Chapter 105
Screeech!
The intruder’s sliding toes came to rest at the boundary between the sidewalk and the road.
As I lit a cigarette, I mulled over the sensation I’d felt at my fingertips.
‘Lighter than I expected.’
I didn’t know who he was, but he didn’t look like someone who’d come with good intentions. Having met all sorts of people while running a matchmaking agency, I knew that every person had an atmosphere suited to them.
I hadn’t realized he was strange because of physiognomy or some pseudo-religious nonsense.
When someone enters a cathedral with his presence suppressed as much as possible and without making a sound, isn’t it only rational to be suspicious of him first?
“Hoo.”
After exhaling a long plume of smoke, the man slowly straightened and asked me:
“0111001010?”
“Ah, damn. How much of your body have you replaced with prosthetics?”
I’d seen someone like this before—someone who had replaced so much of his body with machinery that his language system had become bizarrely altered.
People whose bodies now contained more prosthetics and machinery than their original skin.
You might ask, How can they live like that?
But apparently, once you get used to it, nothing could be more convenient.
For example, downloading a textbook took only one minute.
Since they turned information into data and stored it in a separate internal cloud, they could never forget anything, either.
“They ought to make it so bastards like that can’t ride elevators.”
“10111001.”
“We can’t even communicate.”
Most of his body was prosthetic.
And yet he was light.
“Hey, why’d you come?”
“110101011.”
I’d heard that neural acceleration and assassination went well together in Cyber City, so quite a few people took their tech in that direction.
“You can download Korean, can’t you?”
“110 01011.”
Or perhaps he had a stealth build.
Optical, thermal, recognition interference, and more.
There were all sorts of stealth functions.
“Hoo.”
With the cigarette in my mouth, I pulled out my phone. The intruder immediately kicked off the ground from a sprinter’s stance and lunged forward.
Normally, the more impatient side was at a disadvantage in a fight.
He must have been annoyed that I was making a call and decided to get rid of the phone first.
I swung forward, passing the arm reaching to snatch my phone.
Crunch!
The phone slammed into his face. Kim Yang used to curse me for looking like an old man whenever I put on a hard case, but—.
This was why I used a hard case.
“……!?”
“Why? Weren’t you about to make a call?”
I stamped out the cigarette butt I’d thrown onto the ground.
When I slipped the phone back into my pocket, the man’s body began to fade away.
He really was a stealth type.
“Hey! Where are you going!”
I immediately blocked the cathedral entrance.
The most important thing was the children’s safety.
I thought blocking the entrance would be enough, but what I’d overlooked was Cyber City’s level of technology.
A chill ran down my spine at the sound of a foot pushing off from the wall.
‘No way. Is he climbing the wall?’
His head had already become so mechanical that his language had turned into binary, while his body was as light as a sheet of paper.
It wasn’t difficult to imagine him climbing the wall with lightweight prosthetics.
“That’s cheating, you son of a—!”
Just as I hurriedly shouted toward the wall—
I urgently twisted my body at the sensation of someone behind me.
An awl stabbed into my shoulder.
A sharp pain shot through me, and blood began soaking my clothes.
The man who appeared right behind me shook the blood from the awl in his hand, then vanished into stealth once more.
“What a sneaky bastard……”
He’d pretended to climb the wall using stealth, but had actually stabbed me in the back.
If my reaction had been even a little slower, he’d have stabbed me in the neck.
At least one thing was fortunate: he had no intention of letting me go.
‘Why? If he came for the kids, he could just pass by.’
Was it because of his pride?
Was he ashamed that an amateur like me had gotten one over on him?
No. Judging from his prosthetics, he was a professional in this field.
Professionals didn’t get dragged around by things like that.
‘It’s not as if anyone’s watching—.’
Watching?
For a moment, the view in front of me rippled, and I heard the sound of wind.
“……!”
I hurriedly dodged to the side, and the cathedral’s glass door shattered, scattering fragments across the floor.
This time, I hadn’t even felt his presence.
‘His arm got longer. I reacted when he approached earlier.’
What a gadget-like bastard.
His determination not to approach me at all was clear.
‘Should I use the Law?’
Optical stealth created a ripple in space whenever he moved.
If I accelerated with the Law at that moment and chased the ripple, I could find him.
His body looked light, too, so I could subdue him quickly.
‘But.’
I felt strangely uneasy.
Since last time, an unease had been creeping up on me: What if the Seventh Floor really didn’t know anything about me?
[Taeguk does not mean that yin and yang come together.]
[What we need to know is not power, but boundaries.]
“Hoo.”
I should’ve stopped smoking.
I was regretting showing off by trying to use martial arts when all I could produce was breath that smelled of cigarettes.
Even as I said that, seeing myself put another cigarette in my mouth made me realize I really needed to quit.
Sizzle!
After lighting the cigarette again, I looked straight ahead.
I didn’t know much about stances.
But it wasn’t as if taking a proper stance would make him visible.
As darkness fell, silence descended like a curtain.
Cars stopped at the red light, students watched after the sound of the shattered glass door while waiting to cross the street, and sirens rang out in the distance.
Vroom—!
The smoke rising from my cigarette wavered.
I saw him.
I immediately ducked, and a cold awl grazed over my head.
I leaped forward.
What did “boundary” mean in the Taeguk Yin-Yang Fist?
The line separating yin and yang.
This very place where we were standing.
My vision opened wide, and I realized that this place where we stood was not merely a sidewalk, but the boundary between heaven and earth.
I felt like I understood why Baek Yeonhwa had said my insight (悟性) was exceptional.
I laughed as I reached enlightenment precisely because I couldn’t see him.
Perhaps he’d decided there was no point in hiding, because he revealed himself.
Then his body blurred—and this time, it split into two!
Was this some kind of optical effect or whatever?
“101011.”
After answering something, the man split to either side and headed toward the cathedral.
Apparently, he’d decided that fighting me was wasting too much time and was now giving up and trying to pass by.
‘The one on the left is the real one.’
In the end, he was an existence standing on the boundary. I had my answer as to whether he was an illusion or not, but just in case—
“Ptooey!”
I spit the cigarette from my mouth at the man on the left, and it bounced off his head.
“Got it.”
With the children’s lives at stake, I used the cigarette for one last confirmation, just in case.
I kicked the man trying to pass by me straight to the side.
“Force projection!”
If you kick with your foot, it’s force projection.
I kicked him with 0% inner power and 100% strength. As light as before, the man flew awkwardly through the air and rolled across the ground, then—
He slammed into the nearby road.
“Uh, wait—”
Crash!
He was immediately hit by an oncoming dump truck and sent flying again.
* * *
Crash!
The screen cut out as he was hit by the dump truck.
The pouring rain cooled Vichakos’s head, which had been burning hot.
Thank goodness.
Only one word came to mind.
Although she’d unexpectedly received help from Kim Juseon, if the children were safe, she could bow her head to him any number of times.
“……”
But Vichakos couldn’t simply rejoice.
The screen lit up again, and a green display appeared.
She was worried about what kind of reaction he would show, but—
- Villangsi: This is fun.
- Villangsi: Fortune is on your side, Vichakos.
Villangsi was more composed in the chat than she’d expected.
“Are you going to send someone again?”
- Villangsi: That would be tacky.
- Villangsi: If you failed, you have to admit it.
A brief moment of relief.
But Villangsi continued with another demand.
- Villangsi: That doesn’t mean your work is done.
- Villangsi: The failed mission.
- Villangsi: Assassinate mayoral candidate Elik Dwalbe.
- Villangsi: If you pull this off, I’ll really let you go.
- Villangsi: What do you say?
“……”
Let me go.
Would that mean anything?
- Villangsi: You need to go to the Third Floor and spend the rest of your life in comfort, don’t you?
Spend the rest of her life in comfort?
Realizing that Villangsi didn’t understand her at all, Vichakos sighed.
“Fine. Got it.”
Only then did Vichakos realize.
There probably was no future in which she descended to the Third Floor.
If so.
Even if she was a failure, as a mother, she had a duty to see things through to the end.
* * *
The skyscrapers of Cyber City soared high into the sky.
One of them was home to the master of the film industry, Director Zeke Pulan.
A lavish home and expensive, high-end furniture.
A bar and private cinema inside the house, among other things.
He was living a life no one could envy.
But now he paced anxiously in front of the entrance, waiting for the guest who would arrive soon.
Ding-dong—!
The doorbell rang out at length.
When he hurriedly opened the door, a young blond man was smiling at him.
His name was Villangsi.
The founder of Gold Bar, Cyber City’s gathering of wealthy elites on the Sixth Floor, and an unknown tycoon.
No one knew where his money came from.
That was why he had no enemies, and that was why no one touched him.
A ghost in the literal sense.
A rich man who seemed to have suddenly dropped from the sky.
He had a few visible prosthetics on his body, and his face had the distinctive look of plastic surgery.
Because of that, some people speculated that he was one of the deceased chairmen of a conglomerate who had laundered his identity to live a new life.
“Director Zeke Pulan. This is our first time meeting face-to-face like this.”
“It’s an honor to have you visit my humble home.”
“Heh, yes.”
Villangsi boldly patted him on the shoulder as he walked inside.
Though it was his first visit, he opened a bottle of champagne without hesitation and drank it as if he were in his own home.
“Railmagnon, thirty years old. Not bad.”
Though it was the most expensive champagne Zeke Pulan owned, Villangsi seemed completely unfazed.
Rather, every one of his high-handed actions only made Zeke Pulan more tense.
He felt like a being of an entirely different caliber.
“Phew, Director. What did you think of the videos I sent? I released them specially for our members.”
At Villangsi’s question, Zeke Pulan answered as though he’d been waiting for it.
“They were shocking. Enough to make my past claims of extreme realism feel laughable. Especially Vichakos’s conflict and the action during the cash-in-transit vehicle hijacking—those were things no film could dare replicate.”
Creating art.
In a way, Zeke Pulan could be so favorable because he was already completely captivated by the artist named Villangsi.
The stories he was showing through Mosco Vichakos were clearly breathing new vitality into the boring daily lives of the wealthy members.
Pleased with Zeke’s answer, Villangsi approached with a smile.
“Then, Director Zeke, what do you think about the assassination of the mayoral candidate you’ll be carrying out again this time?”
“……To be honest, I found it a little cliché.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s merely repeating a mission that already failed once.”
Cyber City’s leading mayoral candidate, Elik Dwalbe.
After nearly being assassinated, he was using the incident as a powerful tool in his election campaign.
His victory was practically assured.
But that wasn’t what mattered to them.
“That’s right. So I have a proposal.”
“A proposal……?”
“S.E.L. (Sensory Experience Link).”
The tool that had played the greatest role in making Zeke Pulan a master.
It allowed people to experience another person’s emotions in real time and feel as though they had become that person.
“It’s a boring life. But you don’t want to take on the danger, either.”
“……”
“Humans are truly greedy, aren’t they? Especially in their endless pursuit of stimulation.”
Villangsi patted Zeke’s shoulder and whispered softly.
“Shouldn’t we experience it, too? The feeling of piercing the brow of the man who will become this city’s ruler.”
“……!”
Unable to keep up with the conversation, Zeke Pulan felt as though a fuse had blown in his head.
“Connect the S.E.L. to Vichakos and indirectly experience assassinating a political figure—!”
Zeke Pulan’s heart pounded violently, as though he’d been injected with something.
Elik Dwalbe, who would become the city’s administrative head after Axis.
To experience assassinating such a man through S.E.L.?
In real time, at that?
This man was insane.
And a genius.
“It would be possible, right?”
Villangsi’s voice now sounded like a revelation to Zeke.
This man couldn’t be confined within the human mold.
He casually voiced demonic ideas and then carried them out with ease.
Only one word came to Zeke’s mind to describe him.
‘This man is a god.’
The story continues off the page
Floaties for Everyone
Swim lesson at the water park, and she's demonstrating on you