Something Out of a Fairy Tale (2)
Even among villain organizations, there exists a tier above the rest — the Four Great Organizations.
And of those four, the two most infamous are Freedom and Lilis.
People often call them the mother and father of the villain world, and the question of which is more vile is a frequent topic of conversation. Most people answer without hesitation: Lilis.
You can tell just from their respective goals.
If Freedom is an organization twisted around some warped ideal, Lilis is simply a bunch of edgelords who want nothing more than absolute power.
Not that ranking villain organizations against each other is anything but absurd to begin with.
Calling them edgelords almost makes them sound harmless.
Funny thing is, for all how violent and vicious their members' crimes are, Lilis's internal structure is sturdier than any other organization's. They're extremely closed off — the moment you're accepted as a member, they confiscate your phone and every other electronic device. Going outside is forbidden, too, so any chance of information leaking is naturally locked down tight.
Which is why, no matter how many days I spent glued to a computer hunting for them, I could barely snag so much as a single lead on their whereabouts.
Of course, a huge part of that airtight control comes down to the Lilis boss's ability — but set that aside for now. Communication with the upper ranks is strictly one-way from their end, so even if you squeeze the grunts, you'll never get to the people at the top. End of story.
This time, though, the novel's information really paid off.
In the original story, during Lee Yeon-hui's all-out war with Freedom, there was a scene where she ran into a Lilis spy embedded inside Freedom's ranks. She'd captured and interrogated him, so the description of his appearance was fairly detailed.
After tearing through Freedom's facilities hunting for him, I finally managed to catch the guy.
Given his role as a spy, he was the one who had to initiate contact — which meant he was the only person outside the organizational hierarchy who still held a line of communication to Lilis's upper brass.
Using the intel I pulled from him, I tracked down one of the Lilis branch facilities I'd been searching for so long. That much went well. Hell, factoring in that I'd even gotten my hands on their facility blueprints, it was an outstanding start.
Or so it should have been.
"—Boss, if you go that way, there probably won't be anyone there."
"Okay."
"Over there! Intruder over there!"
"—Boss, for real this time! That one's a completely empty facility."
"I'm trusting you."
"Over there! He's right there!"
"—Boss."
"Shut up."
"—Just one last time! Really, just once more!"
And the result of trusting him that one last time:
Looking around, this place seemed to be a laboratory. I rolled my eyes and counted the people — one, two, three…
"Hey, you bastard! You said there wouldn't be anyone here! Can't you even give directions right?! How is every single place I go packed with people?!"
"—Boss."
"Don't you drop your voice at me, you little—"
"—No, look! Isn't that the kid? The one you've been looking for. She looks older, but she matches the last photo pretty well."
At those words, I turned my gaze — and found a girl who looked about middle-school age staring blankly in our direction.
Long platinum-blonde hair cascading down to her waist. Eyes the same color as her hair — no, a shade deeper.
"—Whoa, she really looks like a doll…"
The guy watching Choi A-rin through the micro-camera attached to my clothes let out a quiet murmur of awe.
Looks like I'm not too late.
That was the whole reason I'd been tearing through Freedom's hideouts hunting for a Lilis spy in the first place — to rescue Choi A-rin, one of the original story's key characters.
And it seemed rushing here had paid off. Choi A-rin didn't look like she'd undergone that experiment yet.
I strode toward her to confirm, looking her over — and my brow furrowed before I could stop it.
I grabbed her thin arm and turned it over. Needle marks packed every inch of skin without a single gap.
These insane bastards…
I forced down the emotion rising in my chest and decided to confirm first.
"Name."
"…Huh?"
"What's your name."
"Choi… A-rin…"
So I was right after all.
If I kept my mouth shut any longer, I was going to grind my teeth to dust, so I spoke again immediately.
"How old were you when they brought you here?"
"…Since I was ten…"
The novel never went into much detail about Choi A-rin's past. Given how ugly those memories were, she was a character who avoided thinking about them. All I knew from the story was that she'd been locked up and experimented on for years since she was little, and that at the end of that final experiment, she'd ended up with a power she never wanted. Nothing as specific as her age had ever come up.
Hearing things like this from the person herself — from a character out of a novel — drives home, bone-deep, that this place isn't a story. It's another reality.
"Excuse me~ Sorry to interrupt while you're having such a lovely moment~ but you really shouldn't lay hands on our precious test subject — ah, I mean, our little princess."
That snickering, snide tone set my irritation flaring.
It was the man who'd been standing next to the lab in a daze at first. He'd probably been so stunned by the sudden intrusion that it took him a while to snap out of it. The researchers, for their part, had been huddled trembling in the corner ever since I smashed through the wall.
"…Hey."
"What the hell, you look ridiculously young — is this brat an Awakened?"
"Hey."
"But shit, for a kid to have no manne—"
Crack-crack-crack-crack!
"Uh…?"
Maybe his eyes just couldn't keep up with me. It took him a second to register what I'd done to him.
"AAAAAARGH!"
His arm was bent at a grotesque, unnatural angle. Staring at it, the man screamed — all the leisurely composure from moments ago gone without a trace as he thrashed and rolled across the floor.
"Hey."
"AAAAAH! AAAAH!"
He didn't even try to answer, just kept shrieking. Watching him, my irritation only swelled larger, refusing to die down.
Crunch!
I couldn't hold back. I stomped down on the leg of the man writhing on the floor and crushed it.
"GAAAAAH!"
His scream jumped several volumes higher.
"Hey. You gonna answer me or not? Next is the other leg."
"AAAAH! I—I'll talk! I'll answer! So… so please, just stop!"
"So then."
"…What?"
"When you said that kind of shit — did you stop?"
Crunch.
"GAAAAAAAAH!"
The moment I crushed his other leg too, he screamed like he was about to pass out — and this time he couldn't even roll anymore.
"Don't worry. There's only so much pain I can give you. Once you take that, it'll all be over. And—"
Leaving the man foaming at the mouth and unconscious behind me, I turned back toward Choi A-rin.
"Just so you don't get bored, I'll send all your little friends here along with you."
It was instantaneous.
The time it took Park Yeon-chan to subdue the man could only be described that way — and even that felt inadequate.
Had the man he'd just taken down simply been weak?
Absolutely not.
He wasn't the branch chief in charge of this Lilis outpost, but she'd heard he was one of the stronger Awakened stationed here. Terrain manipulation type, supposedly.
He never even got to use it.
Choi A-rin had zero experience with fights between Awakened, but even to her untrained eyes, the gap in skill was overwhelming.
An Awakened who looked about her age.
Don't tell me he's also…
While that thought was still forming, Park Yeon-chan had already stepped in front of her. He met her eyes and spoke.
"We're getting out of here. You take the captives and head outside."
He rummaged through his pocket and held something out to her — a master key used by the research staff.
As she took it, a question flickered in her eyes.
"What about you?"
He'd told her to go outside, but he clearly hadn't included himself in that plan.
"I—"
BOOOOM!
Just like when Park Yeon-chan had arrived, a hole blasted open in the wall — and someone came stomping through it.
The roar cut off whatever he'd been about to say, but—
"I need to take that guy down first."
—Park Yeon-chan continued without so much as glancing toward the noise, as if he'd known it was coming all along.
Looking in his place, Choi A-rin saw the branch chief of this facility — a massively inhuman bulk of a man — staring down at his fallen subordinate.
Wasn't he afraid? That man could attack at any second.
Thinking that, she turned her gaze back to Park Yeon-chan.
"In exchange."
"…?"
Still paying no attention to what was behind him, he pulled something from around his own neck and gently hung it around Choi A-rin's.
Not a necklace… a pendant, maybe?
A glittering white light. Tinged with gold, the pendant even looked faintly luminous. Choi A-rin was briefly captivated, turning it over in her fingers — then her eyes widened.
"An artifact…?"
This wasn't just some pendant.
A mysterious tool obtainable only from the Tower. Even Choi A-rin could tell the energy radiating from it didn't belong to this world.
"If things get dangerous, grip it and pour your mana in. Can you do that?"
From those words alone, she could guess it was a defensive artifact. She'd been through experiments involving artifact use before, so she at least knew how to operate one.
When she nodded her assent, Park Yeon-chan smiled gently and ruffled her hair.
"Name."
"What…?"
"I asked what your name is."
"…Park Yeon-chan."
Park Yeon-chan.
She felt like she'd heard a similar name recently, but she couldn't place it. Not that she had any attachment to names to begin with — not her own, and not anyone else's.
It wasn't the kind of thing you asked in a situation this urgent. But this time, for some reason, she really wanted to hear it.
"All right. Ready?"
"Yeah."
"Then run!"
On that signal, Choi A-rin took off — and the branch chief, who'd been standing there blankly until that moment, closed the distance from far across the room in an instant, charging straight at her.
"Who said you could leave?"
"I did."
A low voice.
Before she knew it, Park Yeon-chan had slipped between her and the branch chief—
CRAAACK!
—and with a single punch, sent the branch chief's enormous body — easily ten times his own size — flying.
BOOOOM!
Choi A-rin stared, dumbfounded, at the branch chief who'd been smashed into the wall in a sight she could barely believe.
"Go."
Park Yeon-chan jerked his chin toward the hole in the outer wall. She nodded and ran out of the lab, sprinting down the long, wide corridor as fast as she could.
"Hey. I went easy on you, so crawl on out."
"Heh. I was planning to jump you the second you let your guard down — but you're no fool."
He was built like a house. That wasn't a metaphor — he was genuinely that massive. At that size, you had to start wondering whether he still counted as human or if he'd crossed over into monster territory.
With features that distinctive, you'd think I'd recognize him even from a passing mention in the novel. But Lilis as an organization only showed up intermittently in the story before getting wiped out all at once in the end — so Park Yeon-chan knew absolutely nothing about this branch chief.
Still. That was only true of the novel's information.
"—Boss, I found his info! That muscle pig is a pure power type, just like he looks. Though his Awakened profile hasn't been updated in eight years, so his ability quality's probably way higher than it was back then."
Park Jae-hyun, sharing the situation through the micro-camera I was wearing, had dug up the guy's file.
"List of charges."
"—Let's see… whoa, this bastard's a monster. Rape resulting in death, robbery resulting in death, brutal murder. Listing every charge would take all night."
"Okay, that's enough."
To clear Park Yeon-chan's mind of any lingering hesitation—
"No need to overthink it."
—that was more than sufficient.
"Basically means I can kill him however I want, right?"
A chilling smile spread across Park Yeon-chan's lips.
And the fight began.