Asymmetric Warfare
Clock-out Man stuck a cigarette between his lips. The road to our destination lay wide open now, and still he showed no sign of getting up.
"So…… looks like your story's about to hit The End, bro."
"You already know it isn't going to be happy."
"Tsk."
"Do we really have to hear a story this unpleasant all the way through?"
"You don't know that. Taste is subjective."
"After living through all that, you still haven't had enough?"
"Well…… it's been a while since I quit being a hunter. Might've lost my touch."
The strangest thing, back when I first became a hunter trainee, was that everyone around me was a Core Ability User. People you could barely meet one of in ordinary life were scattered in every direction, and even I—who rarely spared a thought for anyone else—still remembered how singular that atmosphere had felt.
Well. That was as far as it went for me.
I never took it any further than that. The other trainees were different. The ones who'd been ordinary enough during training, at least—Clock-out Man, Min Yeo-jin, that sort—had bombarded one another with questions. How they'd used a Core and come to live a second life, and how they'd come by their Core ability: those were the usual favorites. After enough of that had piled up, the ones who shed the trainee label and became proper hunters finally awakened to the truth.
Listening out of curiosity is fine. Having to comfort them afterward is murder.
I'm a kind person, so I figured I'd lighten Clock-out Man's burden in advance.
"Hear the whole thing and get your curiosity out of the way. Don't strain yourself cooking up some half-baked comfort."
Right on cue he flew into a rage—"Hey! What do you take me for!"—with exactly as little soul behind it as I'd expected.
"So did you leave it out on purpose, or had you really never killed anyone, even back then?"
"I hadn't killed anyone."
"So that's why it felt different."
"Hm?"
"I mean, it's not like I actually saw you. I'm only hearing the story. But there's no edge on you at all, if that makes sense."
I wasn't sure I followed.
"Is that so."
"You don't even get a rise out of this Gang Leader, or the Head Cook."
For all I knew, I had needled them and simply forgotten, so it never made the story. Perpetrators never remember. Well.
"By the way, I wasn't planning to comfort you anyway."
"Who knew hearing that someone has no intention of comforting you could put a man so at ease."
"You're not the type who'd want it."
"Excellent."
In that case, I'd tell him.
"All humans die. Socrates is human. Therefore, Socrates—"
Gunshots cracked one after another outside the hideout. A righteous man, doing what he believed to be righteous. An execution.
The one least able to stomach the slaughter outside was, of course, the Head Cook.
"I can't listen to this."
The executions were being carried out cleanly enough, in their way. They bound the limbs of the subordinates suspected of having been bought, gagged them so they couldn't scream, and put a round in the back of the head. Thanks to that, all that reached those of us inside the hideout was the gunfire—and even that sound made the Head Cook's skin crawl.
"Hmph! You sure they weeded them out properly?"
That was exactly what bothered him. Just as with his right-hand man, the Gang Leader expected more bought men still hidden among the ranks. After hours of interrogation, five were finally picked, and the executions decided.
"Boss, are we really taking those bastards in?"
The Head Cook didn't like that either. The man was weeding out turncoats so he could join Gwanghwamun together with his men. Of course, Gwanghwamun wasn't flush enough to take in a dozen of them all at once. Not in ordinary times.
"Right now we're hard up for every last body."
"If you say so, Boss, then…… whatever."
But now that war had been decided, the situation was different.
"All of you, listen well. And judge for yourselves."
Once again the Gang Leader laid the situation out plain for the crew, so he could give them a choice. Join the war, or don't.
"There's no taking it back. Those worthless bastards have decided to throw out every rule of the trade, and there's no way they'll change their minds. In the end, we have to see it through."
He was right. If a fight was already coming, striking first was the rational call. But that applied only to the Gang Leader.
"Running is still an option, though. For the rest of you, especially."
Goyo-ran was the face of Gwanghwamun. Those bastards were obviously going to try to eliminate the Boss no matter what—even if he abandoned the fight and ran.
On the off chance he became a problem later.
Put simply, the Gang Leader was the sort of enemy commander you didn't want to leave alive. They'd track him to the ends of the earth to kill him, so from where he stood, fighting to the death was the only choice. But the Head Cook, and the rest of the crew?
"I'll say this plainly. Not everyone has to stay and fight. If your life is precious to you, go find a way to keep it, and soon. Don't give the ones who leave a hard time. Anyone spouting bullshit about loyalty, or the lack of it—I won't let it slide."
The Head Cook waved them off as well, signaling them to get lost already.
"Head Cook. Why aren't you going?"
"Go where? What's the point of living if you aren't around, Boss?"
"Is being with me fun?"
"Yessir!"
"……Ridiculous."
Skill showed in the Head Cook's hands as he cleaned the gun. Anything he did with his hands, he did well.
"Besides! If we win, we get to eat a proper feast, don't we?"
The corner of his mouth twitched. So that last bit had been an act, too.
Their opponent was nothing less than a regular army. Not that they actually had to fight the entire armed forces of the Republic of Korea. The quarrel with Gwanghwamun went no further than the corrupt grunts who'd been backing those bastards—a single unit, nothing more. Of course, even that one unit was powerful enough to make the Gwanghwamun crew look like nothing.
And yet.
"You never know a fight until you fight it."
"Oh? Is that right?"
The Gang Leader smiled for the first time in a while. I hadn't said it to make him smile. The face wasn't bright, but he was smiling all the same.
"Then let's hear it. Our strategist's view."
There was only one realistic condition for victory.
"We have to force a surrender."
Annihilating the enemy was out of the question. Our total firepower fell hopelessly short.
"We hit only the key targets."
Set against theirs, Gwanghwamun's firepower was pitiful, so every attack had to be saved for a carefully chosen mark.
"Break their will with the smallest strike we can manage, and take the surrender. That's the realistic way to win from where we stand."
"Hmm."
The Gang Leader came over and sat beside me.
"The textbook way to fight under asymmetric force."
He was still smiling.
"The concept is sound. Good words. But—"
"Carrying it out is the problem. What we name as the key target, how we hit it, whether we can really force a surrender. All of that is what decides it."
His face hadn't been bright a moment ago, and yet the more I talked, the brighter it grew. From the look of him, though, he'd already weighed everything I was saying.
"Then how about this?"
The Gang Leader spread a large map across the table, along with several sheets of furiously scribbled notes.
"I've been gathering it all this time. Not that those bastards are worth trusting."
Everything he'd dug up on them so far. It wasn't perfect, but the unit's deployment and its oddities were written down there.
"Well? Think you can build a concrete tactic out of it?"
Obviously.
"I can."
"Oh, confident, are we? The intel's full of holes."
"If we understood them well enough to fight with a perfect picture, we wouldn't be going through all this in the first place."
The holes in the information were as good a measure as any of the gap between them and Gwanghwamun.
"Short as it is, we work with what we're given. Inside whatever information you have, a best strategy always exists. So yes. I can."
"Not bad."
A war fought with a pen, on a desk.
This is my real specialty.
Not even my older brothers and sisters could beat me at it. Back in the cabin, while the rest of them poured their leftover stamina into training, I had devoted myself to recovery and spent the whole time with books.
While I sank into the war, the Gang Leader finished the work he still had left. Driving the crew out.
"What are you all standing around gawking for? Hurry up and get lost."
At some point the crew had crowded in around me.
"Leave while I'm giving you the chance. Don't come whining later."
"That's, uh……"
"That's what."
They were all thinking the same thing.
"Couldn't we see the plan Jeonggu comes up with, and then decide?"
"I was thinking the same……"
"Listen to this bastard. You need odds before you'll fight? You just fight."
"Hey. The Boss said not to pressure anyone."
"What's wrong with looking first and then deciding!"
Through the bickering—
"You there."
The Gang Leader singled one of them out.
"What are you going to do?"
The one sharpening a blade of revenge against me.
"……I'll stay."
"And the reason is, I assume?"
"I still have something left to do."
"Figured as much."
The Gang Leader played along with the lie. I didn't believe the guy either.
Using me as the excuse.
Playing the avatar of vengeance wouldn't do him any good. Like the Head Cook, he fully meant to stay at the Boss's side until the end. He simply wasn't as honest about it. He came up beside me, too.
"You'd better find a strategy that wins for certain. You hear me?"
Committed to the bit.
"Yeah, yeah."
I supposed I had to play along.
The plan was finished.
"The rank and file don't know a thing. They just follow orders. In the end, the ones who joined hands with you were the officers. The question is which of those officers we go after—"
The Gang Leader sat across from me, chin propped on his hand, ease in every line of him.
"Forcing a surrender was the goal, wasn't it? Then do we grab the very top and kill him?"
That was the easy thing to think.
"There are a few ways. I planned it the other way around. Leave the supreme commander alive, and cut out the key officers under him."
"Hm? Why?"
"Because we lose too badly to them in staying power."
Asymmetric force. Let it drag into a war of attrition, and we were at an absolute disadvantage.
"It has to end as a short war, which means we take the surrender quickly. But if they lose their command, the surrender loses its command too."
"So the top has to stay alive if we're going to take a clean surrender?"
"Right. If the system collapses and they split into separate units, surrender is off the table. Were our strength anywhere close to even, that would be a chance to defeat them in detail. We can't manage that either."
A living chain of command, an organization packed tight into one, was not an unconditional good. No such thing as a strategically perfect state existed. A viper's bite on the fingertip can still kill a man—so long as you fail to cut the finger away, and every organ in the body keeps working as a single system.
"As it happens, this unit has a junior officer who matters as much as the supreme commander. His rank is low, but his background isn't ordinary. You dug up the intel yourself, so you know, but—"
Having heard the whole of it, the Gang Leader's face turned rather grave.
"Hmm……"
He drew something from inside his coat. Another map—one that already carried the strategy he had worked out first. The notes on infiltration routes, how the force would be composed, and how the fight should be handled were astonishingly close to my own, right down to the aim of striking the leadership and forcing a surrender. The decisive difference was that his plan had set the supreme commander as the first target.
He looked from one map to the other for a moment.
"Jeonggu's plan is Plan A."
He laid the map I had drawn over his own.
"If we fail to eliminate the junior officer, we switch to Plan B and go after the supreme commander."
And then he corrected one fact everyone had been wrong about.