"Hello?"
Japan's number-one-ranked Awakener answered the phone.
The caller was one of Imabari's subordinates, who had been sent to investigate in place of the top-ranking Awakeners assigned to guard the event venue. With assistance from the police, Ito's aide had reviewed the footage from the security cameras installed at the scene.
"Oh, the camera footage?"
And from those various recordings, the truth began to emerge.
Along with several new revelations.
"I expected as much, but..."
The subordinate explained that the reason there had been virtually no witnesses to the incident was also thanks to the foreign Hunter named Kim Giryeo.
"It's confirmed."
But Ito merely nodded, as though the conclusion were obvious.
At first, he'd wondered why Kim Giryeo had been at the scene at all. But from the testimonies of the people who had been inside the exhibition hall, he'd already pieced together a rough picture of what had happened.
"I'll need to see it for myself anyway. Record the security footage on your phone and send it to me."
"Yes. Understood."
Still, as expected, seeing reality with your own eyes was very different from merely imagining it.
At last, the surveillance footage from Building A arrived.
It clearly showed the entire chain of events leading up to Kim Giryeo's involvement in the incident.
First, this was what had happened before the footage cut out.
The Korean man in the suit wandered leisurely through the exhibition hall, one hand casually tucked into his pocket.
Every so often, he stopped to examine an artifact on display or study one of the posters hanging around the venue.
If Ito had to describe his overall demeanor, there was only one word for it.
Spectator.
His calm, unhurried manner resembled that of an upper-class patron quietly appreciating works in an art gallery.
"Kim Giryeo really didn't care in the slightest that there were other Rankers in Tokyo, huh."
There were no fewer than three S-rank Hunters in this very city who had once attacked him.
Yet here he was, leisurely wandering around an exhibition as though none of that mattered.
Was that really something a person could do so easily?
Ito continued staring intently at the footage for a while longer.
Thanks to Kim Giryeo's peculiar trait, which completely concealed his mana, the surrounding visitors appeared to remain unaware for quite some time that the blond man was even a Hunter...
"Hmm."
Then the atmosphere changed in an instant.
The blond Korean who had been calmly viewing the exhibition stepped into the hallway—
and suddenly pulled the nearby fire alarm.
"Wait a minute."
Had that alarm not gone off at that exact moment, the visitors in Building A might have been helplessly attacked by the red-eyed guards who came charging across the skybridge.
And yet—
there was something unsettling about the scene.
Something that made it difficult to view the Korean man's actions as nothing more than a simple good deed.
"It really went off immediately?"
According to the timestamps, Kim Giryeo had acted only three seconds after the disturbance began in Building D.
The security personnel had gone berserk under the influence of an artifact.
Then came the commotion as they escaped and tore across the second floor of Building D.
And yet Kim Giryeo, who was in the neighboring building, had suddenly activated the fire alarm in an exhibition hall where, at the time, absolutely nothing appeared to be wrong...
"Was it the sound? Or did he sense the flow of mana leaking from Building D?"
Either possibility was absurd.
"What is this?"
Buildings A and D were connected by a skybridge, but the actual distance between them was more than fifty meters.
"What the hell... How can someone's perception be that sharp...?"
"What's wrong, Ito?"
Before long, the Awakeners gathered on the rooftop were staring at the report in disbelief.
From the Japanese Hunters' perspective, the incident looked like this:
Kim Giryeo had somehow detected a crisis unfolding an incredible distance away.
Then, in less than a minute, he had already begun evacuating civilians.
After all, when the Korean activated the alarm, the surveillance footage showed no trace of an actual fire.
"If there wasn't any fire, and he deliberately went out into the hallway just to press that button, then there's only one explanation!"
In a sense, it was the kind of misunderstanding that could have been cleared up with a single sentence from the person involved.
"So that's why the people evacuating kept asking whether there'd been a fire...?"
But somehow, the situation began drifting in a strange direction.
The truth was that there was one fundamental—and critical—difference between the visitors' perspective and theirs.
"Hey, look at this. One of my subordinates recorded the CCTV footage on their phone and sent it over. What do you think?"
"Hmm."
"No matter how you look at it, doesn't this prove our theory was right?"
"You're right. Even I can see there isn't a single sign of fire anywhere, yet he suddenly activated the alarm."
"As expected... the reason Kim Giryeo set off the fire alarm was..."
"I read online somewhere that Korean Hunters place a lot of emphasis not only on combat training, but also on civilian evacuation procedures. I guess it was true. How could he immediately think of using the fire alarm to evacuate everyone the moment he realized hostile Awakened were approaching?"
Because of the incident in Kagosho, Imabari found it extremely difficult to ask Kim Giryeo for assistance with the investigation.
From their perspective, even thinking about it for a moment made the reason painfully obvious.
"Ugh. As if it wasn't hard enough to even show my face after the dragon raid...!"
Seriously.
How much more troublesome could this situation become?
That blond Awakener had once willingly come to Japan's aid during a national crisis.
And even when Imabari had repaid that kindness with hostility, he had let the matter go without pursuing it any further.
A man of extraordinary generosity.
"I'll overlook it this once. Japan still needs people capable of managing its Gates, after all."
Even the excuse he'd given for his mercy had somehow sounded chillingly dry and emotionless.
Regardless, however one looked at it, Imabari owed that Hunter a tremendous debt.
Even after handing over one hundred billion, the guild still lived with the constant possibility of renewed conflict.
All because of a single issue.
Possession of the [Legendary].
"Ha..."
And now, with all of that history between them, Imabari hadn't even managed to stop its own guards from going berserk.
The venue's security had been exposed as utterly inadequate.
And on top of that, Tokyo's civilians had only been protected because Kim Giryeo happened to be passing through?
"The worst."
How could they possibly ask the Korean S-rank to waste even more of his time on this mess?
For Imabari, forcing Kim Giryeo to remain behind and provide testimony would have been an enormous burden.
So they had deliberately chosen not to request his cooperation.
Instead, they simply encouraged the blond man to enjoy the rest of the event and sent him on his way.
After all, if the culprit was truly at fault, wouldn't the circumstances eventually become clear through the CCTV footage and the criminal investigation?
"Representative Ito. Come to think of it, Iori sent me a couple of messages earlier telling me to 'die.'"
"He's probably blaming me because our response was delayed when that politician held me back. I've spent so long trying to improve my relationship with Iori, and now this might ruin everything."
"I just got another message. This one says 'idiot'..."
Incidentally, the event poster that a certain alien had tried to set on fire had been destroyed when part of Building A collapsed.
Torn apart.
Ripped away.
And to make matters even more convenient, some of the remaining fragments were struck by stray electricity and actually caught fire.
As a result, the evidence disappeared entirely by sheer coincidence.
Naturally, the security cameras had been focused primarily on the exhibition pieces.
The poster itself had been positioned in what was practically a blind spot.
And that small detail soon led Moritake Ito into a profound misunderstanding.
"When the disturbance began in Building D, he noticed them approaching across the skybridge before anyone else—and immediately took action."
Kim Giryeo's abrupt activation of the fire alarm was now being interpreted entirely as an act of careful foresight and goodwill.
"Thanks to that Hunter's quick judgment, all the visitors were protected."
"So how are you planning to cover this up? Have you spoken with the government yet?"
"They'll probably explain it as a malfunction involving an explosive artifact that was being transported..."
Simple negligence.
And Japanese security personnel suddenly going berserk in public.
Those two explanations carried very different implications once released to the public.
Ito, who was responsible for cleaning up the incident after consulting with government officials, thought bitterly to himself.
In the end, they were only able to preserve even a shred of dignity through such trivial distortions because of that Hunter.
"If he hadn't evacuated everyone so quickly, there would've been a huge number of witnesses."
To put it another way, if even a single foreign visitor had been harmed, Japan would have faced international condemnation.
And after that, even lobbying might not have been enough to suppress the fallout.
But as Ito continued thinking, a sudden chill ran down his arm.
"How on earth could someone make that kind of decision in only three seconds?"
Just a few seconds.
Come to think of it, Kim Giryeo's actions during this incident were too strange to explain through speed alone.
"..."
If Ito tried to reconstruct the Korean Hunter's thought process from an ordinary person's perspective, it would go something like this:
Kim Giryeo immediately recognized that something had gone wrong in Building D.
Then, the moment he sensed the approaching mana signatures moving toward Building A, he activated the alarm to evacuate the visitors as quickly as possible.
But there was a problem.
Even if Ito himself had been placed in an identical situation, he wasn't confident that he could have reacted the same way.
"It's enough to make you sigh."
What Kim Giryeo had done was essentially predict everyone's movements in advance.
He had anticipated what would happen next, formed a response in his mind, and acted with absolute confidence in his own judgment and abilities.
It was overwhelming.
There wasn't even the slightest trace of hesitation in his movements on the surveillance footage.
"Honestly, most ordinary civilians hesitate to pull a fire alarm even when there's an actual fire..."
As expected.
The world was unfair.
Moritake Ito had secretly doubted the S-rank Hunter from across the sea many times before.
Whenever he looked at Jung Haseong, he had wondered whether they were really the same kind of human being.
He had questioned how someone could achieve such bizarre feats without relying on some sort of trick.
But today, every one of those doubts melted away like ice beneath the sun.
"I genuinely don't know whether I should laugh or cry."
Even someone as mechanical and efficient as Jung Haseong probably couldn't demonstrate this kind of chilling precision.
"This incident really made me understand that Hunter's capabilities on a completely different level."
At least Korea's first S-rank Hunter shared the same attribute as Ito.
That alone gave him some sense of familiarity.
But now, faced with someone capable of making the optimal decision in an instant...
Ito found himself unable even to form a proper impression.
The blond man radiated an unsettling aura.
And despite his young appearance, there was something strangely inhuman about what seemed to lie beneath the surface.
Like a dark dragon tightly coiled within him.
"When the ceiling collapsed, the security camera was damaged too, so we couldn't see the actual fight... But maybe the unconscious guards were restrained using [Binding], like last time?"
He really was frightening.
For reasons like these, Moritake couldn't bring himself to approach the Korean guest directly.
Instead, he could only continue reconstructing the man's actions on his own.
"Hmm..."
Of course, the truth behind the incident was somewhat different from what he imagined.
"Ha... Anyway."
Even a great mage couldn't notice trouble occurring in another building if he hadn't been paying attention to it.
But the Japanese Hunters, completely unaware of that fact, simply moved on to another subject.
"Looks like we owe Ranker Kim Giryeo another debt."
Moritake Ito grabbed his black hair so tightly that he nearly ruined it.
The entire sequence of events had subjected him to an unbearable amount of stress.
At times like this, he even wished he could travel back in time just to punch his past self in the face.
Seriously.
Dungeons already existed in this world.
So why the hell was there still no time machine?
"Damn it! If my past self hadn't pulled all that insane nonsense, my relationship with that Hunter would be so much better right now...!"
"Exactly. It's not like we could even use the thing ourselves, so what were we being so greedy for?"
It was right around the time the two of them were sighing and muttering bitterly to themselves that the Guild Master of Imabari received yet another phone call.
"Hm?"
The moment Moritake checked the screen, he abruptly announced that he needed to head inside.
"What is it? Is the call that important?"
He explained that it would be difficult to speak properly in the middle of such a noisy construction site.
When his colleague looked at him questioningly, Moritake didn't answer.
He simply held up his phone screen in silence.
[Magic Power Technology Bureau ♂]
Several minutes later, on the rooftop of Building A, where Awakened construction workers were still gathered to carry out repairs, Moritake Ito finally returned.
And this time, the expression on his face was noticeably brighter.
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