Seeds of Conflict (5)
The next day, the media was buzzing nonstop about Red Moon.
After stepping out of the elevator, I checked the news on my phone.
Drugs, sexual favors, kidnapping, and illegal filming in the middle of Gangnam?!
Suspicions of police cover-ups, tacit approval, and special treatment
…
Following the victim’s tip-off, The Koon Guk Ilbo kept hammering away with one report after another.
The public caught fire, and that anger spread straight into the comments.
My own handiwork at Red Moon was also plastered all over the news.
Red Moon Murder Case. Who Is the Real Killer?
A Champion of Justice? Or a Serial Pleasure Killer?
The police announced that the murder case had been the result of a turf war between villain organizations.
The villain may have been involved, or maybe the corrupt cops just swept it under the rug.
After all the noise and all the uproar, Red Moon finally went under and shut its doors.
That’s one problem solved, at least.
Now that the rotten part had been cut away, I felt cleaner for it.
Other clubs were still openly causing trouble, big and small, but once the Red Moon incident was exposed to the public, even the villains started reading the room.
A week later, Gangnam clubbers were joking that the district had become a “drug-free zone.”
Everything was going smoothly.
Still haven’t solved the root problem, though.
…….
Separate from the club issue, the conflict between the police and the firefighters was growing worse by the day.
The standoff between the two sides dragged on, taut as a drawn bowstring.
If I had stopped what happened at Red Moon sooner, would all this have still happened?
No.
The police’s corruption and their ties to villains had existed long before the point where I regressed.
Like a balloon slowly swelling.
A group riddled with chronic rot keeps swelling until one day, inevitably, it bursts.
The signal flare had already been fired.
I can’t stop the Police-Fire War.
What I wanted was for the outcome to change.
In my past life, the police had won overwhelmingly.
Afterward, not only the firefighters but civilians had suffered under the hands of corrupt cops.
This time around.
I’m changing history.
One hundred Dark Alliance villains had been covertly inserted, and the police’s combat power had risen dramatically.
With the villains’ help, the police would overturn the disadvantageous battlefield in the Police-Fire War and win a crushing victory.
The thing I needed to do in order to change history was already decided.
I…….
will side with the firefighters.
I thought it through for a while.
What defined a villain?
Someone who didn’t care what methods they used as long as it made money. Someone who never hesitated to break the law.
A group driven entirely by profit.
Wasn’t it funny?
At a glance…….
They weren’t that different from guilds.
But there was a difference.
Guilds trained hunters systematically, whereas Dark Alliance was a nest of bottom-feeding criminals.
If hunters and villains went at it in groups, the difference in force would be obvious.
Easy victory for the hunters, no question.
However.
What if the numbers were different?
I couldn’t step into the Police-Fire War as a hunter.
Wanting the firefighters to win and the police’s corruption to be rooted out was my own conviction alone.
I couldn’t drag the Dio Guild into it or use them for my own sense of justice.
There was no way other hunters would see things exactly the way I did, either.
So.
I’d be moving alone.
I’d wear a purple suit.
Put on a mask and hide my identity.
I would appear only as…….
Purple Devil.
Then a question came up.
Could I win?
All the villains sent into the Police-Fire War were Awakened.
They weren’t especially strong.
For hunters, they’d be low-tier.
Mostly E- and D-class.
At best, maybe a few B-class.
Were there one or two A-class among them?
To begin with, the Dark Alliance didn’t have many strong members outside of its executives.
But.
No one survives a dogpile.
What, exactly, were my odds of winning a fight against one hundred people?
Go Ju-hun, Yohan, the Cheonyang-ji cult leader, the Dirty Kraken…….
So far, the hero abilities I’d bought had shown their strength in one-on-one battles.
……One hundred people.
Had I ever fought so many at once?
Fear comes from situations you haven’t lived through.
To be honest…….
I was scared.
When the Police-Fire War broke out, Gwanghwamun Square would be packed with people.
Plenty of them would witness the clash between Purple Devil and the villains.
Getting beaten by a hundred people wasn’t something I found shameful or humiliating.
What would truly shame me was…….
bowing to the villains.
In my previous life, I did nothing.
Except when I was clawing my way to money, I spent my days crouched like a dead thing.
I thought that if I did nothing, nothing would happen.
But looking back…….
Maybe doing nothing was the most dangerous thing of all.
The so-called paradox of danger.
If I ignored the Police-Fire War, the butterfly’s wings would become a gale of reverse wind, and razor-sharp blades would hang over everyone around me.
I’m afraid. I’m afraid, but…….
The flow of my thoughts naturally led me to what I had to do.
If I wanted to crush a large number of enemies…….
I had to get stronger.
My goal of becoming the strongest hero hadn’t changed.
I was walking down a hallway in the Dio building when I stopped.
Opening the training room door, I found someone familiar inside.
“Hey. Latecomer.”
Na Sang-min greeted me with a wave.
“I’m ten minutes early.”
“If you’re later than me, you’re late.”
Lee Ji-jun entered the training room a beat afterward.
“You’re last. Five hundred push-ups.”
“Huh? I’m nine minutes early—”
“Do it.”
“Damn it!”
As always, Na Sang-min’s brutal hellscape was waiting for us.
Lee Ji-jun obediently started pumping out push-ups.
I rolled up my sleeves too.
“I’ll do them as well.”
“What?”
Na Sang-min narrowed his eyes.
There wasn’t any time.
If I was going to take on a hundred villains, then as fast as possible…….
“If my partner’s doing it, I should do it too.”
“Oh, is that so?”
Na Sang-min curled one corner of his mouth and smiled like the devil himself.
“Fine. Let’s see it.”
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
“Uweeegh!”
“Gahhh!!”
Lee Ji-jun and I knelt side by side, each clutching a bucket and vomiting.
Lee Ji-jun, gasping for breath, muttered, “Good thing I came on an empty stomach.”
Looks like he’d already gotten used to Na Sang-min’s hell training.
“Five-minute break!”
The moment Na Sang-min gave the order, Lee Ji-jun flopped onto the floor.
“Haaah. Fuck. I feel like I’m gonna die.”
My own legs were shaking too.
I really screwed up by trying to show off.
My body was trembling under the brutal training.
Even if I squeezed myself dry, there wasn’t a drop of mana left.
If I closed my eyes, I felt like I’d pass out right there.
I wanted to lie down, but I forced myself to move.
Heading over to Na Sang-min as he wiped the sweat from his face, I held out an ion drink.
“Here, drink this.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
Na Sang-min chugged it down in long gulps.
“I’ve got a question.”
“What?”
“How do you fight a large number of monsters?”
Call it a disguised version of the real question.
In reality, I meant villains.
I’d twisted the wording a little.
Na Sang-min wiped his mouth.
“You beat the first one, then the next one, then the next one. One at a time. One by one.”
“…….”
Was I an idiot for expecting a real answer from Na Sang-min?
Or was it a stupid question that somehow contained its own answer?
“……Right. I understand.”
“Choi Yongki.”
Na Sang-min called me back.
“How strong do you actually think you are?”
It was a sudden question.
Judging by his expression, he wasn’t joking around.
“Hard to say.”
Na Sang-min tapped my shoulder with the spear in his hand.
Then he pointed the spear tip at Lee Ji-jun.
“That bastard’s A-class. If he works himself to death, maybe someday he’ll make it to S-class. Maybe higher. And you, Choi Yongki…….”
The spear tip swung toward me.
“B-class. Just B-class. At this rate, A-class is a stretch.”
He was right.
Lee Ji-jun was one step ahead of me in every way.
If we fought without hero abilities, I’d probably lose for sure.
And besides…….
Back when I started at F-class, my skill improved visibly almost every day.
Not anymore.
Somewhere along the line, I stopped getting stronger.
No matter how hard I struggled, I was still stuck in place.
It felt like I’d hit a wall.
Am I in a slump?
Na Sang-min snorted.
“The fact that some horribly ordinary bastard like you climbed this far is already a miracle.”
The guild’s systematic training.
The experience earned from fighting so many powerful opponents.
And on top of that, Na Sang-min’s help.
The upward curve that had been climbing so steadily had suddenly come to a stop.
Ironically, the point where it stopped matched exactly…….
the place I currently held in the Dio Guild as a hunter.
Codename Typhon.
B-class Hunter Choi Yongki.
Is this my limit?
It felt like I was staring at a massive wall right in front of me.
A heavy sense of despair crushed down on me.
“But.”
Na Sang-min continued.
“Sometimes you get absurdly strong all at once. When that happens, you’re definitely A-class…… no, above S-class.”
He shrugged.
“Still wouldn’t beat me, though.”
Na Sang-min’s assessment was so precise it gave me chills.
He’d seen through the difference between my normal self and the me who became a hero through Purchase.
“It’s related to your talent, isn’t it?”
“…….”
I said nothing.
“You don’t have to answer. When you fought the Dirty Kraken, your performance…… well, it was pretty damn respectable.”
It was the first time Na Sang-min had ever praised me that directly.
I had severed the Dirty Kraken in a single stroke.
I had split the sea in two with a level of force that was nothing short of overwhelming.
But that power wasn’t mine.
It was Poseidon’s.
One hundred million won per round.
There was no way I could have done it without using Control of Water.
“Good. Then how about this? Between your ability and mine—”
Na Sang-min spun his silver spear once and slammed it hard into the floor.
“What would happen if I fought you seriously?”
I’d wondered that myself.
There just hadn’t been a chance to find out.
If I had to answer honestly.
“I’d win.”
That wasn’t bravado, and it wasn’t meant to provoke him.
If we fought with everything we had.
I was confident I wouldn’t be outmatched by Na Sang-min.
Of course, there would be a price.
But I’d burn through my Awakener’s Balance completely.
Na Sang-min didn’t laugh.
Instead, he was utterly serious.
“Yeah. Maybe you would win. Once. If the match were decided by a single bout. But—”
His eyes sharpened.
“What happens if you fight a hundred times?”
His voice rang through the training room.
“I win the other ninety-nine. Definitely.”
Na Sang-min smiled faintly.
Was that grin confidence?
Or pride born from faith in himself?
“Your absurd talent, Choi Yongki, definitely has limits. It drains your mind the more you use it, or maybe it shortens your life. Don’t lean on it too much.”
Sunlight spilled through the training room window.
“If you depend only on your ability, sooner or later it’ll grab your ankle and drag you down.”
Na Sang-min’s shadow stretched long across the floor.
“It’s rare, but there are hunters who break through their limits and grow explosively. So.”
His silhouette stood brilliant in the backlight.
“Don’t give up. If you fall, get up. If you fall again, get up again. That’s all there is to it, until you’ve brought down all one hundred.”
Na Sang-min turned and met my eyes.
“That’s the surest way to win a fight against overwhelming numbers.”
Na Sang-min’s imposing figure, carved in the backlight, burned itself into my pupils.
Suddenly, a shiver ran through me.
Yeah.
Whatever else could be said about him.
As a teacher.
As a hunter to learn from.
This man really was the best.
I bowed my head politely.
“I’ll keep that in mind, Master.”
Na Sang-min snorted.
“What bullshit. Hey. Lee Ji-jun, get up. Five minutes are over.”
“Already? Damn it.”
The death training continued.
While I gasped for breath and sweated through my clothes, I made my decision.
Unintentionally, the Police-Fire War had become my proving ground and my stage.
I wouldn’t settle.
I’d be remade from the ground up.
And to do that.
I clenched my teeth and swore it.
Not Super Kid’s monstrous strength.
Not Speeder’s supersonic movement.
Not the black magician Mr. Eden.
Not even the king of the sea…….
In the Police-Fire War, I wouldn’t use them.
The money I would spend to eliminate a hundred villains was:
0 won!