Watching Cha Seohu and Eun Woojeong’s conversation with a nervous, on-edge feeling, Kwon Taehyuk narrowed his eyes.
That look in Eun Woojeong’s eyes. It was never a friendly gaze.
Kwon Taehyuk felt a bad premonition and took a step forward to cut in, and that was when it happened.
“What’s with that look.”
Cha Seohu spoke irritably and grabbed Eun Woojeong’s chin with a rough hand.
At that unhesitating touch, Eun Woojeong’s shoulders tensed for a moment. Using the strength of an S-rank dealer, not a supporter, Cha Seohu held his chin and asked in a low voice.
“Looks like you’re unhappy I didn’t move the way you wanted.”
“...No.”
“No my ass. Your eyes are full of fucking complaints.”
Kwon Taehyuk had missed his chance to step in, and now he broke out in cold sweat for a different reason.
Cha Seohu twisted his mouth into a smile.
“If you don’t like it, then die here. I’m the one who saved you, right? Then your life is mine, isn’t it?”
Eun Woojeong’s eyes widened slightly.
‘My life belongs to Cha Seohu?’
That... that was......
He was right.
How many times had Cha Seohu saved him already? Three for sure, and if you included the time he’d kidnapped him for no reason and almost got killed by Cha Sahyeon because of it, that made four.
Even if someone saved you just once, you’d be grateful enough to give up your life. Three times—no, four times—meant Eun Woojeong couldn’t refute it.
‘But....’
Thinking that far, Eun Woojeong looked at Cha Seohu, who was holding his chin.
Because he’d changed into his cover form, the bright blond hair especially stood out and stabbed into his vision. He knew well by now that cover and Cha Seohu were the same person, yet whenever he saw him like this, it still felt strange.
Staring at Cha Seohu with a subtle, complicated feeling, Eun Woojeong asked without realizing it.
“Did you do it on purpose? Using that look while saying this?”
“What?”
Back then and now, Eun Woojeong was always weak against cover.
Maybe because of that, Cha Seohu’s words didn’t feel that unpleasant.
You owe your life, so you belong to the person you owe. Rationally, he could understand it, but emotionally, it should have felt bad.
But if the person who held his life was Cha Seohu, it was pretty okay.
No—he liked it.
What connection was more certain than that?
A connection where it wasn’t strange for Cha Seohu to interfere in his problems, and where it was allowed for him to interfere in Cha Seohu’s problems, too.
“...Okay.”
Eun Woojeong’s gaze turned to his biological mother.
Maybe because she was already so drained, and on top of Kwon Seoyul’s debuff and Cha Sahyeon’s shadow skill hitting her, she still couldn’t steady herself and remained collapsed.
His mother, with a ruined face, breathing harshly as she glared at him.
Those eyes he saw every time he looked in the mirror—eyes identical to his—were filled with hatred so thick it was ugly.
It was so disgusting. Just looking at her made his hands tighten on their own.
He wanted to rush at her again right now and grab her throat. It was something he’d wanted for a very long time, ever since childhood, when he lived under that woman’s abuse.
But... yeah. Cha Seohu was right.
If he hadn’t survived until now with Cha Seohu’s help, it was revenge he never would’ve been able to achieve anyway. In other words, it was a result that had never been in his hands from the beginning.
Nothing was uglier than trying to grasp what you never obtained. Just like that woman.
“Cha Seohu, let’s do it your way. I’m saying I’ll give up.”
When Eun Woojeong declared his surrender, Cha Seohu lifted one eyebrow.
Cha Seohu stared straight through him for a moment as if trying to determine whether he meant it, then released the hand holding his chin.
“Guildmaster.”
Cha Seohu turned away from Eun Woojeong and called Kwon Taehyuk.
Kwon Taehyuk, who had been watching the two of them with a complicated expression, nodded. Just in case, he didn’t lower his weapon as he moved toward the woman slumped on the floor.
A face that resembled Eun Woojeong. Long, dull silver hair sprawled messily across the ground.
Cha Seohu’s mind turned cold as he looked at her.
‘There’s a lot we need to find out.’
If he thought back to what she’d said earlier, it sounded like she hadn’t killed Eun Woojeong and instead sat him in the new Spiderweb head position because of someone’s “order.”
Judging by the attitude she’d shown, she probably hadn’t even raised Eun Woojeong properly, but she’d considered killing him too?
‘Even though there are family relationships in this world worse than strangers.’
Eun Woojeong and that woman were no longer mother and son. They were simply a relationship where the only way one could live was by killing the other.
Cha Seohu, an orphan who had lived in the district, found it hard to understand how those two felt, but stopping Eun Woojeong hadn’t been only for sentimental reasons.
Who was “that person” she mentioned? And where was the source of the energy contained in the ring she’d passed down to Eun Woojeong?
‘If Spiderweb and those cult bastards really are connected....’
The cult had probably extracted a mountain of information through that woman, who was practically no different from Spiderweb’s true head. And they would have used that to do all kinds of things.
He couldn’t gauge how long the two organizations had been cooperating.
‘...I knew it, but still. The Catastrophe really wasn’t something that was born overnight.’
Since when had they been moving this deliberately, this systematically?
Was all of this part of the board that the one called the Cult Leader had set up?
There was too much to learn. And to learn all of it, that woman absolutely had to live.
Cha Seohu spoke to Kwon Taehyuk, who was approaching the woman slowly without relaxing his guard.
“First, let’s find a way to lift the order to kill us. Then we get out of here with her—”
Before Cha Seohu could finish, a sharp burst of laughter exploded.
“Get out?”
The owner of that laughter was Eun Woojeong’s biological mother, who had been slumped there helplessly.
“You dare say you’ll get out of here?”
Her dry skin folded and split grotesquely around lips stretched into an unnaturally wide grin.
Her hair, which had been hanging limp, floated back up into the air. At that sight, Kwon Taehyuk stopped short and moved to shield the others.
The woman staggered up, bracing herself against the wall, and her gaze turned to Eun Woojeong again.
“You.”
Pointing at the emotionless Eun Woojeong with a dried-out finger, the woman let out a cackling laugh.
“You’ll regret not killing me.”
“You were always like that. Disgusting brat, filth, the worst mistake of my life. I curse your existence, and I curse my past for giving birth to you.”
Cha Seohu frowned, about to ask Cha Sahyeon to restrain her, and that was when it happened.
In an instant, a syringe appeared in the woman’s hand. It was an item that had been in her inventory.
The syringe was coated in pitch black, so you couldn’t see what kind of liquid was inside at all.
“You’ll regret it. Regret, regret, you’ll regret it. Regret not snapping my neck earlier.”
Muttering, the woman grabbed the syringe without a shred of hesitation. Then she viciously drove the needle into her own neck and injected every last drop of the liquid inside.
“What—!”
At that horrifying sight, Kwon Taehyuk flinched, but he couldn’t bring himself to get any closer because of the hair writhing limply.
Clang!
The syringe, now emptied of all drug, turned like glass and shattered the instant it hit the floor. Then it turned to powder and scattered.
“Ugh, ngh, kgh, ah, agh!”
The woman twisted her body and let out a stifled scream.
She clawed at the spot on her neck where the syringe had been stabbed in with both hands, then collapsed to the floor and thrashed, her limbs stiffened rigid.
“What the fuck.”
In a situation no one had predicted, even Kwon Seoyul, who had been watching from behind, frowned as if unsettled.
“Cha Sahyeon!”
He couldn’t just watch anymore. Cha Seohu called Cha Sahyeon in a sharp voice.
He didn’t know what that drug was, but they had to restrain that woman immediately, and do whatever it took—treat her, anything—to keep her alive.
Hearing Cha Seohu’s shout, Cha Sahyeon moved at once. Shadow tentacles surged up from beneath his feet and shot toward the woman in an instant.
But the shadow couldn’t reach her and was blocked. More precisely, it was swatted away by the woman’s hair.
Cha Sahyeon’s eyes wavered briefly. Then he narrowed them.
“...Her energy feels similar to mine.”
Cha Sahyeon moved his shadow again. But this time as well, it couldn’t pierce the woman’s hair.
Even as that happened, the energy coming off the woman grew thicker and thicker. Past a rampage, power far stronger than the energy she originally possessed burst [N O V E L I G H T] out of her body in wild, uncontrolled surges.
Her hair whipped around chaotically in that uncontainable energy. The once-white hair gradually darkened into a deep green, and a strong poisonous stench began to spread.
Tsk. Clicking his tongue, Cha Sahyeon quickly raised a wall of shadow from the floor to block the poison spreading out.

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