Capture
"Just three of them and you're done? Guess you haven't been trying very hard, have you?"
Insect corpses lay strewn across the ground.
The bug summoner was staring at Won-goo with wide, astonished eyes. Fresh and Sapiens stood beside him, and behind them, their respective crews had gathered in a loose ring, all glaring daggers at the summoner.
"This is Black Shelter—"
"I know. The place where pieces of shit like you gather to do even shittier things."
"......"
Kang Yu-min, the bug summoner, looked perfectly fine. In fact, her usual appearance wasn't just fine—it was outright pretty.
But everyone here knew what she really was. They knew exactly what was hiding behind that pretty face, which was why not a single one of them so much as flinched.
"Fresh. What do you want to do with her?"
"You're the one in charge, aren't you? How should I know? Can't you hand her over?"
Even laid-back as he was, Fresh knew exactly where the line was drawn.
"I can. Our shelter doesn't hold much of a grudge against this one anyway."
"Then hand her over. Keeping her alive and hauling her back would be useful in all sorts of ways. Let's call the books settled on this merger with that."
"Meaning only your share is settled?"
"That's right. I've got to take care of the people I brought in myself."
"Okay. Then you're officially squared away on this one. Whatever you get out of her, manage the losses yourself."
"Understood."
Fresh bound Kang Yu-min tight.
"Is there even a point to taking her alive?"
Jeon Hye-ji asked quietly.
"There is, for anyone living off the shelter system. She'll be tormented to death. Maybe she'll even get a taste of her own medicine—wasn't it peeling the skin off their backs and eating their intestines? Slipping the blade along the spine like she was picking out fishbones?"
"That's what she did."
Thwack!
At that moment, Kang Yu-min, arms still bound tight, lunged at Won-goo with her jaws wide open.
Her intent to bite and tear was unmistakable, yet not one person tensed up.
Crack!
Lee Hyun-sung's full swing. The flat of his Chinese cleaver caught her, and the impact sent Kang Yu-min spinning through the air several times before she crumpled to the ground.
It was a blow heavy enough that she might not survive it, but nobody paid it any mind.
Fresh handed Kang Yu-min off to the two companions who had brought her in. He didn't follow them, though.
The war with Black Shelter wasn't over yet.
"You've grown your forces quite a bit."
Boom! Boom! Boom!
With the offshoots cleared out, Won-goo had expected the rest to fall apart easily. Instead, Black Shelter's counterattack was ferocious.
And in particular, Won-goo's crew was struggling against an enemy none of them had anticipated.
"Hyeong-nim. Nobody said anything about a psychic."
They were all huddled together inside the Trailer. Sapiens too—though Sapiens alone stayed in the Trailer proper, while his underlings waited scattered even further back.
"I didn't know either. You think I'd have skipped contingency planning if I had?"
"What do we do about that thing? It's got to be a higher grade than even Grandma Yeom-gwi."
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Countless stones came hurtling at the Trailer.
A psychic in a grey hoodie and jeans. Yeong Chi-soo. The front of his hoodie sported two enormous kangaroo pockets, and a small 'O'-shaped logo was stamped across his chest.
"We'll just have to find a way."
"A psychic straight out of a movie, and here he is in the flesh."
Mages were rare, but psychics were rarer still.
And a psychic at this stage of the apocalypse was practically a people-killing demon.
Anyone capable of wielding telekinesis this broadly, like he was doing right now, had to be considered a genuine nightmare.
"He's a different breed from Yeom-gwi. Even among telekinetics, the lineage changes everything."
Yeom-gwi's power to bind everything within a fixed radius was tremendous. That was why she tended to use her telekinesis at fairly close range.
But the psychic they were facing now was different.
He was a very standard telekinesis wielder, one who attacked by hurling nearby objects. A telekinetic like that could handle huge numbers on his own.
You might think an enhancement-type could simply bull his way through a few flying rocks with his body—but it wasn't nearly that simple.
Even a baseball thrown by a professional pitcher can kill a man if it lands clean.
Stones launched by telekinesis were far more dangerous than that.
Worse, it wasn't just rocks. Every so often, a lethal blade would come spinning in with them.
As the apocalypse deepened, an era would come when enhancement-types would chew up and swallow ordinary telekinetics like this one.
But that was a story for when the enhancement types had been buffed to the point where calling them superhuman would be an understatement.
Right now, none of that applied.
"Hey, Director Gong. Can he really keep using telekinesis that long?"
"If he's eaten enough Coins, why not?"
"Goddamn. Psychics are straight-up broken."
"What, you think he'd be running some common Gift otherwise?"
"So could Yeom-gwi do that too? Without limits?"
"How the hell would I know what that old woman's limits are?"
"Is that not him trying to stall for time, in some respect?"
"Probably."
Mu Beob-sa cut in. As a rule, the crew's policy was not to interject when Won-goo was talking with outsiders.
That he broke that rule now showed just how dire the situation had become.
Won-goo's crew couldn't set so much as a toe outside the Trailer.
The moment anyone showed their face, stones came flying—stones with terrifying force behind them.
It wasn't enough to flip the Trailer or wreck it outright, but it was nothing to dismiss either. The gravel smashing against the Trailer shattered to pieces on impact.
No survivor, however tough, would walk away unscathed from a hit like that.
An enhancement-type could maybe shrug off one hit and charge in—but there was another obstacle stacked on top.
The stones didn't come in single strikes. They came in bursts.
The instant one rock hit you, five more were already inbound. And they were fast—faster than a baseball pitcher's fastball.
Meaning the moment you slipped up, you'd take a barrage of heavy, high-speed stones square on.
Fresh's companion, who'd charged out so boldly and ended up a mangled wreck, was living proof of it.
He'd weathered the first hit, collapsed under the second, and in moments his bones had been pounded to mush.
And the psychic they were up against was cruel on top of it all.
On anyone he'd felled, he would unfailingly hurl one final stone to confirm the kill.
Brains were spilling from a crushed skull, soaking into the dirt.
"Director Gong, isn't there a way? Are we supposed to just sit here?"
Fresh asked.
"There is a way."
"What?"
"You go out there. Draw his aggro. If anyone can do it, it's you."
"No way in hell. Son of a—"
"With our current lineup, there's no real answer. We wait until that bastard burns through his mental stamina. He's probably about ready to run dry."
"It's already been thirty minutes, though......"
Fwoooosh!
Still, they weren't sitting on their hands entirely. The reason stones kept flying was that the crew kept showing themselves just enough to bait out his attacks.
Sapiens' men, positioned even farther out than the Trailer, played their part too. From longer range, using cover, they kept taunting the psychic.
"Hyeong-nim."
"What?"
"I think the stones are getting weaker, Hyeong-nim."
"Yeah?"
"Yes. The sound is different. Let me go take a look."
"You sure you're up for it?"
"I am."
"Then the elders will go help too."
"If it's urgent, I'll go out myself."
Mu Beob-sa carried a sturdy shield. But that didn't make him invincible—there was a clear limit to the shock a non-enhancement mage could absorb.
"Withdraw."
"Yes, Director-nim."
"Send Dullahan out with him. Hye-ji. Hit him with something, no matter what."
"I will."
After that, no more words were needed.
Lee Hyun-sung sprang forward, and of course stones came flying. Mu Beob-sa stuck to his shadow.
And Dullahan charged the psychic with a shrieking battle cry.
At a glance, the psychic was small enough to be mistaken for a woman.
Yeong Chi-soo responded to the sudden advance with perfect calm.
He flung a few stones at Lee Hyun-sung first.
Bang!
Meanwhile, Won-goo wasn't standing idle either.
A gunshot. It was a shot aimed at Yeong Chi-soo's head, but a stone hovering in midair intercepted and deflected the bullet.
This was exactly why they'd been playing for time against a single psychic.
The stones orbiting him were weapons and armor both.
But they couldn't stop. Won-goo kept firing and advancing.
Dullahan had pushed deep—too deep to land a hit—and went down.
Thud!
As he fell, Dullahan hurled the head he'd been carrying.
The completely unexpected move knocked Yeong Chi-soo's body out of alignment for an instant—and in that instant, the stones floating in the air all sank to the ground.
But he was already pulling himself back together. The stones that had dropped toward the earth rose back into the air.
Jeon Hye-ji didn't miss that sliver of an opening.
Fweeeeng!
Her harpoon gun punched through that brief window and buried itself in the psychic's thigh.
"Agh!"
A short scream rang out, and the stones fell.
"Nice one! Hye-ji! Reel it in!"
But the harpoon line never came back.
Because a man had stormed onto the battlefield.
A man covered head to toe in the marks of combat.
Oh Gu-sik.
"Director Gong! It's Gu-sik!"
"So it is...... Gu-sik."
Black Shelter's executives were all rated at Named-grade combat power or higher. And among them, the man called Gu-sik—Oh Gu-sik—sat at the very top.
An enhancement-type, yes, but a hexagon of a survivor with offense and defense both fully developed.
Hexagonal stats were a trap in the apocalyptic world—easy to end up mediocre at everything.
Fresh was a good example. Not the kind of guy who'd get dismissed anywhere, but not someone who could guarantee a flawless win against just anyone either.
Come to think of it, Gong Won-goo was arguably the same type.
The difference was that Won-goo possessed a deeply unusual Gift—and hid that unusual Gift extremely well.
Oh Gu-sik was different.
A simple enhancement-type, and yet no one could afford to underestimate him.
When this attack had been planned, he'd been one of the most frequently named threats on the list.
Who marks Gu-sik? That everyone acknowledged him as a dangerous opponent said it all.
So there was no way Won-goo had failed to prepare a counter for him.
It wasn't as if they were strangers, either. Several of Black Shelter's executives knew Won-goo by face, and some had once been close to him.
Neverland had been one. So was Oh Gu-sik.
They were now practically sworn enemies, but it meant Won-goo knew a great deal about them.
Which was why he'd assigned a sure-fire card to Oh Gu-sik.
"Son of a...... Ah-bal...... Looks like she went off in the wrong direction."
Won-goo furrowed his brow and pulled out a cigarette, lighting up.
Oh Gu-sik alone had appeared, and yet the battle had paused for a moment.
"I already met Ah-bal."
With that, Oh Gu-sik tossed something out of his hoodie pocket—a wrist.
He was wearing the same hoodie as the psychic. The difference, if you could call it that, was that Oh Gu-sik had on military fatigues and work boots—a strange pairing with that baggy, oversized hoodie.
A hand tipped with long, stretched fingers.
It looked unmistakably like Ah-bal's.
"You took down Ah-bal? How?"
"Thinking things are the same as back then—what a disappointment, Ttaeng-gu."
Won-goo's eyes turned sharp. Ah-bal and Oh Gu-sik had clashed once before, and Ah-bal had won.
A fair amount of time had passed since then, but he'd assumed that with similar growth, Ah-bal would win again this time.
He'd been wrong.
He could have told himself the hand belonged to someone else, but Won-goo recognized Ah-bal's hand. And he knew Oh Gu-sik's character, too.
Oh Gu-sik wasn't the type to joke around with something like this.
"We've worked together before, though...... Does it really have to come to this? We could all just live our own lives...... Why go out of your way to make things serious?"
Oh Gu-sik stared back at him with eyes just as fierce.
"Even with the world turned upside down, there are lines. Am I supposed to just keep watching as people like you cross them?"
"There you go again, Ttaeng-gu. That's your single biggest flaw—your little 'standards.' The world changed, so the standards change with it."
Saying that, Oh Gu-sik yanked the harpoon out of Yeong Chi-soo's thigh in one clean pull. Then he patted the psychic's head once.
'Good work, Chi-soo,' he murmured, almost too quiet to hear.
"And these 'standards' of yours—was that slavery's revival?"
"......"
"The strong using slaves is just how it should be—was that it? How the hell do you go along with insane garbage like that, Gu-sik?"
Uuurghk!
The moment Won-goo finished speaking, Yeong Chi-soo vomited up blood.
A harpoon wound alone wouldn't do that.
That was the unmistakable backlash of psychic power. Even abilities that looked like cheats weren't invincible—overuse gnawed away at mental stamina and lifespan.
Plenty of people had burned out their minds flinging psychic power around carelessly.
"That one must have been one of your slaves too, huh? No wonder he hung in there for so long."
Oh Gu-sik officially kept numerous slaves. Men, women, young, old—he didn't discriminate. He maintained a diverse roster according to their uses.
"So didn't we agree to stay out of each other's way? You've made your point—withdraw. This attack of yours failed."
"So we meet again next time, you mean? You think that's on the table?"
"You overestimate your own presence. Your name came up a few times on our side. We didn't care. You weren't worth the trouble—you'd just scurry back into your shelter the moment things went bad, wouldn't you?"
"You've still got that gift for spewing bullshit nonstop, Gu-sik. Anyone listening would think we're the ones hiding in a hole."
Oh Gu-sik exhaled through his nose, slow and deliberate, then glared murder at Won-goo.
"Then we see it through to the end."
As he spoke, Oh Gu-sik patted the fallen psychic's head again, and the psychic struggled to push himself upright.
Oh Gu-sik didn't care one bit about the backlash coming. Even if the boy died, he intended to squeeze every last drop out of him first.
The psychic felt the same way. If his master ordered it, he would keep using his power for as long as it took.
Won-goo read that relationship in an instant.
And then everyone started sizing each other up.
Oh Gu-sik alone was more than manageable.
But Oh Gu-sik combined with the psychic was a different story. It would take heavy sacrifices.
Do I break out the Hidden card?
Everyone was thinking the same thing. Won-goo, Fresh, Sapiens—all of them.
In this treacherous, backstabbing world, if you didn't keep at least one Hidden card up your sleeve, you deserved to be called a sucker.
Nobody said a word, but every eye was darting around. Each of them was hoping the Hidden card wouldn't have to be theirs.
At that moment, yet another figure crashed onto the battlefield.
"If anyone sees this through to the end...... it's me, first...... you son of a bitch."
"......?"
The owner of that familiar voice—Ah-bal.
She was walking toward them, clutching her neck with her left hand.
She, too, wore the marks of battle all over her. The differences were that her right wrist was gone, and her throat had been carved open deep.
More than half of her windpipe had been slashed through from the front—she had to grip it with her left hand just to keep it from gaping and swaying.
Even Oh Gu-sik, his face a mask of stone, couldn't hide the shock on it.