A Hotel Infiltration Caper

Hold on. What kind of situation is this?

I watched the footage of the Future Observation with my eyes wide open. My future self was monitoring Wi Seona’s situation on the laptop screen when a group of hulking men in suits came bursting into the room and looked around.

Where the hell is Wi Seona?

The strange part was that however hard the bruisers swept their eyes over the place, they couldn’t find her. There was no telling how she’d hidden herself. Then the bruisers fiddled with their earpieces and went scrambling out of the room, and with that, the Future Observation ended.

“…Staff Member Im. What’s the matter? Staff Member Im?”
“Keep quiet for a second.”

I made a point of ignoring Hong Jangwoo, who was staring at me in concern. For now, one thing looked certain: hotel security had broken into Room 4104, the room Wi Seona was about to infiltrate.

I checked on Wi Seona through the monitor.

“Forty-first floor. I’m going to open the door.”

Right at that moment, Wi Seona was opening the door of Room 4104 with the RFID card key. A green light came on, and the door swung open. In that split second, though, I caught it: not a green light but a yellow one, flickering past.

I switched on the mic and gave Wi Seona her orders.

“Wi Seona, don’t panic, and listen carefully to what I say.”
“Yes, y-yes?”
“I think the moment you opened it with the RFID key, the information leaked through to the security team.”

Wi Seona’s feed went still. She must have frozen at the suddenness of it, and timid as she was, the shock would have hit her that much harder. I kept my voice as calm as I possibly could.

“First, install the camera in a ceiling corner with a good view of the bedroom. If you set it right on top of that ornament there, I don’t think anyone would even see it.”
“Ah, yes, yessir…”
“And… get it up there within a minute. I’ll handle the situation, so don’t worry about it.”

I switched the mic off for a moment and was about to sink into thought when Hong Jangwoo grabbed me by the shoulder.

“Hold on… what are you doing right now? And where did the security team suddenly come from?”
“Did you see the light just now, when she tapped the RFID key?”
“…The light?”
“I looked up every door-lock model used in hotels, so I know this: a yellow light means a notification goes to the security team. It opens, sure, but the instant it opens the signal goes out.”
“!”

Hong Jangwoo went white as a sheet.

“Th-Then Wi Seona is…”
“The security team will already have caught on. That someone broke into 4104. They’ll be sending the security detail straight up.”
“Then we’re finished! Should we g-get moving right now?”

He was already reaching for the steering wheel, and I stopped him. Was this lunatic seriously proposing we abandon Wi Seona and run?

“Get a grip. You’re saying we ditch Wi Seona and run?”
“At least we’d come out of it alive…”
“Are you a Villain, by any chance?”
“Wouldn’t that just be a given, in a Villain organization?”
“Haah…”

Any more talking with Hong Jangwoo and my head was going to boil over. This lunatic was ready to throw away a teammate just to save his own skin? Now I understood all over again how a guy like this had climbed all the way to Senior Staff on Team 2. With character like his, he’d have sailed through the Advancement Match on a free pass.

“I-I’ve got it installed! What do I do now… Staff Member Im?”

Wi Seona’s voice came through shaking. Villain or not, she was on the upper floors of a hotel. Even if she brought her hair out and used her Gift, the odds of her getting back alive and in one piece were vanishingly small.

Think. Come on, think.

I shut my eyes altogether and put the pieces together. The layout of the room as it had looked on Wi Seona’s feed, the view from her own eyes in the Future Observation, the security team’s men suddenly bolting out of the room. In that instant, the window came to me.

“The window! You have to go out the window!”
“Th… The window?”
“Turn your hair back the way it was, then drive it into the outer wall of the hotel. Hang on out there past the window. Then it won’t matter who bursts in, they won’t know. They’ll read it as the door having opened on a glitch.”
“…Yes! I’ll do it right now!”

Wi Seona threw the hotel window wide open at once. Seen through the monitor, the forty-first-floor drop was dizzying. The hotel must have had a fine view, because the Han River and the forest of buildings beyond it were all laid out clear.

“Eeeeek!!”
“…Wi Seona. Do you happen to be afraid of heights?”
“Uh, I thought I wasn’t, but it turns out I am… What do I do?”
“Wi Seona.”

Watching the feed from a dithering Wi Seona, I swallowed a sigh. If she got caught here, the whole thing was a bust. Wi Seona, me, Hong Jangwoo: every one of us had staked our lives on this. In the end, then, it all came down to whether or not Wi Seona could hang off a hotel wall.

“Wi Seona, do you remember what I said to you a while back?”
“Yes? Wh-What was it?”
“What I said back in the Villain Planning and Management Office.”
“!”

Wi Seona shivered, as though something had come back to her. Back when I was working under Assistant Manager Ko Hyeonsik, there was something I’d said to her, terrified as she was on the eve of her first deployment.

“If you can’t believe in yourself, believe in someone who believes in you. That’s what I’d like to say to you.”
“!”
“How about trying to believe in me, who believes you’ll win?”

A line whose source I didn’t even know, picked up who knows where. But I believed in her.

To be exact, I’d only said it after watching her fight in a Future Observation, but the result had been good.

“Believe in me this time too. Do that, and it’ll work out, guaranteed.”
“…All right. I’ll try.”
“I’m counting on you.”

Wi Seona plucked a strand of her own hair clean out and began driving it into the wall. Whether the hotel wall was thankfully weak or her hedgehog spines were strong, they sank in far better and far deeper than I’d expected.

And then came the moment Wi Seona was hanging from the wall above the hotel window.

“Th-They’re here…!”
“!”

Wi Seona took the glasses in her hand and tipped them just enough to show me through the window. The security team’s men, seen through the camera mounted in the glasses. The frames must have been thin enough that nobody ever noticed them. It was exactly the scene I’d watched in the Future Observation.

“Wh-What do I do now…?”

Wi Seona whispered it as faintly as she could, so as not to be caught. She’d stuck the camera up the moment she was inside and climbed out onto the wall by the window, so there would be no other trace left for them to find.

We’ve come this far. There’s only one thing left.

Get the security team’s men out of that room, by whatever means. They’d be passing the situation back and forth over their earpieces, so if something blew up somewhere they’d bring in more bodies at once. The question was how to manage that.

“…Jangwoo. You know that stuff we brought along in case things went wrong.”
“Yes? In case things went… Don’t tell me you mean those?”
“Yeah. Looks like I’m going to have to go out there myself.”

Hong Jangwoo pulled something out with a dazed look on his face: a motorcycle helmet, plus a pair of glasses and an earpiece identical to the ones Wi Seona was wearing. I’d brought them along so I could go into the field myself, in case Wi Seona declared she couldn’t do it or got taken.

“I’m heading out, so keep a good hold on that wheel.”
“…Me?”
“Obviously. Who else is here besides you? We’ll have to move fast, so the second I say the word, pick Wi Seona and me up and put your foot down. Got it? I’m trusting you.”
“No, wait—”

— Slam.

I stepped out of the car without hearing Hong Jangwoo out. Glasses on, earpiece in, and the helmet over the top. Then I headed straight for the hotel lobby.

“Seriously, what exactly are you planning to do.”

The earpiece must have been working fine, because Hong Jangwoo’s voice came through laced with a sulk. I’d told him I’d handle it myself, so what was he sulking about? I snorted a laugh and answered him.

“If the security team going up is the danger, then I make them come back down.”
“Sorry?”
“Keep watching. The moment the security team goes back down, you tell Wi Seona to come down straight away.”

— Ding!

The words were barely out of my mouth when the elevator doors opened. I ran straight for the front desk in the lobby. Other guests were apparently already checking in, but that was nothing to me.

“I checked in under Hong Jangwoo. Take a look at this for me.”
“…Sir? I’m very sorry, but another guest is in the middle of checking in at the moment.”
“Don’t know, don’t care. Make it quick. Do you not know I’m a busy man?”

The hotel staff couldn’t hide their alarm. My voice was going at full blast, too, and this was an expensive hotel through and through: the ceilings were high, and a voice carried through the place like it would in a cave.

“Hong Jangwoo! Hong — Jang — Woo! I told you, I checked in under my own name, all three syllables of it!”
“Er, sir… if you could lower your voice just a little, so as not to inconvenience the other guests…”
“Are you telling me I’m being loud? Is that it? Huh! What kind of staff training is this!”

I went so far as to jab a finger at them, and I didn’t forget to work in an appropriate threat. Sorry as I was for the staff, there was no other way to draw the security team out. Besides the one dealing with me, I could see another staff member saying something or other into an earpiece.

There we go. They’d taken the bait.

“Who are you on the line with over there! There’s a guest standing right in front of you, talking!”
“Sir, we can’t have this. Please refrain from verbal abuse and physical violence toward our staff.”
“When did I ever abuse or assault anyone! You’re framing an innocent man!”
“If you continue to refuse to comply, we will call the security detail.”
“The security detail? Call them. Then I’ll make a call of my own. Get the manager out here. Call the manager!”

I played the nightmare customer to the absolute hilt and made the staff’s lives miserable. Thanks to that, part of the security team turned up, but this wasn’t enough. For one thing, the security detail that had been in Wi Seona’s hotel room was nowhere in sight.

“Security detail. Sir, please come with us for a moment.”
“Come with you? Come with you where. I said call the manager.”
“If you keep this up, we’ll restrain you by force.”
“Try it, you bastards.”

— Twitch.

A fairly big man from the security detail came at me without warning. The vein bulging at his temple said he was plenty angry with me.

That’s it. Get angry.

“Where do you think you’re putting your hands on me, you bastard!”
“…Gurk!!”

— Kaboom!

I threw him over my shoulder and slammed him down for everyone to see. However much training and technique they had, I was an awakened with a Gift. How did they plan to beat a man who’d had Amos’s body modification on top of Panthera’s training? If they wanted to beat me, they should have brought an A-rank Hero.

“A-All at once! Rush him!”
“Sure, come at me in a pack, then.”
“Uwaaaagh!!”
“My arm… my arm!”

— Ker-thump!

The security detail fretted and scrambled to get hold of me somehow. Even so, the gap in strength put us on different levels entirely, like an adult against a small child. As the commotion grew, the security detail gathered in greater and greater numbers, and people taking photos and video started springing up as well. And then the security detail I’d been waiting for all this time came into view.

There they are. Out at last.

They were the men I’d seen through Wi Seona’s glasses up in the room.

“How long do you plan on keeping this up! Huh!”
“…Wi Seona’s in the elevator coming down now. Just give her about five minutes.”

The instant I bellowed that, Hong Jangwoo’s answer came back. At times like this, he had a decent amount of sense. I rolled my shoulders with exaggerated menace and glared at the security detail.

“What? You lot want a go as well?”
“…We won’t be the pushovers you’re used to.”
“Oh?”

Looking closer, they weren’t empty-handed. Collapsible batons, and stun guns on top of that… was a security detail even allowed to be armed like this? Then again, in America even security guards own guns, so it wasn’t all that strange.

“Hyaaah!”

They must have drilled together, because they came at me from three directions at once. Sorry, but next to Panthera’s movements this was a snail’s pace. I threw myself toward the open side and let a light uppercut fly on the way.

That’s one.

One man, caught clean on the jaw and sent flying. I hurled his body at another to wreck that man’s balance, then ran at the one holding the stun gun and hooked his leg out from under him.

A stun gun’s dangerous even for me.

His balance went, and as he fell he ended up jamming the stun gun into his own body over and over. Wounded by his own weapon. Dear me.

The last one had lost the will to fight and only stared at me blankly.

“What. No more?”
“U-Uwaaah…”
“Whoopsie.”

Backing away, he even managed to tread on a fallen colleague and go over himself. To think they keep a man like that on the security detail. Honestly…

With the whole security detail cleared away, a siren came within earshot somewhere off in the distance. The hotel staff had gone and called the police outright.

“Not yet!! I said call the manager!!”
“…Wi Seona’s here!”
“Bah! To hell with this lousy hotel, I’m never using it again. I’ll just leave and be done with it!”

— Swish!

I stepped straight over the fallen security detail and stormed out of the hotel lobby.

“Come out of the parking lot, I’m getting straight in the car.”
“Yes, yessir!”

And so, having laid out the entire security detail, I ran out toward the road and climbed into the back seat of Hong Jangwoo’s car as it came out of the parking lot with perfect timing.

…All in all, it had been a nerve-racking infiltration caper.