Fate’s Cruel Joke (2)
In the factory early that morning, the boss came tearing in as if something were chasing him.
Karki raised one hand and called out, “Huh? The boss is here?”
“Huff. Haaahh!”
The boss kept gasping for breath, glancing over his shoulder again and again. The way he darted around in a panic looked suspicious enough to make me squint.
“Sir, what’s wrong?”
“Karki. If anybody comes looking for me, say I’m not here. Got it?”
“Hm?”
The boss hurriedly ducked into the warehouse.
A moment later, a group of hefty men and one lean fellow walked into the factory.
The man in the tracksuit was wearing matching sweatpants and a jacket top to bottom. He looked ordinary enough at first glance, but his sleazy face and vicious eyes made it obvious he was anything but.
Ah. So that was him.
I recognized him immediately. He’d been coming around here often enough in my last life.
“Kim Sa-jang! I saw you go in here!”
The tracksuit man shouted loud enough to shake the factory walls.
“Let’s not waste energy on this first thing in the morning.”
The people inside the factory barely glanced at him before returning to work. If they stopped every time some small-time troublemaker made a scene, they’d never hit their deadlines.
When nobody answered him, the tracksuit man stepped in front of Karki.
“Sawasdee-krub?”
He greeted Karki with both hands pressed together in a politely mocking gesture, his expression dripping with sarcasm.
“Your boss. Where did he go? Hm? Your boss. Where?”
“I no speak Korean. I no know your language, boss. Namaste.”
Karki was quick on the uptake. He must have instinctively realized the tracksuit man was the kind of bastard you didn’t want to get tangled up with, because he hurried off without another word.
Smart move.
There was nothing to gain by getting involved with scum like that.
Left alone, the tracksuit man let out a long sigh.
“Kim Sa-jang. You’re really getting on my nerves now.”
He shoved one of the brutes behind him to the front and raised his voice. “What is this, kindergarten? You want to play hide-and-seek? Fine. Let’s play. Hey, search!”
“Yes, boss!”
The brutes tore through the factory from end to end.
They even forced open the locked door to the manager’s office, but nobody was there either.
The workers kept sneaking glances at them, clearly on edge. One of them kept looking toward the warehouse.
It was a secret place known only to the factory people — the warehouse where Karki kept his Styrofoam bed.
The tracksuit man didn’t miss that tiny flicker of reaction.
He immediately signaled one of the brutes beside him in secret, then put on a clumsy act.
“What? He’s not here? Tch. Another wasted trip. Let’s call it a day!”
“Yes, boss!”
He started to turn as if he were leaving the factory, but the brutes were already heading for the warehouse door.
The factory fell silent.
Then, from inside the warehouse, I heard the sound of a latch being undone, and the door cracked open a finger’s width.
The tracksuit man pointed at it and shouted, “Grab him!”
“Aaagh!”
The brutes shoved their hands through the gap. Startled, the boss tried to slam the door shut, but in the scramble he smashed their fingers flat between the frame and the door.
“Argh!”
“You piece of shit! Get out here!”
“You damn bastard!”
Chaos exploded in a heartbeat, and before long the boss was being dragged out by the thugs, kicking and flailing all the way.
One of them threw him down at the tracksuit man’s feet.
The boss trembled all over like a herbivore that had just come face-to-face with a predator.
“Ha ha. ...Boss Choi. Why’re you acting like that? Scaring me and all.”
He gave an awkward smile.
The tracksuit man didn’t care. He rolled up his sleeves and cracked his neck.
“Boss Choi? You idiot. You keep calling me boss this and boss that, and you think I’m some kind of pushover?”
The man who’d been loosening up with a series of bone-cracking stretches kicked the boss right in the chin.
“Ghk!”
Blood ran from the boss’s mouth.
Apparently deciding this wasn’t going to blow over easily, he dropped to his knees at once and clasped his hands together in desperate supplication.
“Boss Choi, please. Just once, have mercy.”
“Have mercy? Mercy on what? Jesus. Anyone watching would think I was bullying some innocent guy.”
The tracksuit man pinched the boss’s cheek between two fingers and yanked hard. “I loaned you money because you said you needed it. I even gave you time because you promised to pay it back in installments. And now what? You haven’t paid back even the interest, let alone the principal. So tell me — who’s the worse bastard here?”
“W-Well...”
“Goddamn it. I asked you who the bad guy is!”
The sharp crack of a slap rang through the factory.
The tracksuit man’s hand whipped across the boss’s face, splitting his lip and spraying blood onto the floor.
“Who do you think I am, some charity foundation? I hate bastards like you the most. All that money you’ve been blowing like it was nothing — feeling good about your life, huh?”
Crack. Smack. Crack.
One of the boss’s cheeks turned red almost instantly.
The tracksuit man’s entrance had been almost comical.
But the fact that he was a loan shark hadn’t changed one bit.
The moment he showed his true colors, the air inside the factory froze.
Everyone stopped what they were doing and watched the scene with fear written all over their faces.
Even Karki, who usually hated the boss, looked pale.
He probably hadn’t expected they’d rough him up like that.
The boss swayed as if he might black out any second, but the tracksuit man kept slapping him without pause.
“Quit it! That’s too much!”
Unable to stand it anymore, Karki rushed forward, only for the brutes to seize him.
“Hold it right there, punk.”
“You want to end up looking the same way?”
The tracksuit man still wasn’t satisfied. He yanked off the gold watch from his wrist as well.
“Damn it, the more I think about it, the angrier I get. You think I’m easy to toy with, huh?”
He slipped the gold watch over his fingers like brass knuckles.
“I told you clearly. If you hid again, I’d tear apart your whole family tree — your in-laws, your second cousins, every last one of them. Even your fancy madam wife would get shredded to pieces!”
With that, he smashed the boss’s face mercilessly.
One of the boss’s front teeth flew out onto the floor.
“G-Ghhk!”
I watched coldly.
These guys weren’t some legendary loan sharks. They were just a pack of lowlife thugs shaking down pocket change with absurd interest rates.
Why had the boss ever gone to people like that in the first place?
I slowly looked around the factory.
Factory 4, under the boss’s control, was hardly some failing small business.
It wasn’t huge, but it had steady sales as a third-tier subcontractor beneath a major corporation.
The problem had always been the man himself.
In my last life, he’d embezzled factory funds at every opportunity, spent the money on luxury, booze, and partying, and never once escaped his gambling addiction.
Before long he’d sunk into massive debt and even borrowed from lenders with interest rates so obscene they were practically legal extortion.
The collateral he had put up back then was this very factory — the land it sat on, the machines inside, the vehicles, everything. He’d mortgaged all of it and kept borrowing.
In the end, it hadn’t taken long before those loan sharks took the factory away from him.
It had been the miserable end of a fool.
But sometimes, one person’s tragedy became another person’s comedy.
Finally.
I lifted the corners of my lips into a smile.
It was bad luck for the boss, but for me it was something I’d been waiting for all this time.
The time has come.
I took off my gloves and walked quietly toward them.
The boss’s face was a mess of blood and bruises as he trembled like a leaf.
“Boss Choi! I’ll sell a kidney if I have to, so please, just stop—”
“Don’t pay it! You son of a bitch! What good will selling a kidney even do? Just die already—!”
I grabbed the wrist of the tracksuit man’s arm as it shot up toward the ceiling.
Blood dripped steadily from the gold watch in his hand.
He glared at me.
“And who the hell are you?”
The tracksuit man was still riding the wave of his anger. “Let go. I’m seeing red right now.”
He tried to threaten me with eyes practically bulging out of his skull, but I didn’t budge an inch.
One thing I’d learned since gaining my hero powers: ordinary people were no longer my match.
No matter how much the tracksuit man and his goons snarled, they only looked cute in my eyes.
“How much is the debt?”
“What?”
“I’ll pay it.”
The tracksuit man tilted his head, then burst out laughing. “Puhahaha! What, is the boss out of his mind or something? Now even his employees are crazy?”
The brutes snickered too, their jowls wobbling with laughter.
Honestly, I felt like wiping them all out right then and there.
But not this time. Not like that.
Purple Devil had eliminated the leader of the Dio Guild as an agent of justice through brute force.
But in the real world, Choi Yongki had to uphold law and order and protect justice the proper way.
Holding the tracksuit man’s gaze, I said, “Why? Does that sound like a lie?”
I was, in fact, a liar.
But when I told the truth, I was more serious than anyone alive.
Seeing my face, the tracksuit man slowly wiped the grin off his mouth.
“Then I’ll swear on my family and every distant relative I’ve got. I’ll pay it back. That money.”
I tightened my grip on his wrist.
“Ghk!”
He hastily shook me off and stumbled back.
“You bastard!”
“There’s one condition.”
The tracksuit man, who had just been about to lunge at me, froze.
“This factory is mine. That’s the deal. Are you taking it or not?”
He thought about it for a moment, then wiped the blood off his palm on his pants.
“You’re an interesting one. Fine. I have no idea how a worker plans to pay back that much, but I’ll trust you this once. If you can’t pay, though, you’ll end up just like him. Got it?”
Having yielded a step, he held out his hand toward me.
“Let’s go inside and talk it over, customer.”
I sat across from the tracksuit man on the sofa in the boss’s office.
The brutes stood behind him with grim, ugly expressions.
Behind me stood only one person.
Karki.
When I glanced back, he was straining hard not to lose face under the pressure. I almost laughed at how fiercely he was trying to look intimidating.
As the tracksuit man slipped a cigarette into his mouth, one of the brutes hurried over and lit it for him.
“So. Your name is...?”
“Choi Yongki.”
“Wow. That’s a very masculine name.”
He took a drag and exhaled slowly.
Gray smoke spread through the cramped office.
“As you saw just now, I’ve got a bit of a temper. If you try anything stupid, this won’t be fun for you, customer.”
The tracksuit man tapped ash off the end of his cigarette and crossed one leg over the other.
“What exactly do you mean by taking the factory?”
“Exactly what it sounds like. I’ll repay the debt he borrowed against the collateral, and the factory and machines he put up as security will all become mine.”
“Oh? Is that right? And do you even know how much money you’d be repaying?”
“How much is it?”
The tracksuit man spread both hands. “₩10 billion!”
I couldn’t even laugh at that.
“Cut the crap. It’s ₩4.2 billion. Anything above that is impossible.”
I’d worked in this factory for nearly thirty years, so I knew the annual revenue and the finer details of its finances inside out.
The price I was offering was exactly the fair number.
The tracksuit man bit down on the end of his cigarette and stared at me.
“Listen, customer. Do you even know how much money the boss borrowed? The principal alone is over ₩5 billion!”
Liars know liars when they see them.
He was bluffing.
Since the conversation was getting unnecessarily long, I decided to make the first move.
“Karki.”
“Yes, boss!”
At my signal, Karki lifted the large backpack.
Only Karki and I knew what was inside.
The zipper was pulled open, and the contents spilled across the desk.
The tracksuit man sucked in a breath.
Piles of golden 50,000-won bills and bundles of U.S. dollar notes came tumbling out.
It was all stolen from Cha Chi-do’s safe.
“Y-You got this money from where? You stole it?”
“Does that matter? It’s ₩3 billion. I’ll pay the remaining ₩1.2 billion later, step by step.”
Technically, I could have paid the full ₩4.2 billion all at once.
But just in case something unexpected happened, I’d decided to keep some emergency cash in reserve.
The tracksuit man picked up one bundle of 50,000-won bills and examined it carefully.
“Not counterfeit? It’s real.”
He looked up at me.
“How do you plan to pay the remaining ₩1.2 billion?”
“I’m an Awakened. I’ll be registering with the Hunter Association soon, and I’ll join a guild too.”
Hunters attached to one of Korea’s major guilds enjoyed a number of benefits.
One of them was the loan program.
“If I have to, I’ll borrow it from a bank and pay it back that way.”
Hunters were a recognized profession of sorts.
Because they risked their lives for a living, they also got the chance to handle enormous sums of money.
“Last chance. ₩4.2 billion. Are you in or not?”
I reached out and laid my hand on top of the money.
“If you don’t like it, go make a deal with another factory. Karki.”
“Yes, boss!”
Karki lifted the bills and shoved them back into the backpack.
The loan shark jumped to his feet and stopped him.
“Hold on!”
He bent at the waist with a servile smile plastered across his face.
“I’ll have the contract prepared right away, President Choi.”