Chapter 85: The Monster They Needed

The protest in Guro-dong was smaller than the one in Gangnam. Maybe five hundred people, gathered in the open plaza in front of the Guro-gu district office, holding signs and chanting slogans that the March wind tore apart before they reached the building's facade.

Jin shouldn't have been there.

The decision to go was born from the specific combination of restlessness, tactical desperation, and the particular arrogance of a man who'd been told his face was worth five hundred million won and wanted to prove that a bounty couldn't cage him. Sung-joon had argued against it. Min-ji had argued against it. Won-shik had simply said "bad idea" in the tone that forty years of construction work had calibrated to mean *this thing you're about to do will collapse on you.*

Jin went anyway. Alone. Wearing a cap pulled low and a mask over the lower half of his face—standard Seoul attire that drew no attention, especially during protest season when half the city covered their faces for one reason or another.

He told himself it was reconnaissance. That he needed to see the movement in person, gauge its strength, identify opportunities for the Forgotten to connect with sympathetic organizations. Strategic. Calculated.

He told himself that, and the telling was a kind of lie that he was getting too good at.

What he actually wanted was to see ordinary people standing in a public space and saying that defectives deserved to live. He wanted to hear strangers argue for his right to exist. He wanted proof that the public sympathy Sung-joon tracked on his tablet was real—that somewhere outside the tunnels and safe houses and locked meeting rooms, actual humans with actual lives were willing to stand in the cold and say *this is wrong.*

He found his proof. He also found trouble. But the proof came first, and for twenty minutes it was enough.

---

The crowd was mixed in a way that surprised him. Not just young activists and defective rights advocates—there were middle-aged office workers in winter coats, elderly women carrying handwritten signs, a cluster of high school students in uniforms who'd apparently walked out of class. A man in a delivery driver's jacket stood at the edge of the crowd, alternating between checking his phone and shouting along with the chants.

The signs reflected the same fracture lines that the online discourse had exposed:

**PROJECT SHEPHERD IS MURDER.**

**MY SON IS LEVEL 2. HE IS NOT A THREAT.**

**REGISTRATION = CONCENTRATION.**

**DEFECTIVES ARE THE CANARY IN THE MINE. IF THEY COME FOR THEM, WE'RE NEXT.**

That last one caught Jin's attention. Not because of its content—the sentiment was standard slippery-slope rhetoric—but because of who was holding it. A woman who looked like she'd never awakened. No System signature. No level display. Just a civilian, standing in a crowd of civilians, holding a sign about a problem that technically wasn't hers.

Solidarity from the unawakened. Jin hadn't expected that.

He circled the plaza's perimeter, keeping to the sidewalk, head down. The police presence was light—a dozen officers at the edges, not blocking access, not engaging. The Association's security forces were absent. Either they considered the Guro-dong protest too small to bother with, or they were deployed elsewhere.

The speeches were happening on a makeshift stage—two wooden pallets and a borrowed microphone connected to a portable speaker. A young woman with short hair and fierce eyes was talking about her brother, who'd awakened with a telekinetic ability that moved objects in the wrong direction. Push became pull. His hands sent things flying toward him instead of away. The Association had classified him as defective at Level 8 and recommended "voluntary decommissioning"—a euphemism for the medical suppression of awakened abilities.

"He's in a hospital right now," the woman said, her voice cutting through the wind. "Not because he's sick. Because they're trying to make him normal. Because the ability he got—the one the System gave him—doesn't work the way they want it to. He didn't choose this. None of them chose this. And the Association's response to people who didn't choose to be different is to erase the difference."

The crowd responded. Signs raised. Voices joined. The sound built and crashed like a wave against the district office's indifferent facade.

Jin stood at the edge and watched and felt something shift in his chest that wasn't Pain Drinker's conversion and wasn't the familiar ache of his scar. Something older. Something he'd buried under sarcasm and tactical planning and the relentless forward motion that kept him from sitting still long enough to feel anything.

Hope. The specific, dangerous kind that grew in soil you'd already salted.

Then the van arrived.

---

It was unmarked. White. The kind of vehicle that could be a delivery van or a surveillance unit or an assault platform, depending on who was driving and what they were carrying. It pulled up to the plaza's east side and stopped, engine running, no one getting out.

Jin noticed it because his body noticed it—a prickle along his spine, the ghost of threat detection that wasn't an ability so much as a reflex built from months of being hunted. His inverse senses registered a weight in the air, a density of dimensional energy that shouldn't have been present on a public street.

The van doors opened.

Three hunters stepped out. Not Iron Wolves—their gear was cleaner, their bearing more disciplined. Association insignia on their jackets, visible deliberately. Level badges glowing: 72, 81, 67. E-Rank, all three. Not the highest tier, but more than enough to handle a crowd of unawakened civilians.

They walked toward the protest. Not aggressively—their hands were at their sides, their pace measured. The lead hunter, the Level 81, carried a scanner: a handheld device that could detect awakener signatures within a fifteen-meter radius.

Registration enforcement.

The 72-hour deadline was still thirty-six hours away, but apparently the Association wasn't waiting.

The crowd noticed the hunters. The chanting faltered. Signs lowered incrementally, the way flags drop when the wind dies. The woman on the stage stopped mid-sentence, her mouth open, her fierce eyes tracking the three figures as they approached.

"We're here to facilitate voluntary registration," the lead hunter announced. His voice was amplified—some kind of sound-projection ability, mild, enough to carry over the crowd noise without shouting. "Any awakened individuals present who have not registered with the Association are encouraged to do so now. Portable registration stations are available. This is a voluntary compliance opportunity."

The word "voluntary" did the heavy lifting. It was a word that meant one thing and communicated another—like "routine" before a medical procedure or "standard" before an interrogation.

The crowd stirred. People looked at each other. The unawakened civilians shifted uncomfortably—this wasn't their fight, not directly, and the presence of leveled hunters introduced a physical reality that signs and speeches hadn't prepared them for.

A man near the front—one of the older protesters, white-haired, holding a sign that read **REMEMBER GWANGJU**—stepped forward.

"This is a lawful assembly," he said. "You have no authority to conduct registration operations at a public demonstration."

"Sir, we're offering a service. No one is being compelled." The lead hunter's tone was patient, practiced, the voice of institutional authority speaking to citizen concern with the particular courtesy that concealed coercion. "If you'd like to continue your demonstration, you're welcome to do so. We're simply here for any awakened individuals who'd like to comply with the Emergency Registration Directive."

"Before the deadline? This is intimidation."

"It's proactive assistance."

The exchange was a script. Both sides knew the lines. The old man knew the hunters weren't there to help. The hunters knew the old man knew. But the performance was the point—creating a record of "voluntary compliance" that would hold up in bureaucratic review.

Jin stood at the northwest corner of the plaza, fifteen meters from the nearest hunter, and felt the specific tension of a man watching a situation deteriorate in real time while his own presence could make it worse by orders of magnitude.

He should leave. His face was behind a mask and cap, but his System signature was unmistakable—Level -23, the only negative level in existence. If the scanner swept in his direction, it would light up like a flare.

He should leave. He knew that.

He didn't leave.

Because the scanner was moving through the crowd, and the lead hunter was watching its display, and among the five hundred people in this plaza, there were awakeners. Jin couldn't sense them—the fake detection ability was fiction—but statistics demanded their presence. Five hundred people in a city where one in twenty had awakened. That was twenty-five potential targets in this crowd, and the scanner would find them, and "voluntary compliance" would stop being voluntary the moment a defective's signature registered.

The scanner beeped.

---

The girl was maybe sixteen. She'd been standing near the back of the crowd with two friends, all of them in school uniforms, all of them carrying signs they'd made with markers on cardboard. Her sign said **LEVEL 3 AND PROUD** in uneven purple letters.

The scanner found her signature. Level 3. Unregistered.

The lead hunter approached with the specific posture of a man closing distance on a target while maintaining the appearance of friendliness. "Excuse me. Are you an awakened individual?"

The girl's friends stepped back. Not far—a few centimeters—but enough. The instinctive retreat of the uninvolved.

"I—yes," the girl said. Her voice was small. The fierce conviction of her sign didn't extend to her vocal cords. "Level 3. Enhancement. My ability is—it's minor. I can—"

"You can discuss your ability at the registration station. Are you currently registered with the Association?"

"No. My parents haven't—we were going to wait until after—"

"The Emergency Directive requires all awakened individuals to register within seventy-two hours. We can help you with that right now." The hunter's hand extended, palm up. Not grabbing. Offering. The gesture of assistance that was also the gesture of authority expecting compliance. "If you'll come with me, we'll have you processed in fifteen minutes."

The girl looked at her friends. Her friends looked at the ground.

Jin watched the girl's face go through stages he recognized—the confusion, the fear, the rapid calculation of what resistance cost versus what compliance surrendered. He'd seen that calculation on Jae-min's face. On Yuri's. On his own, in mirrors, in the dark glass of subway windows, in the screen of his phone before he smashed it against a wall six months ago.

The girl was going to comply. She was sixteen and alone and the man asking was Level 81 and wearing Association insignia and the word "voluntary" had done its work.

Jin stepped forward.

He didn't decide to. His body moved before the tactical part of his brain could file the objection. The part of him that calculated risk, assessed threat levels, weighed consequences—that part was still standing at the northwest corner of the plaza, screaming *don't you dare.*

The rest of him was already walking.

He reached the girl and the hunter in six steps. Stopped between them. His body blocked the scanner's view of the girl—a physical interposition that the hunter couldn't misread.

"She doesn't have to go with you," Jin said.

The lead hunter looked at Jin. At the cap. At the mask. At the cheap jacket and the scuffed boots and the absolutely unremarkable appearance of a man who looked like every other protester in the crowd.

Then the scanner beeped again.

This time, the sound was different. Higher pitched. Sustained. The tone it used when it detected something outside its programmed parameters.

The hunter looked down at the scanner's display.

Jin saw his own level reflected in the man's eyes before the hunter said a word. The display showed what it always showed: Level -23. Negative. Impossible. A number that the device's programming couldn't classify, rendered in red text with an error symbol beside it.

The hunter's face changed. Not gradually—all at once, the way a person's expression shifts when they realize the ground under their feet is ice, not concrete.

"Omega-Class alert," the hunter said into his earpiece, his voice suddenly nothing like patient or practiced. "Omega-Class alert, Guro-dong plaza, target is on-site, repeat, Omega target is on-site—"

Jin pulled the mask down. Let them see his face. The scars. The white-streaked hair. The particular expression of a man who'd been running for months and had just stopped.

"My name is Jin Seong-ho," he said. Loud enough for the crowd to hear. Loud enough for the phones that were already recording. Loud enough for the girl behind him, who needed to hear that someone would stand between her and the machine that wanted to classify her out of personhood. "I'm Level Negative Twenty-Three. I'm what the Association calls a defective. An anomaly. A system error."

The crowd was frozen. The hunters were frozen. The scanner screamed its continuous alert, the sound thin and electric in the cold air.

"I'm also a person," Jin said. "And so is she. And so is everyone in this plaza who the Association wants to register and classify and manage like livestock."

The silence held for exactly four seconds.

Then the lead hunter drew his weapon—a short-range mana projector, the kind that fired condensed energy bolts—and fired.

The bolt hit Jin in the chest.

The impact was a bloom of heat and pressure that drove him back a step, his sternum absorbing the force, his ribs flexing under the kinetic transfer. Pain Drinker activated instantly, converting the damage into a surge of energy that flooded his muscles and sharpened his vision to knife-edge clarity.

His HP ticked up.

He didn't fall. Didn't flinch. Just stood there, absorbing the hit the way a wall absorbs rain, and looked at the hunter who'd shot him.

"That," Jin said, "is what I am. The System made me wrong. I can't be healed. Rest hurts me. Violence feeds me." He spread his arms. The burn mark on his jacket smoked. The girl behind him was crying—he could hear her, small hitching sobs that cut through the crowd noise. "I'm the Association's worst nightmare. A defective who can't be killed by the methods designed to kill defectives."

The second hunter fired. A precision bolt—aimed at Jin's shoulder, the kind of shot designed to disable rather than destroy. It hit. Pain Drinker feasted. Jin's body warmed with the stolen energy.

The crowd was recording. Every phone in the plaza was pointed at him, and the footage would show a man standing in a public space, absorbing hunter fire without falling, telling the world that defectives were people.

This was the moment. The moment when public sympathy could crystallize around a living demonstration of what the Association feared—a defective who stood up, who took the hit, who didn't run.

This was the moment.

And this was when it went wrong.

---

The third bolt came from the Level 67 hunter on the right flank—not aimed at Jin but at the space beside him, where the girl was still standing, where the missed shot or the ricochet or the simple geometry of energy dispersal in a crowded space could turn a protest into a casualty report.

Jin moved without thinking. Grabbed the girl. Pulled her behind him.

And Pain Drinker, fed by three consecutive combat impacts, overflowed.

The overflow discharge was involuntary. Jin's body, saturated with converted energy beyond its maximum capacity, expelled the excess in the only way it knew how—a radial pulse of inverse force that erupted from his chest like a shockwave.

The pulse wasn't large. A three-meter radius, maybe four. But it was enough.

The three hunters stumbled. The nearest protesters—the old man with the **REMEMBER GWANGJU** sign, the delivery driver, a woman holding her young daughter's hand—were knocked back, not violently but unmistakably, pushed by a force that came from Jin's body and expanded outward with the indiscriminate reach of a natural event.

The woman's daughter fell. She was maybe four years old. She hit the pavement and screamed—not from injury but from the shock of a world that had been stable suddenly pushing her away—and the scream was the loudest sound in the plaza.

Jin saw it happen. Saw the child fall. Saw the mother's face transform from confusion to fury in the time it took for her arms to reach her daughter and pull her close. Saw the crowd, which had been watching him with something between awe and sympathy, recalibrate in real time.

The man standing in their plaza, taking hunter fire and giving speeches about personhood, had just knocked down a four-year-old with an uncontrolled power discharge.

The phones were still recording.

"He's attacking civilians!" the lead hunter shouted, and the words found their mark because the crowd had just watched a child fall. Context didn't matter. Sequence didn't matter. Cause and effect were malleable when fear entered the equation, and the equation now included a man the Association called Omega-Class standing in a crowd with an ability that couldn't be contained.

Jin looked at the girl he'd shielded. She was staring at him with an expression he recognized—the particular horror of watching your protector become the threat. She'd seen the child fall. She'd felt the pulse. She knew it came from him.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't—"

"Stay away from me." The girl backed up. Her **LEVEL 3 AND PROUD** sign lay on the ground between them, the cardboard creased from where she'd dropped it.

The crowd was moving now. Not panicking—this wasn't a stampede—but retreating from the epicenter of what had just happened. The sympathetic strangers who'd been holding signs and chanting slogans were pulling back, their solidarity recalculating in real time. Some still looked sympathetic. Most looked scared.

And the phones kept recording.

Jin turned and ran.

Not heroically. Not tactically. He ran the way a man runs when he's broken something he can't fix and the only direction available is away. Through the plaza, past the police line, into the side streets of Guro-dong where the afternoon light fell between buildings in columns that he cut through like smoke.

Behind him, the lead hunter's voice, amplified: "Omega-Class target has fled south on foot. Requesting backup. Civilian casualties reported—"

No casualties. No injuries. A child who fell and cried and was picked up by her mother and held close. But the word "casualties" was in the air now, transmitted over official channels, and the footage of a four-year-old falling after Jin's power pulse would be on every screen in Korea before nightfall.

He'd wanted to show the world that defectives were people. Instead, he'd shown them what the Association had been saying all along: that defectives were dangerous. That their powers were uncontrollable. That a man with a negative level could stand in a crowd and knock down children with the overflow of his own biology.

The power demonstration. The failure beat. Chapter 85 in a story that wouldn't stop writing itself in the worst possible ink.

---

He made it back to the community center through side streets and an underpass and a stretch of railroad embankment where the bushes were thick enough to hide a running man from aerial surveillance. The trip took forty minutes. He could have made it in twenty, but he stopped twice—once to vomit in a drainage ditch, and once to press his fists against a concrete wall until the self-loathing subsided enough to let him keep moving.

Won-shik opened the service entrance. Looked at Jin's face. Said nothing. Stepped aside.

Sung-joon was already watching the footage.

"It's everywhere," he said when Jin entered the meeting room. The tablet showed a split-screen: on the left, Jin standing in the plaza, absorbing hunter fire, giving his speech. On the right, the four-year-old falling, the mother screaming, the crowd recoiling.

The chyron at the bottom of the screen read: **OMEGA-CLASS ANOMALY ATTACKS PROTEST CROWD — CHILD INJURED.**

"She wasn't injured," Jin said. His voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. "She fell. She's fine."

"She's fine. The footage isn't." Sung-joon's fingers moved through social media feeds, each swipe revealing a new iteration of the same disaster. The video had been cut, edited, contextualized, and decontextualized in a hundred different ways by a hundred different accounts, each version telling a different story depending on where it started and where it stopped.

The versions that started with Jin's speech and the hunter shooting him first were sympathetic. There were many of these—filmed from angles that showed the full sequence, the girl being targeted, Jin stepping in, the hunter firing first.

The versions that started with the pulse and the child falling were damning. There were more of these.

"The Association has released a statement," Sung-joon said. "'The incident in Guro-dong demonstrates the inherent danger posed by unregistered anomalous awakeners in civilian spaces. The Association's Emergency Registration Directive exists precisely to prevent incidents like this. We call on all responsible citizens to report any contact with the individual known as Jin Seong-ho.'"

"Responsible citizens." Won-shik's voice was a low rumble from the corner, where he sat with his tea gone cold. "They make it sound like a neighborhood watch."

"It is a neighborhood watch. The whole country just became one." Sung-joon set the tablet down. His face carried the exhausted resignation of a man who'd spent decades in corporate logistics and recognized a PR disaster when he saw one. "Jin. I need to be direct with you."

"Be direct."

"What you did at that protest erased three days of goodwill. The Project Shepherd leak gave us credibility. The registration directive gave us sympathy. You standing in a crowd and shockwaving a toddler gave the Association everything they needed to reframe the narrative." He held up a hand before Jin could respond. "I know it wasn't intentional. I know the hunter fired first. I know the child wasn't hurt. None of that matters. In the media economy, the image of a four-year-old falling because of a defective's uncontrolled ability is worth more than a hundred leaked documents."

Jin stood in the middle of the room and absorbed the assessment the way his body absorbed damage—taking it in, processing it, converting it into something he could use even if the conversion hurt.

"You're right," he said.

Sung-joon blinked. He'd been prepared for argument. "I am?"

"I went to the protest because I wanted to see people supporting us. That's emotional reasoning, not tactical reasoning. I stepped in front of that girl because I couldn't watch a sixteen-year-old get dragged to a registration station. That's moral reasoning, not tactical reasoning. And when the overflow hit—" He stopped. Swallowed. "I can't control that. It's a pressure release. When Pain Drinker takes in more damage than my body can hold, the excess has to go somewhere."

"Then you shouldn't be near civilians," Min-ji said.

She was in the doorway. She'd been there for some of it, maybe all of it—Jin couldn't tell how long, and her expression gave nothing away. She wore the clinical mask, the one she used when the observation was medical and the emotion was personal and the two were so tangled that she couldn't separate them without unraveling both.

"You shouldn't be near civilians when you're in an elevated combat state," she continued, stepping into the room. "The overflow discharge is a physiological pressure release—your body expelling excess converted energy when Pain Drinker exceeds your HP maximum. It's predictable. It's measurable. And it's dangerous in confined spaces or crowds." She stopped three feet from him. Close enough to diagnose. Far enough to examine. "I've been documenting the overflow events. Tunnel fights, the Bore Worm, the stash house raid. The discharge radius correlates with the amount of excess energy. Three combat-level impacts in rapid succession would produce a discharge radius of three to five meters."

"Which is what happened."

"Which is what happened. And which I should have warned you about before you went to a protest where hunters might provoke you into a combat state in public."

"You told me not to go."

"I told you it was risky. I didn't tell you it was risky because your body might involuntarily discharge kinetic energy in a crowd. That's a medical detail I should have communicated." Her jaw tightened—the tell for self-blame that Min-ji expressed as diagnostic failure. "I'm responsible for monitoring your condition. I failed to predict this scenario."

"Nobody's responsible for this except me," Jin said. "I made the call. I went to the protest. I stepped into a confrontation I should have avoided. The overflow is my biology, and my biology is my problem."

The room was quiet. Sung-joon with his tablet. Won-shik with his cold tea. Min-ji with her medical guilt. Jin with the image of a four-year-old falling, replaying behind his eyes on a loop that Pain Drinker couldn't convert because it wasn't physical pain.

"The 72-hour deadline expires tomorrow night," Sung-joon said eventually. "After that, we're all classified as unregistered threats. The protest footage will accelerate public support for the directive—the Association will use it as exhibit A."

"I know."

"You said we need to move on the Sindorim facility before the deadline."

"I did."

"Then we have twenty-four hours to plan and execute an infiltration of a guarded holding facility based on intelligence from a compromised double agent, while the entire country is watching footage of you knocking down a child, and our spy is still embedded in our group sending real-time information to the Association."

Jin looked at Sung-joon. "When you put it like that, it sounds impossible."

"It sounds like every other week since I met you." Sung-joon picked up his tablet. "What do you need?"

"Floor plans. The Sindorim commercial district—I need building layouts for every structure within two blocks of the station. Jae-min said the facility is in a basement. That means construction records, utility connections, sewer access points. If there's a way in that doesn't involve the front door, I need to find it."

"I'll pull what I can from public records. Won-shik—can your structural intuition give us anything from the outside?"

Won-shik set his cup down. "If I can get close enough to touch the building, I can map the interior structure. Load-bearing walls, floor plates, sub-level excavations. But I'd need to be within contact range."

"Then we scout tonight. You, me, and Min-ji." Jin's gaze moved to the doctor. "I need you for the medical assessment. Whatever Jae-min said about the guards—the static his ability returned—you might be able to help identify what we're dealing with."

Min-ji nodded once. No argument. No caution. The time for caution had passed somewhere between the child falling and the Association's statement, and what remained was the cold pragmatism of people who'd run out of safe options and were choosing between dangerous ones.

"And Seo-yeon?" Won-shik asked.

Jin thought about the woman organizing canned goods with geometric precision. About the canary trap that had sprung so fast it had become a weapon aimed at his own head. About the data she'd gathered—abilities, weaknesses, locations—that was probably already compiled in a report somewhere, waiting for the right moment to be deployed.

"Seo-yeon stays here," Jin said. "With the group. We don't confront her. We don't tip her off. When we move on Sindorim, she thinks it's a supply run." He paused. "And we make sure the route she knows about isn't the route we take."

"Disinformation through the confirmed leak."

"Exactly. We tell her we're going east. We go south. If the Association shows up at the location she reports, we'll know the channel is still active and we'll have a clear window at the real target."

It was a plan built on lies layered over lies, supported by a foundation of confirmed betrayal and capped by a timeline that was collapsing faster than they could shore it up.

It was also the best they had.

Won-shik stood, his joints cracking like old timber. "I'll need thick gloves. The Sindorim buildings will be cold, and my ability works better with direct contact but I'd rather not leave fingerprints."

"Gloves," Jin confirmed. "Sung-joon, building records. Min-ji—"

"I need to check your overflow recovery," Min-ji said, already pulling her medical kit from the floor. "If you're going into a potential combat situation in the next twenty-four hours, I need current baselines."

"Fine."

"And Jin?" She looked at him over the open kit, her hands already reaching for the blood pressure cuff. "The protest footage. The child."

"Yeah?"

"It wasn't your fault. It also wasn't not your fault. Both of those things are true at the same time. You'll need to hold them both without letting either one paralyze you."

Jin sat down and let her take his blood pressure. The cuff inflated around his arm, the pressure a small compression that Pain Drinker noted and ignored—too minor, too gradual, beneath the conversion threshold.

On Sung-joon's tablet, the footage played again. A man absorbing gunfire. A child falling. A crowd choosing fear over solidarity. A narrative that the Association would ride all the way to the registration deadline and beyond.

Tomorrow they'd go to Sindorim. Tomorrow they'd find out what was guarding a basement full of hostages. Tomorrow they'd either rescue Jae-eun or they'd fail, and the failure would add itself to the pile that was growing taller than Jin could see over.

But tonight, the blood pressure cuff deflated, and Min-ji's fingers pressed against his wrist to count his pulse, and for a moment the only numbers that mattered were the ones she murmured under her breath—seventy-two beats per minute, steady, alive.

"Your pulse is normal," she said.

"Nothing about me is normal."

"Your pulse is normal," she repeated, and something in her voice made it sound like she was defending the last outpost of ordinariness in a body that had abandoned every other convention.

Jin let her work. Outside the meeting room, the community center settled into its evening quiet—thirty people eating dinner, sharing blankets, watching the same footage on their phones, wondering if the man sleeping in the room upstairs was their protector or their biggest liability.

The answer, as usual, was both.