War
The Boss wanted to see how I'd handle it. They were surrounded anyway, and the initiative was entirely ours. No need for her to step in herself.
"What are you doing? This isn't the time to be looking at me. Don't take your eyes off them."
I said it like a scolding, but my face was as easy as a man who'd just woken from a nap.
If she says do it, I do it.
I'm the slave here, after all.
"For starters, I don't think your right-hand man needs to be in the room."
"Huh? Hyung, what did you just—"
I took aim.
"The answer we want to hear. You can give that with one mouth, can't you? I said your right-hand man doesn't need to be here."
"B-Boss!"
I hooked a finger over the trigger.
"Curious whether I'll actually shoot? Then let's run a test. Just the one knee, to start—"
"Fine, all right, fine!"
The punk threw both arms up.
"God, this is too filthy to keep up. The Chungmuro story was something I cooked up, I'll give you that. That part was a lie, but—"
A new phase.
"But I didn't fake the goods, hyung! I just didn't get them myself. They're real, I swear!"
"You didn't get them yourself?"
"Honestly, there's a backer."
So he'd only been carrying someone else's merchandise.
"Then why not say that from the start? Why lie?"
"Ah, come on—people trust you more if you got it yourself. 'I picked these up somewhere and they're brand new~.' Who's going to believe that? Who knew you'd sink your teeth in this far..."
Listen to the words alone, and the logic almost held.
The problem is the goods are used.
I'd confirmed it with the Core ability. That much was fact.
"Hyung, how about this. Word of a mess like this gets out, and we both only lose—"
...Unless he wasn't just wriggling out of it.
"The backer told you to say it, didn't he? Not that you received the goods. That you got them yourself. Said it'd be more believable that way."
I was sure I'd hit it.
"...Huh?"
In this whole mess, there was exactly one real villain.
"Way I see it, the backer played you."
"..."
And exactly one fool who'd been played.
"That goddamn son of a bitch... he actually played me?"
He wilted like a dog left out in the rain. Looking at him now, the man had no talent for acting whatsoever. I could see clean through him.
"Haa..."
Any deeper and he'd fall through the floor.
"Hyung. And Boss Goyo-ran."
He'd made up his mind.
"You said that contact party you sent still has a ways to go before they're back, right?"
"A few hours."
"I'll decide after I see the result. If I really got strung up like a dog, I'll hand the whole lot over, and I won't hide a thing about how it—"
That bastard!
Bang!
"Wh-what...!"
The punk toppled backward.
I hadn't shot him. Why had he gone down?
"Did he just startle himself off his feet?"
"What in the..."
He still hadn't grasped it. This time, the head of the right-hand man beside him had properly blown apart. A pistol trigger he hadn't managed to pull was still caught on his finger, and the muzzle had been an instant from swinging onto the punk.
The Boss clapped twice, light as anything.
"Quick. And the aim's exact. So earlier, you really did miss on purpose?"
"Obviously."
"Well. I knew."
Clipping the man's earring earlier had taken the Core ability too. Being able to read the hit rate in real time while I aimed had made it simple.
"And how many years has that one been under me..."
The shock had landed hard. The right-hand man had been bought. Who bought him was obvious.
"So. What'll it be? Wait until the contact party gets back, or are we done wasting time?"
"Now..."
Left alone, the punk was praying for a rescue.
"I really don't know who he is. He wouldn't tell me. I only needed the money anyway, so I didn't need the details. Just figured he was some man with a lot of cash."
With a disaster like this already on him, he had no reason left to lie.
"He said all I had to do was sell the weapons and come back, but there were a few conditions on the bonus."
Only now was the punk talking straight. No—the man, properly corrected. Once I heard him out, everything he'd done made sense.
"Rattle the Boss's temper?"
"Yes, hyung. That's why I showed up late on purpose. And ending every sentence with 'big sister,' just to scratch at her temper—that was that bastard's—"
The right-hand man with his head blown open.
"No wonder he was unusually nasty about this job... So he'd been given the agitator's part."
According to the corrected man, extra pay had been promised if they provoked Gwanghwamun, by any means, into doing something they normally wouldn't.
"He said the guns were all new. Said it like that, so I figured it must be true."
I thought I'd found the answer. With the inside of it laid bare, one possibility came into view.
"Boss. I think I might have it."
"Mm?"
"The one who gave him the job."
"...You can dig up something like that with a Core ability, too?"
So this was another reason to keep the Core ability hidden. She tied everything back to it.
"I worked it out with an ordinary person's ability."
"How?"
She still hadn't caught the scent? She'd said she'd leave the whole thing to me, so I'd carry it to the end.
"When the contact party gets back... maybe—"
We might have to get ready for a war.
The sun went down.
We untied every one of the corrected man's men. Even so, neither he nor any of them left.
"Hyung, it's all right if I stay here for a while, isn't it...?"
"Safer that way."
The moment he'd moved to expose the truth, the right-hand man—already bought—had tried to remove him. There could be any number of other failsafes prepared to dispose of him the same way. Leave this place, and he might be eliminated on the spot.
"Your men can stay too, if they want."
The terrified subordinates all remained. Another bought man might be mixed in among them, the way the right-hand had been. There was no way to sift one out.
In any case.
"Hm."
Every time I made a decision, the Boss did nothing but nod, quiet.
"We're back!"
At last, the contact party we'd been waiting on arrived. If things had gone the way we'd expected when we first sent them, they should have brought back an obvious answer, and there shouldn't have been much to hope for. The Boss went out to them at a run anyway.
"The serial number check?"
There was something I had said.
The bad feeling hit dead on.
"Ah, well... This is Jeong-gu's first time using the ability, so maybe he misread the information?"
The military's result on the firearm serial numbers. If my Core ability had told the truth, they should have come back as used.
"They said the guns are genuine new stock? Sold right after they were made. They kept asking how the things had already ended up all the way out here, and it got really awkward."
I knew it would come out like this.
"Then there must be some error in Jeong-gu's ability—"
"Hah... It turned out just as Jeong-gu said."
"Sorry?"
The contact party had every right to look lost. They had no idea what had been said in here until a moment ago.
· · ·
"So they might come back with word that the guns are new?"
The Boss bit down hard on her lower lip.
"If the bad feeling was right. Yes."
And if that feeling landed true, everything became clear.
"Jeong-gu? So you're saying there's a problem with the Core ability? Well, it's your first time. Slip-ups with an ability are common enough, mm-hm..."
"No. What Jeong-gu means is probably..."
The Boss seemed to have caught it now.
"...The military are rotten bastards?"
"If I'm right, then yeah. Probably."
For the whole picture to fit, that looked the most likely.
"Don't just know it between the two of you. Explain it so I can follow."
"The one who set this up from behind is the military."
From the moment they handed the punk the job, it had been the military.
"Pass used service rifles off to Gwanghwamun as new. That would have been the heart of the operation."
"Why would they do that...?"
"Because they want to cut ties with the Boss. And lay the blame on her while they do it."
Gwanghwamun, the name built on faith and trust. To shake Goyo-ran loose from the head of it, they had to make her a felon grave enough that even up here, on the ruined earth, public authority could still punish her.
"What are you talking about? The military's on our side. They take their taxes right on schedule!"
There was a scenario you could put together. The Boss seemed to have already guessed it.
"...Those bastards. So they finally went over to the Dongdaemun and Dongnimmun lot."
She was already certain.
Gwanghwamun had kept paying its taxes and maintaining its ties with the military all this time. Under the military's protection, they'd put down roots here and were preparing to build a settlement.
But the bleeding had been bad.
Between the steady taxes and the work of building a settlement, even the great Gwanghwamun had been on the verge of scraping the bottom of its funds. They'd only agreed to a risky deal in new service rifles because the terms were too good to refuse, and they were already gasping for money. Even then, if I hadn't taken down a boss-class creature, the deal itself would have been impossible.
Once the settlement was up they'd grow fast, of course. That was a long way off.
So now, with that growth right in front of them, was when they were most open to being checked.
As far as the military was concerned, they'd already squeezed everything worth squeezing out of Gwanghwamun. Dongdaemun and Dongnimmun hadn't missed the moment, and the military had decided to plant their straw somewhere else.
"I already checked that the Core ability doesn't lie, using it on other things. These guns are all used."
A serial number was nothing but information. Fake the record, and that was the end of it.
"Every one of these guns is probably tainted. Criminal evidence. That sort of thing. Stolen goods, in other words."
"It would go like this. There really was an incident—a rifle plant or a transport hit, and new stock stolen."
Then they swapped the serial numbers and the records of those stolen guns with the relatively clean used pieces lying around the unit.
Used becomes new. Stolen firearms.
The goods passed into the hands of men with no pedigree, and the men with no pedigree sold them on to Gwanghwamun. In the end, every stolen rifle gathered here. And one day, out of nowhere, the military would turn up to search—and Gwanghwamun, scratching a full belly after dinner, would be a criminal organization overnight.
"If we'd just bought these, Gwanghwamun would lose everything it's built. The military would get its chance to wash its hands."
"Fuck! If they don't like the arrangement, they can say they don't like it—why pull something this foul? Cheap little bastards!"
"Why? Because Dongdaemun and Dongnimmun are watching. They're the new partners. What do you think they'd make of it if the military stabbed us in the back with no pretext?"
"Ngh..."
"Run a scheme like this, and they clean us up and send Dongdaemun and Dongnimmun a message to watch themselves from now on. Two birds, one stone."
Nothing difficult about it. A very common pattern, repeated all through human history.
"Telling them to pick a fight and make us do something we don't normally do was the same idea. The more excuses they can grab, the better."
"Tsk. Bastards without a merchant's ethics to their name... Kitchen work is the cleanest work there is, I tell you!"
There was no way the old Head Cook didn't know how filthy the world was. He knew it better than I did, if anything. Even so, he was angry because he still had something I didn't: a positive expectation of the world.
The Boss, by contrast, seemed to be cooling by the moment. She wasn't speaking, of course. Now she wasn't reacting at all.
The Boss is probably thinking the same thing I am.
The Head Cook's world was still a flower garden.
"Still, though... we know the inside of it now, so that's something, right? Let's just dump all these guns and cover it up."
A flower garden, sure enough.
The Boss had said she'd leave the situation entirely to me, but what had to be done from here was beyond my authority. Just as I decided this one had to be hers—
"All of you. Listen."
In the end, the Boss stepped forward.