After capturing the mage, Minjun began his interrogation in the Empty Hospital Room. He had originally planned to read Choi Seona's mind first, but the order of things had changed. Poisoned by magical substances, she remained unconscious. Waiting for Yuntus to recover his strength or for her to wake up naturally would take about the same amount of time.
“Kill... me.”
The mage rasped. The poison in his mouth had already been removed. He glared with the fierce, empty eyes of a man who had given up on everything.
As expected, the Happy Bug didn't work. He had done something to his own brain.
Minjun asked.
“What are you? Who sent you?”
“....”
“Why target Choi Seona?”
“....”
He knew it instinctively. Minjun was a man unafraid to get his hands dirty—a hardened operative who could probably fall asleep to the screams of a torture chamber like a lullaby.
And yet, he was conducting this interrogation far too peacefully. In his shoes, the mage would have started by chopping off a few fingers or pulling out a few teeth just to assert dominance.
But Minjun just stood there silently, showing no intention of making a move.
Furthermore.
‘Why the hell is he holding that Frying Pan?’
As he pondered this, Minjun continued to throw questions at him.
Listening to him, the mage...
‘...!’
...soon struck upon a possibility.
‘Don't tell me!’
The moment the realization hit, he flooded his mind with all sorts of useless thoughts. It was a jumble of contextless garbage, a torrential pour of illogical, disjointed delusions. Through this, the mage shoved all crucial information far beneath his surface consciousness.
Minjun clicked his tongue.
“You're a quick-witted bastard, I'll give you that.”
Whoever trained the mage had been aware of rare and threatening Supernatural Abilities like mind reading. Minjun realized he had been careless. If he had at least pretended to torture the man, he might not have caught on.
The agent asked the Frying Pan.
‘How is it? Is it impossible like this?’
=Mmm... I'm sorry, Agent. This is like looking for a grain of sand in muddy water.=
“Yeah?”
=There is too much clutter to sift through and fish out the specific information you want.=
‘Then what should we do?’
=To increase our chances of success even slightly, it would be best to make physical contact with him.=
‘Should I tie you to his hand?’
=If possible, please press me as close to his brain as you can. And... the resistance and barriers protecting his mind are thick right now. It would be great if you could break those down.=
A psychological barrier, huh.
Minjun toyed with the Dagger and spoke.
‘Would torture help?’
=It would certainly be better to do both.=
Minjun approached, holding the Frying Pan. The mage squeezed his eyes shut, desperately burying himself in random thoughts.
Swoosh!
A shadow flared out and coiled around the man's neck.
“Keugh!”
The black waves seized his hair and yanked his head back. From his seated position, he was forced to stare straight up at the ceiling.
Rumble!
The shadow forced its way between his lips.
“Mmph! Mmmph!”
The mage resisted, but he couldn't overcome its strength. The surging shadow forcefully pried his mouth open. Crack! His jawbone popped.
Despair filled the man's eyes. Someone trying to extract information wouldn't dislocate their target's jaw or cut out their tongue. That would naturally only make confessing harder.
Therefore, it was obvious his captor possessed the ability to read minds.
Just as he was desperately scrambling his thoughts to keep his inner mind from being read, Minjun raised the Frying Pan. He held it by the metal rim instead of the handle.
And the mage witnessed an unbelievable sight.
Shove!
“Ghk!”
Minjun flipped the single-handled Frying Pan around and jammed its long handle straight into the mage's mouth.
“Keup! Ugh!”
The mage thrashed around, his eyes filled with shock and disbelief. But the Frying Pan stayed wedged in his mouth, pressing down on his vocal cords. The Magic Tool marveled.
=Oho! That's quite a bold pl...=
Minjun replied without batting an eye.
“Shut up.”
It killed two birds with one stone: it brought the Frying Pan close to the mage's brain while simultaneously muffling the screams that would inevitably erupt during torture. As an added bonus, it kept the bastard from biting off his own tongue in agony.
Having gagged his informant with the Frying Pan's handle, the dark mage drew his Dagger.
“Let's begin, then.”
And without hesitation, he plunged the Sword in. Pierced through the thigh, the mage let out a beast-like scream. The noise was stifled by the handle, unable to properly escape.
The tedious work began.
*
Vrrrm! Vrrrrrm!
Several tens of minutes later, the Frying Pan vibrated.
Minjun yanked the Magic Tool out of the man's mouth. The mage was half out of his mind.
“Ugh... Uuuugh...!”
Fwoosh!
Minjun burned off all the blood on his hands while simultaneously sterilizing the handle. He thoroughly purged it of the broken teeth, bits of gum, blood, and saliva stuck to it. Only then did he grab that section and speak.
“Did you dig up everything?”
=I don't think there's anything left to find.=
The moment he received confirmation, he knocked the mage out.
“Who is this bastard?”
=First of all, his affiliation...=
Minjun heard the answer he had been expecting.
“Abrams Helper Service?”
The hitman agency that was currently throwing its weight around.
Still, given that Minjun had never even heard of them, they couldn't be all that impressive.
“Why are they trying to kidnap an assemblyman's daughter? And not even assassinate her, at that.”
=Ah... apparently, they're famous for providing excellent service in both assassinations and kidnappings. But for this specific case, they weren't acting on someone's request.=
“If it wasn't an external request, was there an internal directive?”
=Yes, they had a motive.=
The Frying Pan explained, its tone still as cheerful as ever.
=There's another service this company touts besides assassination and kidnapping. When a seemingly insignificant client requests the death or abduction of a high-status target, the firm turns around and presents a counter-offer to the target instead.=
They ask, ‘We've received a hit on you. What would you like to do about it?’
The goal was to negotiate with the target and extort a sum larger than whatever the original client could scrape together.
Minjun scoffed.
“How utterly predictable.”
=This was one of those cases. It all started when Kwak Do-chul put in a request. He asked them to kill his wife.=
“No, wait a minute. Didn't things get mixed up?”
In the end, the person who died was Kwak Do-chul, but he wasn't killed by an assassin—he died by his wife's hands.
There was another thing he couldn't understand...
“Wasn't that bastard the one having an affair?”
According to Jeongpal's explanation, the husband was the one who caused their marriage's downfall.
It would have made sense if the wife had put out a hit first, but why the husband?
=He guesses it was an asset issue.=
“....”
Only then did Minjun understand.
Choi Seona's father was a four-term assemblyman and a renowned millionaire. As the party at fault, Kwak Do-chul would have been left completely destitute if they had simply divorced.
But what if his wife passed away before the divorce?
“He really was less than human.”
=So the firm sent a counter-offer to Assemblyman Choi Panseok. They told him they'd received a contract to assassinate one of his family members. If he paid up, they offered to kill the client instead. No matter how they crunched the numbers, the assemblyman looked like a much better payday than Kwak Do-chul.=
However, they completely refused to reveal who had put out the hit or who the specific target was.
“If they'd told him everything, Choi Panseok wouldn't have paid them for the counter-job. He would have just handled it himself. They saw that coming and kept their mouths shut?”
=Exactly. With Choi Panseok's power, burying a guy like Kwak Do-chul would be child's play. And... he apparently never even imagined that his own son-in-law had ordered the hit on his daughter. Since he already received so many death threats, he just assumed it was one of his usual enemies.=
After agonizing over it, Choi Panseok paid the exorbitant fee and accepted the Helper Service's offer.
The assemblyman had already verified their reputation through his own intelligence network.
=He probably decided it wasn't a scam.=
In these cases, the firm promised to reveal everything—including the original client's identity—once the job was done, so he chose to trust them.
After he wired the money, the Helper Service headquarters prepared to dispatch an appropriate killer. Kwak Do-chul wasn't even a Supernatural Ability User; he was an easy target.
But this was where a variable arose.
=The killers employed there are divided into various ranks based on skill and performance, and apparently, a partner-tier killer showed interest in this mission.=
But that killer was peculiar in many ways.
=Apparently, he's somewhat of a legendary assassin in the underworld.=
Minjun scoffed once again. From his perspective, it was a hilariously pitiful description.
=He worked alone for a long time before recently joining the firm. His true identity isn't even known among his fellow killers, and more importantly, he's never failed. They say he's an assassin of a thousand faces, highly skilled in disguise and never leaving a single trace behind. Even Interpol isn't sure if he actually exists, which is why they haven't put out a warrant for him. The only thing known about him is that he mainly uses a Sword...=
At that, Minjun's eyes widened.
“A Sword?”
=Yes. That's why he's known as Blade in the underworld. It's a bit childish, honestly.=
“Keep talking.”
=It seems HQ can't really control the guy either. Since they had another assignment waiting in Korea anyway, they just sent him over and told him to handle both. But suddenly, the guy started going rogue.=
“What do you mean?”
The killer, famous for doing whatever he wanted but never compromising a job, had caused a massive disaster.
Two of them, in fact.
The first was...
=Apparently, Choi Seona was never supposed to be found at the crime scene like that.=
Even though there had to be far better ways to kill Kwak Do-chul, the killer manipulated Choi Seona into blowing his head off. The daughter of the counter-offer client and the target of the original request.
It was an impossibly foolish choice. He could have just picked any random orc wandering nearby.
His even more fatal mistake was leaving evidence at the scene.
=Originally, the killer's specialty was making all evidence, including the murder weapon, vanish perfectly from the scene... but he failed this time.=
Hearing this much, Minjun could slowly start to piece together the true identity of this legendary killer.
And the reason Interpol had never been able to arrest him.
“What's the second disaster?”
=You know that original mission HQ wanted to give him? It was to eliminate a Korean assemblyman.=
Minjun's eyes narrowed.
“Don't tell me...”
=Yes, it was the assemblyman found dead today.=
The assemblyman murdered by an unregistered Weapon Master.
He had been a target of the Helper Service as well.
“Then from their perspective, the hit was a success, right? He's dead. How is that a disaster?”
=Once again, the method of execution was the issue. Honestly, it was a highly difficult mission. Whatever the assemblyman was so worried about, he had hired several Supernatural Ability Users to maintain twenty-four-hour security.=
Because of this, it wasn't easy even for an assassin to slip in quietly and finish the job.
=But... that guy Blade ended up controlling a killer from the Korean branch, someone who absolutely wasn't supposed to be exposed. The very person who acted as the liaison between him and HQ. He ultimately killed the target, but the Korean branch killer died as well.=
The Frying Pan showed Minjun the person the mage had pictured in his mind, and Minjun recognized a familiar troll's face within the telepathic wave.
It was the unregistered Weapon Master who ran the smoke shop.
‘That troll was the contract firm's local contact in Korea?’
Minjun recalled the dead man's memories. The two of them exchanging cash and cigarettes.
‘It's safe to assume Choi Seona was already being controlled when she made contact with that man. She must have sought the troll out to communicate with HQ.’
Minjun felt he understood why Blade had used Choi Seona as a front instead of moving personally.
‘The only remaining question is this: why suddenly commit a string of bizarre acts? Exposing the Sword to the police, using the client's daughter as a tool, mind-controlling an associate to death... that borders on madness.’
It was enough to make him wonder if the killer had just lost his mind.
=So HQ, completely in the dark, is currently tracking Blade. Since they suddenly suffered a friendly-fire incident. And the reason they tried to kidnap Choi Seona was the timing. He showed interest in this mission right before he started acting weird, didn't he?=
They had determined it wasn't a coincidence, and much like Minjun, they intended to dig up even the smallest clue from her.
But because she was hovering between life and death, they had waited without making a move. They had even delayed reporting the results to their counter-offer client, Assemblyman Choi Panseok.
Then, when she miraculously recovered today, they immediately attempted to abduct her.
After a brief moment of thought, Minjun made his decision.
“I'm going to have to shake down those contractor bastards.”
But there was something he needed to do first.
“After I read Choi Seona's mind. I need to see if she was really just controlled for no reason... or if there's something more hidden inside.”
Of course, he couldn't very well jam a Frying Pan handle into the daughter's mouth right in front of the assemblyman, so he planned to extract the information as secretly as possible.
However, upon returning to her hospital room, Minjun had no choice but to change his plans.
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