The Most Important Last Piece
After that, Won-goo continued to put Ternon's Pistol through its paces in every way he could think of.
"Power's definitely going to need work."
The raw firepower was only a modest step above an ordinary revolver. He'd already been mulling over swapping in a round with better penetration. Upgrading the gun's damage output outright was an option too, but that would cost far too much. In the end, he decided to run with the specs he had for now.
It didn't really matter. The moment Ternon's Warhammer touched a target, the weakening stacks took hold regardless. Sure, it would be nicer if the bullets dealt actual damage, but even if they didn't, the weapon's original purpose was more than fulfilled.
He was still running checks when Dan-shin finally came back.
"What is all this stuff?"
"Supplies for cleaning......"
"You've got plenty already."
"It depends on the use case......"
"Sure, sure. This is what your hobby looked like, right?"
"That's right."
Dan-shin was a certified cleaning fanatic. The first thing he did whenever he walked into the office was check whether everything remained exactly as he had set it up. Most people let things fall into disarray and then did one big cleanup later; Dan-shin fixed anything out of place the instant he spotted it. He wasn't just a neat freak — he was a genuinely different breed, and Won-goo had long since learned to recognize that obsession. Anything related to tidying and organization, he never touched.
"Dan-shin. What do you feel like eating?"
"Sorry?"
"What do you like?"
"I eat anything, really, Director. I'm not picky at all."
"I know you're not. But even you must have something you're craving."
"Tteokbokki?"
"Good luck finding rice cakes for that. I can do rabokki instead — ramyeon noodles in spicy sauce. How about it, want some?"
"Yes, please!"
"Then lock up the office and let's go."
"Actually, Director."
"What?"
"Could we clean up first before we head out?"
"......"
They ended up eating at Sanghae's place.
Amazingly, Sanghae's restaurant actually had rice cakes in stock. They weren't the thick, chewy cylinders that went into proper tteokbokki, though — the dish was made with the thin, flat slices used for rice cake soup. Even so, Dan-shin was putting it away like a man possessed.
"Not bad. I keep saying this — treat your chef well. His food is anything but ordinary."
"Everyone who's eaten here says the same thing. That's why I've fully taken him in as one of my own by now."
Sanghae said this while sneaking a glance at Dan-shin, who was diligently buried in his tteokbokki at the back table.
"He was always one of your own."
"Weren't you two only half-in?"
"Busy lately?"
"......?"
"We wrote up a contract before, remember? You drafted the thing yourself and now you're playing dumb."
"No, that was just meant as a confidentiality clause, as far as I understood it."
"Good grief — accepting him is the contract. Anyway, that's not why I'm here. So? The nibbles should be coming in about now."
"I was just about to start circulating word, actually."
"Yeah? Anyone bitten?"
"They're showing interest, of course. But the price is the sticking point."
"I told you it would be. What's the situation? Are they trying to lowball you hard?"
"No, the owners know the shelter's revenue isn't small."
"Then what's the problem?"
"It's the lump sum leaving their accounts all at once. They're balking at that."
"They want to pay in installments?"
"That's what all of them are thinking. But we can't afford to take it that way right now. You know that, don't you, Director Gong?"
The moment Taderson resurfaced, income from Slow would effectively grind to a halt. Failing to pay up on schedule would be inevitable then, so Sanghae's worry was a legitimate one.
Won-goo, however, reacted with cool indifference, as if he'd already accounted for even that.
"Why wouldn't it work?"
"Huh?"
"I said why not. Tell them to pay in installments — and charge more for the privilege."
"If we take it in pieces...... Slow's the one place that could hit a wall."
"Taderson isn't coming back tomorrow. This was the first kill. It'll be a good while before it revives."
"So we milk it dry in the meantime? Then you're saying keep the installments short?"
"No. Drag it out too short and they might get suspicious. These shop owners aren't idiots — you think they wouldn't notice?"
"Then what do you want to do?"
"Nothing to figure out. Keep the contract exactly as written. Installments."
"......?"
"Sanghae, you've been cooped up in here so long your brain's gone stiiiiff. What exactly are we worried about not collecting?"
"Ah...... right."
Only then did Sanghae nod, the realization dawning.
"Even if Slow's business collapses and they can't pay, we just go take what's ours. Don't sweat the collection. When it's money I'm owed, I collect. Every time."
Sanghae nodded along without hesitation. At the very least, he couldn't imagine a debt Won-goo failed to recover.
Truth be told, it made him think that loan shark suited Won-goo better than mercenary work ever would. Not that he said it out loud.
"Oh, and Director Gong."
"What?"
"Did you factor all this in when you picked which shop owners to tip off? The ones we ran into during the Ganjeol Point job?"
"Spread the incidents wide. Handle a few along the way and everybody wins."
"Ha...... always learning something from you."
"They can stretch the installments out as long as they like — just make sure you charge a premium for it. These are shop owners here. They've got nowhere to run."
A wicked smile curled at the corner of his mouth.
Debt was a headache in any number of ways in the apocalyptic world. A written contract settled things cleanly enough, but special circumstances always arose that no contract could fully cover.
Take what Poke had pulled — signing under a company's name, then dissolving and rebranding the whole outfit. There was endless room for tricks like that. And since these were survivors, some simply skipped town without paying and vanished to some other region entirely. A business that had put down roots inside a shelter carried no such risk.
Consider that Dr. Woo's family, a fairly solid gang by local standards, had ground through years of hardship just to buy a single pharmacy. That told you everything about how much an established shelter business was worth.
"They're going to get a proper operation."
"They've been raking it in for years — this barely dents it. They'll just feel a little pinch in the economy. Nowhere near bankruptcy."
"Still going to sting, though, won't it?"
"Sanghae. Haven't I told you before? They're not people who won't come along. There's plenty of time."
Won-goo met Sanghae's eyes dead-on as he said it.
His gaze could look oily and careless, but every now and then it showed a depth like a man who had lived through several lifetimes. What Sanghae saw now was exactly that.
It was the look of someone who had expected this all along — and who had been waiting precisely because he'd expected it. The man hid eyes like that behind all his scheming talk about possibility and the future.
Sanghae had dealt with countless people as a broker, but he had never once met anyone with an interior as labyrinthine as Gong Won-goo's. On the surface the man seemed hot-tempered and erratically volatile, but look a little closer and everything was fixed, predetermined.
Like a ball that raged and bounced violently — but only, ever, within precisely drawn boundaries.
"Handle the negotiations with installments. As fast as possible. Everyone's been strung through one big incident after another and they're starving — hardly anything's landed in their hands lately."
"What's with the sob story? Weren't there quite a few traders eyeing the Giant bid this time?"
"Showing interest and actually buying are different things. Price is always the problem."
"Got it. I'll work this one carefully."
"Oh, and just in case — is Geosan in that group?"
"Geosan Tour, you mean?"
"Yeah."
"Most interested of the bunch."
"Haah......"
"Want me to cut him out?"
"No. Don't."
"Really? That's a surprise. Geosan did join up with us when it counted."
"Geosan carries real weight among the shop owners. If he drops out, the small fry will smell something's off immediately. So just keep him in, run it through, and write off his share later if it comes to that."
"Understood."
Even as he agreed, Won-goo shook his head slowly. His suspicion had played out exactly as predicted.
"By the way, Director Gong — it's fine if people from other regions show interest, right?"
"Word's already spreading outside the shelter?"
"Every shelter's connected to every other. There's even a saying about it — traders' communities move fast."
"Those guys don't matter."
"For now I've floated the line to the shelter owners here: 'We intend to sell to them first.'"
Won-goo smirked.
"Good work. Then let's run a proper competition. And I told you — the contract has to be airtight this time. Tighter than the last one. Design it so there's nothing left they can squirm out of."
"Director Gong. This is Sanghae. Sanghae. If there's one thing I know, it's contracts — nobody alive drafts one better than I do."
"Then stop arguing and get on it. Oh — and how did the radar sweep go?"
"The Seal Collectors?"
"Yeah. Those bastards are the priority."
"Are they really that dangerous?"
Won-goo nodded slowly.
"Even more than Cheonmok? Director Gong, back then you came back from the actual brink of death."
"That was a serious incident, sure. But back then I had no crew, nothing like now. It's different this time. And don't bring up Cheonmok. Just thinking about it makes me feel like I'm boiling over again."
There was a reason Won-goo reacted like this.
He had swept away Cheonmok — that cancerous presence that had spread through the shelter ages ago — but he'd never received a reward proportionate to it. If anything, he'd ended up burning through a pile of coins without even noticing.
Those who didn't know the workings of his abilities simply believed he'd fought and won. Anyone who knew the truth of it could never describe it that way.
There wasn't a single fanatic among the zealots who wasn't vicious, and to purge those vicious fanatics while outnumbered, Won-goo had clawed his way past countless moments that should have killed him.
And among those moments were ones where he genuinely should have died.
He had shut each of those deaths away using the coins he'd stockpiled before the apocalypse began. Of course it made his blood boil.
Even now, merely hearing Cheonmok mentioned brought him to the edge of a fit — for exactly this reason. In the end, Cheonmok had cost his entire plan a full step of delay. Nothing less.
"Cool it, then. Since the clash with you, there hasn't been a single sighting of the Seal Collectors. Could be they bolted like they did at Black Shelter."
"What about the points Neverland gave up? Did you search them? That rat wouldn't have fed you false leads — not after what you did to him personally."
"You worked him over yourself, Director. Of course they were good. There were traces of habitation at those points. We confirmed the two Neverland flagged; the rest we haven't located yet. But the remaining two show similar headcounts. It's definitely the Seal Collector Gang."
"And still not a hair of them anywhere?"
"They may simply be more specialized in survival than we gave them credit for."
"Haah...... really? I'd have pegged them as more obsessive than that."
"That's how they struck you?"
"Yeah. Those guys felt like Sde, honestly. You know the type — once they fixate on something, nothing settles them until it's seen through. I figured they wouldn't go far at all, just lie in wait for an opening."
"You're never wrong about people, Director...... but."
"But what?"
"You did beat them in a straight fight, didn't you?"
"......?"
"Maybe they left to call in reinforcements?"
"Ah...... come on, that's a stretch......"
At that, Sanghae's face went genuinely stunned. If Won-goo reacted this strongly, it could only mean the Seal Collector Gang was the real deal.
"An opponent who makes Director Gong sweat like this...... I'd better widen the radar sweep."
"One — they walk a path unlike ordinary survivors. Two — they're genuinely, certifiably insane. Three — their skill matches their madness. And last: they've already crossed a river there's no coming back from, with us."
"That last one's the most important, isn't it?"
"Yeah. The last one's the most important."