“How's the brush?”
“It writes well. Far smoother than the old one.”
“Haaaaa.”
Lee Se-a let out a sigh deep enough to sink the ground.
“Mine was a brush I steeled myself to buy too...... I'll have you know it was a designer brush from a department store. What kind of brush costs five hundred thousand won apiece.”
Anyone could see that the brush Yoon Tae-jeong had given him looked far finer.
“Enough making a show of it.”
Setting the brush down, Kang Hyeon beckoned with a finger.
“Let's finish looking at what we had earlier. You wanted one mission cleared, didn't you?”
“Ah, that's right!”
Lee Se-a's face brightened at once.
Just as she brought the tablet back and they were turning through the screens together.
“Hm?”
Kang Hyeon's finger stopped on one particular item.
‘Taejeong Trading?’
“Oh!”
Lee Se-a was startled too.
Indications detected of an overseas S-rank Hunter entering the country illegally
Threat level: Highest
Suspected purpose: Assassination / terrorism
Projected targets
1. National Defense Hunter Technology Institute
2. Taejeong Trading headquarters
“Taejeong Trading is on here? Don't tell me......”
Lee Se-a's expression turned serious in a single beat.
“Could it be connected to the poisoning attempt you mentioned earlier?”
“There's a smell to it.”
“A strong one.”
An S-rank Hunter of foreign nationality entering illegally was a matter tantamount to a national emergency.
Beings who amounted to strategic weapons, slipping in covertly without passing through the proper channels?
Nine times out of ten it meant they had taken a filthy commission.
“Usually it would be the assassination of a key figure in politics or business. That's where the money is.”
“Is that so.”
Then again, it had been the same in Murim.
If a peak-realm master of the unorthodox factions had crept into orthodox territory, that meant somebody's head was coming off, no question about it.
Kang Hyeon himself could dispose of someone without leaving a shred of evidence if he cared to.
“That's why the state goes into uproar when signs of illegal entry like this are picked up. The Bureau and the NIS both go to emergency footing — it's sensitive enough that on discovery they're authorized not to capture but to execute on the spot.”
“So why is this one after Yoon Tae-jeong?”
“That we don't know. And it's only a projected target.”
“Hm.”
He was probably being targeted.
The internal poisoning attempt alone made it clear somebody was harboring a grudge.
“I'll take this one.”
He decided immediately.
They had exchanged only a brief conversation a short while ago, but the man had been rather to his liking.
A good man who knew how to bow his head to his child's benefactor, and one with a merchant's gift besides?
The thought that such a man might die pointlessly struck him as somewhat regrettable.
And above all, was he not Yoon Hyeon-jong's father.
Creating an environment in which cadets could be educated was a professor's duty too, naturally.
“Very well, then I'll report to the Director at once and request operational coordination with the Special Division!”
“No.”
Tak.
Kang Hyeon closed the tablet.
“There's no need to report it.”
He preferred to move alone when handling a job.
The officialdom side in particular he never trusted.
“Let me ask you just one thing.”
“Which thing?”
“This Hunter who entered illegally.”
“Yes.”
“Shall I bring him back alive? Or kill him?”
‘Hgk......!’
Lee Se-a sucked in a breath.
Come to think of it, the man in front of her was Code Name Black, wasn't he?
They were conversing peacefully now, but a mere few weeks ago she had been shaking in front of him.
An operation for which the state's agents would have to stake their lives, this man was discussing lightly, as though its success were a given — and he was a being with the ability to justify that.
“I think it would be better if you took him alive, if at all possible.”
“Is that so? Understood.”
***
That night.
The chief executive's office at Taejeong Trading.
Yoon Tae-jeong, who had not gone home, was glaring at his monitor screen.
‘It's too clean.’
He had gone through every outside party Park Dong-cheol had made contact with recently, and the flow of funds, and nothing came out.
Ordinarily he would simply have let it pass, but......
If anything, being spotless, without a single speck of dust, made him more suspicious.
Was it not rather as though the traces had been erased?
Slide.
This time he brought the internal organizational chart up on the monitor.
From the head of personnel to the finance director.
More than half of the key posts had been replaced with Park Dong-cheol's line.
“Haa.”
A sigh came out.
It was not as though he had had no idea this trouble might come.
Because Park Dong-cheol had always been a man of great appetite.
He had known, too, that someday that greed might cross a line.
‘......I am weaker to sentiment than I thought.’
Grateful for the years they had rolled through together, sweating from the very bottom, he had given the man the post of executive director and tried to carry him along, controlling his authority within reasonable bounds.
But that paltry consideration had in the end become a poison, closing around his heart.
‘Is it true, Park Dong-cheol?’
Did you truly mean to kill me and swallow this company whole?
***
At the same hour.
A private salon overlooking central Seoul.
“Director.”
A man approached out of the darkness and bowed his head.
“It appears the chief executive has caught the scent. This afternoon he activated a private intelligence team and back-traced three years of company fund flows and your log of outside meetings.”
“Is that so?”
Park Dong-cheol stopped the glass he had been spinning.
‘How did he know?’
Haaa, my friend.
You could have gone comfortably, by sudden death. Did you have to go digging into it?
‘So there's no help for it after all?’
Killing Yoon Tae-jeong, then handling the inexperienced Yoon Hyeon-jong and absorbing the shares perfectly at a suitable moment — that had been the superior plan he had laid.
But if Yoon Tae-jeong had noticed?
He had to switch to the middling plan.
The man was his friend, but he was no ordinary opponent.
While he did not know, he could be got at; from the moment he knew, he would exclude him thoroughly.
‘I took out insurance knowing this might happen.’
When he had, more or less incidentally, run a line to an overseas contractor he happened to have learned of, even he had wondered whether it was necessary.
But now the blade was drawn, and there was at least a radish to cut with it.
***
The next morning.
“Chief executive, you have an inspection of the Incheon Port logistics center at 10 a.m., and a luncheon with the board directors this afternoon.”
“Right, let's go.”
Yoon Tae-jeong nodded and lifted the teacup set on his desk.
The aromatic tea he drank every morning out of habit.
At the familiar fragrance brushing the tip of his nose, his eyes settled coldly.
‘So there was poison inside this, killing me.’
In the moment the secretary turned her back to sort documents.
Glug, glug.
Yoon Tae-jeong pretended to merely wet his lips, then emptied the contents of the cup entirely into the orchid pot on the windowsill.
“Let's set off.”
“Yes, sir.”
Coming down to the lobby, Yoon Tae-jeong found a scene unlike the usual laid out before him.
Three large black sedans waited in a row, and around them men giving off a fierce presence had formed a cordon.
The company's dedicated security team, of course, and A-rank mercenary Hunters hired urgently at great expense.
A degree of protection you would never see on an ordinary routine inspection.
Because something felt wrong.
Settling into the back seat, Yoon Tae-jeong watched the car door close firmly and declared inwardly.
‘From here on, Park Dong-cheol, you are my enemy.’
There was no telling when he would try something else, so he would prepare thoroughly.
The vehicles left the city center and turned onto the outer road leading to Incheon Port.
When they reached a quiet, sparsely travelled stretch lined on both sides with dense trees.
Thunk!
“Kuheok!”
At the chilling whistle of split air, dark red blood shot up like a fountain from the driver's chest.
An arrow flown from somewhere had punched through the window glass and pierced his heart.
Screeeeeech!
The sedan, its control lost, slid with a roar.
“We're under attack!”
The bodyguard riding beside him hurriedly hauled up his energy to shield Yoon Tae-jeong.
Crash!
The vehicle could not overcome its speed and slammed into a utility pole on the shoulder, but Yoon Tae-jeong was not seriously hurt.
“Out of the car!”
“Prepare for combat!”
A mercenary shouted urgently into his radio.
Panting as he looked out through the shattered window, Yoon Tae-jeong was thrown into confusion.
‘Park Dong-cheol.’
He had been preparing, but he had never imagined the man would move this fast and this aggressively.
Had he not used the card of poison precisely in order to keep blood off his own hands?
‘What is it that made you so urgent?’
Enduring the heavy pain pressing down on his body, he pulled himself out of the car.
It was a blind spot with little traffic and not even CCTV coverage.
‘So they marked this place as the hunting ground from the outset and waited.’
Screech, skid!
The two escort vehicles following behind braked hard and stopped.
Car doors flew open one after another, and the armed security team and A-rank mercenaries poured out and surrounded Yoon Tae-jeong.
But they were given no opportunity to counterattack.
Shk!
Shk-shk-shk-shk!
Sharp sounds of cleaved air rang out in succession from somewhere.
“Kraaagh!”
“Kuheok!”
A horrific sight unfolded before Yoon Tae-jeong's eyes.
The wall of A-rank Hunters, energy wrapped around them and weapons drawn, was pierced through as though it were nothing.
Arrows flown at a speed the eye could not even follow lodged precisely in the mercenaries' brows and hearts.
A single lethal strike each, without a hair's margin of error.
“......!”
Yoon Tae-jeong's lips trembled.
They were A-rank Hunters, no less.
However much of a surprise attack it was, their wall pierced by a single arrow and dying like leaves in an autumn wind?
That was absolutely impossible.
Unless the opponent stood at a realm unfathomably higher than theirs!
‘S-rank?’
Who on earth?
What guild, what mad S-rank Hunter would carry out large-scale slaughter like this in the middle of South Korea?
At this scale of killing, they would be caught however far out on the outskirts and however absent the CCTV.
Could they possibly have entered the country illegally from abroad?
In the blink of an eye, dozens of escorting personnel lay sprawled on the ground.
The stench of blood carried across the asphalt.
The only one left alive was Yoon Tae-jeong, one man alone.
Just as the surroundings fell as still as the dead.
Rustle.
The thick undergrowth at the roadside parted and someone revealed himself.
“Haa, Tae-jeong. Why did you have to? It would have been so much better if you had just gone quietly.”
The man he had regarded for decades as a brother, and at times as his own hands and feet.
It was Park Dong-cheol.
And beside him, a blond foreigner holding an enormous black bow was smiling this way.
The moment it became certain: an overseas S-rank Hunter.
Yoon Tae-jeong grew angry.
“Park Dong-cheol! However much you covet the company, is this a thing to be done! Taking these men's lives along with it?”
“Come now, why act as though you didn't expect it? You knew, didn't you — that's why you prepared like this.”
Park Dong-cheol, his true colors revealed, was not the friend he had known.
“And covet, you say. It was you who was greedy.”
“What did you say?”
“Frankly, it was all me down at the bottom, getting blood on my hands and clearing up the filth — shouldn't you have given me half the shares? Why are you the chief executive and I the executive director?”
It was outrageous, but Yoon Tae-jeong made an effort to keep his wits.
If he died a dog's death here, what of his wife? He would never see Hyeon-jong again.
“If you coveted half the shares, you should have said so. I would have given them.”
“Like hell.”
Park Dong-cheol snorted.
“Would a man like that pour his aromatic tea into a flowerpot and hire mercenaries?”
‘Damn it.’
Yoon Tae-jeong groaned inwardly.
Which meant?
The secretary who had reported his schedule that morning was Park Dong-cheol's person too.
“So that's why you made a move this reckless.”
“That's right. Once you'd caught on, it was today or my own neck goes first. Don't feel too aggrieved. When you're dead I'll look after Hyeon-jong well. He's still a babe in arms who knows nothing of the world, so I'll raise him into a truly excellent figurehead. And I'll take the company.”
“You garbage son of a bitch!”
When Yoon Tae-jeong raged, Park Dong-cheol jerked his chin.
A gesture meaning: finish it now.
Creeeak!
The enormous black bow in the blond man's grip was drawn taut.
Yoon Tae-jeong knew it instinctively.
‘It's all over.’
It did not even occur to him to beg for his life, offering to hand over every share.
From the moment they had butchered dozens of men in broad daylight on the city's outskirts, Park Dong-cheol had crossed a river he could not come back from.
What they had done was far too bold for them to leave him alive.
Yoon Tae-jeong slowly closed both eyes.
‘My dear, and Hyeon-jong. I'm sorry.’
Just as the faces of his beloved family flashed past like a turning lantern.
“My apologies.”
A languid voice brushed his ear.
Yoon Tae-jeong started and snapped his eyes open.
A broad back stood blocking the way in front of him at some point.
“I came as fast as I could, but I am a little late.”
It was Kang Hyeon.