Rescue (5)
Through the smoke, I could sense something off in the way An Jin-ho was looking at us.
A human instinct.
Something had changed.
Gone was the arrogance from before. In its place was something careful, composed.
This is probably…
Yeah. Not a possibility I particularly wanted to consider.
Something inside An Jin-ho had shifted.
Can I still do this?
I tightened my grip on the hilt and adjusted my hold.
This was the biggest gamble of all.
Fail here, and everything was over.
Succeed…
Well. I wasn't sure about that either.
Either way.
Tak!
I forced my staggering body forward and broke into a run.
The odds might have dropped, but there was only one move left for me to make.
An Jin-ho would be watching me closest. That much I could count on.
Which meant his next move would be—
Whoosh—!
"Here!"
With a shout, I wrenched my arm around and swung the hilt toward the point I guessed he would come from.
More precisely—the beam blade extending from the hilt.
I got lucky.
My dynamic vision couldn't track An Jin-ho's movement at all. All I could do was take a shot at where I thought he'd be.
And he drove straight into the face of my swing. Luck, pure and simple.
Except—
Krrraaash!
My all-or-nothing strike slammed uselessly into a barrier of wind An Jin-ho had thrown up.
"So you were holding another card after all."
His eyes raked over me, cold and measured.
This bastard…!
The change ran deeper—and more dangerous—than I'd thought.
Had he been full-guard the whole time, only pretending to attack…?
The beam blade I'd drawn wasn't some ordinary lightsaber.
Forged from liquefied White Flame Ore, it burned far hotter than ordinary Flame Ore, and the heat didn't scatter—it drove forward in a concentrated line. Its power was on another level entirely.
And he'd blocked it like that.
If he'd taken it head-on, even An Jin-ho shouldn't have walked away clean. But with delicate control of his ability, he'd wrapped the flat of the blade and my hand together and stopped it cold.
"So."
"…"
"What's left?"
Same situation as before. Completely different atmosphere.
This wasn't the voice of a man already tasting victory. His expression made that clear enough.
Why is my life never easy? And why the hell did this guy suddenly grow up overnight?
After a brief internal bout of self-pity—
"You son of a bitch."
The curse slipped out before I could stop it.
I did have one card left.
A gamble on top of a gamble. One I'd never wanted to play.
"Let's go down together."
I flashed him a grin and jammed my thumb down on a button set into the hilt.
In an instant the blade thickened, the light swelling brighter and wider.
The expanding beam pressed into An Jin-ho's wind—
Krrraaaagagak!
—and an ugly, tearing sound ripped through the air.
"…!"
"What? Looking a little dangerous?"
"If you can't swing it—"
"You really think that's all I prepared?"
I yanked the cord on the brace strapped tight across my right shoulder.
Kiiiiik!
The arm that hadn't budged an inch until now began to grind forward, forcing its way toward An Jin-ho.
"People like you—when you're running fine control or dumping out big power—you can't do much else at the same time, can you?"
An Jin-ho didn't answer. He just clenched his jaw and poured everything into shoving my arm back.
Even with the machine's help, it was still a kid's strength underneath. Feeble, honestly.
If this stayed a pure contest of force, he'd push me off and pin me in seconds.
If it stayed that way.
His body swayed.
And in that instant a gap opened in his ability—my blade drove deeper toward him.
"What the hell was that just now…"
"Manipulators like you are more delicate than you think. Takes a lot of focus. So even a little something off in the body, and the whole ability starts to shake."
"I blocked every attack. Not a scratch on me."
"Did you really block everything?"
His eyes went wide.
"Don't tell me…"
"You think I threw attacks I knew wouldn't work just to buy time?"
Well. That was part of it.
But from the start, I'd been playing for a long fight with An Jin-ho.
With the weapons I had, there was no way I was putting down an Awakened of his level in one hit.
So what then?
Stack damage on him without him noticing. That was the only way.
Even Awakened still had the same basic body as anyone else.
And the two things a living body needed most—water and oxygen.
Tell an Awakened to hold their breath and they'd outlast a normal person by a mile. But unless you forced a special situation like that, Awakened and Non-Awakened alike kept breathing.
So I'd been mixing poison into the smoke from every explosion.
His wind ability meant it hadn't hit as hard as I'd hoped.
But the small doses building up in his system could still turn lethal right about now.
"Hang on tight. I'm pretty committed to this one myself."
"If you do this, you'll—"
He swayed hard again, the words dying unfinished—
—and the blade grinding against his barrier punched through and drove straight at him.
And then—
KWAOOOOOM!
The biggest explosion yet tore across the whole area.
"Ugh!"
"Aah!"
A violent blast of wind hurled Lee Yeon-hui and Lee Yeon-ah a good two hundred meters. They hit the ground hard on their backsides.
Strong enough to throw them that far—and yet somehow it hadn't flung them around like rag dolls.
But that wasn't what mattered to either of them right now.
"Park Yeon-chan!"
"Oppa!"
Park Yeon-chan had been locked in a knife-edge standoff with An Jin-ho just moments ago, over that way. They shouted his name and started to run back toward where they'd come from—
"Stay put."
Someone stepped into their path.
He was a full-grown man; from their height they couldn't see his face. They tilted their heads up—
—and found the white-haired man, Lee Jae-hun, blocking the two sisters' way.
"Move!"
"Please get out of the way!"
"Kids, I'm watching a good show right now. Can't have you spoiling it. And besides."
"Ugh!"
He never even touched them. Their bodies lifted into the air again and were shoved back.
"Your boyfriend asked me."
"What?! What kind of bullshit is that!"
Lee Yeon-hui screeched that it was complete nonsense. Lee Jae-hun dug a finger in his ear like the noise was giving him a headache.
What kind of bullshit.
That was exactly what he wanted to say himself.
When that little brat Park Yeon-chan had jumped off Lee Yeon-hui's back and charged in, he'd looked Jae-hun's way and pointed at the two sisters.
Like he was asking him to watch them.
In the middle of a situation that desperate.
"Interesting little bastard."
Lee Jae-hun's mouth curled up on its own. He watched Park Yeon-chan the way you'd watch a movie hit its climax, curiosity bright in his eyes.
"Hah! Would you look at that."
And as if to answer that expectation—
a massive explosion erupted with them at its center.
"Cough! Cough!"
I forced my creaking body through the smoke and clawed my way out.
"Tough little life you've got, huh."
My life had been stubbornly hard to snuff out even before I possessed into this world. Looks like that same stubborn thread had just kept right on going without ever snapping.
And that stubborn thread didn't apply only to me.
Awakened already had higher poison resistance than ordinary people—
"Guess you had a countermeasure of your own."
—and that applied to him too. Which was the problem.
"Protect Armor. Stuff you can't just pick up off the street keeps rolling out one after another. I'm not even surprised anymore."
An Jin-ho let out a hollow laugh, looking at the brace that had fallen off me as a lump of scrap metal.
"First time I've ever tried it myself. Was half-convinced it wouldn't work. Guess I got lucky."
"…"
Protect Armor.
A defensive piece often used as hero costume gear—it absorbed impact for the wearer. Light material, solid shock resistance; a lot of high-tier heroes favored it, though the price was absurd.
You could add a barrier as an extra option. That was what I'd been running.
Of course, even that—
"If you hadn't bled the blast outward, I'd already be on the other side."
"I didn't have the room to wrap you in it too. Coincidence."
That was probably true.
He'd been using his ability with almost nothing left in the tank.
And even then it hadn't been perfect—An Jin-ho had a long burn scar running down the side of his arm. That said enough.
"…What the hell are you?"
Part of me wanted to strike a cool pose and shout, My name is Hardship. I'm a detective.
Instead I answered An Jin-ho's question with something else.
"An Jin-ho of Freedom. An Awakened who can move the air around him."
"…"
"You joined Freedom because of ——————, didn't you?"
"…"
"Not very surprised."
"I figured if it was you, you'd somehow know."
The calm way he said it pulled a dry laugh out of me before I could help it.
This guy had clearly ranked me pretty high inside his own head.
Not that it changed what I had to say.
"So what exactly are y—"
"Shut up, you thick-skulled bastard."
I cut him off hard. An Jin-ho's face didn't so much as twitch.
But then—
"Don't get it twisted, An Jin-ho. That chain you people think you cut is still running just fine. Using Freedom? You think those idiots took you in because they're stupid?"
"What the hell are you—!"
One line from me and his composed expression cracked wide open.
"Don't assume the underside you know is the whole thing. Keep stumbling around like this and you'll go out having done the one thing you find most unforgivable."
At that, he couldn't even answer. He just stood there with his mouth hanging open.
A few seconds passed.
Then, as if he'd pulled himself together, An Jin-ho started closing the distance, slow and steady, and opened his mouth again.
Four steps or so. He narrowed it carefully and reached a hand toward me—
"Hey! You son of a bitch!"
A flash of gold light shot in and slammed into An Jin-ho.
"You… I don't know what you are, but it looks like I've got a lot I need to hear from you."