Jinsu found the patrol in Sector 5 at the transit platform entrance.
Four Hardwired Enforcers. Moving with the specific, unhurried efficiency of people who are not running a pursuit — they were doing something more dangerous than a pursuit. They were following. The specific, patient, professional following of trained investigators who had seen something and were gathering data before committing to action.
They had not stopped Oh Tae-young.
They had not called it in yet.
They were building a picture.
Oh Tae-young was two blocks ahead of them — walking at normal speed, the specific practiced normality of someone who works in irregular hours across multiple sectors and whose movement patterns are documented as routine in the Association's database. The Ghost Profile working for him the way it had always worked — not hiding him, making him legible as something boring.
The patrol wasn't following Oh Tae-young.
They were following the page.
The one that had fallen on the platform and been retrieved. The one that four Hardwired Enforcers had read the title of in the two seconds between it falling and being picked up and had subsequently recognized as the document that the Association's PR architecture had been running comfortable explanations against for five days.
They wanted to know where it was going.
Jinsu activated Eyes of the Architect and read the patrol's equipment.
Standard Hardwired loadout — System-integrated combat protocols, mana-enhanced response time, the Association's best security architecture in human form. Plus — and this was the relevant detail — a System tracker. The small, Association-standard device that logged GPS coordinates and System node interactions to a central database every ninety seconds.
It had already logged two coordinates.
The platform. And Oh Tae-young's first direction change.
In seventy-three seconds it would log the third.
Jinsu ran the calculation.
The optimal solution was to intercept the patrol before the third log. Redirect them — not erase, redirect. Give them a different picture to follow that led somewhere that wasn't forty-two hunters in a residential building.
He had seventy-three seconds.
He Void-Stepped to the alley parallel to the patrol's position.
[Void-Step: -1% Stability]
[Stability: 54.3% → 53.3%]
He dropped System-Mimicry — the Ghost Profile, the 92% Compliance civilian mask — and let his actual signature surface. Zero mana. No System window. The specific absence that read as ERROR in every scanner it touched.
He walked out of the alley and into the patrol's line of sight.
All four Enforcers registered him simultaneously.
[SCAN: TARGET MANA — 0.00]
[THREAT CLASSIFICATION — ERROR]
[RECOMMENDED ACTION — ENGAGE]
They engaged.
The first Enforcer moved with the trained speed of a Hardwired combatant — not S-Rank but enhanced, the System's blessing adding approximately 40% to their natural capabilities. A strike at Jinsu's left side, the mana-enhanced fist carrying enough force to crack reinforced concrete.
Jinsu activated Absolute Arrest.
[Absolute Arrest: Efficiency — 94%]
The strike stopped.
Not gradually. The kinetic energy, the momentum, the mana enhancement fueling the attack — all of it dead-stopped in a sphere of violet nothing that expanded from Jinsu's left palm and ate the force the way the Engine ate everything.
The Enforcer's arm hung in the stopped space for 0.2 seconds.
Jinsu drove his right hand into the Enforcer's chest.
[Erasure: Targeted mana circuit disruption]
Not white salt. Not total erasure. The specific, surgical application of deletion that removed the System's blessing from the Enforcer's combat circuits without touching the person inside the Hardwired armor.
The Enforcer collapsed. Alive. Mana circuits temporarily offline. Effectively a civilian in expensive armor.
One down.
The second and third Enforcer moved simultaneously — the trained coordination of a unit that had practiced this specific formation against high-threat targets. Flanking strike, one left one right, the geometric pattern designed to ensure that any block of one attack left the other one open.
Jinsu didn't block either.
He Void-Stepped.
[Void-Step: -1% Stability]
Reappeared behind both of them. The flanking formation suddenly facing the wrong direction.
He grabbed the back of the second Enforcer's helmet.
[Absolute Arrest: Targeted — System integration disruption]
The Enforcer's integration with their equipment died. The mana-enhanced response time, the combat protocol overlays, the System-provided tactical assistance — gone. Standard human reaction time in armor that no longer had any assistance to offer.
Jinsu released him. Stepped to the third.
Same sequence.
Eleven seconds total for three Enforcers.
The fourth was the tracker carrier.
Jinsu could see it — the System tracker clipped to the fourth Enforcer's belt, its ninety-second logging cycle currently at sixty-seven seconds elapsed. Twenty-three seconds until the next log.
He needed to not be here when that log ran.
The fourth Enforcer had not engaged yet. Training — read the threat level before committing. Three colleagues down in eleven seconds read as extreme threat level.
"The tracker," Jinsu said.
The Enforcer looked at him.
"Take it off," Jinsu said. "Place it on the ground. Walk away."
The Enforcer looked at the three colleagues. At the violet static on Jinsu's knuckles. At the specific quality of someone who has done exactly what they said they were going to do three times in eleven seconds and is currently saying what they're going to do next.
The Enforcer took the tracker off.
Placed it on the ground.
Walked away.
Jinsu picked up the tracker.
He had nineteen seconds.
He walked to the nearest System node — a streetlight, standard monitoring architecture — and pressed the tracker against it.
[Erasure: Data corruption — targeted]
The tracker's logging history dissolved. The two coordinates it had already sent — the platform, Oh Tae-young's first direction change — corrupted in the central database. The Association's monitoring system would flag the corruption as hardware malfunction. Standard maintenance response. Nothing urgent.
He dropped the tracker.
He reactivated System-Mimicry.
He walked back to the alley.
He kept walking.
He reached Oh Tae-young at the analog drop point — a specific alcove behind a Sector 5 transit terminal that Jin-woo's journal had marked as a reliable blind spot — four minutes later.
Oh Tae-young was sitting on a concrete step with his convenience store receipt in his hands and the expression of someone who has been maintaining controlled calm for several minutes and is very ready to stop.
"Done," Jinsu said.
Oh Tae-young exhaled.
"The tracker logged two coordinates," Jinsu said. "Both corrupted. The patrol is down — not dead, circuits disrupted. They'll recover." He paused. "But the Association will notice four Hardwired Enforcers non-responsive in Sector 5 within the hour. They'll send a response team."
"The building," Oh Tae-young said. "The Sector 3 building."
"I corrupted the logged coordinates before they transmitted," Jinsu said. "The Association doesn't have the address from this patrol." He paused. "But they know something happened in Sector 5. They'll widen the patrol coverage."
Oh Tae-young looked at his receipt.
At the small, careful handwriting covering every available millimeter.
"Should we move the network," he said.
Jinsu thought about the chain of open doors. About forty-two hunters in a residential building who had not been recruited and were not part of any formal organization and whose specific, informal, self-organizing nature made them impossible to fully map from outside.
"Tell Sang-min to brief everyone on secondary locations," Jinsu said. "Not to move yet. But to know where to go." He paused. "And tell Park Ji-yeon to move the press."
"She won't like that," Oh Tae-young said.
"No," Jinsu said. "She won't."
Oh Tae-young looked at the receipt.
He put it back in his pocket.
He stood up.
"Jinsu," he said.
Jinsu looked at him.
"The Enforcer who put down the tracker," Oh Tae-young said. "He just — did it. You told him to and he did it."
"Yes," Jinsu said.
"Why," Oh Tae-young said. "He could have fought. He's Hardwired. He could have—"
"He read the situation," Jinsu said. "He made a calculation." He paused. "He's a person. People make calculations when the situation gives them enough information." He looked at the street. "That's all the Enforcers are. People the System has given very specific information to for a very long time." He paused. "When they get different information—"
He thought about the patrol leader taking Park Ji-yeon's copy of the eleven pages in Chapter 64.
He thought about the Compliance bar dropping from 97% to 94% in thirty seconds.
He thought about what different information does.
"Come on," Jinsu said. "We have fourteen days left and a node to hit."