People Standing on the Tracks
"Ahem—a squirrel? What squirrel, ahem, ahem. Did that squirrel just shove me?"
The coughing grew worse by the second.
"You've got to be kidding me. Now rodents are looking down on me? I'm Lee Jeonghun! My world was never the same as yours from the very start!"
Zuuuung—.
The Beam Saber's light began to blaze.
It was proof that Lee Jeonghun was pouring mana into his weapon. As I understood it, a Beam Saber charged and discharged energy in proportion to the mana fed into it. It was one of the rarest weapons in the world—I'd always nursed a little dream of seeing one up close, but I never imagined it would happen this way. Fate really had a twisted sense of humor.
I decided Keongkeongi and I should run a pincer play and restrain Lee Jeonghun before anything else.
Fine. Let's give it a shot. If we didn't, he might slice me and Keongkeongi clean in half!
"Keongkeongi! Angangi! Triangle formation! You take the right! I've got the left! Angangi, wait for your moment!"
I called to mind how the C-rank party had brought down that massive Nidhoggr lizard. Strangers who'd met that very morning, yet they had divided the work perfectly and moved as one.
We could do even better.
Of course, Lee Jeonghun wasn't about to stand still either.
"You're really going to make me use my full strength. Invisible Grab."
Whuung—.
It felt like something had seized me by the collar.
Invisible Grab. If I remembered right, it was Lee Jeonghun's signature skill, built on telekinesis. I'd heard the man could crush steel plates with his mind alone.
Sure enough, my arms and legs might as well have been bolted to the floor—they wouldn't move an inch. But my lips still worked, so I shouted to Keongkeongi.
"Keongkeongi! Squirrel Dive!"
━Woof-woof…!
Whuung, FAAANG—!
Keongkeongi launched himself at Lee Jeonghun at blistering speed. The man's body, still channeling telekinesis into me, lurched violently—and with his concentration broken, my body was suddenly free.
Lee Jeonghun's skill was certainly called S-rank, but it was riddled with gaps. Compared to the sheer density of mana Seo Yerim—herself a former S-rank—used to radiate, his was thin. Diluted and degraded, you might say.
And he had one more weakness.
"Lee Jeonghun, climbing all the way to S-rank, you've barely ever fought another person, have you? You look awkward and unsure of yourself when it's a human across from you."
Which was only natural.
Anti-personnel combat had been a required course back around the first generation of awakeners. By the time the second generation—Seo Yerim, Yu Ari, Lee Jeonghun—came through, they'd slashed those hours and crammed everything into monster-hunting and rift-clearing curricula instead.
And what reason would a third-generation chaebol heir who'd never wanted for anything ever have to fight another human being? In that sense, I still held an advantage over him.
I'd been second in my class in the anti-personnel combat module, after all.
"Hoo—."
I steadied my breathing and spread mana through my whole body. Feeling the heat rise in every limb, I drove straight into Lee Jeonghun's chest—a low, wrestling-style tackle.
"Where do you think you're—!"
He swung the Beam Saber, but the coughing fits had sapped him, and his movements hesitated like rusted hinges. I slipped past the strike and hammered my knee into his gut.
THWACK—!
A satisfyingly loud crack rang out, and Lee Jeonghun's body folded like a hinge. Had my blow landed clean? No—not entirely. The impact felt wrong.
"You wrapped your telekinesis around yourself like armor?"
It felt as though a film thinner than a soap bubble sheathed his body, and that membrane was refusing my knee. That was why the full force of the strike hadn't gone through.
Impressive. So Lee Jeonghun hadn't reached S-rank on looks alone.
"Nice instincts. Eight out of ten."
But I'd heard that fine control of telekinesis was brutally demanding. It was why psionics users tended to grow prickly and hysterical—the ability itself reshaped the brain, or so the story went.
"How long do you think you can keep that shield up? Give it up. Do it now, and I'll pretend today never happened. You're something of an idol to people, you know. You should be managing your image."
"…You little punk—I was going to take you in quietly! I've been going easy on you, and you actually think you're winning? I was trying to bring you in with your limbs still attached!"
Shk—.
Lee Jeonghun's hand slid to his waist, reaching for something that looked like a pill bottle. That was when I heard Keongkeongi, my prime Dog-Squirrel, make a strange sound—━Bbong, bbong…!
The same call he'd made back when he'd discovered the Glowing Mushroom.
I knew this bark well. It was the sound he made to summon something.
And I could guess exactly what he was trying to do.
━Woof-woof…!
━Woof-woof…!
━Woof-woof…!
Dog barks erupted from somewhere, and then, out toward the yard, Dog-Squirrels began to appear—brown fur, striped in every pattern imaginable. Five of them, then ten, then more, the numbers swelling by the second.
Just how many Dog-Squirrels lived in this neighborhood, I had time to wonder—before Lee Jeonghun clutched at his own throat and doubled over in agony.
"Fuck—what is—cough, can't, can't breathe—no way… what… allergy meds—the allergy—."
He shoved the pill bottle back into his pocket and fumbled at his belt, fishing out something that looked like a syringe.
Drawing on ten years of awakener experience, I read the situation in an instant: this was the golden opportunity to bring down a giant.
Shk—.
I pulled a laser pointer from my pocket. A toy I'd bought to play with Keongkeongi and Angangi. As it turned out, Dog-Squirrels chased lasers just like cats.
Ziiiing—.
I swept the red dot across Lee Jeonghun's body.
The Dog-Squirrels reacted as if they'd received a coded signal, and a brown tide came surging in from every direction at once.
"Go! Squirrel NUCLEAR!"
"F-fuck…! You'll regret this! Next time!"
Staggering under the sheer mass of Dog-Squirrels, Lee Jeonghun stumbled backward.
I immediately barked at Angangi.
"Angangi! Block Lee Jeonghun! Don't let him escape!"
The Emperor Ant shot forward with surprising speed, seized the man's pant leg in his mandibles, and pinned him firmly in place.
━Chitter…!
I threw myself at Lee Jeonghun too, wrapping my arms around him in a bear hug. Hugging another man's body—up until that motorcycle ride earlier I'd been in heaven, and now look at me.
"Let go! Let go of me, you bastard! Let go! I'll give you three thousand! No—a hundred million!"
A hundred million? It tempted me for a second, but I bore down on his wriggling body with everything I had. In the struggle he crashed to the ground, and the brown tide of Dog-Squirrels began to pile on top of him.
"GRAAAH! Get off! Get off me, you demon rodents! GET OFF!"
Shk—.
With his gas mask torn away by the squirrels, Lee Jeonghun made a strangled, kh-khh— sound, as if his very breath were being cut off. Clutching his throat, unable even to draw air, he shuddered violently—and at last, his eyes rolling back white, he collapsed.
"I won! I beat an S-rank awakener!"
I threw my fist into the air and shouted for joy. Keongkeongi and Angangi answered with a triumphant ━Woof-woof…! and ━Chitter…!
"Right—we won together. Anyway! But… he's not dead, is he?"
I pressed my fingers to Lee Jeonghun's pulse.
Winning was great and all, but a cold dread had swept over me. My life was just about to blossom—imagine snuffing out a third-generation chaebol heir right now. Even under Korean self-defense law, I'd be looking at hard prison time, no question about it.
"He's alive. He's alive!"
Thankfully, Lee Jeonghun was breathing. He'd merely blacked out.
That was when it happened.
Clunk—.
The door swung open and Oinoi the nymph emerged into the yard.
"This man is a very wicked man, he is…! We nymphs, this Oinoi included, are most fond of beating wicked people until they are corrected, for such is our way…! And thus it shall be Nymph Secret Technique: Random Beating…!"
Thwack, THWACK, thwack—!
Oinoi kicked the unconscious Lee Jeonghun's body over and over.
"This is the share owed for making this Oinoi hide inside the house…! And this… is the share owed for knocking down the wall of the garden Angangi worked so hard to tend…!"
Even unconscious, Lee Jeonghun muttered strange sleep-talk between blows. "Ugh… I'm sorry…. Mom, I'll never play computer games again…."
Watching this bizarre scene unfold, I opened my phone and typed 1-1, then hesitated.
112. Police.
119. Ambulance.
Which one was I supposed to pick?
Was this even a dilemma? Well, the correct answer was obvious.
The ambulance dispatched by 119 arrived about five minutes later. Small blessings—it was the countryside, and they still came fast.
"He may not look it, but he's a third-generation chaebol heir. Please take good care of him."
I said this to the paramedics. They nodded—"Understood, sir."—loaded Lee Jeonghun aboard, and drove off.
Now the yard was empty, leaving just me standing there in the open. Then Angangi came trotting over with something clamped in his horns.
━Chitter—.
Clamped in those horns was a mechanical device that looked like a flashlight.
The Beam Saber.
"Oh. Forgot to grab that. Should've shipped it off in the ambulance with him."
Wee-oo, wee-oo—.
Just then, I saw an ambulance sliding through the village entrance in the distance. Had they come to reclaim this precious Beam Saber? No—the paramedics climbed out and asked me:
"You're the one who reported it, right? Where's the critical patient?"
"I'm sorry—what?"
Lee Jeonghun was dreaming of his childhood.
An elementary schooler, living with his mother, buried under brutal hours of study. There was one game Lee Jeonghun wanted to play more than anything—Autumn Story—and there was nothing his mother hated more than seeing him play it. Get caught gaming in secret, and she would beat him until the switch broke.
"Lee Jeonghun! Look at your brother and your sisters! If you're going to inherit the Ohsa Group, you have no time for games!"
She had fetched a pair of scissors and snipped through the keyboard cable, the monitor cord, every last wire.
What a horrific memory— he was thinking, when his consciousness came floating up, sssshh—and Lee Jeonghun could open his eyes.
The interior of an ambulance swam into view. And leaning over him, a woman and a man in white lab coats.
"Yu Ari…!?"
"You're awake, Lee Jeonghun. You had a severe allergic reaction. An ordinary person could easily have died, but I suppose an S-rank body is sturdy—it's a good thing. And no, you don't need to thank me."
Anger flared in Lee Jeonghun.
Because Yu Ari had broken her promise to him.
"You—!"
As he tried to raise himself, he realized something was very wrong.
His body would not move. As if everything below his neck had gone utterly numb.
Watching him struggle, a certain man crossed his arms and spoke with something like admiration.
"I told you we should've waited at the police station. You were right about one thing and wrong about another, Yu Ari—Ha Ildo really did call 119 instead of the police. That guy's more impressive than I gave him credit for."
"I did tell you, didn't I. That's just the kind of person Senior Ildo is. Isn't he a complete fool?"
"Still—he beat Lee Jeonghun, a former S-rank. That guy's in fine form. Shouldn't we be marking him?"
"No, I don't think there's any need. Lee Jeonghun had a Dog-Squirrel allergy. Far more dangerous than we thought. Another-world allergy, maybe."
"Really? Well, if the Doctor says so, I suppose that's that. So—what do you say? Any thoughts of coming back to the field? Isn't that why you called us? No need to keep marking Lee Jeonghun anymore."
"I'll… pass on the comeback, thank you."
"Shame. Your desk's still there, exactly as you left it. Say the word anytime."
Clack-clack. Clack-clunk—.
Lee Jeonghun noticed that the man chatting with Yu Ari had a mechanical prosthetic where his right arm should be. And his face—sun-darkened, carved with scars—was one Lee Jeonghun recognized at once.
"You—you're 'Iron Arm' Kang Cheolmin! Didn't you die in a T-rank rift!?"
"That's right. Good to see you too, Jeonghun. You heard right—Iron Arm Kang Cheolmin died in a rift. And weren't you glad? The thug who made kidstrade their lunch trays for beatings, dead in a rift—you probably celebrated. I looked for you at my funeral, you know. Not a trace of grief on your face. Honestly, that stung. But—ta-da! Alive and well, as you can see."
"What the fuck is going on here! Yu Ari! Explain!"
Lee Jeonghun was no fool.
He understood that something had just happened that lay entirely outside his understanding.
Iron Arm Kang Cheolmin, first-generation awakener, dead in a rift—that was information he himself had hired people to verify, again and again. And now the man was breathing. Something was very, very wrong.
"Fuck it!"
Lee Jeonghun unleashed every drop of mana he had.
FAAANG—!
A massive psychokinetic shockwave erupted, and the ambulance flipped clean over.
His body wouldn't move thanks to the stabilizer, but that didn't matter. Lee Jeonghun was a telekinetic. Puppeteering his own body with telekinesis was child's play.
He had just dragged himself, inch by agonizing inch, out of the wrecked ambulance when Yu Ari in her white coat and Kang Cheolmin with his mechanical arm tore through the ambulance's steel wall and strolled casually out into the open.
"Wow. You can still move after a full stabilizer dose? Or is it that your skills have dulled since you left the field, Ari?"
"The formulation was flawless. His mental fortitude was simply stronger than we estimated. I suppose even a rotten egg deserved to wear the S-rank name."
"Get away from me!"
Lee Jeonghun fished a drug out of his pocket—pills made from the Glowing Mushroom. An experimental compound, clinical trials unfinished, but its core effect had been proven: it raised mana consumption and maximized a skill's destructive power.
He dumped every pill into his mouth at once and forced himself to chew and swallow.
His body roared back to the output of his S-rank days, and he hurled that telekinesis at his enemies with everything it had.
KWAAAAAA—!
The psychokinetic wave tore the asphalt of the empty lot apart as it blasted forward.
It was a technique that should never, under any circumstances, be used on a human being—and Iron Arm Kang Cheolmin blocked it anyway, mechanical arm thrust forward, advancing one step at a time.
"Just a technique that suppresses the enemy with overwhelming mana volume. I'm not sure this even qualifies as a 'technique.' It's crude, brute-force stupidity."
"H-how! I'm S-rank! You were B-rank at best, Kang Cheolmin! How are you withstanding a direct projection of S-rank mana!? Your body should be tearing itself apart! Die! Just die already!"
"Tearing apart? Dying? Ha. You kiss goodbye your elders pretty rudely for someone who hasn't seen them in years. Lee Jeonghun—do you know why Korea has only three S-rank awakeners?"
Vmmm, clack-click. PST—!
Kang Cheolmin's mechanical arm whirred to life, and in an instant it fired out like a launched wire, seizing Lee Jeonghun by the collar and yanking him forward. What followed—a knee driven deep into his gut—made the world white out before Lee Jeonghun's eyes.
Without even a scream, he crumpled onto the floor of some construction site. Through his fading consciousness, he stared up at the white of Yu Ari's lab coat.
"Yu Ari… what… what the hell are you…. You've been… deceiving me all along…?"
The words left him, and the world tilted.
Maybe it was better not to hear what she really was.
Then, with a clack—, Kang Cheolmin chambered his mechanical arm and asked:
"We ask the questions here. You'd best start remembering everything you've never told a soul, all the way back to kindergarten. Have you ever come into contact with the Witch?"