CH 178

The meeting place with Kim Jong-Bin was at the foot of a gloomy looking mountain somewhere in Paju. But it was also a suitable spot for an ambush, and with no residences around, it was the perfect place to plan for a cover-up even if there were to be a commotion.

Kim Jin-Woo looked around with a satisfied look. He was the one who had wanted somewhere quiet for the meeting. Most of the power he possessed was something he couldn’t be too public about, so of course, the sparsely populated foot of the mountain would be to his advantage. Moreover, since the meeting time was in the evening, the darkness was something he was more than accustomed to.

He followed the GPS coordinates he had received instead of a text message, and leisurely waited for the other party to arrive. However, the promised time came and went, and the other party didn’t appear. Instead of Kim Jong-Bin, almost a hundred unidentifiable opponents approached him instead.

“It was indeed a trap.” Although the enemy had encircled him perfectly, Kim Jin-Woo was still as calm as ever. “I wasn’t expecting much in the first place anyway.”

Just then, the corners of a nearby patch of grass rustled, and another group of men appeared.

“You seem to know why we’re here.” The man who spoke carried a different air from Song Jong-Chul.

Kim Jin-Woo stared hard at the man for a long time before smirking for some unknown reason, replying, “Nope. Not at all.”

The man had an unusual aura emanating from him, but Kim Jin-Woo was still relaxed. He had been completely laid-back from the beginning, as if he were simply out for a leisurely stroll.

His demeanor seemed to tick off the man, who growled with an annoyed frown, “Let me ask you one thing. Was it you who attacked the Association?”

But instead of replying to the man’s question, Kim Jin-Woo asked a question of his own. “Is my father okay?”

“That depends on how you behave.” The man didn’t even deny kidnapping Kim Jin-Woo’s father, intentional or not.

“Where is he? Did you bring him?” Kim Jin-Woo asked.

“Of course not,” the man replied.

Kim Jin-Woo looked disappointed. He had hoped that the opponent would play to his tune. However, unlike in movies and novels, his enemies didn’t seem to have had any intention of bringing such an important hostage to the meeting location.

The man asked Kim Jin-Woo once more, “I’ll ask you again. Was it you who attacked the Association?”

“It wasn’t me.” Kim Jin-Woo casually threw out a lie.

If this had been the Underworld, he would have told the truth and destroyed them all, but this was the surface. Even at that moment, he wasn’t certain if someone was reporting the situation live to the Association, and he found no need to admit his actions.

However, the enemy didn’t drop their suspicions despite his denial. They stared at him for a long time with narrowed eyes, refusing to take their eyes off him.

Kim Jin-Woo looked the man in the eyes and asked, “What should I do to free my father?”

“Drink this first.”

The man took out a small glass flask that he had prepared prior and threw it at Kim Jin-Woo. The flask was the size of an index finger and filled with a brightly-colored liquid.

“If I drink this, will you release my father?” Kim Jin-Woo asked.

In response, the man—the Association executive Park Sung-Jin—brazenly said, “Let’s just say, yes.”

But even as he said that, the look on his face implied that he was expecting Kim Jin-Woo to not even touch the contents of the flask at all. It was to be expected, after all. Anyone who recognized the contents of the flask would reject it. And in Park Sung-Jin’s mind, Kim Jin-Woo knew what the identity of the liquid was.

“If I drink this, I’ll just become a vegetable,” Kim Jin-Woo said. As expected, he knew that the liquid was a concentrated form of the drug made from powdered down gems.

“If you don’t drink it, you won’t get what you want,” Park Sung-Jin said. There’s no way he’d drink this monster of a drug for the sake of his adoptive father, who wasn’t even related to him by blood, he thought, which was why he didn’t even bother to persuade Kim Jin-Woo by force. Even if the other party didn’t drink the drug, he still had a few more backup plans in wait.

“Then drink I shall,” Kim Jin-Woo suddenly said, defying Park Sung-Jin’s expectations. He opened the flask and emptied the contents in one gulp.

It happened so quickly that Park Sung-Jin let out an absurd noise. “Huh? Huh!?”

“I drank it. Now it’s your turn to keep your promise,” Kim Jin-Woo said, frowning deeply.

Park Sung-Jin was taken completely by surprise as he watched Kim Jin-Woo. Although he had simply acted under Song Jong-Chul’s orders, he hadn’t expected Kim Jin-Woo to really drink the down gem concentrate.

Reconciliation was now impossible. Song Jong-Chul highly valued Kim Jin-Woo and looked up to him. If voluntary cooperation wasn’t possible,he intended to take Kim Jin-Woo in by force.

But Kim Jin-Woo had drunk the down gem concentrate. With such an amount, even a fairly strong Deep Floor dungeon baby would lose control over himself immediately and turn into an addict, which was against Song Jong-Chul’s intention of wanting nothing less than complete cooperation.

“You fool!” Park Sung-Jin belatedly screamed, but the deed was already done.

“Free my father, now.” Kim Jin-Woo just continued to blindly demand the release of his father.

However, Park Sung-Jin had had no authority to release Kim Jin-Woo’s adoptive father from the beginning. He muttered, “Urgh, we’ll wait for him to collapse before we take him in.”

Now, he started blatantly ignoring Kim Jin-Woo. He knew that so long as Kim Jin-Woo drank the concentrate to the last drop, it wouldn’t be long before he would have the highest leveled dungeon baby at the palm of his hand.

Just like many other explorers and high-ranking government officials, Kim Jin-Woo would become just another drug addict who would do anything to get his hands on more of those drugs, and it would be an easy task to control him.

Right now, the Deep Floor dungeon baby’s body might be resisting the drug, but soon, he would be crawling all over the floor like a dog and begging for more drugs.

A subordinate asked, “Should we report this first?”

“Urgh, if we report this now, I’m going to get an earful about how I destroyed his precious friend. Let’s just report this after we head back,” Park Sung-Jin replied.

“True. Besides, you did receive quite an earful last time,” the subordinate remarked.

He had brought along a hundred high-leveled dungeon babies as well as the secret army of the Association, but things had ended so anticlimactically. Park Sung-Jin and his subordinates were naturally left dumbfounded and lost.

“Mm?” Park Sung-Jin suddenly exclaimed.

Even after a long time, Kim Jin-Woo hadn’t collapsed. Even for a Deep Floor dungeon baby, he should have been overcome with shock by now and collapsed onto the floor, and yet, he was standing upright.

“Why does he seem okay?” Seeing that Kim Jin-Woo showed absolutely no signs of addiction, Park Sung-Jin belatedly realized that something strange was going on.

“It’s your turn now to keep your promise.” Kim Jin-Woo kept repeating his words like a parrot. Upon closer inspection, the look on his face was otherworldly.

At first, Park Sung-Jin had thought that he was simply being restless out of concern for the safety of his adoptive father, but apparently, that wasn’t the case.

“Promise,” Kim Jin-Woo repeated. The threat sounded dull. Was the drug finally taking effect?

One of Park Sung-Jin’s subordinates shouted, “H-hey!”

Park Sung-Jin looked up with a sullen expression, and saw that Kim Jin-Woo’s face had twisted beyond what a normal human should be capable of.

“Pro… mise.” Even his voice sounded twisted now, and Kim Jin-Woo looked bizarre beyond comprehension. His clean looks were nowhere to be seen, as his eye sockets reached up to his ears and his nose swayed like jelly. It was impossible to consider him a human being.

“Something’s definitely strange,” remarked a subordinate.

“Call the guys! Something’s off!” Park Sung-Jin shouted out orders to his subordinates, but froze when he suddenly heard a soft, deadly whisper right next to him.

“You’re as toxic as ever.”

“Who is that!?” Park Sung-Jin drew his sword from his waist and swung it wildly, only to find a hooded man standing next to Kim Jin-Woo, who had now completely taken on a different form that resembled a monster.

“What do you mean, who? I’m the person you asked to meet,” the hooded man said.

“Y-you’re…” Park Sung-Jin stammered.

The man pulled up his hood. “I was only planning on playing around with you for a while before heading to your hideout, but I never expected that you would even use drugs.”

“K-Kim Jin-Woo!” Park Sung-Jin looked at both the monster whose face had been completely smashed in and the man with his hood uncovered, and screamed.

The man who had suddenly appeared was none other than Kim Jin-Woo. “Tsk, I never expected that the drugs could have such an effect,” he muttered.

Kim Jin-Woo’s decoy had completely reverted to his original appearance. He clicked his tongue as he looked at the King of Mirror Wraiths. Espetos’ Mirroring ability had been deactivated, but it didn’t seem to have done any damage to him.

He had originally planned to use Espetos to infiltrate the deeper parts of the Association, but his plan had gone completely awry. The moment Park Sung-Jin’s reaction deviated from his planned scenario, failure was inevitable. After all, apart from the perfect replication of his appearance, the Mirror Wraith’s acting was pretty awkward.

Park Sung-Jin finally understood the secret of Kim Jin-Woo’s alibi and shouted, “You were the culprit all along!”

In response, Kim Jin-Woo asked a question. “Let me ask you one thing. What were you planning to do if I had resisted here?”

But instead of an answer, a hundred explorers that had been lying in ambush appeared from the tall grass.

“Guess the answer is obvious.” Kim Jin-Woo’s expression hardened as he shook his head. He still couldn’t understand the intentions of Song Jong-Chul, who had once seemed to be conciliatory and cooperative, but had suddenly changed his mind at the last second.

But he didn’t think too deeply about the matter. Now that it had been revealed that the entire Association was involved in his father's disappearance, there was absolutely no reason to care whether Song Jong-Chul was on the side of good or evil.

“You’re planning something weird,” Park Sung-Jin remarked. Kim Jin-Woo didn’t respond.

Up until that moment, Park Sung-Jin had resented the fact that he had been deceived, but now, he wasn’t bothered one bit. He seemed to be unafraid at all, despite the fact that the assailant who had destroyed a dozen explorers in an instant was standing right in front of him. He ordered, “Take him down!”

“You’re not going to kill me, but rather fight me instead? I guess I can fight without fear of killing you guys,” Kim Jin-Woo said cockily with a smirk.

Park Sung-Jin overturned his order in response. “Cocky bastard! Just kill him instead!”

“But the Boss said—” began a subordinate.

“I’ll take responsibility! After all, it’s not like there’s anyone else above him!” Park Sung-Jin cut him off.

Despite the fact that the ambush forces were now even more bloodthirsty, Kim Jin-Woo seemed to take pleasure in how things were developing.

“Yes, yes. Come at me.” Kim Jin-Woo grinned as he looked at the Association’s ambush forces that were surrounding him. “Only then can I fully unleash myself.”

His demeanor changed in an instant. He had been strangely relaxed until then, but that was all about to change. A huge aura rose like a tidal wave and spread out in all directions.

When another Kim Jin-Woo had appeared, Park Sung-Jin was merely surprised, but not shaken. He’d thought that all he had to do was subdue the enemy, and that would be the end of it all.

Now, he was overwhelmed by Kim Jin-Woo’s rising ferocity. But still, he thought there could be some leeway. He knew that the man who had defeated dozens of explorers in one go wouldn’t be taken down so easily. He was confident that no matter how strong Kim Jin-Woo would be, he would be able to handle it.

After all, a battle wasn’t won by sheer presence alone. He was a high-leveled Level 9 dungeon baby himself, and every single one of his hundred handpicked subordinates was a Level 6 or higher dungeon baby. All of them were veteran explorers who had great experience in the Underworld and were specialists in combat.

“Uh…”

However, the very subordinates he had placed his faith in weren’t able to even take a step forward, as their very will was being suppressed by Kim Jin-Woo’s presence alone.

Kim Jin-Woo was standing so defenseless that if anyone could reach out with their knives and slash him, he would easily bleed. And yet, no one took a single step forward.

“I guess I’ll hear an earful later.” Park Sung-Jin finally decided to pull out the hidden trick up his sleeve. He was planning to put the arrogant Kim Jin-Woo in his place.

“Po…” Park Sung-Jin began.

“I’m warning you, you’ll regret it,” Kim Jin-Woo called out in a low, deep voice.

Just as Park Sung-Jin was about to declare victory, he froze. His opponent’s crystal-clear eyes seemed to pierce right into his soul. Those eyes seemed to be telling him that no matter what he did, all he was going to do was run circles in the palm of Kim Jin-Woo’s hand.

But Park Sung-Jin chose to ignore it. He believed that in order to take someone as powerful as Kim Jin-Woo down, he would have to utilize every trick in the book he had. As such, he finally spoke the word he had been holding back.

“Portal!’

The moment the blue door opened in empty space and a familiar energy swept across the field, Park Sung-Jin regained his confidence. His subordinates belatedly followed him as they charged toward Kim Jin-Woo.

But he suddenly felt a strange cramping pain in his chest, and he soon knew why. T-that! That look!

Kim Jin-Woo’s expression was still as calm as ever, even as the portal appeared out of thin air and ferocious soldiers started to pour out of it. “I definitely warned you.”

As Park Sung-Jin looked at the swords swinging and attacks unfolding all around him, he watched Kim Jin-Woo staring down at him one last time before he fell to the ground, his heart pounding.

“Don’t ask me for mercy. The moment you ignored my warning and opened the portal…” Kim Jin-Woo’s grin sharpened. His expression was that of a predator. “The laws of the Underworld took over.”