I was heading for Zamboanga aboard my private jet.
I was in a hurry.
I had walked out of the conference room with my head held high,
but my heart was already somewhere else.
The people around me.
I wanted to see with my own eyes whether they were truly safe.
I wanted to confirm their safety one minute, one second sooner.
I had already expected something like this to happen.
Of all the methods a villain could use,
the easiest and fastest was threatening the people around his target.
It was incredibly simple and required no preparation.
Convenient, and barely cost any money.
There was no need to fight directly or use one’s brains.
You just had to kidnap someone and make threats.
Grab hold of a weak point and shake it.
The effect was remarkably good compared to the effort involved.
There was only one problem.
It crossed the line.
Honestly, threatening the people around someone?
Even a neighborhood thug would get cursed out for doing that.
If someone insulted your family, people would understand if you punched them.
But kidnapping people around you, threatening to kill them, and using that to get what you wanted?
That was the kind of vile tactic you could resort to only when you had absolutely nothing left,
when you were at rock bottom.
At the very least, if you were an organization,
you needed to have something of your own to offer.
Whether you wanted to persuade, cajole, or threaten,
you had to talk to the person concerned.
Dragging in the people around them was cheating.
And an especially low form of cheating at that.
There was one more side effect to taking the people around someone hostage.
If something happened to those hostages,
you were truly fucked.
The vengeance of someone who had lost the person they loved could not be understood through ordinary common sense.
It was desperate, relentless, and blind.
They would never stop until they saw it through to the end.
But that was only my way of thinking.
Other people might be different.
The voice of Adrian coming through the phone sounded like he might very well be that kind of person.
He sounded relaxed and composed,
but there was something strange lurking beneath it.
I could feel the tenacity of someone who would charge straight ahead for the sake of his objective.
It made me uneasy to think that he might do anything to obtain what he wanted.
That was why I called everyone in.
There was no harm in being careful.
Simon, Edward, and Shin Jung-gi lived in Unity Town, so there was no problem with them.
Anna and Chen Zhihao, who had been living in Korea, immediately headed for the Philippines,
while Sandro, Kang Jae-ho, and Im Yu-na, who were in Bohol, temporarily moved to Unity Town at my request.
Kwon Ju-a, along with her father, Kwon Sang-yeol.
Seo Dae-hun and Jeong Geun-su of the Daehoonpa.
Jang Yun-mi, the CEO of Candy Tour’s Seoul branch.
Kurokawa of the yakuza and Du Man-sik of the triad also headed for Unity Town.
I called in Marian, whom I had first met during my trip to Bohol,
as well as Poapi and Jose, whom I had spent time with in the Congo.
Everyone who had some connection to me gathered in Unity Town.
It was better to go overboard than regret it later.
And since we were all gathered, it would be nice to at least share a meal.
.
.
.
I didn’t know about other places,
but at least if a war broke out in Zamboanga, we had a fair chance of winning.
Zamboanga was safe.
There were the rebels in Zamboanga,
the Obsidian Unit,
and above all, the furious Shin Jung-gi.
Unless Parallax went completely insane and dropped a nuke on us,
or unless they devastated Zamboanga with missiles before coming in,
it wouldn’t be easy for them to enter Zamboanga.
What if Parallax dropped missiles and then came in?
That possibility seemed extremely low.
Given his personality, Adrian would never launch a missile.
Because he didn’t have any?
No.
He probably had more than enough missiles.
But he wouldn’t fire those missiles at us.
Why?
Because he would think it was a waste.
They were all money, after all.
Each one cost billions of won.
He could make an enormous profit by selling them.
He wouldn’t send such expensive missiles flying into empty air just for the sake of revenge.
That was the kind of person Adrian was, at least from what I had seen.
Instead, he would search.
He would search for someone who could fight the war in his place, on behalf of Parallax.
A country, a group, an organization, a trafficker—anyone would do.
As long as they could fight the war for him.
Once he picked someone suitable,
he would stick close to them and whisper in their ear with the voice of a devil.
What would happen if they attacked Zamboanga now?
He would tell them that attacking the Philippines could bring them enormous profits.
Someone would be swayed by those words.
Some foolish bastard would eagerly bite.
The one saving grace was that
there were no countries hostile enough to declare war on the Philippines right away.
Since it was an island nation with no shared borders, there were no territorial disputes either.
If I had to name one,
there was a sovereignty dispute with China in the South China Sea.
But that was too minor an issue to grow into a war.
China was merely flexing its strength and issuing threats. It had no intention of going to war.
And even Adrian would have a hard time moving a great power like China.
Wei Zhonglin might be a neighborhood idiot as far as I was concerned, but that wasn’t his public image abroad.
If he couldn’t find an external enemy, he would have to look for rebels within the country.
But the Philippines’ many rebel groups were no longer around.
I had dealt with all of them.
The rebels in Mindanao, who had been the biggest headache,
had become our reliable family.
The rest were nothing much.
Their organization, influence, and firepower were all pathetic.
They were on the level of gangsters.
Of course, they could build up their organization and wage war against us.
But if they did that, the tail would end up wagging the dog.
He would be luring an organization in to sell them weapons,
but he might have to provide far more support than he could earn from the sales.
It was supposed to make money,
but it would end up costing far more.
It might even be better to create an entirely new organization and have it wage the war.
But there was no way Adrian would make such a stupid choice.
Even so, Adrian would find a way.
A way to blow his nose without touching it.
Parallax would manipulate everything from one step behind the scenes
and create a situation where someone else fought in its place.
He would arrange the board by any means necessary
and try to redesign the whole game.
Parallax would aim for two things at once.
He would plan his revenge while selling weapons.
Killing two birds with one stone.
He would try to catch both rabbits at the same time.
That was the kind of bastard Adrian was, from what I had seen.
Vile, quick to calculate, and petty.
But he was cautious to a maddening degree.
Before carrying out anything, he would review it again and again,
running simulations over and over.
There was no way someone like that would simply let the humiliation he had suffered go.
No matter what happened, he would try to pay it back.
And he would do it with ‘someone else’s hands.’
He was probably still fuming even now.
I looked out the window.
Clouds stretched endlessly into the distance.
It was a magnificent sight,
but completely unlike my state of mind.
The private jet felt especially slow today.
I wanted to reach Zamboanga as quickly as possible.
I contacted the cockpit.
“Step on it. Push it all the way.”
.
.
.
When I returned to Zamboanga, I was extremely busy.
First of all, just as Allen had said, everyone arrived safely in Unity Town.
The moment I saw them, I felt relieved.
‘They’re safe.’
But unlike me, who was relieved, their expressions were strange.
Every one of them looked completely bewildered.
Come to think of it, that made sense.
It didn’t seem like I had called them because I had something to say,
and it wasn’t a gathering either.
There were too many people they had never seen before.
Security was much tighter than usual.
I gave them a vague excuse.
“I called you all here to have a meal.”
No one seemed to believe me.
But no one asked why I had called them either.
They simply chose to remain quietly silent.
But it didn’t matter.
It was better to become a liar
than to let any of them get hurt.
.
.
.
I called Chen Zhihao.
“You secured the CCTV footage, right?”
Chen Zhihao spoke while checking his tablet.
“We secured it in 8K.”
We had installed separate CCTV cameras at the Belle Mar Resort.
We claimed it was a security measure,
but in reality, it was to secure the facial and physical data of Parallax’s people.
I nodded.
“Good. Run the facial-recognition program right now. Run it and find those bastards.”
“Now? Didn’t you say you would give them twenty-four hours?”
Chen Zhihao blinked and asked again.
“What are you talking about? I said we wouldn’t catch them, not that we wouldn’t look for them. When you play hide-and-seek, you cover your eyes, but your ears are still open, aren’t they? You figure out where they’re hiding with your ears first. So it’s not cheating.”
“Oh~ I suppose you’re right.”
Chen Zhihao replied with a grin.
“So run the program right away.”
“Should we find where Adrian went?”
Chen Zhihao asked while operating the tablet.
“No. Find everyone who was there that day, including Adrian. Let’s see how those bastards move. We’ll dig up everything—where their office is, how and where they move, where they’re hiding, and who they travel with.”
“Understood.”
Chen Zhihao nodded.
Parallax’s men would pay dearly for exposing their faces so carelessly.
There was nowhere left on Earth for them to hide.
Unless they were living in the Sahara Desert or the Amazon rainforest, they would eventually appear on some CCTV camera.
All we had to do was scour the footage and find where those bastards had hidden themselves.
“Do we have a facial-recognition program? If not, ask China for Skynet.”
“The one we made should be better than Skynet.”
Chen Zhihao replied in a confident voice.
“Really?”
“Isn’t Skynet basically a national-control system rather than simply a facial-recognition system? It identifies someone by their face, then links them to their registration number, financial records, travel records, and communications records. It’s literally a program that traps people in a net.”
“That’s right.”
I nodded.
“But we don’t need to manage those bastards, do we? We only need to find them.”
“Exactly.”
“Our program focuses solely on finding people. It can identify them even if part of their face is covered. It can find them even if they’re disguised or have changed their hair color.”
“Really? That can’t be easy.”
I was slightly surprised.
“It wouldn’t be if we only checked their faces. But we track their gait, body shape, center of gravity, movement patterns, and even the people around them as a group.”
“That’s impressive.”
I was genuinely surprised.
I hadn’t realized the technology had advanced this far.
“That’s why we can find people much faster. We’ve decided to call it ‘TraceNet.’”
Clap, clap, clap.
I applauded.
With this, the game of hide-and-seek looked like it might end a little sooner.
“Good. I like it. We only need to find people, after all. It’s not as though we’re in any position to manage anyone.”
“Ha-ha. Yes, exactly. We can’t even manage ourselves, so who are we supposed to manage?”
“Precisely.”
“Then I’ll extract the data and run the program right away.”
I nodded.
“Good. Contact me as soon as the results come in. Don’t worry about the time.”
“Yes.”
Chen Zhihao bowed and left the room.
.
.
.
Once Chen Zhihao left,
Leon entered.
Leon was a man who had been smuggling weapons alongside Dennis for a long time.
With Dennis gone, Leon was in charge of the weapons.
Why had I called Leon?
It was simple.
I had to assess our current weapons situation.
How many weapons we had.
Whether those weapons could stop the enemy.
Whether we could wage a war,
and whether we could wipe Parallax off the face of the earth.
I asked him directly.
“How many weapons do we have?”
“We have enough rifles.”
“What else? Heavy weapons?”
Leon hesitated for a moment before answering.
“We mainly smuggle firearms, so we’re rather lacking in heavy weapons.”
“Can we fight a war with that?”
“A war?”
Leon stared at me with startled eyes.
“I’m asking whether we can defeat Parallax if we fight a full-scale war.”
“Since we would be on the defensive, we would suffer some losses, but I believe it would be possible.”
Leon answered, sweating profusely.
He didn’t seem accustomed to a situation like this.
He had suddenly inherited the position after Dennis disappeared.
It was like a section chief who had been dragged into a crisis before he even realized it because the team leader was gone.
He wasn’t looking at the bigger picture. He was simply being chased by the problems right in front of him.
I shook my head.
“I never said we would defend ourselves. I said a full-scale war. Do we have a chance if we go head-to-head? Do we have the weapons for it? I told you before to secure weapons. I told you to secure them no matter how much it cost.”
Leon looked flustered.
“As I told you last time, it’s difficult to obtain weapons like that without going through Parallax. Unlike rifles, those weapons are tightly regulated and are hard to acquire unless they’re distributed directly through the defense ministries of individual countries.”
I sighed once.
I understood that Leon felt helpless, but I was frustrated too.
“What about the weapons Shin Jung-gi developed?”
“What Shin Jung-gi developed weren’t new weapons. He modified existing ones, didn’t he? Basically, only prototypes exist.”
“You’re saying they can’t be used?”
“I’m saying there aren’t many of them.”
“How long does it take to make one?”
“A week per unit.”
I spoke immediately.
“No! Make at least one a day.”
“What? That’s…”
I could see how hard Leon was struggling.
It was work he wasn’t used to,
a situation he had never experienced before.
And the situation involved a battle on a scale completely different from anything before.
But things weren’t peaceful enough for me to understand all that and wait.
“Leon. I know you’re not used to this position. But do I look like I’m doing something insane?”
“No.”
Leon shook his head.
“If we don’t have those weapons, we might not be able to protect ourselves. I don’t want to lose anyone in our organization. Not a single person. That’s why we have to prepare. We need to make shields and spears. Only then can we protect ourselves and eliminate Parallax.”
I paused for a moment.
Leon’s shoulders were trembling.
I gently placed a hand on his shoulder.
“It’ll be difficult to adjust to the position. But we can’t put it off. This isn’t for my sake or yours. It’s the bare minimum we need to do to protect ourselves. We have to make sure Dennis’s death wasn’t in vain.”
My words reddened Leon’s eyes.
“Understood. I’ll make them, no matter what it takes.”
Leon left, repeating his resolve several times.
But I couldn’t simply sit around and wait for the weapons to be made.
The problem was that we had no heavy weapons.
We needed to acquire heavy weapons.
I felt sorry for the people I had called here under the pretense of having a meal,
but I couldn’t stay here now.
“Scott. Let’s move.”
“Where are we going?”
“To Korea. Tell President Kim Min-su I’d like to see him for a moment.”