Advance Recon (1)
Weekend. I was waiting at the agreed meeting spot near the dormitory when Dang Gyu-young appeared, precisely on time.
She was in her uniform as always, yet something about her seemed crisper and more put-together than usual.
And then, on top of that—
"Are you wearing perfume?"
"I wear it every day, though?"
"It just smells different today, that's all."
"You're a total bloodhound. Here, take a sniff."
Dang Gyu-young held her wrist up under my nose, and a fragrance hovering somewhere between floral and fruity tickled it. Then she tapped the tip of my nose and flashed a grin.
"I did put a little extra care into today."
And not merely for my benefit — with the people we were about to meet in mind, she needed to look at least a notch better than her everyday self.
"Well then, let's get moving."
"Yes, senior."
Taking the shuttle bus would have made the trip easy, but it carried the risk of our being tailed. And so the two of us traveled to the destination on foot.
I walked wherever Dang Gyu-young led. She seemed to have picked a route some distance away from the commercial district; we followed the roads for stretches, and at times pushed straight through forest where no path existed at all.
I had been trailing along in silence when Dang Gyu-young, walking a little ahead, glanced back over her shoulder.
"Not curious at all about what we're going to do?"
Truthfully, it wasn't so much that I lacked curiosity — I already knew the answer. But I saw no reason to spoil the mood.
"I figured you'd tell me when the time came."
"Sometimes I honestly can't tell whether you're just indifferent or you have the patience of a saint. Anyway, I'll tell you now."
It was better to at least have the basic purpose of today's outing pinned down, after all.
Before long, Dang Gyu-young let a single word pass her lips.
"A black market. The Black Market."
An event hosted by the Thief Club, where the countless items on the ban list changed hands in brisk, lively trade. And the single biggest reason it was held at this particular time came down to one thing: mentoring.
Nine times out of ten, the mentors flowing in from outside Dungeon Island were graduates who had once attended Dragon Slayer Academy. Which meant they understood better than anyone what the current students needed, and they arrived with their inventories packed to bursting with nothing but hand-picked items to match.
"Sell to the students, and the margins are nothing to sneeze at."
There was no need to fret over a student's purchasing power, either — most of them were bankrolled by the capital of formidable factions: prestigious families, guilds, corporations, magic towers, and the like.
And so a considerable share of goods traded briskly for the entire four weeks of the mentoring period, but—
"Banned-item deals are another matter. People get careful about those."
The profits there dwarfed anything an ordinary item could bring, yet get caught, and confiscation was only the start: a mentor's evaluation would take a hit, and word would travel all the way back to the faction they belonged to. Small wonder even graduate mentors had to mind the academy's watchful gaze.
Some might ask, "Then why not simply not sell them? Aren't the regular items enough?"
"But the demand is simply too enormous for that."
There was one more major reason the Black Market opened at this time: midterms were right around the corner.
With midterms and finals carrying such colossal weight in the final grades, the temptation of banned items grew that much harder to resist. The prevailing mindset ran: push yourself a little now, pull a strong midterm score, and the rest of the semester turns easy.
To sum it up — the mentors wanted to empty their inventories as much as possible before the mentoring period ended and they left Dungeon Island, while the students wanted to secure banned items good enough to see them through the midterms.
With supply and demand swelling in tandem like this, the pressure finally crested on the weekend of Week 8. In other words, the Black Market would open around next weekend.
And in all of this, what exactly was the Thief Club's role as the host?
"We hook the sellers up with the buyers, and keep everything hidden nice and tight so the Disciplinary Committee doesn't catch us."
There was no chance the Disciplinary Committee didn't know the Black Market was coming. Just as the Thief Club attempted its infiltration of the Temporary Confiscation Storage in the wake of the Ban Wave, the Black Market, too, was something of an annual tradition. The moment the committee sensed so much as a hint of illicit trading, they would come hunting with their eyes ablaze.
"Well, that much is a given. What matters is the details."
How did you arrange safe trades while slipping past the Disciplinary Committee's gaze? And if someone did get caught, how did you cut the tail cleanly and keep the damage to a minimum?
That strategy shifted from year to year with the temperaments of the Thief Club's president and vice-president. This year, the club's main fighting force consisted of Dang Gyu-young and Chae Da-bin.
As a Shadow Weaver, Dang Gyu-young could conceal not only herself but the presence of any allies within her range. Our infiltrations of the Temporary Confiscation Storage and the Deep Layer had owed plenty to her stealth arts — [Shadow Safehouse], [Shadow Pouch], and their kin.
Chae Da-bin, for her part, possessed the skill to slip straight through the magic-engineering systems of the Dungeon Hall's Deep Layer and neutralize them like it was nothing. Even by my own assessment, that one ability of hers had already left the student level behind.
Which meant she would no doubt be putting those strengths to vigorous use in preparing the Black Market — and Dang Gyu-young had brought me out today with the express intent of letting me watch her do it.
"So in plain terms, it's an advance recon."
"Right. An advance recon."
Dang Gyu-young nodded her assent. And soon enough, the first stop of that advance recon revealed itself before our eyes.
A shabby three-story building. With windows shattered here and there and ivy climbing its outer walls, it looked for all the world like an abandoned structure.
…
As I neared the entrance, I lifted my gaze and stared quietly up toward the rooftop.
Dang Gyu-young opened her mouth to ask what I was looking at — then, as if catching on herself, fixed her eyes on the same spot.
And from up there came a voice, half startled and half intrigued.
"Sharp eyes on this one."
Presently the empty air rippled once, and a man and a woman revealed themselves. They had been lying in concealment the whole time, draped head to toe in Optical Camouflage Ghillie Suits.
In the same motion they leapt down from the third floor's height and touched down lightly in front of us.
The man gave off the same lanky, slippery impression as Shin Byung-cheol — the differences being a luxuriant head of hair and a genuinely handsome face. The woman's eyes drooped gently at the corners, lending her a soft look overall, with a teardrop mole beneath her eye as her signature accent.
And both of them, plainly, looked older than us.
Graduates.
My guess proved right: the moment they alighted, Dang Gyu-young bent at the waist in a deep ninety-degree bow, and I read the room and bowed in silence after her.
"Hello, seniors."
"Good day to you."
"Mm, so Gyu-young's here. And this beside you would be...?"
"A junior I'm rather fond of."
"Ah, a junior, I see."
At that, the lanky man's and the teardrop-mole woman's gazes slid to my chest — checking the color of my tie pin, by the look of it. A moment later, intrigue colored both pairs of eyes at once.
"...A first-year?"
No wonder they were startled. A first-year had seen straight through their concealment while they wore Optical Camouflage Ghillie Suits, of all things.
Ahn Jungmi, too, had been picked up by my veteran-radar once, and she hadn't been stingy with her praise afterward.
"Quite the skill you've got there. Or maybe I'm just past my prime."
"There are a few sides to him that aren't very first-year-like."
"See? I knew there was no way I'd gone stale. The Thief Club's future is looking bright."
To that, Dang Gyu-young answered with nothing but a smile — seeing as how I wasn't actually a member of the club.
Instead she shot me a covert look that plainly asked, why don't you join already? — and when I deliberately played dumb, her lips jutted out in a pout.
But with two graduates standing right there, she couldn't keep sneaking glances for long, and turned to the woman with the teardrop mole.
"Why were you outside? You could have been resting."
"Sitting still that long felt odd, so I was keeping an eye out in case anyone came."
She had been standing watch outside, lest the fact that we were gathering at this building somehow reach the Disciplinary Committee's ears. Dang Gyu-young dipped her head in thanks.
"We appreciate the trouble."
"Oh, it was nothing. Come on, let's head in."
"Yes, senior."
The moment we stepped inside, the people lounging on the sofas over a card game turned their eyes our way: the twins I'd seen a while back, Shin Byung-cheol, and the second- and third-year Thief Club members. Across from them sat several more men who looked to be graduates, and they traded light greetings with Dang Gyu-young.
"Hey there, Gyu-young."
"President Dang. You made it."
"Hello, seniors."
Counting the lanky man and the teardrop-mole woman, the graduates came to five in all.
Most of them had ties to Dang Gyu-young or the Thief Club from years past, or else kept close connections with the thief guilds operating outside Dragon Slayer Academy. And even those without such ties were mentors chasing personal gain all the same — so where the Black Market was concerned, they would raise their hands for the Thief Club over the Disciplinary Committee every time.
Which meant Dang Gyu-young had likely sought out one or two of them personally to make her requests.
Even so, getting five of them on board is hardly the norm.
I had no way of knowing how many graduates or faculty-level heavyweights would throw in with the Disciplinary Committee, but the five before me already made for considerable muscle.
For me, that was excellent news.
So this is what riding the bus feels like.
If all I had to do was sit back and scoop up banned items while everyone else did the work, wasn't that the very best outcome there was?
At Dang Gyu-young's direction, everyone rose from their seats and started up the building stairs.
The closer we drew to the third floor, the louder a mechanical hum droned against our ears. The moment we reached it, the source came into view: dozens upon dozens of monitors, filling an entire room.
Most of the screens were dark, but a few displayed feeds of other rooms.
…
And there, off to one side, sat Chae Da-bin, busily hammering away at a tablet. Every so often she would lift her eyes to check the monitors, then return to tapping — and each time she did, another dark screen flickered to life.
With a setup this elaborate, contrary to my first guess that this place was merely a temporary rally point, they apparently intended to run the whole operation from here as a full-fledged control tower.
Dang Gyu-young watched her for a moment, then seized the instant her hands paused to cut in.
"Da-bin, step out for a minute."
"Yes."
Chae Da-bin stowed her tablet at once and followed her out. Catching sight of me, she tossed a light nod my way, and I dipped my head in return.
The Thief Club members and graduates who had come trooping upstairs gathered in the meeting room.
Rather unexpectedly, the strongest voice among the five graduates seemed to belong to the lanky man. He drifted naturally toward the head of the room where Dang Gyu-young sat, and everyone else trained their attention squarely on him.
The lanky man swept his gaze over the assembled company once, then opened his mouth.
"Then let's get this meeting started."
[134] The Support Ate it All