Theoretically Possible
"You're going to be amazed! Feel free to get your hopes up!"
Min Yeo-jin was buzzing, and that was not a good sign. The things she called wonderful had a high chance of ending in a wreck. There was a bedrock bad luck in her that no sense of timing could never quite explain. Stand next to her, and everyone else's luck went rotten too. The time Clock-out Man and I got stranded together had been Min Yeo-jin's doing as well.
"Instructor?"
"Yeah?"
"You look awful. Are you sick...?"
"I've come down with an illness that clears up if the new weapon's actually usable."
"Then there's nothing to worry about!"
Min Yeo-jin beamed.
Unsettling.
Before following Min Yeo-jin, I stopped at the cabinet. I'd already handed over six Cores as payment for the new weapon, but there was always a chance they'd name a higher price.
One, two, three...
Twenty-three Cores in all. My entire fortune. A few magazines were left, but only what I'd actually set aside to fire. Ah—that magazine short a single round wasn't meant for firing.
Once Clock-out Man brought some money in, there'd be real breathing room. After the run to Busan, most likely. Until now, having more money hadn't changed much of anything: ammunition a little more plentiful, Cores left over in moderation, medicine that didn't run short. That was the extent of it. The moment a way opened to get Geofront-made goods, though, the story would change.
As it happened, Cheon Su-hyeon had said he had a way. The kid had no intention of helping me, but with Min Yeo-jin at his side, a request from me was as good as an order. A chance to arm myself with gear from an entirely different league.
Geofront.
The red uniform that had come up from underground. A way to obtain what lay below. And now, on top of that, a new weapon researched down there.
I'd thought of Geofront as somewhere far off. Another world, nothing to do with me.
Somehow it didn't feel far at all. Was the day I actually went down there drawing near?
The place Min Yeo-jin led me was the survival-training ground.
"It's the only decent place we can borrow."
"Did you set this up to test the new weapon?"
"We have to test it and produce it, don't we?"
"Hm?"
"You'll see!"
Min Yeo-jin, delighted. The signal that somebody was about to die.
Welcome, Instructor Min Yeo-jin. Your next appointment is...
The scanner rattled off the whole of Min Yeo-jin's day, and none of it matched what she'd told me herself. She'd filed a false schedule with headquarters, by the look of it. From the trainee days when she never listened to a damn word, right up to now, this one hadn't changed in the slightest.
"You can have the training ground all day! Make yourself at home!"
Then I'd use it all day. Not that any of it would be comfortable.
Inside, two people were already waiting.
"...Hello, Postman, sir."
Cheon Su-hyeon. Not a face I'd been eager to see, but if I was looking at it beside Min Yeo-jin, that was fine. I wondered whether he'd come ready to be a sandbag.
And next to him—
"The gentleman beside him is going to explain the new weapon to you, Instructor. Su-hyeon brought him. He's a specialist in places that explode? No—in things that explode!"
A familiar man.
"Huh? The one they call the postman was the agent of God...?"
"Tin Can?"
The explosives expert I'd seen at the Human Meat Factory. The same bastard who'd inspected the bomb necklace around my throat. I'd heard the Human Meat Factory crowd never set a foot outside their search zone, and yet here he was, inside headquarters.
"Wait—how do you know someone from Geofront, Instructor?"
"Geofront? Tin Can?"
"Ohh, ahh! Agent of God! Mind if we talk a second? Everybody wait here, the two of us have something to discuss. Haha. You been well?"
He caught my wrist in an awkward grip and dragged me off. What was any of this.
There was nowhere worth hiding inside the training ground. The best he managed was a corner well clear of Min Yeo-jin and Cheon Su-hyeon.
"Don't look this way, just entertain yourselves! I've got a quick word with the postman! We're acquaintances, acquaintances!"
Suspicious bastards, the lot of them.
"Go on. Explain. You came from Geofront?"
"Uh..."
"First, whether you actually came from Geofront. Answer that."
"Ha. Of all the places to run into this guy. You can't go telling anyone—especially not the Human Meat Factory! Got it?"
So even the settlement didn't know.
"I'm listening."
"Tsk... Fine. I came up from underground."
"You don't look it."
"What's with the prejudice? You thought living underground would make a person look different?"
"I figured the nutrition would be better, at least."
Tin Can was in no condition anyone would call healthy.
"Well, I've been out on assignment a long time."
Assignment. No physical proof—from one to ten, nothing but his word.
"And what's a precious guest like you doing all the way up on the surface? How'd you get this far?"
"One question at a time. Getting here wasn't hard. I slipped out of a search patrol."
Searching the ground around a settlement was the settlers' duty. They set a rotation and took turns. Even so, the answer was strange.
"You don't go out on search alone. How'd you slip away?"
"The ones who came out with me are all operatives too. Ahem. They're waiting outside."
"Doesn't the search team's makeup change every time? Landing a group made of nothing but people you know is a little too neat."
"The makeup changes, sure, but it all rotates inside the same department."
"Everyone in that unit is from Geofront?"
"That's right. Uh... I really shouldn't be saying this."
Guessing that Geofront had planted spies on the surface was easy enough. If they hadn't, that would have been the stranger thing. The question was why there, of all places.
"Why is Geofront snooping on the Human Meat Factory?"
"Mm."
"I can hear the wheels turning in that skull."
"...Walked right into it, didn't I."
While Tin Can stalled—
"Um, Instructor?"
Min Yeo-jin, bored.
"What."
"You can use the training ground all day, but the explosives specialist can't stay long. I thought we ought to hurry!"
"What she said. I only slipped out mid-search. I have to get back soon."
Urgent business first, then.
I'll soften that one up in due time.
A Geofront spy was none of my business. Not knowing, though—that I couldn't stand.
What Tin Can had laid out looked like a laboratory rig. Among objects whose purpose I couldn't begin to guess, the only things I recognized were the rounds.
He'd called it a technique for coating ammunition.
A special solution: paint it onto existing rounds and it was supposed to push their effect to the extreme. Surely he wasn't about to teach me how to make the stuff from scratch. A finished product would have been enough.
Anyway.
"I follow the rest. Why is Cheon Su-hyeon here?"
"Su-hyeon said he was curious too."
"About the new weapon?"
"About you, Instructor—using the new weapon!"
Hm. So that was it.
"You want a look at my combat power? Su-hyeon."
"Yes?"
That vacant act wasn't fooling anyone. Still, it was true he'd brought the weapons man, so I'd let it pass. A kid with lines to all sorts of important people, besides. I'd never seen a hunter trainee this well connected. There was a trick to it, no question. And Cheon Su-hyeon was nothing but a brat who'd only just become a trainee.
The only lead is the Core ability he carries.
What kind of ability could take hold of a VVIP's heart? The cheapest guess was brainwashing. But there was no way he had anything that absolute. If he had, Min Yeo-jin would have been the brat's woman a long time ago. Strip that away, and what remained was an ability that made money, or one that made power.
An ability that made money well up—that was the sort of thing Tata had.
"You don't look handy."
"...?"
"Those are hands that have clearly never gotten a drop of work on them."
Every kind of production ability manifested on the foundation of a production skill the person already had. Those soft, pretty hands didn't suit it.
"Is there something on my face?"
The look he turned on me said, Go on. Keep talking.
If it wasn't money, it was power.
An ability that could make power.
No such thing. More precisely, it wasn't something a single hunter could accomplish with nothing but his own Core ability. A greenhorn like this, even less. Power required a deep understanding of people and society, and the high honing of every faculty of communication you possessed. In short, you had to master the art of becoming a con man.
"Even you think Su-hyeon's cute, don't you, Instructor?"
"Hm?"
"You just keep staring at Su-hyeon!"
Cheon Su-hyeon smiled, bright and without a speck on him. He had the makings of a good con man. Kingmaker, though, was still a long way off.
If it wasn't money and it wasn't power, then what?
...Health?
People from underground didn't see survival the way we did. Up here, we concentrated on living through today. Shortsighted, maybe, but live any other way and there was no tomorrow. Underground, they fixed their attention on living as long as possible, and in good health. They kept their eyes on a much farther future. A safe, peaceful world. The faith that tomorrow would be there even if you didn't spend today thinking about how to survive it. Like the people of the old era. An illusion, of course.
Anyway. Become a VVIP with nothing to hinder a whole long life, and the worries of the fortunate start to lift their heads.
Health.
Worth a poke.
"So the agent of God wasn't me. It was you."
"Yes?"
"If you were the only one who knew the secret to a long human life."
"...!"
Sure enough, a child with sloppy control of his face. Meeting me before that head grew any larger was going to be his misfortune.
"Let's begin, then, Tin Can."
"You two already knew each other? My heart is pounding!"
The only person here having a good time was Min Yeo-jin.
"Well then, ahem... Allow me to introduce myself properly. Explosives specialist Kim, here at young Su-hyeon's request—"
"Tin Can is easier."
"Tsk. Anyway, everything that happens here today is—"
"Secret. You coming up from underground is a secret too. Just start."
"Tsk."
Tin Can's manufacture of the new weapon began.
"Skip the complicated explanation. Everything here is what you get from melting down Giant Rods."
"The colors are all different."
"Right. I added dye so they'd be easy to tell apart. Originally they were all the same deep navy."
"Tell what apart?"
"Which section got melted. The rods actually have different compositions depending on the part."
The solutions all sat in clear glass bottles of the same size.
"One liter each. Siphoning off even this much wasn't easy. I don't know when I could pull this much again. Sourcing the material and melting it takes a long time."
"So I'm to use it sparingly."
Come to think of it, someone had promised good news.
"Nothing you've said so far feels like good news."
"Ah, that. The good news is that I managed to bring every section. Watch."
Tin Can drew over the red bottle and the yellow one.
"Coat a round in a mix of these two and the firepower goes to an extreme. You get the Frenzy Round you've been looking for."
"I heard the odds of it actually working were under one percent."
"Right. The warhead blows before it ever reaches the target. All because the coating's unstable. If it pops in midair, that's the lucky version. If it pops inside the barrel, your wrist goes with it."
"You saw that yourself?"
"I was right there opening my lunch, and something went plop onto the rice—"
"Don't describe it in detail."
The good news Min Yeo-jin had meant began here.
"But I brought plenty of solution from the other sections too, didn't I? Mix those in and the stability goes up!"
"Stability going up means—"
"Your wrist doesn't fly off!"
What. So there was no need to flip the odds?
"If it was that simple to fix, why was development canceled?"
"Gain something, lose something. The destructive power drops hard."
"...?"
"Still, the firepower's better than no coating at all! And that's a hell of a lot better than your hand flying off, isn't it?"
The success rate climbs into a band too awkward to flip, and the firepower weakens on top of that?
"Trash."
"Huh?"
"Just mix these two. The original way."
"Did you hear a word I said? Your wrist flies off. That's not a frenzy. That's a frenzy having a frenzy."
"What I said I needed, from the start, was a Frenzy Round. Why haul in all this useless junk and make a scene?"
"Useless?! Through combinations like these you make new discoveries, and with those you overcome the flaws—"
Wait. New discoveries?
"Is the opposite possible too?"
"Huh?"
"Can you make it more unstable?"
"...What are you talking about?"
"So the firepower gets stronger. Unstable enough that if you fire it ten thousand times, your wrist flies off nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine of them."
"Theoretically possible, sure. Theoretically, there's no human stupid enough to do it, but..."
So that was how it was.
"Tin Can."
"...Why are you saying it like that. You're making me nervous."
"Let's try it."
"Try what. Don't."
"Do you know what I'm suggesting?"
"I know. No, I don't. I don't, so just don't!"
Too late.