Chae Jucheol planted his cane on the floor and rose from his throne.
"That's right. I am the same."
Chae Jucheol's flat, arid eyes turned toward the chief. The chief did not dare meet that gaze and lowered his head.
"By now, Sinhyeok must be holding the funeral."
"Yes. That's correct. However, President Chae Sinhyeok has asked that recovering the body and searching for the culprit be left to him. He wishes to handle it quietly."
"……Is that so?"
Thud.
Chae Jucheol's cane struck the ground once more.
"Seeing that fiery child staying quiet until now, it seems there was some issue with my grandson as well."
Even at his grandson's death, Chae Jucheol showed a surprising lack of emotion; he reacted not with coldness but with sheer indifference.
His secretary asked him.
"……What shall we do?"
"Hmm…… Still, this is someone who laid a hand on the Chae family's bloodline. If I let it pass quietly, would that not diminish my standing?"
In Chae Jucheol's voice as he spoke, there was neither intonation nor emotion. As though a matter of course had simply occurred, as though he were merely doing what needed to be done, Chae Jucheol spoke quietly.
"Summon Yu Jinhyeok."
"Yes. Understood."
Chae Jucheol smiled faintly.
Yu Jinhyeok. A good-for-nothing who had been kicked out of the Yu family long ago for committing a grave mistake, but whom he had kept alive until now because he seemed useful.
Having made good use of his own talents all this while and become quite a significant figure, it was about time to repay this benefactor.
"Then how should we set the price?"
"……Price?"
For the first time, a change appeared on his face.
Chae Jucheol furrowed one brow.
However, he soon masked himself with a feigned calm, stroking his chin as if in thought.
"A price……"
And then he smiled grimly, spewing cold words.
"If the bastard wants a price, tell him to think long and hard about why he has remained alive all this time instead of dying."
* * *
In the depths of winter, on a day three days after Chae Jinyun's three-day funeral rites had completely ended.
I came out to the front of Seoul Grand Park.
It was because Chae Nayun had called me.
Chae Nayun had said she wanted to meet me here. She had even added that they had laid Chae Jinyun to rest at the memorial park today, so I had no way to refuse.
"Cold."
Exhaling white breath, I sat on a bench at Seoul Grand Park. The current time was 3:10 PM.
At a point already ten minutes past the promised time, Chae Nayun was nowhere to be seen.
"……I shouldn't have come."
It was the exact moment I muttered that out of regret for what had already been done.
Warmth touched my shoulder. And something sharp settled on the crown of my head.
"……?"
A glance revealed Chae Nayun pressing my shoulders with both hands, resting her chin on top of my head.
"What are you doing?"
"Sorry, did you wait?"
"……No, not really."
Chae Nayun smirked and naturally sat down beside me, leaning her head on my shoulder. Then she sniffed, smelling me, and gently furrowed her brows.
"You smell like cigarettes."
"……Ahem."
I scratched the back of my neck for no reason.
It wasn't untrue; lately, cigarettes clung to my body. Given the situation, it had gotten worse than when I used to write.
But what was truly fascinating was that cigarettes had the effect of temporarily raising tenacity. One cigarette gave about 0.3 per hour. These days, I was smoking various brands to find the one with the highest effect.
"Don't smoke."
A hollow laugh escaped me as I spoke.
'Don't smoke this stuff'…… I never thought I'd say such pretentious words floating around the internet.
"I'm already secondhand smoking, though?"
"……"
Without answering, I raised my right shoulder where Chae Nayun was leaning.
"Ah. Damn it."
Chae Nayun bounced off slightly.
She glared at me sulkily, then suddenly bit my shoulder.
"Ouch. Why are you like this?"
"Tasty."
"Don't say weird things."
At that, Chae Nayun leaned her head far back. Wondering what she was doing, I saw her swiftly scanning my attire with eyes like a hawk's.
"Pfft. What. You dressed up really carefully?"
"I dressed the same as always."
"That's crazy bullshit. Even though you wear nothing but your trainee uniform every day. But it suits you."
We treated each other as normally as we could.
Both Chae Nayun and I.
We neither brought up nor intended to bring up what happened that day.
"Ah, right. Hey. I'm…… going back."
Chae Nayun spoke abruptly without an object.
"Where to."
"Mount Baekdu."
"……Is that possible?"
Barely a week had passed since she had sent off her close family member. Even I suffered whenever I thought about it; my breath was choked and my hands trembled even now. Chae Nayun would need much more time.
"Of course. Naturally."
And yet, such a bold answer.
I could feel the slightest bit relieved.
But Chae Nayun seemed to have more she wanted to say, as she repeatedly pressed down on my shoulder.
"What. Again."
"So…… you know."
"Yeah. What."
"……Wait for me, just a month and a half."
A month and a half. It was when Chae Nayun's training would end.
But for what did she want me to wait?
It was agonizing, as if my insides were burning, but I forced a smile and said.
"If I wait, what are you going to do."
"……I can't tell you that."
"Sigh."
I let out a deep sigh once more.
From now on, it was a story I did not know.
A story I could not even imagine, one I could not write down on my own.
At the ending of that story, with what kind of eyes would Chae Nayun and I look at each other?
"Until then, I won't run away."
I simply said that.
"Really?"
It was then.
Chae Nayun wrapped both arms around my neck and pulled me strongly toward her.
Chae Nayun's face filled my vision.
Our breaths mingled and our noses nearly touched; Chae Nayun grinned widely.
"Then I'll go and come back with my mind at ease."
Saying so, she pressed her forehead against my shoulder.
Rub, rub.
Rubbing her face against my unremarkable shoulder over and over.
"Ugh. You smell like cigarettes……."
Muttering with furrowed brows, she suddenly sprang up.
But I saw.
Though it was only her back, her ears were burning red as if scalded.
"Your face is going to burst. Why do something you don't usually do?"
"Wh-what, what about my face?"
Chae Nayun stammered and pointed at me.
With a bitter smile, I got up after her.
We stood side by side, gazing at the park scenery.
Under the bleak and cold winter sky, the park was teeming with countless people.
* * *
The news of Chae Jinyun's death swept across the entire world. However, the Daehyeon family did not announce the details and remained silent. Thus, what ran rampant were only various speculative rumors and gossip.
Of course, not a single one of them was correct.
"Ah, here it is. Mr. Kim Hajin."
"Thank you."
And today was January 27th.
I had come all the way to the post office to receive the envelope. Because Chae Nayun, who did not know my home address, had sent the letter to the Seoul post office.
I sat at a desk nearby and opened the envelope.
Her personality was tomboyish, but her handwriting made the letter more feminine than anyone's.
[How are you? I'm doing well too.
…but actually, honestly, I'm only telling you this: every time I sleep, I think of it and feel like I'm dying from the pain. I'm also scared of how long I can endure it.
But the funny thing is, training is similarly hard, so I'm actually okay?
And the food here is almost Michelin 3-star level. Since we're self-sufficient in a place with extremely high mana density, all the food ingredients are top-grade. It's super delicious lol.
Ah, right. And I tried smoking a cigarette, you know? I secretly snatched one from the instructor.]
"Huh?"
I read on with widened eyes.
[Wow. Why do you smoke this crap? It was so bitter I threw it away right after one puff.]
……Should I call that a relief?
Anyway, as I read, I had unknowingly reached the end.
[P.S. And hurry up with the reply. Unlike the others, I can only send one of these letters every three days, you know? I'll send another one in three days.]
When I put down Chae Nayun's letter, another sheet of letter paper appeared behind it.
An empty, blank sheet.
This letter paper was a kind of magical item; if I wrote a reply, it would be copied identically onto a letter in the mailbox located at Mount Baekdu.
"……."
I looked at the paper silently.
On my way here, I had thought dozens, hundreds of times.
Could I receive her letter? Did I have the right to write a reply?
Should I just run away? Should I disappear from before Chae Nayun?
But all those thoughts just went in circles like a loop……
—Uwaaaah!
In an instant, a scream was heard from outside.
I glanced outside the post office window.
"What the."
There were underground monsters climbing up from the road's manholes.
Monsters in the middle of Seoul.
It was a bit absurd, but not all that strange.
Because it was about time the frequency of monster appearances increased exponentially.
"……."
I narrowed my brows and watched the scene.
Heroes would soon sortie, so there was no need for me to step up. However, the sight of a hideously shaped mole monster chasing a child entered my vision.
The moment I saw it, my body moved first.
I put down the letter and rushed outside. At the same time, the Desert Eagle born from my Stigma's mana was grasped in my hand.
I immediately pulled the trigger.
The fired bullet penetrated the mole monster's forehead that had been chasing the child.
"Seonghyeok!"
The child's mother, who had hurried over, took the child and evacuated.
Citizens screamed and fled at the sudden monster incident.
However, I walked in the opposite direction of the fleeing citizens and transformed the Desert Eagle into a rifle.
"That's quite a lot."
The monsters that had already surfaced and occupied the road were roughly around seventy in number. Their types and appearances varied, but even the strongest among them looked to be only mid-grade, around the 7th to 9th rank.
If that's the case.
I set all seventy heads as targets and aimed. There was no need to move the muzzle.
Curved Shot (曲射)
The bullet discharged from the straight muzzle split into dozens of branches and rushed along different trajectories.
The bullets homed in on the monsters as if they were living organisms, killing them.
The time taken to kill all seventy of them was barely over a second at most.
After the gunshots that filled the heavens, the middle of the street fell silent without even a sound of breathing.
I put the pistol back into my Stigma's mana.
"……Ah, excuse me. Please don't take pictures."
I said to the citizens furtively raising their smartwatches. With slightly disappointed faces, they pressed keys instead of snapping pictures.
Saw something in Seoul today—
Saw a guy shooting a gun—
They were probably trying to upload something like this to social media.
There wasn't much I could do to stop that, and rumors about a gun-shooting Cube trainee were already rampant in the media anyway, so I returned to the post office.
Just as I was holding a pencil, agonizing over the letter.
Suddenly, interesting news rang out from the TV at the post office.
[Yu Jinwoong, leader of the Strait of Pure Water, entrusts his young daughter with the guild's weighty affairs.]
[World's 2nd-ranked giant guild, Strait of Pure Water, caught in serious overreach of authority. The hidden power behind the throne is a girl not even past her eighteenth birthday?]
[This is an urgent report. Monsters from underground have invaded various parts of Seoul. The threat level is not high, but citizens are advised to refrain from going outside if possible……]
"Ah."
It had been slightly delayed, but what had to blow up finally blew up.
But I had already prepared the materials for a perfect counterpunch, so there was no need to worry.
Rather, Yu Yeonha would use this incident as an opportunity to purge—or co-opt—all her opposition, laying the foundation for a perfect one-person dictatorship in the future.
"Sigh……"
But for now, there was something in front of me that troubled me more than that.
End
[Abuse of authority scandal of Yu Jinwoong's daughter, Yu Yeonha...... Is the true power behind the guild's operations actually the leader's daughter?]
Yu Yeonha bit her nails as she watched the news.
When the first report came out, she had thought it would be buried thanks to the Seoul monster incident happening at a convenient time, but that was merely a personal wish.
Instead, from the very next day, it had poured out like a burst dam, and now three days later, damned false rumors were being added on top, filling the news and newspapers.
Her smartwatch was burning hot from the flood of calls, and her personal social media was an unprecedented chaos.
People she had never seen before were scraping her nerves raw with quarrelsome, derisive comments—saying that someone so young was overstepping her place, that she was an eighteen-year-old puppet master behind the scenes, asking whether she had seduced everyone with her looks, and so on.
“Ugh…”
The intense stress brought on a headache. Yu Yeonha closed her eyes and pressed her fingers to her temples.
Normally, she should have sensed the signs of this kind of attack and dealt with it before anything broke out, but she truly hadn’t imagined it even in her dreams. That was how organized and sudden the attack had been.
“I was too complacent.”
It was Yu Yeonha’s bitter self-assessment. Through the information guild under her command, she had kept herself on edge against external threats down to the second, yet she had overlooked an enemy within.
“The situation is really bad…”
In truth, most of Yu Yeonha’s business funds had been supported by her mother, but in other fields, including the information guild Fallen Blossom, some of Essence of the Strait’s funds had been used in the form of “investments.” This was something Yu Yeonha had requested from trustworthy administrators within the guild.
But if even that fact were discovered, Fallen Blossom was an information guild active in the “Violet Banquet.” Not only would she be expelled from Cube, it would also have a negative impact on the guild’s affairs.
But what hurt more than all of that was… her mother’s disappointment, after all.
“Who on earth is it…”
Yu Yeonha bit her lip hard.
Information from within the guild had leaked far too thoroughly and in far too much detail. This was clearly the work of an insider, and among them, surely the work of the vice-leader’s faction. However, among those connected to the vice-leader, there shouldn’t have been anyone with this level of intelligence-gathering ability…
“Ah, my stomach hurts.”
Under the overflowing stress, it felt as though her stomach was being scraped raw. Yu Yeonha clutched her stomach and buried her head on the desk.
They said bad things always came all at once, and this was exactly that.
Kim Hajin’s past.
Chae Jinyun’s death.
Creator’s Sacred Grace’s attack on the Tower of Miracle…
“Ah, my stomach hurts!”
This time, Yu Yeonha’s stomach hurt in a different sense.
Creator’s Sacred Grace was currently attacking the Tower of Miracle. If they successfully completed that attack without any scandals right now, Essence of the Strait would be stuck following behind them for the rest of their lives—and if something like this happened to her on top of that…
“Ah, seriously. Ah, I really, ah, damn it…”
Thump, thump, thump.
Yu Yeonha stamped her feet, scattering tears.
For nearly three days, she had not slept a wink and had gone without food or drink.
In that state where it would not have been strange if she collapsed at any moment, the intercom in the master bedroom suddenly rang.
—Miss.
Yu Yeonha jerked her head up.
—A man has come to visit. He says he wishes to see you, Miss.
“Ah, what is it now?”
Yu Yeonha sprang to her feet, strode over, and snapped irritably into the intercom.
“I told you to kick reporters out without even asking!”
—Ah, well, the thing is… he is not a reporter. He is a cadet. He keeps saying he is your colleague and is presenting his cadet ID.
“…Colleague?”
Yu Yeonha’s brow narrowed.
Colleague.
The person who would dare refer to himself as her colleague was…
“Could it be Kim Hajin?”
—Ah, yes. That is correct. He says he has something to give you and came in person. Shall I let him in?
“Uh… wait a moment. I’ll go out myself.”
Yu Yeonha opened the master bedroom door and stepped out into the room’s living room. Then she opened the living room door and came out into the mansion’s lobby.
The structure was a little complicated, but with a mansion of such considerable scale, it couldn’t be helped.
“Haah.”
Yu Yeonha let out a small sigh and opened the front door.
The outside air swept in like a wave.
Fresh air she had not felt in a long while. Yu Yeonha drew in a deep breath and looked toward the main gate beyond the front yard in the distance.
There stood Kim Hajin, holding some plastic bag in one hand.
When Yu Yeonha gave a signal, the security guard opened the main gate.
Kim Hajin trudged through the garden.
“…What brings you here?”
Soon, Kim Hajin stood before the front door, and Yu Yeonha greeted him. Kim Hajin held out the plastic bag and said one thing.
“You weren’t answering your messages.”
“Well, given the situation… More importantly, what is that?”
Yu Yeonha pointed at the plastic bag. Kim Hajin silently showed her what was inside.
Tteokbokki, sundae, fish cakes, hamburgers, chicken… all the foods Yu Yeonha loved were gathered together.
“No. I told you I don’t like this kind of thing.”
Yu Yeonha was tempted for a moment, but soon responded sharply.
It was because of a long-standing habit of hers.
If she did not want to appear weak in a situation like this, she had no choice but to show her thorns.
“It’s just a gift.”
But Kim Hajin forcibly hung the plastic bag on Yu Yeonha’s hand.
“Ugh, seriously.”
If she disliked it, she could simply fling it away, and in fact, she had intended to do just that. But the smell rising up from it tickled her nose, and she could not bring herself to.
“…Hoo. I’m going to throw it in the trash. In here