Around then.
“Like I thought…… my eye for recognizing Shin Kang-hoo was never wrong. While everyone else saw him as worthless, I already saw his value long ago.”
Jang Si-hwan muttered with a strange, ecstatic light in his eyes as he looked at Vincent’s corpse photo that Choi Sara had resent.
The look of mourning and regret for the death of Vincent Meyer, a fellow member of Justice, truly lasted only a moment.
More than that.
He was in the middle of praising his own “amazing” judgment for having recognized Kang-hoo’s value early.
A vacancy could be filled—that was all.
There was no human bond between him and Vincent that would make him grieve or feel lingering regret over death.
If anything, Vincent had been a thorn in his side.
Vincent’s reckless behavior, which sometimes made it seem as if he had forgotten who the leader even was, had been nothing short of a runaway train.
Still, an emotional response could weaken Justice’s overall cohesion, so Jang Si-hwan had stayed closer to watching from the sidelines.
This time, it was as if the organization’s constitution had improved on its own.
With Vincent gone, at least within Justice, there was no one else who would act as uncontrollably as he had.
Meaning, he could now calculate his comrades’ actions within a controllable, predictable range.
“Amazing. Truly amazing…….”
Judging from Vincent’s condition.
The wound on his side from Kang-hoo’s attack seemed to have become the most fatal injury that led to death.
He had not seen the situation on site himself, but the picture seemed to form clearly enough.
Even if Vincent had let his guard down, the level gap between him and Kang-hoo had been a full 200.
To overcome that gap and drive him to death, an ambush that shattered common sense had been essential.
“Teleportation. And he even appeared from a position where he could aim precisely at Vincent’s back.”
Jang Si-hwan’s two red-glinting eyes read the situation exactly.
This was not some omniscient vision. It was a conclusion reached through varied experience and open-minded thinking.
From the start, Jang Si-hwan had not assumed that, because Kang-hoo was an assassin, there were abilities he “couldn’t” use.
After all, he himself, as a black mage, had plenty of skills that did not fit him—or felt awkward.
An assassin couldn’t teleport, or a mage couldn’t fight in close quarters.
That sort of thinking was nothing but narrow-minded laziness from people who did not wrestle intensely with every moment.
If you could broaden your thinking, at least you would stop getting blindsided. You might still lose to sheer skill difference—but not to a cheap opening.
“If he burned Vincent’s entire body despite Vincent having a kind of Dark Energy vaporization ability…… then he absolutely has an ability that ignites Dark Energy.”
He reverse-engineered the Dark Energy Ignition ability too.
“And since there are no traces of major recovery, he didn’t even get a chance to use the recovery talisman he had. Which means he died before he could attempt recovery. He has an instant-kill move.”
Jang Si-hwan’s eyes, having inferred even the judgment option, shone colder than ever.
This time, he did not praise himself for analyzing Kang-hoo’s abilities.
Instead, his curiosity and interest in the man called Shin Kang-hoo exploded upward.
His level was lower than Vincent’s, but that was practically his only flaw.
Everything else had plenty to like.
Most people would not bother guarding their rear that carefully, but.
Shin Kang-hoo did not neglect his vigilance against someone who might follow even on the road to Nampo.
Rather, he designed a counter-hunt, and Vincent had been hooked like a fish that bit down on the bait.
“These days, assassins are getting rare, and if it’s Shin Kang-hoo…… he’d be more than suitable as Justice’s new member.”
Jang Si-hwan’s plausible fantasy continued, even though he had never once asked the man’s opinion.
Kang-hoo had rejected his offers several times before, but Jang Si-hwan thought it was only a matter of time.
So far, there had been no hunter who had rejected his offers to the very end.
More precisely, even if there had been…… he had eventually made sure there weren’t. In other words, no one still living counted.
For now, he had been approaching Shin Kang-hoo in a way closer to coaxing and persuasion.
But one day, he would force a choice. If he could not become a comrade, he would only be a potential enemy.
Then.
“As expected. You can tell right away when your best friend dies—is that it?”
Jang Si-hwan smiled oddly as he looked at a call coming in on his smartphone.
The caller was Elizabeth.
About five minutes earlier.
Clink.
Elizabeth, enjoying an afternoon tea no different from any other, flinched and let go of the teacup she had been lifting.
It stopped at a precarious point—if she had raised it a little more, she might have dropped it and shattered it.
Drip, drip, drip.
Tea spilled from the overturned cup, but her attention was elsewhere.
‘The White Flame Ring I linked to Vincent broke.’
The White Flame Ring.
A kind of secret link she could attach without the target ever noticing—one of Elizabeth’s own hidden arts.
She could place White Flame Rings on up to five people, and through them, she could learn two main things.
First, whether they were alive or dead.
Second, their current location.
Simply put, it was like attaching a tracking device and a heartbeat monitor and receiving live data.
But just now, the ring connected to Vincent had been forcibly broken.
There was only one time a White Flame Ring broke: when the linked target died and revival was impossible.
She had known Vincent was going to Korea.
Of course she knew his purpose too. He was going to steal a hidden skill he had had his eye on for a long time.
“Then to Shin Kang-hoo…….”
There was no need to overthink it.
Vincent had died to Shin Kang-hoo.
It felt hard to believe, and it felt hard to believe the balance of power could flip like this, but.
The result in front of her was not a lie. Vincent was no longer a person of this world.
Would Jang Si-hwan not know?
No chance.
Vincent had openly shown greed for hidden skills for a long time. Jang Si-hwan, sharp and sensitive to information, would not miss that.
For now, she called him immediately.
As if he had been waiting, Jang Si-hwan picked up right away.
-El. Just like that, you called immediately.
“Do you know?”
-Yeah, I heard.
The conversation had no subject, but communication was flawless.
Because both of them clearly recognized what they were talking about in this moment.
Over the receiver, Jang Si-hwan’s voice carried a strange kind of excitement rather than grief.
It was too clearly lifted in tone to call it forced.
“We lost a comrade, but your voice doesn’t sound all that sad. Am I imagining it?”
-El, aren’t you the same? If anything, you’re the one who seems even less emotionally shaken.
“……”
It was an answer she could not deny.
She did not respond with a question to herself, but.
Even she had not felt sorrow on learning of Vincent’s death. She had only been surprised.
Feeling as though Jang Si-hwan had read through her, Elizabeth changed the subject.
“That’s because.”
El. Wasn’t it just that Vincent’s connections—and the infrastructure he owned—were valuable, so you stayed close?
Jang Si-hwan continued with words that were hard to answer yet hit dead center. It felt like she had been completely pulled into his pace.
His voice grew even more lively and elastic. It was an unhesitating, confident voice.
That. I’ll splice it onto you so it doesn’t break. So tell me what you really think. Are we supposed to be sad?
Jang Si-hwan asked back.
Elizabeth, hearing that, stayed silent for a long time.
Were their calm conversation, despite losing a comrade, even normal?
But…… it did not feel alien.
Some time later.
Kang-hoo was resting inside K’s villa within Ground Zero.
It was far from “Yuri Land,” where K lived and where the core plants were cultivated.
Even so, this villa, too, was kept spotless—without a speck of dust.
It seemed true that people were sent regularly to maintain it.
Earlier, Kang-hoo had been granted permission to use K’s personal villas anywhere, and had even been given the security codes.
So he entered without issue, washed the fatigue off his body first, and had just come out after changing into fresh clothes.
“No contact in particular.”
By now, Jang Si-hwan should have finished cleaning things up, but no additional message had come to him.
Most likely, he was working his complicated mind hard.
He was probably thinking how to turn this situation to his advantage and “cook” Kang-hoo into compliance.
What Kang-hoo was sure of was this.
Jang Si-hwan was still friendly toward him. He could feel the depth of interest—deeper than what he had shown toward Vincent.
So Kang-hoo was certain he would not give Vincent’s death any meaning.
If he had planned to, he would never have let it come to this in the first place.
The consistent stance Jang Si-hwan had shown so far had been “watching.” Fight, fight, winner’s on our side—like that.
‘I’m becoming the fertilizer that makes the seeds of division sprout. Me.’
Close enough to grab, yet never quite within reach.
Hope torture.
It was the fierce psychological warfare he would have to keep waging against Jang Si-hwan going forward.
The longer it dragged on.
The more the cohesion among The Thirteen Stars would dull and loosen differently from the original story. If it snapped, even better.
With the drizzle outside the window as his backdrop, Kang-hoo finally began the settlement he had been putting off.
The first thing he wanted to examine was the three hidden skills he had taken from Vincent Meyer.
He already knew what traits the skills had, but he did not know the maximum effect at full mastery.
Hidden skills had mastery too, and since the Dimension Plunderer’s privilege applied the same way.
He could not help but see effects far more enhanced than the hidden-skill efficiency Vincent had enjoyed.
【Forced Fusion】
【You can fuse projectile-type magic skills without limit.】
【At maximum mastery, the ‘Cast Deferment’ option is added. You can hold a fused skill in midair in a standby state.
The maximum number of skill spheres you can defer is 3. From the 4th onward, they are forcibly released in order from oldest.】
Cast Deferment—meaning a skill-holding concept—was added to the existing Forced Fusion.
In other words, he could create a fused skill and not fire it immediately, waiting for the right timing.
From the opponent’s perspective, it became extremely hard to predict, since they would not know when the skill would fly.
【A Saint’s Wish】
【On the premise that mana is supplied without interruption, it makes skill firepower and efficiency surpass their limits.】
【At maximum mastery, the ‘Wish’ option is added.
When you use, for the first time, a skill realized through A Saint’s Wish on a target,
only for the first strike, an ‘Absolute Attack’ judgment is applied that completely ignores the target’s Toughness and anti-magic stats.】
Completely ignoring Toughness and anti-magic stats carried enormous implications—even if it was one-time only.
It ignored every factor: level, skill, traits, conditions.
For the very first strike triggered through A Saint’s Wish, the skill’s original firepower applied at 100%.
No matter how huge and sturdy the shield, before an ‘Absolute Attack’ judgment, it could only be a sheet of paper.
In the world of Absolute Attack judgment, it was possible to create a bizarre variable where the beginning became the end.
