I came to my senses and for a moment refused to accept reality.
No way I was actually kidnapped, right?
Could this be part of the test too? Maybe the examiners taped my mouth shut, and I have to escape from here and get to the test site.
I knew that simply finding the test site was part of the exam. That was why Yun had repeatedly warned me not to be late. The location they gave a few days ago was not reachable by public transport.
So Tom and Hesh and I had planned how to get there.
That was why I was pretty sure the exam wouldn’t actually be carried out in such a brutal way.
Still, a sliver of hope remained....
“You awake, idiot?”
Ah.
“Badgers aren’t anything special anyway.”
Shit.
The moment I heard the chuckling, the faint hope I had shattered.
I raised my heavy eyelids.
I took in the situation. Limbs bound. Vision spinning, probably from the drug. Even within that blur I could clearly see phone cameras. People in body armor, wearing grotesque masks, guns dangling from their hips.
A sour, moldy smell.
This was bad. It looked like I really had been kidnapped.
The fact that they all wore coordinated outfits and the phone cameras pointed at me as if expecting me to use violence made it all too real.
But at a time like this?
I stared hopelessly at a place I couldn’t identify.
“No.”
What?
“Who are you?”
Bam.
A baseball bat struck the belly that was tied to the chair.
I winced from the dull pain, but then smoothed my face and sighed. As I expected, they were civilians. They did not possess the power of a Badger.
So of course they were using a baseball bat.
The pain, less than I had feared, ebbed slowly. I sighed again and looked at my kidnappers’ faces.
Why hadn’t I sensed these people approaching?
If people with skills like that had come close, I would not have failed to notice.
I asked, trying to hide my puzzlement.
“Tell me why.”
“Talkative, rookie.”
“You’re acting like this because you’ve got confidence.”
Said the one wearing a mask painted with a skull.
“You think people like us can do it with a flick of a finger, right?”
What kind of inferiority complex is that.
I frowned and tried to steady my wavering vision.
“It’s not that, I really—”
The baseball bat rose.
Whack!
The blows rained down again. The kidnappers pounded me with iron pipes and baseball bats.
“Damn it! I’m asking so at least tell me the reason!”
I complained, helplessly getting beaten.
“And stop hitting me! It hurts... ugh!”
A strong electric shock ran through my body.
I trembled in the chair, bound.
It was the sort of intensity that would have caused a normal person to die of shock.
Seriously....
Now I was certain. Their malice was real. It wasn’t half-hearted. They hated me with everything they had.
And the reality that I had been kidnapped with one day left until the test was real too.
I could not tell why, but it was also true that I had been ambushed while unprepared....
“I don’t like that look you’re giving.”
One of the masked men snickered.
“You lot all think us mortals are idiots!”
“Mort—what?”
“Experiment rat spawn!”
They started getting worked up again.
“Rat spawn!”
Bam!
Multiple cameras whirred energetically. Phones on tripods filmed me and them from several angles. Amid the buzzing resonance, they beat me mercilessly.
For a moment I wondered if they were trying to shoot some kind of video.
It hurt.
But the drug’s effects were still strong and I was unable to resist.
More precisely, I had no confidence that I could control my strength enough not to kill them.
So I waited for the drug to wear off and meekly accepted the violence. These fanatics were thoroughly excited and kept moving their hands. Crash! A chair toppled. But nobody bothered to stand me up.
They shoved each other aside and continued to pummel me.
Then, breathing heavily, they stopped.
They stepped back a pace from me.
I spat blood into my palm.
“What time is it?”
I broke the silence with a hoarse voice.
“You can beat me as much as you want, so can you have me in Zone 1 at 6 a.m.?”
“Hey. You set this up through Green Dream, right?”
Someone jabbed a finger at me.
Sorry, that won’t work for me.
“We’ve emptied three syringes at least! Even if it’s fake, it won’t be ineffective.”
“Yeah. Sounds like they listened. See, the wounds don’t heal right away.”
“But they don’t seem completely eaten up.”
They whispered among themselves.
Growing anxious, I asked again.
“What the hell time is it?”
“Stab him a few more times! Damn it, you brought trash.”
“Then you bring him yourself!”
“What the hell time is it?”
“When are they coming?”
“Bring the drugs!”
“What the hell time is it?”
“Nine p.m.”
Ah.
A masked man, despite the mask, exuded a kind of sluggishness and answered.
Feeling relieved, I gave a faint smile at him.
“Thanks. May 31 at nine?”
“Of course May 31.”
“Hey!”
Someone sharply cut him off.
“Don’t say useless things!”
So about nine hours left.
I blinked and shook the blood droplets clinging to my lashes, thinking it over. I’d been kidnapped from Zone 1 around 6:30 p.m. If it took at most two and a half hours to get back to Zone 1, then being released at three-thirty would let me reach the test safely.
“So the boss is coming soon.”
A gloomy voice pulled me out of my thoughts.
The kidnappers’ heads snapped toward the speaker.
The figure in the musty corner raised their head.
“Keep him tied tight.”
At last I would meet the person who had planned this kidnapping.
I lay quietly on the cold floor while the kidnappers bustled around. They busied themselves preparing to welcome someone. They reset camera angles, checked the ropes binding ★ 𝐍𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 ★ my limbs, and placed what they assumed was Green Dream by my side.
They’d also placed drugs.
I’d had my fill of such scenes during the Colosseum days. I clenched my brow against the rising nausea and gauged the time.
Fifteen minutes had passed....
The door opened.
“Boss.”
Light poured in through the gap of the opened door.
“We’ve prepared everything.”
A young man and woman stood there.
I immediately saw that they were related. They were brothers or twins. They looked so alike I couldn’t have missed it.
People I’d never seen before.
A pair with glossy black curly hair, the man and the woman, approached me slowly.
“You look exactly like the picture in the article.”
I heard the woman’s voice first.
“Well done, everyone.”
“Was the video recorded well?”
The man scanned the masked men.
The kidnappers nodded obediently.
The black-haired man wore a satisfied expression.
“Good. Check the footage on the computer. Pick the decent ones. We’ll send them to Yehyeon soon.”
“Yehyeon?”
My eyes widened.
Even while they spoke, I kept timing it. Twenty minutes.
“Why the Commander?”
A piercing look flew toward me.
A momentary silence, meaningless to me, settled around them.
The woman broke the silence.
“That way your monsters will realize their mistakes.”
“Excuse me?”
“They are things that neither age nor die, wreaking havoc on society.”
She said this as she drew closer to me.
Her high heels clicked crisply.
“We could just fight them with regular soldiers.”
“Actually, your sin isn’t as deep as Yehyeon’s, rookie.”
While the woman knelt and stared at me, the man who I took to be her twin approached with a smartphone in his hand.
“But understand. Don’t be too sad. You will become symbolic. We did not pick you without reason. We’ve prepared for this for months.”
“For what? Your plan to kidnap me?”
Seriously?
The woman grabbed my hair.
Her grip was that of an ordinary person. The drugs made my body uncooperative, but my senses weren’t gone. If I strongly wanted to, I could have broken free.
I decided I would manage to resist and get out somehow if these people kept this madness up until three a.m.
Thirty minutes.
The man shifted his body and busied himself with something, speaking as he did.
“You were hired after almost taking the exam and being accepted almost single-handedly, like William Walker did.”
Ah.
“We protested even when William Walker was chosen. If Badgers are selected this way, the group becomes even less trustworthy. And yet the same thing happened again.”
“I told you. That arrogant bastard wouldn’t listen to us.”
The woman pulled my hair to force me to look up and smiled.
A strong conviction gleamed in her eyes.
“That guy was shot by an extreme environmentalist and came back in an hour to announce land expansion plans.”
So I had become the target of some group opposed to Badgers.
From what I heard so far.... They had seen my face in an article and, because I was one of the most recently chosen and the selection method looked dubious to them, they kidnapped me.
But why at this timing?
And who knocked me out in the first place?
If it were them, they couldn’t have failed to notice my approach.
I kept turning possibilities over in my head until a pain so strong that it would make me scream hit my body.
“Ugh!”
An electric shock.
A heavy jolt enough to have killed a civilian continued for a while and then stopped. Even after the shock faded, my body trembled violently.
I gulped and rolled my eyeballs.
Forty-five minutes.
I saw the man taking a selfie-style video.
“See?”
He spoke to his phone.
“This is the result of ignoring our voice.”
He was making a video message for Yehyeon.
Sweaty and dazed, I listened as the pair who led this group faced the camera and recited their creed. The Black Badger group had caused societal division. They violated the laws of nature. They went against the will of God. They should not exist. They enjoyed privileges of power due to their enhanced bodies under the pretext of being at war....
“So we decided to kill this rookie as an example.”
What?
Me?
“To remind people that you were once mere humans. To show how abnormal your existence is, refusing death.”
That won’t work....
Hearing the kidnappers’ long-winded words, I thought that if they had intended to torture me and then release me, their plan might have gone smoothly.
But since they had planned to kill me, their plan was doomed to fail.
Colton would not allow my death.
At least until I killed Kyle.
So probably....
“Let them see the rookie’s corpse and realize, Commander.”
...Wait.
“The sins you committed.”
If that was the case, Colton would have to intervene before I died.
The twins (I decided to think of them simply as twins) finished their video message and lowered their phones.
They looked at the phones and ordered their subordinates.
“Send it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.”
I muttered aloud.
Some of the kidnappers who overheard turned to glare at me. Eyes plunged toward the floor.
I blinked at their masked faces and smiled faintly.
“You’re going to kill me, right?”
“That idiot still hasn’t realized the situation. Wait and see him split open.”
“Isn’t he insane?”
“Please kill him before three a.m.”
Ignoring their muttering, I said what I wanted to say.
There was a smile on my face that others might have thought mad.
“You have five hours. That should be enough.”
“What?”
“Three a.m.”
I spat blood and cheered on.
“The target time is before three a.m.”
The kidnappers stared at me, speechless.
I smiled gently at them.
***
10 p.m.
The command staff, getting ready to leave work, stood pale-faced as the secretary who had flung the office door open called out.
“Commander!”
Mitchell, who rarely ever panicked, raised his voice.
“There’s an email you must see!”
