Chapter 84. The Way to Handle a Hostage Situation? Take a Hostage Yourself.
Chapter 84. The Way to Handle a Hostage Situation? Take a Hostage Yourself.
─ Ding-dong! Ding-dong! Ding-dong!
"Ah, who on earth at this late hour..."
I had Laila wrapped in my arms as I drifted in a sweet sleep.
But the intercom bell was ringing with a relentless, almost violent persistence.
"Hero... what's going on?"
"Just a moment."
The intercom screen showed a familiar face in a standoff with the security guards and the manager on the ground floor.
"I'm sorry. Those whose identities cannot be verified..."
"This is an urgent matter right now...!"
It was the CEO and the legal director.
"Those people are with us. Send them up."
Only then did they get through, and they came straight up to my residence.
"Chairman... the foundation's employees have been kidnapped!"
"What? Who was kidnapped?"
Still half-asleep, I thought I must have misheard them.
"We've lost contact. At first we thought it was an equipment malfunction, but... a short while ago, a video was delivered to the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, along with a threatening message."
"...Are they targeting me?"
The legal director shook his head.
"That's probably not the case. They don't seem to know what the Seonghwa Foundation is either. If they were targeting you, Chairman, they wouldn't have sent the video to the Foreign Ministry. There were other foreigners in the video besides our staff."
"How is our Foreign Ministry handling it?"
"To ensure the hostages' safety, they've been careful not to provoke them, and they've indirectly let them know it's your foundation."
At that moment, Laila, who had been listening to the story from inside the room, came out.
She had changed her clothes at some point, now wearing her signature Saintess robes.
"Who else knows about this incident right now?"
"The public doesn't know yet... only the Republic of Korea government and the relevant ministries are aware."
"I see."
If this incident became widely known to the public for no reason, it would only stir up anxiety.
"Hero, shall we depart immediately?"
"No. I'm not going to go myself, not right this moment."
I recalled the conversation I'd had with the Colton Association President before.
- Expectation is heaped upon someone who is strong to a certain degree. But... for someone possessing utterly unimaginable power, it is not expectation that follows, but fear.
He was wary of my power while also being concerned about how others perceived me.
And he thought the expectation that came from those perceptions could wear me out.
- People may call you a 'hero'. But behind that praise, there will also be a terror that the tip of the blade could be pointed at them at any moment.
I thought about it.
No, I was familiar with it.
Those who knelt before me in the Otherworld, calling me 'god' or 'hero'.
And that endless expectation and worship.
'That wasn't exactly a pleasant experience for me.'
- When humans see a power beyond the scope of their imagination, they feel fear before awe.
Even so...
I figured I had to make them realize who I was, what kind of being they were dealing with, and at the very least, what kind of resolve they would need if they were going to mess with me.
"What about their demands?"
"There were instructions to deposit money into a virtual account they provided. They said they would kill one person each time the deadline passed..."
"Let's send them a video."
I smiled slightly.
Unlike before, I wasn't going to resolve this thoughtlessly with force.
"This time, let's negotiate gracefully and gently through dialogue."
I would need to take a quick trip to the United States to recruit a guest star who could serve as an example for them.
---
Inside a room fashioned like an underground bunker, an old radio transceiver, communication decryption sheets, and translated documents were scattered across the desk.
"This is the communication from the South Korean Foreign Ministry."
The officer who spoke tossed the paper onto the table.
Someone picked up the paper to read it, and their hands began to tremble.
"Song Hoon... definitely..."
"This foundation. That guy made it. The South Korean Foreign Ministry tried to talk around it vaguely, but there's no mistake."
A murmur spread through the room at the name Song Hoon.
Someone, flustered, suggested that maybe they should release the hostages.
─ Bang!
"So what, you're saying we should let them go now?"
"I'm saying, if we keep this up without even knowing who we're dealing with...!"
"Shut up!"
A member with a deep scar shouted them down.
"So what next? Should we check their ancestry from now on before we take hostages? Whether it's Song Hoon or whoever, a person is just a person! If we back down now, we lose all face!"
At his reply, someone shot to their feet and grabbed him by the collar.
"Face? What good is face if we're all dead for it!?"
Voices and ragged breaths tangled together until the room descended into utter chaos.
Fists were exchanged back and forth, kicking up a cloud of dust.
"Huff... you son of a bitch..."
"You bastard..."
After a lengthy bout of punches, the room finally settled down.
A middle-aged officer quietly opened his mouth.
"Even if we send the hostages back safely... do you think he'd really leave us alone?"
Their most fundamental concern: their own 'survival'.
The very air seemed to freeze at those words.
"He'd, he'd spare us...!"
A hot-blooded young man beside him slammed his palm down and spoke.
"Don't you remember the Forbidden City incident in China? Not a single person died after all that chaos! That guy doesn't enjoy killing. If anything, he tries to avoid it!"
"And you want us to bet our lives on just that one case?"
"Then you'd rather we all just sit around waiting to die together!?"
"Hoo..."
Just then, the screen of the laptop off to the side flickered back to life.
A new video had arrived from the Foreign Ministry.
"A video...?"
"Play it."
At the quiet command, someone clicked on the video.
The man who appeared in the video was Song Hoon.
"Is that place... a prison...?"
The room was filled with gray walls and metal bars.
The surrounding inmates stood facing the walls, all of them trembling like leaves.
- I'll keep this short. Send them back.
─ Crunch...!
Song Hoon grabbed someone by the hair from off-screen and lifted them up.
"Tha, that's... from Del Norte...!"
Whatever they had done to him, one of his eyes was covered with a patch.
Most of his teeth had been pulled out, and his nose was crushed flat.
And the detail that stoked their fear the most was...
"That bastard... is he wearing a diaper instead of pants right now...?"
- You don't want to end up living without ever seeing the sun like this one, do you?
"..."
- In a way, the families of rebels could be considered accomplices too...
The word 'families,' spoken as if in passing.
With those final words, the screen went black.
And the video ended with the sound of someone screaming.
"That, that son of a bitch...! He's going after our families...!"
"Wait a moment."
"Right now, this bastard is threatening us...!"
"There's another video."
When the video was played, Song Hoon's face appeared again.
But this time, the place was different from before.
"Where is this...?"
- If anyone happened to get hurt... that wouldn't be any fun at all.
"Wait!"
"What?"
One of them urgently rewound the video.
And there, something long stood, almost like a border.
"This is... the Kandil Mountains..."
"What?"
The Kandil Mountains, where they primarily operated.
Their home base and numerous outposts were located there, and because of the geography, not even the government could touch them easily.
And the Kandil Mountains were enormous.
"It doesn't look like our side..."
- Hmm...
In the video, Song Hoon fiddled with his earring, and soon the artifact, the club, materialized in his grasp.
"Wh, what on earth is he trying to do...?"
─ Kwaaaaang...! Rumble...!!!
A single swing.
And the mountain shattered.
There was no landslide. It was cleanly erased, as if it had never been there from the start.
- Since the mountain chain is broken... I guess we can't call it a mountain range anymore.
"He, he's not human..."
- If I go around smashing everything like this... I'll probably run into you eventually.
"..."
- If you release our employees safely, that won't happen. And obviously, you won't die by my hand either.
They had known he was overwhelmingly stronger than an S-rank.
But this act transcended imagination.
- It would be really unfortunate if I were just smashing things and your families happened to be inside. You'd probably think a prison was better, wouldn't you?
The video cut off.
They were rendered utterly speechless.
"He, he definitely said at the end...!"
Only then did they remember their families, hidden here and there throughout the mountain range.
If they took hostages, Song Hoon was saying he'd take hostages too.
"He's no ordinary madman..."
Their course of action was decided.
No matter how precious money was, it couldn't compare to their families.
And they believed that the Song Hoon in that video really would smash everything.
---
"Hoo... why did it have to be me..."
The man sitting in the driver's seat of the large bus was constantly shaking his leg from nerves.
Behind him, the blindfolded hostages were packed in tightly, like chickens in a coop.
"They, they won't kill me, will they...?"
He had brought the hostages to the location Song Hoon specified.
After waiting for a long while, figures appeared.
"..."
He couldn't utter a single word.
Standing before him were two Unknown Hunters and the S-rank Hunter Emir, who was glaring at him as if he might tear him apart.
"Thankfully, no one is hurt."
Once their blindfolds were removed and they saw Song Hoon's face, the foundation employees finally burst into tears all at once.
"Sob... Chairman...!"
"We really thought we were going to die...!"
"It's alright."
Song Hoon then gestured with his chin toward the opposite direction.
'That meant we were free to go, right...?'
He gripped the steering wheel with trembling hands, floored the accelerator, and began to pull away into the distance.
---
"Hero, you're letting them go for now, right?"
"Yeah."
I would let them go.
Just like I promised them, 'I' wouldn't be the one to kill them.
And Laila would likely bring down an unceasing rain of golden light from the sky.
"Huh? Emir, what are you doing?"
Once we confirmed all the hostages were safe, Emir was methodically packing his bags.
"I'm going to take out the trash."
"..."
Anyone could tell what she meant by that.
"In the city of Istanbul in Türkiye, around this time of year, a full moon rises over the temples."
"...?"
"Do you know what they call that?"
"What?"
"The Hunter's Moon."