The Ambush
Every eye snapped toward the explosion that had torn through the air without warning.
This was no ordinary grenade going off.
The blast looked more like the combined force of several grenades detonating at once — and what had exploded was a coin-enhanced firearm.
It was a decision that demanded throwing away a serious pile of coins, and yet Won-goo made the call without hesitation. Detonating the weapon cost coins, and restoring that firearm afterward would cost a fortune more.
For a man as obsessed with coins as he was, it was a sacrifice far beyond what he would normally tolerate. But he chose it anyway — and the strike landed exactly where it needed to.
Won-goo had identified Badugi as the most troublesome opponent on Ganjeol Point's roster. But he'd built his plan on the calculation that in a chaotic melee like this one, Badugi couldn't bring his real strength to bear.
Badugi excelled at micromanaging the crew under his command, but on a battlefield that stretched beyond that scope, he became almost ordinary. If he'd been directing every fighter in Ganjeol Point, things would have looked very different — but that wasn't the situation here.
Which was why Won-goo had accounted for one variable: the possibility that the Magic Four Monks were among the newcomers who had recently joined Ganjeol Point.
If they were, things would get complicated. So when the opening came, he committed — hard. If a single move could take the whole quart off the board, it was a bargain by any measure.
"Damn. You're tough as nails.金刚... I mean, is your Gift something like Adamantine Body?"
"You son of a—"
Hyebong, who had been holding the gun himself, lay sprawled in tatters, and the only monk still standing was the youngest, Jeongseon.
Even he looked ready to crumple at any moment. The other two were already unconscious.
As the eldest, Hyebong had taken the brunt of the blast — and yet even he had tried to drag himself up from the wreckage of his body. In the end, he managed to rise halfway before blacking out entirely.
That left Jeongseon, the youngest, as the last one on his feet — and there was nothing he could actually do. Blindsided by an unexpected situation and hit with a blow far beyond anything he'd anticipated, it was only natural.
"That's what you get for stealing other people's stuff. You ever heard of Black Wire Hell? God, these monk cosplayers. Because of bastards like you, the ones quietly doing honest training get a bad name."
Thwack!
One swing of the war hammer and Jeongseon was out cold.
"Jo Mu-sa!"
"Yes, Director!"
"There are four of these monks, right? Tie them up nice and tight. Make sure they can't pull anything funny."
"Understood!"
"Hyun-sung!"
"Yes, Hyeong-nim!"
"Bind them with Taildog tails. You know the knot — the one that doesn't let them squirm loose."
"Yes, Hyeong-nim. I'll secure them beyond a doubt."
"And Chul-soo!"
"Yes!"
"Let Dulla off the leash! Time to sweep house!"
"Got it!"
Geum Chul-soo produced Dulla's capsule.
"DUUULLAAAA!"
The moment it emerged, Dulla snatched up its own head and charged at the enemy.
"Dulla's movements have improved. That's the part I notice."
"You feel it too, Master Mubopsa?"
"I do notice it. So gaining intelligence carries benefits like this as well. An interesting part, that."
"Still too weak to be our mainstay, though. But he'll only keep getting stronger. For now, it's far more efficient to leave the front to Dulla than to Chul-soo."
Before, Chul-soo had been forced to hang back just to keep Dulla moving. Now that the summon could attack autonomously, Dulla could lead the charge while Chul-soo supported from behind.
Their synergy didn't feel quite seamless yet — but that, too, would smooth out as they accumulated experience.
"Hey! Cheap shot — that's just cheating."
He was catching his breath amid the chaos when the attack came in. Three attackers moving as one.
A broad-bladed knife drove toward Won-goo's sternum. He caught the man's wrist and leaned his whole body back, keeping the blade from touching him.
Even fully armored, he wasn't invincible. Survivors knew full well their opponents wore protective gear, and plenty of them studied ways to punch through it. Who knew what enchantments rode on the man's knife right now? The safest option was to make sure it never made contact.
He dodged the other two attackers' strikes by falling back, and Mu Beob-sa stepped in to cover the gap — shoving one man away with a barrier shield and sweeping another's legs out from under him.
That left Won-goo squared off against the man still pushing the knife two-handed toward his chest.
The man was monstrously strong.
"I'd like to finish up and get dinner, you know? How about you just leave?"
"Strong, aren't you? New recruit?"
The man answered nothing, only driving the knife harder with everything he had.
Crack!
The trembling, straining power struggle ended in an instant.
Because Won-goo had seized the man's wrist and twisted it.
Twisted was underselling it — he'd essentially grabbed it and snapped it.
Common sense said only an enhancement type could produce that level of raw violence. And not just any enhancement type — one built around strength.
"...Enhancement type?"
"What? Didn't see that coming?"
"I told you, didn't I? He's not an enhancement type. I said he's not."
Ganjeol Point had already drawn up plenty of countermeasures against Gong Won-goo — and many of them targeted the same perceived weakness: that while he was competent in a fight, he was no enhancement type.
Not being an enhancement type meant that one clean hit could send him to the grave. That was the whole logic behind it.
And so this situation had come to pass.
"If you're not sure, don't bet your life. You never watch movies?"
"You son of a—"
The knife man's face contorted as he stumbled backward.
Vwoooong!
Then the ambush came from behind him.
A massive Chinese cleaver — and Lee Hyun-sung, drenched in blood.
"Hyeong-nim, your younger brother arrived late. I beg your forgiveness."
Hyun-sung bowed his head low.
"Why would you be sorry? In a war, you survive on your own. Anyway — thanks, Hyun-sung. Let's go help Rafael."
"Understood, Hyeong-nim. Your brother will clear the path for you."
Every time the man said Hyeong-nim, he dipped his head again.
Won-goo had told him a thousand times he didn't need to go that far, but the habit never broke. Some men were simply built to live that way.
Hyun-sung was one of them.
So Won-goo answered with a light thump on his shoulder instead of words.
Of everyone in Won-goo's crew, the one turning in the biggest performance was Rafael.
Empowered by coin enhancement, she was carving through the enemy with near-unrivaled force.
There was no special technique to it. She simply crushed her opponents outright with an absurdly oversized sledgehammer.
Most of them went down in one hit. Two, at the very most.
Part of why Rafael shone so brightly was that her fighting style never spared a thought for her own safety.
No defense at all. She struck before the enemy's attack could land.
The enemy wasn't blind to this. They weren't fools.
Watch a comrade get flattened, and even in the middle of a melee, you learn. That's how learning works.
And yet Rafael kept dispatching them with the same single pattern, unhindered.
The secret lay in the sledgehammer's outrageous size — and in Rafael's beyond-common-sense strength behind it.
It wasn't just raw power. Her muscles' elasticity and flexibility, the strength of her core — everything was at an exceptional level, letting her whip that massive hammer around at inhuman speed.
To an outside observer, it might have looked like she was swinging an oversized toy mallet. At a glance, it almost resembled a whip in motion.
But what Rafael swung was neither whip nor toy — it was a sledgehammer bigger than her own body.
On top of that, she knew how to take that one method of attack — swinging — and express it in endless variations. She brought the hammer around from acrobatic postures, throttled its speed up and down to manipulate the timing of each strike.
So the survivors who carelessly stepped into her range were pulverized on the spot or sent flying head over heels.
It was happening again right now.
A survivor who thought he'd sunk a spear into Rafael's neck went flying several meters instead.
This time, she'd chosen to halt the sledgehammer mid-swing and evade the spear. Then she closed the distance and ripped an upward strike from below.
Like a golf swing.
KWAAANG!
The survivor had twisted to react to the incoming blow, and his pelvis shattered as he slammed hard into the Trailer.
Won-goo watched the whole thing with a satisfied smirk and tossed in a comment.
"Rafael, easy there. You're going to hurt the Trailer."
"...?"
"I said watch out for the Trailer only. Beat the hell out of everyone else. These bastards are all Kwak clan — every last one of them, all Kwak."
The ambush had been a resounding success. They'd bagged the Magic Four Monks — judged the most dangerous of Ganjeol Point's executives — the moment the fighting started.
You couldn't ask for a better opening.
By pure luck, the monks had been holding the firearm. And by even purer luck, they'd been gathered together in one spot.
From the monks' perspective, the dice had landed on the crappiest rolls imaginable.
But Won-goo knew the truth of it.
The window in which a surprise attack pays dividends is never long.
The smaller the battle, the greater the ambush's effect. With a small force, a successful ambush could end the fight outright in that single moment.
In a battle of this scale, though, it couldn't finish things — it could only seize the initiative.
And whatever else was true, Ganjeol Point had far more bodies in this fight. Once they steadied their formation and started mounting a real defense, the battle began to drag.
The line settled around the Trailer, with Won-goo's people and Ganjeol Point's forces split cleanly in half.
Of course, even inside that stalemate, some fighters were still waging their own brutal private wars.
Rafael, chief among them.
"Rafael! Careful with that one! That beggar bastard's got a prosthetic arm!"
Won-goo was clearing the enemies around him while covering Rafael, who fought at the very front of the line.
The enemies so far hadn't mattered much — but the man now facing Rafael was a Ganjeol Point executive.
An executive who operated in the rags of a beggar.
The one they called Beggar.
An enhancement type who fought with sneak attacks from a prosthetic arm.
Right on cue, a long blade sprang from the Beggar's left arm and menaced Rafael.
The more intriguing part was that with his other hand, the Beggar was stopping Rafael's sledgehammer cold — with a single palm.
Absurd strength. At this point in time, Rafael's power was comparable to Kim Yang-cheon's, and this man was holding it back.
And while he held it, the prosthetic arm crept toward Rafael's throat.
Rafael's expression didn't change, but the Beggar's body was straining so hard the blood vessels looked ready to burst from his skin.
The standoff held in perfect tension — which meant only that there'd been a weight-class gap from the very start.
And then Rafael caught the strange odor drifting from the Beggar's mouth.
The smell of Reinforcement Pills.
She didn't know what the scent was. But she could tell, easily, that it was something artificial.
Reinforcement Pills so potent the stench bled out with his very breath.
Psshk!
Even the veins on his face bulged out, twisting the Beggar's features into something repulsive.
But neither Rafael nor the Beggar had any intention of breaking the contest.
"He's strong too, so be careful—"
Had it been ten seconds since the two locked in their struggle of strength?
What broke the balance was an attack from outside. A survivor's head came sailing in out of nowhere.
CRACK!
The flying skull slammed hard into the back of the Beggar's head.
His balance crumbled — and Rafael did not let the moment pass.
Whung! CRACK! KWAJIJIK!
The sledgehammer came around with crushing force.
The blow was aimed at the Beggar's head, but his arm intercepted it.
The arm did not survive intact.
A single strike crushed the Beggar's arm into pulp, leaving it hanging limp.
Even that much was a commendable save — he'd only kept it from being fatal by flowing backward with the strike as it landed.
Arm ruined, the Beggar fled without a backward glance, vanishing into the press of Ganjeol Point's ranks.
And watching it all unfold mid-battle was A-bal.
Because she was the one who'd thrown that headshot.
"Agari. Nice headshot."