Don't Be Startled. Listen Carefully.
Masakuni Akitaka, leader of Team Three, faltered at the sight of the tiger bursting straight through the entryway.
What is that tiger?
Gold and black in even balance, its coat streaming, the tiger ignored the storm of bullets and savaged the operatives with its teeth.
“Aaaagh!!!”
As if to show exactly why a tiger’s rampage was classed as a natural disaster, the ordinary operatives—those without powers—were swept aside like leaves in an autumn wind.
Bang!
One of them sacrificed an arm to jam a grenade down the tiger’s throat, and still the beast was unharmed. The operative was split in two, top from bottom.
The intel was wrong.
Akitaka bit down on his finger. Every fact about the Dan Clan was stored in his head, and not one of them concerned a tiger like this. He had heard they kept a pet. The report had been explicit: a cat brought along by a friend of the lady of the house.
That was this monster?
“Hraaaaaah!!!”
The leader of Squad Six swelled his muscles and threw himself at the tiger. A squad leader’s rank meant he was a superhuman. His ability was simple—pumping his own muscle until his strength rose—but its power, at least, was beyond dispute. He locked his arms around the tiger’s neck the way Hercules, long ago, had killed the Nemean lion. When his specially made uniform tore, the massive forearms beneath it really did call Hercules to mind.
With Squad Six’s leader in the fight, the others finally had room to breathe. They fell back to tend their wounds, cheering his struggle on in silence.
“Kwooooooh!!!”
His battle cry struck like a sonic blast, clamping ears shut and setting heads spinning. As if to prove it, his face flushed red as an apple, and his forearms swelled larger still.
“Krrrrr……”
The tiger, which had been ranging the battlefield at will, stopped for the first time. A calamity no one had been able to check had been checked by human hands. In the eyes of those watching, fear drained away, and hope took root.
Squad Six’s leader looked at the tiger, unable to so much as twitch, and smiled in triumph.
“Die like this……”
The words never finished.
It rose.
The tiger that had walked on four legs stood up on two. The sight denied, root and branch, everything the watchers thought they knew.
“Krrrng.”
Transformed, the tiger snorted at the squad leader, whose mouth gaped and shut like a carp’s. To the beast, all that effort had been a child’s game.
Of course it had.
Squad Six’s leader was not Hercules, and the tiger was not the Nemean lion. Perhaps if the real thing had come. How was a mere human supposed to withstand a tiger that had been Heaven’s own calamity?
Crunch.
The tiger swung a palm at the fly clinging to its shoulder. The fly poured out its own blood like a waterfall, went limp, and dropped to the ground. Then, as if returning the gazes fixed upon it, the tiger roared.
“Keoheoheong!!!”
“Eeeek!”
“Ghk! Ghk!”
Operatives foamed at the mouth and fainted, or their legs gave out and they collapsed where they stood. A few fired their guns as if to say they had at least tried to resist, but to the tiger it was only a mildly entertaining massage.
“……Should we withdraw?”
Watching the situation slide toward the worst, the deputy team leader spoke, worry plain in his eyes.
Akitaka barely swallowed a curse.
Damn it all! And here I thought this might actually work!
The moment word reached him that the head of the Dan Clan had appeared in a city groaning under Heavenly Punishment, he had raced for the Dan Clan’s main house. How the Hawaii Dan Clan had returned without being seen did not matter. What mattered was that the lady of the house and her son—closer to noncombatants than to anything else—were alone and cut off. Take them hostage, and the merit would be enormous. He had meant to lead his own team and secure them.
That plan had shattered more cheaply than a reed whistle.
The tiger pressed its momentum and chewed through the operatives. They shook with terror, but their superior’s orders bound their feet. Desperate resistance meant nothing, and the count of pointless deaths only climbed.
Akitaka weighed it. Withdraw now, and at least the operatives still standing might live. But he would be held responsible and have to cut his own belly open. The road to death lay in plain sight, and Akitaka was not brave enough to walk it.
He had to find some other way……
Wee-ooh! Wee-ooh!
Then, as if to shatter his thoughts, a siren wailed in the distance.
“Those bastards… they couldn’t hold them any longer……”
Gunfire was cracking on every side, and a tiger was roaring fit to split heaven and earth. There was no way the police would stay away. Separate measures had ordered a delayed response, but it seemed they could no longer ignore the citizens clamoring outside.
If the police arrived as well, there would be no way left. Let this escalate any further, and death alone would not be the end of it.
Akitaka gave the order as if coughing up blood.
“……Hah. We withdraw.”
“All units, withdraw!”
As if he had been waiting for nothing else, the deputy relayed it to every squad.
“Grrraaaah!!!”
Blood dripped from Akitaka’s fist. He pressed that hateful tiger into his heart.
I’ll come back. I’ll kill you. I swear it.
……That, however, was nothing more than Akitaka’s wish.
“Keoheoheong!!!”
Heaven’s tiger had no intention of letting a single one of them go. The instant the roar hit them, the legs that had started to fall back locked in place.
“……You’ve got to be kidding me.”
He looked down. A ring of white light had bound his legs.
“T-Team Leader?!”
The deputy stared his way with a face on the verge of tears. Akitaka answered him with an empty laugh.
“Damn it……”
That was all Akitaka could manage.
“It’s over.”
Alexei dropped onto the bed as if the whole thing had bored him.
“I wondered how impressive a raid on the Dan Clan would be, and this is all it amounts to…… The news is more entertaining.”
“Sorry about that. We’re just that impressive.”
Mi Soryeong shot the words at him in Russian.
“……You had better be.”
Alexei answered in clumsy Korean.
Dan Chuyeon was staring, openly curious, so Mi Soryeong sent him out of the shelter. Arms folded, she glared down at Alexei where he lay.
“……Your Korean has improved.”
“Thanks to a certain someone, I’m locked in here. Everything on the television is Korean. If I wanted to ease the boredom even a little, I had to study.”
A Korean textbook lay on the desk. Written in English, the lessons had been sorted carefully by difficulty.
“……Did my husband bring those?”
“He did. I asked, and he brought them over looking tired.”
Alexei let out a short laugh.
“You wouldn’t understand it. Learning the mother tongue of a man you fought to the death, from books that same man brings you. I can’t put the feeling into words.”
“……I’m glad, though. That you’re doing better.”
“Worried about me, are you?”
Alexei rolled the other way. Propping his head on one hand, he faced her, and his eyes sank.
“I was the assassin sent to kill all of you.”
“……I know. But that and this are different.”
Mi Soryeong remembered him as he had been when he first woke.
“The first time I saw you, you were breathing, but you weren’t alive. You looked as if you had no will to go on.”
Hair wild as a ruined man’s, eyes empty. When he first woke he could barely speak. For two or three days he did nothing but stare at the wall, and he would not so much as look at food. Set beside that, now was far better.
“Haa……”
Alexei closed his eyes and sighed.
“I’m not used to it…… Kindness.”
“Someone worries about you, and you make a fuss.”
“The problem is that the someone is you people.”
Suckers, or simply kind. Hard to say which.
“We at least don’t kill people for money.”
“……A little late to be saying that now, isn’t it?”
“Hmph.”
Watching Mi Soryeong turn prim and haughty, Alexei saw his own wife laid over her.
“You resemble my wife. That part of you that hates to lose.”
“Now that you mention it, you were married, weren’t you?”
“I was. A married man with one daughter.”
Well.
“No wife. No daughter. So calling myself a married man feels wrong, too.”
“……”
Mi Soryeong was thrown.
“……I-I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.”
“No need to apologize.”
Emptiness filled Alexei’s eyes again.
“……Don’t pity a corpse. I breathe and I eat, but my life ended that day.”
Mi Soryeong had no comfort to give him. She had seen people resolved to die. She had seen people who had given up on living. She had never seen someone who had made a corpse of himself. How could a person be alive and have no life in him at all?
“……Go on up. Come down now and then and toss me a book. That would be enough.”
“……All right. Take care of yourself.”
Mi Soryeong left him and stepped outside.
Dan Chuyeon, who had gone out ahead of her, was waiting there with San-gun, the tiger drenched in blood. She looked around the ruined house and struck her own chest.
“Haa…… I’m going to lose my mind.”
What a state the house was in!
“Mom, what are we going to do?”
Dan Chuyeon looked ready to cry. It was a mercy that San-gun had caught and killed every last enemy, but with the house torn apart like this, the way forward went dark before her eyes.
“……For now we spend the night at a hotel. Then we call people in to clean and repair it.”
“That isn’t the only problem.”
Dan Chuyeon pointed at the entryway.
Wee-ooh! Wee-ooh!
Several police cars had pulled up outside.
“……I’m going to snap.”
The timing could not have been worse. And her husband wasn’t even here.
Ring-ring-ring!
And now the phone?
She lifted the smartphone. It was her husband, the one she had been missing.
“Honey! Right now, here—!”
“Soryeong……”
She tried to explain the state of the house, but the darkness in her husband’s voice stopped the words in her throat.
He was breathing hard. That brief gap was enough for the image of a single torn garment to flicker through her mind.
“Teacher has been kidnapped by Heavenly Punishment.”
“……………What?”
Eeeeeee.
Dizzy. What had she just heard?
“Mom……!”
“Keu……?!”
Round and round.
The world was spinning. No—she was the one spinning.
“Yumin……”
She dropped.