GDDHM 12

12
Crash!
With a deafening roar that shook the earth itself, the ceiling of the abandoned factory came crashing down.
The tremors reached deep into the basement below.
“Huff, huff…!”
A man, covered in dust, was squeezing his body into an emergency passage along the wall.
He was Jin Dong-seop, the manager in charge of the 4th District Factory.
His expensive suit hung in tatters, and his hair, carefully combed back with pomade, was matted with sweat and dust, completely disheveled.
‘This is insane… absolutely insane!’
Jin Dong-seop bit his lip, trembling with fear.
When the alarm first sounded, he’d thought it was just some fearless rat slipping in.
Breaking into Hwanggeum-ryun territory, no less a drug manufacturing plant, alone.
There were only a handful of members stationed here.
He’d assumed the fool wanted to die and decided to grant him a merciful end.
But what appeared on the CCTV footage was no human.
It emerged from the darkness like a phantom, pulverizing his men.
The spells he’d unleashed upon that creature’s head were blocked by some incomprehensible force, rendered utterly useless.
‘A monster!’
The word had escaped unbidden.
When the monster reached the underground factory, Jin Dong-seop knew with sudden clarity.
‘It’s over.’
He abandoned his subordinates and fled first down the secret passage.
This tunnel was his final lifeline—known only to him, hidden even from young master Jang Ki-han.
Boom!
Another explosion roared behind him.
The heat surged into the passage.
Jin Dong-seop screamed, crawling desperately along the floor.
“Damn it all! How much was all that worth?”
The Blue Dust stockpiled in the underground warehouse was worth hundreds of billions of won.
All of it was turning to ash in a single moment.
The instant young master Jang Ki-han learned of this, Jin Dong-seop would be flayed alive.
‘No, it’s fine. I can survive this.’
Jin Dong-seop tried desperately to console himself.
He had ample funds in his slush accounts. Once he slipped through this passage, he’d head straight to the airport, then disappear to the Philippines or Vietnam.
Warm beaches in a southern land. He’d spend his remaining years there, nursing cocktails.
“Yes… I’ll run. Somewhere no one can find me.”
Hope kindled, and strength returned to his legs.
He crawled through the narrow, stuffy passage like a serpent.
After crawling for what felt like an eternity, at last he saw it—the tunnel’s end, the iron door leading to the surface.
“I’m alive!”
Jin Dong-seop seized the handle with a voice trembling with joy.
The rusted handle, unused for so long, was stiff, but he twisted it with all the force born of desperation to survive.
Creak—creak—clang!
The door swung open, and cool night air poured in.
The reek of gunpowder mixed in, acrid in his throat, but he didn’t care.
This was the scent of freedom.
Jin Dong-seop clutched his heaving chest and pulled himself out of the passage.
“Breathe… breathe. It’s finally over.”
He moved to shut the iron door quickly.
In case any pursuers followed.
He was just about to lock the door when—
“Brings back old memories.”
An unfamiliar voice spoke from behind him, abruptly.
“…?!”
Jin Dong-seop’s heart dropped into his stomach.
A voice far too cheerful, utterly mismatched to the situation.
“My grandfather once made me crawl through a fifty-meter-long narrow pipe as a courage test. That’s exactly how I felt back then.”
Creak.
Jin Dong-seop turned his head with rigid, jerky movements.
There, silhouetted against the moonlight, stood an enormous shadow.
A boy whose clothes had been reduced to rags by the flames, his lean, muscular frame laid bare in the dim light.
He was looking down at Jin Dong-seop.
“Ah…”
Jin Dong-seop’s breath caught in his throat.
That face from the CCTV footage—the one that had toppled his men like dominoes.
The source of all this catastrophe.
“How… how did you…”
Jin Dong-seop stumbled backward and fell hard on his rear.
This passage didn’t even exist on the architectural blueprints.
How could he possibly have known to wait here?
Cheon Do-hyeon answered not with words but with a smile so bright it pierced the darkness.
That grin sent a chill down his spine.
“I set the factory ablaze, but not a single rat scurried out. Strange, right? If you’re the one in charge, you should’ve bolted. So I expanded my senses and felt something twitching underground—clearly someone important making a panicked escape. Seemed like I should wait here instead.”
Cheon Do-hyeon approached with measured steps.
“Then I stretched my perception further and picked up that scurrying energy down here. Anyone could tell it was ‘here comes someone important,’ so I decided to welcome you personally.”
“Eee… eeeek!”
Jin Dong-seop shrieked and crawled desperately across the floor.
Cheon Do-hyeon caught him by the scruff of his neck with the casual grace of someone snatching a fleeing rat.
“Don’t disappoint me now. You’ve got to know something valuable, don’t you?”
“Let… let me go! Do you know who I am? If Jang Ki-han finds out you touched me, you’re really, truly dead!”
Lim Sang-chul made a last desperate gambit, drawing Mana to the surface.
Though he was Non-Combat Personnel, he was still a 2-Circle mage.
If he could detonate a spell at close range, he might create an opening.
‘Die! Wind Blast!’
Just as a Magic Circle of whirlwind began forming in his palm—
Whoooosh!
“Wha—?”
The Magic Circle shattered.
No—the Mana composing it had simply evaporated.
A black suction force erupting from Cheon Do-hyeon’s grip was drawing the Mana from Lim Sang-chul’s channels like liquid through a straw.
The Xingxing Dafa.
“Things won’t go your way.”
Cheon Do-hyeon spoke without inflection.
Jin Dong-seop didn’t trust what he’d heard.
He tried again. This time, a fireball.
The result was identical.
The flames never even kindled before all their fuel was sucked away.
Sluuuurp—
“Nghhh… my… my Mana…”
A paralyzing weakness, as if blood were draining from his veins.
The world spun, and his legs gave out beneath him.
That was when Jin Dong-seop understood: the boy before him was a devourer of Mana itself—the natural predator of all mages.
“Just come along quietly.”
Cheon Do-hyeon hoisted the limp Jin Dong-seop like a bundle of laundry and made for a desolate clearing.
In the distance, the burning factory cast their shadows long across the ground.
—
In the middle of the clearing.
Jin Dong-seop lay sprawled on the ground like a criminal crucified on stone.
Cheon Do-hyeon withdrew a small notebook and pen from his pocket.
“Now then, shall we have a conversation?”
“We’re Hwanggeum-ryun! You think you can touch us and walk away?”
Jin Dong-seop snarled, his bravado a thin mask for his terror.
Cheon Do-hyeon shook his head slowly.
“How trite.”
He flipped through the notebook, muttering to himself.
“Let’s see… Grandfather once told me the human body is constructed from two hundred and six bones. I think I’ll start with your fingers.”
“Wh… what…”
“I’ve done plenty of theory work, but practice subjects have been hard to come by.”
Pure physics rendered through Cheon Do-hyeon’s variant of the Joint Dislocation Technique.
Cheon Do-hyeon grasped Jin Dong-seop’s right index finger and snapped it without hesitation.
Crack!
A perfectly calibrated blow—hard enough to break, yet held back just short of shattering.
“Aaaahhhhh!”
But the pain the victim felt was a different matter entirely. A death cry pierced the empty lot.
Yet this was only the beginning.
Cheon Do-hyeon manipulated Jin Dong-seop’s joints with the precision of someone disassembling and reassembling the gears of a delicate clock.
“Here’s the radius, and here’s the ulna. Ah, these ligaments are tougher than I expected.”
“Please… please let me live! Kgh-hgh!”
Jin Dong-seop sobbed and pleaded, tears and snot streaming down his face.
He wanted to beg for death instead.
The boy before him wasn’t savoring the torture. He was simply executing “the process of extracting information” with mechanical dispassion.
That very fact drove him to madness. It happened around the time his fourth finger bent at a grotesque angle.
Jin Dong-seop saw it then—the pitch-black eyes of Cheon Do-hyeon, fathomless as an abyss.
In that gaze, devoid of even a flicker of emotion, Jin Dong-seop’s last psychological barrier crumbled.
“I’ll talk! I’ll talk! Kgh-hgh…!”
The terror of knowing the torture wouldn’t stop until he’d given up everything engulfed him.
“Where is the money going?”
“Club… Club Babylon! It’s Club Babylon!”
Cheon Do-hyeon’s hand went still.
“Club Babylon?”
“It’s a money laundering center… all the Hwanggeum-ryun funds flow there! Hundreds of billions in cash! I’m telling the truth!”
“You should have said so sooner. It’d have hurt less.”
Only then did Cheon Do-hyeon release his grip on Jin Dong-seop’s hand.
The man’s body collapsed limply.
He pressed his forehead to the ground, gasping and sobbing like a wounded animal.
“Huh-uhhh…”
Cheon Do-hyeon jotted “[Club Babylon]” in his notebook and smiled.
“Thank you for your cooperation, sir.”
Cheon Do-hyeon deployed the Celestial Demon Shadow Technique and melted into the darkness, vanishing.
—
At that same moment, in the VIP Lounge.
Jang Ki-han stared out the window, not bothering to clean up the shattered glass.
The report his secretary had just delivered was shocking.
“The 4th District Factory has been completely destroyed. There are few casualties, but Division Chief Jin Dong-seop is missing.”
……
“And… we’ve detected signs that he kidnapped Jin Dong-seop and interrogated him. Next target will likely be…”
“Club Babylon.”
Jang Ki-han cut in coldly.
His hands, which had been trembling with rage, steadied.
A strange calm descended instead.
The boy had torched his business, kidnapped his subordinate, and tortured him for information.
This was no mere schoolboy prank as he’d imagined.
“Ha… haha…”
A twisted laugh escaped Jang Ki-han’s lips.
Every time he tried to crush this opponent, they struck back harder than anticipated. He’d taken them for an insect. But when he came to his senses, the blade was already at his throat. It was eerie—and yet exhilarating. How long had it been since he’d felt real danger?
Jang Ki-han stroked his chin, seriously reconsidering the fate of Hwanggeum-ryun.
Hwanggeum-ryun was an organization he’d founded before becoming head of his household—a side venture to earn money and build power.
In other words, it was a tail he could sever whenever he wished.
But fleeing with his tail caught was not “the way of the Iron-Blooded Jang.”
“My secretary.”
“Yes, Young Master.”
“Leave Club Babylon’s doors open. Let him find his way without wandering.”
“What? But he’s targeting it. It’s dangerous.”
Jang Ki-han’s eyes flashed.
“A bait. Very large and appetizing bait.”
He opened his desk drawer and drew out a crimson card.
A card bearing a skull emblem. In the underworld, only certain people knew of it—a summons card for the highest-tier contract killers.
“And prepare to receive a guest. Call in some very special ‘cleaners.’”
Jang Ki-han threw the card onto the desk.
“We’ll make that place his tomb.”
The moment Cheon Do-hyeon’s foot crossed the threshold of Club Babylon, the air would reek not of music and dancing, but of blood. A sinister gleam kindled in Jang Ki-han’s eyes.