Fracture
Have you ever watched a car windshield shatter?
—Crack-crack-crack!
It fractures in a fine web from the point of impact, yet almost no shards fly free. The pane holds its shape even as it breaks — engineered so that a trapped passenger can still kick their way out.
Tempered glass is the opposite. It resists impact well enough, but the moment a crack appears, the whole sheet explodes into a spray of fragments.
So what about bulletproof glass?
"Damn it! Why won't it give?!"
"The baton! Where's the expandable baton?!"
—Crack! Crack!
The vehicle carrying only Yuria and Choi Se-rin lifted gently into the air. Every escort car running close protection rose with it, bobbing weightlessly against the sky.
"No audio from inside. Looks like the two of them are facing off, but I can't confirm."
"Damn it! Race Four to TC! Self-extraction impossible! Repeat — self-extraction impossible!"
"Weapons free."
"Son of a bitch!"
One of the escort drivers yanked a pistol from his coat, covered his face with his collar, and started firing into the windshield.
—Bang! Bang! Bang!
A string of 9mm rounds from the Jericho pistol hammered the front glass. The mashed bullets simply dropped away. No holes. Not even close — and this was bulletproof glass that should have been lucky to stop three or four pistol rounds.
"Is this magic too?"
And there was one more fact they hadn't grasped yet.
No sound from outside the vehicles was getting through at all. Mana had seized the entire volume of space around each car, so nothing physical — sound included — could cross the boundary.
Of course, the chaos inside the cars had made that hard to notice.
"Damn it! He's drawn a weapon! Repeat — weapon drawn!"
"Shit! Why the hell won't this glass break?!"
Helplessness and frustration poured out of them in raw curses — and then:
"No—!!! Se-riiin!!"
A single gunshot rang out from the vehicle carrying Yuria.
In the same instant, every floating car was released from control and slammed back to the ground.
—Crash!
"Ugh! Check if the doors open!"
—Clunk!
"They're open!"
"Disembark! Use the front doors as cover and approach slow!"
The agents moved as one, converging on the rear of the car that had held Se-rin and Yuria.
"Don't move! Hands out in front of you and wait!"
"Freeze! Freeze!"
And inside—
"…"
"Race, cam feed is limited. Status?"
"…Lost. The mage is gone. Repeat — the mage is gone."
Choi Se-rin lay unconscious with a pistol still in her hand. The back seat held nothing but an empty place with the seatbelt still fastened.
Yuria had simply vanished.
A thought occurred to me.
No matter what RPG you're playing, isn't an emergency town-return function just the most convenient thing in the world?
—Flash!
The muzzle flared — and in that same instant I triggered the teleport.
Spatial magic like this usually needs a disposable beacon if you want to jump fast.
The beacon I'd set was in my new place. The Korean government would be hunting me now, so the house was burned as a safe house — but I couldn't sense a single presence nearby. No need to run for the hills just yet.
—Fssshh…
I'd never expected the digital clock I'd modified — while I was fixing it — to double as a teleport beacon. Turns out that little upgrade paid off.
"…So it's Plan B after all."
I'd wanted to operate out of Korea if I could. Three thousand years ago, on an Earth whose memories had gone hazy, I had been Korean.
So I knew the country. Infrastructure for cutting-edge research. A higher-education system that could raise new disciplines. Ambition that always wanted the next higher peak.
Those things would have synergized with my plans… or so the dreamy, hopeful version of me from not long ago had assumed. Looking back at that version of myself, I couldn't help laughing.
"Ha. What a complete idiot."
It wasn't that I loved Korea more, or that I had some deep national consciousness. If anything, this latest information leak had killed whatever goodwill I'd still had.
"At least in the other world, living as a tool was enough."
Before I hardened into a hero, I'd been nothing more than a kid who could use magic and a kid who could swing a sword.
After I grew into the role, I became a kid who was good at magic and a kid who was good with a sword.
But I never cared about social maneuvering or politics, so I spent every day getting shoved around here and cursed out there — the designated punching bag.
The bigger problem had been the Goddess and the rest of that world's deities. Each of them would pick a saint, a prophet, a revelator — some representative — and then set about stirring chaos for all they were worth.
"What am I, the team leader on a group project…"
Anyway. That was then.
Now there were no gods yanking my chain, no divine chaos agents.
All I had to worry about was the usual political mess between Korea, China, Japan, the US, North Korea, and Russia — plus Korea's own internal problems…
Wait a second.
"I'm not even a politician."
Me? This? Why am I worrying about it?
"Can't the whole world just pool Outer God response research and call it a day?"
My core objective was preparation against the Outer Gods, period.
Building international cooperation bodies and joint research institutes for magical technology along the way was tedious and academic.
What if I just put on a show of force big enough to shut every other country's mouth, then held a knife to their throats and said, work with me? Understanding would come very quickly.
I pulled the phone I'd tossed into subspace and opened the internet.
US military power level
I typed the search.
A rainbow gradient flashed across the screen.
"What the hell is this."
I hit back. It was definitely the search engine I knew.
Forward again — and there was the same wall of rambling data dump.
"Wow. It actually nailed the point. Unbelievable."
I scrolled further down until normal search results finally appeared.
Military ranking articles and the usual noise — and then:
"Oh."
A title that looked exactly like what I needed.
The content was littered with slang and weird jokes, but the charts were clean and numerical, so the picture came through easily.
This many tanks, that many fighters, equipment broken down by generation of tech — America like this, Russia like that, Korea like so… Mm-hmm.
"Hmm. Not bad for a bunch of amateurs."
I had no idea what "Gaijin" was supposed to be, but the comment section seemed heavy with people who actually knew military systems.
"Yeah."
I'd seen enough.
In the end, I reached a conclusion.
"This is doable."
I wasn't starting a world war. I wasn't conquering the planet.
Just a little "anyone who wants to be friends, gather round!" would be plenty. That level of leverage didn't seem out of reach.
Magic really was the best.
A string of incidents in broad daylight in the middle of a highway naturally made national news.
Several vehicles floating in midair.
Shattered glass marked with bullet impacts.
The vanished mage, Yuria.
Even an internet leak claiming an agent had fired a gun at her.
"I'm telling you, the cars just floated up several meters—"
"Honey, have you got dementia or something?"
"No, you know — that magic, or whatever they call it."
"Ahh. Well, that makes sense then."
The first wave of news, carried by social media, reached the ears of elderly folks in rural senior centers in less than half a day.
I learned that much from a breaking news alert online.
But what about the investigation into the information leak, and the demand that they explain the situation to the public? Still nothing.
I'd warned the president. I'd made it sound like the sky would fall if the homework wasn't done in three days.
"Eh, whatever. They'll figure it out."
I had no way of knowing what they were thinking, so I scrubbed the worry clean out of my head. Right now I was walking through downtown Bupyeong.
This phone was probably being tracked too…
The reason I was strolling so openly down a main street was simple.
If you've got a problem with it, come catch me.
"Hey. That's Yuria."
"The mage? Wait, it really is."
What if, right here in the middle of rush-hour foot traffic, a swarm of agents came pouring in?
The current government was trying to bury everything that had happened between us.
Now picture a pack of men in black suits stampeding in to grab me.
My mouth would itch so badly I wouldn't be able to stop myself from saying every last thing I knew.
"If they have any sense, they won't come for me out in the open."
With that thought, and with my throat feeling dry, I ducked into a coffee shop.
Three Island Coffee
"Wow. Coffee is ridiculously expensive."
I slotted the card issued in my name into the kiosk.
✓ Payment Complete
At least they hadn't been petty enough to freeze the account.
I sat down and glanced around the café. People nearby started noticing me one by one and drifting closer.
"Wow~! Can I get your autograph?!"
"Sure, sure."
A quick scrawl of a signature.
A camera shutter clicked.
At the same time, roughly on the other side of the planet — the Houston Space Radio Telescope Base.
A Korean-American researcher in a white lab coat sat in the control room: Nelson Kim.
After his interview with Yuria, he had been made head of the Outer God observation research team. Six months of empty progress had put the project under threat of shutdown since last month.
"Dear God."
He almost wished the research had simply failed to detect anything and collapsed. That was what he wanted to believe right now.
"Cosmic microwave background readings, one-hour intervals."
Kim and every colleague in the room stared at the large console and made the same low sound of dread.
The cosmic microwave background should have shown a uniform 2.7 Kelvin across the entire sky.
Instead, starting from the upper-right of the image, there was a black hole of nearly absolute zero — 0.0001 Kelvin.
It wasn't an instrument fault. The Norwegian observatory wasn't seeing the hole at all.
The result pointed to only one conclusion.
"Something is casting a shadow of absolute zero. And its location is…"
The change in the shadow's size. The estimated distance, refined by slight orbital corrections. Latitude and longitude on Earth.
"Longitude 127 degrees, latitude 37 north… here."
Kim swept across the map. His finger stopped on—
"…Oh, no."
The Republic of Korea.