# Chapter 114
“……”
“……”
A suffocating silence flowed between them. Frozen in the position of having just taken a step, as if someone had called out “freeze” in a game of Red Light, Green Light, Iyeon didn’t even blink. Yu Jeongheon was similarly unnaturally quiet. As the silence grew increasingly heavy, his confused brain belatedly started working. Wait, why is Yu Jeongheon here…?
An enemy?
His movement was quick. In an instant, a large cage appeared and imprisoned Jeongheon.
“Are you working with Young-ssi?”
Despite the sharp questioning, Jeongheon went off on a tangent.
“I saw it.”
“Aren’t you with <Oreun>? Why are you involved in something like this?”
“You definitely used your power without drawing, didn’t you?”
“Kidnapping people in broad daylight, don’t you feel ashamed?”
“Isn’t there punishment for cheating on tier evaluations?”
“That’s only when a lower tier pretends to be a higher tier.”
“Ah, so you’re fine because you’re the opposite case?”
“……”
Damn it, I should have just kept ignoring him… Iyeon frowned, having reflexively answered.
“I’m going to file a complaint with Oreun.”
Finally, as if Iyeon’s sincerity had been conveyed, Jeongheon raised both hands in surrender.
“Ah, wait. I’m not involved with this place either.”
“How can I believe that?”
“If I were with these people, would I have been secretly watching from behind? I would have been openly sitting in a chair enjoying the sight of you tied up.”
“Why didn’t you come out when I asked for help?”
“I was about to leave, but I stayed put because I was curious what you were doing.”
The answer seemed plausible but was strangely annoying.
“…Where is this place?”
Iyeon decided to trust him for now, even if it meant being fooled. Jeongheon shrugged and explained.
“I don’t know exactly either, but my guess is it’s an illegal factory.”
“Factory? What are they making?”
Up until that point, Iyeon hadn’t thought much about it. Since Dr. Kim was someone who had experimented on mutants, he assumed something similar was happening here.
However, he couldn’t help but be surprised by what followed.
“Superpower users.”
“…What, really?”
People, not mutants? Despite the question clearly showing disbelief, Jeongheon nodded. His face showed conviction.
He had only recently discovered this factory.
Jeongheon’s company, <Oreun>, wasn’t large in scale but was a solid business. Normally, they wouldn’t handle D-grade missions like capturing low-level mutants, but due to an internal system mix-up, they had to take one. Since it wasn’t a difficult mission, Jeongheon, the company’s only lower-tier hunter, volunteered to do it alone.
That’s when he saw Young at the mission location.
“That woman has quite distinctive features, right? So I recognized her immediately.”
Long hair tied up high with a wooden stick. As soon as he saw her, Jeongheon remembered she was the superpower user he had met at the Superpower Office not long ago.
Young was dealing with the mutant Jeongheon was supposed to capture. However, after observing the battle briefly, Jeongheon realized something was off.
“She was too strong for a tier 2.”
“…For a tier 2?”
Young is a Mugunghwa tier 1. Since she said she hadn’t taken the promotion evaluation, she should still be tier 1. Moreover, when she coordinated with Iyeon at the Superpower Office, her power level was exactly what you’d expect from a Mugunghwa tier 1…
Anyway, she swung her stick a few times and effortlessly eliminated the mutant. Before the fallen mutant could completely turn to dust and scatter, Young left the scene. Having had his target snatched before his eyes, Jeongheon stood there for a long time, laughing emptily.
After discussing with other tier 2 hunters, he found that stories of a ponytailed woman randomly capturing low-level mutants were more famous than expected. On the surface, it seemed good that someone else was doing their job for them, but the problem was that Young always killed the mutants.
D-grade missions usually require capturing mutants alive. Since she was killing all of them one step ahead, it naturally created difficulties for hunters who had received those missions.
While listening to the hunters’ complaints, Jeongheon inadvertently revealed that he had seen her once at the Superpower Office, and was pushed to talk to her. How could he talk to someone whose name he didn’t even know… It was ridiculous, but there was no resisting their insistence. In the end, he decided to do the proper thing by requesting a couple of D-grade missions from his company.
And fortunately, not long after, he was able to meet Young again as she was eliminating a low-level mutant.
At first, Jeongheon tried to speak with Young. To tell her to stop interfering with others’ work like a thug and focus on her own missions. From his perspective, with that level of superpower, it shouldn’t be too difficult for her.
However, before that, he happened to notice what was below Young’s wrist, hidden by her sleeve.
“Do you know what was there?”
“What was it?”
“Black spots.”
“…What?”
Young’s arm had black spots spreading across it.
Because they looked exactly like bruises, Jeongheon thought Young might be a victim of violence. If so, it was possible that eliminating these mutants wasn’t her own will. Talking to her directly might be meaningless.
So Jeongheon followed Young.
“Surprisingly… righteous of you?”
“That’s harsh.”
If she was in a dangerous situation, he intended to help her. And where she headed was this place.
The warehouse complex where Iyeon and Jeongheon were now.
“She frequented this place. It seemed like she almost lived here.”
A massive warehouse complex in a remote location. And a superpower user who comes and goes frequently. The situation was too suspicious. Jeongheon carefully explored this place on his days off.
The place that looked like an ordinary logistics warehouse had several more superpower users like Young. They seemed to come here regularly to receive some kind of examination and also did superpower training.
And occasionally, it seemed they underwent surgery.
“Surgery?”
“Yeah. I saw them disposing of bloodied gauze and such.”
“Do you know what kind of surgery?”
“Well, I’m not certain, but I have a guess. I’ve heard suspicious rumors circulating among tier 1 users.”
Jeongheon’s voice lowered.
“Have you heard of superpower enhancement experiments?”
No way… Iyeon’s expression hardened.
“The ones supposedly offered secretly only to tier 1 users with good performance at the Superpower Office?”
“Oh, you know about it?”
“A tier 1 I know told me.”
Jeongheon nodded, saying that it seemed related to this place. The most convincing evidence was that Young’s superpower had become much stronger than the standard.
“Why didn’t you report it to your company?”
This was clearly an issue Jeongheon couldn’t handle alone. But Oreun had decent hunter forces, and if they discovered and cleared this place, it would be a significant achievement for the company. In response to Iyeon’s question, Jeongheon, who had been smiling calmly the whole time, frowned slightly.
“I was going to. I was going to, but…”
Most of the superpower users coming here were tier 1. Anyone could understand why they would want to enhance their superpowers.
“It didn’t seem like anyone was getting hurt except themselves, and if they were just strengthening their own abilities, I wondered if it was really necessary to report and shut it down…”
Having more strong superpower users wasn’t a bad thing. It wasn’t bad for people who wanted power to gain it. Even if it was an illegal experiment, as long as no one was harmed.
Yes, as long as no one was harmed.
“Ah… really. Yu Jeongheon-ssi, aren’t you surprisingly too kind?”
Iyeon rubbed the back of his head vigorously. Jeongheon’s face quickly turned sulky.
“Why does that sound like an insult?”
“If it were such a hopeful experiment, they would have gone to a national research institute long ago. Why would they be doing this in such a shabby place?”
The Superpower Management Office, which is more serious than anyone about nurturing superpower users, wouldn’t just sit by and watch. It was reasonable to assume there was something fishy about why the owner of this warehouse hadn’t approached the Superpower Management Office. Jeongheon objected to that statement.
“Do you think national research institutes are that easy? It would probably take a long time before it could actually be used.”
“Still, being legal is better than being illegal.”
“You’re being too idealistic.”
“That’s right. That’s too idealistic.”
A familiar voice. The mouths of Iyeon and Jeongheon, who had been bickering, snapped shut. As if by agreement, they turned their heads simultaneously, and a woman with long tied-up hair came into their view.
“…Young-ssi.”
Iyeon’s expression hardened. A moment later, he noticed a small-framed girl quietly standing behind Young. The girl, looking at the two with detached eyes, was like a doll.
No emotion could be felt from Young’s face as she looked at Iyeon and Jeongheon. He hadn’t noticed earlier, but as Jeongheon had said, black spots were faintly visible on the inside of Young’s wrist between her long sleeves.
“What happened to your arm?”
At Iyeon’s words, Young glanced down at her arm without interest.
“A minor side effect.”
She had always been calm by nature, but something about her atmosphere was strangely different. She seemed like a different person from when they had met at the Superpower Office.
