The Weak
"Son Jeonggu. Who told you to come out?"
The boss sounded frankly incredulous.
"Get back there. Now."
Something had finally clicked, and I couldn't shake the sense that if I let this moment pass I'd lose it for good, so I'd stepped out anyway. The trouble was finding words the boss would actually understand.
"Did you not hear me?"
Honesty was probably best.
"I'm not going back."
"……What?"
Honest to a fault, maybe.
"I think I've got a feel for it. Something came to me."
"……?"
The boss tilted her head.
"Ah."
Fortunately, she caught the meaning.
"Now? In the middle of this?"
"Felt like I shouldn't let it slip, so I followed the feeling and just committed."
"Hmm……."
I was putting into practice the trick for finding an ability that the boss went over every night. When the feeling comes, she'd said, you move however your heart pulls you.
"The feeling's solid?"
"I think I've finally found it."
"Haa……. Well, if it's that, it can't be helped. Rotten luck, and a chance like this might not come again until the day you die. You did well."
A faint smile.
"Then these rifles—once you've checked them, Boss, I'll take a look too."
"You're getting a feeling off the rifles?"
"Yeah."
"Good. If you're doing it, commit for real. So you can reproduce it the next time you need to."
I'd managed to insert myself, at least.
"Uh, ma'am……? What exactly is the situation?"
"Nothing you need to worry about."
"Eh, well then! Take your time and finish the check! Ma'am!"
The boss ran a function check. The guns seemed sound enough. A rifle that passed didn't go back in the crate; she set it down outside. This time she reached all the way to the bottom and drew another—one more service rifle of the same model—and started the check on that one too.
"Top of the line, right, ma'am?"
Every time the word ma'am left his mouth, the boss's hand hitched. Even so, there was nothing wrong with the function this time either. She kept only the rifle she'd been checking, packed the rest back into the crate, and passed it to me.
"Jeonggu, drag the crate to the back and check them."
She meant to finish this one-on-one with the punk. For the moment I hauled the crate, scraping, back to the Head Cook's side.
"Jeonggu……. So you've been recognized as the successor after all?"
Should've gone somewhere else.
"Ma'am, then the price, just as we agreed—"
"This isn't going to work after all."
"Pardon?"
"I won't be changing the terms we agreed on, so I'll speak plainly. The guns work, so I'll buy all of them. If they're the sort of goods that could become a problem later, we need to be ready for that too. That's the only reason."
Gwanghwamun kept the military close, and anything tied to the army had to be handled with care. Get tangled up wrong and it would be a mess. The odds of luck that rotten were vanishingly small, of course. But one in a million and impossible were not the same thing at all.
"No full account of how you came by the goods, no deal."
"Mm~ Coming on strong."
"You priced them awfully cheap. There must be a reason you came looking for us in particular."
Cheap enough to draw other outfits, too. But this wasn't a deal Gwanghwamun had proposed. The one who'd reached out first, from the crack of dawn, was the punk's side. We were not the party in want.
"Might be more than one reason."
On these streets Gwanghwamun stood for faith and trust—a safe partner who didn't run cons. For nobodies with no pedigree, a history of dealing with Gwanghwamun could later serve as proof of credit. If this job also strung a line of contact between them and us, that was a small advantage of its own. Every other outfit that sidled up to Gwanghwamun came for the same thing. In the end Gwanghwamun itself was a strategic resource, and that was the point of getting close: value the boss had built at the head of her crew.
People are resources.
However completely the world collapsed, however nations and districts crumbled, fame and reputation survived. Whether you had them or you didn't, they bore down hard on the survival of both.
"We can get weapons anywhere else we please. If you've nothing to be desperate for either, go find yourselves another Gwanghwamun somewhere else."
In the end, the ones with something to lose were the punk's side.
"Jeonggu, watch close. This is how the weak survive."
"Which side do you mean?"
"What are you asking? The boss, obviously. Ah—and don't you tell the boss I said that!"
The boss, one of the weak.
"I don't mean she's weaker than that mannerless bastard over there. I mean that up on this earth, the boss is weak."
Only after more time had passed did I come to understand clearly what the Head Cook had meant by the weak. It was something I never could have learned from the Old Man, a man who lived clean outside common sense. The weakness the Head Cook spoke of was not a relative thing. On the ruined earth, there were no strong.
"The further the world falls apart, the better you have to be with primitive weapons. A stone axe? No. A person's basic weapon is the person themselves. Get even two of them together, and the other one can become a weapon."
I needed the boss's way of carrying herself, too. Most of the time I could live like the Old Man, some crazy bastard, and get by—but just as often I'd come to my senses and find I had become the boss.
"That's our ma'am! Just like the rumors! I concede!"
A surrender. In the end the punk gave up the source.
"Truth is, I held off talking about it. Worried somebody might go tattling to the army later."
"That won't happen."
"Course not! Since I'm trusting you with it—the officer who handled the deal is family of mine……!"
"So you used blood."
The boss lifted the rifle still in her hand back to eye level and ran the function check again.
Click. Click.
"That's how I got them so cheap, ma'am!"
"Hmm. Surplus production, sale locked in on the spot—they'd have gone straight from the factory to the outlet."
"That's right!"
"And where was that?"
"You know Chungmuro, yeah? Chungmuro. Neighborhood I mostly work out of—"
While she listened, the boss never once took her eyes off the gun.
"So that's how it is……."
Looking closer, she seemed to be studying something along the side of the rifle.
What is she looking at?
Worth a check. I drew one of the guns from the crate.
"Jeonggu! Trying the ability?"
"Oh!"
"Ooh—what? Something coming to you?"
I figured I ought to at least look like I'd found something, so I looked. Whatever she'd been examining, it was definitely the side, right around here.
Ah. This.
The firearm serial number.
Service rifles were a familiar weapon, but I'd never paid the numbers much mind. I'd heard that in the actual army you had to have them memorized cold—that they mattered to a soldier. I'd never been a soldier. Training under the Old Man in the cabin, they were nothing but meaningless digits.
"Boss."
"Yeah?"
The moment I called, she turned straight to me, leaving the punk where he stood.
"This, here—"
No need to draw it out. I pointed at the serial number.
"I think that part needs verifying. Can your ability tell you anything about it?"
She handed me the lead at once. So she'd meant to pressure the punk with the serial numbers.
If so, it was probably that method.
Assume the punk was lying.
The way she told it, that seemed to be the army's set procedure. And then her question.
He never would have expected a question like that. What did it matter where the outlet had been?
Caught by a question he hadn't seen coming, the punk named a district he knew well. If she latched on and kept digging, he might have to answer further, so he'd offered ground he knew inside out—not knowing it would be the thing that closed around his throat.
The boss had lines into the military. A serial-number lookup was entirely within reach.
Look up the number, and you can trace where the goods moved.
Military materiel was handled strictly. But commissioning a lookup would take considerable time. Gwanghwamun had strings into the army; Gwanghwamun itself was not an army unit. Which was why she was testing her hopes on me.
A request with neither head nor tail—but Core abilities were headless and tailless to begin with. No telling what would work and what wouldn't, so you kept trying. Time to commit.
Come to think of it, half of everything in the world was like that. Until it worked, it was a fight against time. With every attempt, success followed as a probability.
A matter of probability.
"I'll give it a try."
I closed my eyes.
While a conversation only Yoran and the kid could follow passed between them—
Grind.
The punk was growing anxious, little by little. Not that there was any gap for him to step into. He only kept grinding blameless teeth, straining to decode their cipher of an exchange.
Grind. Grind.
It did him no good at all.
"You have to close your eyes for the feeling to come?"
"Not exactly. It just feels like I concentrate better this way."
In the end the punk needed a council of war, too.
"Um~ ma'am? Mind if I step off and take a piss?"
"You stink. Go way over that way and come back."
One trusted man in tow, the punk withdrew much farther than Yoran had expected. He hadn't actually needed to go—but once the tension let go, strangely enough it came pouring out.
"Chief! What the hell are those bastards doing? They making the deal or calling it off……!"
Every time the man shook, the bullet earring on his ear rattled.
"That foxy bitch. She's hitting back."
"Hitting back……?"
"I think she's doing it on purpose. Needling me. Paying me back exactly the way I did it to her."
The deal had been nothing but bait for making contact with Gwanghwamun. The punk's real aim was to provoke Goyo-ran.
"You think she's caught on that something's off? Then we ought to push even harder, shouldn't we……?"
"The fuck you saying that now for!"
"What, you want us to run? What are we supposed to do? We took a job……."
"Goddamn it……."
The two of them sighed in turns and said nothing else.
"Hey, Chief? So how do we keep from getting made? You think we slipped somewhere? We gotta know where we slipped if we're gonna come up with a—"
"I think it's the kid. The one who popped out of nowhere."
"The kid. That's probably that kid, right?"
The briefing he'd been given when he took the job: besides Yoran, Gwanghwamun had one more person worth watching.
"Has to be……. Far as I saw, he's the only one there you could call a kid."
The kid who'd finished a boss-class creature by himself. The very kid they'd said might prove even more troublesome than Yoran.
"They say until recently folks around here called him the Rumored Kid. Same guy, apparently."
"I know. I heard. So what? He's a brat either way."
Things were plainly going wrong, but pulling out wasn't an option.
"We go back and end it in one stroke. I can't stomach any more of this. Once this job's done, we leave Seoul. Fuck……."
The one at the very bottom of the food chain was the punk.