After learning the truth about the hidden side of the world and his father's death, Il-gyu did not hesitate for a second.
He moved at once.
The first thing he did, as expected, was revenge.
But in truth, there was nothing especially grand or secretive behind his father's death.
After all, no matter how capable he had been, he was still an ordinary man living in the light.
As had already been explained, he had strayed too close to the world of the supernatural.
And the people who killed him had not done it out of any personal grudge against Il-gyu's father.
They had simply eliminated him quickly because they feared the National Intelligence Service would move once his existence came to light.
The attempt on Il-gyu himself had been part of the same operation.
It was a cruel story, but also one that was far too common.
At least Dohyeok, who had handled the job, remembered Il-gyu's father and Il-gyu himself.
Chances were the others had not even remembered either of them.
That was why Il-gyu said, "I won't let emotion get into my revenge either."
Thud!Crack!
Il-gyu advanced, mercilessly smashing apart the men blocking his path.
Behind him, crushed corpses had already painted a long trail of blood.
Even so, many still stood in his way.
But the ones trying to stop him had long since lost the will to fight, crushed beneath a gap in power so vast it was overwhelming.
"W-Who the hell are you?! Who are you to suddenly pull something like this...!"
"Do you even know where you are?!"
"Even if this is a dispute between mages, you've crossed the line. The National Intelligence Service will move!"
It was little more than the yelping of dogs facing a tiger.
They knew it too.
If a few words like that were enough to make Il-gyu back down, he would never have come here in the first place.
Still, there was one thing Il-gyu could agree with.
For something so trivial, the target of his revenge was indeed a pretty major figure.
"I do find this somewhat regrettable as well. To think the search would lead us to one of the giants of our nation's business world. I intended to settle this cleanly, but it's become rather noisy."
The mastermind behind his father's death was a man named Jang Seong-woo.
He was the vice chairman of Jindo Group, ranked fourth among South Korea's conglomerates.
He was called vice chairman, but in truth he handled the entire group's major affairs in place of the chairman, who was bedridden.
He was already the most likely successor to become the next chairman.
"Publicly, he was known for making plenty of donations and charity work... but behind the scenes, he was filthier than I could have imagined."
He was a rare natural-born mage.
In the supernatural world, he was better known as a psychic than a mage.
He awakened his abilities somewhat late, learned of the supernatural world, built up influence in the underworld using his wealth from the light, and rose to his current position by becoming a power broker within the company.
"By his own logic, he was some kind of ambitious bastard who ran wild in both the light and the dark, wasn't he?"
He was already on the National Intelligence Service's blacklist.
If not for his social standing in the light, he would have been eliminated long ago.
Of course, after learning how terrifying the National Intelligence Service was, he had kept a lower profile lately.
But with the birth of a king in Japan, that restraint had come undone.
"Jindo Group was active in business in Japan too."
He had already established connections with one of Japan's four great families.
And then, as the saying goes, old habits die hard.
He started stirring up trouble here and there again.
Unluckily for him, the family of one of his clients was caught in the mess and killed.
And then Il-gyu's father, who had been investigating the case, was killed as well.
"I know. Killing him will cause a huge ripple."
Of course, if Jang Seong-woo were killed, the impact would be enormous in both the dark and the light.
The National Intelligence Service had not refrained from killing him for no reason.
But...
"So what?"
What was he supposed to do about that?
The law does not distinguish between high and low.
He had to pay for his father's death.
For the friend who had sacrificed himself trying to reveal the truth in order to save him.
He had to bear the karmic weight of every sin he had committed until now.
If society suffered because of it, then that was the price society itself had to pay for failing to clear out trash like him sooner.
"I'll say this in advance: it would be better if you stepped aside now. I said I wouldn't let emotion get involved, but I'm still human. I may be brutal with my hands."
He had already killed plenty.
Even so, Il-gyu gave the mages of Jindo Group one last chance.
And yet no one moved aside.
They all knew exactly what price they would pay later if they stepped back here.
Then, right on cue, someone appeared.
"Which bastard dares to come here and make a scene?"
A man with power clearly on a different level from everyone Il-gyu had faced so far pushed through the Jindo mages and emerged.
At a glance, he looked like the leader of the group.
He frowned deeply at his subordinates, then turned his gaze toward Il-gyu.
After that, he curled one corner of his mouth as if amused and spoke.
"Looks like you learned some half-baked way to handle power and came all the way here—"
But then...
Thud!
"Shut up. I'm not interested in trash like you."
Before he could finish speaking, his head flew off.
It was the result of the judicial baton Il-gyu had thrown, unwilling to waste any more time.
"Huh?"
"T-Team Leader?"
"Fuck..."
The mages who had briefly brightened at his appearance stared at the headless corpse and finally realized how serious the situation was.
Forget compensation or whatever else.
They might really all die here today.
But as always, by the time they understood that, it was already too late.
"I commend your touching loyalty. Since none of you seem inclined to move..."
The judicial baton changed shape.
The handle grew longer and thicker.
The head of the baton expanded, becoming larger and heavier.
The overall impression became that of a war hammer.
Then Il-gyu began compressing a massive amount of power into it.
It was proof that his control over power was already moving beyond the human range.
And with that compressed power...
"Then die."
KWA-AAANG!!
The moment he slammed the baton into the ground, the compressed power exploded all at once.
Just one hammer strike.
And yet that single blow caused part of the mountain hiding Jindo Group's base to cave in.
It was force enough to shake the very earth.
Perhaps at that moment, they realized Il-gyu was not merely a mage, but a fragment of a king.
Only a king could casually perform such divine might.
But by then, there was no one left there who could raise a voice and beg for mercy.
"I said I wouldn't mix in emotion, but I guess I put a little too much force into that."
Well, it didn't matter.
Il-gyu spread his power across the ruined area.
As expected, Jang Seong-woo was still here.
He was not the sort of man who would flee just because one intruder had broken in.
Still, he seemed to have been rattled by that absurd display of power and was desperately trying to escape.
Il-gyu advanced, grinding everything that blocked him to dust with his hammer strikes, and eventually reached Jang Seong-woo.
"W-Wait, just listen to me for a—"
"I've cooled off a little thanks to your men. Let's finish this quickly."
There were too many other bastards he still needed to beat to death.
Thud!
With a clean full swing, the old bastard's skull was shattered, and Il-gyu's revenge came to an end.
Though by now, revenge was no longer everything.
"Stealing Dohyeok's memory first was useful. The trash's information is spilling out without me having to investigate separately."
After a brief silence, Il-gyu took a cigarette from his pocket, lit it, and flicked the butt onto Jang Seong-woo's corpse before leaving the scene.
"I should eat first, then move on to the next one."
His revenge had ended somewhat anticlimactically, thanks to the overwhelming power he had gained.
But because he had chosen his path, he could not afford to collapse here.
Still...
"I feel like eating bean sprout soup and rice after a long time."
His father had always lived at the courthouse.
Today, for some reason, the soup and rice he had eaten with his father in front of the courthouse felt a little nostalgic.
With Japan's situation already forcing the National Intelligence Service into emergency mode, an even higher-level emergency was suddenly declared.
Under the director's orders, every team leader and above in charge of the supernatural division was summoned at once.
They gathered in the conference room and began discussing the situation with grave expressions.
"As you already know, they're rogue mages."
Rogue mages.
Also called mages who had gone astray, these were people who abused supernatural power for crime.
They did not even bother hiding the fact that they were mages, operating completely outside the normal bounds.
They kidnapped civilians without mercy and used them as sacrifices for spells or rituals.
Or they simply went mad with the pleasure of power and committed slaughter for the sake of it.
Needless to say, for the National Intelligence Service, they were a top-priority elimination target.
"Starting with Jindo Group's vice chairman Jang Seong-woo, then Han Do-yoon, CEO of Taeseong Group, Seo Jin-woo, director of Dong-A Planning, Cha Tae-gyu, chairman of Yuseong Group, and so on. The damage keeps piling up."
The person they called a rogue mage, Il-gyu, had begun eliminating the clients left in Dohyeok's memory one by one.
Fortunately, Jang Seong-woo had been the most recent request, so his residence had been identified and he could be dealt with quickly.
But for the others, it had taken time to locate them, creating a gap.
Even so, once their whereabouts were identified, he moved immediately.
In a little over a month and a half, eleven major figures who moved between the light and the dark like Jang Seong-woo had become corpses with their heads smashed in and crossed over to the underworld.
"So who is the culprit?"
"We found him. No, it would be more accurate to say he was practically telling us himself."
"Telling us? What do you mean?"
"There was always a single cigarette butt left at the scene. DNA analysis identified him immediately."
As the projector advanced to the next slide, a detailed profile of a man appeared.
"Name: Yang Il-gyu. Male. Age 26. He graduated top of his class from Korea University Law School. He also passed the bar exam on his first try, so he is, strictly speaking, a lawyer."
The unusual point was that he had no relatives.
He had a father, but the man died in an accident while Il-gyu was attending law school.
His mother had died much earlier from illness, cancer.
Beyond that, he was believed to have had little contact with other relatives.
But that was not what mattered to them.
A woman with a sharp, irritated face, Hong Yeon-hwa, the team leader of Supernatural Team 5, scratched her head hard and said, "So? He's an ordinary person?"
"That's what the investigation says for now. There's no contact point with our side."
"Do you even hear yourself? Does that sound believable to you?"
"No."
Yes, of course it didn't.
Just from the traces left at the scene, the opponent's skill was anything but ordinary.
Above all, the traces of power that should have been there were astonishingly faint.
So faint that without the National Intelligence Service, they might never have found them.
"He's a master who can perfectly contain his power inside his body. More than that, he's likely someone who can even erase his own presence with power."
"Damn... that's not something just anyone can do."
"Only the Hashshashin in the Middle East or Japanese shinobi can manage that."
Within the National Intelligence Service, only Supernatural Team 4, which handled covert operations, could do something like that.
In any case, it was a technique that required extremely specialized training.
And even training alone took at least three years.
To use it at an actual combat level like this, you'd need at least five years.
And an ordinary person did that?
"Bullshit."
"Looks like his body was taken over by a rogue mage..."
"With no relatives, he'd have been an easy target."
"At that level of skill, he'd be a huge name in America. Did one of those guys have possession abilities?"
"Maybe he was just a good vessel."
It was ironic.
Because Il-gyu was such a genius, no one even considered that he might be the king who had achieved god-slaying.
No matter how you looked at it, this was not the skill of a beginner who had just entered the business.
Rather, Il-gyu was seen as the victim.
There were abilities that could seize another person's body, after all.
So it was a reasonable assumption that Il-gyu was simply an innocent man whose body had been stolen.
Still...
"Even so, there's nothing we can do."
"Right."
"We have to kill him."
They would have liked to save him if they could.
They never wanted innocent victims to appear.
But the problem was that the skill Il-gyu had shown, based on the scene analysis, was beyond imagination.
"At minimum, he's Great Knight, Great Witch class."
"There's a very real chance he's even above that."
"He might be a holder of the divine seal."
"If we handle him carelessly, we'll be the ones who get burned."
He was not a level they could subdue.
Maybe in Europe, the homeland of magic and supernatural power, or in America, where they could buy up talent with money, it would be different.
But Korea did not have a way to suppress a strongman of this level.
More precisely, if they pushed themselves, it might be possible somehow.
But the damage would be impossible to bear.
And with the current state of affairs, that was even more true.
In the end, there was no choice.
He had to be killed.
Even if, in their view, an innocent ordinary man died.
To prevent greater damage, this was the best option.
Still...
"What on earth is his reason for doing this?"
That was the only question they could not answer.
Even if they assumed it was the kind of mage hunt that often happened among rogue mages, the targets he had chosen were not particularly tempting prey.
They were hard to target.
They had plenty of protection around them.
And they were not especially powerful either.
They were simply people with a fair amount of social standing in both the light and the dark.
"At best, the only thing they all had in common was that they were shady bastards..."
"Half the dead were already on our blacklist."
"Honestly, at first I thought some kind of dark hero had shown up."
To be blunt, the men he had killed were indeed the sort who deserved to die.
At the very least, no one here had felt anything but relief when they heard Jang Seong-woo had been killed.
Everyone had cleaned up that man's mess at least once.
Just how many incidents had he caused, running wild under the banner of ambition after entering the supernatural world at a late age?
His position as vice chairman of Jindo Group.
His ties to Japan's four great families.
If not for those, he would have been killed long ago.
But that was one thing, and this was another.
The National Intelligence Service director, Choi Kang-pil, and the other seasoned veterans shook their heads and said, "Don't think about motive right now."
"Right. We can save that for after the case is over, when we can say, 'Ah, so he had a story too.'"
"There was a case like this in America too. A mage who went around killing corrupt politicians, businessmen, and criminals, claiming to be some kind of dark hero."
"That bastard was a rogue mage. A huge one too. Killing trash selectively was just part of a ritual."
The great demon summoned then left a wound in America that has still not healed.
It had been a demon god summoned with full intent, so America's god-slayer, the Champion, had failed to kill it.
With Greenwich's cooperation, it was said to have been sealed in the spirit realm using his Authority.
That incident, more than anything, was what drove America's hatred of rogue mages to the extreme, dark hero or not.
There were so many lunatics in this line of work that, as Kang-pil said, motive was not something to worry about right now.
"Anyway, move immediately. We've already wasted too much time. You know why I summoned everyone here, yes?"
"You want us to throw everything we have at this and resolve it as fast as possible."
"Exactly. No matter how major he is, we can't keep losing time to one rogue mage. Japan is far more urgent."
A king had been born in the neighboring country.
More than that, the forces in Japan were already full of plans to exploit it.
Honestly, what could be more urgent than that?
Unless their own country had produced a king too.
At least, that was what they believed.