Chapter 191

For all the bold declaration about winning me over, the truth was we hardly ever crossed paths.

Both of them were insanely busy — with what, I couldn't tell you.

Still, Julia kept her promise to the letter.

Every evening, without fail, she came back to the guild to take charge of Sea-ah and the kids' training herself.

The kids had been on high guard against the stranger at first, but once the coaching turned out to be help they could feel in their bones, they slowly opened up and started taking her lessons in.

Maybe it was the shared ground of both being second-awakeneds.

Sea-ah and Julia clicked especially well.

Soaking up one-on-one lessons from the world's Rank One like a sponge, Sea-ah was smashing through her limits, offense and defense both, at an absurd speed — a different kid every day.

And Cha Yul's change was just as striking.

He'd always been the kind of kid who threw himself into training, but lately it was like he'd staked his life on getting stronger — the ferocity coming off him was chilling.

While the kids' training hall was burning hot, over in Leo's corner there was another kind of madness entirely.

To the guild members who'd once staffed the institute's artifact analysis team, Leo — genius artifact maker — was a god, plain and simple.

How bad was it? When he first walked into the guild, there were people so overcome they foamed at the mouth and fainted.

So no matter how insufferably he behaved, the researchers had no choice but to trail after him with wide, worshipful eyes.

The blind adoration and constant showers of praise from those researchers would've put a cult to shame.

Under that brutal offensive, Leo's stuck-up iron wall crumbled inside a few days.

"F-fine! You're all whining so much, I'll show you this one time only! Watch — you twist right here, like this, and pump mana in—!"

Leo at the whiteboard, face flushed, delivering a master-class lecture.

The researchers taking notes below him, tears of joy in their eyes.

It had become such a routine sight by now that all I could do was let out a small, helpless laugh.

While the guild ran on its strange new hum of energy, I hadn't been sitting on my hands either.

The first thing I did was drop the three refined Chaos Mana Stones Julia had given me into the teapot artifact and set it running.

Took a full month last time. Wonder how long it'll be now.

Watching the energy bubble and churn inside the artifact, I threw every spare moment into honing my ability.

All that relentless training paid off — I could pull an explosion out much more smoothly than before.

Of course, every night I used it, a backlash tore through me like something ripping me open — but bearing pain was one of the things I was best at.

That said, I didn't go in for the official rank assessment.

For one, my awakening was under tight secrecy; for another, I was worried testing might spring a leak.

And the situation wasn't so urgent that I needed a rank right this second.

Three weeks stitched together out of training and pain flew by, and the day of the second meeting dawned.

Per Leo's unilateral announcement at the last meeting, the venue this time was Nest Guild.

Honestly, exposing the guild's location to outsiders sat badly with me, but Leo had sworn up and down no one would remember the route, so I'd had no choice but to grudgingly agree.

And true to his word — the memory-block artifact he'd installed himself around the perimeter was an outrageous cheat of a device. The moment you stepped outside the guild, the whole route you'd taken to get there got wiped clean from your head.

The huge conference room the head administrator had poured his entire soul into conjuring up.

Familiar faces gathered there, one by one.

"Tch! My gleaming guild sitting there going to waste, and we're meeting in this dingy hole. Honestly."

Cheon Sangcheol — who'd shown up last and all but kicked the door open — grumbled, irritable.

Across the table, Namgoong Yeojin, Master of Hwangryong Guild, sat with both eyes tightly shut, still as a statue.

And in the seat beside me —

"Hmm~"

Han Jewoon was scanning the conference room with the fascinated eyes of a kid in a toy store.

"Ah — I'd been hoping our Junhyeok would invite me over properly, y'know."

He gave a playful shrug.

"Instead I'm dragged out here for something this official. Real shame, isn't it?"

"Enough jokes. Sit down and stop wasting time."

Julia's voice snapped through, ice-cold.

"Sure thing."

Unbothered by the chilly warning, Han Jewoon gave his usual sly grin and dropped into his seat.

Snarling at each other the first time they met too — was there something between them, back in the day?

I was turning their relationship over in my head when the meeting proper got under way.

The first to speak was Cheon Sangcheol, lounging back against his chair like he owned the place.

"So — that Awakened Liberation Front, or whatever the hell they call themselves. I figured they were some rootless corner thugs, but you dig into it and they've got a pretty legit-looking org chart."

He flicked a hologram file onto the table.

"The Awakened Liberation Front's broken up into four branches: Hondun, Gunggi, Docheol, Doul. Each branch has one head, and above them all sits the real boss."

Chin propped on the table, Cheon Sangcheol let out a small, sneering laugh.

"Funny part is — not one of them actually knows a thing about that boss. The grunts down below just rave about the master and the great cause like brainwashed mongrels. Full-on cult fanatics, honestly."

Inwardly, I swallowed a small note of surprise.

Three weeks. That's all it had been.

For him to have dug up this much in that short a window.

Turns out he's got a solid intelligence network. Didn't expect that.

As I gave Cheon Sangcheol another look, faintly impressed, Han Jewoon smiled lazily from across the table and picked it up.

"My turn, then?"

He grinned and pulled up a map of the greater Seoul area into the space above the table.

"I went at it from the hideouts angle. Back-traced their movements from the terror and kidnapping incidents, and four suspicious spots popped up."

At a wave of his hand, four red dots marked the map.

"Districts 7, 9, 12, and 13. Every one of them a wasteland, outside government and Bureau control."

My eyes lingered on District 7, and Han Jewoon — reading exactly where I was looking — glanced over with a small smile.

"Yeah. District Seven — the one you cleaned up last time. That's one of the hideouts we identified too."

"Ha! Cleaned up, my ass."

Cheon Sangcheol, who'd been listening quietly, stuck his lip out and sniped in.

"Did our Deputy Guild Master Chae actually do anything there? The press was hyping him up like some kind of hero, but let's be real — the actual details of what he did are conveniently missing, aren't they? Ah — or did daddy set the whole table and you just slid in a spoon at the end like a freeloader?"

What actually snagged my attention wasn't his childish sarcasm — it was what was buried inside it.

Huh? The press was hyping me up? What's he talking about? Was I in the news?

I tilted my head over that inwardly, but had no interest in feeding an attention-hound, so I turned my eyes away, easy, and shut him out.

"…Did you just blow me off?"

His mouth was opening on something ugly when —

"I traced the flow of ki."

Namgoong Yeojin, who'd kept her eyes closed all through the meeting, slowly opened them.

Glowing golden dragon eyes swept the room.

"The flow of ki…?"

Something like mana?

"A form of mana detection. It reacts most keenly to the mana of the strong — and one can glimpse the character of that energy as well."

She can even read the nature of the energy?

That was a sensitivity beyond any regular Awakened.

Something Julia had said in passing brushed the back of my mind.

Second-awakeneds are highly sensitive to reading the flow of mana around them.

Don't tell me… Namgoong Yeojin's had a second awakening too? Or is her ability something along those lines?

Whether she caught what was running through my head or not, she carried on, unruffled.

"By that means I identified four massive, deeply ominous concentrations of ki. Two here in Korea, the other two scattered overseas."

At that, Cheon Sangcheol cut in, chattery.

"Oh! The four branch heads I just mentioned! That's got to be them! Four presences, exact!"

He leaned bodily forward.

"What about the head honcho? Did you catch the boss too — that master figure?"

"Only four registered on my sense. It may be that the one they call boss is uncommonly skilled at masking his presence, and had it fully hidden. Or else…"

"…"

"He stands on a higher plane than mine, and my senses simply cannot reach him."

A heavy silence dropped across the room in an instant, like cold water thrown over it.

A power that vastly outstripped the country's Rank Two.

The hypothesis alone was enough to send a chill down every spine in the room.

Julia broke the silence.

"What did you find out, Deputy Guild Master Chae Junhyeok?"

Every eye in the room turned to me at once.

I ran the numbers, quick.

Play the cards one at a time, careful.

The many truths I knew.

I had to pick a card that wouldn't look thin next to what the others had brought to the table, but wouldn't be too much either.

As long as I drove it in that I was indispensable to this alliance, that was enough.

"Recently, I came face-to-face with one of the branch heads myself."

"What?! You did?"

Cheon Sangcheol goggled, aghast, and even Han Jewoon's eyes went round.

"We crossed paths on the ship during the trafficking incident. Given the circumstances, he's almost certainly the head of the branch that runs District Seven."

I began briefing them on Jin Chahyeon's uncanny ability and appearance — everything I'd witnessed that night.

"He wore a mask… and didn't speak. Just by locking eyes with someone, he could pin them in the air, tens of meters away."

"Hmm… some kind of telekinetic, then?"

Han Jewoon propped his chin, eyes glinting with interest.

"It wasn't just throwing people around. Staring straight at an Awakened shut their ability down outright."

Remembering the chilling moment when Sea-ah's barrier had crumbled to nothing the second his eyes landed on her, I added:

"He even wiped out abilities that were already active."

…!

A deep tension spread across every face.

It was warranted.

For an Awakened, having your ability wiped like that ranked right up there with being thrown into a Gate bare-handed — one of the most horrifying things imaginable.

"You expect us to buy that? One glare and a live ability just vanishes? It was pitch dark on the sea at night — sure you didn't just see it wrong?"

Cheon Sangcheol pressed, disbelief plain on his face.

"Well, if you really can't believe it, think what you like. I'm just telling you exactly what I saw with my own two eyes. Prepare for it or don't — that's your call."

"Hah, what kind of ability even is that…"

The room was rippling with unease over this unknown ability when —

Clap—!

Julia clapped once, sharp, and pulled every eye back.

"Good work. For three weeks of intelligence gathering, this is excellent."

The formal thanks out of the way, her steady blue eyes swept the table.

"While the rest of you were tracking their locations and org chart, we've been digging into the how — the mechanism by which they've been triggering these Gate breaches."

At that, Han Jewoon and I both flinched at the shoulder, as if we'd rehearsed it.

Made sense.

We already knew the mechanism — and, in fact, had teamed up to force an artificial overload ourselves, once.

"They dump enormous quantities of pure mana into the dungeon's core — the boss monster — from the outside, and drive it into overload."

"Sure hearing a lot of crazy today."

Cheon Sangcheol slapped the table, incredulous, and snorted.

"Ramming mana into a boss mob? Until the Gate blows wide open? Your average hunter's pool doesn't come close! Try that shit solo and you'll dry up and drop dead from mana burnout!"

In that moment, Namgoong Yeojin's eyes flew open, as if something had clicked.

"The last time a Gate broke open in Seoul. Several bodies were found around the site, every drop of mana wrung dry out of them, withered to husks. Those were the sacrifices for the overload."

!

Sharp shock broke across the room at the horrific truth.

Not one, but multiple Awakened, wrung out like batteries?

"Hang on — what kind of crazy Awakened empties every last drop of mana knowing full well it'll cost him his life?!"

"You said it yourself a moment ago. Full-on cult fanatics."

Julia answered, eyes gone cold.

"Fanatics in that deep would gladly lay their lives down for the master. Or…"

She paused a moment, then spoke the grim possibility aloud.

"It might not have been by choice."

In the heavy silence that lingered, Julia declared, her voice unwavering.

"They need to be wiped out as fast as possible. We can't let them walk this land any longer."

At the flat statement, every face went hard, and everyone nodded, silent.

Intelligence shared, conclusions drawn — someone was about to smooth the mood over and move to adjourn.

"Then, three weeks from now, we meet again in this same room, and everyone—"

"Yeah, hold on."

A petulant voice sliced the smooth flow off clean.

"Is it just me, or is this shit fucked up?"