Crash!
Shards of stained glass rained down like snow.
Beyond them, familiar assassins of the Geomgye came into view.
As the scene unfolded in slow motion, Amon quickly analyzed the battlefield.
‘They’re throwing swords.’
The probability that the Geomgye had observed Amon’s sparring with their leader and mastered sword techniques?
Not low.
‘But pulling it off in just a week?’ Impossible.
There was only one possible explanation.
‘Chumon must have been hacked.’
It was unlikely that the Chumon Group had been easily overpowered like the Geomgye.
If that had happened, the crown prince would have contacted them.
Instead, it seemed that the techniques Amon had unknowingly recorded had been leaked and downloaded by the Geomgye.
‘At least I only recorded the basics.’
Thanks to that, aside from the fundamental long-range skill of sword-throwing, they didn’t seem to have acquired anything noteworthy.
Techniques like redirecting a thrown sword mid-air, or feinting by catching a tossed blade to swing it—those were absent.
Instead, they awkwardly inserted sword-throwing into their existing techniques.
‘It looks like they just forced together everything that seemed impressive.’
It was a common mistake among beginners in games—
Equipping every legendary item, every essence, and every trait they could get their hands on, thinking it made them top-tier.
But in reality, all the pieces clashed.
‘In the end, it’s no different from just having one strong piece of equipment.’
What mattered was synergy, not the rarity of gear or essence.
‘If rarity was that important, why didn’t I upgrade Sky Step to legendary?’
With over 10,000 hours of playtime, he had long since realized that greed was the shortest path to creating a useless character.
And yet, the super AI, unable to let go of anything, suddenly felt a little endearing to Amon.
‘Does it lack battle experience? Or does it simply not understand humans?’
Either way, it didn’t matter.
For Amon, it made things much easier.
“Sonia. We’re going with Plan A. Just watch out for the sword throws.”
Having finished his analysis, Amon called out to Sonia.
She nodded and pulled the trigger toward the cathedral window.
Crash!
“Father, come with us!”
Grabbing the narrow-eyed priest by the wrist, she flung him out the shattered window and jumped after him.
“Ugh!”
The sorrowful scream of a middle-aged man rang from outside, but no one paid it any attention.
Some of the Geomgye warriors rushed toward Sonia and the priest as they escaped.
But Cassie wasn’t about to let that slide.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
Thwang!
The spear she kicked into the air embedded itself right in front of the warriors.
Caught off guard, one of them slammed face-first into the spear shaft and tumbled backward in a ridiculous fashion.
Cassie recalled her spear to her hand.
The AI tried to hack into her weapon, but—
“I’m used to that trick now.”
She simply shut off the power to her spear and kicked it again.
The spear shot forward like an arrow, impaling a Geomgye warrior’s shoulder.
Cassie glanced at Amon.
“That won’t kill them, right?”
“The Geomgye are tough. Don’t hold back.”
As he spoke, Amon slashed below a warrior’s knees.
Both the legless warrior and the one with a pierced shoulder sparked where their wounds should have bled.
Amon and Cassie rushed toward the two warriors, taking advantage of their vulnerability.
At that moment, Amon recalled a conversation with his hacker younger sister, Levi.
***
A few days prior.
Amon and his Netwalker siblings had been tracking the AI’s traces.
That day, Levi, the hacker among the three, suddenly declared surrender.
“I can find it, but I can’t catch it.”
“Explain in detail.”
According to her, for an AI, the network was no different from the ocean for a fish.
“Remember when you erased Laplace’s Demon? We had to use a paradox attack before we could take it down.”
“Uh… paradox attack?”
“It’s an algorithm that forces an AI to deny its own existence, causing a logic error.”
“Oh, got it.”
She had dumbed it down for Amon’s sake, but in reality, he only barely understood.
Still, if he kept asking for explanations, they’d never move forward, so he decided to just roll with it.
“Anyway, AIs can just move to another system. A paradox attack only works if you isolate it in a single body or computer.”
“Then what should we do? Cassie’s ability isn’t going to work this time…”
The three Netwalker siblings and Cassie all turned to look at Amon.
‘Ah. He totally doesn’t get it.’
Cassie’s ability had worked before because the enemy AI had relied on future prediction.
But this AI had nothing to do with precognition, so while her red threads might confuse it, they wouldn’t cause an identity crisis.
In other words, Amon’s statement just proved that he had no clue what was going on.
A wave of slightly sympathetic, warm gazes landed on him.
Feeling a strange sense of embarrassment, Amon quickly corrected himself.
“So, what do I need to do?”
Levi, as if she had been waiting, laid out the plan.
“First, I’ll track down the AI and make it expose itself.”
Like putting a bell on a cat, she would attach a tag to the AI, allowing them to track it no matter where it moved.
Once they confirmed its main body’s location, they had to lure it into a trap.
“You incapacitated the Geomgye warriors with blunt weapons last time, right?”
“Yeah.”
“This time, instead of that, inject them with this virus.”
According to her analogy, if the AI was a vast forest, the warriors it controlled were the trees on the outskirts.
“If you set fire to the outer edges, the AI will have no choice but to retreat toward the center to escape the flames.”
By surrounding the forest with fire, they would force the AI into isolation.
“As we keep infecting them, it’ll either end up completely surrounded or trapped in the core by itself.”
The virus was designed for this very purpose.
It contained the very paradox attacks that the AI feared the most.
As Amon examined the virus, he tilted his head.
“How did you prepare this? Do you even know what kind of AI it is?”
“Nope. I just crammed in every possible paradox that could mess with an AI.”
“Oh.”
‘Like, “I didn’t know what you’d like, so I got everything.”‘
Amon nodded and took the virus, ready to set fire to the AI’s forest of information.
From there, they formulated their strategy.
First, Levi would locate the AI and deliberately let it detect her.
Until then, the AI would underestimate her.
“Even if I try my best to mask my IP, the AI will just trace me back anyway.”
Once found, the AI would deploy its most convenient pawns—the Geomgye warriors—to the cathedral.
“Meanwhile, my brother and I, along with the prince, will head straight for the palace. Amon, you just keep infecting them with the virus.”
As Amon continued uploading the virus, by the time Levi’s group reached the palace, the AI would be completely trapped.
Then, she would use the ‘tag’ she had planted to pinpoint the AI’s core and present it as evidence of the crown prince’s assassination attempt.
“What do you think? Easy, right?”
Levi smiled brightly.
The prince, seeing her cheerful expression, clutched his chest without realizing it.
Meanwhile, her two older brothers’ expressions contorted in real-time.
However, in this somewhat lively (?) atmosphere, Amon raised his hand with a face that showed he had something on his mind.
“That won’t be easy.”
“Huh?”
“It looks like you don’t know.”
Amon told Levi something she was unaware of—when they escaped with the current prince through the forest, an unusually large number of ghosts had been drawn to them.
“I don’t know if it’s a trick from the other side or something about His Highness’s constitution, but on your way to the palace, the ones chasing you won’t just be people.”
“What? But I haven’t felt anything like that these past few days.”
“This is a cathedral. And the priest here is keeping everything at bay.”
When Amon pointed at the squinting priest, he puffed out his chest with a smug expression, much like Sonia often did.
But ghosts weren’t the only problem.
“The demons haven’t even shown themselves yet. And the Saljugye faction? They’re still around too.”
Amon never assumed demons wouldn’t exist in Joseon.
After all, the ones who stole the AI from the Vatican were demons—there was no way they wouldn’t be here.
The same went for the Saljugye faction.
They wouldn’t just give up after one failure.
It had been an assassination attempt on the crown prince.
No matter how incompetent a terrorist group might be, there was no way they’d be satisfied with just one failed attempt.
When Amon brought up the two factions that had yet to reveal themselves, Levi’s face turned pale.
Not out of fear, but—
“Ugh… I need sugar…”
Her brain had run out of fuel from the unfamiliar mental exertion.
“I’m a hacker, not a strategist…”
With the situation becoming more complicated by the addition of two factions, she immediately surrendered.
Seeing the opportunity, Lee Hyun handed her some chocolate.
Unfortunately for him, what increased wasn’t his romantic appeal, but Levi’s trust in him as a friend.
“Thank you, Your Highness!”
But when she smiled so brightly at him, the prince completely misread the situation and turned away, clenching his fists in determination.
From a third party’s perspective, it was a frustrating sight to witness.
Amon, losing interest in the small-scale love drama unfolding between the younger ones, returned to strategizing.
“I won’t change much from Levi’s original plan. The key point is still isolating the AI. The problem is the demons, the Saljugye faction, and the ghosts…”
Amon handed over the command to Cassie.
He was capable of forming a strategy, but he wasn’t on Cassie’s level.
Cassie quickly devised the plan.
“We’ll prepare up to Plan C. Depending on the enemies that come to the church, the strategy will change in real-time, so make sure to memorize it well.”
***
Back to the present.
Following the plan, Amon and Cassie uploaded a virus into some of the fallen Gyeomgye warriors.
As they worked, Sonia’s message arrived.
[I’ve reached the operation point.]
“How’s Levi’s side?”
[As expected, ghosts are following them.]
From the rooftop of a building away from the cathedral, Sonia was setting up her sniper position as she spoke.
Amon checked on the unmanned units in the cathedral once more and shared the information.
“It’s just the Gyeomgye warriors here.”
[Then we’ll proceed with Plan A as is.]
“Roger. From now on, cutting comms. Operation command transfers to Sonia.”
Amon ended the transmission and exchanged glances with Cassie.
Cassie nodded and ran down to the cathedral’s basement.
Amon remained at the entrance, standing guard as if to protect the basement, facing off against the Gyeomgye warriors.
As the AI controlling the Gyeomgye warriors grew wary of their intentions, the ground suddenly trembled violently.
“?”
The controlled warriors hesitated, reflecting the AI’s unease.
Moments later, a massive electromagnetic pulse (EMP) was released from the cathedral’s basement.
The pulse swept through all the Gyeomgye warriors stationed around the cathedral.
The AI, still inside them, realized what had happened.
‘Damn it!’
Its algorithms began rapidly generating protocols for this unexpected scenario.
Of course, Pip, being a bio-organic entity, was unaffected by the EMP.
However, in high-level combat, an EMP was practically a suicide bomb.
Anyone with significant skill had undergone implant procedures by default.
In other words, Amon and Cassie—who had no implants—suffered no losses, while the enemy’s high-level combatants were severely weakened.
Reflecting the AI’s distress, the Gyeomgye warriors momentarily froze.
Amon, knowing the AI was on the other side, smirked.
“Did you really think we’d fight fair and square?”
While Amon and Cassie continued their one-sided battle against the EMP-disabled Gyeomgye warriors, the pulse also disrupted Amon’s communications, fully transferring field command to Sonia.
***
A royal high-rise in Hanyang.
Sonia had a clear view of the black van and the pair of bikes speeding through the city with ghosts hot on their trail.
She spoke over the comms.
“I’ll cover you with sniper fire. Just keep going straight.”
She aimed her machine gun at the pursuing ghosts.
Without a scope, she relied solely on mechanical sights.
She pulled the trigger.
Bang!
A high-caliber bullet pierced through a ghost’s head just before it could reach Seonu’s bike.
[Fides, Signum, Exilium]
The three words engraved on the bullet cleansed the ghost instantly.
Before she could even feel satisfaction over her long-range shot, she fired again.
Tat-tat-tat!
Casing after casing fell from the rooftop as Sonia sniped ghosts with her machine gun.
Beside her, the squinting priest was continuously blessing the ammo belt in real-time.
Though the gun was a machine gun and its rate of fire was much too fast to be called “sniping,” Sonia insisted on calling it that, given her precision.
[Nice shot. That was impressive marksmanship.]
Seonu praised her over the radio.
“Isn’t sniping supposed to be about shooting from a hidden position regardless of distance…?”
The squinting priest muttered beside her, but his words were drowned out by the gunfire.
Sonia continued providing cover.
She rained down bullets without recoil, occasionally swapping out her gun when it overheated.
As she fired, she found it strange how persistently the ghosts were chasing the prince.
Just as she was wondering about it, the squinting priest called out to her.
“Sonia, I think we have company.”
She stopped shooting and turned around.
Men in black suits were steadily making their way onto the rooftop.
Each of them had features that weren’t quite human—horn-like protrusions on their heads.
She immediately spoke over the radio.
“Plan A is over. Switching to Plan B. Levi, you’re in command now.”
She ended the transmission and detached her machine gun from the mount.
The suited figures began shedding their human disguises, transforming into beast-like creatures.
Watching them, the squinting priest hesitantly tapped Sonia’s shoulder.
“Uh… Sonia? Where am I supposed to go?”
“Cassie already told you. If a fight breaks out on the rooftop, you…”
She trailed off.
“…should immediately get down.”
“But the Goetia guys are blocking the way down?”
“That’s why Cassie prepared this too.”
She nudged the parachute bag the priest was carrying.
The squinting priest checked the height of the skyscraper they were on and turned pale.
“I was never informed about this!”
“Then why are you wearing it?”
“I thought it was an ammo belt bag!”
“Oh dear, what a misunderstanding. That was actually a parachute bag just for you, Father.”
“I’ve never trained for this!”
“In this day and age? It’s an automatic deployment bag, so don’t worry.”
“But… my daughter…?”
“You won’t get hurt. Cassie said there’s no future where you get injured.”
“That is not reassuring at all!”
“Less talking, more jumping! Unless you’d rather get shot up here?”
Just as she had done at the cathedral, Sonia shoved the squinting priest off the rooftop.
He flailed helplessly as he fell.
“AAAAAHHHH!!!”
The sorrowful scream of a middle-aged man was swallowed by the winter winds of Hanyang.
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