When Things Go Too Well, the End Always Gets Tough
A cruise ship out of China put in at the Jeju passenger terminal.
The informants Dan Miryu had seeded through the place were checking every soul who passed through immigration, one by one. Time dragged on. Not a single face that could be pinned as Unjinhoe ever appeared.
"What's going on?"
He opened a channel to the others.
"This is the terminal. This is the terminal. Unjinhoe not found. Requesting checks at the other sites."
Jeju Port: "Copy. This is Jeju Port. This is Jeju Port. Nothing confirmed here either."
Jeju Airport: "Copy. This is Jeju Airport. Nothing confirmed here either."
Branch Watch: "Copy. No movement confirmed at the Unjinhoe Jeju branch."
Cruise Ship: "No identification possible inside the cruise ship either."
Not today, then?
The informant rose, reported up the chain, and slipped out of the terminal.
"Damn it. Even sneaking in is a pain!"
Cloud smoked with his face tipped to the night sky. For the boss of an organization, he looked like nothing of the sort: a steward's uniform, a cigarette, and a scowl.
"Damn it. At least you got a breath of outside air. The whole way here across the sea, we were locked in!"
Mugang's color was awful. The three hulking men at his back looked no better.
Mugang and Cloud had smuggled themselves into Korea aboard the cruise ship. Cloud had passed himself off as crew. Mugang and the three had been handled like freight and stuffed into the hold. They were living through a spy film that had never been written into their stars, and it had put them in the foulest of moods.
"If Busan had just stayed in one piece, we wouldn't be pulling this crap!"
"Our faces got burned. That's on us. What else are we supposed to do?"
Negus's key executives had already had their faces sold to the national intelligence services. Take a legitimate route and they would have been caught without fail.
"Just let me rest already! I feel like I'm gonna die!"
Mugang vomited onto the ground and wheezed.
"Wait. It isn't safe yet."
"Fuck!"
They still had to slip the Dan clan's watch. For the moment, they waited where they were.
"What's the status of the other troops?"
Cloud put the question to the Jeju branch chief who had come out to receive them.
"Yes, sir. They should assemble in about three hours."
Unjinhoe's elite would reach Jeju by other routes.
"And Korea?"
"I'm sorry, sir. Most of the strings we had on the mainland have been cut."
Cloud ground his teeth until they creaked.
"Then what the hell have the bastards who've been eating our money all these years been doing!"
How many collaborators had they spent decades putting in place?
"Mr. Cloud, our ties to them have already been dumped all over the Korean press."
"What?"
"Please look at this."
The Jeju branch chief handed him a tablet. Korean articles filled the screen. Cloud could read a little of the language—enough to understand what he was seeing.
"Fuck!"
He hurled the tablet in a rage.
Officials and companies with even a thread of connection to Unjinhoe had seized the portal sites, and the country was denouncing them as traitors to Korea.
"And Jeju?!"
"Jeju is no problem."
A trap.
Hunting Unjinhoe down on Jeju would have been easier than shaking out the idiots plastered across those portals. That they hadn't done it meant Jeju had been turned into a trap a long time ago.
"Cloud, shouldn't we turn around? Anybody can see this is a trap."
Cloud couldn't deny it. The situation was against him. This was a Korea where his influence was already gone, and he couldn't even spend Chinese politicians to fix it. The right move, even now, was to abandon the country.
"……If I were going to, I'd have done it sooner!"
He knew better than anyone that the losses outweighed the gains. He still couldn't step back.
Pull out here and there's no road left to live on anyway.
Inside Negus, plenty of mid-sized outfits handled transport besides Unjinhoe, and some of them were organizations even Unjinhoe couldn't brush aside. Lose Korea, shrink Unjinhoe's reach, and they would come for Cloud's chair. He had built enough that he wouldn't fall easily—but they were not his only enemies.
Negus. That bastard will clear me out.
Negus, master of the villain alliance that bore his name. He would sweep a weakened, brittle Cloud aside and fill the empty seat with his own man.
I don't know about that bastard Mugang, but my neck is on the block.
Mugang seemed to have caught how bad things were. The killing intent that had been boiling off him a moment ago had cooled into some other calculation. Leave him like this and he would knife Cloud in the back and run.
"Mugang."
"What."
"If we can take Korea back, I'll give you ten percent of Unjinhoe's share."
"……Ha."
The offer left Mugang dumbfounded.
"Cloud. I like money. You think that means I hold it dearer than my life?"
Rage filmed his eyes.
"So you do know there's no winning this. Then you should've come ready. You think I'll walk into a place I'm obviously going to die just because you wave cash at me?"
The three giants' auras rose with his. Mugang's inner circle, executives of Mugangdan—the Crushing Nine-Force Trio—turned on Cloud as enemies.
"Cloud, you already paid up front, so I won't kill you. We're going back to China. Right now."
"……I'll give you Negus's weakness."
"What?"
Mugang's feet stopped.
"I said I'll give you Boss Negus's weakness."
"……And how the hell do you know that?"
The moment Mugang looked like he might actually listen, a smile of recovered confidence crossed Cloud's face.
"Does Unjinhoe look like an outfit that just gets led around by the boss? We keep a weakness or two in the drawer. I'm offering to share it."
"Talking about it now doesn't sound very believable."
The words were skeptical. Greed had already lit in Mugang's eyes.
Right. In the end, we're the same.
That was the trade. You always wanted to climb, and then climb higher.
He'll covet it. The seat that leads the villain alliance Negus.
Not only Mugang. Every organization inside Negus wanted that chair.
"If I die like this, the secret scatters on the wind. I'm the only one who knows it."
Mugang weighed it. Accept, or refuse.
He would have to show good faith first. Cloud wrote a cipher on a scrap of paper and held it out.
"What's this?"
"The password to a document that holds Negus's weakness."
"This?!"
"But!"
Cloud's voice cracked sharp.
"Only I know where that document is. If I die, I've set it to destroy itself."
Mugang flinched. Cloud stared straight at him.
"Mugang. The moment you look at it, you're in the same boat as me."
Smoke seeped up off Cloud's body. Mugang and the Crushing Nine-Force Trio went tight. They were the faces of Negus's armed strength, but Cloud was no small thing either.
"Look at that and try to walk past me, and I'll kill you where you stand."
"……Ha!"
A thin cold sweat traced Mugang's back. One misstep and they might have to settle life and death right here. He wouldn't lose a fight, but something on him would break.
A dead end.
He never should have taken the job. He cursed the version of himself that had folded for money.
"I'll take it!"
He pushed his presence out so he wouldn't give ground.
"But!"
"If my life's in danger, I drop it. No hesitation."
"I won't stop you that far."
Cloud yielded a step. Mugang felt filthy about it, but it was too late to pull his foot free.
Their staring match ended, and right on time a signal came that they could move. Neither of them spoke. They got in the car.
Mugang. The moment you see it, I have no intention of letting you live.
Cloud isn't planning to let me live either.
For that one moment, they were thinking the same thing.
If the chance comes, I kill him.
I'll kill him before he kills me.
Killing intent flooded the car until it spilled.
"Hm. According to the informants, no one suspicious got off the cruise ship."
"Well. Of course not."
They wouldn't have boarded in the open as passengers.
"Among the things that came off that ship, was there anything that wasn't a person?"
"One moment……."
Dan Miryu seemed to check.
"They say several cargo loads came off. And there were stewards assigned to them."
"Bingo."
Hauled in like luggage.
"……You're certain it's the boss of Unjinhoe?"
"That bastard Cloud is always fast."
In the original, he was the first one to come running. This world wouldn't be any different.
"He thinks he's the finest thing in the organization, so he'll rush to Korea and try to put the mess back together."
He was their greatest fighting strength besides.
"Give it time and the elites brought from Unjinhoe's main force will arrive as well."
Not one route. Several, all emptying onto Jeju.
"We hit them before they're all together."
"Understood."
The Jeju branch's location was already pinned down. The timing was right. All that remained was to drive straight in.
"Mr. Hwang Seokgu, I'm counting on you."
"I don't know how things came to this, but I'm the one who ought to be counting on you."
Hwang Seokgu had accepted the offer and come to help us. On Jeju, the finest force Korea could muster had gathered.
Hwang Seokgu.
Dan Miryu and the Phantom Thief.
Five from the Temporary Hero Association to support from the flank.
Something swelled in my chest.
In the original, taking Unjinhoe alone had been hard enough. Not anymore. They were throwing everything they had, and we still had strength to spare. Dan Miryu and Mi Soryeong had shattered Busan by themselves, and now Hwang Seokgu was here too?
The outcome was already decided.
"Hmm."
Hwang Seokgu didn't look pleased.
"What's the matter?"
Hwang Seokgu frowned.
"Right now is exactly that. It's flowing too much the way we want."
His sense came from experience and years. It was close to foresight. In the original, that instinct had carried him past the brink of death more than once.
"We'll be careful."
"Hmm."
Hwang Seokgu scratched his head.
"Don't take it to heart. The mood was too light, so I said it. That's all."
"No. I'll carve it in."
Nothing good ever came of dropping your guard. Even so, something about Hwang Seokgu still wouldn't settle.
"Mr. Phantom. Elder. We're moving."
At Dan Miryu's word, we got in the car and headed for the Jeju branch.
All the way there, Hwang Seokgu never took his eyes from the window. He was sunk deep in worry.