010-****-1234.
Not quite a palindrome, but there was something endearing about it.
Easy enough to memorize since the digits ran in sequence.
He knew whose number it was now.
Yun Jin-gi, employee of the Korean Awakened Association.
Yun Jin-gi turned out to be one year younger than him, and had the kind of personality that attached to people instantly.
For the entire car ride over, he talked without pause.
A human songbird.
The rapid-fire stream of this and that coming out of the guy’s mouth had nearly bored holes in Woo-joo’s ears.
Oh — why were they in a car together?
He’d come all the way to pick Woo-joo up in person, first thing this morning.
He didn’t know the reason exactly, but whatever error was in the paperwork clearly carried some serious consequences — that much he could piece together on his own.
“Here we are~!”
“You really didn’t have to go this far. It’s a lot.”
First time in his life having a car door opened for him — a strange experience.
He scratched his cheek, a little awkward, and Yun Jin-gi just smiled warmly.
“Come on, hyung! It’s nothing!”
And led him toward a particular elevator.
Hyung? When exactly had they met for Yun Jin-gi to be calling him hyung?
He cleared his throat and asked his newly acquired younger brother a question.
“So what did I fill in wrong?”
“Hm? I’m not actually sure, sir! The team lead will explain — let’s head in first!”
“……”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Oh Won-taek, head of the Talent Management Team here at the Korean Awakened Association. Please, have a seat.”
The man who introduced himself as Team Lead Oh Won-taek pulled out a chair at a stark white square table and gestured.
Team lead? Not a detective inspector?
Strong features at first glance.
A scar running across his face that only underscored that impression.
A build that didn’t look remotely like office work.
The mild tension he’d felt sitting with Yun Jin-gi solidified into something heavier the moment Oh Won-taek joined the room.
This feels like……
Did he know about the good cop/bad cop routine?
Simply put: one person delivers the pressure, the other delivers the reassurance.
The way he read the room right now — bad cop was the team lead, good cop was Yun Jin-gi.
“Awakened Kim Woo-joo-nim!”
He startled and looked up at Yun Jin-gi, who was standing to the side. The guy grinned.
“Would coffee be alright? Anything you’d like?”
Outside he’d been hyung, hyung — but inside the workplace, Yun Jin-gi was calling him Awakened Kim Woo-joo-nim with impeccable formality.
“Yes. Iced Americano, please.”
He asked for iced because it was faster to drink.
Faster to drink, faster to leave.
The atmosphere in here was off and he wanted out.
The paperwork error — fine, that could happen.
But did they really need to bring him to a place this deep in the building, via a private elevator, just to sort that out?
When the first registration had happened in a room where people were walking around having normal conversations?
No matter how he thought about it, something felt strange.
What’s the actual agenda here? Sending someone to pick me up personally instead of just asking me to come in — the whole thing feels off……
A brief thought that maybe they’d found out he was the rabbit — but he dismissed it.
The rabbit mask he wore?
Just eye holes, a small nose hole, and a tiny mouth hole.
Identifying someone from that combination alone?
You could suspect, sure, but certainty would be hard.
It’s probably the Floor 2 record thing.
No matter how he turned it over, nothing else fit.
“Awakened Kim Woo-joo-nim. What actually happened is that one of our staff accidentally fed your registration documents through the shredder. We wanted to ask you to fill them out again. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.”
A middle-aged man dipping his head slightly in apology.
Oh — that’s all it is.
Except — for that they dragged him this deep in the building?
The wariness didn’t lift. The questions kept rising.
He held his tongue and stayed quiet for a moment.
Smooth.
A single sheet of paper slid across the table toward him.
The Awakened Association registration form — he’d seen it before.
A ballpoint pen followed. And right on cue, Yun Jin-gi returned with the iced Americano he’d requested.
“Is this the only thing I need to fill out?”
“If you have any questions, feel free to ask.”
No. He didn’t want this conversation getting longer.
Do what needed doing and go home.
He knocked back the coffee in one go and picked up the pen immediately.
There wasn’t much to fill in.
Name, gender, age, residence, phone number.
The kind of list only the person themselves would know — he moved through it quickly.
Then awakening date, awakening trait, awakening grade.
Awakening date…… when was that again?
Roughly a month ago, close enough.
And trait and grade——
“Same as what I wrote before, right?”
Trait: Body Enhancement. Grade: D.
He quietly set the pen down and slid the paper back toward Team Lead Oh Won-taek.
Time to get up and leave now.
He had a full day ahead of him.
“Then I’ll be on my way.”
Rising from his seat with the casual ease of a salmon swimming upstream — or so he intended — but.
“Hmm……”
“Ah……”
Sounds like something wanting to be said but being held back came from either side of him.
No.
There was nothing left to hear.
After a brief, half-standing pause he started to move toward the door — but.
“Awakened Kim Woo-joo-nim!”
Team Lead Oh Won-taek’s resolute voice caught him by the ankle one more time.
“Many Awakened are reluctant to disclose their abilities. We fully understand that. Outside a Tower, abilities can’t be used — but if someone has a powerful trait, they risk becoming a target for people with ill intent. If you’d prefer to leave things as they are, we can keep it exactly as written.”
Not a hint of uncertainty in it. Complete conviction.
Right — this was definitely about the Floor 2 third-place record.
Or possibly — about seeing Body Enhancement written as his trait.
Some perceptive people from the Special Floor had already started talking: rookie Kim Woo-joo’s main weapon was a light bowgun. And Body Enhancement using a light bowgun as a main weapon was roughly equivalent to a kickboxer fighting exclusively with punches.
Body Enhancement equaled gauntlets.
A formula as fixed as any law.
He’d overlooked that in his rush to get out, just writing what he’d written before — and now it had come back to bite him.
But……
Before answering, he quickly read the room — scanning both faces.
Why are they looking at me like that?
He’d just seen the eyes of a retriever who’d had its treat taken away, somehow packed into the face of a tiger.
He should have just answered without making eye contact.
Looking at both of them only made things more complicated in his head.
He held that moment for a beat, and then Oh Won-taek continued.
“That said — we would very much like for you to act in the national interest.”
The national interest.
Suddenly dropping national interest into the conversation, not personal interest.
“The national interest — does that mean formally joining the Association as an official member?”
The guild topic that had started gaining traction lately, led by America.
Awakened Associations in various countries were trying to block individual guilds from forming and instead position themselves as the central, guild-like structure of authority.
It had been showing up in the news enough that even kids who had no idea how the world worked were starting to pick it up.
The national interest Team Lead Oh Won-taek was talking about was probably, ultimately, join the Association, follow the Association’s lead, and work within the Association.
He was going to decline that.
He asked with the intention of refusing.
“No, that’s not it. The current mainstream view within the Association does lean that way, but our thinking is a little different.”
A negative answer, not a positive one.
Worth hearing out a little more, then. He sat back down.
One leg kept angled toward the outside, ready to push up and walk out the moment anything felt wrong.
“We want to form a TF team with Awakened through a contract arrangement.”
“A TF team?”
He hadn’t expected that at all.
A TF team — short for task force — was typically a group of specialists assembled to solve a specific problem.
The defining feature being that it was short-term.
“Yes. Things like targeting the current domestic highest floor record, performing well in the Special Floor, or focusing exclusively on sourcing materials that Enchanters need.”
Hmm. Something like a team where the short-term goals kept getting updated?
But.
“You’re listing multiple objectives.”
“The Tower entry limit is five people for everything except the Special Floor — we can’t help that. The purpose of the TF team comes down to two things: first, to prevent talent from leaving Korea, and second, to distribute power.”
“Distribute power?”
“Think of it like the separation of powers — it’s easier to understand that way.”
Whether he’d determined that Woo-joo was willing to listen, the team lead tore off a piece of notepaper and quickly sketched three rough ovals.
“The way a democracy divides state power into legislative, executive, and judicial branches so they check each other — we want to apply that principle here. Divide power among the Association, Awakened, and Enchanters so each keeps the others in check. That prevents the concentration of power and protects everyone’s rights and freedoms. When power becomes too heavily concentrated in one place, that’s where domination begins.”
“And the means to achieve that……”
“Yes. This.”
A new sheet of paper appeared over the one with the three circles.
Thick stack of A4 paper, stapled at the top left corner. And printed prominently at the top of the front page — the word Contract.
“A contract?”
“Yes. A contract.”
“So: not operating as an Association affiliate, but remaining in a contract relationship only. The purpose being to prevent talent drain and at the same time maintain balance in the ecosystem?”
“You catch on quickly. That’s exactly the right reading.”
“But you and Yun Jin-gi-nim are formal Association employees, aren’t you? Is it alright to push something like this forward against the mainstream view?”
Pursuing something that went against the dominant internal opinion at a workplace?
That would take considerable nerve.
Or the person doing it would have to be the chairman’s child.
He couldn’t read their intentions.
He looked back and forth between the team lead and Yun Jin-gi — but they’d clearly coordinated their expressions in advance, because neither face changed.
“Don’t overthink it. Just as a political system has a ruling party and an opposition party, we’re something like that. But the people who share our view are few in number…… so we’re trying to slowly build strength, however modestly.”
That made sense.
Now he understood why they’d cornered him here and gone to such lengths explaining things.
The people within the Association who shared their position were few — so they were trying to bring Awakened in to build up their numbers.
Because the actual power of an Awakened Association came not from the desk workers doing administrative work, but from the Enchanters and Awakened out there doing the real work.
The Korean Awakened Association’s problems were famously numerous.
Which was exactly why it felt reassuring to know that even a small group like this existed within it.
But he wasn’t naive enough to take everything they were saying at face value.
“Did you get something in your eye?”
Out of habit and impatience he’d started blinking, and Yun Jin-gi — who had been maintaining his business-professional smile — finally shifted to a look of concern.
Oh right. This doesn’t work in the real world.
Eagle Eye.
Blink rapidly twice — and a status screen appeared. For people it showed their current psychological state; for boss mobs it showed the reverse scale (weak point).
The same habit that had leaked into his involuntary behavior here.
Old habits outside the Tower.
But.
[Oh Won-taek Status Screen]
— Currently completely sincere!
Wait.
Why was this showing up?