Gwanghwamun
"Boss!"
"Booooss!"
They came sprinting for the hideout, screaming their throats raw.
"Just run quiet and save your breath. The boss'll be there when we get to the hideout anyway—"
"Booooss!"
"Boss! We're so sorry!"
They weren't listening.
They hit the door like a raid and shoved it open.
"Boss! We... hah—"
"We... huff, huff..."
"I told you to save your breath."
It happened to be lunch.
"Mmfgh...?"
The boss blinked at them, cheeks ballooned around a mouthful of food.
"Surrounded... hah!"
Faster if I handled it. I shoved the lot of them aside.
"The army moved first. They'll be on us any minute."
Everyone lurched up mid-bite.
"Aughk!"
"Gah—!"
Mouths packed full, they mumbled something that sounded an awful lot like swearing.
"Defensive positions, all of you! Grab every weapon you can carry!"
"Yes, Boss!"
"Boss, that apology—"
"Save the useless talk and move!"
"Yes, Boss!"
"Jeong-gu, stick with me. Head Cook!"
"Yessir!"
"Pack up whatever's left and follow."
"Yessir! Jeong-gu, see you in a bit!"
"Everyone, hurry!"
Grab every weapon you can carry. Did that mean I was allowed to pick up a gun now? I hesitated a moment too long.
"What are you doing? Move!"
The boss seized my wrist and broke into a run.
We don't defend from inside the hideout. Too many people know where it is, and if we get surrounded in there, that's the end. The defense happens outside.
Ruined buildings crowd the place, but they aren't as abandoned as they look. Gwanghwamun had already picked several of them out as strongpoints, and the insides held the bare minimum for a defensive fight. We'd even run regular drills for the day the hideout came under threat.
"Hm...? Where's the army?"
We'd come out of the hideout, and there wasn't a soldier in sight.
"Boss! Don't let your guard down! We really are surrounded!"
A lookout on the roof across the way, binoculars up long before we arrived.
"Catching their breath?"
"Looks like it! The hideout's right in front of them—maybe one last ops meeting?"
"If they're giving us time, we're the ones who ought to be grateful."
Inside the ruined building, the boss's position was the basement. It had once been a corridor and a scatter of rooms; a few walls had been knocked out to make the place easier to hold. At the deepest point sat a sniper's nest. That was her spot.
"We hold the first floor first. If they push us, we fall back underground."
Fighting from the basement meant, in other words, fighting until you died. Go down once, lose the stairs to the enemy, and you were never coming back up. Everyone assigned to this building—the whole family—had gathered on the first floor.
"The rest of you... fight as you see fit, and find your own way to stay alive."
There was nothing else to be done.
"Yes, Boss!"
They scattered. All of them headed upstairs.
"Even normally, besides me, only two people were posted down there."
"Where'd those two go?"
"Left last night. Never came back."
Dead, then.
"But I've got you, so I'm not alone anymore, am I?"
"Mm."
"Boss! Jeong-gu!"
The Head Cook appeared with an enormous crate.
"Heard it outside. Looks like those army bastards found the rifles we buried."
The secondhand rifles?
"Goddamn it... I wondered why they were charging in so cheerfully. So they had a sure thing."
"How'd they find them that fast? We buried them a ways out on purpose, in case they came searching right away."
The army had put far more into this operation than I'd thought. Probably—
"A comms Core shard."
"Huh?"
"Jeong-gu's probably right."
A tracker small enough to hide inside a gun. A Core fragment that small couldn't stay powered for long, but if the operation was short, that wouldn't matter. They'd come down on us less than a full day after the deal closed—find the illegal weapons fast, then use them as the pretext to roll straight in here.
"Damn. Should we have buried them farther out?"
"Hah... Wouldn't have mattered. All that fuss was just for show anyway."
The boss was right. Even if something had gone wrong along the way and they never found the guns, they still would have come in. By the time they marched a unit this far, that was already the plan.
"Finding the evidence just lets them push harder with a cleaner conscience. If they hadn't found it, they'd have done it anyway, then put their heads together afterward and figured out how to clean up the mess."
"Absolute bastards!"
With the perimeter already sealed tight, they had no reason to rush. Still, the moment they were ready, they'd come straight in.
"How many?"
"Too many to count. Enough to ring this place in completely, starting from a long way out."
"Figures."
"That was earlier, though. Word is their numbers keep dropping as time goes on."
"Pulling out?"
"The sons of bitches we actually dealt with couldn't scrape together numbers like that even if they called in every man they had."
"True."
For the low-risk encirclement, they'd brought in other units that didn't know what they were walking into. The pretext was probably the search for illegal weapons. They'd taken support through the part where the justification was solid and nobody had to bleed. From here on, it was their own work.
"So there were reinforcements at the start... They really did their best."
"Doesn't that mean we won? The almighty regular army had to muster that much just to come at us."
"Fine. We'll call it a win."
We'd won, so that was that. From here on it was an exhibition match. The score no longer mattered.
"Head Cook, take whatever position you want."
"Jeong-gu's going with you, Boss?"
"I'd be alone down there otherwise."
"Yessir! Understood!"
The Head Cook grabbed his weapons and headed for a corner of the first floor—the spot that covered the stairs down to the basement.
"My weapon?"
A P210 came off her belt.
"You've got this. Or take your pick from what's here."
I took the P210. It had been a long time since I'd held one, but there was no room to get sentimental. I needed a rifle too.
Nothing but service rifles, stacked deep. Digging underneath, I found something else.
"This would do."
"An HK416."
It wasn't quite what I'd had in mind.
"This looks like a 14.5-inch barrel. Don't we have something in the tens?"
"Upstairs! If Heung-guk's got the shortest one, bring it down!"
One came down at once.
"Yeah. This is it."
"The only 10.4-inch in all of Gwanghwamun. You know how to choose. Whatever else you learned, you learned guns from a good teacher."
All of it from the Old Man, though. Funny—the word teacher used to bring up only him. Now two people came to mind.
"Let's go down."
"Yeah."
The boss set her right hand on my shoulder. Just before we went down, I looked back. The Head Cook gave me a thumbs-up and mouthed three syllables so they made no sound.
"...A kettle?"
The weapons crate buried underground had been dug up. Twenty service rifles, still packed inside. Perfect evidence.
"Preserved nice and neat, weren't they?"
"Saved us the trouble."
"Write the report, and send people into the black market to spread the word. Taking a beating for something that deserves a beating—that's justice, served."
"Yes, sir."
Now all that was left was the business they'd put off and put off again.
"Why are our cleaners so late?"
The most important ones still hadn't shown.
"Hardly men of any breeding, sir."
"Gwanghwamun kept time sharp as a blade, I'll give them that."
"Only because they were fanatics about mealtimes."
"Khah! Right—I'd forgotten!"
"They're probably in the middle of lunch even now. Precise as a blade, that lot."
"Dear me. We've gone and interrupted none other than Goyo-ran's last meal."
"Still, the meal was already half over, so Goyo-ran will have eaten twice what a normal person manages in a sitting."
"Khahaha!"
"There they are."
The cleaners they'd been waiting on had arrived. Two bosses rushed to greet them, competing to bow first, bending so low and so hard there was no telling which bow won.
"Good to see you. Dongnimmun, and the Dongdaemun family. Ah, now, don't go getting sore over something petty. I only called Dongnimmun first because it comes first in the Korean alphabet. Next time I'll mention Dongdaemun first. Haha!"
The warmth never let up. The laughter didn't stop until the overall commander stopped his, and only then did the rest follow.
"Everything's already in place. I hear you have information on their defensive tactics?"
"Yes. They'll have cleared out of the hideout already."
"They'll have scattered into the buildings nearby and set up to defend."
Two gangs who knew Gwanghwamun's strategy. Old organizations, all of them—bound to be one or two who'd switched sides along the way.
"Of course, as we understand it, they rotate their strongpoints often."
"So you know the strategy, but not how they're actually deployed?"
It didn't matter. They weren't the ones who were going to die.
"Then I'll leave it to you. We'll hold this position and spare nothing in support."
They had a minimum of conscience. They kept their word, after all. They held the position like a fortress, and if any runner from Gwanghwamun showed themselves, they killed every one of them. They poured resources into Dongnimmun and Dongdaemun's fight without stinting. And while they fulfilled every last promise, the army guarded its own lives, and guarded them dearly.
We were just settling into the basement when the floor above went loud.
"These crazy bastards!"
"They're really going at it."
"Shoot! Doesn't matter who—they're all the same!"
The boss went up, took a look, and came back down wearing a bitter smile.
"Dongnimmun and Dongdaemun are pushing in. Not a single army bastard in sight."
I had to give them that much. Like the boss said, the army had done its best. Even in a straight fight, Gwanghwamun had almost no chance of winning, and still they'd spared no effort to stamp us out thoroughly, and neatly. Which meant they'd recognized Gwanghwamun as an opponent you didn't take lightly. The Head Cook's moral victory had been the right one. If we'd drawn that kind of response across a gap in weight class this wide, you could call it Gwanghwamun's win.
Tat-tat. Tat!
Tat. Taang! Tat-tat!
Gunfire started rolling in from far off. It was only a matter of time before it reached us.
"...Been so busy dealing with all this, we never even had time to talk."
"Talk about what?"
"Just... this and that."
Tat-tat!
Tat... Tat-tat!
"Got to save our strength."
"I regret it. No..."
"Hm?"
"I'm sorry."
The boss never took her eye off the scope. Beside her, I kept my rifle sights on the stairs. A soft weight settled over my head. Her hand had come up, very carefully—the same feeling as the first time we met.
"You only do this when I haven't washed my hair."
She stroked it, slow.
"...I wanted to let you leave. I left it too late."
It couldn't be helped.
"You didn't need to get caught up in this."
Maybe not. I'd already decided I'd walk out of Gwanghwamun the moment I got the chance. I wasn't someone who could blend into the gang as true family, the way the others had.
"Doesn't it feel unfair?"
"What does?"
"The others, maybe. But you dying here like this... I got greedy for no reason."
Her voice was starting to shake. I have no gift for picking the right words at a time like this. But staying quiet would only make it more awkward.
"Boss. Your sights are drifting."
I had to say something.