Inside the car heading toward the warehouse in Namyangju to meet the people I had arranged to see.
The news Jeong Il-su had put on as he drove reached my ears.
—The public security reinforcement bill submitted by the government has once again failed to pass the National Assembly. It drew many opposing votes not only from the opposition party, but from the ruling party as well. In particular, the opposition of senior ruling-party lawmakers once again played a decisive role in derailing the bill.
I frowned at the words coming from the radio.
It was different from what I had heard from the president not long ago.
At the time, the president of Korea had confidently said he could do anything within Korea.
But the story coming from the radio was completely different.
“What the hell are they doing?”
The mutter slipped out before I realized it.
This time, I had brought several times more awakening agents than before, but if things were going like this, I couldn’t give them to the president.
“Are you talking about the Korean government and the National Assembly?”
I had only said it because I was irritated, but Jeong Il-su heard me.
Perhaps pleased that a topic he knew had come up, he explained the situation in an excited voice.
“The Korean president has been putting forward all sorts of bills to restore public order, but it seems they’re all getting blocked in the National Assembly. When his own party leader, senior lawmakers, and even the chaebol all rise up together to stop him, there’s nothing the president can do.”
He talked politics as though he were discussing some other country.
‘Since he’s a black-haired foreigner, I suppose it really is another country to him.’
When you got right down to it, he was an American.
“You know the situation too, then.”
“I also placed my hand on the relic and swore an oath not long ago. Relics are fascinating things. When it’s just the two of you here, I can talk like this, but in front of others, my mouth clamps shut completely.”
“You must have received a ticket too.”
“Yes. Even my family back in the mainland received theirs. I’ll have to withdraw before it’s too late as well.”
His words reminded me once more that he was American.
And also that he was cold-blooded enough to work as an intelligence agent.
Hanna, who had frowned at Jeong Il-su’s words, asked me in a quiet voice.
“Why are they blocking it like that? Isn’t it a good thing if public order improves?”
Perhaps thinking she had asked him, Jeong Il-su answered right away.
“They say it’s for stability and freedom, but more than that, it’s probably because the law includes measures restricting overseas travel. When the time comes, they’ll all need to go to relic sites overseas, so they can’t accept it.”
At his matter-of-fact words, Hanna’s eyes widened.
“That’s…”
I let out a hollow laugh as well.
They were blocking the law so they could secretly leave Korea before the apocalypse arrived?
You could say it was something they were doing to survive, but that was only from the perspective of those who had been granted special treatment.
To everyone else, they were nothing but villains.
After hearing the news and Jeong Il-su’s explanation, I was able to harden my resolve once again.
If they were ignoring the chaos for the sake of their own gain, then I had no reason to worry about them.
While I was making that decision, the car we were in crossed the Hangang again and arrived in Namyangju.
The car stopped in the parking lot near the warehouse I had visited several times before, and Jeong Il-su stood beside it, waving at Hanna and me.
“Have a safe visit to the warehouse. I’ll wait here.”
Even though I had never told him the warehouse’s location, he had found his way here without issue.
Aside from the times he had come separately by taxi, he had once arrived by helicopter as well, but I had never told him where the warehouse was.
And yet he knew its location.
Should I say it was just what one would expect from an American intelligence agent?
He surely knew what kind of warehouse it was and who used it as well.
Naturally, he would think I had come this time too in order to use the ruling party leader’s warehouse.
The reason I had arranged to meet the NIS agent and the reporter here was to make Jeong Il-su and the CIA misunderstand.
He was someone helping me, and he was an intelligence officer like Margretta, but Jeong Il-su was not on my side.
I had thought so before, but today I realized it once more.
Right now, the only people I could trust were my family and my team members.
Perhaps because I had not made an appointment in advance, the warehouse was empty, and the warehouse keeper was nowhere to be seen.
Instead, I sensed two presences near the warehouse.
The place where I sensed them was exactly where the two had hidden before.
As I approached, I heard whispering.
“I don’t know if this is the right thing to do. The way things are going feels awfully suspicious…”
“Then you go back first. I’m a reporter, so it’s enough for only me to be here.”
“Haa, I can’t do that. Now that it’s come to this, I should hear the story too.”
I stepped over in one stride and cut into their conversation.
“You would be better off listening. It probably isn’t something a reporter can handle alone.”
At my words, both of them hurriedly turned their heads.
They were startled to see me right behind them, then startled again when they saw Hanna approaching this way.
Unlike the NIS agent, who instinctively raised a hand to his chest, the reporter threw out a question.
“You scared me. But who is the woman who came with you?”
At the word woman, I turned around as well.
Behind me, there was only Hanna in ordinary plainclothes.
Seeing Hanna, I understood what the reporter meant.
I had been seeing her continuously, so I hadn’t noticed, but now that I looked, Hanna did not look like a schoolgirl.
Come to think of it, the year had changed, and she was no longer a minor.
I looked at Hanna approaching and said,
“She’s my colleague.”
“Uh, then is she also a dispatched team member?”
He knew about the dispatched team?
I asked the reporter.
“You know about the dispatched team?”
At my words, the reporter scratched his head.
“Yes. After digging around here and there, I was able to learn the small details. I couldn’t publish it as an article, but I found out that the dispatched team went from the Baekdusan relic to a planetary system called TRAPPIST, and that they’ve been fighting monsters there while bringing black stones and various samples back to Earth.”
This reporter knew more than I had expected.
Or perhaps rumors had spread farther than I thought.
When I looked at him with an impressed expression, the reporter sighed.
“But there are far more things I still can’t figure out. Why they’re bringing back the black stones, whether the changes in the environment have anything to do with the relics… In the past, stories would have leaked out somehow, but this time there’s none of that.”
This was all due to the power of the relic containing oath magic.
It seemed to be reaching its limit, but the fact that the secret had been kept this long was already remarkable.
So I told the two of them the secret that had been hidden.
Earth’s destruction, the planets that America and China had chosen as refuges.
The black stones that would serve as fuel to reach those planets, and the work of the dispatched team mining those black stones.
I told them everything.
Their eyes had begun to waver from the moment I said Earth would be destroyed, and after hearing the entire story, the two of them were at a loss for what to do.
However, unlike the reporter, whose face was full of disbelief, the NIS agent bit his lip with a hardened expression.
“No, how are we supposed to believe this…”
The reporter began to complain to the agent, then saw his friend’s expression and opened his mouth.
“Don’t tell me you believe this?”
“If what he said is true, then all the absurd things the higher-ups have been doing make sense. The continued control of the North Korean region even after the war ended, the U.S. military still remaining in this country, the big shots continuing to block those bills—it all makes sense!”
At his NIS friend’s words, the reporter stammered.
“But… that’s… No, even so, that’s…”
The reporter’s expression kept changing as he spoke.
Doubt, anxiety, comprehension, acceptance.
His expression, which had continued to shift, eventually settled into a single one.
An expression called despair.
The reporter asked me with a darkened face.
“Is Earth really going to be destroyed?”
“It will become a place where humanity can’t survive, so it wouldn’t be wrong to call that destruction.”
If we could live in temperatures as high as those on Venus, that would be one thing, but even for me, that was impossible.
“If that’s true… then the people who have everything are trying to survive among themselves.”
It was a crude way to put it, but it wasn’t wrong.
I nodded at his words.
My answer didn’t seem to sit well with him.
The reporter asked me with an angry face.
“Why are you only telling us this now? If you had told people sooner…”
Perhaps thinking he had heard the story far too late, the reporter grew angry at me.
It seemed like his anger was directed at the wrong person, but I answered his question.
“What do you think would have happened if I had told everyone in advance?”
At my words, the reporter stared at me blankly.
If the people of the world had known first, the world would already have been covered in war.
That was why I had kept the secret too.
If they had not tried to flee by themselves, I would have continued to keep the secret.
The agent, his friend, patted the half-dazed reporter on the shoulder.
“I think we should be grateful we can hear it even now. If it weren’t for him, everyone would have died without ever knowing what was happening.”
At his friend’s words, the reporter came back to his senses.
He had turned away from my words because of the shock, but once he recovered from that shock, he soon believed me.
“Do you need more evidence?”
At my words, the reporter shook his head.
“No. If what you said is true, I’ll find the evidence quickly. It’s simply hard to believe; the evidence was scattered everywhere.”
People were only trying to look away. The world was currently racing toward destruction.
They would be able to check the temperature and carbon dioxide increases soon enough, but even without that, if they looked into the medical checkups of each country, the Middle East war, or the Korean war, they would quickly learn the truth.
Even while saying there was no need to worry about evidence, the reporter’s expression was not good.
“The problem won’t be finding the evidence, but getting the article published.”
It seemed the reporter was worried about how to inform the people.
Certainly, it would not be easy to publish it as an article.
Even without the relic’s influence, those in power would try to stop the article from going out.
But there was a way around that too.
“Fortunately, there is someone currently being tormented by those in power. He’s suffering, but he has enough strength to protect a newspaper article, at least.”
Leaving the two confused men in front of me, I took out my phone.
I found the private number I had gotten last time and called the person on the other end.
After it rang, he answered immediately, just as he had promised before.
—Have you come to Earth?
As expected, he hadn’t known I had come to Earth.
“You weren’t even informed that I came? You’re having a harder time than I thought.”
—I have no excuse. It hasn’t been as easy as I expected. I didn’t think not only the politicians of both parties, but even the business world would unite this tightly.
He admitted that his situation was difficult.
As expected, that was not like an ordinary politician.
Seeing that he had not yet changed, I asked the president,
“There is a way to reverse the situation. Would you like to hear it?”
—There is such a way?
“The world will become even more of a mess, but it will help break this frustrating deadlock.”
—Tell me. Whatever it is, it can’t be worse than now.
At the president’s confident words, I shook my head.
I had no way of knowing whether he would be able to say that after hearing what I had to say.
I told the president,
“I’m going to reveal Earth’s destruction to everyone.”
The Prophet of Earth