The Difference Between Danger and Threat (4)
After hearing the Branch Director out, I swept the Grand Turtle's insides with Spatial Perception—and sure enough, the thing was nowhere near intact. Its organs were riddled with holes, as if moles had been tunneling through them; blood had run into those cavities and clotted there, and in the worst places whole cavernous voids had opened up inside the body.
...Was that because of the Spatial Perception I'd spread out?
Krrrrrk.
From the moment its neck had twisted something like a hundred and eighty degrees, the Grand Turtle couldn't even scream anymore—only its limbs kept twitching. Then the head kept turning, past three hundred.
Crack! A boom, and then a long, grinding rumble. The neck snapped clean, and with a wet, bursting rush an unbelievable volume of blood poured out—enough to make me wonder how the thing still had that much left in it.
The head, torn free by the Space Wall and the size of a small building, tumbled down the slope, rolling end over end. What trees, houses, and fields still stood, it crushed flat as it went, until at last it came to rest on the highway. Set against terrain tied to ordinary life, the Grand Turtle's sheer bulk sank in all over again, right down to the skin.
From the raw cross-section where the head had been ripped away, scarlet blood kept pouring, carving rivers and gathering into a pond of blood. The Branch Director watched with the face of a man who'd just swallowed the bitterest medicine, burned the cigarette he'd been smoking down to nothing, and offered his congratulations in a worn-out voice.
"Congratulations. The birth of the undisputed strongest ability user in the world—the man who raided a Highest-Rank Variant alone."
"Uh, well. Thanks. About that proposal I made regarding the disaster victims—I'll run it through a meeting after I get back and let you know."
"Right. I'm counting on you."
The Branch Director turned to watch the helicopters circling the skies over Gangdong District, then muttered, looking exhausted.
"If I'm stuck with the cleanup, I might as well call myself dead for a month."
With that, he clapped the shoulder of the wind-attribute ability user beside him—who was watching me with a slightly frightened face—snapped the man back to his senses, and took off toward where the Ability Users Association building had stood.
"Huh? Wait! What am I supposed to do with that Dark Matter Slime!"
"Leave it! I'll contact the IWO and Association headquarters and find a way to dispose of it!"
Tch. Then I'd better lock it down so nobody can lay a hand on it.
I wrapped a double layer of Space Wall around the Dark Matter Slime and overlapped each wall twenty times over, until it looked like a round amber sphere floating in empty air. That ought to keep anyone from poking it. The slime wouldn't be escaping from in there, either.
Its nature was to absorb any attack thrown at it and reflect the force back, and the Space Wall wasn't delivering any impact at all—so leaving it like this should be fine. It would only sit in there, quivering.
I was stroking the amber sphere when I noticed the Branch Director, already far off in flight, moving his lips. Before I knew it, I was reading them.
BRANCH DIRECTOR
"I hope this incident doesn't end up stirring the hornet's nest."
SECRETARY
"The hornet's nest... You mean a crackdown on mental-manipulation ability users?"
The wind-attribute ability user who seemed to be serving as his secretary asked, looking puzzled.
BRANCH DIRECTOR
"They end up out of their minds doing it, but if word gets out that a Highest-Rank Variant can be subjugated through mental manipulation, a great many people will feel threatened by mental-manipulation ability users—even if those users haven't done a thing. And if that happens, a crackdown on them might begin. Just as you said."
SECRETARY
"......"
BRANCH DIRECTOR
"And if a crackdown starts against them, there's no law that says mental-manipulation ability users won't become a second or third Ha Cheolsu. The problem is what comes after that."
SECRETARY
"After...?"
BRANCH DIRECTOR
"When it comes to that, who do you think the mental-manipulation ability users will watch most carefully?"
SECRETARY
"The chairman of Grand Blue, I imagine. But what are you saying that means?"
The Branch Director's face went grave. He set another cigarette between his lips and struck a flame from his fingertip.
BRANCH DIRECTOR
"The chairman is pathologically sensitive about his family's safety. He's already killed. If he so much as decides some irritating bastard means to harm his family, or him, he won't hesitate to assassinate them. His ability is built for assassination, too. Cover something with the Space Wall and dismiss it a second later, and nothing remains. But if an accident were to happen—if his family died at the hands of a mental-manipulation ability user... Haa."
SECRETARY
"...Are you saying the chairman might go on a rampage?"
BRANCH DIRECTOR
"I'd put the odds above ninety percent. And if that happens, a whole country could vanish in the blink of an eye. That's how dangerous he is, and how strong. It's why even Ability Users Association headquarters has been laying various debts on him, securing his goodwill, and tightening the guard around the people close to him so they aren't exposed to terror. You know that, don't you?"
...And the conversation broke off.
Eavesdropping on the Branch Director and the wind-attribute ability user—his secretary, maybe—I had to admit he might not be wrong. I should probably prepare for other mental-manipulation ability users. More than that, I'd had no idea the Ability Users Association was providing security for the people around me.
Anyway, the job was done. Time to head back.
I stroked the head of Hiarid, who stood there staring at me blankly, a staff gripped in each hand.
"You did well. Go back first and help Hwayeon. Tell her I'll be there soon."
=Ah, yes. Lord of the Sky.
Praised, Hiarid's expression wavered, plain to see. Color rose in her cheeks, and she darted off in a fluster. I watched her back as four wings beat and she vanished toward the Grand Blue Building in an instant, then slowly descended onto the Grand Turtle's shell.
I began taking into my whole body the Phase Power billowing out like exploding steam, and the energy, thickening by the moment, seemed to brand itself into every last cell.
Seven million, what I'd already had. Three and a half million for killing Ha Cheolsu. Eight million four hundred twenty thousand for killing the Grand Turtle. Eighteen million nine hundred twenty thousand, all told.
A figure you could fairly call solid mid-tier B-Class. Kill the Dark Matter Slime on top of that and another fourteen million two hundred twenty thousand would stack on, putting me at thirty-three million one hundred forty thousand—close to a B-Class Master. But...
I looked up at the amber sphere floating in the air and sighed.
A Phase Power structure in the shape of a Klein Bottle. I was certain of it now—that was the fundamental form Phase Power took for mental manipulation. And I was just as certain Ha Cheolsu had done something to this Dark Matter Slime with that same art.
...Another plan flickered through my head.
If I learned mental manipulation and brought that slime under my control, I could wrap it around my body the way Ha Cheolsu had. There would be no armor like it. It would be an enormous help, no question, when the day came to fight the blue-skinned demons.
Then again—handing over this much Phase Power, leaving a clue to the mental-manipulation skill, and at the end even giving me a slime that could pass for the ultimate armor. Ha Cheolsu, that bastard, might have been unexpectedly generous. A Giving Tree, of all things.
I pushed harder on absorbing the Phase Power from Ha Cheolsu and the Grand Turtle, and sorted through the tangle of information crowding my head.
First, mental manipulation. Who would have thought it was impressive enough to carry someone all the way to B-Class in a mere three months? Two Highest-Rank Variants, plus a host of High-Rank to Peak-Rank Variants—that was enough force to overturn a country.
How had he dominated two Highest-Rank Variants and become B-Class in three months? The fighting itself couldn't have been hard. Only the first is difficult; once you seize a single aberrant with mental manipulation, growing your forces afterward is easy, using aberrants as a shield. And the larger those forces grew, the stronger the aberrants under his control became, and the stronger he became himself...
From Mid-Low Grade upward, aberrants were at least a full step stronger than ability users. Unless you had exceptional combat sense, winning a one-on-one against an aberrant of equal rank or higher grew difficult, and once you reached mid-rank or Mid-High Rank, taking one down alone became close to impossible. Of course, the gap between individuals was large. Even among Mid-High Rank Variants there were weak sorts—wallaby aberrants, for one.
In any case, reaching B-Class in three months took luck, and it was a brutally hard road... Then again, I'd dropped his life into the gutter, so he must have fought like a man possessed, hatred of me for fuel. From that bastard's point of view, I was the one who'd made him a criminal and ruined his life—hateful enough to chew up and swallow. How much must he have loathed me, if even with his reason gone he billowed killing intent the instant he laid eyes on me?
...If I could talk to that Dark Matter Slime trapped in the Space Wall, I might learn how the bastard grew so fast in the Phase World. A shame.
Or maybe there was no need to regret it. I had the Mana Sieve.
"Hoooo."
Phase Power had jumped by eleven million nine hundred twenty thousand all at once, and my body felt swollen with it—like the stuffed, overfull feeling of eating too much, spread through my whole body. I set the Mana Sieve turning, rotating the Phase Power slowly in hopes it would ease, and switched on the Certifier.
I needed to tell Yeongeun I'd dealt with the aberrants that had appeared alongside Ha Cheolsu. The signal went out twice, and the connection opened. Yeongeun appeared in the hologram, her face grave. Red carpet underfoot, brown hardwood paneling the room—the State Council chamber at the Blue House, by the look of it.
"If our Seoha is the one calling first, does that mean you succeeded in cutting down the mastermind behind this attack?"
"Yes. The one who led the aberrants in the assault was Ha Cheolsu—the mental-manipulation ability user who entered the Phase World without authorization three months ago and had a kill order issued on him. I just severed the neck of the Highest-Rank Variant, the Grand Turtle..."
I turned the feed to show the Grand Turtle's corpse beneath my feet. Beyond the hologram window the murmuring swelled, broken here and there by gasps of awe. I showed them the amber sphere, about a meter across, floating in the sky, and went on.
"The Dark Matter Slime is sealed tight inside a Space Wall. And Ha Cheolsu—I took his life myself."
"Haa... So you brought down the Grand Turtle, which has never fallen in all of recorded history, and captured the Dark Matter Slime alive besides. Our Seoha really is a national treasure of Korea."
"A treasure is a bit much..."
I played at modesty, a little embarrassed, but Yeongeun shook her head gently, her expression faintly melancholy.
"If it hadn't been for Seoha, it wouldn't have been Gangdong District that fell. It would have been the city of Seoul—and beyond that, Korea itself might not have survived. Two Highest-Rank Variants have more than enough power for that. So there's no need to be modest, is there?"
She smiled, but the smile didn't last. Her face tightened again. The damage must have been severe.
"And I'm sorry we couldn't warn you about the Dark Matter Slime. We only just learned of that thing ourselves."
"It's all right. Branch Director Kang Hyunwoo came and told me. ...Is the damage very bad?"
"...We're estimating the casualties at over fifty thousand, at a rough count. And that number is expected to rise. Especially where the Ability Users Association building fell and crushed everything beneath it—the ability users who were inside the building when it came down... Haa."
Yeongeun let out a long sigh, looking as if her chest were tight. In the modern age, an ability user was a nation's armed force in the flesh. The Association building where those ability users had gathered had been brought down by an aberrant terror attack—an unprecedented disaster, broken out in Korea. No wonder she looked like that. The Ability Users Association had two Korean branches, but the national headquarters branch in Seoul had been the one with both the quality and the numbers. Yeongeun's face was very dark.
"Hm. On the wooded hill between Hanam and Gangdong District—though I can't even call it a hill anymore. Anyway, the Grand Turtle's corpse is there. It doesn't have a phase stone, but it's still the corpse of the first Highest-Rank Variant, right? I should sell it dear and put the money toward repairing the damage."
"Oh, please. You caught it, so it is yours through and through. The government will cover the disaster recovery costs, so don't you worry about that."
The moment Yeongeun declined, a small stir rose around her, and I caught a voice saying there was no need for the president to refuse when the chairman of Grand Blue himself was offering a restoration fund so generously.
"Madam President, the chairman of Grand Blue is personally pledging a generous restoration fund. There's no need to decline..."
Yeongeun must have been glaring at whoever had said it. A look cold enough to make even me flinch flashed across her face. Right after, a man's voice came through, quietly rebuking them.
"Is our government so poor that we must accept a private charity fund to recover from this disaster? This incident is a clear failure on the part of the Ability Users Association, so we should be able to receive aid from the IWO and Association headquarters as well. That ought to be sufficient to restore the damage in Gangdong District—and yet you would take the chairman's property, the property of the man who gave everything to quell this crisis at home, as if you were robbing him. Know some shame."
That voice—Mr. Kim Hakjun, from the government's ability bureau, wasn't it? The deputy minister. Or had he been promoted to minister last time? Then another, slender voice rose near Yeongeun.
"The chairman of Grand Blue reached the scene faster than anyone, kept the damage from growing any worse, and in the end stopped even a Highest-Rank Variant. He is no different from a hero. For the government to accept a donation of his property, when we ought to be compensating him ourselves and would still fall short, would leave ample room for trouble later."
And from beside her, a sharp voice cut in as well.
"A great many ability users are dead. This is the moment we should be soothing the chairman of Grand Blue and encouraging him to keep raiding—how can you say something liable to rub him the wrong way?"
Yeongeun silenced the room with a look, intense and cold, then turned back to me and smiled, soft and warm.
"Do you have any idea how glad I am that our Seoha was there? I'll be calling you in soon to give you a decoration, so you must come, all right?"
Only then did the gravity largely leave her face. She smiled the way she usually did, full of mischief, gave me a little wave, and ended the Certifier call.
Then again, was the Ability Users Association actually responsible for Ha Cheolsu's attack? The way they'd talked so confidently about securing compensation, it seemed like it might be... I didn't know. There was such a thing as moral responsibility, so it would probably be better to release some of the proceeds from selling the Grand Turtle's corpse in the form of a donation.
"Mm. Then I should head back and tell them to recover the aberrant corpses quickly... Though how do you even process a turtle hundreds of meters long?"
Well, Aunt Hyeryeong or my sister would figure that out.
In the middle of the fight, all I'd been able to think about was killing Ha Cheolsu and the Grand Turtle and dealing with them, and I'd been fine. Now that it was over, my body was starting to shake, cold sweat running, the strength going out of my legs. The tension letting go, maybe. I let out a small sigh and looked up at the sky.
"Hell of a blue sky."
Through Spatial Perception I could feel the tears of families whose people hadn't gotten away in time, the faces sunk in grief, and the taste in my mouth went bitter.
On my way toward the Grand Blue Building I stopped for a moment and looked down over the disaster site. Black smoke and flames were still climbing out of Gangdong District. When I examined it with Spatial Perception, I picked up more than ten thousand corpses in the wreckage of the Ability Users Association building, fallen toward the Han River, and in the houses crushed beneath it.
...The place where Ha Cheolsu had first appeared, dragging the aberrants with him, was worse still.
Where the Grand Turtle—its body over six hundred meters long—had trampled back and forth and set off a small-scale Big Bang, the raw yellow-brown earth lay bare. The ground where High-Rank and Peak-Rank Variants had run wild, crocodiles and lizards and turtles tens of meters long, was a ruin, as if a war had been fought there. High-grade aberrants on a rampage were no different from a calamity. Thanks to that, the whole of Gangdong District was without power, without water, and with traffic paralyzed completely.
The one mercy, if you could call it that, was that once the sirens sounded, citizens had evacuated quickly to nearby shelters, so no further lives were lost. As long as people were alive, I could put up funds myself and help with the recovery.
...The dead were a pity. But there was nothing to be done.
Fire trucks were rolling out one after another into the burning residential blocks, putting down the fires, and ability users were arriving behind them, setting to work on rescuing survivors.
"......"
From the place where the Ability Users Association building had fallen, a mournful, watery shimmer of Phase Power was spreading in waves. It looked like the souls of ability users slipping free and rising into the sky—a funeral procession.
Then I spotted a survivor pinned under a building. I raised a human-shaped Space Wall above the spot, erased the heaped wreckage on top of it with the Space Wall, and cleared the way for a rescue. A firefighter nearby startled for a moment, then came running with the others and pulled the survivor out.
I searched the whole disaster site and found almost no one left alive. Three hundred, at most...
Gripping a high-grade phase stone in my left hand, I marked every place a survivor remained, then erased the piles of building on top of them with the Space Wall, one after another. Human-shaped Space Walls suddenly cascaded across the sky, and the concrete burying the ground beneath them vanished. The firefighters flinched, then seemed to understand my message exactly—they gathered the people nearby, cleared what rubble remained, and pulled the survivors free.
I watched for a moment, then turned my steps back toward the Grand Blue Building.
Once I was home, I sent a text from Franc's smartphone saying the job was done and I was back. Then I opened a joint call to Hwayeon and my sister through the Certifier. It would have been nice if all three of us could talk at once, but mix a regular phone in among Certifiers and a joint call won't connect. A shame.
"Seoha? You're not hurt anywhere?"
"No. I'm not hurt."
"Whew. Thank goodness you're safe."
Having said that much, my sister widened her eyes, leaned in close to the hologram, drew her brows together, and spoke.
"Your clothes are a wreck. Are you sure you're not hurt?"
"Huh?"
At her words I looked down at myself—and maybe from the Shockwave I'd taken when the Grand Turtle landed that first hit, my clothes were in shreds.
"Hey, hey. I'm not hurt. Look, I'm fine, aren't I?"
I turned the Certifier this way and that to show I was in one piece, and shrugged. In the hologram, Hwayeon raised a hand and covered her eyes. My sister looked dizzy, then let out a deep sigh.
Tch. I'd been so out of it I hadn't even noticed my clothes had turned into rags. The Branch Director could have at least mentioned the clothes before he left.
"I took one hit at the start, but you know how tough I am. Not a single scratch. Really. More importantly, everyone evacuated without getting hurt, right?"
"Yes. The security team, the escort team, and the ability users led everyone well. There were no casualties at all."
"Emergency news has been running for a little while now that every aberrant that attacked has been dealt with, so we're on our way back to the building."
I'd forced the subject aside, and they answered me—but Hwayeon wore a faintly dissatisfied look, and my sister was watching me with an expression too complicated to name. I was just about to ask what was wrong when Franc came flying in through the veranda and dove straight into my arms.
"Seohaaa! Heavens—your clothes!"
I pulled her in as she looked over the shredded clothes and touched me here and there, checking for wounds, and stroked her hair while I asked my sister.
"What's wrong? Your face is strange."
"...It's because we couldn't be any help. That's all."
"You were worried about that? Come on. It was a Highest-Rank Variant, and a bunch of Peak-Rank Variants besides. And Ha Cheolsu was there, using mental manipulation. If you'd come to help and died, or gotten caught in mental manipulation, that would've been more of a burden."
"I know! But it's still because I couldn't be any help to you!"
She all but barked it, and then—whether she'd cut the Certifier herself—the hologram showing my sister blinked out.
"...That time of the month?"
I blinked and muttered it, more baffled than anything. Franc, who had been wearing a startled look at my sister's shout, opened her eyes with a prim little glare and jabbed me in the side. Hwayeon, too, turned a reproachful face on me.
"Uh, well. I dealt with all the aberrants that showed up with Ha Cheolsu. So once you're back, next to Gangdong District... I mean."
I checked the map for where the Grand Turtle had died. Mount Iseong. But Hwayeon answered as if she already knew.
"Mount Iseong, you mean? Siha is already on the move with Combat Teams Six, Seven, and Eight, and Logistics Squads Seven through Thirteen, gear in hand."
"Oh. How'd you know?"
"A broadcast helicopter flying over Seoul filmed your entire fight and aired it live. They all set out the moment the Grand Turtle's head came off."
Ah, so that helicopter flying around in the distance had been a news chopper. Anyway, if they'd already left to handle the corpse, there was nothing left for me to worry about.