Elder Heo
I drew the red core from my bag.
The core bought with Gyeongsu's sacrifice.
I'll have to get it appraised.
Truth be told, a core with a high chance of being a dud is sometimes better left unappraised. Submit one for appraisal as a private citizen and you pay the fee yourself. A Hunter enjoys the courtesy of having that fee waived and can hand cores over without a second thought. A postman gets no such mercy.
The odds this core carries some negative effect... As expected. I can't see them.
The probability wouldn't show itself. A core met every condition under which my ability ought to take cleanly—familiar, inanimate, small, and right there under my hand—and still I couldn't read the odds. There was, of course, the further condition that the structure had to be simple. A core is an immensely complicated thing; maybe that was why the ability wouldn't take. But my power doesn't demand that every condition be satisfied before it stirs. Usually a few of them lining up is enough for the probability to appear. I can even read the chances of treating an injured human being. That says it all.
Conclusion: cores, and cores alone, lie beyond my ability's reach.
Not that I needed the odds to know this one was rotten. Anyone who had handled a few cores could tell. Red, and glossy on top of it—every bad omen gathered in one place.
Even so...
I was going to have it appraised. Otherwise I might not sleep tonight either.
Core appraisals are done in a dedicated annex. A failed use can end in an explosion, and that makes them dangerous. The annexes crowding Yeouido are pure white, the same as the Complex, and in daylight they are blinding just to look at. Whose taste was this, anyway?
"Plain as day it's a dud, and you want this appraised?"
He was a regular of mine; we'd been face to face for years. He didn't recognize me. Even back when I was a Hunter he had been prone to forgetting, and now he had reached the point of not knowing me at all. Dementia had found him at seventy. Fortunately he had not lost the ability to appraise, and so Headquarters had yet to drive him out. He was still clinging to his life.
"Yes. Just in case."
"Just in case? What kind of just-in-case is that? You're a postman, so you never get a look at cores and can't tell shit from bean paste, that it?"
"I'll pay the appraisal fee in full, so please just check it."
"Don't know a waste of resources when it's staring you in the face, do you, youngster? Appraisal refused! I won't do it. Go on back!"
Advice, in the end: it was a dud anyway, so don't waste good material. I knew he meant it for my sake. That warm heart of his always managed to make a nuisance of itself.
"Appraiser."
"Refused!"
"Elder Heo."
"Hmph. Say what you like, it won't work. Appraisal refused! I'm not changing it. Not even thinking about it. Hurry up and go!"
"It's about your daughter."
Nothing else for it. I had to bring that up again.
"...My girl? Why. Something the matter?"
"Have you forgotten? You asked me to send some mail to your daughter. I was the one who took that job."
"Th-that's right! Course I remember!"
"It was delivered safely. She asked me to tell you thank you."
"Hmph. Thanks, for a trifle like that..."
A flick, and Elder Heo snatched the core from my hand.
"Today's appraisal is free."
"No. I ought to pay the fee properly."
"Ah, I said drop it!"
I was grateful for the kindness, but taking it for nothing would have sat wrong with my conscience. I had never once in my life met Elder Heo's daughter.
"Put it away."
"Ehh, I swear."
With a show of giving in, Elder Heo accepted a few rounds of ammunition.
He has no daughter. She isn't dead. She was never born. Elder Heo never married, and he has no children at all. And yet, from some point on, he began to speak as if he had a daughter. It started around the time he stopped recognizing my face.
At first the people around him wondered whether he had kept a family hidden away. Look into it from every angle, though, and there had been nothing of the sort. Even so—what was pleasant was best left pleasant—and everyone played along with talk of a daughter who existed only in a fantasy.
Then Dr. Myeong went and ruined it.
I don't know if doctors have some rule against lying to their patients, but Dr. Myeong went and told the truth. He even shoved every piece of evidence at Elder Heo, who was already in a fury. Everyone tried to drag the doctor back from it, but—
Elder Heo had already looked reality in the face.
That was probably the first time any of them saw him cry. He sank to the ground and wept without a sound, only his shoulders shaking. I still can't forget his face from that day. It wasn't pity for his own aged, ailing self, and it wasn't a look salted with lament. It was, unmistakably, the face of a father who had lost his daughter.
After that, no one saw Elder Heo's tears again. From the next morning he was smiling his soft little smile and bringing up his daughter as if nothing had happened. He didn't know why his own eyes were so swollen. Dr. Myeong said nothing more, either. He simply handed the place of Elder Heo's attending physician over to another doctor.
"Tsk. A dud, sure enough. Been a long while since I saw shit this pure."
Just as I'd expected.
"How bad is it?"
"The odds of it wrecking your life sit at 99.99 percent."
Elder Heo's ability is seeing the probability that using a core will fail. In my case, so long as the conditions are met, I can read the odds on anything except a core. His ability is limited to cores alone. Gain a power like that and you can become an appraiser, take an indoor post, and remain at Headquarters. A sweet assignment, in its way.
A 99.99 percent chance it's a dud.
I had never seen a figure that high.
"Say—you're not curious about the failure effect too, are you? What's the point of looking? You'll never use the thing."
The appraiser beside Elder Heo has the ability to determine what will happen if a core's use fails. An explosion, to start with. A plague. The summoning of a monster. Only when you punch through those odds and succeed does a core finally show its hidden face—becoming a communications core for comms gear, or a power core that can serve as a high-efficiency battery. Rarest of them all, without question, is the Ability Core.
A core that grants its user a special power. These, without exception, carry a high chance of failure. Ninety-five percent at the minimum. The trouble is that the higher the failure rate, the more lethal the effect of failing. Use a core boasting a failure rate of ninety-five percent or more and come up short, and you die, or come right up to the edge of dying. In the end, gaining an ability means staking your life. And only once you have an ability can you become a Hunter.
"I am a little curious what the failure effect is, I'll admit."
"Now, now."
"This time I'll listen to you."
"There you go. Smart thinking. Then I'll just run this to the incinerator—"
"No. Give it back."
"Eh?"
"I ought to keep it. As a memento."
A core that might kill you if you used it, at 99.99 percent. If this really were an Ability Core, success would mean an incredible ability. As a rule, the higher the failure rate, the rarer the power sealed inside. But taking that gamble would be madness. A useless core—that much was true. Even so, I didn't want to burn it.
"A memento out of shit-trash like this? Hmm. Got a story to it, does it? Somebody's keepsake?"
This sort of thing happened often, by the look of it.
"Something like that."
"Tsk. Won't listen no matter how I warn you. Mind you don't go using it by accident."
"If I were dull enough to make a mistake like that, I'd have died a long time ago."
"Anyway. This sticker."
Elder Heo slapped a pitch-black sticker onto the core's surface, any which way.
"This one's got to go on. You understand, don't you?"
An entry-prohibited sticker. This core could no longer be carried into any government-owned building. The unmanned scanners would sound the alarm.
"Yes. I'll see that it's stored properly."
Later I'd bury it somewhere with a fine view and plenty of sun.
"Well, then..."
"I'll be going, sir."
"Aye..."
Elder Heo clearly wanted to talk a little longer, but I had no leisure for it now. Another body search, and then—
A heavy clank. At last the main gate, the one that opened onto the outside world, swung wide. Guards with rifles stood rigid, tracking me with nothing but their eyes.
Beyond the gate, a world in ruins. Giant Rods stood sparse and far, driven into the earth all the way to the horizon. It looked like a graveyard. A few days of life at Headquarters, and the ruins felt strange to me again. For no good reason I glanced back. White buildings packed tight together: a civilized world. Look forward, and civilization was nowhere to be found.
A dull thud. The moment I stepped through, the gate slammed shut behind me.
I had been thrown back into the end of the world.
The envelope the Explanation Fetishist had given me bore an address and a name in a small, cute, clustering hand.
Did he write this himself?
Set against that stiff impression of his, the handwriting was impossible to reconcile. The envelope was gaudy with color, besides. Had he left the writing to someone else?
Sometimes you can read what isn't written from nothing but the words on an envelope. This letter was one of those times.
New Government Complex / Jo Yong-han
Properly, the address ought to begin with Seoul out in front. But a good many of the people sending mail from Headquarters simply jot down the Complex and leave it at that. A kind of privilege. They look as if they live in another world entirely.
The way the name was written told me two things as well. First, this was someone who did not want his affiliation or his rank known. Second, he was a man with an unusual name.
Recipient: Namdong District, Incheon...
Incheon is a region thick with struggles for power. The master of each settlement changes constantly, which makes the situation hard to read. Simply having to go to Incheon already raises the difficulty, but this job was anything but ordinary.
Namdong District, Incheon. AAA.
AAA. A settlement that has severed all exchange with the outside. They won't even take mail. And piled on top of that, the condition of this delivery was that it be handed directly to the recipient in person.
Settlements with their hackles up usually censor the post. You never know what might be inside, or what the contents might say. I was supposed to skip that process and deliver it straight to the person. There are a few methods you can use at a time like this, and not one of them is the easy road. All the more so when the destination is AAA.
Even so, the goal is to finish two days ahead of the deadline. A successful delivery goes without saying.
Only then would that miserable bastard acknowledge it without a word of complaint.
I made it out of Seoul around the time the evening glow was settling. Taking the safest roads the long way around had cost me time. Even so, this far had been easy—it was a route I usually walked. The problem started now.
It really has been a long time.
I had decided to go by way of Bucheon, and the moment I entered the city, what greeted me was not the landscape I knew. The settlement I had used as a landmark was gone. It had been a fairly large one, and now barely a trace remained. In its place, nothing but a Giant Rod driven into the ground.
Memorizing every air-raid report one by one is close to impossible. The maps Headquarters shares are updated often only for places where missions come thick and fast; somewhere like Incheon is slow to be refreshed. And because I had always screened out any delivery bound for Incheon, I was all the more ignorant of the ground on this side.
And it was one of the few settlements you could actually talk to.
My plan—to use the range of those settlers' movements and push safely toward Incheon—was already dead. I was just turning over a Plan B when—
"Too expensive!"
"Then what do you want me to do? Die together?"
"If you've got resources to spare, you pay up and go join them over there! I'm going alone!"
At the sound of an argument I hid at once. Looking around, I found the source of the voices off in the distance.
"Let's split up here! I can't make a deal like that!"
"Hah. Doesn't even know his own life is worth something."
The voices belonged to two postmen. Postmen, the same as me—but I don't live the department life, so every one of them is a strange face and a strange voice.
Beside the two of them as they bickered stood a group of people watching. Each carried a bag that looked heavy. The only exception was a child of about five, who held no luggage of their own. It seemed the group had proposed a deal to the postmen, and the postmen had split on it.
"You government gentlemen sure aren't short on nerve. We told you—we can guide the way, safe and certain."
"You said what we're asking is expensive, but however high the price, could it really cost more than a postman's life?"
Safe and certain guidance. If the price was reasonable, it was a deal worth making. Cross rough country on thin information and you can easily end up in a fight. Then ammunition, medicine, or my own stamina—something gets spent. You lose the road and burn your resources besides. I was the one who ought to wedge myself into that trade.
"Trust people like that? Ha. Has Mr. Kim decided it's his time to die? I'm going, so suit yourselves!"
While I was closing on them, one of the postmen refused the deal first and left. But they must have hated losing even a single customer, because they opened their mouths to persuade him—
"Postman! We really are peaceful people."
And with those words, they lost their second customer as well.