Chapter 29
real. You really know how to make a guy stop smiling."
That's a bit stiff. More natural:
"Ah, hyung, you're gonna make me get serious." "Come on._TITLE: Ripples (1)
The moment Ashmoon Night 200 ended, Nova Arena communities across the world were turned inside out. The peak concurrent viewership recorded that day hit a staggering 1.8 million — a figure you would be hard-pressed to find even in the top-billed matches of the World League.
All through the sixth match the live audience traced a frightening upward curve, and the heat reached its peak, without question, in that desperate instant when Ak-gwi stood before the walls of Fel Grad and came face to face with four Named.
His body was a wreck. One arm was gone. Even so, he did not give up. If anything, he answered with overwhelming ferocity, cutting down Battle Axe, Liang Wei, and even General, one after another. At the very end he met a valiant death, caught in the trap Viper had laid — but it was never a meaningless defeat. It was a calculated sacrifice, buying thirty minutes so Adrian, the one he had been sent to extract, could cross the border of the Kingdom of Kainon unharmed.
That grim ending — a man gladly throwing his own life away to save his extraction target — carved a heavy awe, and a shiver, into the hearts of the millions watching from beyond the screen.
Above all, the American fans — the ones who live and die by a hero's story — exploded. They were utterly captivated by this altruistic and yet merciless demon, the man who had stayed alone in the middle of a hopeless hell and burned himself up for someone else.
Portals and social media across the United States were plastered with nothing but Ak-gwi. Under the banner of the most dramatic successful extraction in Arena history, he became, overnight, the most watched Named fighter in the American pro league.
"Heh... heheh..."
The Nova Arena Korea Branch Tower rose out of the heart of Gangnam. Watching the frenzy of the entire world fill his tablet, a man let a low laugh slip out.
Director Oh Hyun-seok. Sunk deep into the sofa, he scrolled through the flood of real-time posts one by one. The laugh was less joy than the electric certainty that hits when a hand you've bet on pays out far beyond anything you imagined.
"Knew it. My eye was right."
Oh Hyun-seok had been one of the people watching this match most carefully. And in that sense, he was certain. That man was Ak-gwi.
He switched the tablet off and turned to the secretary who had been checking the community reaction beside him — Park Chun-sik.
"You had the intelligence team leave Ak-gwi out of the information gathering, correct?"
"Yes. The instructions were delivered clearly. That said, he's a prospect whose stock is climbing fast, so people inside the intelligence team did find it a little strange."
"And what did you tell them?"
"I said he'd flown so high we couldn't get our hands on him anymore, so we were giving up at our level. They came around almost immediately."
Oh Hyun-seok let out a laugh at that. This was the normal reaction. Ak-gwi was no longer merely a fighter in the American pro league. He had become a star warrior the whole world was watching.
Anyone who watched the Arena, league and nationality aside, wanted to know who the masked monster really was. Massive legions across the globe were surely hunting his identity with blood in their eyes. But it was plain that not one of them would get anywhere near the truth.
They don't even know Ak-gwi is Korean. Heh heh heh.
A strange sense of victory soaked through him. And yet a thick regret remained alongside it. The talent Ak-gwi had shown was already beyond any standard measure, but the circumstances he lived in were wretchedly poor. If only he could receive systematic training in a slightly better environment...
Then he could put up results even more overwhelming than these.
Of course, Director Oh was the sort who respected each warrior's style and tastes. Shutting someone into a mold by force, or demanding it of them, did not suit him. Even so, he could not be comfortable watching a prospect like a raw jewel shut himself away in the corner of some shabby old workshop. It was a kind of occupational disease — the particular burden of a man with an eye for genius.
"Did you look into that representative of his?"
When Oh Hyun-seok changed the subject, Park Chun-sik held out a single document.
"It was genuinely difficult to obtain. He'd hidden his identity very tightly."
"So he's hiding something too?"
"Turns out he runs a private investigation office. The man named Go Tae-min is the same — their records barely surface at all, which suggests they operated together before."
"Is that so?"
A meaningful smile caught at the corner of Oh Hyun-seok's mouth as he listened. Go Tae-min, the representative of that legion, and a past kept hidden. As the pieces fitted together one by one, a very interesting thought flickered through his head.
"So that's how it is..."
After the sixth match of Ashmoon Night 200 came to an end, Go Tae-min, once again, lost consciousness and collapsed the instant the capsule's hatch opened. The desperate blood-fight against a knight who wielded mana, and the battles with one powerful fighter after another, had left an aftermath beyond anything he could have imagined. He lay there for a full week, unable to so much as stir.
And the first place he went, the moment he finally opened his eyes after that week and pulled himself together, was Mount Munhak in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province.
An ash-gray stone stele sat quiet on a lonely slope where few people came. It was a place that honored those who had served their country like shadows and vanished without a name — the Special Mission Fallen Soldiers Memorial.
Go Tae-min let his gaze stop on one nameplate among the many.
His old partner, who had taken a bullet in his place and died in the hot, wet jungles of Laos.
Go Tae-min carefully set a single white chrysanthemum down before it. Then he drew a crumpled cigarette from inside his coat, set it between his lips, and lit it slowly.
"Hack—! Hack!"
Smoke stabbing into his lungs for the first time in a long while was viciously harsh — harsh enough that his shoulders shook as he coughed it out for a good while. Even so, he smoked the cigarette all the way down to the end.
Into the burning haze, Adrian's face, trembling with fear in the deepest pit of Tartaros, overlapped with Lee Jong-hyuk's face smiling at him in that final moment, and both scattered into the empty air.
"Been a while. Good to see you. I'll come by again."
Go Tae-min ground the burned-out butt out against the ground. Down at the foot of the ridge, Chae Geon-wook, who had been leaning against the hood of a midsize SUV and sipping coffee, finally straightened up.
Watching the lonely look on Go Tae-min's face as he came down the mountain, Chae swallowed a sigh.
Maybe I shouldn't have pushed him to start the Arena.
A corner of his heart sank heavy. He had only meant to give the man a refuge from reality, and instead he seemed to have raked up a vicious trauma buried deep, and he was sorry for it. All through this match, watching the frantic struggle and the sublime sacrifice Go Tae-min had shown, Chae had felt as if he were sitting on a bed of thorns.
But the worry did not last long. Because Go Tae-min, rigid ever since he had come to, smiled brightly for the first time and opened his mouth.
"Ugh, I went over a week without eating and I feel like death. Pretty sure my stomach's glued to my spine and won't come off."
"...Huh? Yeah? Want to go grill some meat, then?"
"Who has time to stand around grilling? I'm one dizzy spell away from hitting the ground. Let's just go shove some burgers in our faces right up the road."
At that, Chae Geon-wook let a snort of laughter slip, quietly relieved. This was the usual Go Tae-min he knew. The shadow of the former agent who had stood before the stone a moment ago — the man who had walked back and forth through the dark — was nowhere to be seen.
"Sure, let's go. But you're paying today, got it?"
At the sly offer, Go Tae-min, walking ahead, stopped dead. He turned, brow creased.
"Ah, hyung, there you go again, making a man get serious."
"What?! You made a fortune off this match!"
"Huh? I did? How much came in?"
When Go Tae-min asked it back with his eyes gone round, Chae snorted as if he couldn't believe what he was hearing. Well, the man had been out cold for a solid week. There was no way he knew what number had landed in his account.
"Your base match fee alone was twenty-six thousand dollars. Victory bonus on top of that, another twenty-six thousand."
"Whoa!"
Chae went on, ticking it off on his fingers.
"And a VIP extraction actually got completed for the first time in half a year. By you, alone. Thanks to that, a special bonus of a hundred and thirty thousand dollars dropped in on top. Add the PoA bonus of a hundred thousand, and..."
Go Tae-min swallowed. Two hundred and eighty-two thousand dollars in all. Converted, it was a whopping four hundred million won.
"Whoa. That's a jackpot, isn't it?"
"Well? With money like that, you can spring for today at least once, can't you?"
"Come on. There hyung goes again, making a man get serious."
Go Tae-min's face twisted into something so ugly it was hard to believe he had been smiling a moment ago. Chae looked at him with an expression that said, plain as day, Are you even human? Then he let out a long sigh and jerked his chin toward the foot of the mountain.
"Fine, I'll pay, I'll pay. God, you money-grubbing bastard."
"You should've come out with that from the start! Let's go!"
The two of them headed straight for the burger franchise nearby that they always used.
Faced with a generously stacked combo, same as ever, Go Tae-min took a huge bite and sank into thought.
It had been a long time since I felt that powerless.
It was a match that had forced him to feel a great deal, and to think about even more. The desperate fight in Tartaros. The youth he had protected to the end, so like his old partner. The knight who had made him feel the wall. And General, who had wielded mana.
At last, swallowing the mouthful, Go Tae-min spoke with the usual mischief put away, his face wholly serious.
"Hyung, I've got a new goal."
"A goal? What is it?"
At that declaration which wasn't quite one, Chae Geon-wook looked up, a french fry stopped halfway to his hand. Go Tae-min spoke again.
"I want to become the Super League champion."
"Super League champion? So that wasn't it until now? You said you were climbing because you wanted to make a lot of money."
"That's still true. The reason's just changed a little."
Go Tae-min looked down at his own palm. This match had driven into his bones the need to grow stronger. There was a clear wall that inborn senses and a trained body alone could not cross. Before the overwhelming power of a knight wrapped in mana, he had been forced to gamble by throwing even his sword away, and before General's speed he had been driven all the way to death's threshold. Once he had taken that hopeless gap with his whole body, the way he saw the world itself had changed.
The Super League. The summit, reachable only by the strongest — those who had crossed countless battlefields and proven their talent and skill there. Go Tae-min spoke, his eyes a shade deeper than before.
"I want to get stronger. So that I never again... have to lose the things that matter."
Lee Jong-hyuk's last face, falling bloodied in his place in the jungles of Laos, crossed with the back of Adrian running beneath the moonlight in Tartaros, trusting him. If he was not to lose someone again and be shut inside the prison of helpless guilt, he could not remain some half-formed agent. He had to become a true warrior no one could even approach.
Silence held for a moment. Then Go Tae-min grinned and added on.
"Well, if I make an absurd amount of money on the side, even better."
"...Haah, you money-drunk brat. A serious mood doesn't even last you a minute."
Chae let out an empty laugh and shook his head. But inwardly, he was deeply glad. The junior who had wandered with no destination, chasing nothing but money, seemed at last to have found for himself the road he needed to walk.
"All right. What can hyung help with?"
"Nothing you need to help with right now. I'm going to be out getting hit for a while anyway."
"Getting hit?"
Chae was echoing it, puzzled, when a short buzz hummed from Go Tae-min's pocket.
Go Tae-min checked the screen, and a pleased smile spread across his mouth.
"Ah, perfect timing. He just reached out."
"Who?"
Go Tae-min rose from his seat, lightly loosening his stiff neck as he answered.
"The old man. Figured I'd walk the meal off while I'm at it. I'll head out."