Do what can be done right now.
That was the thought I had as I left the columbarium.
"Right now, I have nothing. No information, no clue to the truth, nothing at all."
For the moment, there was nothing I could begin.
But that did not mean there was nothing I could do.
Preparation.
That was the only thing within my reach.
"They know I'm not going to back down. And no doubt they'll try to silence me quietly too."
What else was there to do?
Then I'd gladly become the bait.
Fortunately, if this had happened before, I would have been crushed without resistance.
Now I had the "power" to stand against injustice and malice.
I still didn't know what this power truly was.
But even if it was something that would take years off my life, I had no intention of hesitating.
So after leaving the columbarium, I kept up the pretense of continuing my investigation, maintained a regular route to make myself easier to target, and spent the nights alone at home.
Normally, they would have found that far too convenient and grown suspicious, but their confidence in their own overwhelming strength, combined with the fact that my social ties had genuinely thinned after my father died, put them at ease.
As a result, after killing time and sharpening my blade for about half a month, the ambush came exactly as expected.
Crash!
"Tch, what a pain. If he passed the bar exam, he should've just forgotten that dead bastard of a father and lived quietly. Instead he's rushing his own death like an idiot."
"Not our problem if he wants to ruin his own life."
"Let's finish this quick and get out. The boss said he'd handle the cleanup cleanly."
They were the textbook image of hired thugs.
But they made no effort to conceal what they were doing.
They came in through the balcony window, brandishing gleaming blades, smashing it apart in plain sight.
They had at least put on masks and baseball caps as a minimum precaution, but anyone who knew how far modern forensic science had advanced would have clicked their tongue at their sloppiness.
And yet they still acted as if they would never be caught...
Instinctively, I became interested in the "boss" they had mentioned.
"So it really is some kind of supernatural ability? Well, thinking I'm the only special one is a privilege reserved for middle schoolers."
Now that I had one foot in the realm of the abnormal myself, it was only natural to suspect that the people my friend had told me about—those who lived outside the law—belonged to the same breed as me.
Frankly, my father's death and the cover-up around it were hard to explain by simple power and influence alone.
But if it had been the result of some supernatural ability?
That would make sense.
There were still too many things I didn't know.
"Though if there really is someone behind this using such an ability, why did they try to kill me with the hands of ordinary thugs? If they were going to handle the cleanup themselves, wouldn't it be better to do the job personally?"
Was I not even worth the effort of using a superhuman asset?
Or were they just short on manpower?
"Whatever the case, if I beat them down, I'll get my answer."
I released my Authority and summoned the baton into my hand.
The intruders were still unaware of me, since I had remained silent inside the room.
Honestly, I could have subdued them without even using my Authority, but they were beneath my concern anyway.
I hurled the baton straight at the door.
The baton flew like a boomerang, smashed through the door, and struck one of the intruders in the head.
His skull exploded cleanly like a watermelon.
Then, just before the baton hit the wall, I recalled and resummoned it in rapid succession, bringing it back to my hand.
"Good thing I didn't spend the last half month sitting around."
For the past two weeks, I had been studying how to use this energy, this vital force.
If my enemy really was someone who possessed abilities like mine, then a direct clash was inevitable.
Honestly, I wasn't even sure whether I could truly make use of it.
And even if I could, I had no confidence I could master it in such a short time, let alone by self-study.
But to my surprise, even that had been absurdly easy.
"Though for now, it's only body reinforcement, protection, and detection."
If other sorcerers saw this, they would have coughed up blood.
In just half a month.
And by self-study, no less.
Not only had I reinforced my body, I had wrapped vital force around my skin to protect it, and then spread it outward to detect space itself.
They would have told me to stop spouting nonsense.
And yet Yang Il-gyu, the king, had gone beyond what was possible and was already approaching the realm of mastery.
There was no other word for him.
Genius.
"What the hell!"
"You broke into my house and entered without my permission. That's trespassing."
"Y-you... don't tell me you were a sorcerer?!"
"Damn it, this wasn't part of the—"
One of the thugs reached for something and tried to call someone in a panic.
The instant I noticed it, I exploded vital force through my feet and closed the distance in a single breath.
When the thug looked up in shock, I swung the baton wrapped in vital force and tore his arm apart.
"Aaaagh!!"
How noisy.
I swung again at his head.
His skull burst like a watermelon once more, and I felt a small pang of regret that I hadn't just smashed his head from the start.
Then I turned to the remaining men.
"You came in armed, so that's aggravated trespassing."
"You also openly talked about killing me, so that's aggravated assault. No, attempted murder."
Honestly, they looked less like men who had tried to kill me and more like men who had merely committed assault.
Though, of course, even that would have been impossible for them.
"Well, since it's only an attempt, maybe you'll rot in prison for a decade or so?"
Though with a first offense, maybe less.
What a soft, rotten law our country had.
"But not in my courtroom."
I could see it.
The deep karma wrapped around them.
Without a doubt, they were men who had made murder their trade.
That was probably part of the Authority I had gained as well.
I would only know for certain once I opened a "trial."
But once attempted murder had already been confirmed, there was no need to go that far.
Judgment.
"You're all sentenced to death."
My baton had already transformed into a sword of light, [Tyrfing].
In truth, I didn't even need to draw it.
But since it was a power I couldn't summon at will and could only use when the conditions aligned, I figured I should try using it directly at least once.
However...
"You're beneath the standard."
As mere thugs, ordinary men, they couldn't even glimpse a single fragment of [Tyrfing].
"Just die."
The men, still dazed by the sword I had drawn before them, only then tried to beg or make excuses.
But the instant the blade was swung, they vanished without leaving even a final word behind.
All that remained was the shattered glass of the window and the living room strewn with headless corpses.
"Hoo..."
I recalled the sword and sat down on the living room sofa.
"Then shall I wait a little more leisurely?"
If anyone had seen me now, they would have asked why I hadn't left one of them alive to extract information.
But as I said before, I had no interest in these trash.
What could I possibly learn from a man swinging a blade around at the scene?
If you want answers, you interrogate someone who actually knows something.
"The fact that they used an honorific when talking about the man handling the cleanup means he definitely knows something."
There was no way he would tell his underlings to finish the job and then come clean up himself.
More likely, if the lower-level men finished the job within the allotted time, he would show up.
Even if that wasn't the case, I was alive and all his men were dead, so some kind of reaction was inevitable.
That was why I waited.
For a bigger fish.
Yang Il-gyu's prediction was not wrong.
The thugs he had killed were low-level employees of a company called Swald.
Trash who knew nothing.
All they really knew was that they took money from important people and carried out contract killings.
But anyone with even a little sense would know this.
In a country like South Korea, contract killing should not be possible in the first place.
No matter how much people cursed the police, Korean law enforcement and public security were among the best in the world, and above all, the CCTV cameras scattered everywhere caught most crimes.
So how could they openly make murder their trade?
"What else? Sorcery."
Supernatural ability.
More precisely, an ability closer to magic than sorcery.
They used that power to erase every trace.
But if they used their abilities directly in the act of murder, the National Intelligence Service would catch them by the throat.
So the actual killings were always carried out by non-ability users.
They made it look like an accident, like a thug's murder or some lawyer getting run over by a truck, and used their abilities only to erase the traces.
Even then, their business model depended on not doing that too perfectly.
It had to look like nothing more than a smart criminal who had covered his tracks well.
And if the police somehow chased the few remaining clues all the way to the truth?
They would just cut off the lower-level worker who had done the job.
Of course, after tampering with his memory a little.
Since all the traces had been left on that employee anyway, all they had to do after that was find another pawn.
"Well, finding a pawn that's easy to use is a bit of a hassle."
Still, that was how the representative of Swald, Jang Dohyeok, had risen smoothly and without interruption.
His "cleanup" work never got him caught by the National Intelligence Service.
That was because demand for this kind of service far exceeded demand for murder itself.
Besides, unlike other cleaners, he never entertained any foolish ideas.
He never stole the things he had cleaned up, pretending they were his lifeline.
His clients were not the kind of people who would fail to notice that.
So Jang Dohyeok, who was genuinely clean, had not been disposed of and was still doing business under the shadow his clients had created for him.
"Now then, shall we move on to the next scene?"
The request that had come to him.
And the request that had once come to him.
It was a job to kill some lawyer, and to take out the son who had followed in his father's footsteps and become a lawyer as well.
The father's case had been only cleanup, so he had forgotten it quickly.
But the son's case had been a rare bundled request for both murder and cleanup, so he remembered it too.
"Those people really are pathetic. It'd be nice if a person just worked hard enough and lived with just enough competence."
The father, the lawyer, had learned something he should never have learned during the case.
He had not only dug into the deliberate sloppiness left behind to evade the National Intelligence Service, as mentioned above, but had also tried to reach the truth behind the client.
The real truth.
"The National Intelligence Service has been on edge lately because of the Japan matter. No wonder that man was rattled."
Who would have thought a lawyer would try to reach into the world of supernatural abilities over something that had been left half-finished?
And since they were secretly in talks with a Japanese organization, they had quickly disposed of the lawyer and handed the cleanup job to Swald's Jang Dohyeok.
But the problem was that the son was absurdly capable too.
A law school student.
Even after his father died and his mental state must have been shattered, he graduated and passed the bar exam without issue.
He mobilized every connection he had and dug into the case.
And of all things, one of the friends who helped him was someone from this line of work, so the truth nearly came out again.
"They hurriedly took out that friend, and now it's the son's turn."
Honestly, he felt a little sorry for them personally.
They had been good lawyers, and they would have become good lawyers.
Still, work was work.
"The job should be finished by now, right? His recent movements were clean, and he stayed home at night, so cleanup should be easy."
In any case, this job would be erased from memory soon enough.
The Japanese king had been born, and most of the clients were shifting their business toward Japan.
Even the customers who had favored him were recommending that he move his operations to Japan.
Jang Dohyeok intended to accept that offer.
Frankly, a king was a cheat.
No matter how much the National Intelligence Service could run wild in Korea, that was only within Korea.
Even the famous magical families of Europe were no match for a king.
"If I'm going to rebuild the business in Japan, I'll be insanely busy from here on out."
He no longer had room in his head for one more unfortunate request.
So after finishing the cleanup neatly once again, and wondering whether he should also dispose of the pawns to make absolutely sure everything was wrapped up, he arrived at the home of the son-lawyer, Yang Il-gyu.
As expected, the smell of blood filled the house.
But...
"Huh? This... looks like my guys' corpses? Why would that be..."
The source of the blood was not Il-gyu's body.
It was from another corpse.
The head was gone, so it was hard to tell, but the smell was coming from the body of someone familiar.
In an instant, Dohyeok sensed that something had gone terribly wrong and tried to retreat from the scene quickly.
Then something flew out of the darkness and crushed his shin.
Crack!
"Aaaagh!"
What the hell was that?
What flew at him?
But the projectile had already been thrown and recalled, now resting in its owner's hand.
From the darkness where the baton had come flying out, a man who should not have been alive stepped forward.
"There are a lot of trespassers today."
"Y-you...?!"
"So you know my face. Bingo."
Il-gyu swung the baton again and shattered Dohyeok's other shin as well.
Along with a thunderous scream.
Yet for some reason, the sound could not escape the living room.
Only then did Dohyeok realize that an enormous amount of vital force had formed an invisible barrier.
"A barrier?! There can't be many people in Korea who can use this!"
Even if the principle was simple, it was by no means easy to execute.
Above all, it was a technique impossible to attempt without a sufficient quantity of vital force.
And yet the target he had assumed to be a non-ability user was using such a barrier with terrifying skill.
So skillfully that he had not even noticed it until he had already stepped inside.
But whether Dohyeok was shocked or not, Il-gyu slowly approached him and then opened his mouth.
"[Kneel before the sinner and kill him.]"
Ju-bok-sa-sa.
The beginning was the encroachment of space.
The manifestation of a domain called the pinnacle of sorcery and magic.
In effect, a divine power.
Within the transformed space, now a courtroom packed with execution blocks,
Il-gyu struck the baton three times and declared:
"Now, let's begin the trial."