At the End of the Rat Hole
Dawn came to the detention camp.
At an hour when nearly everyone slept, Gwak Sang-gu was doubled over a stomach in open revolt.
Grrgle—
"Agh, damn it. It looked decent, so I stuffed my face..."
He had gone at the mud-meat with real enthusiasm. Two straight days of wolfing down something that held not a single nutrient had left his gut in agony.
"Aigoo. The life I lead..."
Once he had been a playboy roaming the night streets of Hangzhou. Now he was a man on death row, waiting for nothing but the day he would die.
The charge was the violation of a woman. One night, out chasing pleasure, he had fallen into a dalliance with the granddaughter of the lord of Mangeom Manor, a clan of no small name.
Then the real disaster broke. Terrified her fiancé might learn of it, the young woman of Mangeom Manor had thrown the whole affair onto him, claiming she had been forced.
"Hic... sob, I said I didn't want to, but that man forced me..."
"Th-this outrage against heaven and man!!"
It had been a night they both agreed to. Before the weight of Mangeom Manor and a woman's tears, no excuse would hold.
Seized without warning and sentenced to death, he had been dragged here without even managing to get proper word to his only sister.
"My brother is my pride...!"
She had always looked up at him with eyes full of respect. Even as he was hauled away in disgrace before her, he had not been able to give her a single decent word.
"Sang-ah..."
A lovely little sister, too dear to trade for anything in the world. If he could only see her again, he felt he could die without regret.
Click.
The food slot in the solitary-cell door opened, and a voice came through.
"Number 71. You awake?"
A stern voice beyond the door. Certain it belonged to a guard, Gwak Sang-gu shot upright and answered.
"Ah, yes! I'm awake!!"
"What's the charge?"
"I-it's the crime of violating a woman."
"Feel wronged?"
"...No. It's my own fault."
In a way, it had been coming. He had been faithless to his post as head of the merchant guild, and a man who spent his nights roaming the streets was bound to meet a ruin like this sooner or later.
"Got family?"
"My parents have passed. I have one younger sister."
"Anything you want left to her?"
"Pardon?"
"I'll pass it on."
"Y-you truly mean that!!"
Surprise flooded Gwak Sang-gu's eyes. He nodded furiously.
"...In Hangzhou there is a small company called the Baekwoon Merchant Guild. I would be grateful if a letter could be sent to Gwak Sang-ah there."
"Fine. What do I tell her?"
At that, Gwak Sang-gu shut his mouth. A moment later he began in a choked voice.
"Tell her I'm sorry, for being a shameful brother.... Sob. If there is a next life, I'll live it putting my strength to use for my family. Please tell her that.... Hic."
He broke where he stood and began to wail. And then, a line he had never expected reached him.
"Then you can tell her yourself."
"Pardon?"
Crack!!
Something solid split. In the same instant, the iron door that had been shut fast began to swing slowly open.
"Wh-what...!?"
His jaw would not close. Standing in the doorway was a young man with a gaunt look about him and hair in a wild tangle.
Gwak Sang-gu knew that face. It was the man who had collapsed, out of nowhere, with a thud.
"You were on the prison transport...!"
The other nodded. Looking down at him, he asked:
"Do you want to see your sister?"
"...Yes. Yes!!"
"Then come with me."
Gwak Sang-gu blinked, but only for a moment. He nodded furiously and, as if bewitched, took the hand held out to him.
Grip.
Step. Step.
The corridors of the detention camp ran on like a maze. Gwak Sang-gu and I picked our way along that winding path with care.
"Hoo... huh... hoo..."
Behind me, the man let out cautious breaths, wound tight as a wire.
Someone would have said it. Escaping alone was already more than enough—why waste the effort saving somebody else?
I had an answer to that, and I could give it without flinching.
Because this one is Gwak Sang-ah's older brother.
Gwak Sang-ah, the Greatest Beauty of Hangzhou. She had another name as well.
The Fairy of Ten Thousand Gold.
A mercantile genius who succeeded at whatever she touched, joined to a beauty startling enough to earn the title.
In the original work she had backed Gwan Chae-ryeong with no small presence, and there was something she was always saying.
"Set beside my brother, my talent is a firefly before the moonlight."
"...If only he were still alive, this place of mine would have been his."
That brother was standing in front of me now. Childhood memory always ships with a buff, of course.
Even if only half of it is true, it's a bargain.
As I stood, I had neither connections nor talent. If I could at least scrape together capital, I might have a chance of chasing the prestigious-clan bastards already pulling ahead.
And if I can bring Gwak Sang-ah in later as well, so much the better.
I stole a glance at Gwak Sang-gu. He blinked back at me.
"Wh-why are you looking at me like that?"
"Haha. It's nothing."
I turned the talk aside at once. Even so, I couldn't keep the thought down.
How did this face ever pass for a playboy...?
The cheekbones on him were outrageous. I had been certain he would turn out a tremendous beauty of a man, and I had not expected faces from the same blood to diverge this far.
I was still turning over the genetic mystery of the Gwak family when a chime rang.
Object scan complete.
View results?
Huh?
Something had risen in front of my eyes. I nodded, and a window unfurled.
Another chime.
Oh...!?
Gwak Sang-gu's profile was right there in front of me. Name, age, realm, extracted keywords—all of it laid out.
This is going to be useful.
Uses were already stacking up in my head. The corner of my mouth was climbing toward my ear when footsteps carried in from down the corridor.
"Shh. Quiet."
Gwak Sang-gu clamped his mouth shut and nodded. I eased my head past the wall. At the far junction, two bulky guards stood the night watch.
Neither of them has opened his energy gates. Ordinary men, through and through.
No need to worry about Hanja arts. A night shift at a camp for the powerless was never going to be staffed with that grade of personnel.
I quietly picked a pebble off the floor.
"Y-young master... you aren't going to use that on the guards, are you?"
My body had climbed past a decent ordinary man. Even without an art, I could probably put them down.
Kick up a fuss doing something stupid, and I won't be able to clean up after it.
No reason to scratch a scab that wasn't bleeding. I drew my energy up in silence and carved a single Hanja art into the stone.
"Resound."
Blue light coiled over the pebble. I stretched my right arm and swung, clean and hard.
Shriiiing!!
A sharp burst tore at the ears. Both guards snapped their eyes toward the wall of the opposite corridor.
"Eek!? Wh-what was that just now!!"
The rookie yanked the telescopic baton from his belt. Shaking, he looked to the senior.
"I-it's an intruder, isn't it, senior!!"
A reasonable opinion. The senior's answer was merciless.
"Hey, you goddamn idiot. Get a grip."
"Aack!"
He cracked the rookie across the back of the head and looked at him as if the sight itself were an insult.
"Use your head for once. You think some intruder would be crazy enough to crawl into this shithole, where we lock up powerless nobodies with nobody behind them?"
"Ah... well, that is true, but..."
"Fine. I'll give you a hundred concessions and pretend somebody really came. One shot of Head Warden Ma's Suppress, and—"
"They'd be dried fish on the spot!"
"There you go. Now you're talking sense."
The rookie nodded with fervor. The senior yawned wide enough to split his face and started walking.
"It's obviously just some old stone lantern in Block Three blowing out. You know what happens if we dawdle and the Warden catches us, right?"
"Huk—anything but that...!!"
"Right? Move. Follow me."
"Yes, sir!!"
The two of them shot off down the opposite corridor. Crouched in the dark, I rose slowly to my feet.
"Come on. We slip through while we can."
"Ah—yes!"
Gwak Sang-gu stuck to me, still blinking. Once we were past the junction the pair had been watching, the rest was a free pass. Nothing else stood in the way. We cut straight through the camp.
"Um, young master...?"
"What is it?"
"Have you been here before...!?"
"No. Why would I come to a dump like this twice?"
"Then how are you finding the way so smoothly, like it's your own house?!"
"......"
I had no answer I could give him. Say it out loud, and I would be treated as a lunatic. That much was obvious.
...That bastard of an author. Every time a prison showed up in the background, he copy-pasted the exact same 3D asset, day after day.
Honest Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, not even flipped left to right. Thanks to that, every passage of this prison sat in my head in perfect shape.
All right. Next is the last gate.
I made straight for the laundry room. In the corner sat a drainage inspection hatch. I hauled aside the iron plate lying loosely over it.
Screeech—!
Pitch-black dark opened under the floor. A drainage duct, just wide enough for one person to crawl.
"Th-there's something like this under the floor!!"
Sang-gu's eyes looked ready to fall out of his head. His face was asking what I actually was.
"Details later. For now, we go."
"Ah, yes!!"
I folded myself into the passage at once.
The last gate of the escape. Getting through it was genuinely vile.
"Urp—gack..."
"I-I can't breathe!!"
Gwak Sang-gu, crawling after me, dry-heaved again and again. The laundry drainage duct had the bad luck to join the sewage pipe that the filth ran through.
Rotten fish-water and stale ammonia braided into a stench past anything I could have imagined.
I clenched my teeth and crawled, and crawled. How long we went on like that, I couldn't have said.
Far ahead, a faint light began to show. Through the lattice of iron bars sealing the end of the pipe, thin moonlight was leaking in.
If we can just get out there...!
The bars were rusted and loose. I set my strength into one leg and kicked. It was the first time I had used the strengthened body since my energy gates opened.
Screech. Thunk!
The bars lodged dully in the ground outside. Sang-gu and I threw ourselves into the grass, racing each other.
"Hah—huk—hah...!"
I dropped onto the ground, dragging in air. Cool night wind poured into my lungs.
"Whew. Worst moment of my life."
"...I honestly thought a smell could kill a man."
Outside air, breathable again. The fact of the jailbreak was only now sinking in, but there was no time to sit and moan about it.
Watchtowers along the outer wall came into view. On each of them a searchlight of the character Bright turned slowly, sweeping the stone.
By a mercy, the tower on our side alone was dark.
...Lucky.
Still too early to call it fortune.
"A little farther. First we get clear of this place..."
That was the moment.
Tsss—
Tap.
Out of the dark at our backs, a sound that did not belong scraped cold across my ear.
"...Hoo."
A thin exhale. The acrid smell of rolled tobacco, riding the wind. Every hair on my body stood up at once.
Damn it. Don't tell me...
I forced my creaking neck around.
A deep shadow lay across the camp's outer wall. In that pitch-black, a single red ember flared, and died.
"...Outside wind's pretty sweet."
Step. Step.
A man coming on in a voice sunk low. With every pace he took, the chirring of the grass insects cut off, one by one.
The clouds parted. Under the spill of moonlight, his silhouette came clear.
Head Warden Ma Cheol. Rolled tobacco clenched in his mouth, he fixed us with a pair of savage eyes.
"Shame. You'll have to go back in."
The instant I was sure we had cleared the last hurdle, I ran straight into the worst of them.