Preliminary Reconnaissance (4)
The moment I accepted the wager, the older graduate gave a nod.
"Good. We'll head in first and wait for you there."
He rested a light hand on the tear-mole woman's shoulder, and like that the two of them walked together toward one wall of the building — then passed straight through it and slipped inside.
Watching their backs disappear, Dang Gyu-young spoke up.
"Kim Ho, honestly, this all started as my little prank... but haven't we let it snowball a bit too far?"
All she had wanted, in snatching my napkin, was to see me flustered for even a moment; she couldn't have predicted I would blurt out that I could manage without a landmark. Before I could even answer her, the graduates had cut into the conversation, and within a few words everything had escalated at a staggering pace — until, with no opening left to rein it in, the wager had been sealed. Dragged abruptly into the middle of it all, Dang Gyu-young had every right to feel awkward about the spot she now found herself in.
That said, I agreed that things had grown bigger than intended.
"It would look bad if I failed, sure."
Tracing the wager back to its root, the cause was me inadvertently scraping their pride, however unintentionally. So if I failed, the graduates' image of me would be stamped as nothing more than 'a first-year who got taught a hard lesson for pointlessly flexing.' And Dang Gyu-young, who had introduced me as a junior she was fond of, would take the hit by association.
Even so, my attitude remained as carefree as ever.
"Which is why all that's left is for me to succeed, isn't it?"
"...I'll say this for you, that confidence of yours is in a league of its own. Is your instinct really that sharp? Can I actually count on it?"
"At the very least, I trust it."
And what was the true face of this 'exceptional instinct' of mine? Nothing other than the sense of a grizzled veteran, tempered by sheer volume of experience.
Having churned out S-Rank heroes like products off an assembly line, I had seen and lived through more than I could count, and it had honed my eye until even the faintest whiff of something off registered with uncanny precision. Long ago I used to pick apart the reason behind every little dissonance, one by one; by now, I no longer bothered sweating the small stuff.
The important thing is simply that I know at a glance.
The same way I could see through someone wearing a Transparent Ghillie Suit in a single look.
Dang Gyu-young let out a small sigh, as if she'd given up on making sense of me.
"Yeesh, fine, go on then. I'm sure our junior who's graduated two hundred times over — no, pardon me, our great senior — will handle everything perfectly."
With that she stepped back a pace, folded her arms, and planted herself there. Spectator mode, apparently.
Leaving her gaze at my back, I started forward.
The distance between me and Exchange A wasn't far — the building fit within a single glance, and a short walk would see me inside. Assuming I handled the formation properly, that is. If I fumbled my response, that short stretch could stretch out as long as it pleased.
As expected, a few steps further and my veteran's sense sent up a signal. I had entered the formation's zone of influence — and at the same time, I had a fair idea of what kind it was.
A Confusion Formation.
A formation that scrambled the sense of distance, speed, and direction of anyone who wandered into its range. For instance, I might be convinced I was striding forward when in truth I was unknowingly backing away in slow retreat, or believe I'd reached an alley and turned it at a right angle when I was actually marking time in place. That was the formation's whole purpose: to quietly steer unwelcome guests poking around the exchange off in another direction, until at last they drifted clear of the area without ever knowing it. And according to the tear-mole woman, the whole process unfolded so naturally that the one caught in it never noticed a thing.
Just like right now.
A few more steps and my veteran's radar pinged; I veered hard on the spot. Yet even after that abrupt turn, the scenery before my eyes was exactly what it had been a moment ago. The formation had tried to lead me off somewhere else entirely, and I had seen through it and righted my course.
I pressed on a little further, then abruptly broke into a crab-walk, sliding sideways. By all rights, Exchange A should have slid across to the far edge of my vision as I moved — instead, I was inching closer to it. Once again I had crab-walked deliberately to correct my path, and to any outside observer I would have looked like a man walking perfectly straight.
The entrance now yawned open right in front of me. But it isn't over yet. Instead of stepping in, I swung another forty-five degrees and made a beeline for the building's outer wall. I trusted my veteran's radar one hundred percent — so completely that I shut my eyes altogether. A few seconds later I opened them again to find that, far from colliding with the wall, I had passed clean into the building's interior.
Just like that, the formation was dismantled — with almost insulting ease.
Well, half the battle is won. Of course, the formation ran through the interior as well, so letting my guard down was out of the question. On top of that, to reach where the two graduates were waiting, I would have to cross the walls laced with [Throughwalk] as well.
A glance left and right showed a long row of rooms with their doors shut fast. I walked up to one of them and flung the door open as boldly as if it were my own bedroom, then stepped inside.
The room was arranged like an office, its details so intact that someone might have been at work there only moments before. And this wasn't one room or two — they had furnished several buildings' worth. It gave me a real measure of just how much effort the Thief Club poured into the Black Market. Even as I marveled inwardly, I turned my head toward the wall my veteran's radar was pointing to.
So it's this way.
I walked straight at the wall, and with no sensation of impact whatsoever, the next room simply appeared. Another office, dressed up just like the last. Again my head snapped around toward a single spot. This time, over here. And on I went, room after room, without a moment's hesitation.
"...?"
Dang Gyu-young blinked, dumbfounded.
Did I really just see that? The scene she had witnessed moments ago refused to be believed.
The graduate senior had described this formation as 'so natural that the target might never realize they'd been caught in it.' But natural or not, anyone squirming to break free of a formation's influence was bound to give themselves away somehow. They should waver at least a little — stumble, hesitate, glance around. What Dang Gyu-young had seen, however, was nothing more than Kim Ho strolling into the building without a care in the world, wearing the air of a man for whom no formation existed at all.
She blinked blankly a while longer, then fiddled with the transceiver tucked in her ear — first things first, she had to confirm she hadn't imagined it. The line to the control tower connected almost at once.
"Chae Da-bin."
"— Yes, President."
"You're watching this?"
"— Watching."
"Pull the footage from just now and send it over."
"— Yes, one moment."
Before long, Chae Da-bin transmitted a video clip: footage of Kim Ho as seen through the surveillance crystal ball overhead. Dang Gyu-young had been watching from behind, while the crystal ball hung above — their angles differed. So she leaned in and studied the footage closely, half expecting it to catch something her own eyes had missed.
"..."
Contrary to her hopes, Kim Ho's gait on the recording was no different from what she had seen with her own eyes. Utterly, unremarkably ordinary. With the cross-check complete, the next thing to rear its head was doubt.
Hmm. Did she maybe not set this up properly? Had the senior installed the formation sloppily? Or never installed it at all? Then why? Had she secretly schemed with Kim Ho — to mess with me? But when would she even have had the chance? Was this a hidden-camera prank?
But the two graduates were every bit as bewildered. They had been watching Kim Ho through the feed shared by the control tower, and at the same sight that had stunned Dang Gyu-young, their words died in their throats. Then they traded glances heavy with questions.
The older graduate asked, "You did install it properly, right? The formation."
"Of course I did. I did, but... didn't I?"
The tear-mole woman tilted her head, her face clouded with uncertainty. As far as her memory went, she had set it up flawlessly and seen the review through to the end — yet watching that, she couldn't quite summon her conviction. Had she overlooked something crucial? A miscalculation, perhaps, or a misconfigured range — was the formation failing to perform as designed?
One thing the footage did prove, with Kim Ho flitting from room to room without hindrance, was that the [Throughwalk] enchantment was working exactly as intended. The formation's manifestation, on the other hand, was invisible to the naked eye — doubly so for a type like this, which simply scrambled its target's senses. You could only infer it was working by watching the target wander. And Kim Ho's footsteps had been so utterly natural that even the formation's creator found herself doubting her own work. The tear-mole woman began seriously weighing whether she ought to go down and check for herself.
"Mmmmm..."
Dang Gyu-young propped her chin in her hand, knitting her brow, easing it, furrowing her eyebrows, easing them again. She turned the problem over from every angle, but no crisp answer emerged. Which left exactly one option.
Don't know? Then just try it. If she wanted to know whether the formation was doing its job, the simplest way was to experience it firsthand. There was no danger of getting hurt, and a president personally vetting performance wasn't a bad look either. Dang Gyu-young held out her napkin to a club member waiting nearby.
"Hold this for me a second."
"You got it."
With the landmark handed off, she too would now take the formation's effects in full. Dang Gyu-young set off after Kim Ho's footsteps at an unhurried pace. The entrance to Exchange A crept closer, little by little.
...It really doesn't feel like she set anything up? Not the faintest hint of anything strange. What she had failed to notice was that, with every step she took, the world around her drifted past just a touch too slowly.
Still walking along without a care, Dang Gyu-young stopped dead in her tracks as the dissonance finally caught up with her. The exchange she should have entered ages ago was still holding nearly the same distance away, no matter how far she'd walked. Snapping back to her senses, she looked around — and found herself on the threshold of the commercial district. The boisterous chatter and laughter of passersby rang in her ears.
Dang Gyu-young let out a hollow laugh.
"So the performance is rock solid, huh."
Without her even realizing it, she had been shown the door — smoothly, gently, as if by an invisible usher. The formation's effects were in unmistakable working order, which was, at the same time, proof that Kim Ho had broken straight through them.
"Your instincts really are something else."
[137] The Support Ate it All