ep11. Stripped of the Five Senses (2)
I stared at Kwon Mu-seop with eyes wide enough to register an earthquake.
"It'll be a bit inconvenient, but safety comes first."
That was Kwon Mu-seop's breezy response to my silent scream.
"Safety... sir?"
"This week, if you got dragged off somewhere, there'd be no one free to respond right away. So I figured it was better to just go along with you myself."
He meant it. He really, genuinely intended to recreate the personal effects experiment that I had done with Jae-gyeom.
We agreed to never do that again after the massive accident it caused, didn't we?
And does the section chief himself really need to be the one stepping up for this?
"But why does it have to be you, Chief...?"
"There's no one to spare. Everyone's swamped."
"Still, if something happens to you, Chief, wouldn't that be a disaster?"
"Haha, well, it's a disaster if anyone goes down, isn't it?"
Kwon Mu-seop beamed at my concerns, bright and unbothered.
True. All life is precious.
But is the absence of the head of Field Operations really the same as the absence of some rank-and-file agent?
"Don't worry too much, Do-woon. My gut's pretty good. It'll be fine, I'm sure of it."
The problem is that your entire justification is a gut feeling.
Meaning to at least talk him out of it a little, I looked past Kwon Mu-seop at Yoon Woo-jeong, the Deputy Head of Field Operations standing behind him. She just smiled and tried to reassure me instead.
"It's fine, Do-woon. If something happens to the Chief, everyone moves up a promotion slot."
Chief, you heard that, right?
Your deputy is eyeing your chair.
"Well then, let's have a good week."
Having accepted my silence as agreement, Kwon Mu-seop gave my shoulder a pat.
And that was when I finally began to understand the sour look on Kim Woo-in's face.
It went without saying, but possessing Kwon Mu-seop was a far harder proposition than possessing Gwak Jae-gyeom.
Kwon Mu-seop was a superior ten years my senior. Gwak Jae-gyeom was my roommate, five years my junior.
Even setting those traits aside, the answer was the same: the Chief's actual work was on a whole different level of complexity from Jae-gyeom's. And the timing couldn't have been more chaotic.
Situation reports streamed in from every direction. Split feeds bloomed across the massive panoramic screen, and from the command seat I could see it all laid bare: a hundred-odd Control Team operatives and the monitoring booths ringing them.
This was the Bureau's Situation Control Room. In a space big enough to swallow two movie theaters, communications, reports, and live footage flickered past without pause. It was a sight that pressed down on you with sheer, crushing scale.
So this is where they monitor the inside of the Special Zones.
...Which means footage of me has been broadcast across those giant screens too, hasn't it?
Cold sweat broke out at the mere thought, and I tore my eyes from the main display. My gaze drifted naturally toward the Control Team monitoring booths—and locked eyes with a man sitting there.
A familiar face. The fox-faced Control Team operative who'd picked a pointless fight with me at the training grounds and gotten thoroughly demolished by Baek Sa-ra for it. His name was... Yeon Ga-ram, wasn't it?
For whatever reason, Yeon Ga-ram was glaring at me with eyes positively burning. Then, the moment our gazes actually met, he whipped his head away with a start.
Still a strange one, that guy.
"Chief, all units ready for entry."
"Team 4, enter. Team 2, hold."
At Kwon Mu-seop's command, the Team 4 operatives waiting in what looked like a giant aircraft hangar rolled forward into the tunnel ahead. Heavily equipped Response Team members led the way, the more lightly kitted Exploration Team trailing behind.
Maybe ten minutes of driving through that tunnel. The far end gradually brightened until a new space opened up before them.
They had arrived at the Funeral Hall Where the Dead Return.
"Team 2, enter. Team 3, hold."
The moment Team 4 arrived safely, Kwon Mu-seop issued the next order. Several repetitions of the same cycle.
"Team 1, enter."
Finally, Team 1—home to Response Team 3—entered their operational zone, the Island Where Blood Rains.
Resetting the Island Where Blood Rains was the main mission of this Intensive Suppression Week.
The Island was one of the few outdoor-type Special Zones, built from an entire island copied wholesale. The original was a tiny scrap of land you could circle on foot in twenty minutes.
But the Island Where Blood Rains had already managed one successful growth cycle, and its space had expanded severalfold. Worse, the spatial distortion had rendered all prior exploration data meaningless, and its appetite for human flesh had grown stronger with it. Sixteen percent of this year's first-quarter casualties had come from this one zone—that number said everything.
In the end, the zone had been rated as off-the-scales in the latest hazard assessment, and its reset was decided.
"Team 1, successful entry into the Island Where Blood Rains. No anomalies to report."
With the Team 1 monitoring supervisor's report, the island's landscape flooded the screen.
It was the view through a Team 1 operative's bodycam. At first glance, it looked like a beautifully landscaped park—verdant grass in harmony with sculptural architecture.
But look closer, and an impossible distortion emerged. The space had warped and swelled every which way, terrain and buildings stretching out endlessly toward every horizon at once.
And somewhere in that vast expanse, Team 1 had to find the zone's core—and destroy it.
The platoon-sized Team 1 pushed slowly into the interior of the Island Where Blood Rains. There was a weight to their steps, something akin to marching toward a battlefield.
No. Not akin. Exactly that.
Ta-da-da-DAAAM, ta-daa—!
Accompanied by that by-now-familiar music, Agent Moomu—the Bureau's mascot—appeared on screen.
Agent Moomu blinked her dot-black eyes and winked. For an educational mascot, she was inexplicably sultry. Then she played sad, and a few low-resolution photos slid up beside her—images of a pitch-black sphere buried in smoke, in flame, or entombed in some tangled mass of matter.
Next, Moomu abruptly donned a white lab coat and raised her eyebrows in scholarly fashion, a black sphere bobbing at her side. When she slumped into dejection, the sphere melted away like it was dissolving. Then, research apparently abandoned, Moomu traded the lab coat for a rifle slung across her torso and went bang bang bang, shooting a fresh core full of holes.
Agent Moomu winked once more.
I was in the middle of being seduced and destabilized by this snake mascot's sultriness when—
Knock knock.
"Come in."
Kwon Mu-seop answered the sudden knock. The door opened and Deputy Head Yoon Woo-jeong appeared.
"Is Do-woon doing all right in here?"
I yanked out my earphones and answered. "Ah—yes, ma'am. Doing fine."
"Ugh, look at him standing at attention next to the Chief. Poor thing."
"Haha......"
"And you, Chief—whew, you're giving me flashbacks. It's unsettling."
Yoon Woo-jeong sighed, glancing back and forth between me and Kwon Mu-seop. I had a pretty good idea why, so I stole a careful look around the Chief's office.
Kwon Mu-seop sat ramrod straight as a monk, working through his paperwork. Matching the atmosphere, I was watching the training video with funeral-parlor solemnity of my own. And right now, on top of everything, the Chief was in full combat kit—sitting at his desk with a rifle slung on his back.
Yeah. Unsettling was the word.
But Kwon Mu-seop seemed to have noticed nothing at all, and asked me, "Do-woon, is it uncomfortable in here?"
"It's asking that's uncomfortable, Chief."
Before I could even respond, Yoon Woo-jeong clicked her tongue.
"Suffering out in the field, suffering in here too. That kid never catches a break... Do-woon, listen—if the Chief talks in his sleep tonight, you have my permission to stuff a rag in his mouth."
She grinned and leaned in to whisper it. Kwon Mu-seop just chuckled.
"A rag might be a bit dangerous."
"If it's dangerous, then he should wake up. And what's there to worry about anyway? You've got me."
One of them fretting over workplace accidents. The other angling for a promotion. Even with a subordinate openly needling him like that, Kwon Mu-seop simply smiled and turned the question back on her.
"Deputy Head, aren't you busy?"
"I am busy. I was in the control room until just now—that's the only reason I'm out."
Yoon Woo-jeong answered offhandedly and dug through her pocket. Jingle—
"Chief's ID tag and his ring."
"You brought those yourself?"
"Came to check on Do-woon anyway. Figured I'd kill two birds."
What she handed over was a Bureau ID tag, shaped like a dog tag, with a silver ring threaded onto it like an afterthought.
"Well then, take it easy in there. Don't wear the kid into the ground."
Yoon Woo-jeong passed over just the ID tag and was gone as quickly as she'd come. Kwon Mu-seop hung it around his neck, then offered me the ring for a verification check.
"Do-woon, you've got your silver ring too, right?"
"Yes, sir. Wearing it now."
I raised my ringed hand to show him. Two rings sat on my left hand: one a black ring from Baek Sa-ra, the other the silver ring issued by the Bureau. Stacking them on a single finger because the clinking annoyed me, I'd ended up with a stark black-and-white contrast laid bare.
"Good. You never know when you'll need it—keep wearing them."
The silver ring was an item that worked in strangely reliable ways inside Special Zones, one of the standard-issue essentials for field operatives. Seeing Kwon Mu-seop pack a silver ring along with his ID tag gave me a fresh, sobering sense of how grave he considered this week.
"Must've been rough today, getting tailed around all day."
"Not at all, sir."
It was, in fact, rough.
"First day's always hectic one way or another. It'll ease up from tomorrow."
Kwon Mu-seop smiled apologetically, as if he could read every one of my grievances. And to my eyes, that smile looked like the grin of a saint.
Well, of course it did. A man of his rank was running a personal emergency-response protocol on my behalf, around the clock. Yoon Woo-jeong had scoffed that the sight gave her hives, but to me his earnestness felt, if anything, remarkable. Something to be grateful for.
I was in the middle of watching my respect for Kwon Mu-seop quietly take root and grow when, all of a sudden, he called to me with grave seriousness.
"By the way, Do-woon."
"Yes, Chief."
"What ever happened with your girlfriend?"
......
I was truly, deeply sorry—but in that moment, I finally understood something.
I understood why everyone in the Bureau looked at this man the way they did.