Soo-Yeon called back at 6:14 AM, which meant she'd been working through the night. Her voice carried the particular crispness of someone running on caffeine and institutional fury — sharper than usual, the clinical veneer thinner over whatever was underneath.
"I have reviewed the photographs you sent. The facility's condition represents an immediate public safety concern. Forty-plus containers with actively degrading wards is a potential mass-casualty scenario. This cannot be ignored."
"So report it."
"I have. Through channels that bypass Assistant Director Cho's direct oversight." A pause — the sound of keys clicking. "At 4:30 AM, I submitted a Facility Safety Assessment Request to the HA's Infrastructure Division, citing a routine review of legacy curse-storage sites prompted by the recent increase in curse-related incidents. The request was filed under regulatory protocol 12-B, which requires Infrastructure Division to conduct an independent audit regardless of divisional jurisdiction. Cho cannot block it without creating a paper trail that implicates his authority over a facility he is not supposed to know exists."
"You filed a routine safety audit at four in the morning."
"Diligent employees occasionally work irregular hours. The timestamp is unusual but not suspicious." She paused again. "The audit team will reach the Incheon facility within seventy-two hours. However, there is a complication."
"Yeah?"
"The request automatically notifies all senior staff with legacy clearance for curse-storage oversight. Assistant Director Cho Min-Seok holds legacy clearance. He will be notified."
"So he'll know someone's poking at his graveyard."
"Correct. And his likely response will be to ensure that anything connecting him to the facility's operational history is removed before the audit team arrives. I have taken the liberty of securing external backups of the photographs and report scans you provided. But the physical records in the facility itself—"
"He'll destroy them."
"It has been my experience that institutional actors facing exposure tend to prioritize evidence management. Yes."
Three days. Cho had three days to sanitize the facility before the audit team showed up. Which meant the physical copies of the supplementary report — the one with Baek's handwritten notes, the one documenting Cho's denials — would be gone by the time anyone official walked through that door.
Zeke had photographs. Photographs could be questioned, challenged, dismissed as fabrications. The originals were another matter.
"I'll go back," he said. "Tonight. Pull the originals before Cho's people get there."
"That would constitute unauthorized removal of Hunter Association property." Soo-Yeon's voice carried zero inflection. "I could not condone such an action in my official capacity."
"I know."
"I have a meeting at 9 AM. I will be unreachable until 10:30."
"Understood."
She hung up. The message was clear: do it while I can't officially know you're doing it.
---
Tanaka's lab. 2 PM.
The detector sat on her folding table — a jury-rigged assembly of resonance monitors, frequency isolators, and what appeared to be a repurposed radio antenna held together with electrical tape and ambition. It looked like something a particularly gifted child might build for a science fair. It hummed.
"It's not pretty," Tanaka said, preemptively defending her creation before Zeke could comment. "The frequency isolation requires extremely precise calibration and the commercially available resonance monitors don't have the bandwidth to capture the wielder's signature without modification so I had to strip the filtering hardware from three units and recombine them into a single receiver array which is why it looks like — well."
"Like a bomb built by an optimist."
She almost laughed. Caught it. Redirected into a hum. "The detection range is limited. Approximately two hundred meters in open air, less in urban environments with high ambient curse-energy noise. Seoul's background curse radiation is — hmm." She checked her tablet. "Higher than I expected. There's a lot of residual energy in this city."
"Lot of curses in Seoul's history."
"Exactly. Which means we'll need to be relatively close to a target curse to get a clear reading. But." She held up a finger. Tapped the detector. The humming changed pitch — lower, steadier, a pulse rather than a tone. "I calibrated using the consumption data from your Gangnam, Hwaseong, and Daejeon sessions. The wielder's craft frequency is isolated and locked. If there's an active Han Seung-Woo curse within range, this will find it."
"You're sure it's his frequency."
"The frequency consistency across all samples was 99.97% correlated. The odds of another wielder independently producing the same signature are — well, I'm not going to say impossible because that word has no place in curse research, but it would require a level of coincidence that I'm not prepared to entertain."
Zeke looked at the detector. The humming filled the small lab, a steady mechanical heartbeat keeping time with something invisible. "Let's test it."
Tanaka attached the detector to a portable power unit and clipped it to a shoulder strap. They took the elevator to the ground floor, walked out the main entrance of the HA building, and stood on the sidewalk in Yongsan like two people who'd taken a wrong turn out of a science fiction movie.
The detector hummed. Tanaka watched the readout on her tablet, which displayed a graph of frequency signatures detected in the surrounding area.
"Background noise," she narrated. "Standard urban curse residue. Old hexes, dissipated curses, ambient awakened energy. Nothing matching the target frequency within — wait." She stopped walking. "That's not right."
Zeke watched her face. The transition from casual monitoring to intense focus happened in under a second — her eyes narrowed, her humming stopped, her fingers moved across the tablet with the precision of a surgeon.
"I'm picking up a faint signal. Very faint — at the extreme edge of detection range, approximately one hundred and seventy meters, direction..." She rotated slowly, tracking the signal strength. "Northeast. The signal is consistent with Han Seung-Woo's craft frequency. Confidence level: 94.2%."
Ninety-four percent. Northeast. Something made by the wielder was within two hundred meters of the Hunter Association headquarters.
"It's not on infrastructure," Tanaka said, reading the signal characteristics. "The frequency modulation pattern is different from the infrastructure curses. This is — I'm comparing against the Hwaseong data, the curse placed on Agent Baek — yes. This pattern is consistent with a personal curse. A curse placed on a specific individual."
*We told you*, the Collective said. *The maker is not finished with his list. He is patient. He placed the curse and waited. A seed in soil, waiting for the right season to bloom.*
One of the remaining Suppression Unit members was walking around Seoul with a Han Seung-Woo curse inside them. Active. Dormant. Waiting.
"Can you track it?" Zeke asked.
"The signal is too faint for precise location at this range. We'd need to get closer. Within fifty meters, I could triangulate the exact source." She looked up from the tablet. "Do we know where the surviving Unit members are?"
"Soo-Yeon has them under surveillance. Six remaining. Addresses on file."
"Then we need to visit each one. The detector will identify which of them is carrying the curse." She paused. "Or — May I suggest an alternative? If you're within proximity to the cursed individual, could you sense the wielder's energy directly? Through your... accumulated sensitivity?"
*She is asking if we can help*, the Collective said, and its tone carried something adjacent to amusement. *Yes, little eater. We can. We know the maker's flavor now. His grief. His craftsmanship. His particular shade of righteous fury. If you bring us close enough, we will tell you which of these old soldiers carries his mark. We are very good at recognizing family.*
"Yeah," Zeke said to both of them simultaneously. "I can sense it. But I'd need to be in the same room."
Tanaka nodded. "Then we combine approaches. The detector narrows it down. Your... internal assessment confirms." She clipped the detector to her shoulder strap and straightened her inside-out sweater. "When do we start?"
"Now."
---
The six surviving Suppression Unit members lived scattered across greater Seoul and its satellite cities. Soo-Yeon provided addresses through the unofficial channel — a secure messaging app that she used exclusively for communications that, as she phrased it, "exist outside the scope of current operational directives." Zeke suspected she'd set up the app specifically for this investigation. The woman planned six moves ahead.
Three of the six were in Seoul proper. The others in Suwon, Seongnam, and Goyang. Zeke and Tanaka started with the closest.
Yoon Sang-Chul, age fifty-seven. Last known address: Songpa-gu, eastern Seoul. Former B-rank awakened, now running a hardware store in a commercial district that smelled like wood shavings and paint thinner. He was behind the counter when they walked in — a lean man with the rigid posture of someone who'd never fully left the military, even seventeen years after retirement.
Tanaka held the detector at her side, tablet angled away from the shopkeeper's view. She shook her head after thirty seconds. No signal.
Zeke shook Yoon's hand anyway, briefly, feeling for the frequency the Collective would recognize. Nothing. Clean.
"Thanks. Wrong store," Zeke said, and they left.
Number two: Shin Hye-Jin, age sixty-one. Mapo-gu. Retired, lived alone in an apartment above a dry cleaner's. She opened the door with the chain still attached and peered at them through the gap with the suspicion of a woman who'd spent her career in curse suppression and knew what danger looked like when it knocked.
"Who are you?"
"Curse Division. Routine check-in for former Suppression Unit personnel." Zeke held up his ID. The lie tasted like nothing, which was appropriate given his current relationship with taste.
Shin studied the ID. Studied Zeke. Her eyes lingered on his neck. "Your marks are extensive."
"Yeah, I eat a lot."
She didn't smile. She closed the door, unchained it, and let them in.
Her apartment was small and aggressively organized — everything in its place, surfaces clean, a bookshelf arranged by color. Military discipline applied to domestic life. Tanaka did her sweep while Zeke made small talk about the dry cleaner's and whether the noise was bad and other things that mattered to people who lived above dry cleaners.
No signal. Zeke shook her hand at the door. Clean.
*Patience*, the Collective murmured. *The maker's curse is here. We can feel it getting stronger with every block we travel north.*
North. They were heading north through Seoul, and the Collective was picking up what the detector was too distant to resolve.
Number three: Park Kyung-Soo, age fifty-five. Jongno-gu. Still active in the awakened community — ran a private security consultancy that contracted with corporate clients for curse-protection services. He had an office on the third floor of a building in the business district, with glass walls and a receptionist who offered them water.
Tanaka walked through the glass door and stopped.
The detector emitted a tone it hadn't made before — a clean, steady pulse that matched exactly the craft frequency she'd calibrated against. She looked at Zeke. Her face said everything her mouth didn't.
Park Kyung-Soo emerged from his office: broad, fit for his age, silver-haired, wearing a suit that cost more than Zeke's rent. A man who'd turned his Suppression Unit experience into a profitable second career. He smiled. White teeth. Firm handshake.
The moment Zeke's skin touched his, the Collective screamed.
Not words. A sound — a chord of recognition so violent that Zeke's vision whited out for a quarter second. His curse marks burned, the patterns on his hands flaring hot where they pressed against Park's palm. He dropped the handshake faster than politeness allowed.
*There. THERE. The maker's curse, buried deep, dormant, dormant, dormant but not for long. It is woven into his bones. It has been there for weeks. It is waiting for a signal — a trigger, an activation, a command from its creator. When it wakes, little eater — when it wakes, this man will learn what a Wasting Curse feels like from the inside.*
A Wasting Curse. The same type that had killed Yuna. Han Seung-Woo had placed the exact same curse on Park Kyung-Soo that the Suppression Unit had failed to contain in his daughter. Poetic. Precise. Personal.
"Something wrong?" Park said, watching Zeke's face.
"Low blood sugar. Sorry." Zeke put his hands in his pockets to hide the trembling. "Routine visit. Division's checking in on former Unit personnel after the recent curse incidents. Standard protocol."
"Of course. Happy to cooperate." Park's smile didn't reach his eyes. He'd survived twelve years of curse suppression and seventeen years of private security. He knew when something wasn't routine. But he couldn't see the dormant curse inside his own body, and Zeke wasn't about to tell him — not here, not without a plan.
They left. On the sidewalk, Tanaka grabbed his arm.
"The signal was definitive. The curse is dormant but structurally complete — it's ready to activate. Based on the resonance patterns, I'd estimate the activation trigger is external. The wielder has to initiate it remotely."
"Which means we have until Seung-Woo decides it's time."
"Do we know his timeline?"
"He's been escalating. The infrastructure curses were weeks apart. Baek was targeted before Daejeon. Now Park is carrying a dormant curse that's been in him for weeks already." Zeke's hands were still in his pockets. Still shaking. "He's getting close. The infrastructure tests are done. He's moving to the real targets."
"We should remove the curse. You could consume it before—"
"Look, if I eat a dormant curse from a guy who doesn't know he's cursed, in his office, in front of his receptionist..." Zeke thought about Eun-Ji's mother. The backing away. The *please.* "It needs to be controlled. Medical setting. Explanation. Consent."
"And if the wielder activates the curse before we can arrange that?"
The question hung between them. Tanaka's detector hummed against her side. The Songpa-gu street noise — cars, pedestrians, the distant pulse of a city that didn't know one of its residents was carrying a time bomb in his skeleton — filled the gap.
"Then I eat it fast and deal with the consequences."
---
Back at the lab. 7 PM. Tanaka was running analysis on the dormant curse data while Zeke sat in the examination chair and tried not to think about all the things that could go wrong in the next seventy-two hours.
Cho's cleanup of the Incheon facility.
Park's dormant curse activation.
The wielder's next move.
The six Suppression Unit members, each one a potential target.
The Collective, growing more helpful and more coherent with every conversation, offering assistance that came with costs he couldn't calculate.
Tanaka broke the silence. "Have you eaten today?"
The question was casual. Medical. The kind of thing a monitoring researcher asks a subject to ensure accurate biometric baselines.
"Yeah. Convenience store stuff."
"Was it good?"
Zeke looked at his coffee.
"It was fine."
Tanaka looked at him. Put down her tablet. Stood up, walked to the coffee maker she'd brought from home, and started brewing a cup. The smell — rich, dark, the particular roasted-earth aroma of decent coffee made with care — filled the lab.
She poured a cup and set it in front of him.
"What does it taste like?"
Zeke looked at the coffee. Picked it up. Drank. Warmth. Bitterness, faint and far away, like hearing music from a passing car. The ghost of coffee. The idea of coffee, without the experience.
"It's good," he said.
Tanaka sat back down. She didn't push. Didn't ask the follow-up question that both of them knew she wanted to ask. Instead, she pulled up the dormant curse data on her display and said, "I'm going to develop an extraction protocol for the Park curse. If we're going to consume it in a controlled setting, we should optimize the approach based on the wielder's structural patterns. May I use your previous consumption data to model the most efficient extraction sequence?"
"Yeah. Whatever you need."
She started working. Humming. The coffee maker gurgled its last drops into the pot. Zeke held his cup — warm ceramic against curse-marked fingers — and drank something that tasted like memory.
His phone buzzed. Soo-Yeon.
**Development. Cho Min-Seok has requested an emergency meeting with the HA Director regarding "legacy storage facility decommissioning." Meeting scheduled for tomorrow, 8 AM. He is moving to shut down the Incheon facility before the audit.**
Then, thirty seconds later:
**Additionally. Agent Lee Jun-Sik has reported that the autopsy on Kwon Tae-Hyun is complete. Cause of death revised: curse-induced cardiac arrest. Residual curse signature detected in cardiac tissue, previously masked by decomposition. The signature matches Han Seung-Woo's craft frequency with 98.6% confidence.**
Kwon hadn't died of natural causes. He'd been murdered by a curse that mimicked a heart attack. The wielder had already killed one member of the Unit and planted a dormant curse in another.
Zeke set down the coffee. The warmth lingered on his palms.
"Doc."
"Hmm?"
"How long would it take to scale up the detector? Build more units. Enough to cover multiple locations simultaneously."
She stopped humming. Turned around. "Why?"
"Because I think Han Seung-Woo has cursed more than just Park. I think he's been placing dormant curses in all of them — every surviving Unit member, one by one, over weeks or months. We only detected Park because we happened to walk into his office. The others could be carrying the same thing."
Tanaka's face went through a rapid series of calculations — not emotional, mathematical. Build time, component availability, calibration requirements, detection range, target count.
"I could build three more units in forty-eight hours. Maybe four if I skip sleep, which I've done before and my work quality doesn't degrade until hour thirty-six approximately."
"Build them."
She was already moving toward her equipment shelves, pulling components, her mouth running on autopilot — "I'm going to need the resonance isolators from the backup monitors and the antenna configuration will have to be simplified for rapid deployment but that reduces range to approximately one hundred and twenty meters which means—"
Zeke left her to it. In the hallway, he pulled up the secure messaging app and typed:
**Soo-Yeon. Going back to Incheon tonight for the originals. Also: I think all six remaining Unit members may be carrying dormant curses. We need to move fast. The wielder's already killed Kwon. Park is next. And I don't think Park is the last.**
The response came in eleven seconds.
**I see. I will arrange discreet medical evaluations for all six members under the pretext of a post-incident health screening. This provides cover for proximity scans with Dr. Tanaka's equipment. Timeline: I can have appointments scheduled within thirty-six hours.**
Thirty-six hours. Cho's meeting with the Director was in fourteen. The Incheon facility's evidence could be gone by morning.
Zeke took the elevator to the parking level and found Hwang — the young Daejeon liaison agent, who'd been temporarily assigned to Seoul after the bus crisis and was currently the only Curse Division agent who took orders from Zeke without asking why.
"Hwang. I need a car and four hours. No questions."
Agent Hwang looked at him. Looked at the elevator. Looked back at Zeke.
"Keys are in the second vehicle on the left," he said, and went back to his phone.
Zeke drove toward Incheon in a borrowed government car with the windows down and the radio off. The night air tasted like nothing. The Collective hummed in harmony with the engine.
*The pieces are moving, little eater. The maker. The old general. You. We move with all of you, and we are very curious how this ends.*
Somewhere in Seoul, a man named Park Kyung-Soo slept with a curse woven into his bones, dreaming whatever dreams a man dreams when he doesn't know he's already been sentenced.
