Scars and Suspicions
Chapter 3
Haneul rested for a while and let his stamina recover. Then he sealed the magic beast's corpse inside a space-compression vacuum pack and buried it in the ground. The disc the beast had been riding got the same treatment — shrunk down to a lump and buried beside the body. Last of all, he interred the Maryeongseok the size of two clenched fists along with the corpse.
What he intended to carry back to Midland Seoul was only the small Maryeongseok he'd taken from the beast's neck and the sharp, hardened spikes the thing had fired. With a haul this modest, even the 1st Raid Commander couldn't have found fault with him.
Time to leave a marker.
From inside his backpack, Haneul drew out a metal lump sealed in several layers and split it in two. The round parent metal was the N-pole end of the pair — the anchor used whenever Awakeners were guided into Highland by teleport. Which meant that if he buried it here, the odds of being teleported somewhere near this spot the next time he entered Highland were bound to shoot way up.
I'll come back for the corpse and the disc later.
And with that, Haneul made a promise to his future self. The vow he'd sworn — never again to set foot in Highland — had quietly evaporated somewhere along the way.
Next, he carefully pried open the watch's front glass and pulled out the hands. Those hands were the child metal that guided Shinseung Group's Awakeners to Base Camp 1 of Continent 8; they resonated with the parent metal buried at the camp and dragged Awakeners toward its vicinity.
Hmph. This child metal didn't even get me to Base Camp 1 of Continent 8 in the first place. Don't need the damn thing.
So Haneul pulled the hand out of the watch the 1st Raid Division had issued him, tossed it, and fitted a new child metal in its place — one that paired with the parent metal he'd set down on the wasteland floor only moments ago. The instant he reassembled the watch and strapped it back on, the hand swung around and pointed dead-on toward the parent metal.
Ooh. Nice. Working perfectly.
Haneul nodded, then pressed three fingers into the three grooves set into the round parent metal.
Click!
A drill sprang from the metal's underside and went grinding down through the wasteland. In the blink of an eye it had settled into the bedrock a hundred meters below ground. Haneul smoothed his palm over the hole it had punched, and every trace of the excavation vanished as though it had never existed.
There. That's done. Next up...
He slashed open the bottom of his backpack with an ultrasonic knife, then scattered a handful of nonessential expendables here and there across the wasteland.
That way I can explain where the parent metal went.
With every detail accounted for, Haneul made his way back to the spot where he'd first arrived and settled in beside the rippling blue mist.
Going back too early would only invite suspicion. I'll kill some time here, then head in.
He fished a pop-up tent out of his backpack. At a light tap of his finger, the one-man shelter unfolded on its own — a flat affair just barely big enough for a grown man to crawl in and lie down. Better yet, it came with an auto-concealment function: the fabric shifted on its own to match the surrounding wasteland, and it even blocked the distinctive scent of a human being.
Keeps the dust out too. Even better.
Haneul crawled inside and lay down for a while. A fair stretch of time slipped by.
Then he folded the tent up small, stuffed it back into his backpack, and got to work. The moment he took out one of the sharp spikes the beast had fired, his pupils gave a tremor.
God, I hate pain.
Haneul was the timid type — a man who couldn't even watch a syringe draw blood. Wounding himself on purpose was never going to come easily.
Still, better this than walking into danger defenseless.
He dragged the beast's spike down his left forearm.
Ngh.
His skin split open in a long line and blood came pouring down. Then he drove the spike hard into his thigh.
Aaargh. Goddamn it.
It hurt like hell. Wiping away the tears that had sprung to his eyes with his palm, Haneul pulled out a detox injection kit and plunged it deep into his side — a safeguard against viral infiltration and poisoning from the beast's spike.
Hah... hah... That ought to do it.
Having finished carving himself up, Haneul hoisted his half-shredded backpack and plunged into the blue mist.
The vomiting that ambushed him without fail on every crossing between Midland and Highland was as wretched as ever.
Uuurgh.
The vertigo arrived right on schedule, dizzying and suffocating, and swallowed him whole.
"Emergency. Emergency."
"What the hell is this? Where did he pick up injuries like these?"
"Sir, forget that for a second — look at this."
"What is it?"
"A triangular Maryeongseok. I've never seen one in that shape before. And this spike — I've never seen a material like it in my life."
The noisy clamor rattled through Haneul's skull. Almost none of it carried a shred of concern for him.
Sons of bitches.
Flat on his back, Haneul squeezed his eyes shut. Inside Highland, sheer tension had kept him on his feet; the moment he returned to Midland Seoul, every scrap of fatigue came flooding in at once and turned his whole body into waterlogged cotton.
Before long, medics attached to Shinseung Group came running to the secret platform beneath the Han River and whisked Haneul away to a hospital emergency room.
I made it. I'm going to live.
Wee-oo, wee-oo, wee-oo — to the wail of the ambulance siren, Haneul surrendered himself to a deep sleep.
Chapter 4
Haneul woke at the dead of night on May 22nd.
That hospital again.
A private room in Gangbuk Shinseung General Hospital. Looking at the needle stuck in his forearm and the nutrient packs dangling in a cluster beside the bed, Haneul gave a faint smirk. Perhaps thanks to his high vitality, the self-inflicted wounds looked all but healed, and the punctures from the beast's spike no longer hurt at all.
Even so, his heart was pounding hard.
Damn it. I nearly died again.
That made twice now.
I can't go on like this. I need real countermeasures.
Haneul was a self-preservationist above all else. He could not very well march into Highland again, defenseless, without a proper plan in place.
So what's the problem?
He started by weighing the risk factors. The answer was obvious.
Guided teleport failure.
For some strange reason, Haneul had a habit of botching guided teleports and getting dumped straight into danger zones. Two attempts, two failures — no small matter for him. Worse still, he had no idea why. Humanity, in truth, had never managed to crack the exact mechanics of guided teleportation, and without the principle in hand, analyzing the causes of failure was impossible.
Then is there any way to stay safe when a teleport goes wrong?
That was the question Haneul fixated on. And here, too, the answer was obvious.
He possessed an ability that could kill even a powerful magic beast with a single blow. That was his one truly lethal weapon.
The problem is my defense.
Did he have the defense and the vitality to hold out until he could catch a magic beast's soul and pull it free? If he wanted to survive, he had to endure at least one hit, didn't he? As things stood, that was far from guaranteed — so his defense and vitality were what needed reinforcing first.
How do I raise those numbers?
The first solution.
The straightforward path was to keep crossing into Highland and grow stronger there. An Awakener's stats didn't freeze in place after a single blooming; even afterward, one could keep developing by hunting magic beasts.
But leaning on that alone is far too dangerous. I could just as easily die in the middle of hunting beasts to survive.
Which brought him to the second solution: getting help from the outside.
Take the A-rank vest and recovery potions, for example. Things like those had saved his life twice over.
I need better armor and better potions. But Shinseung Group would never shower that kind of high-grade support on a green rookie like me. So is there some other way?
Every time the thought surfaced, Haneul envied the owner family and the executives' relatives who had group-level support lavished upon them. And in the same breath he would nurse a little fantasy — what if I have a secret birth too? What if rich, wonderful parents suddenly appear one day? — until it withered away, as it always did.
Tch. Who'd do that for an orphan like me? One way or another, I have to carve out a living for myself.
Haneul pressed his palms against his suddenly heavy eyelids and rubbed hard.
In the dead of that same night — just as Haneul was coming to in his hospital bed — Lee Jae-in, head of HR at Shinseung Group, paid a visit to the 1st Raid Division Building near Gangnam Station. From the Raid Commander's office, which overlooked the glittering night streets of Gangnam at a glance, Lee Jae-in spread his fingers and pushed up his horn-rimmed glasses in his habitual gesture.
The 1st Raid Commander glared at him with the look of a man studying something unpleasant stuck to his shoe.
"Well, well. What an honor, having a busy head-office gentleman grace our humble 1st Raid Division in person at this hour of the night. So — what do you want?"
Thorns bristled in the Commander's every word.
Lee Jae-in belonged to Lee Myungwoo's line — anyone who was anyone at Shinseung Group knew as much. The 1st Raid Commander, by contrast, was a trusted man of Expedition Force Commander Lee Sungwoo. And with Lee Myungwoo and Lee Sungwoo locked in a quiet rivalry, the relationship between their lieutenants was hardly smooth. Lee Jae-in, however, never flashed his dislike as openly as the Commander did.
"You seem busy, Commander, so I'll keep this brief. Employee 330895 — Haneul..."
"330895? Hmhm. What about him?"
A flash of alarm shot across the 1st Raid Commander's face. He recovered his expression almost instantly, but Lee Jae-in didn't miss that fleeting flicker.
"Even if the man is assigned to your division, working a rookie in violation of regulations is a problem."
"Violation? Ha. You have got to be kidding me. What regulation has my 1st Raid Division ever broken? Listen, HR Manager. Do you know what 'overreach' means, or don't you?"
The 1st Raid Commander closed the distance and jabbed a finger into Lee Jae-in's chest. Lee Jae-in raised both palms — a silent declaration that he had no interest in a fight — and answered with perfect calm.
"Open the rulebook and you'll see. 'New employees are to be sent into Highland only after completing sufficient training.' That's what it says."
"What?"
The 1st Raid Commander was dumbfounded. He had no idea whether the rulebook actually contained such a clause — but nobody with an ounce of sense dragged some crusty old manual onto the field.
"Hey! HR Manager. This is straight-up overreach. I'm an ignorant fool who's spent his whole life rolling around in the field, so maybe I don't know the rulebook — but even I know overreach is a serious breach of company regulations. How about I carry this little matter straight to the Expedition Force Commander, hm?"
The Commander was brandishing Lee Sungwoo's name like a club. Lee Jae-in's counter came just as fast.
"If we're invoking the Expedition Force Commander, then allow me to return the favor. You may not be aware, but Employee Haneul is a matter of interest — one that has been reported all the way up to the Head of Strategic Planning."
"Wh-what?"
At the mention of Lee Myungwoo, the 1st Raid Commander's pupils wavered. Lee Myungwoo versus Lee Sungwoo. Rivals or not, there was nobody in the company who didn't know which of the two stood closer to the next chairman's seat. And even setting that aside, the sheer weight of Lee Myungwoo's name bore down on the Commander like a stone.
"330895 — that green rookie is in the Head of Strategic Planning's sights?"
The 1st Raid Commander pressed the question out as if wringing water from a rag. Lee Jae-in set the record straight.
"Not at all. The Director hardly has the leisure to fuss over a mere rookie."
"Hey. You — didn't you just say..."
"I never said the Director had his eye on Employee Haneul. I said our HR team had grown curious about the rookie, and that we had reported to the Head of Strategic Planning recommending he keep an interested eye on the boy going forward."
"Th-that's... fine, we'll call that true enough. And besides — where's your proof that I've been working that rookie to the bone? That's a baseless smear. Why on earth would I mistreat a kid who's come into my own care? Clearly you haven't checked his hospital chart yet, HR Manager. He's fine. He could check out tomorrow if he wanted. Uh-heh-heh-HEM."
The 1st Raid Commander was changing the subject. Lee Jae-in slid his glasses up his nose.
"I checked the chart before I came. Gulping down an A-rank recovery potion and still ending up with wounds like those? That usually means someone was pushed far harder than 'fine.'"
"Impossible. An A-rank recovery potion? No, wait — how does a rookie get his hands on something that precious?!"
This time, the 1st Raid Commander's shock was entirely genuine.
The Soul-Harvesting Puppeteer
Author | Junon
Publisher | Samyang C&C Co., Ltd.
Managing Editor | Editorial Department
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