Which Card to Call
"That's enough. I don't need it."
With that answer to the Chief's question, Kang Do-seok lifted his blade. The faces of the staff huddled in the corner of the VIP room went rigid. One of them yanked a pistol from his waistband.
Crack!
Kang Do-seok twisted his wrist, and the deflected round skewered the eye of the staffer standing beside the shooter.
"GRAAAAGH!"
The rest bolted for the exit, and Kang Do-seok stayed on their heels. What remained took only a few cuts.
Shluk! Shff! Splat!
The head of the man running out front went flying with the rest of him, blood fanning in a long streak across the carpet. Perched on the poker table, the Chief smoked and watched the whole thing unfold.
"Fine sword work."
Kang Do-seok flicked the blood from his blade.
"Done spectating?"
"I am. Thanks to you I made two billion, so the least I owe the show is a review."
The Chief looked over the corpses strewn across the floor. The VIP room, packed with living people mere minutes ago, had gone silent.
"Very clean. You'd have made a fine cop."
"No. That one would've been a struggle."
"How so? Policing is dealing with people all the same. You beat on criminals, and kill them when you have to."
"I know that much."
Kang Do-seok shook the fresh blood from the steel.
"But the pay wouldn't be worth it."
The Chief gave a small laugh.
"Fair enough. Trying to wring a blade of your caliber dry on a cop's salary would be plain thievery from the word go."
He took a deep drag. The reddening ember lit up the chrome sheathing his jawline.
"I should be heading back."
He turned to the aide standing at his side.
"Call my ride."
"Yes, Chief."
The aide checked his wrist terminal.
"Team 4 of the Counter-Terror Response Division, Special Operations Bureau, has finished a nearby assignment and is returning to headquarters. Rerouted this way, they arrive within three minutes."
"Have them pick me up en route."
"Relaying the order."
The aide opened a channel at once. Cigarette clamped between his lips, the Chief turned back to Kang Do-seok.
"Ah, Kang Do-seok. Come to think of it, I met a man a while back."
The Chief tapped his cigarette ash into the liquor glass Big Bess had been drinking from.
"He was talking about you. The Cheongmyeong Guild—a cooperative of Koreans. He was its vice guild master."
Kang Do-seok's eyes went to the Chief.
"So the Chief keeps company with Koreans now?"
"When they offer free liquor and women to play with, refusing would be poor manners."
Kang Do-seok studied him in silence for a moment.
"And he talked about me?"
"He did. Poked at it, subtle as anything. Said you might become a problem for F-Sector's public order going forward."
The Chief exhaled a long plume of smoke.
"So what did you tell him?"
"Told him it was no business of mine."
"...Aren't you the Chief of Police?"
"I am."
The answer was so absurd that Kang Do-seok nearly snorted out a hollow laugh. The sheer gall of it—broadcasting his corruption like a badge of honor instead of hiding it—was genuinely impressive.
"You're a natural-born bureaucrat. Truly admirable."
"Always happy to hear it. Either way, having watched you work today, I'd say the Cheongmyeong vice-master wasn't wrong."
The Chief swept his gaze across the corpse-littered room, where the blood-soaked carpet and shattered tables filled every inch of the view.
"You could certainly become a public-order problem."
"So you're going to make trouble for me?"
"No."
The Chief's mouth curled into a grin.
"I'd rather stay on friendly terms with you."
He rose from the poker table.
"Spare me one of your cards?"
Kang Do-seok quietly sized him up. Chrome cyberware capping the jaw. A face that hadn't so much as twitched over a roomful of dead men. A human being who'd chain-smoked through a table where he'd dropped two billion. Corrupt, shameless, faithful to every appetite he owned—and yet a man who seemed to keep a code of his own. Which meant there was only one last thing to verify.
"And drugs?"
"That sort of thing ruins a man's life."
The Chief waved his cigarette as if the very word disgusted him.
"I only pursue pleasures I can keep in check. I'll do everything else under the sun, but I don't cross that line."
"Skim as much as you can get away with, but the job still gets done?"
"Something like that."
The Chief smiled, satisfied.
"You're right—I am built for the civil service. Not just any civil servant, mind you. A senior one. A man like me belongs among the executives."
He held out his hand to Kang Do-seok.
"Petty crooks get caught without me. Gambling dens get raided, dead bodies get hauled away. That's work for the men under me."
Kang Do-seok drew a card from his coat and tossed it over, and the Chief raised a hand and snatched it out of the air.
"What a senior police executive actually does is something else entirely. Taking your card, for instance—just like so."
He took a long, rasping drag and sucked the cigarette down to its very end. The red ember quietly burned itself away.
"Setting the Cheongmyeong card and yours side by side on my desk, and deciding which of the two to call. That sort of thing."
The Chief looked around the bloodstained VIP room once more.
"Petty criminals, the Black Table, Celnar—trash like that isn't worth a moment's thought. All I decide is who gets to throw their weight around in F-Sector from here on out."
His mouth pulled upward at the corner.
"And my personal philosophy is that deciding it properly requires generous amounts of booze, cigarettes, and sex. Magical acts, all three—wonderful for keeping the mind sharp."
"Crazy bastard."
"Hah!"
The Chief burst into a wide laugh. Golden light slid greasily over the chrome inlaid along his jawline.
Then it happened.
CRASH—!
The floor-to-ceiling glass filling one whole side of the VIP room blew inward, shards raining across the carpet on a violent gust of wind.
RRRUUUUMMM—!
Three black aerial armored vehicles hung hovering flush against the building's outer wall. No wings, no rotors. Anti-gravity engines set into their undersides spewed blue light, pinning the massive hulls to the air.
Clank.
Operators in black combat suits came across the boarding ramp, faces hidden behind ballistic masks, most of the skin bared below their necks sheathed in matte chrome.
The man at the front slowly lowered his rifle and reported.
"Nightfall Team 4. Escort route secured."
Kang Do-seok watched them, sword hanging loose at his side. Full-body augmented humans who cleared 2.2 meters without effort.
The Netron City Police's special-operations counter-terror unit. Commonly known as Nightfall.
Combat cyborgs—each one alone a match for an entire company, and a full team deployment could smash not just armed gangs but a small military base besides.
The operators split to either side in unison, black helmets dipping together to open the Chief's path.
Before taking it, the Chief turned to Kang Do-seok one last time.
"Let's do this again sometime, Kang Do-seok."
The Chief walked at an easy pace straight through the middle of the encircling Nightfall operators. The blood-soaked carpet and the bodies strewn across it didn't concern him in the slightest. Cigarette still in his teeth, he crossed the gangway and climbed into the armored vehicle.
The vehicle's armored door sealed shut.
"All units, return."
At the team leader's order the Nightfall operators moved; the gangway retracted, and the three black aerial armored vehicles rose as one.
The huge hulls slipped away between the buildings. Through the shattered window, only the wind came roaring in.
Kang Do-seok watched the armored vehicles dwindle into the distance, then slid his sword into its sheath. The commission was done—it was time he headed home too.
By the time Kang Do-seok returned to the penthouse, the whole city had already sunk into darkness.
He opened the front door and stepped inside, shed his coat onto the sofa, and went straight to the living room window. The panoramic glass that had been blown apart had been replaced with something brand-new. Kang Do-seok rapped a knuckle against its surface.
Tok. Tok.
Not a scratch. Good as new.
"They fixed it properly."
The moment he sank into the sofa, the terminal on the table chimed.
Celnar.
He accepted the call, and a voice thick with mechanical distortion came through the speaker.
"Is it finished?"
"Yeah. Killed the staff down to the last man. Left the customers alone."
"And Big Bess—I assume you made certain of him as well."
"I didn't kill that one."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"Someone else killed him for me."
"Someone else? Who?"
Kang Do-seok thought of the man who'd been smoking and spouting nonsense not ten minutes ago.
"The police."
The other end of the speaker went quiet.
"Did I hear that correctly."
"The Chief was gambling there. Said that once the Black Table was smashed to pieces, the debts he owed would vanish with it—so he lent a hand."
Celnar said nothing for a long moment. At last came a short, dry laugh.
"Ha. Ha. Netron City truly is a wonderful place to live. Wouldn't you agree, Kang Do-seok?"
"Not particularly."
Kang Do-seok thought otherwise. That Netron City was a shit-hole of a city was a fact he'd known for a very long time.
"In any case, I will send the balance as soon as I have finished verifying. Good work, Kang Do-seok. Expect my call."
Before long, a deposit notification slid across the terminal screen. Kang Do-seok checked the amount.
The job was finished, and the money was in.
On the television, the weathercaster's voice was playing.
Once the storm began, the roads and the air corridors would all be sealed. Within the vast residential megacomplex where Kang Do-seok lived—ten thousand households stacked into a single mixed-use development—he could still roam its restaurants and shops, but setting foot outside the complex would be impossible.
Which meant the only thing left to do was sleep.
Kang Do-seok rose from the sofa, started toward the bedroom, and paused to glance out the window.
The sky over the city had gone black. Not with night—a vast ink-cloud of pollution particles had settled over the city like a continent of storm front, and the upper reaches of the distant skyscrapers were already half-submerged in the filthy yellow-brown shroud.
Then the news changed.
A satellite photograph flashed onto the screen. Dozens of targeting reticles overlapped around the dark-red silhouette.
Listening to the anchor's flat, dry voice, Kang Do-seok stared at the blackened sky for a long while.
Shabelle's Storm was closing in.
— End of Episode 13 —