A Person, But Not Human
A being that is a person, but not a human.
“The operation has been revised. We would like the consultant to take the lead.”
“Alright. I block the attacks from the front and break through, while the rest of you provide backup from behind. Did I understand that correctly?”
“Precisely.”
Special Forces Captain Lee Gwan-ho glanced at Dowol. He had essentially asked him to become their bullet sponge, and done so directly, yet Dowol accepted the role without complaint.
The problem was that only Dowol remained perfectly calm. The subordinates who trusted and followed him felt very differently.
“Captain.”
Dowol had left the operation room. A brief silence followed, but it did not last long. One word. No, a single syllable. That one syllable carried far too many meanings.
“...It’s an order from above.”
Yet nothing changed. To the captain, what mattered was the mission’s success, the lives of his men, and the safety of his family. The man sitting quietly in an appropriate spot outside the operation room—Dowol—felt the same way about the value of other people’s lives.
“Maybe I should just cut off the arm.”
Not too much. A clean cut below the wrist. If one was not enough, he could cut two. Having reached that conclusion, Dowol stood up again, thinking he might as well grab a coffee from the vending machine.
“We meet again.”
“Ah, yes.”
The moment he reached the vending machine, his connection with Jo Ha-yoon crossed paths once more.
Should I ask the question here?
Dowol hesitated for a second, but now was not the time. Instead, he took out a coin and selected a coffee.
“...How did you manage it?”
Dowol flinched. The other party’s information had traveled faster than expected, but with a few minutes in between, it was not impossible.
“It was a decision the higher-ups made to save their subordinate. I simply stayed still.”
“Does that mean we’re inadequate?”
There were thorns in her words. Dowol did not particularly like it, but he let it pass. Instead, he wanted to offer a small correction.
“Awakened can be people, but they are not humans.”
“...I’m not asking you to play word games.”
“I am not joking either. Can an ordinary person instantly kill another with their bare hands? No, it is impossible. But an Awakened can. Even if a bullet flies toward them, they can shield themselves with qi or catch it outright.”
Such a being could not be called human. That was Jo Ha-yoon’s thought, and objectively speaking, they could not be viewed as human. The defensive capabilities of the Awakened she had witnessed were on a level that...
“However, Awakened of that caliber are usually on the front lines, handling themselves well in the shadows, or they have seized a city. Well… if they strike first, the story changes.”
With only those words, Dowol left the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency.
Creak.
“Dad’s home?”
The door lock opened and Lee Gwan-ho stepped inside. A moment later came the sound of heavy footsteps, followed by his son’s voice greeting him, and a small smile returned to Lee Gwan-ho’s face.
“Yeah, Dad’s back. Ho-cheol, anything happen while I was gone?”
He looked at his son, Lee Ho-cheol, who had come all the way to the entrance to meet him. An unfamiliar voice, face, and body. A hoarse voice, a face half-melted, hands and feet abandoned because of burns. He could be considered an entirely different person. There was even the possibility that Lee Gwan-ho’s blood did not flow in him.
Yet… even so, Lee Ho-cheol was Lee Gwan-ho’s son, and that essence remained undeniable.
If the price of a new body was the old one…
As a parent, he could accept it without hesitation. A fire demon had come and stolen his son’s original body, but when the greater demon arrived, his son had gained a new one. It was painful, but looking at his son made the once-hopeless future begin to reveal faint possibilities.
“That’s right. Come to think of it, didn’t you say you were meeting someone?”
Besides, his son had recently started seeing a woman. The money for it had come from engraving reinforcement magic circles at the police headquarters. Lee Gwan-ho let out a hollow laugh at his son’s tragic fate that somehow managed to bloom even after the world had ended.
“Well… I think she rejected me.”
“Tsk. She has no eye for quality.”
Lee Gwan-ho did not know who the woman was, but he was certain she lacked discernment. Rage at someone daring to reject his son, and irritation at the possibility that she had seen his son as nothing more than bait to lure women, surged inside him.
“Anyway, you must be careful. The world is a dangerous place now. You never know what people might do…”
Even as he spoke the words, self-loathing gripped Lee Gwan-ho. Because the ‘dangerous person’ and the ‘things they might do’ referred to none other than himself.
He had already spent the past week torturing drug dealers to locate their base and extract information. He had coerced and threatened gangsters. He was doing things no police officer should ever do.
But it must be done.
Substances that could escalate from drugs into biochemical terrorism were about to flood Seoul.
The blood is already on my hands. No point feeling new about it now.
Hands stained with blood for the sake of the nation and its citizens. The only thing that truly bothered him at this point was…
Could that Awakened stain their hands with blood?
Shing.
A refreshing yet skin-crawling scrape of metal echoed across the quiet rooftop.
Night had fallen, and people avoided going out on the streets. And crucially, the only people in this building were the four who had arrived with the knight currently sharpening his blade, so the emptiness was only natural.
Shing.
The whetstone slid across the sword once more. He had not spent his entire life walking the path of the sword, but he had lived a life intimately familiar with metal. From the day he was born until now, he had heard the sound of metal many times.
Ding♪
A very faint bell tone reached his ears as well.
“...I don’t recall mentioning that our guild members carry bells.”
“Pass.”
The knight who suddenly received a pass notice from the darkness was taken aback. But since the opponent had revealed themselves and spoken the word “pass,” the chance of an immediate preemptive strike had at least decreased.
“Vice Guild Master of the guild Gilded Jade World, ChickenNoodle…”
“Fuck, call me by my real name.”
At the sudden curse, a short silence fell between the uninvited guest hidden in the darkness and the ‘ChickenNoodle Passer.’
“...Well, anyway, Lady Nam Hong-ryeon. I have a request for you.”
The uninvited guest, wearing a black gat and a poncho, set down a scroll-like letter and a map on the floor before stepping back.
“Wait. You should at least introduce yourself before you go.”
Nam Hong-ryeon pointed her sword at the uninvited guest as she spoke. Suspicion had its limits, but the stranger was far too suspicious. Moreover, the fact that this was two days before their drug raid operation and that the stranger had completely located their position weighed heavily on her mind. It would not have been strange if the special forces team had come to this location instead.
“I see no reason to give information to a rebel group that has illegally occupied a city.”
The uninvited guest had touched Nam Hong-ryeon’s reverse scale. The price was her slash.
Kang!
A clear, devastating ring of shattering metal echoed. The uninvited guest had defended instantly against Nam Hong-ryeon’s strike, but the dagger that endured the blow shattered into pieces and released a massive cloud of smoke at the same time.
“Tsk!”
Nam Hong-ryeon clicked her tongue. From the look of things, chasing him was already out of the question.
“What happened!”
The guild members who had rushed up after hearing the noise saw her holding her sword and the thick smoke filling the area.
“...An unwanted guest.”
Nam Hong-ryeon sighed and explained what had just occurred. When everyone fell silent, Molly raised her hand.
“For now, I think we should check this request.”
Molly was right. To understand the other party’s intentions, stepping forward was necessary.
“Sssip.”
But the magician seemed troubled by something other than the request’s contents.
“What is it?”
“No, the description you gave sounds familiar…”
The nun, curious about the magician’s distress, asked a question, but there was no way she would receive an answer that even the distressed person did not know.
“...We’re heading to Taean County.”
“What?”
“Huh?”
The magician and the nun, who had not yet seen the request, could not understand what Nam Hong-ryeon was saying.
“There’s information. It looks like a drug cultivation site.”
Nam Hong-ryeon frowned as she examined the red-marked section of the map and the explanation written in the letter.
“So you already knew where the drugs were being grown.”
Yet that was precisely why Nam Hong-ryeon could not shake her suspicions.
“Then why entrust this to us?”
“It’s definitely been tampered with.”
“Then I ask you to disable it.”
As briefed, the location had clearly been tampered with, but…
“The door is a trap. It’s the floor. This is… a formation unlocked by a shoe pattern.”
The real mechanism was not the door but the formation on the floor. It was not particularly difficult. Rather, it was one of the most basic among beginner formations. The faintly remaining shape of qi closely resembled a shoe print. It was likely a formation that only recognized and activated when the matching shoes were worn.
“There are two options. The first is to activate it normally and enter directly. The door will open, but we can deceive it so it seems the formation was not bypassed.”
“Will it take long?”
“Ten…”
“Minutes? As expected, we’ll force it.”
“9, 8, 7…”
“...It’s good that it’s fast.”
Rumble.
In the end, the iron door opened within the ten seconds I had predicted. What greeted us was—
“Huh?”
A man who had been about to slurp ramen made eye contact with me. Before he could react properly, Captain Lee Gwan-ho fired a taser gun, neutralizing him while minimizing the noise.
As I stepped inside, the team members followed and began inspecting the first floor.
“Hey, speak quickly and I’ll spare you.”
“...”
Even though the taser’s effect should have worn off, his silence suggested he had no intention of talking.
“Here, we found it.”
One of the team members had discovered a door leading to the basement. After carefully checking for traps, he gave me a look.
“It’s not a matter of shamanistic traps.”
I suppressed my unease and roughly opened the basement door. What lay before us was endless darkness and a staircase that stretched to unknown depths. There was no way a basement created by mere gangsters would carry such deep and sinister energy.
“Consultant, this is…”
“It’s a type of barrier. I don’t know what’s inside, but it will be far wider than this building.”
A pocket dimension. The feature from Glorious Land responsible for dungeons and housing.
“Captain, do you happen to have any paper and a pen?”