Iron Mask
Chelgamen had been one of the most promising B-rank Awakers, and more than that, his striking good looks drew the public’s and guilds’ spotlights wherever he went.
For an entire year, the other four party members had been nothing more than wretched side characters, forever there to make the handsome, righteous Chelgamen shine all the brighter.
That rotting inferiority complex finally exploded deep in the darkness of the gate, in the middle of a damp cave strewn with monster corpses.
Thud.
“Ghk?!”
A cold lump of iron had been driven deep into the back of Chelgamen, who had been walking in front.
It had missed his heart, but it was still a clear mortal wound.
Spitting blood, Chelgamen collapsed to the ground and, in his pain, hurriedly turned his head.
He thought it was a monster ambush.
But what met his eyes was the ugly, cruel sneering of comrades who had smiled and walked shoulder to shoulder with him for more than a year.
“Y-you bastards... why...?”
Chelgamen asked with effort, his voice shaking with rage.
The warrior-class party member who had stabbed him casually flicked blood off his sword against the floor and snickered.
In his eyes was all the warped inferiority and jealousy he had been suppressing for the past year.
“Why, you ask? A year. Do you have any idea how fucking miserable it was, staring at that pretty face of yours all year long, while you played the saint and the hero and we had to kiss your ass from behind?”
“Khh... What are you talking about? We’re friends.”
“Friends? Don’t make me laugh. You never once saw us as equals. Always looking down on us with that disgusting expression! It pissed me off!”
This was a desperate, solitary struggle.
Already gravely wounded by the ambush from behind and bleeding out, there was no way he could survive against four other B-rank Awakers.
As he fought back and swung his weapon, a massive slash carved deep into his face, from the corner of his eye all the way to the tip of his jaw.
Blood gushed down, turning his vision red.
“Heh. Serves you right. That pretty face is gonna be scarred for life.”
“Guess we won’t be calling him handsome anymore. Right?”
Chelgamen lay on the floor, breathing raggedly, and glared at them.
His whole body twitched from the betrayal and the searing pain.
“Just kill him. Stop wasting time.”
The party member who handled magic spoke in a cold voice from behind.
“I’ll handle it. Just looking at this bastard makes me want to puke. We can just say monsters killed him inside the gate anyway.”
“Just in case, should we burn him? If we leave only bone ash, nobody’ll be able to tell whether a monster ate him or not.”
“You’re weirdly thorough only when it matters. You disgusting bastard. You look like you’re dying to play with fire.”
The party’s mockery rang out, slick and vile, through the damp air.
When the fire-element Awaker gestured, flames surged over Chelgamen’s body, which could only lie there and barely breathe.
“Gaaaaah...!”
Blood surged back up his throat, and his vocal cords were ruined so badly that even his scream came out mangled.
The horrific agony of flesh burning away.
Chelgamen was clawing at the mud on the floor, his consciousness slipping away.
Just then, as the fire-element Awaker looked down at the burning, pitiful wreck of Chelgamen and smiled with satisfaction—
“Wow, that’s burning nicely.”
Suddenly, an unfamiliar woman’s voice rang out inside the gate, a voice that should never have been heard there.
A clear voice, laced thickly with mischief.
The four party members all turned toward the darkness where it had come from.
There, a woman in a black leather jumper stood smiling faintly in the dark.
With her long hair falling loose, she looked back and forth between the burning Chelgamen and the party members, then spoke.
“You guys know how to have fun. Mind if I join?”
Shock flooded the party members’ faces at once.
“How are you here...?”
The mage stumbled back, flustered.
Solo entry, and entry with fewer than five people, was strictly forbidden in a gate.
When they left, there would only be four of them since Chelgamen was dead.
In any case, that woman wasn’t one of their party, and there was no way she should have been in here alone.
And wasn’t she a witness?
At the appearance of this uninvited guest, the party members tightened their grip on their weapons.
Then the woman’s mouth split into a long, knowing grin.
“Because I feel like it. Whether I come in or leave, whether I let you live or kill you—all of it is up to me.”
No sooner had she finished speaking than her eyes turned cold.
With a light flick of her arm, a violent ripping sound tore through the air, and a black shape vibrated around them.
“Ghk...!”
A black whip sliced through the air and cleanly severed the waist of the party member who had been mocking Chelgamen just moments before.
One attack.
One strike.
Hit by the black whip, the party member was smashed to the floor, blood spilling out of him before he even managed a scream.
“Y-you insane bitch! Kill her now!”
“I’m pretty rotten myself, but I just can’t stand losers like you.”
The remaining party members panicked and grabbed their weapons, trying to activate their skills.
But the woman moved with overwhelming speed.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
A series of sharp cracks, like the air itself being split apart, echoed through the cave.
Each time the black whip in her hand cut through the air like a living serpent, the party members were struck in their vital points and fell one after another like dead leaves.
Four B-rank Awakers collapsed across the floor, cold corpses, without landing a single meaningful blow.
The woman crossed the floor stained with blood and approached Chelgamen, who was dying amid the flames.
With a casual flick of the whip, she extinguished the fire engulfing him in an instant.
Only the stench of burning flesh remained, thick and choking in the air.
“Should I save you? Or do you want to die like this?”
She looked down at Chelgamen’s face, ruined by burns and a massive slash, and clicked her tongue with a frown.
“What a waste. That handsome face is completely wrecked.”
“Wh...o...?”
Half out of his mind, Chelgamen tried to move his lips and ask at the sound of the woman’s voice.
“Me? Just someone passing by.”
The woman answered casually.
She was an Abyss Awaker, one of those who ignored the law and hunted in remote gates on the sly.
“Do you want me to save you or not?”
“Please... save me...”
He wanted to live.
“Heehee~ This is really expensive, you know. You’d better be good to me from now on. You’re going to pay me back properly for your life.”
The woman pulled an exquisite, high-grade potion—rare enough to be hard to obtain—from her coat and poured it roughly over Chelgamen’s charcoal-blackened body.
The amount of potion was limited.
Rather than the deep scar on his face, the potion’s healing effect concentrated on the burns and internal injuries that were immediately life-threatening.
Torn flesh knitted together, burned organs recovered, and he miraculously survived.
But his face could never return to what it had been.
A grotesquely twisted face, scarred from the corner of his eye all the way to his jaw.
From that day on, Chelgamen followed her advice and pulled a jet-black iron mask over his face.
He erased his past and his face completely, and was reborn as a faithful pair of hands obeying only her orders.
* * *
Now and then, beneath the cold metal mask covering his face, Chelgamen felt the hideous burns and deep scars throbbing.
The agony of that day had never been fully erased, and whenever an ominous feeling he couldn’t name crept over him, it tormented him with the sharp clarity of phantom pain.
As he walked toward the top floor of Changho Building, the 12th floor, the wound felt like it was being torn open.
When he opened the massive iron door, sealed tight, and stepped inside, a chill breeze brushed his cheek.
“Boss...”
In the center of the spacious room, Kim Tae-su, who had arrived first and was waiting, and a corpse sprawled on the floor came into Chelgamen’s view.
Seeing the body, blood-soaked and bound at the limbs, Chelgamen frowned beneath the mask.
“Is that him?”
Chelgamen’s low, dry voice echoed through the room.
Kim Tae-su hunched his shoulders, flustered, then quickly bowed his head to the floor.
“...Yes, boss. It’s him. This is all because of him.”
At those words, Jo Tae-jun, the vice boss of the Black Moon Gang, who was tied up on the floor, twisted convulsively.
He shook his head wildly from side to side as if insisting absolutely that it wasn’t him, and screamed with bloodshot eyes.
“Mmph! Mmmph-mmph!”
Chelgamen’s eyes turned cold.
A flash of light between the empty eyeholes of his jet-black mask stabbed at Kim Tae-su.
“I made it clear to Kyung-su that I’d give him one week. I told him to find the mastermind behind this mess and bring him before me within that time.”
Chelgamen spoke heavily as he took slow steps forward.
“And if he couldn’t find them, I said to bring me even a made-up culprit if he didn’t want to pay with his own life.”
The sound of his shoes stopped right in front of Kim Tae-su.
“So why is Kim Kyung-su gone and you’re the only one who brought me an obvious scapegoat?”
Chelgamen had already seen through everything.
He also knew, as plainly as anything, that the old E-rank Awaker bound up like a corpse on the floor was Jo Tae-jun, vice boss of the Black Moon Gang—and that he was not the true mastermind behind any of this.
He was nothing more than a sacrifice grabbed in a hurry by the brothers, squeezed for time.
“...”
Kim Tae-su bit down hard on his lip and couldn’t continue, bowing his head even lower.
Before long, his rough shoulders shook, and a voice thick with tears scraped out over the floor.
“H-he’s dead. Boss... Hyung Kyung-su... he’s dead.”
“Dead?”
Chelgamen’s pupils wavered ever so slightly.
He had naturally assumed Kim Kyung-su had run away.
He had known Kim Kyung-su at his side for seven years already.
Chelgamen had always vaguely figured that Kyung-su would one day be the sort of man to turn his back and flee at the most important moment, when things turned against him.
Because he carried the awful trauma of having his trust betrayed by comrades in the past and being brought to the edge of death, he never grew attached to his subordinates and always kept them at arm’s length.
Seeing Kim Tae-su rush in alone with a fake culprit, he had assumed the older brother had abandoned even his own younger brother and cut tail to escape.
But Chelgamen’s prediction had been completely wrong.
He hadn’t run.
“That bastard?”
“...Yes.”
Chelgamen’s eyes gleamed more sharply in the dark.
“So you did meet him face-to-face. Kyung-su was killed instantly by that bastard, and you had no way to catch that rat, so you grabbed this one in a hurry just to survive. You somehow managed to escape from him...”
As though he had been standing in the yard of that abandoned hospital himself, Chelgamen inferred the situation with exact, merciless precision.
Kim Tae-su answered, biting his lip until it bled.
“T-that’s right...”
“Tell me in detail. What kind of bastard was he?”
Kim Tae-su swallowed dryly and reported in a suppressed voice.
“He was an invisibility-type Awaker... He couldn’t be seen with the naked eye, but strangely, he was leaking presence all over the place, so pinpointing his location wasn’t that hard. But that bastard had a movement skill too.”
“A movement skill?”
“At some point, without a trace of presence, he got right behind me.”
“He took my rear in an instant...?”