The Shadow Cast Over a Place of Learning
Click. Click. Click. Click.
The brisk sound of money being counted echoed through the small room.
Despite the filthy, cluttered surroundings, Go Gyeongsu sat in his chair with a savage face and a cheerful expression.
The money he was counting now was his cut.
His share, as a gangster and an executive of Beomho Development.
The boss is really something else.
The amount was even larger than he'd expected. Gyeongsu clenched his fist tight, overcome with admiration for hyungnim.
In other words, the boss.
The source of the money now counted and tucked away by Go Gyeongsu was students.
More precisely, it was part of the money offered up by delinquent punks still attending school, scraped together by any means they could.
An amount so large it was hard to believe a bunch of teenage thugs had pulled it together.
The one who had made that possible was none other than the head of the Beomho Gang.
Crew.Circle.
They gave themselves grand names and turned what had once been a chaotic mob of punks into something organized, with a proper system in place beneath them.
The little bastards who used to shake down kids only when the mood struck them—or at best on some loose regular basis—had been handed all kinds of new ways to make money.
If they produced results, they were accepted into the organization and backed with real power, so naturally they worked even harder.
And with the funds growing richer than anyone had expected, Beomho Gang—no, Beomho Development—had managed to get itself connected to powerful people.
That made them an even bigger, more successful organization, and promising prospects started hoping to join Beomho Development. The boss called that some kind of virtuous cycle.
Go Gyeongsu didn't know much about theories like that, but he could feel it in his bones that the organization was thriving.
"Let's wrap this up quick, boys."
"Yes, hyungnim!"
He glanced out the window.
There it was—one of their existing operations.
At the junkyard, not the youngest gang members but strong young hopefuls who wanted to become real family were doing unpaid labor. That sight alone was proof enough.
Half of it was a front, sure.
But the other half was a real junk shop.
They brought in delinquent kids who wanted to be part of the family and worked them like dogs there.
They weren't dragged in by force. The little bastards came on their own.
They dressed it up in all kinds of respectable excuses, but anyone with eyes knew the real reason was to cut labor costs.
Even the sharper kids figured that much out.
But they still came and worked anyway.
Because they wanted, somehow, to become family.
If they did well here, they could be trusted with the organization's real work.
Smack!
Crash!
"Get up."
Smack!
Bang!
One of the gangsters mercilessly slapped a delinquent across the face, and the whole mood turned thin and brittle as ice.
The kids all froze.
Watching them, Go Gyeongsu gave a short snort of amusement.
This was the regular discipline session.
If you roughed them up now and then like this, the brats learned to fear the organization and kept themselves in line.
Gyeongsu looked away from his underlings, pleased they understood that much, and recalled what the boss had said.
If this goes well, we'll finally be able to shut down this hole-in-the-wall operation.
They hadn't just gotten a good connection.
They'd reached all the way to the very end of that line.
And waiting there was a major guild.
If things broke right, Beomho Development might stop clawing a living out of a garbage heap like this and grow into a proper guild.
And if that happened, even an executive like Go Gyeongsu would...
Crash!
"Hands on your heads! Face down, all of you!"
"...Huh?"
The dream-drunk look on Go Gyeongsu's face turned stupid in an instant.
"Who the hell are you—Aaagh!!"
"You little shitheads! Aaaagh!"
Thud! Thud!
The underlings who had been doing their jobs just fine were suddenly beaten senseless and sent rolling across the floor.
At first, a few of them reacted on instinct and tried to throw their usual swagger around.
Then the ones who had seriously started drawing up mana were reduced to rags and hurled into piles of scrap.
That was when Gyeongsu's body locked up and he finally understood the situation.
The ones raiding the junkyard weren't nobodies.
They weren't a rival gang, either.
"Hunter Crimes Division, Team Three. We are executing a warrant. Resist, and your safety will not be guaranteed, so cooperate fully."
They were special police from the hunter division—men who responded to crimes committed by awakened individuals with force of their own.
And not only that. The men who would normally bark every curse under the sun were making an effort to observe proper form.
That meant they weren't the highest authority present.
There were high-ranking hunters standing behind them, watching the operation unfold.
W-what is this?
There was no way they hadn't greased palms while doing this kind of business.
They had carefully fed money to the local police, to guilds, to public institutions—everyone.
If something on this scale was about to happen, they should have gotten at least a single phone call in warning.
The fact they hadn't meant only one thing.
...Fuck. Just how high up did this come from?
Modern policing was split into two branches.
The ordinary police force that had always existed, and the hunter division that handled crimes involving awakened individuals.
Just as not all people were good, not all awakened individuals were good either.
Some never became hunters.
They went down a darker road instead.
It often started with schoolyard delinquency in their youth and led straight into criminal guilds.
The criminals tied to Beomho Development were exactly that sort—and worse.
Now every last one of them had been dragged into custody by the hunter division.
And so, inside a building packed with hunter police and criminals alike—
"......"
—the place, which should have been noisy and violent, was instead deathly quiet.
Awakened criminals were more dangerous than wild beasts.
One mistake could cost a person their life, so the hunter police who dealt with them were always sharp-edged.
Accordingly, the law was more than lenient toward officers confronting awakened criminals. Screaming curses and using violence was practically standard.
But not today.
Today there was none of that.
"......"
And yet the criminals only shrank in on themselves even more. Some were outright trembling in fear.
To put it bluntly, there was no cursing, no violence—not even the kind of bluster that was basically just WWE theater.
The hunter police were radiating the very real intent to kill anyone who caused a disturbance.
Because the impossibly high people from above—the ones who had made this atmosphere possible—were in the room with them.
...Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! What the hell is going on?!
Go Gyeongsu shook where he stood, screaming only inside his own head.
He didn't know the details, but he recognized them from television.
Hunters who took down international criminal syndicates were standing right there.
Even a brute like Go Gyeongsu knew they were extraordinary.
So why were people like that here?
And what the hell is that supposed to be...?
And among them was something his brain simply couldn't process.