Kang Hyeon was inwardly flustered as well.
He had known the man would act, but he had never imagined it would be this fast.
‘I overlooked how fast cars are.’
In Murim it had been enough to chase the tail end of a carriage at worst, but in the modern day this was not easy.
And had his inner arts been whole it might have been another matter, but with most of them spent holding down Asura's venom, keeping up had been no simple thing.
As a result, having tracked Park Dong-cheol well all night, he had still let unnecessary killing take place.
‘My apologies for being late, gentlemen.’
Kang Hyeon offered his condolences to the sprawled bodies.
But what had happened had happened.
Kang Hyeon did not sink deeply into deaths already past.
It was something he had experienced countless times in Murim, and regretting spilled water gained nothing.
“Wh-Who are you?”
Startled by the sudden intrusion, Park Dong-cheol asked warily.
“Me?”
Kang Hyeon glanced back over his shoulder and answered.
“This gentleman's son's professor.”
“Professor?”
Park Dong-cheol's brow creased sharply.
Could he be Hyeon-jong's professor?
“How would a professor know to come here.”
Kang Hyeon ignored the question and went on.
“If you're going to carry out a killing, you finish the target's breath first. What are you doing taking your leisure after pointlessly slaughtering nothing but the escorts?”
“Hah, some crazy bastard turns up out of nowhere to lecture me. When you send off a man who used to be your friend, you give him a last word or two. Haven't you watched a film?”
“So he says, Mr. Yoon Tae-jeong.”
“Sorry?”
Yoon Tae-jeong had been wearing a dazed expression for some time.
He could not begin to understand how Professor Kang, who ought to be at the Academy, was here.
“What would you like to do? He says a last word is called for. Is there anything you want to hear from the man?”
“This crazy bastard, I've listened and listened to this.”
Park Dong-cheol's face flushed red.
“You seem too drunk to tell up from down, so let me say it: I'm the one holding your lives. Oi, William! Shk-shk, shk-shk! Put one through his skull! Shooting head!”
When he mimed drawing a bow and took aim at Kang Hyeon, only then did Yoon Tae-jeong snap back to his senses.
“Professor, get clear! That man is no ordinary Hunter. At minimum he's S-rank......!”
Yoon Tae-jeong's words had not even finished.
Pyung! Pyung!
The arrows left the string and shot toward the brows of the two men.
‘Aah.’
Yoon Tae-jeong knew death instinctively.
His own dying was bitter enough, and now his benefactor was going to die too.
His son had praised the man extravagantly.
A monster stronger than any professor at the Academy.
Yoon Tae-jeong himself had felt an unapproachable presence when he faced him alone.
But the opponent was S-rank.
A walking calamity, of which the nation had only seven!
However impressive a professor might be, he would be around A-rank, so there was no dodging this arrow.
But.
Naturally, the arrows did not pierce the two of them.
Tak, ta-tak.
Because Kang Hyeon plucked them out of the air with the greatest ease.
‘If I couldn't catch something like this, that old man the Yellow Springs Poison Hand would be hurt, wherever he is in the next world.’
The Yellow Springs Poison Hand.
In poison and concealed weapons, the absolute sovereign whom nobody in the history of Murim could approach.
The infamy came from the saying that if he once extended a hand, the target went the road to the Yellow Springs without exception.
The old monster who had once held the Wood Luminary Formation among the Seven Luminaries.
“Let me show you a little of what the real thing is.”
Fwap!
Kang Hyeon flicked his wrist lightly.
Whirrrl!
The two arrows that left his hand curved this way and that through the air, and then.
Thk, thk-thk!
The arrowheads buried themselves in the backs of the two men, precisely at the Gate of Life point at the center of the spine.
A wondrous stroke that sealed the point itself with a thrown weapon!
It was a technique belonging to the Yellow Springs Poison Hand alone, one that even the most renowned shadow-devils of Murim would have been unable to stop themselves calling impossible.
Thump.
Park Dong-cheol and the foreigner dropped to their knees.
Both wore astonished expressions, and when Kang Hyeon approached they cried out in terror.
Their bodies could not move, but they could still speak.
“Wh-What are you!”
“I told you a moment ago. Yoon Hyeon-jong's professor.”
“......Impossible. How. William is an S-rank Hunter?”
The blond archer, William, was struggling desperately to haul up his strength somehow.
Tok.
A light flick of a finger sealed the Gate of Silence point as well.
Now he would be unable to move, and unable to speak.
Then Kang Hyeon spoke to Yoon Tae-jeong, who had come up behind.
“I'll have to take this foreigner alive. The Bureau requested he be captured.”
Yoon Tae-jeong swallowed dryly.
Subduing an S-rank Hunter's very breath with a single flick of a finger?
There was a great deal he wanted to ask — what the man's identity was, how he possessed such impossible strength — but first he put his thanks into words.
“Truly, sincerely, thank you. I will repay this debt without fail.”
“One set of the Four Friends of the Study won't cover it this time, you know?”
“Naturally not. On top of my son, you have saved my own life. Whatever you want, I will give you more than that.”
At that, Park Dong-cheol begged Kang Hyeon.
“Spare me!”
- I'll have to take this foreigner alive.
He had felt the killing intent in that one remark Kang Hyeon had tossed out a moment ago.
The foreigner would be taken alive.
Which was to say: he himself would be killed.
“T-Tae-jeong! I must have been out of my mind! Please, save me! My shares! I'll give you all my shares!”
“You did the killing of others easily enough, and now it seems you want to live?”
At Kang Hyeon's chilly words, Park Dong-cheol's mouth stopped.
“In your next life, if you must be greedy, be greedy in proportion to your vessel, and honestly. If you try to take what is another's while getting blood on your hands, in the end your own blood is spilled. That is the way of the world.”
“Eek!”
Park Dong-cheol's face went white.
He knew instinctively that this man was genuinely going to kill him.
“Wh-What are you! By what right do you mean to judge me! Call the police! Call the Bureau! I'll confess everything, I'll pay for my crimes, just don't kill me!”
“As a rule I don't leave alive a man who uses poison or a man who uses an assassin. And you used both, didn't you?”
“Th-That's.”
Kang Hyeon shot a lance of energy into the heart of the man as he tried to make excuses.
“Kuheok!”
Loosing a single cry, he clutched his chest and toppled to the ground.
Instant death.
Yoon Tae-jeong looked in silence upon the futile death of the man who had been his friend.
It was not excessive in the slightest.
‘Killing others easily, and then reaching for the protection of the law the moment his own life is on the line?’
Even if it had come to that, he would have dealt with the man himself.
Because he was a fiend who had tried to destroy his family.
“The tragedy that took place here will be processed as the work of that William fellow.”
Which meant that in the course of it, Park Dong-cheol too would be recast as a victim.
“......I thank you once again for your kindness.”
Yoon Tae-jeong bowed his head repeatedly toward Kang Hyeon, who was promising even a flawless cleanup.
Kang Hyeon took out his phone and pressed a speed dial.
- Yes, Professor! Did you find a lead?
Lee Se-a's voice came through.
“Caught him.”
- Sorry?
“The one who entered illegally. I said I caught him.”
- I-In a single day?
“Shall I pin the location and send it?”
- Yes, yes, yes! Please send it! I'll deploy right away!
Having done this much, the Bureau would handle the cleanup cleanly.
***
Kang Hyeon and Yoon Tae-jeong rode a Bureau agent's car back to Taejeong Trading headquarters.
“Is there anything in particular you want from me? You have saved my life, so I would not begrudge you my entire fortune.”
“That won't be necessary.”
“Then how about this? That Park Dong-cheol wanted half my shares. I will give you half of Taejeong Trading.”
“Sorry? Isn't that going rather too far?”
“Too far, hardly. Without you, Professor, it is a company that would have been taken from me entirely.”
“Hoh.”
Honestly, it was surprising.
Were men with a merchant's gift all this large-handed by nature?
Taejeong Trading was substantial in scale but an unlisted company centered on the owning family.
Handing over half the shares amounted to saying he would offer up the company whole.
“I'm grateful, certainly, but.”
Come to think of it, wasn't this originally Hyeon-jong's?
It felt a little unpleasant, like taking something from a boy he was teaching.
“I know what you're worried about. But I too am a merchant. I know how to distinguish gratitude from profit and loss.”
“Meaning?”
“I have become convinced that handing you half the company is, for me and for Taejeong Trading, actually to our advantage.”
Kang Hyeon's eyebrows rose.
It was a fairly frank thing to say.
Taejeong Trading had technical strength and yet could not climb.
Why?
Because it had no power.
Behind most large corporations stood an S-rank Hunter, or a major outfit like one of the three great guilds.
When they moved, information gathered, capital attached itself, and risk vanished.
Conversely, a company without that power had a ceiling in the end, however good its technology.
“What has kept Taejeong Trading standing until now was purely ability and luck. But today's events have made one thing certain to me. That without power, one cannot even protect what one has.”
Yoon Tae-jeong quietly steadied his breath, then continued carefully.
“And...... as I feel it, Professor, you stand far above those S-rank Hunters.”
In truth, only a fool would fail to see it.
He had watched a man subdue an S-rank Hunter with a single gesture before his eyes.
The answer was plain enough just from how that rigidly upright Bureau treated Kang Hyeon.
“So you mean to bind a man like me with shares?”
Kang Hyeon said it with a short laugh, as a joke.
“Hoho, binding you with shares alone would have been discourteous, but did I not hand over the company itself?”
Yoon Tae-jeong did not bother to deny it and laughed back.
Kang Hyeon liked a man who spoke like that better than one who hid what he was thinking.
Join hands with a man like this and at least there would be no knife in the back.
The way Park Dong-cheol had done it.
“Please accept. The one thing I can do for my benefactor...... is to grow this company into the finest in the country, and perhaps the finest in the world.”
There was no reason for Kang Hyeon to refuse.
He had needed a source of funds, as it happened, and if a company with a capable chief executive came rolling in on its own two feet, he was grateful for it.
“Very well, I'll accept the offer.”
Yoon Tae-jeong had just made the finest choice of his life.
Because if Kang Hyeon released even a fraction of the information he held, the secret-manual market would be all but monopolized.
Had the man approached him knowing that, he would not have accepted.
But because he had approached in sincerity, he accepted readily.
‘There's nothing free in this world.’
Yet giving a fitting reward to a man who offered up everything he had and knew how to be grateful, using calculation as his pretext — that was Kang Hyeon's way.
“Then I'll be in your care, Chief Executive Yoon.”
Rising from his seat, Kang Hyeon put out his hand first.
Yoon Tae-jeong gripped it firmly.
As though he would never let a chance that had rolled his way slip.
“Hoho, now that you hold half the shares, I shall have to address you as our major shareholder.”
“Never mind that. Just go on calling me professor. I prefer it.”
Once Kang Hyeon had gone, Yoon Tae-jeong's expression hardened.
His own work was not yet finished.
He intended to convene an emergency board meeting first and cut out Park Dong-cheol's line entirely.
The secretariat would have to be torn up as well.
There would be no mercy in the process.
Because he had no intention of repeating the mistake of the past, when he had tried to carry a man along out of a clumsy sentiment.