The Wizard's Bluff
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'What the hell is wrong with this guy now?'
That was the only thought Dr. Pyeong So-woon could summon.
Truth be told, she had privately celebrated, crying jackpot under her breath.
The situation was already finished. All that remained was to extract a few final answers — or so she'd told him, closing in with that exact line. A hunter who walked himself into her range like that, she assumed, could be cooked any number of ways.
And yet.
'Is he an idiot?'
To Pyeong So-woon — a woman who lived in a world of theory and principle, of logic and equations — the situation before her was simply incomprehensible. Why was he angry?
The data her own organization, Novus Ordo Seclorum, had provided made the facts crystal clear. Humanity, in its current state, could not bring down an extra-standard rank monster. That was precisely why she had surrendered. Well, you could call it betrayal, if you liked — but either way, it amounted to the same thing. Refusing to yield against an opponent you could never defeat wasn't courage. It was nothing but foolish obstinacy, and she was hardly at an age to find blind defiance romantic anymore.
If anything, Dr. Pyeong So-woon couldn't understand why he was angry.
How very noble of him.
And so, for the moment, all she could say was:
"......Well, it doesn't really matter either way."
It was, after all, a shot in the dark — like jabbing at a persimmon she couldn't reach anyway.
The distance between them was roughly ten meters.
Frankly, the situation was terrible. This was a facility she had built herself, and yet now he had slipped past her guard. Naturally, the traps installed throughout the building hadn't had much of an effect either — she could count herself lucky they'd only managed to snag a few ankles.
But still.
It was more than enough to buy time.
"Stop right there."
...Huh?
And that was why Dr. Pyeong So-woon could raise her chin and lob that demand squarely at Park Woochan as he advanced on her.
Warrior and mage, hunter and researcher. In a situation like this one, the advantage lay with the former nine times out of ten.
But a mage is one who prepares.
The preparations for interception had been complete since the moment Park Woochan first set foot in the research wing. "See this keyboard my hand is resting on right now? What do you suppose it is?"
"Connected to the lab's main computer, I'd imagine."
"And these commands on the screen?"
"Even if I looked, I couldn't make heads or tails of them."
"......Goodness. You really are a piece of work."
A quiet sigh. With Pyeong So-woon regarding him like a problem child, Park Woochan quietly squared his shoulders. Call it carelessness, call it showing off — either way, it was an insufferably cocky posture.
"Fine, then. Consider it a treat for the hopeless student. I'll explain, just this once."
And so, in her languid drawl, Pyeong So-woon walked him through her research achievements.
This laboratory, for instance — a mage's domain, built by gathering and accumulating the dregs of the city's ley lines. The feng shui divination architecture the research wing had been designed around. And on top of that, all the new knowledge she'd absorbed during her time with the organization.
In other words: "If I press this key right now — oh my, dear me — every last scrap of mana we've stored up goes pouring into the other laboratories."
"Mm."
"And when that flowing mana makes contact with the equipment stationed in each lab, a violent reaction occurs."
"A violent reaction?"
"Exactly that."
Snap — Dr. Pyeong So-woon flicked her fingers.
And at those words, even Park Woochan couldn't help but furrow his brow. Concentrated mana. The violent reaction it would produce. He was all but illiterate when it came to mana engineering theory, but he knew perfectly well what the world called such a phenomenon.
"A gate?"
"Correct."
Touch the keyboard, she claimed, and a temporary gate would tear open across the entire surrounding area. That was the card she was playing.
......Was that even possible?
An artificial gate — the goal and the finish line that countless researchers had chased. If the monsters spawned inside a gate could be culled and only the rare resources extracted, the world's resource crisis would be all but solved. In the long run, it might even settle the question of territory itself. If what Dr. Pyeong So-woon had just said was true, it could be a genuinely monumental leap for the entire field of mana engineering.
Of course, Park Woochan was not a mana engineering researcher.
Therefore.
"Go ahead, then. Try it."
"...I'm sorry, what?"
After a moment's thought, that was his answer. No — he understood what she was getting at. Open a gate around the city whenever she pleased, so don't touch me — that was the threat she wanted to make. And sure, if it were true, it would be genuinely dangerous. It would explain exactly why this mage, this mere researcher, had been flaunting such outrageous composure.
But still.
Dr. Pyeong So-woon still didn't understand.
She didn't grasp what it meant that humanity's strongest hunter had joined this operation — she, the finest failure her own two hands had ever produced.
No, before that.
"I said, go ahead. Try it."
He was underestimating the hunter profession.
A mage's domain. A research wing that might as well have been a dungeon. And though the hunters deployed on this operation didn't know it, the New World Order stood behind this laboratory — which was exactly why Park Woochan and Lee Joongoo had hounded their people to the point of tedium. Suppression of a research facility, they'd assumed — a pushover. To make sure nobody thought that way, they had drummed into them, again and again, to bring proper combat armament.
"You think I'd hear all that and just let you walk? No chance."
A lunatic claiming she could mass-produce artificial gates by the dozen. There was no letting her go now.
As if to say go on then, do your worst, Park Woochan stopped walking. And then, on top of that, crossed his arms.
Dr. Pyeong So-woon couldn't fathom the source of the confidence he was radiating.
'...Did he see through the bluff?'
Certainly, the traps she'd prepared were nothing all that sophisticated. Nowhere near capable of forming a permanent gate. Call it a temporary gate, at best — literally, something that could only bare its fangs for as long as the mana leaked from the core research wing still lingered.
But even that, she had concluded, was enough — enough to paint the city's sleeping dawn, the first blush of morning light, in blood and violence.
And yet the hunter didn't move.
She had expected a standoff — the instant the hunter lunged against the instant her finger hit the key, a conclusion not unlike a western quick-draw. His reaction came as something of a surprise.
......No. Maybe it was the exact opposite.
Crack.
The sound of her own molars grinding — because Dr. Pyeong So-woon had clenched her jaw without realizing it.
'Is that bastard looking down on me?'
What else could she think? The goal countless researchers had chased their whole lives — and even she had only just managed to establish artificial gate generation. And this man simply assumed she couldn't do it? Was that what he was thinking, right now, to her face?
......Simmering. Boiling. A sensation like her guts catching fire. The contempt aimed at her, and the humiliation of being unable to answer it — emotions that had piled up since the day she'd joined this organization, maybe even before that — detonated all at once.
"You son of a bitch!!"
And then — Dr. Pyeong So-woon pressed the key.
Negotiation, extortion — none of it mattered anymore. In that single moment, her head held only one thing: proving her own achievements to the man who dared scorn her.
'What is with this woman all of a sudden?'
To Park Woochan, of course, it was nothing but a random seizure.
But the effect was undeniable.
BEEBIBIBIK!! BEEBIBIBIK!!
Inside the research wing, across the screen anchored at its very heart, every variety of warning message came pouring out. Mana flooding over. A wave of it, overflowing from the central laboratory, surging into every adjacent room — and where that radiated mana touched the spell arrays stationed in each lab, the laboratories built on the arcane principles of feng shui divination began to activate their magic autonomously.
It was, by design, a device meant to work in concert with every research wing to raise a colossal gate above the New City — a project meant to salvage her standing within an organization that had been floundering helplessly against Park Woochan's very existence.
But magic forced into activation by half couldn't muster its full strength. Summoning a cataclysmic supercolossal monster — one that could level the city and blast the Academy off the map — was beyond it.
However.
For erasing every living soul in the New City from the face of the earth, it was actually better than a supercolossal monster.
Soon enough, the monsters flooding out of the laboratories would dye the city's dawn red. And at that thought, Dr. Pyeong So-woon felt an uncontrollable laughter bubbling up.
"Ha, haha. Hahaha, HAHAHAHAHA!!"
"Look at this!! What did I tell you? I said it would work, didn't I?!"
The ones who scorned her. The ones who doubted her ability. The ones who dismissed her, convinced it was impossible. All of you — go to hell. I am Pyeong So-woon. Dr. Pyeong So-woon is me. A task like this is nothing — nothing at all, to me—
And just as she was about to gloat, her eyes stopped.
On Park Woochan. Because the hunter had been staring blankly at the screen this whole time.
...Did she seriously need to explain what the screen meant, here of all moments? For a fleeting instant, Dr. Pyeong So-woon actually agonized over it.
But the reason Park Woochan was standing there so placidly was nothing of the sort.
He had never doubted her ability in the first place. He couldn't have doubted it — he couldn't even gauge how far it reached.
And so, Park Woochan had assumed the worst. He had posited a scenario in which everything Dr. Pyeong So-woon said was true — in which she truly had mastered artificial gate generation — and even then, he hadn't moved.
To break her spirit completely.
There was no question she was a genius. One look at the research wings displayed across the screen — at the red points multiplying and blinking over them by the second — made that clear. No, he hadn't even needed to watch. With his abilities, he could count every monster flooding the research wing from right where he stood.
Which meant that, unlike Dr. Pyeong So-woon's wounded pride, Park Woochan's stillness had exactly two reasons.
First: if he so much as twitched here, he might well go after the monsters instead of her.
Second: he simply didn't need to move at all.
Park Woochan was a hunter — which is to say, he had concrete proof that he could afford to leave her be. Absolute, one-hundred-percent-plus confidence that even her atrocity could be fully covered after the fact.
In other words, the credentials of humanity's strongest.
Bibibibik, bibibibik...
"Wh-what?!"
The red points that had been convulsing across the screen seconds ago were being erased — rapidly, one after another. The warning sirens that had howled without pause through the laboratory were dying down as well. It wasn't any system error. It was simply this:
KRRRRRRUM!!
Thunder swallowed everything. The blinking points — monsters. The flashing lights — evacuation signals. Every last uproar rising from beneath the city's outskirts was buried under a single peel of thunder.
Lightning split the dawn sky. In one instant, every monster in the struck district of the research wing simply ceased to exist. And then, once — in the space of a single blink, every monster that had appeared in the remaining wings was annihilated with them.
The Thunder God, in the flesh. Tens of thousands of ragtag strays, hurled against humanity's strongest as he tore through the sky as literal lightning itself. Contact alone was lethal.
"Well, I'll be damned. That's just embarrassing."
That was Park Woochan's entire assessment of the sight. Not staggering power. Not the violence befitting the name of humanity's strongest. None of it.
'A bookworm playing general — but there are limits, you know.'
Even an A-rank dragon, thanks to its innate aura of dread, couldn't simply be buried under sheer numbers — and that was saying something. A monster called humanity's strongest, an S-rank beyond S-rank, being pinned down by chaff that had nothing going for it but quantity? Not a chance.
'She doesn't know the first thing about fighting, does she.'
"Well, saved me the trouble, at least."
Silence settled over the laboratory once more. Tap. Tap. Unfolding the arms he'd kept crossed, Park Woochan began to walk — quietly, unhurried.
Dr. Pyeong So-woon's gaze, which until seconds ago had hung slack-jawed on the screen, swung toward him. Fear was the first thing that pooled in her eyes. Injustice came next. And finally, settling into her pupils, was rage — some curdled emotion slicking across them, as if she genuinely couldn't comprehend why she'd been dealt so absurd a hand.
Watching her, Park Woochan drew out his greatsword. A towering slab of iron about as suited to anti-personnel combat as a weapon could be — though to Dr. Pyeong So-woon, who had no experience of battle, it could only look like a grotesque, brutal death.
Before he knew it, a snort of laughter escaped him. The whole spectacle was just too absurd.
And then.
KAANG!
He had merely let go of the hilt — and the greatsword, falling to the laboratory floor, punched straight through it and stood embedded in the concrete below. Park Woochan quietly rolled his wrist as he regarded it, and Dr. Pyeong So-woon's eyes, which had been darting back and forth to follow his every movement, filled with confusion once more.
But Park Woochan's objective had been crystal clear from the very start. Ever since she'd finished explaining herself, in fact.
That is to say:
"Honestly, finishing this with one swing would be way too boring."
"B-boring?"
"Want to? Ma'am."
"...Want to what?"
"A magic duel."
"Heh... heh..."
Dr. Pyeong So-woon's mouth hung open.
Literally, precisely, Park Woochan intended to obliterate her mind — completely.
* * *