Chapter 345

It was, quite frankly, baffling.

“They’re really concentrating all their forces on just one side like that?”

All he had done since entering this place was hide behind a pillar near the entrance and kill time. He hadn’t attacked anyone, nor had he done anything to deliberately provoke the people inside.

Logically, they should have been far more wary of Kim Giryeo, who had actually gone deeper into the bunker, than of him standing guard at the entrance.

So why was this happening?

“No, this is a little...”

Before long, an increasingly strange sight entered his reptilian vision.

A considerable number of the highest-ranking Awakened inside the facility were moving en masse toward the entrance.

Faced with such coordinated movement, Kang Changho could no longer hide his bewilderment.

“Why me, of all people?”

Unfortunately, he had no time to resolve the questions lingering in his mind.

Before he knew it, the enemy forces had already reached his position.

Kim Giryeo’s request had been simple: prevent anyone from leaving this place.

But when an overwhelming force of superhumans came bearing down on a single gatekeeper, the more pressing question was whether said gatekeeper would end up as a corpse.

For a fleeting moment, Kang Changho was tempted to surrender.

It was hardly an unreasonable thought.

The enemy was drawing closer by the second, yet one question refused to leave his mind.

Why were they defending the entrance so openly—and with this much force?

***

Meanwhile, at the same time.

Tap tap tap, tap tap tap tap—

The second basement floor of a certain building.

The lively clatter of typing echoed through the room.

In an ordinary workplace, a mechanical keyboard this loud and clicky would probably have been frowned upon. But the person hammering away at the keys didn’t seem to care in the slightest.

After all, beyond the walls of this room, the massive bunker informally known as “the Factory” belonged entirely to him.

[Central Server Room]

“Hmm.”

A bespectacled man stared intently at the screen.

[41.40338-2.17403]

[78.45122-57.68550]

Strings of seemingly meaningless numbers flowed endlessly down the wide monitor in front of him.

“No matter how many times I look at it, it really does seem like another S-rank has emerged in China...”

Apparently, however, those numbers did have meaning, because the seated man soon began muttering to himself.

“Maybe I should stock up on some Chinese liquor soon.”

It was difficult to reconcile such an ordinary remark with the fact that this man led an organization powerful enough to frame Enzo Chano, one of the country’s highest-ranking Hunters, as a mere terrorist.

To an outsider, the chatroom he belonged to was nothing more than a gathering of selfish and ruthless people.

And yet, despite being a criminal who had once attempted to drown a nation’s capital in blood, this particular man led an astonishingly mundane daily life.

Sometimes he opened YTube and watched whatever the algorithm recommended. At other times, if he had a little time to spare, he would play some VOD movie that had been sitting unnoticed in the corner of his screen.

But just as he was idly passing the time, a red warning indicator suddenly lit up on one side of the monitor.

[Detected: Entrance Opened]

There were no deliveries scheduled for today.

Nor was anyone expected to arrive.

So why had the bunker’s only entrance—one that should have remained firmly sealed—suddenly opened?

“A glitch?”

The bunker’s owner naturally considered that possibility first.

Perhaps the program had malfunctioned.

But the moment he pulled up the surveillance footage to verify the alert, he realized immediately that his assumption had been wrong.

“This is...”

Only then did he notice that the entrance had been destroyed.

The door looked as though a rampaging elephant had charged straight through it, leaving it completely wrecked.

If someone had broken in with that much force, then whoever had entered was obviously no ordinary visitor.

“Who is it?”

But the real problem was identifying the abnormal intruders.

One had dark brown hair and a severe, intimidating expression.

The other looked much younger, with light-colored hair and a face visibly dotted with freckles.

The bunker’s owner shifted his gaze between the two figures captured on the surveillance feed, his eyes narrowing in suspicion.

“They both have such ordinary faces... the kind you might have passed on the street a few times without remembering.”

For a moment, he even had the strange impression that he had met them somewhere before.

“They’re almost too unremarkable. In that case, there’s a good chance they’re using disguise artifacts.”

However, the man staring at the monitor had an exceptionally narrow circle of acquaintances.

[Warning: Face not recognized.]

[Warning: Face not recognized. (2)]

[Recommended Action: Entrant identity cannot be verified due to suspected item usage. Administrator is advised to perform face-to-face confirmation...]

The computer system soon confirmed it beyond any doubt.

The two people who had just entered were unfamiliar faces.

He definitely did not know them.

“I originally developed this system to hand over to the FBI. It still has quite a few bugs, but... the response speed isn’t bad.”

A high-resolution camera capable of zooming in closely enough to capture even an individual eyelash.

A program capable of taking all that information and reconstructing a person in three-dimensional detail.

Come to think of it...

Computer technology really was absurdly convenient.

“Hmm.”

There were people in this world who referred to the abilities of the Awakened as magic.

The man staring at the monitor thought differently.

“Awakeners...”

Wasn’t the knowledge humanity had accumulated over countless years the true magic?

Technology.

The future. ℴℴ𝘮

Things more precious than gold, because unlike gold, they continued to evolve.

Those were what truly mattered.

So why did people blindly worship the Awakened?

He simply couldn’t understand it.

Just look at the beasts currently captured by the camera.

Why resort to such primitive displays of brute force?

“Violent from the very beginning, I see. My, my.”

The true nature behind the Beast Incident was finally revealing itself.

Andy Oliver immediately sprang into action.

Click.

He pressed three specific keys at once.

A moment later, a message appeared on the screen.

[Magic power scan complete]

This was something most people above ground had no way of knowing, but the man sitting here had mastered nearly every piece of technology used by PIXY.

For that reason, he was also capable of remotely operating the latest analysis equipment released that year.

To think that technology had advanced to the point where the quantity of mana inside a person’s body could be measured with such precision.

“Hmm!”

And once such detailed scanning data was available, something close to a miraculous identification process became possible.

An Awakener’s magical signature was, in essence, like a fingerprint.

Even if two people possessed roughly the same amount of mana, the values beyond the decimal point differed from person to person.

By cross-referencing those characteristic figures with Hunter data stored in the databases of various countries, it was possible to narrow down a person’s identity with surprising accuracy...

[Confirmation required]

[Case 1. Comparison test error]

[Case 2. Comparison test error]

...or at least, that was how it was supposed to work.

So why was it suddenly failing?

“What?”

The man named Oliver propped his chin on one hand and stared silently at the screen.

Just when he had been on the verge of identifying the intruders, two unexpected errors had appeared.

Fortunately, there were only a handful of known reasons such errors occurred.

First—

when an Awakener’s magical signature had never been registered in the database.

“To put it in the terminology used by certain Eastern countries, it would be like an ‘unlicensed’ Hunter.”

The second possibility was that an individual’s awakening level had changed, causing their current mana values to differ from the recorded data.

“For the most famous example, you only have to look at Korea’s Choe, who obtained the [Dragon’s Heart].”

The problem was the sheer power possessed by the Awakened who had entered the bunker.

According to the older detectors installed throughout the facility, both intruders possessed power on the level of an S-rank.

And really, how many superhumans that powerful existed in the world?

More importantly—

what if one of them was actually using a dragon organ?

“There aren’t many cases like that.”

An idea suddenly flashed through Andy Oliver’s mind.

His fingers began moving across the keyboard.

[->To: Security Office - Scan both intruders with the item detector and confirm whether either possesses any dragon-type organs.]

Before long, the expected response arrived.

[->Sender: Security Office - Confirmed that the Awakened individual at the entrance is wearing ‘Dragon’s Eye1’.]

Dragon loot generally ended up in the hands of the strong.

Yet perhaps because of its rarity, surprisingly few people actually wore such items.

At present, only around two known S-rank psychics in the world used [Dragon’s Eye].

That narrowed the list of suspects considerably.

“One of them is under my command. Which means the other one must be the S-rank Hunter from South Korea...?”

Kang Changho had appeared.

The man who ruled PIXY’s underworld and secretly maintained cartels with the leaders of major guilds across several countries was, in truth, deeply fearful by nature.

That personality revealed itself most clearly in the lengths he had gone to for the sake of preserving his youth, sacrificing countless others because of his terror of death.

So the moment he learned that Kang Changho had appeared, Andy Oliver made his decision without hesitation.

Every esper stationed inside the bunker would be mobilized immediately.

“I have no idea what method that Awakener might use. I set that trap fully intending to kill him, and yet he still broke through it and came back alive, didn’t he?”

And at that moment, Andy Oliver’s intelligence network proved its worth once again.

[->Sender: Security Office - The other Awakened individual who entered is also using an organ artifact. That one possesses the ‘Lungs.’]

To be perfectly honest, he had no idea what to make of that report.

“An S-rank Awakened using a useless lung?”

Someone powerful enough to accompany Kang Changho had entered the country illegally without so much as appearing on the news.

Andy Oliver naturally assumed that this person was also a Hunter from South Korea.

Despite Kang Changho’s unusual background—he had foreign grandparents—he rarely left his home country, which made the circle of people he regularly associated with relatively easy to predict.

“No way.”

But now that he thought about it...

Hadn’t that S-rank Hunter frequently been seen accompanying a certain Hunter over the past year?

“Could the blond Asian guy charging through the bunker right now be...?”

The bunker’s owner immediately realized the identity of the second intruder.

33Aw.

At the same time, a certain number flashed through his mind.

In the past, he had looked down on that Awakened simply because someone so seemingly pathetic had managed to return alive.

“But if he’s charging in here alone like this... he must have some kind of special trait as well. At the very least, it must be enough for him to convincingly pass himself off as an S-rank in front of others.”

Andy quickly reassessed the situation.

Even though he was now fairly certain that the person accompanying Kang Changho was Kim Giryeo, he did not make the mistake of dismissing him as an ordinary F-rank.

That alone showed he wasn’t taking anything for granted.

“I’ll have to deal with both of them.”

There was, however, one slight problem.

No matter how he looked at it, he simply couldn’t place the blue-violet-haired Hunter—whose true strength remained a mystery—on the same level as the 33Aw...

“Send every capable person in the bunker to the entrance immediately and eliminate Kang Changho as quickly as possible. As for Kim Giryeo’s side, two S-rank operatives should be enough to hold him off for a while.”

Such was the power of the subconscious.

Without realizing it, Andy Oliver had categorized Kim Giryeo as the weaker threat.

At the same time, he had developed a subtle fear of Kang Changho—the man who had somehow escaped a trap designed to be inescapable.

And that bias had led directly to his decision.

Once the hierarchy of danger had already been fixed in his mind, how could he possibly divide the bunker’s forces equally between them?

“But seriously, that caught me off guard. How did those Hunters even find the entrance?”

Andy Oliver composed a group message instructing everyone to exercise the utmost caution when dealing with the Awakened stationed at the entrance.

“What exactly did they come here for...?”

Tap.

After sending the message, he began doing something utterly at odds with the behavior one might expect from a man facing an immediate crisis.

“Anyway, what a nuisance.”

He suddenly started clearing his desk.

The papers scattered across its surface were swiftly gathered into a neat pile.

Then, without hesitation, he shut down the computer that had been running perfectly well and began disconnecting several rectangular devices that appeared to be storage drives.

Judging by the fact that he reached for the SSD first, this was clearly an emergency procedure he had rehearsed countless times.

“Everyone, get ready.”

They still had no idea who the Awakened rampaging through the bunker truly was.

Sending an assassin armed with an extraordinary power like superhuman abilities—fine. That much was understandable.

But no matter how powerful an attacker might be, what did it matter if they never actually reached their target?

“It’s unfortunate, but now that the bunker’s been compromised, this isn’t the time to be stingy.”

The item every coward in the world dreamed of possessing.

[Teleportation Stone].

A lightweight and fragile object that, once crushed, would instantly transport its user to a predetermined destination.

Teleportation—a method of travel once believed almost impossible—

had, in fact, been in Andy Oliver’s possession for quite some time.

“Whether Kang Changho is death incarnate or whatever else, there’s no reason for me to stay and see how this ends. I’ll just leave immediately.”

But just before he escaped—

at the exact moment he was about to destroy every piece of sensitive information still remaining here...

Click.

“Aaaaahhhhh!”

More precisely, it happened the instant he pressed the format button on the central computer.

A scream erupted behind him.

For reference, the only other people in the room were several bodyguards stationed there for the sole purpose of protecting Andy Oliver.

So why would bodyguards whose only duty was to keep him safe suddenly let out such bloodcurdling screams?

He turned around.

And this was what he saw.

Hair the color of sand.

Short and utterly unremarkable.

A face scattered with freckles.

“Ah!”

But the most unsettling feature of all was the man’s piercing sanpaku eyes.

His pupils were relatively small, and as he widened his slightly hooded eyes, he spoke.

“Why did you suddenly send two S-rank Hunters after me? You startled me so badly that I ended up running all the way here.”

He had a Western face.

Yet he spoke Korean.

Even more disturbing was the fact that, despite standing face-to-face with him, Andy could sense no mana from him whatsoever.

That only made the situation feel even more unnatural.

To think he could feel this pressured by someone who looked like an ordinary bookworm—

the sort of person he might have seen sitting somewhere in a classroom during his school days, yet whose name he would never have remembered.

There was no answer.

Crack!

The instant Andy Oliver realized who had appeared behind him, he crushed the [Teleportation Stone] in his hand.

Then, without hesitation, he shut his eyes.

Normally, by the time he opened them again, he should have found himself standing inside another hideout he had prepared in advance.

“I’ll just stay at a hotel in this country for a while.”

But that wasn’t what happened.

“...”

Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.

The ventilation fans continued to spin somewhere inside the bunker.

For some reason, that sound kept echoing in his ears.

A strange unease crept over him.

Slowly, he opened his eyes.

“...?”

Nothing had changed.

Sandy-colored hair.

Pale skin.

And the young man whose face was still dotted with those familiar blemishes remained standing there in the dim shadows of the bunker.