Wait, Why?
Four-term assemblyman Kim Dae-Young was a politician already being watched as the next party leader.
His political creed of keeping Awakened in check drew plenty of criticism as an outdated way of thinking, yet he himself was a C-rank Awakened. The reason he opposed policies that favored Awakened was simple: he wanted to keep the balance between Non-Awakened and Awakened. People could call him a relic all they liked; his political career remained rock-solid.
“Haaah…….”
He stepped into the dark, unlit house, let out a long breath, thought of Jeong-Hoon, and clicked his tongue. Several days had already passed since Jeong-Hoon had visited, calling it a “civil petition,” and handed over the Hunter Law amendment bill. Some lawmakers had stirred at the news that Lumen was moving, but Kim Dae-Young stayed firm. He had not even read the bill Jeong-Hoon left him; he fed it straight into the shredder. Even if the chairman of a megacorporation that fielded its own private army made the request in person, he would not be shaken.
Ten years had passed since the world changed. The Hunter Law thrown together in a hurry was riddled with problems. Kim Dae-Young himself admitted that much. The problems were so numerous that dozens of amendment bills came up every year, and more than three of them actually passed. As a lawmaker who had sat in the National Assembly for over a decade, he had watched the flaws of the Hunter Law pile up. Yet for all its faults, he had no intention of rewriting it simply because some businessman showed up and asked him to.
“……Is anyone home?”
He flicked on the living-room lights and felt the wrongness of the quiet house. Then he saw the mess and scowled. It was not ordinary clutter; the place had been completely torn apart. Deliberate. Not a thief’s work. At this hour his wife, his son, and his daughter should all have been here. If burglars had broken in, they would already have called the police and contacted him.
“Honey?”
An uneasy feeling made him call for his wife and children, but no voices answered. For a moment he wondered whether they had prepared some surprise party, yet there was nothing worth surprising him about right now.
“Stop joking around…….”
He opened the master-bedroom door, turned on the light, and the suit jacket in his hand slipped to the floor.
If you care about your family’s lives, approve the Hunter Law amendment.
The instant the lights came on, the red letters scrawled across the wall filled his vision. It was not written in blood, yet the color was chosen to intimidate, and Kim Dae-Young’s body began to shake.
After a drinking bout with his friends, Jeong-Hoon did not leave Lumen for several days. It was not the hangover. He had already visited the assemblymen and delivered his “civil petitions,” making his will more than clear. Now the work was slow and patient: sort the supporters from the opponents, grow the number of yes votes, and push the Hunter Law amendment through.
“Still, the biggest obstacle has to be this Kim Dae-Young, right?”
“Fifty-six this year. Elected in his early forties from a district seat, not proportional representation, and now a four-term assemblyman—quite the heavyweight. He is certainly the largest obstacle. His influence as a four-term member is enormous.”
Butler Joo nodded as he supplied the brief résumé in answer to Jeong-Hoon’s remark. From the outset the Hunter Law revision needed to establish the PS Association had been planned on the assumption that persuading Kim Dae-Young was hopeless. Calling him an obstacle simply acknowledged how much weight he carried. If he dug in his heels against the bill, the lawmakers who followed him would oppose it as well, and passage would become uncertain.
“Even if he won’t support it, I’d like him to stay neutral at least. Hard, though, isn’t it?”
“Bribes don’t work on him, and he has no real weak points. If one had to name a soft spot, it would be how much he loves his family…….”
“We are not committing crimes.”
When Butler Joo floated something that reeked of crime, Jeong-Hoon shook his head and cut him off cold. Touching someone’s family was not the sort of “crime only if you get caught” that could be shrugged off as cute.
Knock-knock.
“Forgive the interruption, Gaju. Assemblyman Kim Dae-Young is currently causing a scene in the lobby, demanding we hand over his family.”
“……Butler Joo?”
“I suggested we bring his family over to our side and persuade him. I never proposed using them as hostages.”
Jeong-Hoon stared at the butler with a look that asked whether the deed had already been done; Butler Joo shook his head in firm denial. The family’s schemes always aimed at mutual benefit; they never operated for the family’s unilateral gain alone.
After barely talking the enraged Kim Dae-Young down and bringing him to a private suite, Jeong-Hoon listened to the story of the kidnapping and tapped the table with one finger.
“I apologize for the disturbance. Receiving a petition from the chairman himself and then having something like this happen so soon afterward—I lost my reason.”
Speaking face-to-face with Jeong-Hoon, who had come out personally to calm him, Kim Dae-Young grew convinced that Jeong-Hoon was not the one behind the kidnapping, and his attitude shifted. Gone was the dismissive tone of a few days ago; he now used polite, respectful speech.
“Anyone whose family had been put through that would react the same way. Please don’t give it another thought.”
“Still, it was not conduct befitting a National Assembly member.”
“It was perfectly natural conduct for the head of a household. And the only damage done was a few minutes of noise in the lobby.”
There were more than enough reasons to suspect their side, so Jeong-Hoon kept offering reassurance. Even while speaking with Kim Dae-Young he found himself wondering whether one of the vassals had gone rogue and acted on their own.
Once the Hunter Law was amended, the PS Association would finally shift into high gear. The clauses that most obstructed its founding—those restricting relationships between corporations and guilds—would be rewritten from top to bottom. The PS Association, to be jointly funded by corporations and guilds, was a project begun purely by Jeong-Hoon’s will. That left almost no one outside the family as a plausible suspect.
“No one comes to mind as the culprit, I take it.”
If Kim Dae-Young already had a guess, he would never have come rampaging into Lumen. Jeong-Hoon shook his head.
“Have you filed a police report yet?”
“Not yet. But will that be all right? If this becomes public through a police report, public opinion will swing hard against the amendment.”
Kim Dae-Young’s eyes brightened; he had not expected Jeong-Hoon to raise the subject of reporting first. Even with his family kidnapped he was still trying to read Jeong-Hoon’s intentions—proof that he was a politician down to the bone.
“Laws exist to protect people. Shouldn’t we protect your family first?”
The words landed so perfectly that Kim Dae-Young almost wondered whether Jeong-Hoon was trying to move him on purpose; an uneasy look crossed his face. Jeong-Hoon ignored it and snapped his fingers.
“Butler Joo, the assemblyman seems rather overwhelmed, so please file the report on his behalf.”
“……Are you certain that is acceptable?”
“Even with a report, the safety of his family will require the investigation to stay as quiet as possible, won’t it?”
Kim Dae-Young had been asking whether Jeong-Hoon was truly fine with the amendment for the PS Association becoming impossible; Jeong-Hoon took the words in a different sense and simply shook his head.
“And call a board meeting. We’ll respond from our side as well.”
By “board” he meant the 12 Vassals. Jeong-Hoon exhaled a long breath and frowned. Watching him, Kim Dae-Young revised his opinion of the young chairman. He had thought of Jeong-Hoon only as a greedy corporate boss pushing the amendment to raise a private army of his own—a twenty-year-old greenhorn who nevertheless kept thousands of snakes in his belly. The man in front of him now looked like a pure-hearted volunteer who moved solely to protect people.
On Jeong-Hoon’s orders, Si-Hwan and Su-Ho arrived at the crime scene and immediately put distance between themselves the moment they stepped through the front door. Even though they had come together at the Gaju’s command, they preferred independent investigation over cooperation. The long-standing feud between Flamma and Diana still ran deep among the current 12 Vassals.
“They ransacked the living room after the kidnapping succeeded. Deliberate mockery of Assemblyman Kim Dae-Young.”
One glance at the wrecked living room told Si-Hwan what had happened; he began examining the floor with meticulous care. Given the perpetrators’ skill there would likely be no traces left, but they might have made a mistake.
“Whew~ For a man who lost his head and stormed Lumen, the scene’s been preserved pretty well. This much is easy.”
Su-Ho activated psychometry through magic and was smiling brightly when the spell suddenly rebounded with a sharp crackle of static; his face twisted.
“Ugh! Stings! What the hell is this?”
“……The kidnappers know how to handle magic. Useful information.”
Si-Hwan nodded at the discovery of magical defenses. Su-Ho dipped his head slightly and glared at him.
“We’re both 12 Vassals. You’re not even going to worry about me?”
“As if.”
Si-Hwan brushed the complaint aside with a dry snort, then frowned. The use of magic narrowed the suspects dramatically. Until now there had been no way even to guess who was responsible; now only two candidates remained.
“Hmm. This isn’t family magic, though.”
“All magic belongs to the family. What are you talking about?”
“This is why martial types……. Of course every magic ultimately came from the family. But this feels like someone stole the basics from us and reinterpreted them on their own. Something like that.”
As the family’s greatest mage grumbled, Si-Hwan immediately narrowed the culprit to one.
“Then the perpetrators are—”
“Those Organization bastards, obviously. We thought they’d cut their tails and fled, yet here they are moving like this. Should we call it a provocation aimed at the family?”
Su-Ho cut Si-Hwan off, said his piece, and shook his head. They had hunted hard for a month without finding a single trace; no one had expected the enemy to reappear this way.
“Good thing no report was filed with the police.”
His train of thought interrupted, Si-Hwan shifted the subject to something he still wanted to say. Jeong-Hoon had originally intended to report the matter and had even urged Kim Dae-Young to do so, but the assemblyman had refused. No matter how carefully they handled it, once a report went in the fact that Kim Dae-Young’s family had been kidnapped would inevitably leak. Hostage safety could not be guaranteed, so he had desperately blocked any filing.
“True enough. The Organization might already have people inside the police.”
“……Anyone else saying that I might accept, but you’re the last person who should.”
“Huh? Why me? I analyzed it properly. What’s the problem?”
“If you’re the 12 Vassal in charge of intelligence, you should already know exactly how many Organization plants are sitting inside the police.”
The remark was pure nitpicking; Su-Ho scowled and jabbed a finger at Si-Hwan.
“What about you, then? You’re the assassination specialist—why haven’t you already cut the Organization’s throat?”
“I am the Gaju’s hidden blade. A hidden blade that dances around on its own is no use to anyone.”
Si-Hwan parried the protest lightly and stepped from the living room into the master bedroom. The red letters on the wall made him frown.
“This handwriting…….”
“Ugly as hell, right?”
“Haaah—”
Su-Ho made a stupid observation about the crooked red letters meant to inspire terror; Si-Hwan shook his head.
“No. It was written with the left hand. You can’t even tell that?”
“I can? I saw it at a glance? But I write just fine with my left hand, you know?”
Writing with the non-dominant hand usually produced a mess. In exchange it made handwriting analysis far harder, and reading the writer’s personality from the script became nearly impossible.
“……Or so they say, but ta-da! I can do it!”
“I said it was difficult, not that it was impossible.”
Neither yielding an inch, Si-Hwan and Su-Ho set about analyzing the personality of the person who had written the message.
“Chef Baek, Director Han! How’s the progress? Find anything useful?”
Competitive fire had them scrutinizing even the tiniest details when Jeong-Hoon’s voice reached them from the front door. In the heat of their rivalry they had completely forgotten: the Gaju himself had come along.