The Elevator

Turn the clock back just a little. Three days ago.

The conference room of Eunha Guild.

In that lavish chamber, dressed in crystal chandeliers, the air hung thick with the sweetness of champagne and the bite of hard whiskey. A dozen or so of the people who actually moved the guild sat gathered around a round table, their faces grave, arguing over what came next.

"So. What do you intend to do?"

The executive who oversaw the intelligence team broke the silence. He jerked his tie loose with a twitch of irritation and tapped the table with two fingers.

"We've had our dirty laundry aired in front of the entire world. The stock has been hitting the daily limit-down, day after day. Do we tuck our tails and bow a little deeper, or do we throw the full weight of the guild at them and hit back hard? It's time we made a decision."

Irritation and boredom chased each other across every face in the room. A few of them even huffed out incredulous little laughs.

"Do? We dip our heads just enough to look sorry, and she'll slink off on her own."

The raid captain across the table hooked one leg over the other and slung it up onto the wood.

"Have you all forgotten what that bitch is like? An S-rank Hunter, and yet — tsk."

"She refused her evaluation because she was scared of having to actually use her power, remember? I nearly died laughing when I heard that."

"I guarantee you — leave one comment on a news article calling her a parachute appointment who doesn't deserve to be Association President, and she'll sniffle about it all day."

Laughter broke out around the table.

The Lee Dohwa they remembered had always been like that. A coward who possessed overwhelming power and lacked even the spine to swing it. A fragile, pathetic child who flinched from the smell of blood and feared being hated more than anything else in the world. That was the verdict every person in the room shared.

"Exactly. Stick a microphone in her face and she hunches her shoulders and looks anywhere but ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠at the camera. That girl."

"And then she puts on a hat and suddenly decides to play dictator. I'll give her this — nobody saw that coming."

The intelligence executive shook his head as he flicked through a holopad.

"And to think she dug up every last scrap of those lawmakers' dirty little secrets and dropped them, word-perfect, on the day of her inauguration. We really did get hit in the back of the head."

"Doesn't change what she is."

The raid captain crushed out his cigar and spoke as if the matter were already settled.

"We pretend to roll over. Peel off a few worthless outlying operations and toss them to the Association like scraps. She'll swallow it and move on. You honestly think she's going to start an all-out war?"

Every head around the table nodded. They were certain Lee Dohwa would let it go at that.

And then the day the grace period ended.

Every prediction those executives had made shattered in front of the CCTV feed playing live across the monitors at the front gate.

"…"

"…"

Silence had settled over the wall of giant screens. The faces of men who had been laughing over champagne a moment ago had gone slack with horror.

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It did not look real. The B-rank physical enhancer who had planted his bulk across the front gate now lay mashed into the concrete like a stomped tomato, and the sight of him was so completely, viscerally wrong that the mind refused to accept it.

There had been no fight. No crossing of blades. No exchange of magic.

Three seconds. In the span of a single bored sigh from the Lee Dohwa on the screen — three seconds, and the man was already halfway dead.

Beside the wreck of his colleague, still coughing up pink foam, the Hunter who had been blocking the path with him quietly stepped aside.

"Insane."

"Sh-she was that far outside the scale? An Awakened that strong?"

"Has she been hiding it this whole time?"

Unease spread through the executives like a crack through glass. They had known Lee Dohwa wore the title of the strongest. They had not known it meant this.

They turned, all of them at once, toward the person seated at the head of the table.

The founder of Eunha Guild. One of only three S-rank Awakened in South Korea. The Guild Master — Yoo Eunha.

Someone forced a smile toward the woman sitting there with her silver hair in a neat braid and one leg crossed over the other.

"Ha — haha. Impressive, sure, but that's all it is, right? Our Eunha could do that much without breaking a sweat."

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"Th-that's right! If the Guild Master steps in personally, a brat like that is nothing! Isn't that so?"

Yoo Eunha did not answer. She stared at the screen as if she meant to bore a hole through it.

The same S-rank as herself. No — an S-rank that did not even belong in the same conversation.

On the feed, Lee Dohwa had already passed the front gate and was walking toward Elevator No. 1 in the lobby. Her gaze tipped up toward the camera. Her destination was obvious. The summit of this skyscraper. The conference room they were sitting in.

"Guild Master…"

The Vice Guild Master could not take it anymore. He swallowed dryly and opened his mouth.

"What do we do?"

The weight in that single question was enormous. Go to their knees now and signal surrender — or fight it out to the end. Flip the defense grid on past this point, and it would be a genuine all-out war.

Yoo Eunha closed her eyes. In the space of a breath, tens of thousands of calculations turned over in her head.

And then she opened them. Her pupils flashed as if they had caught a light.

"…I'm sorry?"

Yoo Eunha rose slowly from her chair and pointed at the Lee Dohwa on the screen.

"No matter how strong she is, she has to have a limit."

"G-Guild Master! That's the same as declaring war on the nation…!"

"I know that much. It doesn't matter. If we take Lee Dohwa alive, we can negotiate. And neither side can actually kill the other — that part is even. The moment a single person dies, Korea goes to war overnight."

"So you're saying…"

"Yes. We have the advantage. We have the numbers. And if that bitch is gone, the check on us disappears with her. A coalition of guilds swallowing this country whole wouldn't even be a dream."

The executives hesitated for a heartbeat. Then their faces hardened, and they nodded.

"Understood!"

"Let's give her a broadcast. Tell her we've left a present on every fifth floor."

"Yes, ma'am!"

WEEE-OOO. WEEE-OOO.

Emergency lights stuttered to life in the control room, and the sirens began to wail. On the screen, the floor indicator of the elevator Lee Dohwa was riding climbed steadily upward.

The first floor. The second. The third. The fourth. And then—

A clunk. The elevator stopped.

The announcement rang through the car, and the doors slid open.

The fifth floor.

This was the kennel where Eunha Guild kept and trained the illegally imported monsters of threat level A-rank and above. A floor that seethed with mindless, carnivorous slaughter-weapons, all of them kept hungry.

Lee Dohwa looked down the fifth-floor corridor for a long moment — dark, and thick with the stench of rot. Then she turned her head, slowly, and flicked a glance up at the CCTV lens, as if she meant to meet the eyes of every executive watching from the other side of the glass.

The men at the monitors felt their hearts drop.

Having said that, Lee Dohwa stepped out of the elevator without a backward glance.

"We're opening the containment doors…"

The executives swallowed and locked their eyes on the screen.

And then, roughly a minute after Lee Dohwa set foot in the corridor—

KRRRRRMMMMMMMM—!!!!!

A vibration tore through the tower as if the entire building were coming down. The control room floor bucked like something alive, and concrete dust rained from the ceiling in a hissing sheet.

"Aaaagh!"

"I-is it an earthquake?!"

"Hhk—!"

The executives scrambled under the table or clung to the columns, swearing. Even Yoo Eunha staggered, unable to keep her footing on the heaving floor.

"What… what kind of output is this?"

Horror broke across Yoo Eunha's face. This was far beyond anything recorded and registered with the Hunter Association — so far beyond it that the numbers on file looked like a joke.

Five minutes later, the fifth-floor CCTV, which had been coughing up errors behind a wall of dust and fog, miraculously flickered back to life.

Lee Dohwa walked out across the wreckage of a corridor smashed past any recognizable shape, and stepped into the elevator that had opened for her again.

"Fuck."

Someone among the executives spat the word. Because there was not a drop of blood on Lee Dohwa's suit. Not a speck of dust.

Cold sweat ran down them in sheets. Every person in the room understood it at the same instant.

There's no going back now.

The chance to surrender had already evaporated.

A low hum. The elevator began to climb again.

The sixth floor. The seventh. The eighth. The ninth. And then—

The tenth floor.

A defensive line of Hunters and mercenaries, dug in and waiting. The elevator doors opened. Lee Dohwa glanced at the CCTV the same way she had before, and stepped out into the corridor.

A guild executive screamed it into the radio as if he were coughing up blood.

A moment later, another shockwave heavy enough to rock the building came climbing the walls, and the screams came with it.

"GAAAAAAAH—!!"

Yoo Eunha ran to the window and looked down.

A shatter of glass.

The specially reinforced windows of the tenth floor burst outward as if a bomb had gone off behind them. And through that ruptured glass, Hunters were being thrown.

"Th-that's…!"

The screams of falling Hunters tore the open air.

And what Yoo Eunha saw next sent a colder ripple down her spine than the fall itself.

The ones being hurled outside were not the fragile mage or healer types. They were physical enhancers — Hunters who could hit asphalt from ten stories up in nothing but their own skin ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠and still walk away with their lives.

Yes. That was it. Neither side could kill the other. From Lee Dohwa's position, justification was everything. The image of the Association President murdering someone a week into the job would be fatal — and the Hunter Association President killing a Hunter would be a weakness no one could ever wash off.

She knows exactly where she stands.

That was what frightened Yoo Eunha more than the power. That the woman down there was moving with a running calculation of how each action would turn public opinion.

Then from that monster's point of view, this isn't even a fight.

If it had been a real battle — the kind where blood flew — she might have gotten excited enough to kill someone. That had been the idea. Yoo Eunha swallowed.

Twenty minutes passed like that.

Even the screaming on the other end of the radio cut out, and a strange quiet settled over the building again. The executives stared at the CCTV in a daze.

Ding.

The tenth-floor elevator opened once more, and Lee Dohwa stepped inside. Still not a drop of blood on the suit. Still not a speck of dust.

A low hum. The floor display lit again, numbers blooming red.

The forty-sixth floor. The forty-seventh. The forty-eighth. The forty-ninth. And then—

The fiftieth floor.

In other words: the conference room.

The executives looked at one another with faces gone bloodless. Somewhere in the silence, a throat clicked — a dry swallow so loud it seemed to fill the whole room.

Ding.

"…"

"…"

"…"

The elevator had arrived.

Every pair of eyes in the room turned toward the doors.