The President's Gambit
"Somehow, I'm completely drained...."
"You were under a great deal of strain when you began, Master."
At my words, Juliet gave a wry smile and braced me from the side. My body had been wound so tight that the moment everything ended, the strength simply drained out of it.
"Over here! Move in!"
"Find Lord Kokuyo!"
"Quickly! Quickly! Quickly!"
That was when the commotion erupted outside. Japan's Self-Defense Forces, which until moments ago had shown no intention of moving an inch, were suddenly in motion.
Looks like Lust had something prepared after all. Whatever it was, she had almost certainly tied it to her own life.
I clicked my tongue and opened a gate.
"Let's go, everyone."
If it had been up to me, I would have gathered up the loot we'd left behind, but there was no time to spare for it. Still, this much I was taking with me.
I picked up the bell hanging at Lust's waist and stepped through the gate. The instant I entered, the gate vanished without a sound, as if it had never been there at all.
"Ah."
Greed, who had been tipping back a glass of wine as he gazed out over the city's nightscape, let the glass slip from his hand.
"Ah, aaaaah! Aaah!"
The scream that tore out of Greed was perhaps rapture, perhaps madness, perhaps despair. There was only one reason he had come undone like this: word had arrived from his contract demon.
"Lust... that bitch Kokuyo is dead."
He and Lust had locked horns over every trivial matter, but this was far too large a thing to simply bury. Envy, and now Lust... who would be next... Awakener Han Jin.
He had yet to learn anything about the human responsible, but his instincts were already whispering the answer—that the one who had killed Envy and the one who had killed Lust were one and the same.
"Those bastards will sneer at me over this again."
Greed bared his teeth in a grin as he imagined the Demon Council he would soon have to convene. The only thing occupying his mind now was how to turn this situation to his advantage.
"Yes... I'll simply sponsor him."
Sponsor him, and raise up the very sword that could cut down the Seven Great Demons. A blade that would exist for him and him alone...
"Ah, I'm already starting to look forward to it."
With a greedy smile worthy of his name, he turned his gaze back to the glittering city below.
"Multiple demon corpses discovered in the heart of a city... the culprit, a giant snake?"
With every word of the newspaper headline that left the Association President's mouth, another degree of cold sweat slid down my back.
"I grant you clearance to enter North Korea, and you vanish for nearly three months. Now you're exterminating demons in the middle of a Japanese city... You've made quite the spectacle of yourself."
For all that the President's lips were curved in a smile, his eyes showed nothing of the kind. That was the 'murderous smile' I had only ever seen in manga. Every single person who had ever been on the receiving end of it, without exception, had come to a bad end.
"Haha, you're right about that... I do wonder who it could be...?"
"......"
I tried to steer the conversation elsewhere, but the wordless pressure only bore down harder. My rhetoric, my mind games, my way of handling people—all of it had stopped dead in my twenties. I had spent far too many years alone in the mountains with no one to talk to, and my experience with conversation had ended along with them.
And this version of me was supposed to out-talk a President who had survived every scheme and storm imaginable? Not a chance! In a sense, the President was the one true counter to everything I was.
Refusing to buckle under that mounting pressure, I rolled my eyes in every direction, doing my level best not to meet his gaze.
"Ha...."
Roughly three minutes passed in that standoff, and the outcome was the President's defeat.
"I can't decide whether to call that the work of a sly old snake... or plain shamelessness."
"Haha."
Only then did I finally look the President properly in the eye. His gaze seemed ready to press me then and there, but the question never came.
"I won't ask what you've been doing. Every person is entitled to a private life, after all."
"I'd be grateful for that."
And with that, it was settled. By promising not to pry into my private life, the President was implicitly agreeing not to interfere with whatever I chose to do. Getting around would be far easier from now on.
Between the kingdom's affairs and everything else, I hadn't been free to come and go as I pleased—but that was one worry I could finally set down.
"In return, of course, I'll be needing something myself."
"You really weren't about to let it slide, were you."
I had half hoped he might, but the President was not a man to let things go. Having extended me a benefit, he naturally intended to collect one in kind.
"What is it you want from me?"
If the demand proved unreasonable, I intended to walk out of there on the spot. And I would never set foot in Korea again. There was no guarantee that a place which had already made one unreasonable demand of me wouldn't simply do it twice.
I was a citizen of Korea, yes—but I was also the King of the Roa Kingdom. Asked which came first, the answer was Roa, without hesitation. Because I stood in the position of a king. Had I been an ordinary citizen, I would have chosen Korea, my homeland. I was not one anymore.
I swallowed dryly and waited for the President to speak.
"Well, it's nothing difficult. Just... pay a visit to the United States."
"The United States?"
I had braced myself for some far heavier favor, and all he wanted was a trip to America...? Wait. Wasn't there something in America around this time?
I knew better than anyone that the President never gave anything away for free, so I wracked my brain for what was supposed to happen at this point in the timeline. Of course... if it's this point in time... the Death Dragon's appearance?
The Death Dragon Atlcarus. Before my regression, it had appeared in the middle of America's S-Rank evaluation and slaughtered some twenty S-Ranks gathered from countries around the world. And now he was telling me to go to America...
"You'll be taking the S-Rank evaluation."
"Just as I thought...."
Certainly, viewed from the President's chair, my taking the evaluation was a gain. The birth of a new S-Rank raised the standing of the nation that claimed them. Except my affiliation is the Roa Kingdom...
Becoming an S-Rank Awakener came with undeniable advantages. But it carried losses to match. The greatest of them was freedom.
A fighter at the S-Rank level could stand alone against a nation's strategic assets. Which meant that whatever an S-Rank did, wherever they went, watchers were bound to follow.
So that's it. The Korean Association would leave my freedom untouched—but he meant to bind me with something else entirely... I understood, very clearly, why this man was the Association President.
The Korean Association wouldn't lay a finger on my movements. In exchange, the paparazzi would strangle my freedom for me, wielding the power of the press.
"...You believe I'll accept?"
"Isn't that the natural conclusion?"
The President said it with an easy grin, and I found myself genuinely curious where all that unshakable confidence came from.
"Ordering me off to take the S-Rank evaluation—isn't that a far cry from the promise you made at the beginning?"
"Promise? And what promise would that be?"
He looked back at me with a smile of pure, practiced innocence. I glared at him, dumbfounded. The entire S-Rank test had only come up because of his earlier word that he wouldn't question my activities. And he had to know that if he pretended that conversation had never happened, I wouldn't sit here and listen to another word.
Then why manufacture a situation like this? There was a design behind it—I couldn't see it any other way. I turned the problem over and over, but my mind couldn't crack what the President was thinking.
This isn't how today was supposed to go... My meeting with the President was supposed to wait until after Yu-jin came out. Of all the timing, I hadn't expected him to be at my house the very moment I got home. Let alone to be outright kidnapped to the Association.
"Why... do you assume I'll agree to this?"
Dragged deeper into this war of nerves, I was certain to lose. So I simply threw the straightest pitch I had.
"Hmm... there are a number of reasons, but if I had to pick one—your family."
"My family?"
"Yes. You may not fully grasp it yet, but you are already a public figure."
By the time the President's explanation wound its way forward, I had come to believe there was no way around his words.
"Your face has already been sold. And sold spectacularly, at that."
The article he showed me carried the faces of me, an A-Rank Awakener, and my father side by side—a feature piece digging into the father-and-son pair.
"The Association has been holding the news back for now, but stories about you keep surfacing on a regular cycle."
"Why?"
However starved for exclusives the press might be, there was no reason to keep running pieces on someone who wasn't even active.
"Because you are a singular curiosity."
"Me?"
"Indeed. A promotion from C-Rank to A-Rank in a matter of months. A place in the demon subjugation campaign. Exploits alongside the special forces. That imugi serpent—Cheongun, was it? I could keep going. Care to hear the rest?"
Laid out like that, it was undeniably the sort of record that would hook every journalist in the country.
"But how does anyone know about Cheongun? I've never once shown him in public."
"That, I genuinely don't know."
Perhaps he truly didn't; the President answered my question with a bitter smile.
"Still, none of that adds up to a reason I need to become S-Rank."
"Of course it doesn't. If that were all there was to it, I would never have pressed the evaluation on you."
"Then what would?"
"The problem is what you left behind in Japan this time."
What he meant by what I'd left behind in Japan was, naturally, the extermination of the demons. At first, the reports had blamed nameless 'assailants,' but once every last victim was confirmed to be a demon, the unknown perpetrator had been rechristened the Apostle of Justice.
"For starters, Japan resents you."
"Japan? I rid their own country of demons for them."
"Had you done it in secret, they would have been thrilled. The trouble is that you made such a magnificent spectacle of it that the whole affair went public."
Destroying the demons was all well and good—but demons had been nesting in the heart of their city, and what, exactly, had the government done about it? The administration was being flayed for it, publicly and without mercy.
"Which is why Japan's politicians do not look upon you kindly."
"Ha...."
Honestly, it wasn't that the possibility had never crossed my mind. I simply never imagined it would actually come to this.
"And it isn't Japan alone. Every other nation is much the same. This incident sent your value skyrocketing overnight."
"So the other countries will turn on me the way Japan has?"
"Probably not all of them. But some will move to check you."
Having heard it through to the end, I understood at last exactly why the President had raised all of this. If the world couldn't reach me, the easiest target within its grasp was my family.
"And your answer is for me to become S-Rank to protect them?"
"Precisely. The moment you are S-Rank, no nation will dare move against you carelessly. You would be, in every sense, a powerhouse equal to a strategic-grade weapon."
At those words, I took a moment to put my thoughts in order. Because of what I had left behind in Japan, my family could now be in danger. It would be simple enough to bring them all to the Roa Kingdom, but my sister was still a student, and the rest of my family had lives and roots sunk deep in this land.
My family, hurt because of me... It was something I refused to watch happen.
Having settled the matter, I opened my mouth.
"I'll take the S-Rank evaluation."
"Well decided, Awakener Han Jin."