Chapter 28
The rise of villains, the so-called Union, reached back to a time before anyone had even settled on the word villain.
Their origin lay in the sharp, almost overnight divide that had opened up over the past twenty years, along with a broader erosion in the value people placed on human life.
To stand against the monsters that had invaded Earth, humanity had built the Academies and trained the awakened, but in those early days they focused so obsessively on raw combat power that personality problems and emotional care were treated as afterthoughts.
Even low-level awakened could smash through thick walls with a single punch or hurl fireballs as if it were nothing.
Once people had power like that, how long before they started asking why they should bother protecting ordinary people who had none at all? Why sacrifice anything for them? What, exactly, could the protected ever give back?
Meanwhile, non-awakened people had also grown quietly wary of the inhuman strength awakened could wield, and that unease had curdled into fear.
In an era where absolute safety could never be guaranteed, death always seemed to be waiting close at hand, and among ordinary people that fear had swollen far beyond reason.
From there, the discomfort, resentment, and suspicion multiplied little by little until they finally crossed the line of law and moral order.
Again and again, the abilities learned and honed at the Academies were used in secret against ordinary citizens through violence.
So the Guardians were founded to stop that descent and restore the broken order.
It was a chaotic age, one in which countless awakened who had grown addicted to selfishness, cruelty, and pleasure through violence were suppressed, while the more extreme cases were often executed or driven out.
And then the Union appeared.
With their overwhelming strength and varied abilities, they offered a path to the awakened who had been suppressed and expelled, feeding the resentment that had been building in the dark.
They stirred up ugly desire and spread chaos to such an extent that in some countries they were even notorious for successfully attempting to overthrow the state.
In response, the International Awakened Organization, the IAO, went so far as to label the Union and every awakened who disturbed law and order as villains and began regulating them...
"Hey."
"Yes?"
"You think I’m here to study history or something?"
I glared at Kim Su-hyun across from me, my eyes full of irritation.
"I don’t give a damn about where villains came from, got it?"
He had been talking fine until a moment ago, and then all of a sudden the conversation had veered off into some irrelevant direction.
I ground down the stupid instinct that kept trying to poke its head up whenever my temper ran hot.
Lee Seo-ah was asleep in my arms like a newborn baby, so I had to be careful not to wake her.
"Now listen. Answer only what I ask, all right? Friend. First question: is it true the Union's goal is the Demon King’s descent?"
"The Demon King... nim?"
"Skip the trivial part, idiot. Is it true or not?"
"Yes, well. Every executive we’ve encountered so far has said the same thing. I imagine they’re sincerely pursuing that absurd goal."
As he answered, Kim Su-hyun adjusted his glasses with a skeptical look.
Thanks to having been dealing with me in his office ever since the previous night’s incident had finally been sorted out, his face looked a mess, with wrinkles and dark circles all over it.
That, of course, was none of my business.
"Good. Then second, where are those bastards now?"
"I don’t know."
"You sure sound proud about it."
"Because I don’t know."
I stared at him, dissatisfied with the answer, and Kim Su-hyun added a more detailed explanation.
"All of the Union executives confirmed so far are high-level magic users, and five of them use particularly troublesome kinds of magic."
"Troublesome magic?"
"Space. Illusion. Transformation. Silence. Severance. All of them are difficult to master and even harder to perfect."
I couldn’t help admiring that in my head.
They really had learned only the most infuriating kinds of magic to fight against.
"One of them even has a trait called Gate. It can create a kind of passage that allows movement anywhere."
"...That doesn’t mean they can cross into another world or anything, does it?"
"Of course not. I can say that with confidence because someone with the same trait is currently in Seoul."
For a second I had wondered if the Union's talk of controlling a 'door' and bringing about the Demon King’s descent meant something like that, but apparently not.
Come to think of it, even crossing dimensions with nothing but a single trait would be ridiculous.
"In any case, for that reason, identifying their location is extremely difficult in practice. They also rarely travel alone, so we keep losing them."
"Is being useless your idea of a talent?"
"I’m aware of the shortcoming. I have no excuse."
From there, I learned that in the United States, aside from a hero called the Watcher, there were very few people who could even claim to know the Union’s location with any clarity.
No chance of tracking them down, then.
If I wanted to do this the way I had when I went looking for the Eraser, I’d have to wrap the entire Earth in detection, but even if it were my master, my jusu could only cover a range a little wider than the Korean Peninsula.
Traveling overseas just to hunt down Union bastards would be exhausting and a pain in the ass.
Besides, I didn’t like the idea of moving around while leaving Lee Seo-ah behind.
Hadn’t there already been one attack?
I wasn’t worried that my familiar was unreliable, but that was a separate matter from the fact that I was the one going crazy with anxiety.
If I assumed the one who attacked Lee Seo-ah was a Union villain, I wanted to go kill them all immediately, but charging off blindly would be stupid.
No matter how stupid I was, I could still tell that much apart.
Making a mental note that I’d have to catch them alive the next time they showed up, I moved on to the next matter.
"Hey. You know about gu poison insects?"
"Gu poison insects? What are those?"
"Never seen one of these before?"
With a quick glance, a bead of blood formed on the table between us, spat out the corpse of a dark violet insect larva, and vanished.
Kim Su-hyun looked at the gu poison insect and inspected it with a shocked expression.
"Isn’t this the parasitic insect the Union uses to make hosts?"
"You know your stuff. Then what about Vitria Mold?"
"Vitria Mold?"
Commander of the Demon King’s Army, 7th Legion, Vitria Mold.
When I dropped the name of the creature-obsessed bastard, Kim Su-hyun shook his head with a face that said he’d never heard it before.
I had expected as much, but still, he really didn’t know.
I clicked my tongue and immediately took out another object.
When I tossed him a mana core from my inventory, Kim Su-hyun caught it lightly, then stared at me with his eyes wide open.
"Th-this is!"
"Is this the thing the Union bastards supposedly dumped off like crap when they left?"
"Yes, yes. But where did you get this? No, how... ?"
Judging by his expression, he truly had no idea.
Still, just in case, I asked one more thing.
"Open the shop. Check whether that marble is there."
Kim Su-hyun, looking puzzled at my words, obediently followed the instruction in silence.
After a few minutes, he looked away from the shop window and shook his head at me.
"It’s not there."
"Not even anything similar?"
"No, nothing."
Good. That confirmed everything I needed to know.
Thankfully, it didn’t seem as if the item I had sold was being used.
"It’s called a mana core. If you infuse mana into it, a monster comes out, and it’s a thing that obeys the will of whoever infused the mana without question."
"Something like that... Where did you get it?"
"From some bastard named Potato or Gamma or whatever."
I mixed in a little lie, since there was no benefit in letting people know I could generate mana cores myself.
That made Kim Su-hyun flinch again, and he asked in a hurry, "You, you came into contact with the Union?"
"Yeah. They came looking for me and tried to talk me into it like a bunch of clowns, so I killed them. But they were hosts. The insects came from there too."
"...So there was a reason the Union moved so boldly."
He sent me a complicated look.
I ignored it, pulled out a few more mana cores, and said, "I’m giving you the villain corpse I brought and all the mana cores I have. Roast them, boil them, do whatever you want. Figure something out and tell me. Got it?"
"I’ll do that."
Taking the mana cores, Kim Su-hyun nodded quietly.
It was better to use a proper information network than to keep blundering around alone.
"Done here. I’m leaving."
"You said you needed somewhere to stay at first, correct? I’ve had a car waiting. It’s a house under my name, but I’ve never used it, so you shouldn’t have any trouble staying there for a while."
As expected of a sucker. He worked fast.
Satisfied, I got up from the sofa and held Lee Seo-ah upright in my arms.
Her tiny body was trembling faintly, which made my chest ache.
For an ordinary person, and especially for a girl that young, this had to be hard to bear.
How shocked had she been? It was probably a good thing I had kept her asleep more deeply with magic.
"Cynthia."
Just as I was about to step out of the director’s office, Kim Su-hyun called me in a low voice from behind.
When I turned slightly, he was bowing his head toward me.
"I’m sorry."
"What’s this about, all of a sudden?"
"Whatever the reason, you and that child are citizens of this city. I failed to protect the citizens' safety and let them fall into danger, and I failed even to handle the situation properly afterward. As one of the people responsible for this city, I offer you my sincere apology."
Then he lifted his head and continued, "And thank you very much for helping instead of pretending not to see the city’s danger."
I stared at Kim Su-hyun in silence for a moment.
I had no idea what he was talking about.
Help people? Me? And thank me for it?
I hadn’t done it with that intention. I’d only acted because it had irritated me.
So why?
Something feels weird.
It was only a trivial remark, so why did it reach me in such a strange way?
"..."
Seized by that odd feeling, I ended up saying nothing at all and turned away.
I opened the door and left the director’s office.
"What was that?"
For some reason, I felt uneasy.
Why? I had no idea.
"..."
Having been in charge of directing the city’s restoration work through his clones, Shin Hyun-ah came to the bureau on business for Kim Su-hyun and encountered a strange lifeform.
"Goreuk?"
A goblin was wandering the hallway, looking around with an intrigued expression.
Yes, that was a goblin.
Though its pink shirt reading Love and Peace and the absurdly expensive weapon hanging at its waist made the sight almost ridiculous, there was no mistaking it: from any angle, it was a goblin.
She had already received information from Kim Su-hyun beforehand, so the moment she saw that goblin she recognized it as Cynthia’s familiar.
What had shocked Shin Hyun-ah, however, was not simply that the goblin stood before her, but that it was no ordinary lifeform.
Level... 680?
The special miniature device in her ear, equipped with a simple measuring machine, was malfunctioning.
A level of 680 was ringing in her ear.
It was obviously not an exact reading if judged only by that crude analysis, and yet the number was still absurd beyond belief.
Was that little goblin a catastrophe-class monster? Was the device broken? Was it an error?
There was something else that confused Shin Hyun-ah as well.
The monster isn't evil?
Her trait, Eyes of Good and Evil, was judging the goblin before her to be not evil.
Then was it good? No, not that either.
This was balance. Something perfectly unshaken by either side...
Neutral.
Shin Hyun-ah’s eyes trembled wide at the phenomenon, something she had never once witnessed in her life.
Humans could be good, and they could be evil.
But monsters were absolute evil.
That was what she had learned, known, and lived through, and yet this thing before her stood there as if to deny everything her years had taught her.
For the first time, Shin Hyun-ah began to doubt the truth of her own trait.
"Stop right there. If you go any farther, the heart demon will come looking for you."
"...!"
She flinched at the sudden voice.
The goblin, Gobra, looked up at her with deeply sunk eyes.
"Goreuk. Pleasure to meet you. Gobra."
"..."
"I heard about you from my master. You’re a strong swordswoman who can distinguish between good and evil, yes? I hear you’re skilled with a blade. You certainly look the part."
"..."
"And yet, you’ve wavered when looking at Gobra?"
The yellow eyes fixed directly on Shin Hyun-ah beyond the clone.
"Gobra does not know you. But as a fellow swordsman, I would like to offer you one piece of advice, though it may be presumptuous."
Walking slowly past her, Gobra let the words fall in a quiet murmur.
"You must swing the sword you hold, not be swung by it. Doubt is fine, but if you sink too deeply into it, it will ruin you."
— Establish the right conviction. You do not have it, swordswoman.
As if even his breathing had stopped, Shin Hyun-ah stood rooted in place with her mouth shut tight.
Only long after he had gone did she turn around and look down the empty hallway.
The quiet void there seemed to mirror her own mood.
"Where were you?"
"Goreuk. The wonders of Earth are many."
"So while your master was tearing her hair out, you went sightseeing because you felt like it?"
"Why are you being grumpy again?"
"I don’t know. I’ve been in a foul mood since earlier."
Walking side by side, I scowled, and my familiar sent me a strange look.
"Master."
"What."
"Could it be that it’s time to prepare for mating..."
"No, you bastard!"
"Kuhek!"
This damned thing had no filter when speaking to its master.