Chapter 52 Good and Evil (3)
“Everyone get out, out!”
Did she think that she’d already been found out? Suddenly, Elle began to kick out all the challengers inside the currency exchange store.
“No, it’s already my turn…!”
“Forget it. Our operating hours have ended. Get out!”
“You have operating hours? I mean, if there’s such a thing, You should have put up a notice beforehand…!”
Disgruntled complaints were heard from challengers who queued before Yoon-seok, but Elle ignored them like a tyrant.
“Uh, do I have to go out, too? Ah, no…I’ll leave. ”
Fahur, who accompanied him, murmured blankly and soon left after reading the room.
Click.
Elle kicked out all the challengers and locked the door, leaving Yoon-seok and her as the only ones inside. She stood in front of Yoon-seok. Then she spoke like the final boss in a game.
“I’ve been waiting for you!”
“You’ve been waiting…?”
“Yes, I knew you’d come if I stayed in the plaza.”
Had she been waiting? As the atmosphere grew increasingly tense, he became nervous since he couldn’t figure out why. On the other hand, this raised another question for Yoon-seok. If Elle had been expecting him, she shouldn’t look surprised and ask what he was doing here, which was very unlike her.
He was about to find out.
“Well, don’t get me wrong? If it weren’t for Yoon-seok, I would never have applied for such a trivial job.”
‘…So it was because she’s embarrassed.’
His questions were resolved, but Yoon-seok didn’t show that he’d noticed it out of consideration for Elle. However, he was a little curious about how she would overcome difficulties in the future.
“I see. May I know why you’ve been waiting for me? I don’t think it’s common to volunteer for this kind of work…”
“…”
He tried to ask, but was it because she’d never thought about it before? Contrary to his expectation, Elle became mute. After a few moments, Yoon-seok decided to pull Elle out of the hole she was stuck in.
“Are you here for {Bloodseeker’s Ultimatum}?”
“Yes, you’ve already experienced it, so you know the side effects, right?”
Elle was more thick-skinned than he thought. She said so naturally; never in her dreams would she have known that Yoon-seok knew that she was lying. He was glad that he was wearing a mask. If not, he wouldn’t have been able to hide his smiling face.
Now that he’d mentioned it, Yoon-seok decided to ask Elle about what he wanted to know about {Bloodseeker’s Ultimatum}.
“Have you always known about the side effects?”
“…No, I didn’t.”
“Then it means you’ve found a future solution. So I’m asking, is it possible to solve the side effects with ‘Heart of Liberty’?
“I don’t know for sure, but I think it’ll work.”
“I see. I’ve been anxious about this, but I can’t believe you’ve come all the way here to let me know…I’m relieved to hear that.”
“…It’s not a big deal at all. You are my only contractor.”
Yoon-seok predicted that Elle’s face, which was covered by a hood, might be growing warm. No, he hoped so. If she was a person who lied without batting an eye, he didn’t think he could continue to trust her in the future.
“Is it possible to buy powers here?”
“No, WP can only be used within the administrator’s area.”
That referred to the cozy cabin. In other words, it meant that he could only purchase Heart of Liberty after ascending to the tenth floor. Silence followed as the conversation was cut off. Yoon-seok hesitated and eventually brought up the sensitive topic.
“Do you know what happened in the plaza on the sixth floor?”
“Yes, because I’m always watching. I’m sorry, I could’ve said something before, but I didn’t know it had changed that much.”
Elle apologized for failing to warn him about the situation in the sixth-floor plaza. But Yoon-seok felt that it wasn’t her place to apologize. Suppose he’d known that in the first place, he might have still gone there. However, this was what he wanted to ask.
“Did I do the right thing?”
Of course, the members of the sixth-floor plaza deserved to die. But, after coming to the seventh-floor plaza, he realized that the judgment mark might be indefinite. Perhaps the side effects of Bloodseeker’s Energy had served to make him more narrow-minded. That was why he wanted to hear Elle’s opinion.
Elle, after a long pause, spoke calmly.
“At least for me…yes, you’re not wrong.”
Maybe good and evil were subjective, or maybe it was justifiable to kill hundreds of evil men to save dozens. Elle didn’t try to reason every single word. She just told him so. But somehow, it was very comforting.
“As I’ve said before, I want you to live without any obligations and enjoy your rights. So…”
Elle continued firmly.
“Go the way you want to go, no matter where it takes you. It’s only my desire that you’re not bound anywhere. If necessary, I’ll bear the remnants of the trail.”
The previously naive Elle was gone. Only the reliable woman, when she said no one could hurt Yoon-seok here during their first encounter, remained. But Yoon-seok decided not to rely on her.
“You don’t have to do that.”
There was just a bit of confusion, but he’d never thought of running away.
“If I had to face the consequences someday, I won’t blame it on anyone else.”
Despite Yoon-seok’s firm tone, Elle wasn’t offended at all. On the contrary, she smiled quietly as if she knew this would happen.
“If that’s what you want, okay. Go ahead.”
Thus, the issue was roughly tied up. Now that he thought about it, this may have been a strange topic for them. There was a moment of awkward silence. Then, Yoon-seok bowed to Elle.
“Thank you.”
He meant it. For saving him from Heavenly Warrior and even taking up an unpleasant job to support him without complaint. Not only that, Elle’s power was of tremendous help. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been able to do anything when he’d encountered evil on the sixth floor.
“I’m really glad that I signed with you.”
There was no need for rhetoric. If he was more eloquent, he could’ve relayed all his sincerity in a softer expression, but Elle was more than satisfied. It was crude and clumsy, but that’s why it hit home even more.
“I’m glad that I signed with Yoon-seok too. I mean it.”
One wearing a mask, and one wearing a hood, smiled without looking at each other. After a few more words with Elle, they separated ways. When he headed outside the currency exchange store, he noticed Fahur was waiting.
“What happened? Do you know the staff?”
“Do I know her? She’s the admin who signed with me.”
“Huh! The rumor must be true!”
The admins he saw at the Wish Auction all seemed prominent. Was that why? Fahur looked incredulous at the fact that she was doing this for the comfort of her challenger.
“By the way, is the currency exchange going to stay closed?”
“It’ll re-open soon.”
“Then we’ll have to wait a little longer.”
“No, let’s go. She gave me plenty so that I don’t have to use AP.”
“Well, it’s like getting allowance from your wife…I mean, I’m jealous! If you don’t mind, could you buy me ice cream?”
“…”
Yoon-seok headed to the ice cream parlor with Fahur. The rather gentle-looking male staff operated enthusiastically while courting the challengers.
‘I’m sure he’s also an admin like Elle.’
It felt strange to think that the man, who was working as if it was his calling, was a challenger who reached the final floor of the Tower. Yoon-seok and Fahur took one ice cream each and sat at the fountain by the plaza.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to hear more about what happened on Earth.”
“Of course! Shouldn’t I pay for the ice cream?”
Perhaps because he ate something sweet, Fahur recalled his experiences in chronological order with more detail and kindness than before.
“When you first go to another dimension, the place of arrival is random. In my case, I landed on a mountain in Seoul. Oh, Seoul is a city in Korea.”
“…I know where Seoul is.”
He did suspect when he made that ‘Latte’ ad-lib, but he was connected to Korea. Thanks to this, it felt like he could collect information about Korea without revealing that he was Korean.
Yoon-seok asked for information about Korea without being too obvious. And the more he knew about the situation in Korea, the more he couldn’t help but form a bitter smile on his face. When he asked about South Korea’s challenger group, Fahur spoke bluntly.
“It’s crazy there.”
“Crazy? Can you elaborate?”
“Unlike other countries that treat challengers with the utmost care, they only think of challengers as good tools.”
Their behavior was extremely outrageous. An unknown challenger appeared in Korea? The Korean Challenger Group found them and forcibly pushed them into a military agency. In the process, kidnapping was commonplace, and they didn’t hesitate to hold families hostage. In the name of government authority, they ignored both law and morality. And the fact that they were gathered together…
They didn’t gain powers and skills to fight in the trial or against other challengers, but they were taking advantage of them so they could use them on Earth.
“What they wanted is a healing skill. It’s probably to target rich people who have diseases that modern medicine can’t cure.”
Fahur continued with a fed-up expression.
“It’s a good thing that nothing can be taken from the Tower. Otherwise, they’d buy healing potions and put knives to their families’ throats.”
Korea earned astronomical profits by exploiting challengers, but the cost was minimal.
“That’s why I immigrated to America.”
Slowly adapting to human society, Fahur was scouted by an American organization, and when he heard the conditions, he went there. After spending many fulfilling days there, he didn’t have enough AP, so he returned to receive the trials.
“I was anxious since I lost three times in a row, but I think I’ll be able to relax for a while, thanks to you.”
Fahur mentioned his plans to return to Earth by investing about 1/10 of the rewarded APs in tickets and told stories about the planet after. They chatted about other small things here and there, but Yoon-seok didn’t miss any and listened to it all. Until…
“By the way, talking about Korea reminded me of this. Not long ago, traces of an unregistered challenger was discovered in Korea. Well, it’s pretty common, but apparently, a second-generation chaebol was involved? It was an unusual case.”
Second generation chaebol? Yoon-seok felt a strange sense of anxiety as the word appeared out of the blue.
“Can you explain more?”
“Even so, it’s just a story I happened to hear, so I don’t know. Moreover, I don’t even know what happened because I ran out of tickets at that time.”
“Even pieces and bits are fine, and being wrong is fine. Just tell me what you remember.”
Whether it was information that he had heard as he passed by, Fahur recollected his memory.
“Well…I originally tracked the traces of an unregistered challenger found at an abandoned site, but somehow I found out that there were two, not one. But after digging into the other person’s whereabouts, it seems that they had a bad relationship with a Korean chaebol.”
Why did his bad feeling always fit so well? Now, Yoon-seok couldn’t deny it. That was his own story.
“Did you find out about me when you were chasing Lee Chang-hoon? How the hell?’
He had no idea how they traced him. But only one thing mattered.
“Anyways, I felt sorry for the challenger if the Korean government caught him…”
“…What do you mean?”
“I didn’t tell you earlier. They’re crazy people. Perhaps they’d succeeded in kidnapping the challenger by now, or they probably have his family waiting for him to return to Earth.”
No matter here or there, the truth was there was too much trash around.
“I see.”
Yoon-seok smiled ever so coldly. Now, he had a reason to go back as soon as possible.
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