-The Boss and His Subordinates
When I asked again with a deliberately calm expression, King narrowed his eyes as if something about me seemed suspicious, then answered.
“Loki asked me if I wanted to expand my range of activities. He said if I moved into the realm of black magic, I’d be able to do far more things. Of course I said yes. I was getting pretty tired of hacking, anyway. There’s only so much you can do by stealing genetic maps and bio-modification blueprints.”
It was truly absurd. He had heard the words black magic and still agreed without the slightest concern.
I wanted to scold him and ask what on earth he wanted to do when he said there were limits to hacking alone, but I didn’t bother.
King was already a criminal far beyond the level where a scolding would get through to him. He only looked like a boy on the outside.
Perhaps guessing what I was thinking from my gaze, King added,
“It’s a world where you can’t enjoy any power unless you’re a mage. A mage like you wouldn’t know. The barriers and helplessness ordinary people feel, I mean. So don’t even think about lecturing me. But Loki said he could let even an ordinary person like me wield great power. He said directly using magic wasn’t the only path in this world.”
So that was how he had made his subordinates, who wanted an entirely different level of bio-modification, into chimeras, and gifted him the desk that was a magic tool.
As if to say I could look all I wanted, King jerked his chin toward the frozen desk.
I had no intention of melting it down and examining it right away.
“So where does the portal lead? Which dimension are you bringing the goblins from?”
“How would I know? I’ve never gone over to the other side. But wouldn’t it be some kind of storage room?”
“A storage room?”
“Yeah. Loki said he’d gathered a whole lot of goblins there, so I should summon them and use them whenever I needed. It’s probably empty now, though. Because of you, they’re all frozen here like this.”
“You’re saying the goblins here are all of them?”
“What, did you think they’d pour out endlessly?”
As expected, a portal opened with a magic tool seemed simpler than a portal a mage opened with spatial magic.
It probably wasn’t a portal connected to another dimension, but merely an entrance to a subspace.
In any case, that was something I could confirm after taking the desk with me.
“Have you ever met any black mage other than Loki?”
“No.”
“And you’ve never heard about the Magic Tower?”
“I’ve heard of it. Loki talked about it several times, like he was bragging. Loki seemed to have dealings with the Magic Tower too.”
I drew in a breath and checked my phone. I was making sure it was recording properly.
Another important piece of information had come out.
It seemed Loki had not merely taken on the dirty work of the Hall or the government and subcontracted it out; he had also served as a link to the Magic Tower.
He hadn’t even been living in Korea the whole time, so I wondered just how long he had been going around acting like some lobbyist.
“What did Loki say about the Magic Tower?”
“He said he had connections to the Magic Tower too, that the time would come when the Magic Tower held great power, and that if we did our assigned roles well, he’d connect us to the Magic Tower too. Things like that. It’s all gone wrong now, though.”
King spat out the last sentence in a regretful tone.
He didn’t seem to have any sense of revulsion toward the black mages of the Magic Tower.
Apparently, he didn’t care that they caused terror attacks and brought calamity upon the world.
Now that I saw it, King was a bastard whose sense of ethics had completely broken down. I wondered if it was really all right to let him go like this.
When I silently glared at King, he waved his hands and said,
“Ah! Don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying I like the black mages of the Magic Tower.”
“Really? The way I see it, you look like you’d gladly offer your loyalty to anyone who gives you money, authority, and power.”
“Well, that’s not entirely wrong, but even I have a line. The black mages of the Magic Tower are terrifying. They’re on a different level from Loki. If I got close to them for no reason, I might lose my head.”
“Ha! You look down on Loki, do you? Loki could blow away someone like you with a single finger too. What exactly do you think a mage is?”
Somehow, I had ended up defending Loki. No, well, it wasn’t exactly defending him, but anyway.
Of course, I was merely trying to teach the reckless King proper knowledge about mages.
“Sure. That might be true. But in any case, Loki tried to make a deal with me. That means he was someone controllable enough. But the black mages of the Magic Tower are different.”
“You said you’ve never met them.”
“What are you talking about? You must have heard what happened to the people who went to Incheon Airport of their own accord to seek out the black mage during the Incheon Airport terror attack, haven’t you? They say that guy, Yasin or whatever his name was, devoured them all. After hearing that story…”
King shook his head.
If he had even the slightest sense of rejection toward the black mages of the Magic Tower, then that was fortunate, at least.
For King himself, for the biohacker group, and for the world as well.
Of course, I had heard from Thor about the reawakened from Daejeon who had come to Incheon Airport.
They had gone there of their own accord, claiming to worship black mages, hadn’t they?
Pitiful beings who had ultimately been combined into chimeras and, in the end, swallowed by Yasin.
It seemed King didn’t want to meet that same end.
If he knew his own life was so precious, why did he bring in other lives and recklessly experiment on them and run wild?
“Have you ever thought about living properly?”
I asked, looking straight into King’s eyes.
“What?”
“You. Stop living like this, committing crimes and even acting as a black mage’s underling. I’m not even asking you to live kindly. Have you never thought about living without doing bad things?”
“What are you talking about? Spare me the lecture, you damned heroic mage.”
Now that he had told me everything, he had no power and no defensive weapons left, yet his boldness was still alive and well.
In any case, he didn’t seem to have any hope of rehabilitation.
“I’m sick and tired of mages now, whether they’re white mages or black mages. We’ll live on our own, so you mind your own business and save my subordinates like you promised!”
King continued grumbling as he glared at my face.
Still, his concern for his subordinates was commendable.
“I’ll keep my promise, so don’t worry. But you’ll have to leave this place. If you stay here, the Bureau won’t leave you alone.”
“But Director Han Huiyeong…”
“Han Huiyeong won’t be able to remain in her director’s seat anymore either.”
“You’re saying you’re going to overturn everything? That goes against our promise!”
“What do you mean, it goes against it? Leave this place immediately. And from now on, don’t make any deals with black mages. I’ll be watching you.”
My conversation with King ended there. The names of the core figures among the swindlers had come out as much as they were going to.
I didn’t have even the slightest hopeful thought that King would live properly from now on, but I left him room to leave this place and live anew.
Even if I had misjudged because I was deceived by an appearance that looked as young as Gil, I had nothing to say.
He was, without a doubt, a young man with a great many days left to live.
I wouldn’t be able to stop him from continuing to live while committing all sorts of petty crimes, but in any case, I hoped King would at least keep his distance from black mages.
When I stepped out into the hallway, the situation there was not the slightest bit different from before I entered King’s room.
Gil was still maintaining wind magic, holding the operatives and orcs pinned against the wall at the end of the hallway.
Gil didn’t look tired at all.
Quite some time had passed while I interrogated King, but the mana consumption didn’t seem to be an issue for Gil in the slightest.
Looking closely, I saw that the mana waves flowed out in concentric circles, made one round, and flowed back in again, maintaining the spell that way.
It was a unique and clever method.
On top of that, Gil’s mana vessel was larger than anyone else’s, so this level of magic looked extremely easy for him.
“Nothing happened, right?”
“Yes. Not here. Is everything finished now?”
“Yeah. Let them go now. And come inside. There’s something we need to take from the room.”
At my words, Gil immediately withdrew the wind magic. Then the operatives and orcs stuck to the wall slid down to the floor.
Long sighs came from here and there.
Leaving them as they were, I went back into King’s room.
Gil, who followed me in, saw the inside of the room and widened his eyes.
“This place is packed with goblins, isn’t it?”
“Come across carefully this way. We’re taking that desk.”
“The desk?”
First, I melted the desk that was frozen solid.
When I did, the portal floating above the tabletop melted with it and began to ripple again.
“Wow! It’s a portal, isn’t it? Then this desk is a magic tool?”
“Yeah. It’s a magic tool designed to open a portal through a mechanical device.”
We had to close the portal first. Looking over the side of the desk as I had seen earlier, I found two buttons under my hand.
When I pressed a button, the tabletop flipped over and the portal closed.
It was fairly bulky to carry whole, so I considered tearing off only the tabletop and taking that, but the operating buttons were attached to the side of the desk, so that wouldn’t work.
“We’ll have to take the whole thing for now.”
“Yes. I’ll float it with kinetic magic.”
As we were about to leave the room with the desk, King, who had been watching, spoke.
“You have to melt my subordinates too!”
“Right. I forgot.”
Come to think of it, the two men in the room were still frozen too.
When I quickly melted them, they looked around with startled faces.
They remained taciturn as ever.
“King, you’d better gather your subordinates and leave this place quickly.”
“I know. I’m going.”
There was a lot to do even on the way downstairs.
I had to melt the frozen X, and I had to release the guy I had put a magic snare on.
King followed behind us, carefully taking care of even the subordinates who had collapsed on the first floor.
When we finally stepped outside the building, King spoke bluntly.
“There are a few of my subordinates in the laboratory building too. Let them leave unharmed as well.”
“Got it. Don’t worry.”
At the very least, a boss who treasured his subordinates was worthy of respect. It was fortunate he wasn’t a man who cared only about money.
Gil and I headed for the laboratory building.
When we entered the building, King’s subordinates, who had been standing guard, immediately came rushing out, but even after seeing us, they offered no particular resistance.
Even if they didn’t know the details of the situation in the headquarters building, they had grasped that something had gone wrong.
“Go outside. King is waiting.”
When I told them that, they ran outside without a word.
We searched every corner of the laboratory building.
In addition to the Phil Office mercenaries we had come to find, dozens of zombies and homeless humans, as well as orcs and goblins, were imprisoned there.
When he saw them, the veins stood out on Gil’s face.
Because he knew very well what it meant for them to have been brought here.
We released them all.
“Leave this place. It’s safe now.”
“Thank you, Mage-nim!”
“We’re alive!”
The humans and zombies ran off in a hurry without looking back, but things were a bit different with the orcs and goblins.
The orcs showed a ferocious demeanor, as if they weren’t in their right minds, and the goblins wandered about in confusion, chattering in sounds we couldn’t understand.
Thinking about it, these beings hadn’t been residents of our country in the first place, so it didn’t seem right to simply send them outside.
I hurriedly used freezing magic to freeze the orcs and goblins.
Then I called Yu Jaeseon.
“Please come here at once. I have a whole bundle of gifts for you.”
[What? Gifts?]