Master of Reading the Room
“So… overlaid mana, is it.”
There it was. Right on schedule.
Nothing to be surprised about. Cults that worshiped magical beasts were already operating in the shadows all over the world. Politics, economics, culture—most of human society had already been eaten into, and the Hunter Administration was no exception. Even at the Incheon Branch, the director’s own daughter had fallen victim to a mental skill.
“Figures. Put on the glasses and you can see everything.”
I muttered it under my breath and gave a little nod. The Director’s eyes sharpened at once.
“You already knew?”
I shrugged once and answered lightly.
“Well… that’s exactly why I helped you activate the Clockwork of the Mind’s Eye, Director.”
“Oh? Elaborate for me, if you would.”
Before I knew it, the Director had settled into a wooden chair and was tapping the table with his fingertips. His whole face was painted with the question of why, if I had known this secret, I had simply sat on it until now. Fortunately, it wasn’t accusation—just pure curiosity.
I nodded and parked myself across from him. The aide standing behind the Director immediately threw up a sound-dampening barrier, killing every noise around us.
I narrowed my eyes at the transparent swirl of mana flowing through the air.
White Wing Silence…?
So that guy was close to S-class too. A Unique-grade skill, one step below Legendary. It didn’t just erase sound and presence—it interfered with perception itself so that the target’s existence went unregistered. Even if someone stared straight at you, all that remained in their head was a hazy afterimage. Useful for secret talks, and just as useful in a fight.
What worried me was something else.
“That’s impressive. Really. But…”
“Appreciate the compliment. So—what’s going on?”
“…”
In a hurry, was he? Fair enough. From the Director’s point of view, this was the kind of mess that would flip his eyes inside out.
I sucked down the rest of my drink with a long, noisy pull, then set the cup down on the table with a sharp clack.
“Before I answer—how many were there? The infected.”
“Not so much a number as a ratio. About two out of every ten employees I ran into were like that. Whether they themselves knew it or not, I couldn’t say.”
Twenty percent. So they’d concentrated the infection heavily at headquarters. Of course they had. The other branches only had real power when Central issued the orders. Seize Central, and the entire national hunter management system went dead.
I nodded and held up two fingers on my right hand, like a little V-sign.
“There would have been two kinds of infected. You saw that too, right?”
The Director let out a long breath.
“You know it in detail, don’t you. Spells with complicated magical formulas applied to them—and then the intermediaries linking those people together.”
In plain terms: there were the simple infected, and then there were separate individuals who collected their information and supplied them with energy. Even if one of them got inspected or came under suspicion, the surrounding units would all throw up interference at the same time. Linked together like an ant colony.
Once he’d confirmed that much, the rest was easy. I laid out the curse for him in full.
“Hah… remarkably systematic. So how do we crush it?”
The Director scowled and folded his arms. I answered in a troubled tone.
“You don’t.”
“Hm?”
“Most of those people are going to be diligent, or hold high social trust ratings.”
The look in the Director’s eyes changed. He had grasped the meaning of what I was saying at once.
“Good lord. You don’t mean…”
“Yes.”
Their curse slowly rewrote a person’s thought circuits. Take someone who loathed magical beasts with every fiber of their being, and turn them into a pet-beast enthusiast—that kind of thing. Even the sharpest elite, once infected, would gradually shift into a personality that suited the cult’s tastes. And once their disposition and ideology had changed, the work was judged complete. The curse dissolved on its own. After that, it would feel as if they had always held those cult-like beliefs from the start.
“Dangerous.”
The Director muttered it in a grave voice.
“Even a great sage, if he starts praising magical beasts, gets treated as fallen, as mad. But when there are many of them, it becomes a problem.”
I nodded.
“When a bunch of elites start barking weird conspiracy theories, the social climate turns ugly in a hurry.”
That was probably how Gate Apocalypse had been born. Stir up enough friction for humans to start violence among themselves, create chaos—and then, in that opening, deliver a fatal blow to human society. That was their basic strategy.
Beyond that, I gave the Director a rough outline of the cult’s information and scale: the organic, curse-linked global organization, the funding, the subordinate groups and nations already compromised.
When he finished listening, the Director exhaled a deep sigh.
“This isn’t a problem that ends with Korea. The people above us knew nothing until it got this far?”
“Above… the World Ability Agency?”
“That’s right.”
“They know.”
“Hm?”
“They know—they just can’t move. Even among themselves, they don’t know who’s on whose side.”
“…!”
The Director’s temper turned savage in an instant. Rage at the incompetence of a higher agency that knew the secret and still did nothing—exactly the setting I’d seen in Gate Apocalypse.
I didn’t expect him to react this suddenly, though…!
I absently rubbed my forearm against the gale of the Director’s mana. It wasn’t hostility aimed at me, but taking an S-class’s fury head-on was still rough. Like a mutt hearing a tiger’s roar.
I hastily opened my status window and dumped every remaining point into one place.
The more I put into Will, the calmer my heart felt. Combat skills became more efficient, and fear dulled. At first I’d written it off as a useless stat and left it alone… but in the Gate world, there was no stat more important than this one.
Feeling my mind settle in an instant, I smiled.
In that same moment, the aide standing behind the Director narrowed his eyes.
“…?”
I gave the aide a little nod of greeting, then touched the Director’s forearm and soothed him down.
“Director.”
He snapped back to himself and looked at me with a startled face.
“Ah—what a blunder. Forgive me. Are you all right?”
“Heh. I’m fine.”
“No damage to the skin? There must have been a mana storm.”
“I’m really fine.”
I casually threw both arms up to show him. The Director looked me over with worry, then let out a breath of relief.
“Thank goodness. Nearly twenty years without something like this… for some reason, my temper’s been running hot today.”
“That’s because the Director is…”
“Not because I’m old.”
“…Hehe.”
I knew. The Director’s temper wasn’t flaring because he was old, or even because the situation had shocked him. There was simply a magical beast sitting right in front of him, so his instincts put him on guard. Even if he couldn’t sense mana, gut feeling wasn’t something you could ignore. If anything, I should have seen this coming.
The Director stared off into the middle distance, settling his mood, then after a moment let out a short laugh.
“I think… I’d better call it a day and go rest.”
“Please do. Ah—one more thing before you go.”
“What is it?”
I pointed at the aide.
“Tell him not to overuse that skill.”
The aide’s eyes went round. Seeing that expression, the Director asked with a look of interest.
“Why?”
“White Wing Silence is a spell that affects the caster too. Right now it’s just headaches, but later it can lead to mental breakdown.”
With a soft thump, I used hypnosis to tidy the mana circuits in the aide’s head. Repeated use of a high-tier skill had left clumps of unusable mana scattered all through them.
The startled aide blinked several times. The Director tilted his head.
“What is it?”
I asked the aide.
“Feeling a little better?”
“Pardon?”
“How about it—headache’s gone, right?”
“That’s… how did you know the skill’s name—”
“None of your business. You’re feeling better, yes?”
The aide swallowed hard, then managed a stiff nod. The Director looked at him in disbelief.
“You had a headache? Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Ah, well… it wasn’t particularly severe.”
I shot back at once.
“That’s a lie.”
“Hm?”
“On a normal day it was just a dull throb, but every time you used the skill it would have felt like getting hit in the head with a hammer.”
The aide grew even more flustered and waved his hands.
“Ah, no, that’s not— it wasn’t that bad.”
“Yes it was.”
“A misunderstanding. I’m not that fragile.”
The Director clasped his hands behind his back and sighed.
“Enough. We’ll talk later.”
That aide was probably the one called Team Leader Han. In the original setting, the Director’s right-hand man had been murdered a few days before the Academy incident. Whether this would change fate, I didn’t know… but it was better than doing nothing.
The Director studied the aide for a long, silent moment, then turned his head toward me.
“One last thing before I go, Purple Bunny.”
“What is it?”
“Do you have any particular goal? Something you want. Abstract is fine.”
“My goal…? All of a sudden?”
“Well… frankly, after you’ve shown this much capability, I’m a little worried. I’d be grateful if you answered.”
“Ahh.”
I nodded with confidence. Maybe it was the Will points—what had once been a vague notion now had a clear outline. A little embarrassing, maybe, but if it eased the Director’s concerns, so be it.
“I want a world where everyone is happy.”
The Director’s eyebrows lifted slightly.
“A happy world?”
“Yep. A utopia where nobody hurts anyone else, nobody picks fights, and nobody is sad!”
Like the amusement park where Yena ran and played. A place where no one fell, so I wouldn’t have to watch over everyone or clean up after them. So I could just sleep my fill in peace!
The Director blinked a few times, then smiled faintly.
“Humble and vast, all at once.”
Immediately after his meeting with Pecia, the Director returned to the Hunter Administration and summoned someone at once.
Two days later, an East Asian man stepped into the Director’s office, his pitch-black eyes gleaming clear.
“Good to see you well, Director.”
“Ah, come in.”
The Director warmly offered him a seat, and the two of them began catching up. There was more than forty years between them, yet they talked as easily as old friends.
“…So that’s what happened. What would you have me do?”
Having heard the news of the cult’s operations, the man asked it calmly. Even with the entire world in crisis, he barely seemed to flinch. The Director let out a dry laugh inwardly.
The young one’s better than I am.
He himself had nearly lost his composure in front of Purple Bunny… and this domestic youngest S-class was already hunting for solutions as if it were nothing. Perhaps Purple Bunny’s crack about him being “old” hadn’t been entirely wrong. The Director touched his chin with a bitter smile.
“Given the situation, there’s nothing that needs doing immediately. Just an investigation, if you would.”
“Say the word.”
“Look into humanoid magical beasts. Especially individuals that were friendly toward humans—historical records included.”
“Friendly… for example, like ‘Alpha’?”
“That’s right. Ah, and—”
“Yes.”
“…Never mind.”
He’d almost added the condition “and ones that are quietly insolent when they talk,” but the Director swallowed the words and clicked his tongue. If Pecia really was a little girl, it wouldn’t be hard to understand. Whatever her true identity might be.
She said she wanted happiness.
And yet the one saying it seemed to take a quiet delight in teasing people. For someone who lived by logic, she was pure nonsense.
Seeing the smile at the corner of the Director’s mouth, the man tilted his head.
“Haha. Something amusing?”
The Director’s smile deepened.
“…Just thinking of a ridiculous little troublemaker.”
“I see.”
The man rose from his seat and bowed his head.
“In any case—Safety Keeper, codename Black Serpent. I will follow the Director’s orders.”
“Mm. Counting on you again this time.”