On-Time Clock-Out Went Live (2)
Senior rolled his wheelchair between me and the mutant.
Twelve cameras locked onto his back.
A shabby jumper. An old wheelchair. From behind he looked like nothing more than some old man who had taken a wrong turn.
The hundreds of thousands watching outside the gate would be staring at that same back right now, murmuring who the hell he was and why he was standing there.
I couldn't believe my eyes at first either. I had never told a soul where I was or that I was in danger. Yet Senior was here—as if he had heard my scream and come running.
"Senior, it's dangerous! That thing—ice doesn't even work on it…!"
My voice shook. The man in front of me was in a wheelchair. He had just rolled in with no plan whatsoever in front of a monster even I, an S-Rank, couldn't beat. I wanted to stop him right then. I thought I had to drag him out and run.
"I know."
Senior cut me off.
"That's enough. Fall back. Just hold your wounds."
His voice was low and even. No fear. No bluster. He simply told me to step aside as if it were the most natural thing in the world. And at those words my body moved back on its own. Something irresistible lived in that voice.
Senior tapped the mix-coffee box off his knee. Then, slowly, he raised one hand.
From here, it was nothing special.
I only came because it was noisy.
I had been waiting for my on-time clock-out in the complaints office when a broadcast kicked on. The kid from Baekho was doing a solo clear, plastered huge across the Association lobby screen. I didn't care. It was an obvious fixed show. Hunts these days were all the same—act dangerous, flash the sponsor logos, soak up the cheers. I figured Seoha was playing that game just fine without any trouble.
I was about to turn my back on the screen and stamp out when, on that same screen, the kid actually started bleeding.
Something the system couldn't catch. Something born outside the system. It had punched straight through the script and was cornering my first disciple.
My body moved first. No thinking required. When your disciple is dying, a master doesn't sit there sipping coffee. Even through the screen I could see how hard she was gritting her teeth and holding on.
How I reached the gate can be skipped. An Association staff ID got me past the cordon; the wheels handled the rest.
When I arrived, it was nothing special. A mutant the system couldn't turn into data. A catastrophe for system-generation kids like Seoha, but for a 1st Generation like me it was only a degraded version of the things we had fought to exhaustion back in the day.
Before the system existed we fought these things bare-handed every single day. No data. No weakness markers. No safety ratings. Just read them with your senses and crush them with force. How many comrades died then—I don't even try to count anymore. In exchange for surviving that hell I handed over both legs and any chance at an ordinary life.
So this thing held nothing new for me. I had already faced far worse twenty years ago.
I lightly clenched the hand I had raised.
The mutant screamed. Or rather, it tried to. That massive body began to crumple inward from the center, as if an invisible hand had seized the whole of it. No skill name. No chant. No flash of mana. I simply clenched my hand, and it was crushed. That was all.
Behind me I heard Seoha suck in a sharp breath. No wonder—something her ice couldn't freeze without it breaking free was being pulverized by a single gesture from me.
The mutant thrashed and shot out tentacles. I flicked my other hand. The extending tentacles stopped dead in midair. Not ice. Not chains. The movement itself simply ceased.
"Noisy."
I lightly clenched the stopped hand. The tentacles frozen in the air burst from the inside out. I had reversed the mana flow and shredded its body from within.
Behind me I felt Seoha start to speak and then swallow the words whole. Watching the opponent she had risked her life against get handled like a toy in her master's hands left her with nothing left to say.
Crush. Stop. Burst. Back then this didn't even rank as basic technique. To survive that hell, this much had to come as naturally as breathing.
The rest was simple. I finished clenching my hand. What had been crumpling compressed into a single point—basketball-sized, baseball-sized, finally marble-sized. With a soft tok, that black, massive thing was left as a single black grain the size of a fingernail.
What had driven Seoha to the brink of death moments ago was now just a pebble rolling on the floor.
The room went quiet. No explosion. No flash. No roar. Just something enormous quietly becoming small. The time it took was less than a sip of coffee would take to cool. I didn't even need to go all out. My body hadn't rusted enough to require full power for something like this.
Making a spectacle of it might actually have been better. The current generation, used to flashy skills, would have shrugged that off as normal. But ending it so quietly with a single hand gesture made it look even more unreal.
I lifted the grain with telekinesis. It still twitched faintly. Even after its volume had been crushed away, something like a core inside refused to die. That was exactly the nature of things born outside the system. Kill them and they still don't fully die.
Things like this were starting to raise their heads everywhere these days—on C-Rank lower floors, in broadcast gates like today's. The safer the system stamped a place, the more defenseless it actually was. Today it had simply exploded in front of the cameras.
I looked back. Seoha was sitting on the floor looking up at me. Blood streamed from her shoulder, yet her face had forgotten the pain. Those eyes were completely different from a few days ago. When she first met me, that kid had seen me as a pitiful senior who needed looking after—the one who ran coffee errands and asked if I'd eaten. There was none of that pity left now. Only the eyes of someone who had witnessed something for the first time and did not know how to process it.
"You okay?"
"…Yes."
"If you're okay, that's enough."
Seoha started to say more, then closed her mouth. Her face said she had a mountain of questions—are you really that Baekjeong? How have you been hiding power like this? But I had no intention of answering, and she seemed to understand this was not the time to dig. Instead she struggled up on her bleeding arm and stood beside me, as if to support me. Trying to guard the person who had just saved her life with her own injured body—that was pure Seoha.
I slipped the black grain into my pocket, thinking I should show it to Dohagyeong later.
Only then did I properly take in the room. Twelve cameras. Every single one of them turned toward me. Every red recording light lit without exception. Everything that had just happened—the mutant that ice could not touch reduced to a marble with a single gesture—had gone out live to the entire world.
A staffer wearing a headset stared at me with a dazed face. His lips moved.
"Th-that person… is he the Baekjeong from the article…?"
I let out a low sigh. When the article dropped a few days ago it had only been circumstantial suspicion. The guilds had tried to bury it as conspiracy theory. Just now I had proven that suspicion with my own hands in front of twelve cameras.
Only, what was proven today was not just my identity. Something the system could not catch had burst out of a gate the system had guaranteed safe and tried to kill an S-Rank. It was not a fixed show. It was real. All of it had been broadcast live before hundreds of thousands of eyes. Mutants were no longer individual accidents that happened to unlucky hunters. The whole world had seen it with their own eyes. The system was not absolutely safe. That had become an undeniable fact.
And outside the gate, in front of the giant screens, the hundreds of thousands of spectators who had been screaming moments ago closed their mouths as one. I knew exactly what that silence meant. It was the silence of a world that had just witnessed something.
That silence would not last long. Soon hundreds of thousands of phones would light up, the scene would be clipped and copied and spread, galleries would explode, reporters would swarm, and the higher-ups would move. The fact that the monster called Baekjeong who had only circulated in articles truly existed—and that he wielded overwhelming power without the system—had been confirmed by the entire world with their own eyes. The fake hero narratives and system-supremacy the guilds had built over twenty years had shattered into pieces in a few seconds tonight.
I prepared to leave the gate with the injured Seoha. On-time clock-out had long since gone down the drain, and now I had no idea how many more days my peaceful mix-coffee life would last.
As we stepped out of the gate entrance, people with microphones came flooding toward us. At the very front I saw a familiar face—the persistent reporter who had gotten her hands on sealed materials a few days ago. That woman was approaching, looking straight at me. While the other reporters chattered excitedly about how to write up what they had just witnessed, only she was quiet. With a face that already knew all the answers, she simply stared me down.
In front of twelve cameras and hundreds of thousands of spectators, I had completely proven that the article she had written was one hundred percent true. The moment that woman grabbed a mic again, the name Baekjeong would become a complete reality the guilds could no longer cover up.
I rolled the old wheelchair wheels and slowly advanced toward her. If I could not avoid it, better to face it first myself.