They Chose Suicide
Korean Awakened suffering from Mana Insensitivity could be cured as well.
They would have to pay, of course. Money alone, however, would not be enough.
The government of the Republic of Korea shall conduct a proper investigation into the cashiering of Shin Haneul.
That was the condition he set on the table.
The government of the Republic of Korea refused the hand Shin Haneul held out. More precisely, it did not stop at refusal. It answered him with one enormous middle finger.
As demanded, a full reinvestigation into the cashiering of Shin Haneul has been conducted.
The results, however, confirm that the cashiering of Shin Haneul was justified.
The reason was simple.
High-ranking officials had been tangled up in the work of shielding Park Gyeongtae and grinding Shin Haneul into garbage. And after he began to make his name in the United States, after the tide of public opinion started to turn? Still more people knotted themselves into the mess. Admit the wrong now, and the political lives of everyone who had set a foot on that pile would be in danger.
Accepting Shin Haneul's demand was, therefore, profoundly inconvenient.
On top of that, the Republic of Korea felt no great urgency about treating Mana Insensitivity. Captain Park Gyeongtae—back from his injuries, and having swallowed the mana stones for himself—was, at present, one of a handful of the nation's strongest. Send every top Awakened in the Republic of Korea along with him, and most mutated dungeons could be cleared somehow or other.
Of course, that only held as far as the mid-sized ones. Unlike the United States, where Shin Haneul stood, they could not so much as dream of a large dungeon, and yet—
"Large dungeons are out. We'll evacuate the people and let the things burst."
"What else can we do? It isn't the capital region, anyway."
"The public is going to be absolutely furious, though. If Shin Haneul were still here, failing to clear a large dungeon wouldn't even have been a question."
Then one lawmaker offered an idea.
"Then we simply say it isn't a large dungeon. We say it's something harder than that, and that is why it can't be cleared."
"Oh!"
"Now that isn't bad at all."
Put that way, driving Shin Haneul out would not be what caused the dungeon bursts. Unprecedented ultra-large mutated dungeons, the likes of which the world had never seen, would merely have had the bad luck to appear, and they would merely have been impossible to clear.
"A masterstroke. A masterstroke!"
Done this way, they could slip free of blame for failing to stop the large dungeons. Nor was that all. They could properly revive their justification for choosing Park Gyeongtae over Shin Haneul.
He, too, could clear a large—in truth, mid-sized—mutated dungeon somehow, so long as the rest of the unit went with him. On the surface, the two would look like equals.
"In the first place, Shin Haneul may not even be operating alone. How could one man be stronger than the entire elite force of our Republic of Korea?"
"Exactly. I've found it suspicious for a long time."
"Of course. Of course. It's an absurd story."
No one mentioned that the United States had no reason to play along.
And the paper AARC had published in the middle of it all—A Study on the Possibility and Danger of Irregular Mana Explosions among Patients with Mana Insensitivity?
It never even made the agenda.
Patients with Mana Insensitivity, suddenly exploding. It did not even sound like a sentence.
"Then—does anyone oppose this view?"
"No one!"
They applauded as one and fell in behind the proposal, and a press conference was opened at once.
They adjusted the reported scale of the other dungeons at home as well. Certain small dungeons were announced as mid-sized, and mid-sized ones as large. The record had been inflated.
It was the perfect two-for-one.
That doubts would be raised overseas was only natural.
But there was no proof.
Data on dungeon scale was classified, a domain only the nation in question could enter. Insist that the results had come out that way, and it was difficult for anyone else to produce direct evidence to the contrary.
And then there was television, the papers, the internet communities and social media. Public opinion was worked so skillfully that ordinary people had no path to the truth. Even when someone tried to cite a foreign article, muddying the waters, trolling, and conspiracy talk made it hard for any third party to follow the thread, and anyone advancing a credible claim was buried.
But Shin Haneul had already expected it to end this way.
Speak plainly, and he preferred it. Had they broken his forecast here and come in with their heads bowed, he would have been faintly disappointed. But no—everything ran exactly as expected.
Apologize.
or commit suicide.
Faced with a choice whose answer was already plain, the government of the Republic of Korea selected the latter.
Shin Haneul, for his part, held out a hand to individual Korean Awakened as well. Almost no one took it. His single condition—a declaration of conscience—was, they said, too heavy to bear.
Nothing to be done.
A glance at the calendar told him the time was drawing near for the rifts to widen.
Lee Junhyuk's commute home was always a sardine tin. Wedged onto the bus, he barely managed to catch a strap. Two stops before his own, he pressed the bell—a thin chirp—and got off. Walking a little was better than throwing up.
There was nothing he needed to get home early for, and no one waiting on him. One earbud in, a convenience-store bag looped around his wrist, a slow walk beneath the streetlights. That was how Lee Junhyuk finished his days now.
"Well... this kind of life isn't so bad."
Not long ago, he could not even have imagined thinking such a thing. Back then he, too, had been one of the foremost Awakened in the Republic of Korea. There were even people who ranked his ability just behind Park Gyeongtae and Shin Haneul.
Then, one day, he suddenly could not use mana. Mana Insensitivity.
He still remembered his mind going white when he heard the diagnosis.
Fuck.
Lying in a hospital bed, staring at the ceiling, he had truly believed it was all over. Climbing out of that shock had taken time. These days, well, he was getting by, telling himself it was what it was.
The recent string of mutated-dungeon bursts had something to do with it. The Awakened death rate climbed by the day, and he had heard that a fair number of the colleagues who once stood with him were dead. The more stories like that reached him, the more his resentment at having retired faded away.
Haneul. I know you were wronged... but what can you do. I don't see a reason to cure this thing if it means making a declaration of conscience.
Mana runaway? He didn't believe that bullshit. Hadn't the country's own foremost experts dismissed it as nonsense?
That rumor is funny, too—the one about National Intelligence Service agents showing up and dragging off anyone who lives in the capital, or near the high officials. In a liberal democracy, does a thing like that even make sense?
The convenience-store bag fluttered in the wind. He had only just reached home: a small, precious house, bought on a full thirty-year mortgage when he retired. He entered the code and opened the door.
And then—
—?
Something felt wrong in his gut, as if a thing long asleep had suddenly begun to thrash. A moment later, pain like every vessel in his body catching fire crashed over him.
"Gaaaaah—."
A scream tore out of Lee Junhyuk. Everything that had slept for three years was bursting free at once, with no control at all. He strained with everything he had to stop it. It was useless.
It would not stop.
"Agh—aaaaagh—!"
The front door shattered. Lines shot out in every direction and split the floor of the house like a spider's web. The fluorescent tube burst with a crack, and shards of glass flew everywhere.
Lee Junhyuk stood where he was and locked his hands together, trying to force it down. Even in his days as an Awakened, he had never once experienced a mana runaway. People had always said his control was exceptional.
This was different. It had nothing to do with the blank years. Mana was running wild as if a dam that had been holding it had exploded, and it was merging with a strange energy in the air, far past anything he could handle.
D-dangerous!
With a splintering crash, the house he had secured on a thirty-year loan was already long since smashed flat. And the runaway showed no intention of stopping. Its range kept widening, spreading into the surroundings.
If this went on...
I—I don't want to die!!
Even as he burned in the agony of hellfire, he tried somehow to put an end to it. A meaningless struggle, of course.
Just before the Tower appeared—in the days that would be called the Tower's Dawning—some of those afflicted with Mana Insensitivity brought about catastrophes on the scale of natural disasters.
It was not their fault. Rift energy had simply met the mana pooled inside them and thrown it into runaway. A truly wretched accident.
So Shin Haneul distributed a vaccine at a reasonable price, matched to each nation's means. For those who could not make the timing, he even shared the safety protocols. Because of that, most of the damage the whole world ought to have suffered was able to vanish.
Not everyone accepted it. There were nations that refused his mercy, that would not even believe the safety protocols, and ignored them. The representative case was his homeland: the Republic of Korea.
Victims poured out across the country. The chain of social chaos that followed was far too vast to call a mere aftershock. Buildings came down, and the voices of people wailing echoed along every street.
"If the government had listened to Shin Haneul..."
A citizen sank down before a collapsed wall and sobbed.
"This disaster never would have happened. My family would still be alive!"
That was the beginning.
"Reveal the truth of this crisis and take responsibility! Who ignored Shin Haneul's warning—and why did they have to ignore it!"
The voices of the crowd swelled and spread like a single wave.
"Punish those responsible!"
"Uncover the truth!"
"We don't need a government that abandoned its people!"
The shouts rolled like surf—a wave of hoarse voices, anger and grief stirred together.
A caption went up announcing that an official briefing would begin in the name of the government spokesperson's office. Phone screens switched over to the live feed all at once. In the briefing room, the spokesperson, expression carefully managed, unfolded a sheet of paper.
There was no sincere apology in it. Nothing but a fog of evasions.
"Oh, fuck off——!!"
The crowd took up someone's shout.
"You knew."
"You knew, and you ignored it!!"
One week after the first mana explosion. A massive rally opened in front of the National Assembly. At three in the afternoon, when it began, the organizers counted two hundred thousand. By around eight, some one million citizens had gathered.
Busan. Daegu. Gwangju. It was the same everywhere else.
Meanwhile, Shin Haneul was preparing for what was coming his way.
That the Mana Runaway Disaster had broken out meant a rift had appeared. And a rift appearing meant they had finally entered the Tower's Dawning.
There's something I have to do now.
He had to find the place where rift energy was overflowing most fiercely. He tried to narrow the location down from the news.
"Colonel Curtis."
"Yes?"
"There's a dungeon I'd like to go and see. Would that be all right?"
Curtis's eyes went perfectly round. The place Shin Haneul had indicated was a small dungeon in Alaska.
"If you're willing to go yourself, we'd be nothing but grateful, but... may I ask why...?"
"No special reason. I can go, can't I?"
"Yes—yes, sir! Of course. I'll see that everything is passed along!"
The reason he meant to go all the way to Alaska was simple. A rift was a passage connected to the Tower. Use that fact well, and he could claim the reward for the hidden quest the Tower had granted.