Discipline 13. The Disciplinary Committee Leader Does Not Get Ambushed by Villains (3)
Let me say it again.
After my rebirth, it took me quite a long time to arrive at a very simple and obvious resolution: let's live happily.
Every child born in the academy city went through much the same process. Confined to a narrow room under the care of a childcare robot, and from the moment we were capable of learning, we were made to watch educational material every day at a level that bordered on brainwashing.
The moment your gaze drifted even slightly from an educational video — the moment you fidgeted, fussed, did anything else — the AI registered it and brought out the cane.
For me, who carried memories of a past life and developed common sense far earlier than the others, it was an agonizing, hellish time. The grueling mana cultivation technique became my refuge — that should tell you how bad it was.
Spending my days that way in a place that smelled of nothing human, cursing for the longest time the inexplicable phenomenon that had reborn me, it was only natural that I came to feel a burning thirst for human warmth.
And the person who appeared before that starved boy, the first person to take my side, was the woman standing in front of me now.
Kim Dal-bi.
"It's been a while, huh?"
I greeted my childhood friend — still wearing the exact form of her villain persona from the game — in a cold, level voice. Inside, my chest refused to settle down.
It felt like finding a family member who had gone missing. Even so, I suppressed the welling emotion as best I could. I was grateful for all the years I had spent honing my poker face. If I hadn't learned to manage my expressions properly, my face right now would have been quite the spectacle.
"……"
Perhaps she hadn't expected to run into me in a place like this — Kim Dal-bi's eyes had gone wide for a moment. Then her expression smoothed back into composure.
She stared at me and blinked, slowly, deliberately. The seconds until she spoke stretched out long.
"…Long time no see, Woo-jin! You been doing okay?"
Dal-bi greeted me with an easy, breezy smile, as friendly as if we'd only seen each other yesterday. Her voice echoed from inside the dokkaebi mask, and my heart reacted to it. The emotional gap from the day I'd received her letter after years of silence was night and day.
Hearing Dal-bi's voice in person was like striking a spark against embers I'd thought were long dead.
I missed you climbed all the way up my throat. I forced it back down.
I kept my mouth firmly shut and walked toward her. The Bomber Lee Ha-min and the dokkaebi stood directly in my path, and I paid them no mind.
"How are you the Disciplinary Committee Leader…?"
Still stunned, Ha-min gritted his teeth and pulled a remote control out of his pocket.
"You bastards… you're ignoring me!?"
The corners of his mouth finally lifted, trembling violently.
"I've still got plenty of bombs…! Heh…! I could kill every single person on this street! I'm not the kind of guy you get to look down on…!"
Mid-stride, I launched myself at him like a loosed arrow and swung the three-section staff. BOOM!! A shockwave of raw impact and lightning crashed over him. Caught off guard, Ha-min took a vicious blow to the head and went flying through the air. BOOM! His body slammed into the same wall it had struck before.
Then Ha-min fell silent.
He had passed out cold.
The Bomber was a particularly nasty breed of villain who wreaked his explosive games while efficiently staying on the run. But honestly? He was only a difficult opponent when you couldn't find him. Up close, he was this easy to deal with.
I walked over to Ha-min and snapped the remote and his wristwatch without ceremony, then threw the restraints.
Click!
A belt shot out of the restraint device and bound him in an instant. And with that, the obstruction was gone.
I turned my gaze back to Dal-bi. She stood with her arms crossed, watching me quietly.
Relaxed, isn't she.
She had every right to be. It was self-evident that Dal-bi was overwhelmingly stronger than I was.
Dal-bi was a powerhouse approaching the 7th Tier. She commanded the power of the dokkaebi, and on top of that, dokkaebi forces followed her. Whether it was a war of numbers or a war of firepower, her combat strength lost out on neither front. A straight-up cheat of a Unique Ability.
Astonishingly, unlike other Unique Abilities, there was no obvious activation condition or penalty attached to it. Surely there was something — but it was buried so deep that not even the online communities had managed to figure it out.
Which meant that even I had no idea what Dal-bi's weakness was. All I could conclude was that the best answer was to fight her with the Disciplinary Committee's full firepower. Truth be told, it was precisely because monsters like her existed that I had become the Committee Leader in the first place.
Fighting Dal-bi here and now, my defeat was as plain as day. But if it came to a fight, I intended to fight. It wasn't as if I had anywhere to run.
I slipped my hand into my pocket and, pressing quick-dial number one, fired off a brief text message condensing my call-to-arms into a few words.
The recipient was Vice Leader Oh Baek-seo. She'd be right in the middle of carrying out my earlier orders — identifying the traits of the micro drone bombs I'd warned her about and coordinating with the management office to dispose of them.
It was an order I could only give because I already knew how to handle the Bomber. With him now in custody, there was no rush anymore. Better to leave that task to the management office and have Baek-seo join me against Dal-bi instead.
Fzzt!
Lightning mana crackled to life along my three-section staff. Dal-bi must have sensed my killing intent, because her eyes narrowed.
"You planning to arrest me?"
"That's the job."
"Can you, though?"
"We'll see."
I answered flatly, giving my shoulders a single shrug. For a conversation with someone dear to me after all this time, there was precious little warmth in it — but I was neither charming enough nor strong enough to play it cool against Dal-bi.
"First, let me ask one thing."
Before the battle began, the things I wanted to say to her came flooding up all at once. Why she was here. Why she had become a villain. Why she'd said she liked that I was pure. What I had meant to her. And on, and on.
I was curious about all of it, but this was no situation to pick through them one by one. Even so, it was obvious which question — among all the words circling my head — I wanted to ask first. So I asked it.
"Why did you leave without a word? You could have at least told me why before you went."
I knew I had no right to hold Dal-bi back. Still, she could have given me a reason, at least. If she knew it would hurt me, why did she just walk away?
Dal-bi seemed to mull it over, then simply offered a cryptic, laughing tilt of her eyes.
"Would knowing now even mean anything? I've already come way too far to turn back…"
"What kind of nonsense is that?"
What was with the cryptic act this time? A sigh escaped me before I could stop it.
"Just tell me. Stop being so cagey."
Did she think she was the heroine of some drama? What surfaced instead were memories of childhood — the warmth of huddling close with Dal-bi again and again — and then the letters she'd left me at intervals over the years after she disappeared.
In those letters, Dal-bi had called herself trash. To be precise: that even though she had become trash, wouldn't I please believe she was always on my side. It had the same flavor as someone swept up in their feelings enough to slap an embarrassing quote into their messenger status — the kind of thing you'd cringe at later.
But I wasn't enough of a fool to take words dripping with that much longing at face value.
"Why leave without a word, and then leave letters like that behind?"
I wasn't generous enough to play along with that kind of evasive game.
"…Sorry. For being so pathetic."
But Dal-bi gave me no clean answer.
"Why I left the letters… honestly, I don't really know. I just wanted to, I guess. As for leaving without saying anything — I can't really explain that one either."
She gave an awkward, crooked smile.
"But it's true, you know? I'll always be on your side."
"Then just say it—!"
"If I say it, you die."
"What?"
The unexpected answer slammed my mouth shut before I knew it, because my head had suddenly become a storm of confusion. My brain raced to process just what in the world that was supposed to mean.
"…See you around."
Making it clear the conversation was over, Dal-bi turned her back and began to walk away.
This was no time to drown in confusion.
"We're not done talking yet."
The moment I gathered my emotions and squared my stance—
Whoosh!
I threw myself at Dal-bi like a bolt shot from a bow.
In that instant, a dokkaebi threw itself between us.
CLANG!
I swung the three-section staff, and the dokkaebi caught it on its club. Crack! The shockwave of lightning burst outward and shoved the club aside. Judging by its reaction, the force had exceeded its expectations — the creature looked genuinely rattled.
The beauty of the three-section staff was how blisteringly fast and clean its chained movements were. I swung again immediately, hammering the dokkaebi's torso.
WHAM!!
Crackle-CRACK!!
Two chained shockwaves of lightning slammed into the dokkaebi before it could blink. Unable to withstand the impact, it was driven backward — but it didn't fly away. Even as its feet skidded across the ground, it barely held its balance and endured.
Its hide was remarkably tough. It had reinforced its body with mana to a high level, apparently.
The dokkaebi puffed out steam and glared at me with two pairs of menacing eyes.
Chained shockwaves. A technique that had become possible only after my fight with the Anomia goons — I could feel my combat experience accumulating, step by steady step. When I'd tested it before, the result showed it packed roughly one and a half to two times the damage of a normal shockwave, all in a single instant.
Thud. The damage must have piled up all at once, because the dokkaebi buckled, one knee bending toward the ground.
But then—
Ssshh.
Before I could charge in again, smoke rose from the ground and a second dokkaebi took shape. A menacing hulk of a creature, its iron club large and heavy in proportion to its massive frame.
Two dokkaebi blocked my path. Beyond them, I could see Dal-bi's back as she drew further away.
BOOM!
FWOOSH!
The hulk's iron club shattered the ground where I'd stood, flames erupting from the impact. If I'd tried to block that attack head-on, I'd have been reduced to pulp.
Still — it had clearly throttled its speed on purpose, the way one fires warning shots. It must have noticed I knew how to dodge.
Going easy on me?
That stung my pride considerably.
I traded blows with the two dokkaebi, irritation boiling up at the pair of them condescending to an opponent they clearly didn't understand. Click! Seizing my opening, I drew the wall-breaker staff from its harness at my hip with my free hand. Neither of the dokkaebi had anticipated the extra weapon.
Intense turquoise lightning flooded down the staff's length — and I swung.
CRAAAACK!!
A blinding flash engulfed both dokkaebi, and a torrent of lightning burst across them and swallowed them whole. Ssshh. The two creatures crumpled, powerlessly extinguished.
Whoosh! I tore through the aftermath of the lightning blast and hurled myself at Dal-bi. Somewhere in that instant, the wall-breaker's explosion had startled her — I could see her whirling toward me.
Shing!
Reflexively, Dal-bi drew her blade—
—and my three-section staff collided with it.
CLANG!
Crackle!
"Kgh!"
Had she believed I couldn't punch through two dokkaebi in such short order? Caught unprepared, Dal-bi couldn't even wrap her mana around her blade properly, and her balance broke.
I didn't know what circumstances had driven Dal-bi to this. What was clear was simple: she was a villain, and I was the Disciplinary Committee. The fact that I had to subdue her first and interrogate her afterward hadn't changed one bit.
My lightning-wreathed staff cleaved through the air, driving straight for the nape of Dal-bi's neck.