“What are the two conditions? Just say the words!” Jae-hee said.

Ghost took a breath, then stated in a clear, deliberate voice, “First, like you said: become the strongest. Don’t stop until you’re stronger than anyone else.”

“You got it!” Jae-hee replied with a carefree smile, nodding eagerly.

Ghost continued, “Second, if and when that day comes… you will grant me one wish.”

“Huh? A wish?”

“If I’m going to raise the world’s strongest disciple, I think a master is entitled to at least one wish in return. Don’t you?”

Jae-hee propped his chin on his hand and thought for a moment.

Just like after his first lesson—the one on Stormroad—this was another blank check. A wish to be fulfilled at some unknown future date.

Still, last time she settled for a bowl of gamja-tang, so I guess won’t be anything too serious?

Ghost jutted her chin at the pensive boy. “So, do you accept?”

“All right! Deal! Let’s do this!” Jae-hee threw his arms into the air in a victory pose. “So I can keep calling you Master?”

“…Fine.” Ghost nodded, a bitter taste in her mouth.

If he went back to calling her ‘Granny’ now, she’d be the one who couldn’t stand it—probably flying into an angry outburst and punching him for his insolence.

At her approval, Jae-hee was so overjoyed he nearly teared up. “Awesome! Master!”

“What.”

“Master, Master, Master!”

“Why do you keep calling me?”

“I’m just so happy I can keep calling you that!”

“Must be nice to be so easily pleased.”

Ghost shot Jae-hee a sharp look from her piercing blue eyes. “Now that you’ve declared your goal is to be the strongest, I’m going to train you into the ground every single day.”

“That’s what I was hoping for!”

“You’ll be so miserable you’ll beg me to call the whole thing off.”

“Hehe, no way. I’m confident I can endure any training now.” Jae-hee puffed out his chest and struck a bodybuilder’s pose. “Behold! The practical muscle I’ve forged in the gym!”

The boy’s thin, flexible frame looked like it needed a few square meals, not an ounce of so-called “practical muscle.”

Ghost felt a wave of dizziness and pressed her fingers to her brow.

“…We’ve got a long, long way to go.”

“A long road is just a bunch of steps put together! We’ll be there in no time! Come on, just give the order, Master! Should we start with some extra training today? I’m ready for anything!”

“Oh, you’re confident, are you?” A deadly smile touched Ghost’s lips. “Then prepare to die.”

And so, that day, Jae-hee was once again carried back to the clinic, his body a wreck of torn muscle.

The sky was high and clear.

It was autumn.

***

The days passed relentlessly. Late autumn gave way to the first real signs of winter.

December had come.

But Jae-hee didn’t feel the cold.

In fact, he felt a little warmer. The prison cruise, Paradise Lost, had set a course south and was slowly making its way down the coast. As their latitude decreased, the weather grew milder.

The ship had departed from Incheon Port—the site of Jae-hee’s first mission—and traveled down the west coast. It had now passed Mokpo and was nearing the shores of Jindo.

“Mokpo is a port city!”

On the ninth deck shopping arcade, Jae-hee sat at a café on the port side of the ship, spouting whatever came to mind as he watched the distant mainland slide by.

“Jindo means Jindo dogs!”

“…”

Ghost paid him no mind, sipping her coffee as she read the newspaper in her hands. She had insisted on coming here, declaring she needed a proper cup of drip coffee.

Whether it was because of their recent outing or her attempt to quit smoking, she’d been desperate for a substitute for her cigarettes.

To celebrate the extension of their master-disciple contract, Jae-hee had boldly offered to buy… only to wilt when he saw the menu prices. Ghost had clicked her tongue and told him to just order; she’d pay.

And so, Ghost was drinking coffee brewed from high-end beans, while Jae-hee had a hot chocolate.

It’s decent, but it’s still not as good as on the outside.

The coffee cost tens of thousands of Credits per cup, but there was a limit to how well long-term-storage beans could maintain their quality. Ghost swallowed her coffee with a hint of disappointment.

The headline on the newspaper she held read: Awakened Protection Act Passes Judiciary Committee After Dramatic Bipartisan Backroom Deal… National Assembly Vote Imminent, Fast-Tracked to Enactment.

A black-and-white photo showed the opposition party leader, Archmage Ryu Yeon, wearing a white scarf and shaking hands with members of the ruling party. 

The biggest obstacle to the President’s bill, the leader of the opposition himself, had joined hands with the ruling party at the last minute to pass it.

Ghost closed her eyes for a silent moment, then looked up from the paper and scanned the café. The world outside was always in an uproar, yet inside this prison, it was quiet and peaceful.

The irony was absurd.

“Hee hee. This is good.”

Sitting across from her, Jae-hee took tiny, careful sips of his exorbitantly priced hot chocolate, his eyes fixed on the distant shoreline.

“After Jindo… um, what’s next?”

“After Jindo, we hit the south coast,” Ghost said, folding her newspaper and picking up her cup.

She gave a deadpan explanation to Jae-hee, who was trying to picture a map in his head. “Haenam, Wando, Goheung, Yeosu, in that order.”

“What are they famous for?”

“Haenam has the Land’s End Village. Wando has the island where Jang Bogo was stationed. Goheung has the Naro Space Center, and Yeosu has…”

Jae-hee’s eyes lit up as if he knew this one. “The night sea! ‘Yeosu Night Sea’!”

“…Right. Let’s go with that.”

A single song by a certain band still held incredible influence, even now in 2050. When spring came, another one of their songs would no doubt rise from the dead like a zombie and echo everywhere.

Every city and island had endless stories if you dug deep enough, but Ghost stuck to the most famous facts. She figured that if he knew at least one well-known thing about a place, he might get interested.

From there, it was better to visit and experience it for himself.

Though it’s better for everyone if we don’t visit.

By the time the Black Parade showed up, a place was likely already crawling with monsters. It was mutually beneficial for the Convict Unit to never have a reason to stop by.

Jae-hee closed his eyes to update his mental map, then opened them wide. “By the way, where did you say we were going?”

“Geoje Island.” Ghost stated the prison cruise’s destination and elaborated, “The area used to be big in the shipbuilding industry, so there are still maintenance yards there. The plan is to use some of their facilities.”

Paradise Lost was, at its core, a prison, which meant all sorts of problems arose whenever it dropped anchor in a port.

Inmates frequently escaped and caused chaos, and the fed-up residents of port cities often protested its arrival. As a result, the ship was designed to handle everything from repairs to resupply at sea, without ever having to dock.

But there were limits to at-sea maintenance. That was why it made regular visits to Geoje Island, the only port city that operated a dedicated offshore plant for ship maintenance.

“For the record, this ship… Paradise Lost was built on Geoje Island. At one of the shipyards there. You could say it’s a homecoming of sorts.”

“Huh~ a trip back to the old hometown!”

Jae-hee looked at the floor, tapping his feet. “Good for you, pal.”

Ghost let out an amused snort.

“Come to think of it, where’s your hometown, Master?”

“Seoul.”

“So you’re from Seoul. No wonder you knew your way around so well on our last outing.”

“What about you?”

“Hmm, I don’t really know where my hometown is. I’ve been wandering around since I was really little…”

Jae-hee rubbed his chin thoughtfully, then asked, “Anyway, we’ll dock at Geoje for a bit… and then what?”

“Who knows. It’s all up to the commander. We could go to Jeju Island, pass Busan and head up the east coast, or turn around and go back to Incheon along the west coast.”

Ghost inhaled the aroma of her coffee.

“This ship doesn’t have a fixed port. It just drifts. The capital region is already oversaturated with defense forces, so we tour the other provinces, helping out where we’re needed.”

They took requests from the military, the Hunter Association, and occasionally, private requests from VIPs like Dia Kim.

But fundamentally, the Black Parade received its orders from the government—the Gate Defense Bureau. Most of those missions were classified operations that couldn’t see the light of day, so-called black ops.

Requests for provincial defense support were also common. When a provincial city with overwhelmingly weaker defenses than Seoul requested support from the government, the Gate Defense Bureau would often subcontract the deployment to the Black Parade as a quick fix.

“The Incheon mission you were on was one of those cases.”

“I see… So since we’re in the south now, does that mean there’s a higher chance we’ll be sent to support this area?”

“Statistically, yes. Though in reality, it doesn’t matter where the ship is. The mission teams just get flown out on a transport plane and dropped wherever they need to be.”

Ghost held the coffee in her mouth, savoring the aroma as if it were wine.

Jae-hee mimicked her, holding the hot chocolate in his mouth. He couldn’t tell much, other than that it was very sweet.

“By the way, about the prisoners who go on missions. It’s not just us, is it?”

“You think we’re the only ones?” Ghost nodded. “It’s normal for multiple teams to be operating at the same time, with members picked as needed. In fact, while you’ve been on break since joining, other teams have run several other missions.”

Even now, unbeknownst to them, several other teams were out there under Hae-eun’s command, handling dirty work somewhere in the dark.

“The commander tends to sort the prisoner pool and build teams from within those groups to foster teamwork, but she’s also known to mix things up without warning.”

Jae-hee’s eyes widened. “I wanna meet the others, too!”

“And do what?”

“Well, I guess it’d be nice to get to know them?” Jae-hee said cheerfully, as if he’d completely forgotten how he’d bawled his eyes out when the convicts he’d befriended on previous missions had died.

Ghost stared at the kid’s bright, earnest face, utterly dumbfounded.

Jae-hee just grinned. “I don’t have any school ties, family ties, or hometown ties, so I guess I’ll have to make some prison ties!”

“You’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel, aren’t you?”

Just then.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

The screen of his Null Cuff flashed red and vibrated. A mission call.

“Speak of the devil.”

“Looks like a new mission!”

Jae-hee let out a little “Whoa!” and drained the rest of his hot chocolate in one gulp. “Let’s hurry, Master!”

“Hold on.”

Ghost rose from her seat with elegant slowness and carried her cup to the counter. A moment later, she returned with the rest of her coffee in a paper to-go cup and gestured with her chin.

“Let’s go.”

“Whoa, I didn’t know you could do that!”

“You think I’m going to chug something that costs this much? I’ll savor every last drop right up until the mission starts.”

“That’s my master for you,” Jae-hee said, his voice full of admiration. “This student still has much to learn.”

Ghost snorted and led the way, sipping from her paper cup.

Trotting behind her, Jae-hee gazed at the long, distant stretch of land visible from the port side of the ship.

“I wonder where this next mission will take us~”

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