A Lottery Ticket
To put it bluntly: Novus Ordo Seclorum—the New World Order—had decided to avoid a head-on collision with the Academy. If anything, that call had been made back when the current operation was first drawn up. Ever since Dr. Pyeong So-woon's research building was raided, in fact. The whole plan had been drafted after long deliberation over what to do with the facilities that hadn't yet been discovered.
In a word, it was escapism. From the very beginning, the exposure of the remaining research buildings had been nothing more than a matter of time. And so the organization's policy had naturally drifted away from concealment and toward exploitation—toward the question of how best to run those facilities in the time they had left.
Taken to its extreme, the logic was simple: no matter what they did, discovery was an unavoidable end. Which made it all the more realistic to talk instead about how to dispose of the buildings still standing. Sending them berserk was one option. Rigging them with traps to bury any hunters who breached them was another. They might even turn Pyeong So-woon's Feng Shui sorcery upon the Academy itself and level the place from afar.
None of it, in the end, had been serious discussion. Destroy the data that needed destroying, then decide what to do with the scraps of time that remained. That was the height of it.
The small talk only began to put on real flesh in the small hours of yesterday morning—because one of the informants planted in recent days had confirmed Park Woochan's departure. And with that, the New World Order convened a full-scale meeting.
Why Park Woochan had suddenly gone off the rails, they had no idea. But neither were they fools so dim as to let an opportunity land in their laps and go to waste.
Hence—
"A trifling affair, wouldn't you say?"
As Tae Siyoung had put it, this operation had a rather dull edge to it. The executives of the New World Order were no fools. An opportunity had arrived out of nowhere—and yet they were not so hasty as to stake the organization's grand design on a plan improvised without a shred of proper preparation. Above all, it lacked realism.
It was true that Park Woochan had abruptly left his post. But. Considering the thoroughness the man had shown until now, the odds were nine in ten that he had at least handed things over to whoever was covering for him.
And indeed, he had. From the moment the plan went live until now, the ghoul unit had failed, without a single exception, to bring down the boarding house where the presumed target was staying. It wasn't as if Park Woochan were the only strength the Academy had left, either. There was Lee Joongoo and Choi Seungjun, hostile to them from the very start. Added to that, Nam Sangwon, who had defected from the organization. To seize Ja Hayeon head-on, they would need at least three combatants of S-rank or better. One man stepping away was no license for recklessness.
And so, the gist of the operation they refined came down to this: strike where no one was looking.
Reclaiming Ja Hayeon through this operation was off the table. If it happened anyway, so much the better. But by any measure, using a freshly reclaimed Ja Hayeon as the catalyst for a summoning ritual was impossible. That was the conclusion the organization had reached.
For one thing, even how long Park Woochan would stay away was uncertain. More than a day would have been lovely, but judging by how abruptly he'd left the city, half a day at most was the obvious ceiling. Even two days or more would change nothing—in that case, there would be ample time to abduct Ja Hayeon and hold the ritual with no proper preparation at all. Hardly worth worrying over.
The outline of the plan drafted under that judgment was, in truth, simple. Stage a diversion, feinting at Ja Hayeon. Naturally, Park Woochan would rush to her side first. And in that instant, time would open up for them. That fleeting window was precisely what they were after: the time it took Park Woochan to return, plus the time it took him to crush the boarding house. With that much, holding the summoning ritual in the remaining research buildings was entirely feasible.
The real problem lay with the theory underpinning the ritual—Dr. Pyeong So-woon's theory. It seemed the doctor had been researching whether the catalyst, Ja Hayeon, could somehow be replaced. And this operation rested squarely on that theory of hers. In other words—
Ugh...
The girl collapsed and groaning before his eyes was no exception. Lee Yeeun. The younger sister of the 'hero'—a woman Tae Siyoung, too, knew well. She was to be the very heart of this ritual.
Abducting her had been easy—Lee Yeeun, thrown into panic by the gate that had torn open right before her eyes. As always, her brother Lee Joongoo was away, tied up with his duties as a National Assemblyman. She apparently had some skill of her own, but nothing that would let her hold out against Tae Siyoung. From subdual to abduction—had it even taken ten seconds?
Her brother would no doubt be heading home before long. A supermassive gate of that scale had opened, after all. And once he returned, he would notice his sister was gone. But Tae Siyoung was not worried. It wasn't that he looked down on Lee Joongoo. Simply—
Tae Siyoung knew Lee Joongoo.
A hero. The Thunder God. Humanity's strongest. Thunder given human form.
The great hero so hailed could not, under any circumstances, move. Not even if he confirmed his sister's absence. If anything, precisely because she had passable skill, that was exactly what he'd conclude. She must have evacuated separately, he'd tell himself. And on this side, all they had to do was finish the ritual before then.
...The most polished sample among the 'products' Dr. Pyeong So-woon had supplied to the government. This ritual would proceed with that Lee Yeeun as its catalyst. After all, nothing was known more intimately to the doctor than the fruits of the artificial hunter project she herself had built. Naturally, her catalyst-substitution plan had been constructed on the premise of that project's results. It apparently involved the theory she had used as the bedrock for creating artificial hunters, but...
That much was beyond Tae Siyoung. Because he was a blockhead. No—it was simply all material that would have demanded a doctorate at the very least.
Simply—
"In the end, it's nothing more than a compromise, is it?"
So he thought. In a situation like this, securing the original catalyst, Ja Hayeon, was difficult. That much he got. Tae Siyoung understood it too. And so they would run Dr. Pyeong So-woon's backup plan, built on the research buildings they'd intended to discard anyway. He could follow the logic that far.
But if this had been the intent all along, then why abandon Dr. Pyeong So-woon in the first place? Of course, it had been an eminently results-driven decision. Back then, no one could have known they would end up using the doctor's new plan here, of all places. Every last scrap of data obtainable from her was already in their hands. Besides, a head-on clash with the Academy—the Association included—right then and there would have carried far too much risk. So they had cut the doctor loose. He could understand that. He could understand it, and yet...
"It's all terribly half-baked, isn't it."
Seen from the position of the very man charged with executing the plan, he couldn't help wanting to say something—anything at all. This operation was proof enough of that. In conducting the ritual, the upper echelons had attached a single condition to Tae Siyoung: he was not to kill Lee Yeeun.
There was, of course, a reason. It wasn't as though they'd had a late awakening to the sanctity of human life. It was because of Lee Yeeun's older brother—Lee Joongoo, mentioned only moments ago.
The hunter called Lee Joongoo was, without question, a hero. A man who had resolved to fight for the wellbeing of countless people. His actions, in the end, were credited with holding together a country that had come within a hair of splitting in two—hunters on one side, civilians on the other.
And so, Lee Joongoo could never face them at full strength. From the beginning, the man's passion had lain in saving people rather than in fighting them. But what if they killed Lee Yeeun here? Perhaps even Lee Joongoo would lose his mind. For an upper echelon already locked in combat with a mad dog, it was a development beyond all hoping for.
Of course, with the sacrifice left unkilled and unprocessed, the ritual's odds of success sank lower still. A ritual site improvised in haste. The spellwork's own architect absent. An imperfect catalyst. And the ritual's groundwork far from complete. In Tae Siyoung's eyes, this operation was, quite literally, a lottery ticket. The odds weren't zero, so they'd bought a number and were waiting for the draw. If things went well, it might even become the trigger for the Third Great Cataclysm. Well—under the present circumstances, that much was the limit of their ambition.
Simply—
"Do spare a thought for how the rest of us feel~"
It would have been nice if they'd considered, even once, the feelings of a man drafted into a job like this. At first, he had even allowed himself a sliver of hope. Perhaps he might cross blades with that marvel of a man, Lee Joongoo. Perhaps he might face Park Woochan in a rematch. But judging by how things stood, neither looked likely. After all, his role in all this began and ended with abducting Lee Yeeun. And with the assigned task already complete, he was the one who had chosen to linger—so he had no grounds to complain.
Morning had long since broken. The hour he had fixed in his own mind had come; it was time to slip away from the holed ship before it went under.
"Honestly."
Life never went the way a man wanted. And this time, it was his own side's fault. Against the Butcher—already rampaging with bloodlust—no such method would ever work. Unlike Lee Joongoo, the man would not so much as blink at killing someone. Lee Yeeun or anyone else, it made no difference.
In any case, Tae Siyoung remembered. The mad hunter who had come lunging for his life—even with a student who needed a doctor that very moment lying before him, potion or no potion. It was the same reason Tae Siyoung had given up on terrorizing the Academy altogether. Killing a student or two at this point would hardly fan the Butcher's flames any hotter—he could hardly picture it.
Which meant that, just as with this operation, the one with the problem was his own side. A sigh escaped him before he knew it. It was true he had sold his credentials as an S-rank hunter to buy his way into the organization, but things had proven far less comfortable, in more ways than one, than he had expected.
Well. There would be a next chance. For now, that was all he let himself think.