-The Link
“Wow! This car is seriously amazing!”
Gil was the first to burst out in admiration.
Even to Gil, who knew little about cars or brands, it seemed impressive enough to draw an exclamation on its own.
Then again, it was such a splendid car that anyone would have found it hard not to be impressed.
It really must have been incredibly expensive—so much so that I wondered if the Bureau hadn’t overdone it a little.
“It’s nice. Want to take it for a spin now?”
“Can we?”
“Of course we can. They said it’s our car now.”
We promptly climbed into the car.
Now that we had a new car, how could we not test-drive it right away?
The sleek teal exterior was impressive, but the interior, filled with the scent of new leather, was both extremely luxurious and comfortable.
Sitting in the seat, it felt as though the car were embracing us.
I started the engine and slowly drove out of the alley.
From the feel of the ignition to the smoothness when I pressed the accelerator, the ride quality and handling were all fantastic.
“It really is an excellent car.”
“It’s so comfortable.”
But there was an obstacle to properly testing it.
The moment we left the alley and got onto the side street, we couldn’t move. Even though rush hour should have been past, the roads were still packed with cars.
At this rate, the riverside road would be no different from a parking lot.
It felt like I’d need to drive it on something like the Autobahn to truly appreciate this car’s worth, but there was nowhere like that in downtown Seoul.
And it wasn’t exactly the right time to go far, either.
“Hmm. This won’t work. The roads are completely jammed.”
“Yeah. We’ll have to put off really driving it until tomorrow. Let’s just go home and rest today.”
“Yes, let’s.”
In the end, we returned home without even making it out of the neighborhood.
I had just finished parking in front of the house and was getting out of the car when someone hurried toward us from the far end of the alley and called out to me.
“Mage-nim!”
A familiar voice. It was Jang Pildu, the head of Pil Mercenary Office.
I hadn’t seen him in a while, so I had forgotten about him entirely, but the moment I heard his voice, I remembered at once.
Jang Pildu emerged from the darkness and approached me.
A bright smile was spread across his rugged face.
“Chief, long time no see.”
“Yeah. Somehow it ended up that way. But did you get a new car? Wow! You picked a good one, huh? As expected, now that you’ve become a hero, your household circumstances sure are different. Still, I’m glad you didn’t move. I might not have been able to find you. Anyway, in the short time I haven’t seen you, you’ve become a hero, so now I’m honored just to meet you, aren’t I?”
Jang Pildu prattled on.
It didn’t seem like he was just saying it for show; he genuinely seemed unsure how to treat me.
Back when I went around doing mercenary work, we had been comfortable with each other like friends, but then again, I had become a hero overnight.
Not that he suddenly started using formal speech with me or anything.
“Enough. What brings you here?”
“Here, this.”
Jang Pildu handed me something in a paper bag.
When I took it, it was whiskey.
The bottle labeled “Oakwood Single Malt Whiskey” looked familiar.
Come to think of it, it was the very whiskey I had found and drunk in my room on the first night I fell into this world.
Now the memory came back faintly, as though it were an old recollection.
“Whiskey? Thanks.”
“No need to thank me now. But you’re taking it just like that? You’re a hero now—can you still do shabby jobs from our mercenary office?”
Jang Pildu said with a laugh.
His face was smiling, but he was watching me with slightly startled eyes. He looked a little anxious.
Only then did the memory tied to the whiskey rise to the surface of my consciousness.
There was a meaning behind the whiskey Jang Pildu handed me.
“Oakwood Single Malt Whiskey” was a rather expensive whiskey in this world.
Whenever Jang Pildu requested mercenary work from me, he would gift me a bottle of it, a way of giving me special treatment as a mage in his own fashion.
Accepting the whiskey meant accepting the request.
And I had just taken it without a second thought.
‘So there are still memories like this that remain submerged and haven’t surfaced.’
It was probably because they weren’t particularly important.
Still, it made me wonder if useful information might emerge if I combed carefully through Oudin’s memories.
“What, you had a request for me?”
“Let’s go up and talk for a bit.”
Jang Pildu looked around as if belatedly cautious, then pointed toward the rooftop as he spoke.
At the same time, he glanced once at Gil standing beside me.
His expression seemed to ask who that was.
“Fine. Let’s go up first. Gil, you go to your room and rest now.”
“Understood.”
Only after Gil went into his room did Jang Pildu ask who he was. When I said he was a teammate I went on raids with, he didn’t pry any further.
Jang Pildu and I went up to the rooftop.
I was about to sit in the chairs left outside and talk, but Jang Pildu pointed to the rooftop room.
“Let’s talk inside. It’s a bit……”
“Got it. The inside will be sweltering, so prepare yourself.”
Looking at him now, Jang Pildu seemed extremely anxious and frightened of something.
There was a firm protective barrier around this house, so there was no need for that, but rather than go into a long explanation, I did as Jang Pildu said and went inside.
As expected, the rooftop room, which had been closed up for days, had been heated by the sun and was terribly hot, the air stale.
Only after throwing all the windows and the front door wide open could we barely breathe.
“What’s going on?”
I took two bottles of water from the refrigerator, handed one to Jang Pildu, and asked.
As if his insides were burning up, Jang Pildu gulped down the water before opening his mouth.
“Last time, I couldn’t properly compensate you, Mage-nim, and I felt bad, so I couldn’t even come see you. I’m sorry for showing up out of the blue like this. I really couldn’t bring myself to come unless it was something serious. You also seemed very busy all this time……”
“Skip the preamble and get straight to the point.”
“Actually, it’s less a request and more something I need to ask of you. It’s a personal favor from me. Save me. I’m in a very dangerous situation.”
“What happened? Tell me in detail.”
“Before, our office took on a job with only mercenaries, without a mage. It wasn’t a very difficult job, so we didn’t need a mage. Still, the pay was pretty good. It was a request from Vanaheim.”
“What? You took a request from Vanaheim?”
Before I knew it, I had cut Jang Pildu off and asked again.
At that, Jang Pildu watched my reaction, and the conversation veered off again.
“Yeah. Sorry. It was a request from a major corporation, but I didn’t even contact you, Mage-nim. But it really wasn’t a difficult job. Back then, after the Incheon Port incident, our office suffered massive losses too. I had to look after the mercenaries who were struggling.”
Perhaps thinking I was blaming him for not giving me a good job, Jang Pildu kept making excuses.
“I’m not saying that because you didn’t give me the job, so don’t worry about it and keep talking. What in the world would a major corporation like Vanaheim request from a mercenary office?”
“It probably came all the way to us because it was some trivial thing. I told you, it really wasn’t anything special.”
The job Vanaheim had requested from Pil Office was to catch stray cats in the city.
They said Vanaheim had asked them to catch every cat in the area around Neo Forest.
For several days, Jang Pildu and the mercenaries diligently caught cats every night. Then they loaded the cats they caught and sent them to a warehouse somewhere in Gimpo.
“The work was really easy. Vanaheim gave us some kind of powdered medicine. When we sprinkled it in the alleys, the cats would crawl out right away and follow us. You know, like the Pied Piper from the fairy tale. That’s what it felt like. Oh, right! Was it rats that man led away?”
“So you weren’t killing the cats, but luring them with the medicine and transporting them?”
“That’s right. Since they’re a bio company, I figured they were probably going to use them for animal experiments or something. Vanaheim’s basically like a pharmaceutical company originally, isn’t it?”
In any case, he said the cat-catching job ended easily, and they received a nice payment and moved on.
It was illegal, but half the jobs requested of mercenary offices were originally like that.
They had signed a confidentiality agreement, but since they weren’t going to go around telling anyone, they hadn’t paid much attention to it.
“But right after we did that job, the incident with the monster rat swarm happened in the city.”
“What? That cat-catching job was around that time?”
“You remember, right? The monster rat swarm incident. It wasn’t anything else—it was a swarm of rats. So I thought it might have something to do with the cat hunt.”
Jang Pildu’s instincts weren’t wrong.
If Vanaheim’s request had cleared all the stray cats out of the city, and a swarm of monster rats appeared in that very area right afterward, then there was definitely a connection between the two incidents.
I had already suspected Vanaheim regarding the monster rat terror attack.
The monster rat terror attack had not been carried out by the black mages of the Magic Tower. There had been no mark of the Infinite Pentagon in the ashen energy surrounding the rats.
The monster rats had not caused any particular harm to people.
They had merely served as a pretext afterward, allowing the dwarf district to be searched by framing the dwarves.
‘As expected, it was Vanaheim’s doing. They pinned such an absurd accusation on the dwarves to find Ren.’
And Vanaheim wasn’t the only one involved.
The mages of the Hall had spread the rumors, and the government had officially announced that it was a problem caused by the dwarves.
It was a work created by scoundrels joining hands.
I had long suspected the connection between them, but my heart beat faster at the thought that evidence might pop up from an unexpected place.
“And then?”
I urged Jang Pildu to continue.
“To be honest, whatever a corporation goes around doing isn’t really our business, but still, you know. They committed the kind of terror attack a black mage would pull. It scared me for no reason. I wondered if they might pin it on us.”
Around that time, the Incheon Port explosion incident had not been long ago, so Jang Pildu’s emotions must have been on edge.
He had seen mercenaries literally blown to pieces and dying right before his eyes because of a black mage’s terror attack.
He had no good feelings toward black mages who committed terror attacks, and he was also afraid that he might be falsely accused of terrorism.
So he said he secretly tried to track down what had happened.
First, he went to the warehouse in Gimpo where they had transported the cats and snooped around. Sure enough, a suspicious mage was going in and out.
“I thought, so that guy must be a black mage, and tried following him. But what do you know, he had his feet in all sorts of places. Vanaheim, of course, but he was also going in and out of the Hall, and it seemed like he had connections on the government Bureau side too. He wasn’t a black mage, just a foreign mage, but he was suspicious as hell.”
“A foreign mage? Do you happen to know his name?”
“I do. A guy called Loki.”
Loki. I wasn’t surprised at all. I had thought Loki was suspicious for a long time already.
Looking back, when the monster rat swarm happened, the first person to spout nonsense had been Loki as well.
He was the link connecting the scoundrels as he moved between Vanaheim, the Hall, and the government.