A Task Born of Necessity
Thanks to Jeong-Hoon's not-quite-mediation, Jeong I-Yeong's excitement had cooled, and she never offered Han Si-Eun a place among the vassals.
Even if she had, Jeong-Hoon figured Si-Eun's deep sense of belonging to FC Guild would have kept her from accepting. So he was privately relieved there had been nothing to blush over.
"But is it really all right?"
"Sorry? Is what all right?"
Jeong-Hoon had been watching the pork belly sizzle on the grill when Si-Eun's sudden question pulled his gaze to her.
He had brought her to a barbecue place he used to visit often with his parents. On the way from Myeongil Hospital, intending to see her home, he had remembered the restaurant was nearby and decided to drop in—partly for the food, partly to stir up a few old memories.
"You said you'd learn all three—magic, martial arts, and superpowers. Are you sure that's fine?"
"As Butler Joo already explained, it doesn't matter. If anything, mastering all of them and growing stronger would only help the world."
He shrugged as he answered, certain that if there had been a real problem, Butler Joo would have stepped in on his own.
Si-Eun was a friend Jeong-Hoon had acknowledged. To the vassals, that made her the Gaju's friend. Given their loyalty, nothing that might harm her would ever be allowed to happen.
"What about you, Chairman? Are you all right?"
"Sorry? With what?"
"The, um… the barrier."
She glanced around the restaurant and kept her voice low. Jeong-Hoon could only manage a wry smile.
She was treating it like some enormous secret—and yet every person in the place was a vassal. Even the staff member grilling their meat was a vassal. The moment Jeong-Hoon had mentioned wanting to visit a barbecue joint he used to frequent nearby, the buyout had already been finished. The whole place was wall-to-wall family people, and the wry smile came whether he wanted it or not.
"Ah—was that rude of me to ask?"
"No. You've already seen it. Of course it's going to weigh on you."
Si-Eun had taken his wry smile the wrong way and looked troubled, so he shook his head and set her straight.
"I'd like to say there's nothing to worry about—but I hope you'll understand that Lumen has its reasons for supporting hunters like you, Han Si-Eun."
She grasped what he meant at once and nodded hard. Right then the vassal at the grill said they could start eating, and Jeong-Hoon picked up his chopsticks.
"Huh? No empty tables?"
The restaurant door swung open and a group walked in, freezing him mid-motion.
They had bought the place out and filled it with vassals, but they had never put up a "fully reserved" notice. It was secret security work; the vassals were disguised as ordinary customers and simply occupied every seat. Other guests walking in was perfectly possible.
The only thing that made Jeong-Hoon turn was that the newcomer's voice sounded familiar.
"Huh?!"
"Wh—what?!"
Their eyes met, and Jeong-Hoon and the newcomer blurted the exact same sound at the same time. A face he knew. Of course they both gasped.
"Wait—Jeong-Hoon? Lee Jeong-Hoon, right?"
"Yeah, that's me. Yeong-Min?"
"Yeah! Man, it's been forever!"
Jeong-Hoon recognized his middle-school classmate Choi Yeong-Min at a glance and smiled. After high school started, his parents had died, and he had bounced between orphanages; they had never managed to meet again. They had traded calls and messages often enough, but this was the first time they had seen each other since middle-school graduation.
"What are you doing here?"
"Uh, well… work, I guess you could say?"
He had been about to say he had come for the meat, but one look at Si-Eun sitting across from him made him pivot. Yeong-Min was likely to recognize her; calling it work was the safer play.
"Work? Now that you mention it, you've been radio silent lately. You land a job?"
"Yeah. Got hired by Lumen—the hotel chain. This is Hunter Han Si-Eun. She's a Lumen client."
Yeong-Min knew the Lumen name well enough to look pleased for him—and then startled when he actually looked at Si-Eun.
"No kidding? Glad you found something. So the radio silence was training at Lumen?"
Jeong-Hoon nodded, then finally took in the people who had come in with Yeong-Min. Every last one was a middle-school friend he and Yeong-Min had been close with. It stung a little that they had gathered without him—but becoming Gaju had left him with no time to check his phone, so that was on him.
"What's the occasion? You've got the whole crew here."
"Huh? Just something to celebrate… Look, there aren't any seats, and standing around is just going to bother people. I'll fill you in later."
Yeong-Min started to leave, not wanting to make a scene in a packed restaurant. Jeong-Hoon caught Si-Eun's eye. She read the silent request for permission at once and nodded.
"Actually, I think a table's about to free up. Hang on a second."
He stopped Yeong-Min on his way out. Yeong-Min looked puzzled. Everyone seemed busy eating; nothing looked ready to clear anytime soon.
"Check, please!"
Before Yeong-Min could even finish scanning the room, the people at the table right next to Jeong-Hoon stood up and asked for the bill.
"Wait—there's still more than half the meat left."
Yeong-Min stared at the sudden departure in confusion, but Jeong-Hoon simply waved them into the seats.
"They were just picking at it. Looked like they were about to leave anyway."
In truth the vassals had barely eaten because they were too busy guarding the Gaju—but Jeong-Hoon offered a mild excuse and smiled.
One way or another, Jeong-Hoon ended up having dinner with his friends and Si-Eun, then returned to Lumen wearing a serious expression.
"Butler Joo. An individual's Awakened information is supposed to stay private unless they personally authorize its release, correct?"
"That is correct. Did something go wrong after you met your friend?"
"Nothing major. A small problem came up."
The reason Yeong-Min had gathered their friends to celebrate was that he had Awakened. His rank was B-class—high enough that he could still reach S-class before thirty. Even a mid-tier guild would treat a talent like that as elite and try to recruit him. Worth celebrating, no question.
"That sounds like cause for congratulations."
"It is. And thanks to him, nothing awkward happened between Hunter Han Si-Eun and my friends over conflicting stories about me."
Jeong-Hoon had been so glad to see them that he had invited them over without thinking—only to remember, with a jolt of tension, that Chairman of Lumen Jeong-Hoon and ordinary Jeong-Hoon were not the same person. Yeong-Min's Awakening had neatly swept the whole issue aside. Si-Eun, for her part, had simply filed it under the long list of secrets Jeong-Hoon already carried.
"Then what is the small problem?"
"Apparently a bunch of guilds already know his Awakened rank and have been contacting him. He said he registered as private because he has no intention of becoming a hunter."
Jeong-Hoon toyed with his phone, reading the recruitment messages Yeong-Min had been forwarding, and let out a long sigh.
Awakened registration was mandatory, but there was no law forcing every Awakened to become a hunter. In practice, every vassal of Lumen—of the family—was registered as Awakened, and not one of them worked as a hunter. They all held positions in the family's businesses.
That law existed because of a compromise the state and the family had reached under the polite name of "negotiation." When the family transferred the Hunter Association it had founded over to the government, it had also secured the private-registration statute—partly as a cover for Lumen and the rest of the family's enterprises. Three thousand A-class Awakened and twelve S-class or higher would have stood out far too much otherwise.
"That matches what I was told, so this is a small problem, right?"
"Gaju, this is not a small problem. It is a large one. That statute was something the family negotiated itself. This is a direct slight against Lumen."
If Jeong-Hoon wanted, Lumen could seize the Association President by the collar at any time. For security the family had poured its heart into to be breached like this was something the family's chief steward could never overlook.
"Couldn't we look at it positively—as a chance to show the world our strength?"
Sensing that Butler Joo was getting far too worked up, Jeong-Hoon tried to rein him in carefully. Butler Joo shook his head.
"If Gaju desired world conquest, it would be positive. Because you do not, it is a serious problem."
"…It's on the level of world conquest?"
"Three thousand A-class and twelve S-class or higher, all under a single organization. Do you think the world would simply stand by?"
Butler Joo's words set Jeong-Hoon's mind racing. The government already knew the family existed; it did business with them under the Lumen name. The only reason the family could still operate in secret was that its immense power remained exactly that—a secret. If private Awakened information leaked and became public knowledge, the government would be forced, if only for appearances, to openly check Lumen and every other family enterprise.
"So if the family is exposed, the only options left are world conquest or disbanding the family."
"Exactly so. Which is why this cannot be ignored."
"Then how do we handle it? Should I be the one grabbing the Association President by the collar this time?"
World conquest held no appeal for Jeong-Hoon, so he asked for a plan at once. Disbanding the family was not even on the table. He had no desire to give up the comfortable life that came with being Gaju—and his lifespan was effectively the time humanity had left. Putting himself at greater risk was the last thing he wanted.
"It would do no good. Surely the government is not so mad as to knowingly tolerate the sale of private information."
"Meaning it isn't the top brass—it's the people lower down lining their pockets."
"And on a wide scale. Almost certainly as a matter of routine practice."
"The world only changed ten years ago. Isn't that a little fast for 'routine practice' to form?"
"A figure of speech. Calling it practice is how people grant themselves a free pass."
In any case, Jeong-Hoon agreed that cracking down from the top would accomplish nothing. If the upper ranks—the people who actually understood Lumen's true strength—were looking the other way, that would amount to a declaration of war. But nothing so far had looked like a declaration of war, so the only reasonable conclusion was that lower-level operators who had no idea why the law existed were running wild. The sheer volume of recruitment messages hitting Yeong-Min supported that view. Far too many guilds of every stripe had latched on for it to be one person's leak. Not jumping on it would almost have been the foolish choice.
"The price of looking the other way while the guilds planted people in the Association is coming back to bite us."
When the Association was first founded, close ties with the guilds had been essential, so they had tolerated guild informants inside it—had even used them as liaisons. Now that decision had come around to hobble them.
"Making an example of one or two people wouldn't help, would it?"
"They would simply decide they were unlucky and grow more careful. We would need to sweep them up all at once."
"So we coordinate with the government?"
Jeong-Hoon agreed they needed to round everyone up in a single stroke and send a clear message that Lumen would never stand for this—but Lumen's own manpower had limits, so he shook his head. Borrowing the government's hand was the natural next step… except this whole mess had started because the government had failed to police its own people.
"Hard to trust them enough to borrow a hand, isn't it?"
"Precisely. There is also the risk that they would ignore their own failings and decide Lumen now owed them a favor."
Jeong-Hoon nodded. The only real option was for the family to commit a large force of its own people in one go and put pressure on the government. The moment they borrowed outside help for lack of numbers, the government might start believing Lumen had grown weak.
"If manpower is the issue, what about taking on a new assignment?"
"…A new assignment?"
"There happens to be a business concern through which we could secure a large number of people at once."
Butler Joo watched Jeong-Hoon wrestle with the problem and smiled with quiet pride, certain the young man was steadily growing into a proper Gaju.