Chapter 95

Bam! Crash!

Grrr!

—Grab her!
—That’s why I said we should have put the handcuffs on first!
—Aaah! My arm! She bit my arm!
—Calm down, Light Mage! It’s not what you think…!

Clank, scrape!

Shshshshsh!

—Ugh! Where is she? Where did she go?
—It’s too dark! I can’t see a thing!
—There! She’s taking the elevator shaft up!
—Up? How—
—How should I know!? Just follow her, quickly!
—Damn it, how is a mage this fast!?

Screeeech!

Crack!!

Screeeeeech!

Snap! Crackle!

—The elevator has stopped operating. Judging by the doors not opening, something must have tampered with it from above.
—The lights are out too… What should we do, Commander?
—Call for reinforcements.
—Should we call Division 5? Or Division 1…
—Call the Commander.
—Commander Ha Yeri? But she specifically said not to be disturbed.
—We can’t let Hayan leave the Bureau building. Hurry!

If you weren’t at the level of a commander, capturing me alive while I climbed walls and ceilings freely would have been impossible.

But by lunchtime, I wandered near the cafeteria and, seeing the “Light Mage Only,” I walked in without suspicion—and ended up getting caught so easily.

It was a trap clearly set just for me.

So unfair.

“28 injured, 13 property damages, climbing windows and leaving handprints that will cost extra for exterior cleaning, and disabling more than half of the CCTV in restricted areas… Why didn’t you just bomb the Bureau instead?”

“Ahem!”

“And why did you sneak into the female locker room at the training grounds? Did you think hiding there would keep you safe?”

“No, sometimes I get headaches, and smelling the shoes that Deputy Commander Yoo Se-byeol always uses helps them go away completely.”

“…I feel my headache getting worse just hearing that. Let’s pretend I didn’t hear it.”

Anyway, after the sudden intervention of Division 2, I had chosen to escape—and thirteen hours later, I was sitting properly in Ha Yeri’s office, hands raised.

A sign hung around my neck: “I fell asleep during training.”

“Keep your arms up, Hayan.”

“Sorry, ma’am.”

She seemed to be playing some game like Go on her desk.

A massive world map lay on the table, and she was placing black and white stones on it. Whenever I let my elbows drop even slightly, a ghostly shout would cut through the air.

The weight of the tentacles attached to both my arms made it impossible to stay perfectly still.

After standing there for about an hour, I heard a small sigh.

I looked up. Ha Yeri had gathered the stones and covered the map, then turned her gaze toward me.

Her expression was dark, making me doubt if her headache was really a lie.

“I must have explained this countless times during training. Agents deployed on missions to prevent retaliation from criminal organizations are subject to mandatory confinement outside the Bureau for a set period for safety.”

“You didn’t say that the confinement location was an underground prison.”

“You were called here because of your failure to report a top-tier artifact to headquarters.”

“Please, just this once…”

“I’d like to, but I can’t.”

Ha Yeri played a video on her smartwatch.

The voice of a VTuber using a tentacle avatar flowed out.

—Normally, we’d report to headquarters and wait for a response, but if someone else got their hands on it, it would inevitably lead to disaster. That’s why we’re planning to destroy it with magic.

Apparently, the VTuber’s account had been suspended for 30 days due to platform guideline violations, and the replay was deleted—but Ha Yeri had clearly secured a copy.

The account had been penalized for inappropriate content, probably because of the use of the tentacle avatar.

Still… it felt unfair.

I had hired a famous writer and paid for it.

“How can you say that so openly on a live broadcast? Over fifty thousand people heard you—there’s no way this can be brushed off with just a written apology anymore.”

“Hing.”

“Show some manners. What kind of attitude is that in front of your superior?”

“Hing, ma’am.”

I couldn’t even begin to understand how the viewers managed to stretch this out like that…

Ha Yeri let out a heavy sigh, massaging her temples, and muttered under her breath.

“Originally, I intended to keep you confined while you wrote your report from below, but now it’s too late. I’ll get you out soon, so just stay in there for a few days.”

“You’re seriously planning to put me in that cold, hard underground cell…!?”

“The heater will be on, and I’ll have meals brought to you. What’s there to worry about? Take this and go down.”

I looked up from the box like a drenched cat, but it was pointless.

It was impossible to look Ha Yeri in the eye unless she chose to reverse her decision.

With no choice, I accepted the casual clothes she gave me and took the stairs down to the basement instead of the broken elevator.

The last time I came here was when No Yeon-hwa’s command brought out the “dark” side of me.

Perhaps because security had been breached once before, now a Special Unit agent, not a regular guard, was posted for surveillance.

I headed not to the interrogation room, but to the quarters where disciplined task force members stayed.

A poster reading “The Bureau Respects Suspects’ Human Rights!” was on this wall as well.

“Anything you’d like to eat?”

After handing over my robe and belongings and stepping into the cell, Ha Yeri asked as if she had done something right.

I didn’t hesitate to answer immediately.

“Hamburger, please.”

“You mean the set with the children’s toy included? Understood. There’s still time until dinner, so I’ll pass it to the next person on duty.”

“Won’t you have it with me, ma’am?”

I imagined her holding the toy in her hand while biting into the hamburger.

If I could get even a single photo of that, I might sell my soul to Baek-seon.

“I’m busy, so I’ll have it later.”

“Is this because of the game you were playing in your office earlier?”

“That’s not a game. It’s a device called a Destiny Board used to predict world affairs according to strategy.”

“Destiny Board ?”

“Yes. It’s an artifact brought by the Commander-in-Chief through a covenant with the Seat of the Council.”

Oh, that actually sounded pretty fun.

So it’s some kind of board game.

I grabbed the bars to stop her from leaving.

“I want to try it too.”

“No, you can’t.”

“Then I’ll just watch you play, Ha Yeri.”

“No….”

“Even if I stay alone in that dull office, racking my brain, nothing good will come of it, right?”

I recalled how, during my punishment in the office earlier, she had sat on a stack of three cushions for a long time.

That must have meant solving this board game was that difficult.

After a moment of thought, Ha Yeri sighed and spoke.

“For Hayan… the saying ‘even if you can’t speak, you’re not hated’ really fits.”

“Where are you going!? Are you leaving me behind!?”

“Wait quietly. I’ll bring it from my office.”

She told the agent standing at the cell that she would cover duty for today, then went upstairs.

A short while later, she came back down, carrying the large world map and the container filled with stones she had in her office earlier.

The map bore clear scorch marks in various places, and a dense grid was drawn across it.

The stones, like those in Go, were black and white, but there seemed to be quite a variety. Strangely, their shapes subtly changed depending on how the corridor lights hit them.

“Wait a moment. I need to place them exactly as before.”

Ha Yeri sat on the floor across from me, the bars between us, spreading out the map and placing the stones one by one.

She mostly placed white stones on the Korean Peninsula, the continent, and the European branch where the Magic Tower was located.

Near the charred Daegu and the cratered Ground Zero, she placed black stones.

The Sea of Decay had nothing on it, suggesting it represented the demons.

She placed all the white stones on the map except for a few.

The black stones still filled more than half the container, but she didn’t place any more, seemingly unsure where they should go.

“What are we doing with this?” I asked.

“You can do many things with it. Something Hayan might find interesting is, for example, this.”

Ha Yeri turned a small clock hand marked in the corner of the map, and instantly the stones moved on their own.

The burned area near Daegu healed, while black stains began spreading along the West Sea.

“This is… the Sea of Decay.”

“Exactly.”

It felt as if time itself was flowing backward.

This wasn’t a simple board—it was a type of simulation recording history.

“How about it? Want to try turning it yourself?”

“Yes.”

I reached past the bars and touched the edge of the map.

Then, I tried to move time forward, opposite to what Ha Yeri had done.

If it only recorded the past, there’d be no reason for this to be an artifact.

What I wanted to see was the future.

Bang! Crash!

Clunk, scrape!

Snap! Crackle!

I kept turning the clock.

Judging by the “minor impact” registered on the Ability Management Bureau building, it seemed time had returned to the present.

When I tried to wind it further, there was a click, and mana began to drain away.

Even so, it felt surprisingly manageable.

Part of it was probably because my mana pool was larger than most, but even by the standards of a mid–Upper Level mage, the amount of mana consumed to peer into the future wasn’t that high.

So when I gradually pushed time forward, the result was truly shocking.

Dark shadows passed over the surface of the world several times, and then—eventually—the entire globe began to burn.

As the smell of scorched flesh and black smoke filled the cell, the ventilation system kicked in.

After Ha Yeri reversed time again and erased the smoke, I asked her,

“Is our destruction… confirmed?”

“No. That’s incorrect. The Destiny Board isn’t a tool for predicting the future.”

She brushed aside my unease, explaining that it merely reconstructed situations based on the amount of information its user possessed.

Accurately foreseeing the future was something that even the Commander-in-Chief had to pay an enormous price to accomplish.

Humanity, which could at best sense the appearance of Gates in advance, had no way of clearly understanding the trials laid out before them.

The Destiny Board had a different purpose altogether.

“Then what were you using this for?”

“I was reviewing things. There’s something about it that doesn’t sit right with me.”

Doesn’t sit right?

What was she talking about?

“In all of South Korea, there are very few people who possess more information than I do.”

That was probably true.

She was the commander of the Counterintelligence Unit—arguably the second-in-command of the Special Unit.

In terms of raw power, she might fall behind the Seven Immortals or a few Transcendent Awakened, but when it came to information, no one could match Ha Yeri.

She was the ideal person to use the Destiny Board properly.

“I can’t know the demons’ movements in full detail, but I can predict them. That’s why I believed I was moving forward using all the information I had.”

“And yet?”

“But it seems there’s something else—something I never accounted for.”

Only then did I understand why her expression had been dark the entire time.

And what she had been doing.

“I can’t identify it. But like dark matter that makes up the universe, it unquestionably exists. And it occupies most of this seemingly empty space… a powerful presence of enormous scale.”

That was probably an apostle of an Outer God.

In other words—

It was something that had been searching for me.