Groundwork (5)
Inside a darkened room, screams rang out alongside the earnest conversation of two people.
"GAAAAAH!!!!"
"So if you press the Mute Point here, you can inflict nothing but pain without leaving a single mark on the body."
"I already know that. Instead of just hitting the Mute Point, what if we also…"
Every time Cheon Seong and Mir exchanged another frank remark, a chorus of ghostly wails filled the room.
For all the intellectual atmosphere of two minds building on each other's ideas, the subject of their discussion was torture — specifically, how to deliver pure agony without causing any lasting physical damage.
Cheon Seong offered insights drawn from everything he had endured at the Tang Clan before his regression, while Mir contributed what she had learned long ago from her own fascinated study of the human body.
"Whoa~ isn't this conversation getting a little too bloodthirsty?"
Loki, who had been quietly listening from a distance, finally cut in with a look of pure disbelief.
"Why are you even here? I'm busy, so if you're just screwing around, save it for later."
Mir waved Loki off with a flick of her hand, certain the robot was about to pull some pointless prank.
"Aww~ I was gonna help, but if you don't need it, whatever."
"Help? You don't know anything about this stuff, do you?"
At Mir's dismissive tone, Loki insisted the offer had been genuine. Mir only looked more unconvinced, asking whether Loki even possessed any knowledge in this area.
"Fine, fine. If you don't need it, I'm not saying a word."
Loki huffed, crossed both arms, and turned away in a full sulk.
"What? Don't tell me you actually know a good method. What is it? Spit it out."
Mir pressed, half-wondering if Loki really did have something useful — only for the reply a moment later to leave her looking thoroughly unimpressed.
"Forget it! You doubt the person offering to help you! I'm not telling!"
Loki kept up the petulant humming, determined to broadcast the sulk. But Mir caught the telltale tremor at the corner of Loki's mouth and quietly called over to Cheon Seong.
"Hey. Beat this bastard within an inch of death."
"You sure?"
"Just do it."
"Well, alright."
That trembling mouth — shaking as if Loki were fighting back laughter hard enough to die — was proof enough that the robot was only messing with her. Knowing Loki's personality all too well, Mir told Cheon Seong to thrash the offender to the brink of destruction.
Cheon Seong asked if she was certain, but at her impatient urging he cracked his knuckles and started toward Loki.
Crack. Pop-pop-pop.
Watching him approach while working out his hands, Loki still fought the laughter, mouth twitching like a seizure, and managed to say:
"Hey, hey~ even if combat isn't my thing, I don't lose to some little kid, you know?"
"We'll see about that."
Mir smiled at the way Loki dismissed Cheon Seong as a child, folded her arms, and addressed the robot who had no idea what was coming.
"Don't worry. Even if you break, I'll fix you up perfectly."
"I told you I won't lo— aaargh!"
Loki's form vanished mid-retort. The voice trailed off into the distance, growing faint — and then the laboratory filled with Loki's agonized screams, accompanied by the sounds of the entire lab being reduced to wreckage. Through it all, the corner of Mir's mouth never once turned down.
Mir-nim's friend. Birds of a feather. Condolences to Loki, who provided me with this new information.
Watching the scene unfold, Sara duly recorded a new fact in Cheon Seong's file — that Mir's friend was cut from the same cloth — and offered a moment of silence for Loki, who had sacrificed so much to deliver this revelation.
"Ghk! Urgh!! S-spare me! GAAAAH!!"
Loki's screams went on for quite some time. They only stopped about an hour after the robot had first disappeared.
When that hour was up, Cheon Seong came into view from afar, dragging a limp Loki across the floor by one hand. Mir ran over, planted a foot on the lifelessly trailing body, then rose onto her toes and clapped Cheon Seong hard on the shoulder.
"Yes! Beautifully done! You thrashed it just right! Excellent work! Real praise, seriously!"
"Well, glad you're satisfied — but in this condition, how are we supposed to get any information? Fixing it looks like it'll take forever."
He had done as Mir asked, but looking at Loki now, extracting information seemed unlikely.
He had been careful not to damage anything like the main memory, of course, but he didn't know Mir's robots in any real detail — and nearly everything else was thoroughly wrecked.
"Don't worry about that. I just pull the main chip and slot it into another device."
Cheon Seong wasn't sure a humanoid like Loki could be handled like a battery you simply swapped out, but Mir knew machines better than he did, so he kept quiet and watched.
"Hah! Mm! Main chip's fine, just as I thought. That's me for you. Sara, bring me that, would you?"
"'That,' I take it. Understood, Mir-nim."
Still watching in silence, Cheon Seong saw Mir extract a single chip from Loki and ask Sara, standing nearby, to fetch that.
Sara returned shortly with a small sphere. Mir thanked her, took it, and fitted Loki's main chip inside.
It was larger than a baseball but smaller than a soccer ball — roughly the size of a handball.
I've never seen this thing before. What is it?
It was new even to him, so he studied it with open curiosity — until Loki's voice issued from the sphere and a laugh escaped him before he could stop it.
"You son of a—! You know I hate this thing!"
"Pff—!"
"Don't laugh! I said don't laugh!"
The speech patterns confirmed it was definitely Loki. But what had set Cheon Seong off wasn't the attitude — it was the voice.
Where Loki's original voice had been a playful, middle-aged tone, this one was a high-pitched register laced with mechanical static, something close to a soprano.
As for the body, stubby little limbs jutted from the sphere in a U-shape where arms and legs ought to be, and a rocket pack had sprouted from the back, letting it zip around through the air.
On the surface that passed for a face was an angry emoticon: ( `-´ )
In short:
"That's pathetic."
"Pff—! Ahahaha! Right? Even you think it's pathetic, don't you? Hahahaha!"
At Cheon Seong's verdict, Mir clutched her stomach and rolled back and forth across the floor, howling with laughter.
"Shit! Don't laugh! I said don't laugh!"
"Hahaha! Listen to that voice! What a spectacle!"
"You're the one who made this, Mir, you—!!"
Loki shouted at the hysterically laughing Mir to stop — but the voice only made her laugh harder, and in a fit of pure rage Loki finally uttered the one taboo that must never be spoken.
"You damn old ha— mmpf!"
The display flashed a startled (⊙⊙)‼ as Loki clamped down on the rest of the sentence. The little body began to tremble violently.
Cheon Seong glanced cautiously down at Mir. Her laughing face had frozen solid, as if time itself had stopped, her body locked in place. Confirming the sight, he scrambled backward and got clear of the blast radius.
"Good day to you."
"What? Sara, why are you here?"
At his chosen refuge he found Sara, who had fled even earlier than he had. When he asked why she was already there, having read the situation and bolted before him, she answered:
"I don't believe I have ever given you my name, but to answer your question regardless: when Loki becomes that angry, the rate of verbal catastrophe is ten out of ten. Accordingly, I elected to evacuate in advance."
"Ah… so that's how it is."
Whenever Loki got angry, the probability of a fatal slip of the tongue aimed at Mir was a clean one hundred percent. Sara, who had spent far longer at Mir's side than Cheon Seong, had seen it coming — and her presence here confirmed that his own reading of the situation had been correct.
Which meant there was only one thing left for him and Sara to do.
"YOU LITTLE SHIIIIIT!!!!!! DIE ALREADY!!!"
The frozen moment thawed. The face that had held nothing but laughter twisted into something out of a nightmare.
"GAAAAAAAAAH!!!!"
From afar came Mir's roar, thick with bottomless fury, braided together with Loki's screams. All that remained was to offer Loki a sincere prayer for a peaceful end.
Condolences to the arrogance — and the courage — of one who had not merely touched a dragon's reverse scale, but carved a wound into it.
"Gaaaaah! Murder— I mean, robotslaugh— GAAAAAH!!"
"Hah. That's what you get for running your mouth."
Mir wiped the sweat from her brow with a look of deep satisfaction. Cheon Seong pointed at something with an expression that clearly asked whether this was really fine.
"Is that actually okay?"
"It's fine, it's fine! I put a lot of work into the durability on this one, so this much is no problem!"
"I'm saying it because it very much looks like a problem."
He felt bad contradicting Mir's confidence, but honestly, Loki's current state was — even with the most generous appraisal — half a corpse, a piece of scrap straight out of a junkyard.
I've got baseline physical strength, so fair enough for me… but just how hard did Mir beat this thing to leave it like that?
Mir was not strong. In game terms she was a strategist-type character — and yet looking at Loki, one had to wonder if "strategist" had somehow become "strategic weapon." The robot was a wreck.
There were marks suggesting the same spots had been struck dozens, even hundreds of times, and across the face the word Error blinked in red once every second.
Whether the credit belonged to Loki for toughness or to Mir for craftsmanship was debatable, but Loki came back online within a few minutes.
Not unscathed — flight speed had dropped considerably — but not destroyed either, so it was probably fine.
"Hey. Start talking. What's the method?"
"Urgh, you crazy bitch. You assault a person — a robot — like that and you don't even apologize?"
"Want another round?"
The moment Loki came to, Mir demanded the method. Loki attempted a small act of defiance, but it was exactly that — small — and so, with a sigh thick with mechanical static, the robot answered.
"Why overthink it? You've got the solution sitting right nearby."
Loki looked straight at Cheon Seong while saying the answer was close at hand — more precisely, straight at his pocket. Cheon Seong knew at once what Loki meant.
Lightning.
That was the solution Loki was pointing to.
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Early morning. The sun had only just shown its face when Cheon Seong sat in his dormitory and drew a single bright-yellow pill from his coat, turning it over in his hand.
Having left Mir's laboratory and returned to the Academy without being discovered, he studied the yellow pill — Lightning — and found himself replaying the conversation from the night before.
So this really is Lightning?
You knew about it too, huh.
Yeah, I knew of it. First time seeing the real thing, though.
Looking at the Lightning, Mir had said it was her first time with a physical sample. Cheon Seong had explained how he'd come by it.
What? Lightning was on some Mid-Lower nobody? That doesn't make any sense.
Mir may have been seeing the real article for the first time, but she knew the danger of Lightning well enough to be stunned that a mere Mid-Lower had been carrying it.
When she said something felt off, he had nodded in agreement.
Honestly, the wrongness had registered the moment that man swallowed the Lightning.
It was a last-resort drug of pure desperation — fiercely addictive, its only guaranteed ending death — and yet it could elevate even a Mid-Lower to Upper rank in a single dose.
Something that dangerous sitting in the pocket of a middle-aged Mid-Lower man meant there were pieces he still couldn't see.
Mir had admitted that once she'd learned of Lightning, she had tried to research it herself, but the supply chain was a snarl of deliberate complexity. By the time she untangled it, the stock had already been moved elsewhere, and she never managed to obtain a sample.
Remembering the way she had insisted she would have won if she'd kept at it a little longer, Cheon Seong found a brief smile tugging at his mouth before he could help it.
In any case, her words had let him narrow the field to the people most likely involved.
Only four.
As far as he knew, only four minds in the world could stand comparison with Mir's.
One was the heir of the Zhuge Clan, off in the Wulin. Another was that lunatic in Greece who went around claiming to be an avatar of Athena, goddess of wisdom and war. Then there was that bastard Solomon, and the Druid. That was the full list.
Strike the Greek and the Druid — both of them recoiled from filthy work like this — and the strongest candidates left were the Zhuge Clan and Solomon.
Two prime suspects. Killing them both would have been the clean solution, except for the problems.
One was a member of the Five Great Clans of the Wulin, a house that had served as the martial world's strategists for generations. The other was a man whose location and true identity Cheon Seong did not know at all.
Everything he knew about Solomon amounted to this: a unique ability specialized in wisdom and summoning, male, and a mind on par with Mir's. That was the entire file.
And more than any of that, the thing weighing on him most heavily had nothing to do with Lightning's distribution routes.
The future changed again.
This time it wasn't an event or an outcome that had shifted — it was Lightning itself that differed from before his regression.
The fierce addiction and the mana amplification were the same as he remembered. The problem was the duration.
The Lightning he knew lasted one hour. For reasons he couldn't explain, that window had become twenty-four hours — twenty-four times longer.
It wasn't a changed result or a shifted timeline, so it might have looked harmless. It was anything but.
Variables he now had to account for had multiplied beyond counting.
From this point forward, every raid he had been bracing for, every villain and hero he had been watching, and everything else besides — he would have to move under the assumption that Lightning might be involved.
With the duration stretched from one hour to a full day, there was every chance villains — and rotten heroes — were already operating under its effects.
Given Lightning's power and its side effects, he effectively had to suspect every villain and every hero alive.
Hah… enough thinking for now.
Turning it over again only made the current more tangled; his head ached as if it might split.
He had still been adjusting to everything that had already changed. Before that adjustment could settle, the volume of change had ballooned dozens of times over. Simply tracking the flow as it stood was almost more than his mind could hold.
Mir needs to find something, and fast.
On Loki's word the night before, he had handed one of the two Lightning pills he'd seized over to Mir for research. He had reached the limit of what his pre-regression knowledge alone could uncover.
To take the next step, he needed to know why Lightning's duration had increased, what its primary components were, and who had made it.
"Mm… Seong, good morning. You're up early."
Still studying the Lightning and thinking that Mir needed answers soon, Cheon Seong heard Yuna's sleep-roughened voice behind him — she had only just woken. He slipped the pill away as he answered.
"Morning, Yuna. I haven't been up long either."
He smiled as he returned the greeting. Beneath that smile, deep and heavy deliberation lay hidden, wearing a mask.