Jang Yi-soo (3)
"That's why I told you not to come near me."
Hae-na spoke as if laying the blame at my feet.
"So was helping you out against that orc a crime, then?"
The reason she'd kept up her ice-cold attitude all day, I realized, had been to cut off Jang Yi-soo's abnormal jealousy before it could ever ignite.
"You really need to develop a better eye for people, Hae-na. Keeping a piece of trash like that for a lover."
"He's not my lover."
After a brief pause, Hae-na went on.
"Jang Yi-soo blackmailed me."
Indignation smoldered in her eyes.
"I wasn't his first, either. Whenever Jang Yi-soo sets his sights on a woman, he digs up everyone around her, one by one, and blackmails the lot of them. If I wanted to protect my people—my family included—I had no choice but to keep him happy."
Only now did I understand how Hae-na had come to be tangled up with Jang Yi-soo. It must have been pure torment. Looking closely, the marks on her body weren't only from today—scars from long ago were mixed in among them.
"Jang Yi-soo is a complete psychopath. Perverted tastes, maniacal obsession... And that lunatic will be back here soon enough."
With death staring her in the face, her expression looked closer to fury than despair.
"Knowing it all ends like this, what really gnaws at me is not getting my revenge on Jang Yi-soo first. I should've slashed his throat wide open while he slept."
A fierce blaze roared up in her eyes.
I looked at the status window floating before me and said,
"Once we're out of here, let's take that revenge together."
I was combing through the shop for anything useful to an escape when the item I'd scored earlier came back to me. Oh, right. I still have that. No need to spend EXP buying something new after all.
"Inventory! Summon dagger!"
At my shout, Hae-na gave me a look of sheer disbelief.
"In a situation like this, you're doing something that ridiculous...!"
A portal yawned open in the air before me, and a single dagger dropped out with a clatter. Bound as I was, I stretched my neck out as far as it would go and caught the blade in my teeth.
"An ability hunter!"
Hae-na shrieked at the sight of a dagger born out of thin air.
"Is your skill summoning?"
"Mmph-hmm."
I gave Hae-na a rough nod and began sawing through the ropes, dagger clenched in my mouth. The first to go was the one binding my arms; it slid loose with a soft hiss, and from there everything else was a piece of cake.
"Let me get you free too, Hae-na."
Fully out of my bonds, I cut through every last rope holding Hae-na as well. In nothing but her underwear, she rose to her feet and cracked her joints loose—neck, shoulders, arms—in a series of pops. The ropes that had bound her body so cruelly were gone, but her expression remained hard.
"It's too early to breathe easy. Jang Yi-soo's men will still be spread out thick all around outside."
I pulled off my top and draped it over her bare upper body.
"How much firepower are we looking at out there?"
"Most of them are E-Class, D-Class at best. But the real problem is the handful who run the place. And of those, Chil-ak-gwi is especially dangerous."
"Chil-ak-gwi?"
"Yes. Chil-ak-gwi, the youngest of the Seven Evil Spirits of the Black Way. He's serving under Jang Yi-soo right now."
"Would this Chil-ak-gwi happen to be the old man who was standing next to Jang Yi-soo earlier?"
Hae-na nodded. So the elderly man in the suit who'd knocked me out cold was Chil-ak-gwi. That one was definitely dangerous. But this time, unlike when I'd fought bare-handed and been captured, I was armed.
If I'd summoned a dagger and fought back then, I wouldn't have been taken so pathetically. In the fight that broke out of nowhere, I'd flat-out forgotten the weapons stashed in my inventory. Now, even though the Black Way thugs had searched me from head to toe and confiscated anything remotely dangerous, I could still pull items from my inventory.
"Lighter."
Lighter in hand, I told Hae-na,
"I'll draw their aggro. Use the opening and run."
Jet-black smoke began billowing from the warehouse.
"What the hell?"
"Hey, isn't that a fire over there?"
The Black Way thugs keeping watch over the warehouse shouted at the black smoke surging up out of nowhere.
"Those bastards are in there! What do we do?"
"What do you mean, what do we do? The boss told us to keep those bastards in one piece, didn't he? We go in, obviously. Grab your weapons!"
Click. The thugs jimmied the iron door open and stepped inside. The warehouse was already packed solid with jet-black smoke; not an inch ahead was visible.
Something's off, though. All this smoke, yet there's no heat to it. Baffled, the thug hacked his way deeper through the haze—and then his eyes went wide. The two bastards who should have been lashed tight to the iron chairs bolted to the floor were gone.
"Hey! Those bastards got aw—!"
Wham! I burst out of the smoke and slammed a fist into the back of his skull.
"What the—!"
Shunk! My dagger punched through the thug's left chest, and he dropped dead on the spot.
"No! How did you—!"
Shick. Clang. Tumble-tumble. The last thug's head rolled across the floor.
"Cough. Cough."
Having felled three men in the blink of an eye, I finally let out the cough I'd been holding back. But this was only the beginning.
"What the hell is this guy?!"
The moment I stepped outside the warehouse, fifty-odd Black Way thugs had me surrounded at a glance.
"Ha... shit..."
Spitting the curse under my breath, I shot toward the nearest thug like a gale and brought the dagger down like a thunderbolt. It was a common-grade blade, but with my strength behind it, it cleaved the man from crown to crotch in two clean halves, like some storied sword. He died without so much as registering it.
Thud. Thud. Split precisely into two slabs of meat, he toppled to either side.
A shallow slash across the throat would have been enough to kill him, but I halved him instead—to break their spirit. Just as I'd calculated, the surreal sight of a corpse sheared along a mirror-smooth plane froze the thugs dead for an instant.
Shish! Shish! In that opening, I wove among the Black Way, slashing and carving them down without pause. I'd mowed down close to twenty when—
"You rat!"
The old man in the suit—Chil-ak-gwi—appeared with a roar.
"I'll bury you!"
His spiked club whistled past my skull by a hair's breadth—and so began a blood-spattering battle between me and Chil-ak-gwi.
I fought far better than I had when I was taken, but not well enough to overcome the thirty-odd thugs ringing me in.
"Haah... haah..."
My breathing was turning ragged; an easy win wasn't in the cards. Had I faced Chil-ak-gwi one-on-one, his head would already have left his shoulders and been rolling at my feet, but the crafty old snake was too wily for that—every time the tide turned against him, he shoved his underlings in front of him as meat shields and wriggled out of danger.
Before I could cut down another ten of the Black Way, I could already feel the color of defeat deepening around me.
Could I use one more possession coin?
Right at that moment—Thwip!
An arrow came streaking in like a thunderbolt and knocked aside, with a sharp clang, the axe a thug was bringing down toward my head.
Startled, I looked toward where it had flown from—and there stood Hae-na atop a shipping container, a bow she must have scrounged from somewhere slung over her shoulder.
So she hadn't run after all.
Thwip! "Argh!"
Her next arrow punched through the elbow of another thug lunging at me.
Incredible accuracy! Hae-na's an archer!
Nocking a fresh arrow, Hae-na called down to me.
"Focus."
I nodded. Nothing more needed saying. A new rhythm took hold of the battle: I carved through the Black Way from below while Hae-na backed me up from above with her bow. With a first-rate archer on my side, I felt as fortified as if I'd been handed a whole army.
"Kill Hae-na first!"
Chil-ak-gwi howled himself hoarse. But none of the thugs who tried to reach her could break through the line I held to cover her.
Every time Hae-na loosed an arrow, the recoil sent her heavy breasts bouncing. Arrowheads sank into arms and legs, and the ranks of the crippled kept swelling. Each time she put a man out of commission, I moved in and harvested the thug's head.
In the space of a breath, the tide had turned completely.
"Haah! Haah!"
Now it was Chil-ak-gwi, backed completely into a corner, heaving for breath. He had no underlings left to throw out as meat shields.
"Hah..."
My footsteps splashed with every stride; the floor had become a river of Black Way blood.
"Now you're the only one left."
"...Heheheh. Maeng Su-ho. That strength of yours... it reminds me of my younger days."
Chil-ak-gwi, who'd snarled like a demon while the odds were his, was suddenly speaking to me with a softened face.
"I wasn't always of the Black Way, you know. There was a time I dreamed of being a righteous hero, too. But then, ten years ago, because of that business..."
Shunk! As he unspooled his sob story like a man begging for absolution, I cut his throat.
"Ghurk!"
Blood came gushing through the opened gash in his neck. His eyes, fixed on me, seemed to ask, Why...?
"Sorry, but I don't have time to sit through a confession."
Slosh. Slosh. The reek of fresh blood stung my nose and turned my stomach—by now I was, for all intents and purposes, bathing in the blood of the Black Way.
"Let's get out of here first."
As we slipped away, I happened to glance back—and saw the tranquil face of a country farm. It was hard to believe a gore-soaked battle had raged there mere minutes before. The place, I gathered, was a farm abandoned long ago that the Yisu Gang had seized and been squatting in.
"Woof woof woof...! Whine..."
The guard dogs took one sniff of the blood caked all over me and wet themselves.
I made a careful sweep of the surroundings, then said,
"Looks like there's no one left."
Seven black cars with windows tinted pitch-dark stood parked at the farm's entrance. In one of them I found the keys sitting right where they'd been left; I slid into the driver's seat and fired the engine.
Vroom! When I looked around to pick Hae-na up, she was setting the farm on fire.
Fwoooosh. Whoosh whoosh. Bang.
"Get in."
The car carrying the two of us pulled off the farm grounds, black smoke climbing into the sky behind us.
Once we'd put a good stretch of country road behind us, a strip of self-service motels came into view along the highway.
Hae-na spoke.
"We should wash up over there."
I was inclined to agree. Our black SUV rolled into the motel parking lot.
