaining arm was sliced by the blade too. With both arms gone, Seo Sinwoo staggered.
While he was still reeling, a kick landed on his stomach. With a single boot, he collapsed helplessly to the floor.
He could feel blood soaking his back. Seo Sinwoo knew. This wasn't an amount of blood a human could lose. No—it wasn't an amount one could survive.
"Ah…. If only I had a mom."
Sensing the end, Seo Sinwoo lamented.
"F*ck, if only I had a mom…. I wouldn't be dying like this…."
"…."
A hand came down over the throat of Seo Sinwoo, who was raving however he pleased with hazy eyes. He wanted to thrash, but no strength would enter his body.
An expressionless face was looking down at him.
He sent a strong current through the skin where they touched, but for some reason the other showed no sign of being shocked.
Where the hell did that cap bastard go?
His vision blurred.
It was a blackout.
