Crashing the Kingdom
"Hey. Look at this."
"…Hyung?"
The phone screen he held out showed a coin trading window.
Against a black background, vivid green and red graphs rose and plunged—by any glance, fluctuating not in tens of millions but in units of billions.
In the upper right corner, the words "Total Assets" were visible,
"Whuh-oh…!"
"That's right, you bastard! Billions!"
At the figure 8,577,972,138, Gwak Cheol-sik crumpled weakly to the floor. Eight billion won.
So it was true.
The coin rich weren't confined to Cheongdam-dong moms.
"Damn it, I could quit this whole thing. You think detective work is the only way I make a living? Those sons of bitches…. I'll catch every last one of them like trapping rats."
The squad leader, it turned out, had also become a coin millionaire.
"You too, kid. Hyung'll buy you a nice suit. Heard you've been running around buck naked lately? So what's this, five thousand won a shirt? For a T-shirt?"
"Worry about your own clothes…."
"Hey. This is a LouisXX."
The pauper's field jacket the squad leader wore was, in fact, a luxury brand. He wore it so convincingly shabby that the audience had simply been fooled along with everyone else.
"This is?"
"This is."
Gwak Cheol-sik pointed in disbelief. At his fingertip, the luxury logo on the chest of the squad leader's jacket caught the sunlight and gleamed.
"Anyway, damn it! Let's do this! Let's raise all the hell we want!"
When a small man with nothing finds his courage, audiences feel moved.
"I'll take full responsibility! Damn the consequences!"
When a man with plenty takes action, audiences feel thrilled.
"Hey, Detective Gwak. I've been dying to say this line. God, I look so damn cool right now."
By twisting the cliché just once, the entertainment value of Faster Than the Law came through even more crisply.
At last, everything was ready. If they could pin down the supplier of the Funny Series here today, it would be their victory.
Yeo-reum, decked out in glamorous party finery, was trembling like a leaf. Detective Yoon brushed the hair back from her face and fitted the wire in place.
"Relax your face."
Holding her tense jaw, Detective Yoon turned her head left, right, up, down. His gaze as he studied her was deep and unhurried.
As Detective Yoon committed her adorable face to memory from every angle, Yeo-reum asked quietly why.
"Why are you…."
"So I'll remember it."
Pretty girl….
"Can't have the wire falling out."
By now a single line of the song that had become her unofficial theme made the audience burst out laughing. Yeo-reum fidgeted with her ear.
"Hey, get over here."
Detective Gwak beckoned her over with a wave of his hand.
"How am I supposed to get over there, it's this cramped inside."
"Just stick your head through, that's all I'm asking. Aigoo."
Wriggling and heaving his body along like a man folding himself in half, Detective Gwak inched his way close to Yeo-reum's seat. Then, face to face, he spoke with a grave expression.
"If you don't think you can do it, walk out. Got it? Don't take on responsibility you don't need."
"…."
"If one person going down would sink this whole operation, we'd never have started it. Whatever goes wrong, none of it is on you."
Pushing the foal into the tiger's den had clearly weighed on him. He was, after all, a detective sworn to protect justice and the weak in the Republic of Korea, come what may.
"He's right."
Detective Yoon nodded, and the other detectives nodded in the same rhythm, sharing the sentiment.
"…."
Just as Yeo-reum was about to be moved, Detective Yoon spoke up.
"However, your liability for the repair costs on my car, the rental fees, and my medical bills remains fully in effect."
Crash. The sound of her swelling emotion shattering—no, being blown to smithereens—was almost audible. Yeo-reum kept her expression perfectly managed and took a deep breath.
"AAAAGH!!!"
Then she let out a battle cry that shook the van. The detectives were knocked half out of their senses by the sudden, thunderously resonant voice.
"Going in. Going now."
Having screamed her nerves loose, Yeo-reum stepped out of the van without a moment's more hesitation.
Club music pulsed from within. She walked with her head high toward Club D.K, where crowds were already lined up for entry, same as any other night.
Her retreating figure looked brave.
Almost like a kind of foreshadowing—a promise to the audience that this operation could never, ever fail.
The detectives remaining in the van watched the interior through the cameras attached to Yeo-reum and Detective Yoon. The two had made it inside successfully.
Above all, it helped that Yeo-reum was a former influencer.
But then a problem arose.
"Uh-oh! What is this!"
He'd assumed they could enter the same room. They could not. Grabbed by the guards, Detective Yoon was shoved bodily into a different room.
Having come this far into the party, he couldn't make a scene, so Detective Yoon resolved to buy time however he could.
And the place he'd been pushed into was a room packed chock-full of thoroughly drunk women.
"Kyaaa! He is SO my type!"
"A woman my age shouldn't be meeting a man like you, right? Just say one word for me. Hmm? Then I'll buy you a new watch!"
Apparently the guards had been instructed to fetch a shirt-and-glasses type, because the moment the women laid eyes on Detective Yoon, a fistful of tips came raining down.
Instantly surrounded by women he couldn't even fend off, Detective Yoon shot back a look of pure disbelief.
"…Are you all in your right minds?"
But his attitude only whipped the cheering into a frenzy.
"One more time! Say it one more time!"
Slow motion kicked in as Detective Yoon was shaken this way and that in the women's grasp. Elegant classical music drifted through the room, at utter odds with the scene.
When he tried to push them away, the women only tightened their grip on him.
Riiip—!
This time his shirt tore clean off. Detective Yoon raised both hands and covered his chest, expressionless.
Watching him on the monitor, Detective Gwak heaved a sigh.
"What the hell is that idiot doing? Ugh. This is why I keep saying I should've gone instead."
At those words, the detectives silently stared at Detective Gwak's face.
"…."
"…."
"…."
Then all three quietly shook their heads. Getting through the entrance seemed flatly impossible for him.
"I mean, fair enough. They'd have nabbed me too. I'm apparently the older-man type."
"…."
"…."
"…."
They shook their heads again. Older-man type or not, something told them that would not have gone well either.
"Oh! She's arrived!"
Just then, the camera attached to Yeo-reum finally reached its destination. Inside the cavernous club, a place so convoluted it took several twists and turns to reach.
And there was an elevator leading out of the building—the easiest escape route anywhere in the club.
"Is he there? Is K there?"
"It's too dark, we can't see clearly!"
Out of all these party rooms, they had to find the supplier known only as "K."
He was a social-media attention seeker, so they'd assumed he'd be easy to spot—but his real-time stories and posts had been tapering off.
As if taunting the detectives to come catch him, he'd tag locations from days past or upload old footage, deliberately muddying the waters.
As a result, they'd already struck out more times than anyone wanted to count.
"Zoom in!"
The feed switched to the room where the supplier of the Funny Series sat. Smile balloons floated everywhere, and the space was genuinely enormous.
It was a two-story room. On the ground-floor sofa sat one person clapping and laughing alone, another spinning in circles laughing, another banging their head against the wall while laughing….
Every one of them was laughing. The entire space had filled with grotesque, unhinged laughter. The high ceiling made the cracking cackles echo and reverberate.
Then it came. A voice calling to Yeo-reum from the second floor.
"Ohhh, a new face~. Hiiii?"
Most of the men were awake.
Most of the women were unconscious.
At that bizarre tableau, the audience tensed without meaning to. To put it precisely, the only person in that entire room who was in her right mind was Yeo-reum.
"You're K, right?"
But she walked into that room as if it were nothing. The face of the man seated at the head of the room was too dark to make out clearly, but from the way he gave a short nod, that was K.
As she settled into the plush sofa, the gazes around her bored into her like an inspection. Yeo-reum began the performance she'd been given.
"What? Startled because I'm pretty?"
Determined not to meet anyone's eyes, she lazily fished her phone out of her bag and turned on the front camera.
"God. I'm. Better in person, right?"
Then she turned her head this way and that as if checking her look. She didn't forget to casually brush her fingers against the wire as she swept her hair behind her ear.
Yeo-reum fiddled with the wire under the pretense of fixing her hair.
Tap-tap. Twice.
"She's there! K is there!"
Hearing those two taps through the monitor, the detectives in the van erupted. Knowing the interior would be too dark for the cameras to catch clearly, Yeo-reum had agreed on a signal system with the team.
"Okay."
Certain now that K was there, Detective Gwak raised a fist ever so slightly. At last—the moment the audience had been waiting for.
"Faster than the law. Let's go."
It was time to shatter their glittering kingdom to pieces.
"Wait, something's off…."
Someone muttered, looking at Yeo-reum. She'd been so tense she'd been throwing words around at random, and she'd simply assumed everyone here was too far gone to notice. That had been her mistake.
"I've never seen your face before. You don't come here often, do you?"
At those words, gazes slid toward her, slow and deliberate. Music drifted through the room, heavy with a sense of rising tension.
Clink…. Ice shifting in a whiskey glass sounded strangely, disproportionately loud.
"…Ugh, so annoying. Would you get off my back about my face?"
But the tension lasted only a moment before Yeo-reum shot back with the same sloppy, entitled drawl as the rest of them. She was managing to stall just fine.
The detectives were approaching from the rear of the building. To cut off K's escape route before he could bolt for the elevator.
"What's this?"
"Hey. Why the long faces? That's no way to greet customers."
The guards at the back door bared threatening expressions at the sight of the detectives. The moment they moved to close in on Detective Gwak, who'd appeared out of nowhere talking down to them—
"Ugh—!"
Crack! With one crisp, satisfying sound, the guards near him were subdued in an instant.
"Wha—what the—?"
The stunned guard at the front went down with a single over-the-shoulder throw from Detective Gwak. The scenes worthy of the title Faster Than the Law had begun.
"C1, C1, this is V0 here…."
Detective Gwak choked out even the guard transmitting a radio call, then continued.
"All clear."
The detectives who'd flattened half a dozen guards in the blink of an eye rolled their shoulders loose and easy. Nothing like the sloppy, bumbling detectives of days past.
Pulling entry cards from the pockets of the fallen guards, they strode forward with swagger. A razor-sharp electric guitar riff rang out.
Stoking the expectation that something spectacular was about to unfold.
The film was racing toward its climax.
Detective Yoon, too, had escaped the women with impeccable timing. It had actually worked in his favor. With his clothes in shambles and lipstick smeared across him, he looked perfectly at home here—a man drowning himself in drink.
"Where did she go…."
Unlike Yeo-reum, Detective Yoon had no way to conceal his wire. He carried a locator beacon, but he had no idea where in the building she was. Detective Yoon did his best to imitate a weaving, drunken gait.
Fortunately, the deep interior of the rooms was comparatively under-surveilled. Anyone who'd made it this far was assumed to be one of them.
"Nothing for it, then."
Detective Yoon drew a long breath. At this point, there was nothing to do but open the doors one by one.
Click!
Click!
Click!
Detective Yoon opened and shut door after door. The people inside were too far gone to pay him much mind anyway.
"Wahaha…! Heehee! Heeheehee!"
Everyone was laughing like lunatics. Set against the smile balloons filling the rooms, the effect was chilling. The moment Detective Yoon's hand found the next doorknob and turned it—
Click!
"Oh…."
There, he saw the police chief's face. As he hurriedly shut the door again, not a single person spared him a glance.
Because the chief and everyone else in that room were already insane. Amid the maniacal laughter, the mere sound of a turning doorknob drowned easily.
By now the tension on Yeo-reum's face was impossible to hide. Gulp. The sound of her swallowing rang out, far too loud in her own ears.
Dozens of smile balloons bobbed and drifted around K as he studied her. Their knotted strings ran into one another until they formed what looked like a folding screen.
"Don't dole them out one pathetic pack at a time. Just hand over the whole lot."
Through the wire in her ear, she could hear the detectives' footsteps. They were running.
"Ah-ha! Look at this. Tiny little thing's got some nerve."
They were coming, fast.
"A lady is speaking here~. Oh—sorry, my bad!"
Just hold out a little longer.
"Chang-seok, come on, she asked for the whole thing, give it to her! Don't be a stingy man!"
Just a little longer….
Rustle.
An envelope stuffed with smile stickers landed in front of Yeo-reum. The instant her fingers closed around it—
BANG—!!!
They were finally here.
"Ah, for god's sake, this place is a damn maze. You absolute idiots. You twisted the building up like this—what, you planning to sprint out of a fire? You practically deserve emergency exits carved into every wall!"
"Looks like they've done some illegal expansions too."
Backlit against the glare, Detective Gwak and Detective Yoon looked like salvation itself. The rim of light flared brilliantly past their shoulders.
"Oh, NOW you show up?!!"
Yeo-reum cried out, her voice cracking with emotion.
The composition had them framed from below, looking down on the first floor, but the two detectives stood with their heads held high and defiantly—and they did not look small in the least.
"God, you're loud. Who the hell are you, old men?"
K asked, brow furrowed.
"You moron! Take one look and you'd know! Who do you think it is!"
Yeo-reum roared, flush with the triumph of knowing her people had come. Her voice was so enormous that everyone clapped their hands over their ears. K clicked his tongue in annoyance.
"Would you cover yourself up. Seriously."
At those words, Detective Gwak turned to look at Detective Yoon.
"She said tidy up your clothes."
"Shut it…."
There wasn't a shred of real tension in the scene. The theater filled with easy, comfortable laughter—the kind that comes from the unshakable certainty that, whatever happens, our side is going to win.