Honbul: Flame of the Soul

Someone calling himself “Bride,” demanding the return of “Fool”...

Yoon Taehee, who had been about to summon an intelligent ghost, froze the moment those words came crackling through the radio.

“What? Who?” Kim Yekwon asked sharply.

Unlike him, Yoon Taehee recognized the intruder immediately from those few words alone.

No way... I told him to go back to headquarters.

Lowering his head, Yoon Taehee gripped the armrest hard.

The plan had gone wrong.

His thoughts raced. If Jaegyeom was here, summoning an intelligent ghost would become difficult. Since he had already decided to hide the fact that he was the leader of Byeoksadan from Jaegyeom, it would be dangerous to let him witness him controlling an intelligent ghost directly.

And from what he had overheard through the radio, Jaegyeom was bleeding.

A cold unease crept through him. He worried Jaegyeom might actually be hurt somewhere. Worse, the idiot was probably throwing himself around recklessly when he still couldn’t properly use spiritual force.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Meanwhile, his heart had started pounding uncontrollably.

Kim Yekwon narrowed his eyes as he looked down at Yoon Taehee, clearly noticing how abnormal the reaction was from someone who had remained calm until now.

“Did you call in reinforcements?”

After a brief silence, Yoon Taehee feigned innocence.

“No. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Kim Yekwon clicked his tongue mockingly.

“If that’s true, then this is very strange.”

He clearly did not believe him. The moment he realized an intruder had appeared, Kim Yekwon immediately radioed for the security personnel to gather.

“Ahhh! G-Get away!”

Right then, screams erupted from outside. Shouts overlapped in the hallway, the noise swelling all at once.

Kim Yekwon turned sharply toward the door.

BANG!

The door burst open violently.

Kim Yekwon’s face stiffened the instant he saw the unfamiliar intruder.

A boy drenched in blood stood there with a knife in hand. Blood poured from a deep wound in his shoulder. The sight was grotesque. Unsettling.

“....”

The moment their eyes met, a chill crawled down Kim Yekwon’s spine.

There was madness in the boy’s eyes.

The boy’s gaze passed straight over Kim Yekwon and locked onto the figure behind him.

Finally, he found Yoon Taehee tied to the chair.

“Who are you?”

Ignoring the question completely, Jaegyeom stared fixedly at Yoon Taehee.

Yoon Taehee sat restrained in the chair, his appearance disheveled. The moment Jaegyeom saw the strange object embedded in his arm and the ropes binding his limbs, something inside him boiled over.

Rage surged all the way to the tips of his hair.

Yoon Taehee’s clothes, normally immaculate, were a mess. His carefully styled hair had fallen loose. Looking closer, Jaegyeom saw that his lip had split open too.

I’ll kill them.

Only then did Jaegyeom slowly turn toward Kim Yekwon, murderous intent blazing in his eyes.

“W-What are you all doing?! Get him out of here already!”

Kim Yekwon, who had frozen at the ghastly sight, finally shouted.

The security guards who had followed him in rushed toward Jaegyeom.

“Get the fuck off me before I kill every last one of you.”

Jaegyeom slashed his knife at the guards grabbing him while bracing himself against the doorframe. Spiritual force flooded his legs as he kicked out violently.

THWACK! THUD!

The guards caught by the brutal kicks cried out and crumpled helplessly to the floor.

“Take the knife away from him first!”

One of the guards struck Jaegyeom’s hand hard enough to knock the knife free.

The instant he lost it, Jaegyeom lunged anyway as though he did not care in the slightest.

“You bastards... who the fuck do you think you are...”

He grabbed one guard by the collar, slammed him to the ground, and began beating him mercilessly.

The guard convulsed beneath him, limbs flailing wildly.

Looking into Jaegyeom’s eyes—burning with pure violence—he no longer seemed human.

“Fuck... who the hell are you people... to do that to him...”

If I’d beaten him every time he mouthed off, he would’ve been in a coffin three times over already.

“You think I don’t know how to hit people? I held back this whole time because I chose not to hit him. So where the fuck do worthless pieces of shit like you get off—”

His fist crashed down again.

“—touching him?”

Each broken sentence ended with another punch.

Jaegyeom struck him over and over, rage overflowing from his eyes as though he were venting everything he had been holding in.

The shoulder wound where he had stabbed himself and torn the knife back out throbbed viciously, but it was still bearable.

By now his entire body was soaked in blood. Weak traces of spiritual force had finally begun flowing back into his hands.

But it still wasn’t anywhere near enough.

He had stabbed his own shoulder on purpose, fully prepared to go berserk.

Even after losing this much blood, though, the spiritual force paralyzed by the drug was recovering far more slowly than he expected.

The guard in Jaegyeom’s grasp had long since lost consciousness.

After beating him senseless, Jaegyeom flung the limp body aside like garbage.

Then he slowly looked around.

Earlier there had only been three or four guards. Now the room was swarming with them, more flooding in after Kim Yekwon’s call.

That meant he would have to crush over twenty people to get to Yoon Taehee.

The fact that these worthless bastards were standing in his way irritated him beyond belief.

Even killing them all wouldn’t be enough.

But wasting time dealing with them one by one was even more irritating.

And right now, the Yoon Taehee Jaegyeom could see looked half-dead.

In reality, Yoon Taehee had only been slapped around a few times. But Jaegyeom had no way of knowing that.

His anxiety kept growing.

The guards hesitated, unable to approach yet unable to retreat either, clearly frightened of Jaegyeom.

At that moment, Jaegyeom expressionlessly reached into his suit jacket.

The guards instinctively recoiled.

Thinking he was pulling out another weapon, several stepped back in alarm. One braver than the others raised a gas gun and shouted:

“D-Drop the weapon and step back! Final warning!”

Ignoring him completely, Jaegyeom pulled something from inside his jacket.

“W-What the hell is that...?”

The guards exchanged bewildered looks.

What Jaegyeom had taken out was not a weapon.

If anything, it was far too small and ridiculous-looking to call one.

“Is that... a slingshot?”

In Jaegyeom’s hand was a slingshot some child had dropped at the event venue earlier.

The guards stared in confusion at the absurd object while Jaegyeom calmly raised it toward them.

Then—

He drew the slingshot taut with the smooth precision of an archer and aimed directly at Kim Yekwon.

FWIP—

Something shot through the air at terrifying speed.

Kim Yekwon instinctively threw both arms over his head.

The object struck near his temple before clattering to the floor.

Direct hit.

Still, perhaps because of the distance, it didn’t seem particularly painful.

Frozen stiff, Kim Yekwon bent down and picked up the fallen object.

“What is this?”

He examined it closely.

Small. Flat. Round. Silver.

One of the nearby guards swallowed nervously before speaking.

“It looks like... a mercury battery?”

At those words, Yoon Taehee’s eyes slowly widened beneath the cloth covering them.

“Hey, Yoon—!”

Jaegyeom started to shout his name, then abruptly caught himself and swallowed the words.

If these bastards survived, they might track Yoon Taehee down later. Better to hide his name as much ❖ Nоvеl𝚒ght ❖ (Exclusive on Nоvеl𝚒ght) as possible.

“Hey, you piece of shi— Fool—!”

Jaegyeom corrected himself mid-sentence and shouted again.

“It’s June 27 today, asshole!”

Yoon Taehee jerked upright.

With his vision blocked, he had been piecing together the situation from sound alone.

For a moment he simply froze at Jaegyeom’s words.

Then he lowered his head and bit hard into his lip.

If you can’t come, then just shoot it.

Hadn’t he said that before?

The instant he understood what Jaegyeom meant, Yoon Taehee finally broke.

A laugh escaped him.

His shoulders shook as quiet laughter spilled out.

Kim Yekwon frowned.

“Why are you laughing all of a sudden?”

“Right. That was a lie.”

“...What?”

“That person. I know him.”

Yoon Taehee admitted it openly now.

Then he continued smoothly:

“Allow me to introduce him. An incredibly sexy sniper.”

“What?”

Kim Yekwon’s brow furrowed.

“Didn’t you hear him? He said it’s June 27 today.”

“...So?”

“You don’t know what day that is?”

Yoon Taehee chuckled under his breath for a long moment before murmuring almost like a sigh.

“The twenty-second day of the sixth month in the Year of Gyemi...”

Then—

“Yoon Taehee terminates the Silver Wheel’s time limit.”

BOOOOOOM—!!

The mercury battery in Kim Yekwon’s hand exploded.

The fluorescent lights burst apart. Windows shattered simultaneously. The ceiling collapsed in an instant.

A massive explosion tore through the building.

The mercury battery’s true identity was a silver battery.

Earlier, Jaegyeom had grabbed it from the sedan’s console compartment.

Remembering how Yoon Taehee had once taken radio pins and silver batteries from the console compartment during the possessed-ring case at the party, Jaegyeom had come up with a simple conclusion.

If he couldn’t use spiritual force himself right now—

Then he would use spiritual force that had already been stored beforehand.

Buried beneath chunks of collapsed debris, Jaegyeom groaned and staggered back to his feet.

“What the...”

The surroundings were complete chaos.

When the silver battery exploded, nearly half the building had blown apart.

The destructive force was beyond imagination.

By pure coincidence, the silver battery Jaegyeom had grabbed happened to be the strongest one Yoon Taehee possessed—compressed with an enormous amount of spiritual force and powerful enough to kill.

Jaegyeom’s face went pale.