Chapter 179: Three Men Make a Tiger 4
Chapter 179: Three Men Make a Tiger 4
Lee Ha-rin wanted me to be known for a benevolent image,
and she was convinced at her core that I was a good person.
I'm the sort who thinks about stabbing someone first the moment things go south.
'If you knife a guilty man, you can't be convicted—so why let him walk?'
A philosophical mind that seriously debates the value of human life, this was not.
I weighed easy and simple against complex and hard, and whether or not it'd be a pain in my ass.
To the utterly smitten Lee Ha-rin, I was
a man moved by nothing but compassion and mercy.
I'd taken Han Ye-ji and Lee Ha-rin as Incarnations out of interest rather than talent,
and I was healing patients across the continent only because it bumped my magic reserves up a little.
"Hm-hm, then I will reach out and begin making the arrangements."
"Yeah, I'm counting on you."
She'd been ranting about my mercy and Seonghwa Gallery's insolence
until her mouth went bone-dry,
and only when she had to stop and catch her breath— *hah, hah*—did the tirade finally end.
Then she turned red, as if embarrassed by her own outburst,
grabbed her documents and the envelope of letters, and bolted out the door.
...Yet she didn't bat an eye at being paraded naked on a leash in front of Song Ye-na.
'Some sensibilities are just impossible to grasp.'
And so Lee Ha-rin vanished, face flushed scarlet.
Even as absurdly capable as the Academy was, they'd still need to take applications from every continent. No matter how efficient and quick their processing, it'd take anywhere from two weeks to a month.
An event this size—advertise it on the day of, take applications for one day, done!
Pull a stunt like that, and you'd get buried under every insult mankind could invent.
Morally rigorous or not—Constellations exist, so faith exists—a politically empowered institution eats public scorn as a matter of routine anyway.
The way the old saying goes: *in private, men curse even the king.*
Curse a Constellation, though, and the cyber-ghosts of the Gallery drag you off.
In my past life, I once read about a Japanese otaku who analyzed a street sign reflected in an idol's eye in a photo and tracked down which hotel she was staying at.
Add real supernatural powers into the mix, and I genuinely can't imagine what kind of nightmare that looks like.
"Constellation, have you heard the news?"
As I lounged around mulling that over, Han Ye-ji came by this time.
"What news?"
"Word's already everywhere that you're holding the tournament."
"Ah, that news."
"I got to work today and people were already asking me things first thing in the morning. I don't know anything, though, so I just said it was confidential and got out of there."
Kim Ha-eun, holed up in the city. Lee Ha-rin, buried in her lab.
And Song Ye-na, who hadn't even been contracted for a full month.
Naturally, all eyes gravitated to Han Ye-ji.
Her personality was easygoing, she didn't carry the high-pressure presence most Incarnations did—yet she was still my first-ever contractor, so to anyone with a question she was bound to seem like the safest bet.
"You're right. I talked about it with you yesterday, and once the rumor got rolling, I figured I'd just go ahead with it."
"...Once the rumor got rolling?"
Word gets out, so you casually run a continent-level tournament.
The notion was clearly hard to swallow with ordinary sensibilities—
Han Ye-ji echoed the words, and I gave her a vague nod.
A tournament with a far grander scale than the Incinerating Tyrant's invitation for a new Incarnation up north.
Han Ye-ji's face had registered pure bewilderment at the idea that I'd launch the whole thing because a rumor happened, but once I explained that the Academy had already prepared everything and only needed my permission, she understood.
"Ah, so that's what that was."
"What?"
"There's a plot of empty land they'd planned for a dueling arena—it suddenly doubled in size and they moved the fence. And by the new wing they're building for the patients' quarters, a few temporary structures have already gone up. I bet those are the participants' lodgings. On top of that, security staff were making all sorts of offers to the Incarnations on guard duty—people like me."
The dueling ground for the tournament: selected from the site already planned for a general arena.
Lodging for participants and staff: tacked onto the expansion of my patient ward.
Event staff: volunteers recruited from the Academy cadets, employed as hands.
As for roles needing muscle—like security—they were looping in the half-idle guards from Han Ye-ji's unit to coordinate.
Easy enough to say, but in practice that's dozens of forms flying between just as many departments—yet under the banner of "the Constellation commands it," everything clicked into place smooth as clockwork.
This kind of efficiency was exactly why the Academy was so terrifying to me.
My entire experience with public institutions was a university that couldn't even handle course registration without crashing, and an apartment women's association that sued itself over a boiler embezzlement scandal.
So of course the Academy's hyper-competent operation felt unnatural.
"Then, does that mean you're bringing over the Incarnation surveillance team we assembled back then?"
"Yeah. They all came in thinking tracking a Fallen Constellation was a years-long project, so they've been left kind of hanging."
The Heart of the Exiled Serpent, and the personnel assigned to watch her and her Incarnation.
Even the ultra-capable Academy hadn't expected another Constellation's Incarnations to resolve a Fallen Incarnation that easily and that fast. The incompetence of Constellations outrunning the Academy's brilliance—something like that.
Anyway, because of it, Han Ye-ji and parts of the guard detail had almost ended up stranded in a truly awkward limbo.
A team had been formed, a department assigned, duties allocated—
and the whole assignment had ended not even a month in.
They couldn't return to their original teams; there were no openings.
They couldn't stay on—the Fallen Constellation and her Incarnation had been shipped off as test subjects to the Incinerating Tyrant and the Academy's custody.
Surveillance? What were they going to surveil when the target had been dragged off like a puppet, unconscious and stripped of bodily control?
Thinking of it that way, I could understand the Academy's logic.
Incarnations so capable they'd been trusted to surveil a Fallen Constellation's Incarnation—dozens of talents turned jobless overnight. Wouldn't any institution want to fabricate some work to keep them busy?
"Fair enough. I didn't think they'd get caught that quickly either."
"Right? Definitely not."
The wry smile Han Ye-ji gave almost made me laugh out loud.
On a continent where Constellations are sacred, people hold a certain ambiguous deference toward Fallen ones. Most fallen cases, only happened because the Constellation had an unshakable personal ideology.
Take the Constellation of imperial birth who fell because he couldn't accept democracy. He'd wanted to unify the continent and be worshipped as its sole emperor, amassed troops, and was dealt with.
A priest-born Constellation believed in a single god and denied the fundamental nature of this world. A mage Constellation went mad researching why magic's laws differed here.
From deranged scientists to blue-blooded types who couldn't let go of past glories—even the Dream Demon I'd disposed of had acted in service of some grand cause.
Except for the Heart of the Exiled Serpent, who just wanted to bang hot guys.
"The, uh, Heart of the Exiled Serpent was kind of a special case, wasn't she?"
Ambition to become the unified empress and lead humanity into prosperity—
can you really put that on the same level as "I want to bang guys with great bodies"?
The whole thing could've been resolved without her falling at all. On this continent, where Dream Demon abilities command this much respect, isn't it practically a given?
"Let's not talk about that moron."
"Anyway, Constellation, the tournament news is up online already."
"...Already?"
"Yeah. I think the cadets probably sent an official inquiry to the Academy. Once they got the go-ahead, an official answer went right out."
My curiosity piqued, I pulled up the internet.
The first thing my eyes landed on, of course: the Constellation & Incarnation Gallery, or Seonghwa Gallery for short.
― At this point, can't we just officially call him our Gallery Lord?
[Tournament announcement screencap.jpg]
Dude personally keeps fanning the flames so the Gallery's hype doesn't die down
Stop with the dick-measuring vs. threads and watch the damn thing in person
― You think cadet-level fighters even stand a chance?
[Broadcaster cadet declaring entry screencap.jpg]
Looks like mid-tier Incarnations are all flocking in too
Honestly, isn't it weirder if the pussy-haired ones *don't* show up?
Just have sex and your enlightenment literally duplicates
Unless you're a lesbian, you're signing up
Just looking at it made my head swim—dozens of pages already.
So many Incarnations had seen the Academy's notice and decided to join that their fandoms were flooding Seonghwa Gallery to post about it.
"Wow, this dedication... what's a Best Post even worth?"
"They just do it for fun, probably."
"Do you do this stuff?"
"Nah, too much hassle. Maybe Ha-rin does?"
Han Ye-ji and I flopped onto the bed on our stomachs and watched the chaos unfold side by side.
Plenty of posts simply aired out sexual fantasies about the Dream Demon, sure,
but since the core topic was the tournament, far more were analyzing the Incarnations.
Contract year, time left until Academy graduation, key Authorities and Talents,
their Constellation's characteristics, and their known deeds to date.
The analysis was so detailed it bordered on obsessive stalker levels.
And every single Incarnation who'd declared entry had at least one such post.
This being the internet, shit-stirring was a given—
― Reasons this tournament is horny as fuck
[Tournament announcement screencap.jpg]
Isn't this literally continent-sanctioned Dream Demon sex?
A continent-wide broadcast sex-deciding match
Victorious woman earns breeding rights, full-on beast-style fucking
Fuck it, I'm gonna go pound one out, brb
—all manner of demented bullshit swelled up and sank away in turn.
Then again, when I stopped to think about it... it sort of tracked.
A continent-certified sex-decision match—what kind of AV premise was this?
"A continent-level se—sex-decision match, they're saying."
Maybe the title bait had hooked her,
because from beside me came a stifled snort of laughter.