The Asura's Gambit
Lee Hocheon watched Choi Seongcheol's press conference in real time. Three horned heads. Six arms. Blood-red eyes that radiated an overwhelming dread.
"Terrifying."
His emotions rarely swung, but that didn't mean he had none. He, too, felt fear at the sight of Choi Seongcheol. His face simply refused to show it.
So he's willing to come out this hard.
This was no private vendetta — Choi Seongcheol had mobilized the whole of Sura Guild. Had the guild members actually agreed to it? There was no way to know, but it said everything about how much power the man commanded.
Killing Choi Seongcheol right away is out of the question.
Because of the gates. When an S-rank gate broke, a city was erased. The one that had ruptured in Kuwait two months earlier had claimed two and a half million lives. Nothing said that would happen here, but if an S-rank gate ever burst open in Seoul, South Korea would take a blow from which it could never recover.
Hm. It was far thornier than he'd expected. Killing Choi Jinwoo had been a necessary act, but the world refused to be that simple.
The gates still have to be dealt with, though.
His instant-death skill targeted living creatures, which meant it ought to work on monsters as well. The trouble was that the inside of a gate swarmed with anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred of them.
Twenty. That's all he could kill right now.
Hopelessly insufficient. So he turned to the internet and began digging into gates.
The key to clearing a gate is the boss monster...
The rest of the monsters posed little real threat — which meant he only needed to spend the instant-death skill on the boss.
The problem was getting to it. Other complications kept springing up. And then, quite suddenly, he found himself wondering just how much stronger his body had become. When he'd roughly tested it last time, he was already performing beyond human limits.
What if he could take down monsters himself? What if he could close in on the boss with his mana still in reserve? A solution seemed to take shape before him.
There was another path as well: wait for a gate to break. Once every monster had poured out, he would need only to kill the boss and leave the rest to the Management Bureau and the guilds. There would be casualties, but at least the nation would not fall.
Of course, all of it was conjecture. Nothing guaranteed it would actually work — for all he knew, monsters might not register as living creatures at all, leaving the skill unusable.
Then he would simply have to verify it. What he didn't know, he would learn one piece at a time. Even if Choi Seongcheol made his move, finding him would be difficult for some time yet. He set out alone, toward a gate.
Hunter Management Bureau, Crime Investigation Division. Seo Gichan, Park Gwangdo, Kang Yeji — the ones who, until recently, had been called the division's aces were gathered in one room, though ever since the Judgment Seat had appeared, nobody used that word anymore.
"When's the Chief getting here?"
Kim Woocheol had called this meeting. Right on cue, the door swung open and he walked in.
"Seo Gichan. The warrant for Judgment Day has come through, so push the investigation forward."
"Understood."
"Yeji. How's your end holding up?"
Kang Yeji was managing the perpetrators held at the shelter. Her expression hardened at once.
"Not good. You need to get this side sorted out, and fast."
"Why? What's wrong?"
"At the rate we're going, the healers and the doctors are going to die before the perpetrators do. Even working in shifts, someone has to stay on-site twenty-four hours a day, running surgery and healing back to back — the fatigue is brutal. And worst of all, they'll barely pull someone through only to watch him die the next day, so their will keeps breaking. The perpetrators themselves are under round-the-clock surveillance and are showing signs of depression. Even I go numb the moment I set foot in that shelter. I've started dreading the commute."
"Hm."
This was a fairly serious problem — no, a grave one. If they lost healers and doctors in the business of protecting perpetrators, the public would be within its rights to hurl stones at them.
Park Gwangdo spoke up in agreement. "Something has to give, one way or another. The upkeep costs alone are staggering."
"And we can't just leave them to be slaughtered at the Judgment Seat's hands, either."
"Better that than losing our doctors and hunters. The juvenile detention side isn't protecting anyone anyway, are they?"
The school-violence perpetrators held in juvenile detention were dying helplessly, one after another. There were simply too many of them; bringing them all to the shelter was impossible.
"Haah... hold tight for now. I'm going to go have a word with the Director."
Kim Woocheol headed straight for the Director's office. Just yesterday, after Choi Seongcheol's visit, the man had been lamenting that everyone else ought to learn to clean up their own messes.
"Ugh. Here we go."
He knocked at the door. From inside came the Director's voice.
"If that's you, Kim Woocheol, don't come in. I mean it — I'll kill you."
Kim Woocheol ignored the warning and entered. The Director, a man in his fifties, lay sprawled sideways across the sofa, watching him. Bald right through the crown, he looked like any perfectly ordinary middle-aged uncle.
"I have something to discuss with you, sir."
"No. I said I'd kill you if you came in, so why did you? You want to die?"
"Come on, cut me some slack here."
"...Sit down."
Kim Woocheol's wheedling earned him a wave of the Director's hand — and a cup of tea poured for him.
"Did you hand over all the materials to Choi Seongcheol's people?"
Yesterday, in order to send Choi Seongcheol home appeased, the Director had promised him every cooperation they could give.
"Yes, sir. I organized everything and sent it straight over."
Kim Woocheol answered, then relayed Kang Yeji's report word for word.
"You punk. Do you have any idea how much money we've sunk into that place? How hard I had to work just to talk the doctors into it?"
"...Even so, sir, I don't think this is right."
"Ever since that Judgment Seat or whatever showed up, you've turned into a blithering idiot. Can't even make a judgment call on your own anymore. Suspend it."
"...Understood."
The Director took a sip of tea and spoke again.
"How's Choi Seongcheol today?"
"No unusual movement, sir."
"Has he gone to the gates?"
"Yes. We've received reports that he left to clear his assigned gates."
"Phew. Keep a close eye on that side. It's priority one. You know what I'm telling you?"
"I do, sir."
"Know, my ass. A man who actually knew something wouldn't be up here whining at me. Spend that time coddling and coaxing him instead! If Choi Seongcheol throws a fit and refuses to clear his gates, we are all well and truly fucked!"
Kim Woocheol clutched his head. A whole handful of hair came away in his fingers.
"And the investigation into the Judgment Seat?"
"During the drunk-driving incident, he even reached out to media outlets directly, but right now we can't find so much as a trace of him. He appears to have gone to ground with no intention of surfacing."
"This is driving me mad. Mad, I tell you! Woocheol."
The Director called him by name. That meant the conversation was turning private.
"Yes. Hyung."
He addressed the Director as an elder brother. The two men had spent no fewer than thirty years as sworn siblings.
"Do you think the Judgment Seat can kill Choi Seongcheol?"
"What do you mean?"
"You've been watching that ability up close all this time, haven't you? Would it work on a man like Choi Seongcheol?"
"Hm. I'd say it might... but even for Choi Seongcheol, could he really stop his own brain from rupturing? Then again, S-rank hunters are beings from another dimension entirely, so perhaps he could."
"Hm. Is that so? In that case—"
The Director leaned forward, drawing close, and lowered his voice to a whisper.
The Director's expression was utterly serious. Kim Woocheol's eyes wavered hard.
South Korea never knew a quiet day anymore. Since the Judgment Seat's appearance, the nation had been through the Park Woohyun affair, the death of Choi Jinwoo, and now the opening act of Choi Seongcheol's revenge. Public opinion, which had been riding its dopamine high all the way through the Park Woohyun incident, turned dead serious the moment Choi Jinwoo died.
Survival came before justice, and so public opinion sided with Choi Seongcheol. His record as an S-rank hunter was substantial, and his fanbase was large. From the very start, the country's mere three S-rank hunters had all enjoyed the people's trust. However comet-like the Judgment Seat's rise had been, the wall they had built over the years could not be brought down in a single blow.
There were dissenting voices, of course.
Amid all this, the press, too, began running negative takes on the Judgment Seat. Even KMS, the outlet that had made itself the face of support for him, turned its back. That was how immense Choi Seongcheol's power truly was.
And in truth, it wasn't merely the standing of an S-rank hunter at work. Beyond gate clearing, hunter guilds ran all manner of businesses — mana stone research and sales, hunter development, guild consulting, mercenary dispatch, item sales, and more. Their influence ran deep through every corner of the Korean economy. Their entanglement with the conglomerates and the political establishment was a given. And so, quite naturally, everyone in the country had no choice but to tiptoe around him.
Asura Choi Seongcheol moved fast, convening an internal meeting at once. The executives of Sura Guild gathered in a single room, and a handsome man with features like carved stone rose to his feet and began the briefing.
"Our subject is the Judgment Seat. From this point on, we will refer to him as sd1234. Having reviewed the Crime Investigation Division's files, I can report that what they learned about sd1234 amounts to very little: that he can kill a person simply by seeing their face, that he can dictate the manner of death, and that his information network does not extend beyond the internet."
"So how do we catch him?"
Choi Seongcheol asked for nothing but the business at hand.
"Our assessment is that tracking him would be extremely difficult — even the Crime Investigation Division, staffed with special-ability users, failed at it. We must draw him out instead. The simplest method is to apply pressure through the gates."
"What do you mean?"
Choi Seokhyeon — the strategist of Sura Guild, an executive, and the man touted as its next S-rank hunter — drew a slow breath.
"We simply stop clearing gates. Until the Judgment Seat shows his face. The burden on the Hunter Management Bureau and the other guilds will climb sharply, and gates will begin to break."
It was a breathtakingly childish scheme. We won't be doing our jobs — the rest of you deal with it. But compared to what it stood to gain, the side effects were far too many.
"The moment a gate breaks, public opinion turns on us. And the other S-ranks won't sit still for it, either."
Whenever a gate ruptured, even without loss of life, the property damage was staggering. When it was people's own homes being leveled, no kind words were going to leave their mouths.
"Of course, that's how it begins. But as time passes, the public will start pinning every last shred of blame on sd1234. The Management Bureau and the guilds included."
In the end, the argument was this: as the direct damage kept piling up, every curse would land on the one who had caused it all — the Judgment Seat. And if that happened, there was a strong chance the punishment of criminals would no longer command public support.
"He wants to change society. If he's cornered, do you truly believe he'll sit still?"
"And the S-rank gates?"
"Those we will, of course, continue to resolve."
"Hm."
Choi Seongcheol weighed it. A full stoppage of every gate except the S-ranks. In his heart, he wanted to hunt the man down and tear him limb from limb — but reality said otherwise.
"Any other opinions?"
The executives' faces made their displeasure plain, yet not one of them offered an alternative. Every man in the room feared Choi Seongcheol.