Dad's Coal Pit Hid a Dungeon, Now Guilds Pay Me to Enter novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Spat Out

Daewon's raiders steal tags and ride down on live stream, the shaft throws them back out in front of the whole town, and the Association inspector who registers the Pit tells him Daewon has already bid four billion won to clear it.

By ten past seven, the stream on Seon's tablet had forty-one thousand viewers, and Seok-hyun could see the number from across the yard.

Daewon Guild ran its own channel, with its name in gold letters on the vans.

A young woman held the microphone and smiled for the drone.

Hunters were the only celebrities Korea still had, and a guild that did not film itself was a guild that did not exist.

Seok-hyun knew the drill from the mart's TV.

It played a raid panel every night at three in the morning, when nobody was there to watch it.

He came out of the lamp house with the quilt still on one shoulder.

Behind him, in the gray, a few people had begun to gather at the fence.

Sun-ja was there in her apron, and the old men from the clinic, and a taxi driver, and two women from the school bus.

A boy on a bicycle who had filmed none of it yet and was reaching for his phone.

Word moved quickly in a town of thirty thousand people with one road.

"Mr. Gwon," Seon said, and the microphone swung toward him.

"I'm told you locked the door of an unregistered dungeon against two licensed climbers yesterday, and against the city."

"I locked my father's shaft against three men who wanted his land," Seok-hyun said. "You can look at the footage."

"There is no footage," Seon said, still smiling. "Nothing records below the first hundred meters."

"That is why I brought two B-ranks to see for themselves."

The Association's law said an unregistered dungeon belonged to the Association within twenty-four hours of a report.

The Association's licensed climbers had the right of inspection.

Seon had read the law that morning, and he held a printout of it.

Seok-hyun looked at the raiders.

The bigger one was called [Slam] by his skill, the other [Hook].

He knew that only because the Daewon channel had put it under their faces in white letters.

They walked toward the headframe past him, close enough that he smelled the cold air on their jackets.

"Hang a tag," he said. "That's the rule. Hang a tag from my hand, or don't go down."

The bigger raider reached past him to the lamp-house counter and took two brass tags off the rack by the handful.

He hung them on the board with a click.

"There," he said. "Tags."

Seok-hyun said nothing.

He had read his father's ledger, and it said a tag counted only if the keeper's hand had given it.

He let them go.

The cage rattled down into the shaft with both raiders and the drone's cameraman, a stringy kid with a headlamp.

Seok-hyun counted the seconds in his head.

At eleven, the winch cable went slack.

At twelve, a long dragging sound came up out of the shaft, and the Daewon vans' windscreens rattled.

Then the shaft mouth coughed.

Both raiders came out of it together, upward and fast, over the collar and the rusted rail.

They rode a column of warm air that smelled of coal and hot metal.

They landed on the gravel in front of Seon's vans on their backs, one on top of the other.

The cameraman landed on them both.

The gold lion on the bigger man's jacket had come off at the shoulder and hung by a thread.

His helmet rolled twice and stopped against Seon's shoe.

Nobody in the yard made a sound.

Then the boy on the bicycle shouted, "It threw them out!" and the fence went up in noise.

The taxi driver was laughing so hard he had to hold the fence.

"It spat them out," the boy said, to his phone. "Like seeds!"

On the tablet, the viewer count jumped past ninety thousand, and the chat began to scroll too fast to read.

Seok-hyun read one line at the bottom before it was gone.

[who is this guy, why is he holding a quilt]

The bigger raider got up on one knee and looked at his own hands.

"Master Seon," he said, in a small voice, "I used [Slam] on the floor and it did nothing. It did nothing, sir."

"The floor just took it."

"Cut the stream," Seon said, quietly, to the girl with the microphone.

She did not cut it fast enough.

Seon turned, and for the first time the pleasant face went.

What was under it was an accountant who had been told the number would not be what he promised.

"It doesn't matter," he said to Seok-hyun, low, so the microphone would not take it. "You think a trick at the door beats the Act?"

"The Association takes it today, and you'll be on your knees by Christmas."

Seok-hyun looked at him for a moment.

He found he was not afraid, and he did not know when that had started.

"Then it's a good thing you told me the date," he said.

A gray hatchback pulled in through the gate at eight fifty-five, with a silver badge on the dashboard and a state plate.

The woman who got out was about his age, maybe a few years older.

She wore a gray Association windbreaker zipped to the chin, and a hard equipment case hung from her shoulder.

She had a short black bob, a mint tin clipped to her belt, and a ballpoint pen.

She was writing the time on the back of her left hand as she crossed the gravel.

She did not look at Seon or at the vans.

She looked at the headframe for a long moment, and then at the third steel brace on its north leg.

"Jo Da-hae, Dungeon Registry, Gangwon office," she said to Seok-hyun, and turned her badge toward him.

"That brace has about one heavy snowfall left in it."

"I know," he said. "I was going to hold it up myself."

She glanced at his hands, and her mouth twitched, and it was gone.

"My skill's [Plumb]. B-rank. I see where things fail," she said. "Are you the owner, or the man with the quilt?"

"Both."

"Then you've got until nine-twelve to let me in. Daewon filed the report at nine-twelve yesterday." She tapped her wrist where the ballpoint figures were.

"I'm told it's already thrown out two of mine."

"Not yours," Seok-hyun said. "Daewon's. They took the tags themselves."

He opened his palm.

He had pulled one brass tag from the rack that morning, before the vans came, and warmed it in his pocket.

It had no name on it.

He put it in her hand, and he felt, as he did it, that the Pit was listening.

"Hang it yourself," he said. "It's good for you."

Da-hae turned the tag over, read the blank face, and hung it on the hook beside his father's.

The cage was waiting.

She rode it down alone, over Seon's objection.

He stood at the lip of the shaft with a hundred people at his back and a number in his head.

She was gone eleven minutes.

When the cage rose, her face was white.

She did not speak until the cage gate was shut behind her and the vans were out of earshot.

"Come inside," she said.

In the lamp house she set her case on the counter and took out a form.

She wrote his name on the first line without asking him to spell it.

"Mr. Gwon, I've read the Act every working day for four years, and I've never had to say this sentence."

"Say it," he said.

"Hwangji Pit is a registered dungeon as of nine-twelve this morning."

"Under the Act, the Association sells the clearing rights by sealed bid in fourteen days. You keep eight percent."

He had known it was coming, and it still landed hard.

"Who's bidding?"

"One bid is already filed." She looked at her form. "Daewon Guild. Four billion won."

"Filed when?"

"Yesterday, nine-twenty. From inside your cage."

He thought of Seon with the phone up in the amber light, talking and filing at once.

He understood that the man had planned the morning's show with that bid already in his pocket.

The stream, the tags, the raiders had never been to take the pit.

They had been to make him look unfit to keep it.

"Clearing means the core dies," he said.

"Yes," Da-hae said.

"And the dungeon dies with it."

"It goes quiet in a day. The embers stop. The stone is stone."

She said it as one reads a rule aloud, and she did not look at him while she said it.

"I've watched four of them go."

He thought of five old men breathing on the Pit's money, and of Sun-ja.

A bell in the yard that he had taken for a pipe all his life.

Four billion won was nearly twelve times what he owed the credit union.

Eight percent of it was three hundred and twenty million, twenty short of the loan.

He did the sum twice because it was so close.

It would pay almost everything.

In a week the clinic's oxygen plant would run out of its payments, because there would be no embers to pay them.

"Mr. Gwon," Da-hae said, and for the first time she lowered her voice. "There is one clause. Article 31."

"An owner may retain a dungeon uncleared, if three conditions are met."

"Which three?" he asked.

"The city council votes its consent. The owner posts a bond of ten percent of the best bid," she said.

"And the Association's licensing board hears the case and agrees."

"Four hundred million won, then," he said slowly. "A council vote. And a board."

"In fourteen days." She put the pen down. "In seven years, nobody has ever filed an Article 31."

"Why not?"

"Because no one has ever owned a dungeon that didn't overflow in a hundred days."

She looked, finally, at the shaft through the lamp house window. "And because the board has never once said yes."

← Chapter 2 · All chapters · Chapter 4 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend