The Successor's Lesson
“……What?”
If this mess had a root, it was that the Thug was genuinely hopeless with directions.
“What's the matter?”
“Ha... Don't tell me we've lost the road again. Now, of all times.”
“Sir?”
The place where they'd made contact with the Gwanghwamun gang should have been right in front of them, and yet there was no one. Not the weapon crates they'd hauled in. Not the guns they'd set out. A ruin without a single trace that a rendezvous had ever happened.
“Tch. Where'd we take the wrong turn?”
“Strange... I could've sworn we came the right way.”
“Right, my ass. We're turning back.”
Abandoned buildings crowded the district, and every direction offered nearly the same view, so getting turned around was almost inevitable. Naturally, the Thug decided they were lost.
But—
Click.
They had come to the right place after all.
“……!”
“Hands on your head.”
The voice came from somewhere high above. The Kid from the rumors.
“……Where's that old boss of yours run off to?”
“Chief! Hands up, now!”
The henchman shot both arms straight into the air. The Thug, forcing a show of ease, brought his hands to the back of his head at his own unhurried pace.
He looked up, trying to read the situation, and the noon sun twisted his face. The crew that had been lying low rose all at once. Gwanghwamun on the roof of every ruined building. The Thug and his henchman were completely surrounded.
The one holding Yoran's famous sniper rifle, sights settled on the Thug's head, was none other than the Kid. Yoran stood beside him with one foot up on the railing, looking down.
“Whoa. You startled me.”
Yoran only watched, expressionless. The answer belonged to the Kid.
“If you're going to play it cool, play it all the way. Forget to stick noonim on the end of that?”
“……What?”
“Don't worry about your men. They ought to all still be alive. Last I saw them, they were.”
“Well, aren't I grateful. Kid, I want a word with noonim, so step aside.”
“I've been given full authority.”
The sunlight sharpened until he could barely look at the rooftop. Only after the Thug brought one hand from the back of his head down to shade his brow could he keep his eyes on the Kid.
“Full authority...?”
“So from now on, you call me hyungnim.”
“The hell are you saying?”
“You called our Boss noonim. Anybody can see you're older than she is.”
“Wha—?”
Click.
“First time holding one of these. The trigger pull feels strange.”
“……Is this kid insane?”
“Chief, just call him hyung—”
Crack!
“Agh!”
The henchman's scream was short.
“You crazy little shit!”
“Agh...”
He clutched his ear and groaned.
“You all right? You're not dead, are you?”
“You son of a—”
“Hm?”
“Fuck! Just call him hyungnim, damn it!”
Blood ran from the torn earlobe. The Kid's shot had blown the henchman's bullet earring clean off.
“Cocky little brat, showing off parlor tricks.”
“Chief!”
“Haa... Fine. Fine... Just drop an airstrike on me and be done with it.”
But the one groaning was the Kid, too.
“Ugh... Boss, first time with a sniper rifle. Feels awkward. I missed.”
The Thug and his henchman doubted their own ears.
“I was going to take his head off. Shame.”
“It happens.”
“That was a special round in the chamber, wasn't it?”
“It's fine. Don't mourn it. Want to just use your usual gun?”
“I've got to practice. Mind if I take another shot?”
The instant the henchman was about to scream Chief, you fucker—
“Understood, Hyungnim!”
“There we go.”
The Thug had decided, for the moment, to bend. Not that he put his head all the way in the dirt.
“But Hyungnim, you sure you can handle what comes of this?”
“Handle what?”
“Way I heard it, Gwanghwamun's known for clean deals. Word gets out you pulled shit like this, you think anyone's going to do business with you after?”
The Kid scratched hard at the bridge of his nose.
“If you took us for nobodies with no pedigree and figured you could walk all over us, that was a mistake. We prepared for exactly this sort of thing. This will not stay buried.”
“That's rich. Thief crying victim.”
“What is.”
“A little more prac—”
“What was that, Hyungnim?”
“The shit was yours.”
Gwanghwamun thought they had a sure thing. At the center of it stood the Kid.
“Shit? Us?”
The Thug played the wronged man to the very end.
Clock-out Man's instincts were sharp. No argument there.
“At that point, the outrage wasn't an act, was it?”
When a choice actually mattered, I tended not to lean on a hunch. If I had to guess, I'd sooner bet on luck than on a feeling. Clock-out Man, though, was the sort of man whose gut you could trust.
“Oh! So I got it right?”
“Checking the answer.”
“Shit? Us?”
The performance of wounded innocence was vicious enough that I ought to have been taking notes.
The Thug lied. That much is certain.
Was he planning to stonewall and see how long he could hold?
“Hyungnim, isn't it possible you've misunderstood something?”
“Just say it straight. I already know.”
“Sir?”
“You lied to us about something.”
He let out an empty laugh.
“Well, let's put it all on the table. Hyungnim, can two people meeting for the first time be honest about every last thing? I'll admit it! I am older than Boss Goyo-ran!”
“Cut the bullshit. Fudge whatever else you want, but you don't lie about the goods at a deal.”
“I've had no idea what you're talking about this whole time, Hyungnim.”
He had lied. That was certain. I'd confirmed it with my Core ability.
What's the probability this gun has never been fired—that it's new?
That was the first probability I ever checked.
So this is a Core ability.
The moment I confirmed it, the first thing to ring through my head wasn't a shout of Finally! It was an echo. Why only now?
I'd tried every word and concept I could dredge up—smells, light, taste, even cats and constipation.
Why hadn't I thought of probability?
Anyway. I already knew the guns they'd brought were all new merchandise.
What's the probability this gun has never been used—that it's new?
A question I already knew the answer to, tossed out lightly.
And yet.
0%
The Core ability showed its worth from the very first try.
I checked every gun in the crate. Same result. Not one of them was new. They'd all been finished so perfectly that they only looked it.
Of course, all of that only held if I could trust the ability.
“Jeong-gu. Did you try it the other way?”
I had.
What's the probability this gun has been fired before?
100%
“It reads as the exact opposite.”
“Then what about something like this?”
That one was the Boss's suggestion. A question with only two possible answers was pointless to read as a probability, she said, and offered another.
If I throw this shoe high over my head, what's the probability it lands upright?
18.89%
“That's a plausible number.”
Verifying it would mean throwing the shoe something like ten thousand times, so we let that go. Judgment would be the Boss's to make, as Gwanghwamun's representative.
“We trust Jeong-gu, and we go.”
From that moment, the deal ran in an entirely different direction.
“From here on, Jeong-gu leads.”
“Huh? Me?”
“We're betting on your Core ability and nothing else. If I take the lead, I'll have to stop and ask you every time we need it again. That'll look unnatural to them. Better if you just handle it yourself.”
“But—”
“You're smart enough.”
“That's—”
“If it starts looking like it's going badly, I'll step in.”
Across the way, the Head Cook was watching me with a knowing smile. Out of nowhere I remembered the nonsense he'd spouted earlier.
As if.
If the Thug had lied about the quality of the goods, the deal was void. The problem was that the method I'd used to learn the guns weren't new was a Core ability.
The Gwanghwamun family believes me because they're on my side.
The blue light. The probabilities. All of it visible only to me. Which meant I had nothing I could shove in the Thug's face as proof.
So I'd arranged something.
I lifted one of the service rifles they'd brought.
“You probably can't see it, but—”
“I can't see a thing, Hyungnim.”
“It's written about here. You know—that useless stuff they stamp on everything that comes out of a factory.”
“Ah, that useless stuff!”
“For an ordinary person, there's truly nothing you can learn from the number. So yes. Useless.”
I'd have to be kind enough to explain what it was for.
“Every gun is stamped with a different number. Think of it as the gun's name. In the army, they keep a record on each one. A birth registration.”
His eyes said, And what do you want me to do with that?
“It logs things like which base produced it, and where it was first issued.”
It wasn't the old world's kind of tracking, following a rifle through every hand it passed. That kind of obsession was hard to manage on a dead land. But the first posting, at least, got recorded. The minimum required to manage military matériel. Nation and army did, after all, still exist.
“Chungmuro, was it? Look up the serial numbers and you can see which factory these came out of, and where they were headed.”
“Well... a record can be written down wrong, can't it? People are always making mis—”
“Let me know when you're done with the bullshit. I'll be getting some target practice in with your henchman.”
“Fuck, Chief!”
That was how a measure that could actually catch hard proof had been possible.
“I sent a liaison ahead. We've got an army unit watching our back. They're going to run the serial numbers on the guns you brought.”
The surest method there was.
“If you're telling the truth, the record ought to say they were sold the moment they came off the line.”
But if the answer my Core ability had given me was right, it would say these were rifles long since issued for live service.
“The unit's a ways off, so they won't be back before sunset.”
In truth, I'd meant to verify every piece of information the Thug had given us with the Core ability. But a Core ability was still a Core ability.
A flawless one would've been too much to ask.
Just as it had been with the Boss's.
What's the probability this gun came from Chungmuro?
Nothing appeared.
Nothing's taking.
I tried this and that. Far more questions returned nothing than returned a number. What condition decided whether I saw an answer or not?
“Don't let it eat at you. You're only getting started.”
The Boss reacted as if she'd expected exactly this.
There was one condition I had pinned down for certain.
It only works on whatever the blue light marks.
Fail to notice that, and you'd have a real problem. The question that actually mattered—under what condition the blue light appeared at all—was still a complete blank. Right now, only the Boss and the service rifle were glowing.
“Head Cook. You see anything the Boss and a service rifle have in common?”
“The rifle and the Boss?”
He looked from one to the other. At some point, certainty flooded his eyes.
“Heavier than they loo—urp!”
Even after hearing me out, the Thug didn't waver in the slightest.
“So if I put what you're saying together, Hyungnim—”
Still looking for a way out?
“The guns' origin is suspicious, so you're checking. That right?”
“That's right.”
“Meaning you won't take my word for it. That it, Hyungnim?”
“Yeah.”
“Hmm...”
He was strangely unshaken. The Thug wasn't a slow man, and yet his answers were coming slower. Not because he was fishing for an excuse. The right read was that he genuinely didn't understand.
“Son Jeonggu. How's it look to you?”
“Something's wrong.”
“Hm?”
The Thug's behavior was almost as if—
“I think he honestly believes there's nothing wrong with the goods.”
I'd been saying it with my eyes on his every move.
“But you already found it out with your ability. That he's lying.”
“What do you think, Boss?”
“What do you think?”
“Huh?”
That was when I turned toward the Boss. Her eyes bored straight through me.
Had I been looking at the Thug the same way?