A Week Is Enough
“And you’re asking me to believe all that?”
Lee Ki-seok asked, his face a picture of pure disbelief.
The Tower. Skills. Monsters. Items. The end of the world, and so on.
It was the kind of talk that belonged in games or novels. Hearing someone lay it out with such deadly seriousness left him too dumbfounded even to laugh.
On any ordinary day he would have thrown the man out on the spot for wasting his time. He couldn’t do that now. Not after what Yujin had shown him.
A lone fighter with cold weapons facing soldiers armed with modern firearms was supposed to be impossible. If those soldiers numbered not one or two but an entire unit, it was even more so. Even if luck let him drop a few, the price would be a storm of bullets. He wouldn’t last a single second before being turned into a honeycomb and ending his life right there.
Yujin was different.
He had single-handedly crushed more than a full battalion’s worth of troops and still walked in to find Lee Ki-seok. He had done, in the real world, what only movie superheroes managed on screen. That alone was enough to prove there was substance to his words.
And then there was the Tower—the black spire that had appeared across the globe without warning. It left Lee Ki-seok no choice but to listen.
“I’m not particularly asking you to believe me,” Yujin said with a shrug, looking at the thoroughly bewildered physicist. “You’ll have no choice later anyway.”
His whole manner said it didn’t matter either way.
“Fine. Let’s say, for the moment, that everything you told me is true.” Lee Ki-seok sorted through the chaos in his head and spoke slowly. “Why did you come looking for me?”
Yujin had said that once Players reached the fifth floor, they could come outside for a week. That the same applied to him. A week was not a long time. Naturally there would be countless things he wanted to do and things he had to do. Even so, he had sought Lee Ki-seok out for a reason of his own.
I can’t even guess what it is.
It didn’t seem like a simple handoff of information about the Tower and the Players. He had clearly come for something deeper, something more high-level than that.
Yujin smiled—as if he had been waiting for exactly that question.
“There’s something I need you to do for me.”
“Something I need to do?”
“Nothing grandiose.” Yujin leaned forward off the sofa, bringing his face closer. “I need a little support and management. If we’re going to clear the Tower, that is.”
Park Ji-hoo stopped walking.
He stood in front of the only place in the neighborhood that could even pretend to handle inpatient care.
DONGSEONG CLINIC
It was a small building. As the sign itself made clear, it wasn’t truly a hospital—just a clinic. The facilities were old, the location a little out of the way, and a gloomy atmosphere clung to the place.
She’ll be here.
It was the only place the lower-class people of this miserable neighborhood could lean on. And the man he had once called Father would never have put Si-yeon in any glossy, well-kept hospital.
With a hard expression, Park Ji-hoo stepped into Dongseong Clinic.
It was late; the interior was dim and gloomy. Only a few patients heading out for a smoke were visible here and there. As if by long habit, Ji-hoo went straight for the stairs and climbed to the third floor in one go.
It used to be hard.
Before being summoned to the Tower, Park Ji-hoo had been a weak boy. He had never eaten well, so all that remained of him was spite and grit; his stamina had been far below that of his peers. Just climbing three floors had been enough to leave him winded.
Not anymore. Three floors, thirty floors, three hundred—he felt as if he could take them all without effort.
I don’t know if I’m supposed to call that lucky.
He forced the dark thought aside, pushed open the emergency stairwell door, and stepped inside. A brightly lit corridor appeared. Because this was the inpatient floor, they had left the lights on.
“Hm? How can I help you?”
A nurse who spotted him started forward, then frowned. His appearance was pure vagrant—and the stench rolling off him was enough to rot a nose. She stopped well short of him.
“I… came to see my little sister.”
“Your sister? Ah, so you’re here for a visit. But I’m afraid visiting hours are over. Even if they weren’t, I couldn’t let you in looking like that.”
After the pandemic a few years earlier, hospital visitation rules had tightened everywhere. Places that once ran visiting hours loosely now enforced them to the minute; some wouldn’t even allow that without a full-time guardian present. And looking at the state of Park Ji-hoo, permission was out of the question either way. Even a rundown, slapdash clinic like Dongseong was no exception.
“…Is that so?”
Ji-hoo’s shoulders sank. He was angry and frantic, but he was not a boy who lacked manners. Nor was he so dense that he failed to understand what his appearance would do to other people. He was already thinking he should go wash up first so he wouldn’t trouble the other patients when the nurse spoke again.
“What’s your sister’s name?”
“P-Park Si-yeon.”
“Si-yeon? You’re Si-yeon’s big brother?”
Her eyes went round.
“No one came to see her for days—I was starting to worry. You’ve finally shown up.” She gave him a faintly pointed once-over, then turned. “Room 307. There are other patients, so keep it quiet. And wash your hands before you go in.”
Was that permission? The moment she heard he was Park Si-yeon’s brother, she looked reluctant but no longer tried to stop him.
“Room 307.”
Ji-hoo bowed toward her back and headed for the room. The clinic was so small it took less than a minute. A six-person ward—judging by the nameplates outside the door, every bed was full.
He stopped at the bathroom first, as the nurse had said, and scrubbed everything visible with soap. He had been filthy enough that it took a long while. In the mirror, his face and neck looked somewhat clean. Washing his hair was out of the question; he settled for this much, left the bathroom, and returned to Room 307.
He eased the door open. Soft breathing filled the dim ward. There. By the window, behind a drawn curtain, he slipped his head through and looked.
His little sister’s face. She was curled up like a shrimp, deep in sleep. Only thirteen years old, she was far smaller than her peers—just as he had been.
Si-yeon.
Cuts and bruises covered her face. So she really had fallen into the hands of those lowlifes.
He lifted a trembling hand toward her sleeping face, then stopped short—afraid of waking her.
A grinding sound came from between his teeth. Rage surged up at the scars carved into this small, fragile body. It all felt like his fault, which only made it worse.
If I hadn’t been summoned to the Tower…
None of this would have happened. He could have protected his sister in place of that trash of a father and that irresponsible mother. Because he had been taken into the Tower, this had been allowed to happen. The thought burned so hot he could barely stand it.
He drew his hand back.
He wanted to wake her, to say hello. Overnight, the big brother who had been her roof had vanished. How terrified must this little girl have been? He wanted to tell her he was back, that she didn’t have to worry anymore.
He couldn’t. The time left to him was one week. After that he would have no choice but to return to the Tower. He did not want to make her live through the sudden disappearance of her brother a second time.
In those brief moments, countless thoughts raced through his mind. In the end, Park Ji-hoo did not wake her. He simply stood for a long time looking at his sleeping sister’s face, then slipped out of the ward.
“There isn’t much I can do for you.”
But right now, a few things at least seemed possible.
Lowlifes, he said.
The moment he heard it from his father, certain faces had risen in his mind. Thugs so well-known that no one in the neighborhood failed to recognize them—the same ones who had never stopped tormenting Ji-hoo himself. The odds they were the ones were 99.9 percent. Their toy had disappeared, so they had picked Park Si-yeon as a substitute.
Even if it wasn’t them, it didn’t matter. They would be the same breed. Beat them hard enough and the truth would come out eventually.
One week. Not long.
But—
“It’s enough.”
Enough to make sure those bastards never saw sunlight again.
Decision made, Park Ji-hoo moved fast. The nurse he had met earlier called after him; he ignored her and took the stairs down to the first floor.
What time is it?
He checked the clock hanging over the lobby-and-reception desk. Two in the morning. Not too late. He could find them before sunrise.
He already knew where he needed to go first. The park the city had built to “change the neighborhood’s atmosphere,” which had instead become a sanctuary for local thugs and drifters. A place people avoided even in daylight, never mind at night.
Without hesitation he headed straight there. It wasn’t far from Dongseong Clinic; he arrived in under ten minutes. A flickering streetlamp at the entrance only deepened the ominous feel. In the old days he would never have set foot in a place like this.
Park Ji-hoo took a short breath and stepped forward. What had once been a clean walking path was buried under trash and cigarette butts. Crushed refuse crackled unpleasantly under his feet. He did not stop. He walked all the way to the center of the park, to the little pavilion there.
“This bastard’s wasted.”
“How much did you even drink to be this gone already?”
“Ah, fuck! You wanna die?”
Snickering laughter and thick curses drifted through the air. Even from a distance it was unmistakably the sound of thugs.
“But is it okay for you to be this late? Didn’t your old man say he’d kill you if your little brat caused any more trouble?”
“That’s what’s pissing me off so fucking much. I smack the kid a few times and suddenly it’s this big fucking deal.”
“It’s the settlement money, right? You paid those beggars a decent chunk, didn’t you?”
“How much could that money even be? He’s ready to grab his own son by the throat over it. I oughta just set the house on fire.”
“If I’d known it’d turn out like this, I would’ve wrecked her properly so she couldn’t even talk. We went easy and stepped in shit.”
“Next time we do it right. Make sure they can’t even say the first syllable of ‘settlement.’”
Them. It was definitely them. The ones who had beaten and tormented that young, weak child.
Park Ji-hoo did not hold back any longer.
His steps quickened, then became a full run.
Mana he dragged up roared through him like a storm, driving his body forward.
“Huh?”
One of the thugs blinked and stared his way—trying to decide whether what he was seeing was real or a drunken hallucination.
So Park Ji-hoo threw the punch. To brand into him, beyond any doubt, that this was reality.
Bone shattered under his fist. Blood sprayed. The sensation came through clear and absolute.