Chapter 60 - The Manipulator III

7

As I said earlier, I was neither a detective nor a police investigator. My deductions ranged not only over the past, but over the future as well.

Which meant I could pull off tricks like this.

“Puppeteer is my daughter.”

“Pardon?”

“Puppeteer. Yul. Lee Hayul. She’s my daughter.”

Run nineteen.

I deliberately followed the exact same sequence of events as in the previous run and traveled to Fukuoka on business.

Unless the butterfly effect intervened, the laws of cause and effect were strict. Just as in the previous run, Jeong Sang-guk said, “I’ll get in touch with my daughter, so please wait at your lodgings for a few days.”

The difference in run nineteen was that, instead of eagerly rushing to my lodgings to enjoy the hot springs, I secretly followed him.

A detective who catches a criminal without deducing their past is third-rate. One who uncovers the history that led the criminal astray is merely second-rate.

A truly first-rate detective tracks a crime before it unfolds and witnesses all its causes at the scene, in real time.

What kind of detective is that, you ask? If you’ve got a problem with it, go awaken a regression ability. Of course, the contract comes with a clause requiring you to defeat Tenlegs and assorted other anomalies. Easy, right?

KNOCK KNOCK

As soon as the drinking party ended, Jeong Sang-guk headed to the “Dollhouse.” After he knocked a few times with the door handle, the housekeeper appeared.

So far, an ordinary scene.

Things became extraordinary immediately afterward.

“I’m back.”

Jeong Sang-guk bowed his head.

Not the housekeeper. Jeong Sang-guk himself bent at the waist to bow to her.

I couldn’t suppress my sudden case of eye-widening syndrome. Just as I was about to develop mouth-gaping syndrome as well, the housekeeper spoke.

“Come in.”

“Yes.”

The prime minister of the Second Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea followed the housekeeper inside as though this were perfectly natural.

“...”

What on earth was going on?

Feeling as though I’d been bewitched by a ghost, I crept right up to the Dollhouse.

The wall blocked my view, but my aura-enhanced hearing helped me eavesdrop.

“How was the gathering?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary.”

“What does Undertaker want?”

“He says he wants to take Lady Hayul to the academy.”

Their quiet conversation carried through the wall. Jeong Sang-guk was scrupulously polite, yet there was a trace of fear in him. The housekeeper, by contrast, was as cold as a machine.

“Academy?”

To be precise, even that word sounded sharply segmented: “A/ca/de/my.”

“Yes. He says their aim is to gather and train awakened with outstanding potential, like Lady Hayul.”

“...”

Lady Hayul?

He was using an honorific for his own daughter?

“He also gave me a curriculum. Here. I’ve read it over myself, and it looks quite impressive. The Sword Star is the principal, Undertaker is the vice principal, and Dang Seorin is an honorary professor...”

“And?”

“Pardon?”

“Did you accept?”

“No. No! How could I dare? I couldn’t make that decision on my own, so I’ve just arranged lodgings for him at an inn in town. He should stay put for the next two days or so.”

Silence.

“You went outside halfway through.”

“... Pardon?”

“During the drinking party. You went outside alone with Undertaker. What did you talk about?”

“Ah... We only stepped outside for a quick smoke. We didn’t discuss anything in particular.”

“Liar.”

Goose bumps rose along my back.

‘How does she know that?’

There had definitely been no one around when Jeong Sang-guk and I spoke alone. Had someone from the provisional government who attended the party passed that information to the housekeeper?

Could this seemingly ordinary housekeeper in her forties actually be the mastermind controlling the provisional government from behind the scenes?

My questions didn’t last long. Decisive testimony soon spilled from Jeong Sang-guk’s mouth.

“Come down. Downstairs.”

At the order to come downstairs, Jeong Sang-guk, who had maintained his composure until then, went into a panic.

“I-it’s true! Lady Hayul! Please believe me! Please, I beg you! Anything but the doll room!”

My mouth fell open.

‘Lee Hayul!’

There was no mistaking it. Just now, Jeong Sang-guk had addressed the housekeeper as “Lady Hayul.”

Unless he had dementia and could no longer tell the housekeeper’s face from his daughter’s, that made no sense.

The housekeeper and Lee Hayul couldn’t be the same person, either. The housekeeper was in her forties. The corpse of Lee Hayul I’d seen in the previous run had been in her early twenties at most.

In other words:

‘Lee Hayul was controlling the housekeeper!’

Puppeteer.

Whoever had come up with that alias, it was remarkably accurate. Presumably, Lee Hayul possessed [the ability to control people].

The housekeeper was a marionette. Practically an extension of Lee Hayul herself.

No, not just the housekeeper.

I recalled the “countless requests for handshakes” from provisional-government officials when I arrived in Fukuoka. The ministers of foreign affairs, finance, justice, and the interior. There had been something stiff about their embraces.

‘Are the provisional government’s senior officials marionettes too? All of them? Or only some? If only some, how many?’

Shock swirled through my head at a truth I hadn’t even imagined in run eighteen.

In a sense, Old Man Scho had been right.

“Come down. I’ve told you twice.”

“Please, please...”

No words followed that last “please.”

None could.

Jeong Sang-guk could no longer form words. Only faint, stifled choking noises reached me.

Human ears weren’t that precise. It was difficult to understand everything happening through hearing alone. Still, I could at least guess that something had stopped up Jeong Sang-guk’s mouth.

“Mmph...!”

Jeong Sang-guk struggled.

Given that a grown man was unable to put up much resistance, it was reasonable to assume his body had been restrained by unnatural means.

Spiderwebs.

I remembered the webs tightly binding the corpses of the housekeeper and Jeong Sang-guk. And the webs covering the Dollhouse.

Perhaps those weren’t spiderwebs at all, but “puppet strings”?

“Mmmph...!”

A body slid along the floor, dragged away. The vibrations coming from the ground floor gradually descended lower and lower.

I quickly grasped what was happening. The housekeeper was dragging Jeong Sang-guk into the basement.

I could no longer detect any distinct sounds. The walls were too thick. This was the limit of the aura mastery I’d built up in run eighteen.

The basement. That would be Puppeteer’s true hideout.

Once again, I made my decision quickly.

I decided to break in.

8

Outstanding awakened have extraordinary memories. To survive in a void, you need to be able to memorize all sorts of rules.

Among them is a saying passed around as common knowledge:

-A well-built awakened hideout is comparable to a void.

Personally, I find that a little exaggerated, but I suppose it means you should be that careful.

For example, every train Dang Seorin uses as a base has a powerful security system in place, without exception.

Uninvited guests who enter without obtaining a “train ticket” will discover just how excellent a killing machine a train can be.

The same applied here.

On my final visit in the previous run, the Dollhouse had been nothing more than an empty shell left behind after its owner’s death.

Even on my first visit, Puppeteer had probably disabled the security deliberately. She would have needed to lead me into witnessing the housekeeper’s death and returning to my lodgings.

CLICK. CLICK. CLICK.

In short, this was the first time I’d entered the Dollhouse as a hideout in the truest sense.

The moment I blasted the door away and charged inside, clicking noises rang out from every direction. The dolls were making them.

The entrance. The hallway. The ceiling.

Marionettes hanging from “puppet strings” worked their jaws furiously.

Their joints creaked along with the clacking of their jaws. Blue, black, yellow, and red eyes swiveled.

CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK.

A declaration of territory. A signal announcing an intruder.

And movements intended to eliminate the contaminant according to a preprogrammed process.

Every movement of the marionettes had clearly been calculated with meticulous care.

Their joints creaked like piano keys, setting the strings into motion. A faint golden sharpness suffused those puppet strings.

‘Aura!’

At the time, Old Man Scho and I had a monopoly on the methods of using aura. You could call it Freiheit Academy’s specialty.

Which meant the aura-powered puppet show unfolding before me was entirely self-taught.

‘She can’t just control people—she can channel aura through her puppet strings too!’

I was impressed, but I didn’t hesitate.

Like that famous opening scene in the film <Cube>, semitransparent threads were closing in from every direction. An ordinary person would lose their limbs at the slightest touch.

Fortunately—or unfortunately—my life was far removed from the word “ordinary.”

Instead of using my sword, I charged straight into them with brute force, wrapping my entire body in aura.

SWISH—SNAP! SNAP! SNAP!

The puppet strings rushing toward me with murderous intent snapped the moment they touched my body.

CLICK CLICK CLICK.

The dolls rattled more noisily still. The mass of spiderwebs doubled, quadrupled, then increased eightfold, skyrocketing exponentially.

But it was no use.

In Old Man Scho’s assessment, my “talent for martial arts was fifth-rate, but my talent for aura was beyond first-rate.” I compensated for external technique with internal power.

And I had the [Continue] skill. A skill that carried physical capabilities, such as my muscles, into each subsequent run.

That included the amount of aura I possessed.

In martial-arts fiction terms, my internal energy had already surpassed sixty years’ worth by run nineteen.

CRUNCH!

I reached out and crushed a doll’s head. The dolls moved incessantly up, down, left, and right along their strings, but none could escape my clutches.

However much this world might be a paradise for anomalies driven bug-eyed mad by power inflation, sixty years’ worth of internal energy was originally a level that required a human to devote an entire lifetime to training.

I’d spent that lifetime on battlefields.

It wasn’t a life some awakened ensconced in the relative safety of Fukuoka’s rear lines could stand against.

-...!

I broke through the entrance. The hallway and living room were neutralized in turn. No fewer than three hundred dolls crumbled in my hands.

Soon, the murderous spiderwebs settled down as well. The dolls’ precise arrangement must have formed the core of this hideout’s security system.

A high-level awakened ability. An excellent understanding of her own power. The caution to conceal her true self. Decisive, audacious methods. Self-taught aura control at a young age. Meticulous powers of calculation.

... The test was over. Much as I hated to admit it, Old Man Scho’s intuition had proved right in the end.

An exceptional talent. There was no question that Puppeteer was worth recruiting.

Even the absence of both legs wasn’t a major obstacle. She might not be able to run around a battlefield herself, but she had immense potential as support personnel.

“Lee Hayul. Are you listening?”

Silence.

“I’m Undertaker. A colleague of the Sword Star, and of the Great Witch. I’m sorry for barging in like this. That was my fault.”

Silence.

“Lee Hayul. I want to talk to you. I used violent means to demonstrate my abilities. I could force my way into the basement now, but I don’t want our relationship to get off on the wrong foot.”

Silence.

“My aim is to persuade you to come to our academy in Korea. Give me a chance to convince you.”

CREAK.

The basement door opened.

“Come in.”

The housekeeper held the door handle. Hearing her voice at such close range made its mechanical quality much more uncanny.

Come to think of it, throughout history, humanity’s ideal machine—the pinnacle of machinery—had always been a doll. Whether made of paper, clockwork, or AI chips.

In that case, calling it a doll’s voice instead of a mechanical voice wouldn’t be far wrong.

I walked past the housekeeper and entered the basement.

THUD.

The heavy iron door shut behind me.

“...”

At last, I could meet Lee Hayul’s own eyes.

This, too, was a first. In the previous run, the corpse’s eyes had been closed.

Golden eyes.

Light chestnut hair.

A girl with neither leg.

Sometimes, the manifestation of an awakened ability altered the color of a person’s hair and eyes. The girl sitting in the wheelchair had coloring that bore no resemblance whatsoever to her father, Jeong Sang-guk.

“Mmph! Hmph, mmmph...!”

Jeong Sang-guk, dragged down here only moments earlier, was also sitting in a wheelchair.

In terms of limited mobility, he was actually worse off than his daughter. Both his legs were intact, but his entire body was tightly bound in puppet strings, leaving him unable to move. He looked exactly like prey caught in a spider’s web.

Blood was even streaming from the father’s fingernails, as though they’d just held a grand opening.

‘... Ah.’

Hmm.

So that was why Jeong Sang-guk had worn gloves in run eighteen.