The Mage Who Prepares
Now then — on the subject of Dr. Pyeong So-woon as an individual.
Truth be told, what I actually knew about the woman was precious little. That she had already been an adult when the Great Cataclysm began, and threw herself straight into mana engineering immediately after? Something like that. Whether she had a demon's nose for money or what have you, who's to say.
Either way, it made Dr. Pyeong So-woon a household name in Korea's mana engineering circles. She exchanged research with the Americans, mentored every conceivable line of study suited to Korea's circumstances, and then transplanted mana engineering — a discipline established almost entirely under American leadership — onto Korean soil. Those credentials carried her into a string of government-led projects, until at last she became head of the Artificial Hunter Development Project itself.
But even a life on a winning streak has its limit. To complete research that had, in truth, gone nowhere, she reached for outright criminal methods. When those sins were eventually dragged into the light, she took responsibility and resigned as the laboratory was dismantled in negotiations between Lee Jungoo and the government — and from that point on, she simply vanished from the pages of Korean history.
Well. Her achievements were impressive, but she'd committed her crimes on that grand a scale. There was no one left who could shield her. If her disgrace had surfaced even by accident, she'd have been finished in an instant along with everything else.
And so the Dr. Pyeong So-woon who resurfaced did so under an organization with no need to worry about such things — as chief researcher of Novus Ordo Seclorum. I suppose you'd call it the inevitable end of the story. A researcher who once helped hold up an entire nation, brought that low — and yet, in a way, it was the most predictable ending imaginable.
But that covers Dr. Pyeong So-woon the researcher. What about Dr. Pyeong So-woon the awakened — one of those whose abilities opened their eyes under the gates' influence?
She was already an adult by the time of the First Great Cataclysm. Maybe that's why she managed to come out of it in one piece — though the ability the gate granted her back then no doubt pulled its own weight too. Mana perception. In other words, Dr. Pyeong So-woon had the same ability I did.
'Probably a mage, then.' Given her field, it's obvious enough. Mana engineering — the study of figuring out what mana actually is, for all the jargon wrapped around it. Back during the First Great Cataclysm, nobody even had basic information on what mana, that divine energy source, actually was. These days people talk about inscribing mana into objects and casting spells, but there were no such categories at the time. In reality, Dr. Pyeong So-woon must have been the kind of talent who could do anything under the banner of "mana engineering."
Even with the same detection ability, she's in a different league from me — I burned the bulk of mine on monster detection. Fuck's sake, I'm the one who came late to the party. Look at the difference in brains, and there it is.
Anyway. The real question was Dr. Pyeong So-woon's actual skill. To be blunt, nowhere in any record was her combat ability documented — she'd awakened, sure, but she'd always been research staff.
I wasn't overly worried, of course. Judging by her career, the doctor was a textbook rear-echelon researcher. No matter how you slice it, she wasn't at the level where raw ability alone lets you beat down professional fighters.
Which meant the only thing I needed to watch out for was her skill as a pure mage. A mage is one who prepares. That's the closest thing to a proverb among hunters, and as far as I could see, it was endlessly true.
A mage is one who prepares. The more preparation stacked on preparation, the more intricate and devastating the magic becomes. Twice as true for a mage who can survey the dragon veins and draw backup power from a facility itself. Unlike a hunter, who prepares to fight flawlessly at any moment under any condition, a mage literally converts time itself into strength.
But there was a paradox sitting at the exact opposite end of that truth: because a mage is one who prepares, a mage caught unprepared is ultimately next to useless. No — that's just common sense, isn't it. Magic is, in the end, a ritual performed with mana. You have to draw a spell circle; it has to run in a specific sequence. Even if raw mana manipulation can substitute for all that, against an equal opponent, the blade obviously lands faster. Mana is just another physical faculty, like an arm or a leg. Drawing a sword and swinging it, versus drawing out mana and arranging it into a pattern in a specific order — ask which is quicker and the answer is the sword, obviously. Short of an overwhelming skill gap, a mage can't beat a close-quarters vanguard or an archer at the back line.
Some mages compensate by enchanting their own bodies and wading in to fight, but... 'That's a hard road.' Magic is simply the art of handling mana — and throwing a proper punch demands its own technique and craft. In other words, unless you devote yourself to actual martial training on top of learning a single body-reinforcement spell, that breed of mage needs nearly double the effort of everyone else. Surely Dr. Pyeong So-woon wasn't about to unfurl practical boxing forms she learned as a hobby.
So the problem came back to her magic. And —
'In raw power, A+. Primary specialty appears to be Feng Shui divination.'
RATATATATA—!!
Through the roar of a machine gun vomiting its guts out, sounding for all the world like beans crackling in a pan, I reached that conclusion. Clearly even Dr. Pyeong So-woon had noticed our little break-in by now. Bullets spewed fire with no apparent interest in hiding the fact that this was an illegal laboratory. Sure, gun restrictions had become a dead letter since the Great Cataclysm — but this was not the kind of hardware a single research facility should have been holding.
I kept my body hidden behind the wall, out of the sight of the lab's internal security systems, and let the noise wash over me while I thought. The short version: the laboratory's defenses were genuinely solid. That's what you'd expect from a mage's domain, I suppose. That machine gun alone proved it. A plain machine gun, I could punch through. But whatever backing it had, its properly interlocking fields of fire were too thick to simply brute-force with stats. For all I knew, it was built to handle enemies who tried exactly that, trusting in their own durability.
'And above all...' I studied the bluish mana coating the heat beyond the wall. A muzzle soaked in overwhelming mana — enough to give even a defense-specialized hunter real trouble. The rounds spitting from that barrel were mana-coated as well. Even a hunter who could break through an ordinary machine gun would stall right here. No mana crystals or spell-arrays sat at the heart of the trap — well, naturally. Nobody would be fool enough to leave such a readable layout. No, the thing empowering this whole defense network was the structure of the building itself.
Feng Shui divination. One of the magical traditions handed down in Korea. Its defining trait: the ability to deliberately warp the natural order determined by the lay of the land — geomancy, dragon veins, the flow of heaven. As the legend of Doseon the monk attests, the instrument of that warping was usually architecture itself. A building distorts the concepts of geomantic placement, generating an intended heavenly flow. In this case, the heart of the technique had to be this laboratory — or more precisely, the entire research complex constructed around this lab, built near the dragon vein of the New City. Its power source would be the leftover mana bleeding off the vein, energy the city itself never managed to harness. Siphon it a little at a time, accumulate it, and this is what you get. Since it never blatantly interfered with the vein, the Association would have found it nearly impossible to notice. In sheer craftsmanship, it was nothing short of art.
A mage is one who prepares. And a mage's domain with this much preparation behind it might as well have been a dungeon.
'A dungeon, huh.' Fine by me. I flicked my toes — and a shard of wall, sheared off by the machine-gun barrage moments ago, caught the tip of my foot. If she's a mage, then I'm a hunter. Breaking the place open is my specialty.
So — what's the weakness of Feng Shui divination? 'No flexibility.' It's a technique for warping the great current called fate, the flow of heaven itself. Naturally its scale balloons beyond imagination — same reason a building, something you can't easily demolish and rebuild, serves as its medium. That's exactly why Feng Shui divination lacks flexibility. Merely distorting the mana current of heaven is a crushing burden; who could revise that flow in real time? Granting it flexibility would mean the building's structure literally rearranging itself on the fly. And the opponent was a mage — worse, a researcher with zero combat experience, whose ability had grown bloated while the rest of her stayed soft. Rerouting the structure now, she'd never put it to effective use. Best case, she'd just be flailing. The fact that a mere researcher had tied me up this long already proves the point.
A mage is one who prepares. Which means she'd prepared protocols for intruders, too. If you can't block a sword swung in front of you, but you've known for a month that a blade would fly at exactly that moment — well, you just wear a stab-proof suit under your clothes.
So then. I flicked a chip of stone to the side. The defense system didn't react. From there, the rest was simple. I loaded the next throw with mana and hurled it over the wall. The shard streaked toward the machine gun and met it with a colossal crack of impact — and the completely demolished weapon clattered to the floor.
Neutralization complete. Figured as much. This corridor, with its machine guns emplaced at long range and capable of thousands of rounds per minute, had no need of reinforced walls — its firepower was the reinforcement. So long as I had a way to destroy the guns without showing myself, suppression was trivial. An arrow would have been the better tool, but honestly, thank god I'd practiced throwing spells just in case.
I stepped back into the corridor's open. A long, dead-straight passage designed to pin down anyone moving through it — there was nowhere to dodge an attack except back the way I came, and anyone retreating that way would simply be herded forward by enemies appearing at their rear. Naturally, none of that applied to me. The wrecked security robots sparking and bursting along the way — or rather, let's call them golems rebuilt with a modern aesthetic — lay scattered behind me. For my purposes, it was nothing more than useful confirmation that even golems dressed up as robots counted as monsters.
Ah, thank you, Karel Čapek. Which left just one corridor. I rolled my shoulders loose and started walking it at an easy pace. And then —
CLUNK!!
The sound rang out from beneath my feet and above my head, simultaneously. A fairly textbook trap, as traps went. The floor gave way beneath me in a soft collapse, and at precisely the moment that would rattle even a veteran hunter, a massive hunk of metal dropped from the ceiling. Rare metal out of legend, no doubt — given the circumstances, mythril or adamant. In the same breath, I leapt with the timing of Shukuchi, clearing the hole that had yawned open in the floor just before I could fall. Beyond it, ore plummeted endlessly downward — spatial manipulation of some kind at work, surely. Nobody wastes that much rare metal for nothing.
The moment I landed, mana crystals tumbled from the ventilation ducts on both walls. 'Ignition paired with atmosphere manipulation — an explosion, then.'
KA-BOOOOM!!
A precisely calibrated blast swallowed the spot where I'd stood. But it was, at bottom, just an explosion from mana crystals — with no wielder actively driving it, it meant nothing to a mana manipulator. Least of all to one who'd seen it coming. When the smoke cleared, I brushed the soot from my clothes. The air-manipulation crystals had transmuted the surrounding atmosphere into something highly combustible; light the spark, and boom. A trap that banks on everyone guarding against fire rather than wind — well, you just seal the wind to begin with.
I swung the shimmering air hard, once, in time with my rotating mana. Poison gas had been seeping in, subtle as anything — a contingency against anyone sturdy enough to survive the blast, presumably. The trouble was that gas potent enough to matter to a hunter almost always runs on mana. Which means, to someone with mana perception, deploying it is exactly like the lab broadcasting: incoming poison gas, folks.
On I went, breaking through trap after trap, pushing forward — dismantling a mage's dungeon as I walked. And then —
Good afternoon, is a Dr. Pyeong So-woon home?!
Beyond the door I kicked off its hinges like a tiger pouncing, the interior of the real laboratory finally opened before me — and there she was, face to face at last. Never ordered any delivery. Life-sentence warrant, issued. What a tragic affair. It was the same face I'd verified in the documents, the bob cut clipped sharp just above the shoulders. Maybe most of her ability was tied up elsewhere, because it hadn't changed a hair since the Cataclysm. Even so, what stuck with me was the fatigue hanging beneath that white lab coat — an expression like unwashed residue, a face one bad afternoon away from brewing coffee in a beaker. On paper she was barely different from me, and yet some uncanny weathering of years seemed baked right into her.
Pyeong So-woon. Former director of the Artificial Hunter Development Project, current researcher of Novus Ordo Seclorum. And at the same time —
So much for the makeup. Bastard.
Apparently the woman had a filthier mouth than I'd bargained for.