Ch.1414. Life as the Wager (1)

“Urgh, what is this all about!”

“My life, please spare my life!”

In the VIP room of a hotel where Ji Se-hwa was meeting with finance industry executives. I, Lee Lu-a, and our villain subordinates had successfully infiltrated the location in secret.

“You damn bastards! Do you know who I am!”

Ji Se-hwa, furious to the point of boiling over, was charging toward Lee Lu-a. I stepped between them.

I didn’t even need to transform. I easily subdued her with basic fighting techniques.

Since I was the one who taught Se-hwa how to fight, I could predict her moves with my eyes closed.

“Ugh! You son of a bitch! I’ll kill you!”

I silenced the noisy Se-hwa with duct tape over her mouth and secured her hands and feet with special handcuffs.

The situation was under control. All the guards were down, and the guests were restrained. Communication devices were confiscated. Being a VIP room, the soundproofing was perfect. Even gunshots with silencers wouldn’t leak outside.

There were seven guests. Five middle-aged men and two women. All greedy pigs.

“Urgh. V-Vengeance. D-Dark Matter.”

One of the guests recognized us.

“Dark Matter… isn’t that the villain organization that attacked Silver Mirrored?”

“Do you have business with Blue Saber?”

“W-why us too? Let us go.”

Lee Lu-a stood before them.

“Let’s see. Kim Young-heon. 62 years old. Director at Angellan Securities. You’re the bastard who designed the trench structure during the subprime crisis 12 years ago, right?”

“U-urgh?”

“Back then, a lot of loans collapsed in sequence, causing people to lose their homes and commit suicide. Was it 120,000 unemployed and 4,000 suicides?”

“I-isn’t that over now! The responsible parties are currently serving time…”

“You cut off the tail, huh? You’re still living well?”

“I-I only did legal things!”

“It’s illegal now, and it was illegal overseas even back then, wasn’t it?”

“Laws are typically not created until problems arise!”

“Ahaha. So you’re not guilty? How much did you suck out that way? Was it delicious to suck until hardworking citizens became corpses? You were trying to do the same thing with Blue now, weren’t you?”

“Urgh.”

“All seven people gathered here. You’re all the same kind. Birds of a feather? Ugh, you stink. Hey, you trash. Even pigs eating slop their whole lives would smell better than you.”

The guests fell silent. Lee Lu-a mocked them.

“D-do you think you’ll get away with this? If anyone outside notices something strange, my security will come in immediately.”

One of the guests spoke with a frightened voice. Lee Lu-a chuckled.

“Will they notice? Are they knot-eyed? Right, Illusion unnie?”

“Mmm~ If they can distinguish my doppelgangers, I’ll have to give them a special reward in bed all night.”

The villain with a seductive figure who licked her lips with a suggestive voice was ‘Illusion.’ An A-class villain under my command.

“Hahaha! What a great party!”

“This is so enjoyable! Hahaha!”

There were images of guests clinking wine glasses on the balcony.

“W-what is that?”

That’s Illusion’s ability. She can create illusions and doppelgangers.

Although they’re like holograms without physical substance, they’re so detailed that you can’t tell the difference unless you look very closely.

“T-this is a hotel! There must be CCTV records of your entry, someone must have seen you!”

“Hehe. Don’t worry. We hacked everything long ago.”

Lee Lu-a smiled.

That’s right. The villain who’s manipulating the data in real-time is S-class, ‘Deep Dive.’ She has the ability to materialize internet information and handle it like physical objects. Simply put, she’s a genius hacker.

She was originally a capable ability user I wanted to recruit. Fortunately, she was impressed by Vengeance’s attack on Silver, so things worked out well. She’s currently supporting this operation from our hideout.

She also helped when we infiltrated Choi Minseo’s party with Lee Lu-a. It wasn’t difficult to infiltrate; the challenge was finding Deep Dive in the first place.

“No one knows we’re in this space except you and us. There’s no one coming to help you. Understand?”

“T-that can’t be…”

The guests’ faces turned ashen.

“Is money your objective? How much do you want?”

“Money? Ahaha! I don’t need that.”

Lee Lu-a laughed coquettishly.

“I definitely don’t need your stinking corpses either. I came here to play a game with Blue Saber. You just need to help make the game work. Then you might leave alive.”

“G-game?”

Hearing those words, Ji Se-hwa squirmed. My subordinates and I set her up. We tied her to a human-sized cross we had prepared in advance. When we put the lid on, it became an excellent coffin.

Ji Se-hwa with only her face and hands exposed. I removed the duct tape from her mouth.

“You fucking bitch! I’ll rip out your eyeballs and shove them up your ass!”

“You really have no manners. Blue, if you don’t play the game with me, I’ll really kill you.”

“Stop talking shit, you fucking bitch!”

“Sigh, really. I keep my promises. I let Silver live as promised after only killing her crew members, right? I’ll make one promise with you too. I’ll absolutely follow the game rules and won’t use any violence outside of them! When the game ends, we’ll leave. How about it?”

“You crazy bastards. Are you enjoying this? Is it that fun to play with people’s lives?”

“Yes.”

Lee Lu-a brought her face close to Ji Se-hwa’s.

“It’s fun. So much fun I could go crazy. Playing with heroes is my favorite thing in the world. Hey, Blue. I want to play with Yellow and Green too. Could you introduce me?”

“Fucking bitch. Pleasure addict. Your brain is rotten. Die from a burst blood vessel.”

“Hehe. Then I’ll explain the game rules.”

My subordinates and I brought another identical coffin to face Ji Se-hwa. A cross-shaped coffin facing Ji Se-hwa.

“We need Ji Se-hwa and six guests. But there are seven? Let’s see. You.”

“Y-yes?”

Lee Lu-a pointed to one woman.

“You’re not needed, so leave.”

“Pardon…?”

“I said leave. Go home.”

“R-really?”

“Get out quickly. But you know what will happen if you reveal anything about this until it’s all over, right?”

“Y-yes!”

The woman hurriedly left. She had committed relatively fewer crimes. That’s why I had told Lee Lu-a in advance to send her away first.

Of course, she can’t go home. This VIP room has a double structure, so she’ll be waiting in the lobby. But they can’t know that from here.

The remaining six guests looked enviously at the woman who was actually leaving the VIP room.

“I told you, right? I keep my promises. If you help with the game well, you’ll get to leave one by one like her.”

“I-is that true?”

“Of course.”

Lee Lu-a turned to Ji Se-hwa.

“Do you see that coffin? Both coffins are the same shape. Do you see the holes?”

“Holes?”

“Yes. There are six holes, right? Both arms, both legs, stomach, and chest. Now we’re going to stab something into each one.”

“You crazy bitch. You’re just planning to kill me!”

“Think carefully. Why would there be two coffins?”

Ji Se-hwa bared her teeth. She seemed to have realized something.

“Six people…?”

“Right. You won’t be the only one getting stabbed. Depending on the game results, you might get stabbed, but… The game has six rounds. One guest will enter that coffin each round. At the start of each round, the ‘body part’ and the ‘stabbing tool’ will be revealed. Then you’ll ‘negotiate’ with the guest.”

“Negotiate?”

Lee Lu-a grinned.

“Yes. About who gets stabbed.”

The guests stirred.

“There’s no way to negotiate! Who would volunteer to get stabbed!”

Ji Se-hwa shouted. Her words were absolutely right.

“True. That’s why you need to negotiate using your specialty.”

“What?”

“Money.”

Lee Lu-a snapped her fingers. I brought a small box to her.

“Guests, listen carefully too. Inside this box is all the ‘cash’ that Blue Saber was carrying.”

“C-cash?”

“Yes. All the bills and coins in her wallet, and all the ‘chips.'”

Here, chips refer to something like memory cards that store cash as data. They’re a storage medium in this world because carrying large amounts of cash is inconvenient.

This makes villain black market deals and money laundering much more active.

“You petty thieves. How much could that possibly be worth stealing…!”

“Shh. It’s better not to mention how much it is. This is the negotiation material.”

“What?”

“One round is 5 minutes. If you finish negotiating within that time, both the guest and Blue must write down an amount on a note. The one who writes the larger amount wins. The one who writes the smaller amount will get stabbed.”

“Then I just need to write a large amount!”

“Don’t you understand? Blue, you have to actually pay us from the cash you have. You can’t write an amount larger than what you have. Conversely, if a guest writes an amount larger than Blue’s total cash, they lose.”

“That means…”

“If Blue Saber writes 1 won, and we write 10 billion won, even though we wrote a larger amount, we’d lose because it exceeds the available cash?”

“And then get stabbed in the arm or leg with something like a skewer… urgh.”

The guests seemed to understand immediately.

“But we don’t know how much Blue Saber has, so how can we win?”

“Hey, wait a minute! Why are you already thinking about winning?”

Ji Se-hwa raged.

“I’m Dragon King Sentai! I just got discharged from the hospital yesterday! I need to fight the Galaxy Empire, and you want to injure me again? It’s just arms and legs! You won’t die from being stabbed! After I’ve protected you this much, shouldn’t you sacrifice this much?”

“W-well, that makes sense, but…”

“First, we need to find out the total amount. Let’s have the first person write one million won. If that exceeds the total, we can estimate the range…”

“What if you get stabbed!”

“Will the amounts we write be revealed after each round?”

The guests desperately started thinking. Lee Lu-a grinned and nodded.

“Yes. You might not trust us if we manipulated the results, right? We’ll reveal the handwritten papers exactly as they are.”

Things were going as expected.

Once we made them enemies of each other, they couldn’t recognize us—the real enemies who created this situation—and were only thinking about defeating each other.

The temptation of survival is that powerful.

“You fucking bastards! Ungrateful pieces of shit!!”

Ji Se-hwa raged.

Se-hwa, I understand how you feel.

But you’re not really in a position to say that, are you?

“Shall we begin then?”

Lee Lu-a announced leisurely.

“For the first round, let’s start with this.”

In her hand was a vicious electric drill, 3 centimeters in diameter.