Yu Na-gyeong might not be an old hand like Limon, who had been through every kind of battle imaginable, but she was a former PAB agent. She was a veteran who had dealt with countless players, from drunks to murderers. And she had overheard enough of Limon’s talk about dangerous criminals to know, from one brief glimpse, what kind of man Bellows was.

‘That bastard’s a psycho! He’d kill some random passerby for no reason at all!’

He killed anyone who got in his way. Anyone who saw him. Anyone who bumped shoulders with him on the street. In a way, he was worse than a killer who took pleasure in murder: a monster who regarded people as no more than stones. That was the madman Bellows.

What if that murderer caught sight of Seong Sia and the other children from Hanbit Orphanage?

[No!]

Na-gyeong screamed at the thought of the worst. Frantically, she sent out telepathic messages—not only to Limon, Li Qingyu, Yo U-in, and Wei Ling, who knew she had been reincarnated, but even to maids and warriors she knew only by sight. She had to warn someone.

[Oh, what do I do?]

But it was no use. After repeated messages failed to reach anyone, Na-gyeong clutched her head with her wings. Whether Bellows was using a skill or an item, she clearly couldn’t call for help by telepathy.

[Should I find one of the warriors and ask him for help? But...]

She thought it through. If a bluebird he had never seen before suddenly appeared and asked for help, would he really cooperate? Especially during an emergency like this? She would be lucky if he didn’t suspect her of something instead.

‘There’s nobody who can help me right now!’

Even if someone believed her, there was another problem. The corpse lying in the corridor told her that a warrior of middling ability would be no help.

[I don’t care anymore!]

POP!

After agonizing over it for some time, Na-gyeong finally used Teleportation. There might be nothing she could do in this tiny bird’s body, but she couldn’t simply sit there.

POP! POP! POP!

She could travel only about ten meters at a time. But after living at Leviathan lately, she knew its layout well enough to take the shortest route and reach her destination in no time.

Beneath a dazzling, distant ceiling, countless corridors and staircases intertwined in tiers like an inverted pyramid. These were Leviathan’s underground facilities, so beautiful they were called the underground skyscraper: the Underground Dragon Palace.

‘Thank goodness. Nothing seems to have happened yet.’

Na-gyeong slowly surveyed the vast space, practically a small underground city. Perhaps because the hotel had gone on emergency alert, the various facilities that would normally have been bustling even at night now had the desolate air of a ghost town. That only reassured her. If Bellows had arrived first, the place would not be this quiet, even shut down as it was.

“Who’s there?”

“This area is off-limits right now... Urk!”

[...]

Like that. Na-gyeong rushed toward the commotion, even using Teleportation, but before she could get there, she saw two crushed bodies and bloody footprints leading down to the lowest level. Her face hardened.

‘He’s fast. They didn’t even have time to scream.’

It was just like the corpse she had seen in the corridor. Crushing a rag doll this thoroughly would take minutes, yet he had done it to people in the blink of an eye. Considering that the Seven Dragons Society’s warriors were each as capable as a mid- to high-level player, it would have been impossible without a skill.

‘I don’t know what skill it is... but it’s definitely ranged, and it takes effect immediately.’

Having reassessed how dangerous Bellows was, Na-gyeong hesitated. With Teleportation, she had thought she could at least escape even if he was one of the Liberation Brigade’s ghosts. But what if his skill was powerful or effective enough to kill on sight? The instant he spotted her, she might die without so much as a chirp.

‘Should I grab the kids and run?’

‘No. They don’t even know who I am yet. I don’t have time to persuade them one by one.’

‘And with the facilities locked down, there’s no way out...’

‘Ugh, seriously! Why did I have to be reborn as a bird?’

Na-gyeong realized anew that Limon’s warning had been right: it would be hard to live a new life while carrying memories of her old one. At that moment, she had never regretted not being human more.

After a short spell of anguish, Na-gyeong seemed to make up her mind. She pressed her beak shut and took a step toward the lowest level, where Bellows had disappeared.

“Hmm. I wondered how impressive Leviathan’s famous vault would be, but this is rather disappointing.”

PATTER PATTER PATTER!

Na-gyeong promptly darted back into hiding. Just afterward, Bellows strolled out of a passage connected to a secret facility on the lowest level.

“If my foolish Comrade had infiltrated the place properly, as planned, I could have handled this much more quietly. Instead, I’m the one who has to suffer for her incompetence.”

He clicked his tongue lightly, then sauntered on, muttering to himself. “In any case, if it isn’t here either, they probably didn’t know what it was and hide it away somewhere special...”

Like a detective deducing the location of a treasure, Bellows stroked his chin and looked over the many facilities in the Underground Dragon Palace. Then he turned abruptly. He approached a digital facility directory mounted on a wall, scrolled through the listings, and stopped at one entry.

“Perhaps it’s ‘here.’”

After studying the directory for a moment, Bellows spun around and strode off as though he had chosen his destination.

‘That way is...!’

Na-gyeong, peeking out to watch him, felt her heart sink. He was heading straight toward the area with the childcare facility.

‘Hey, you lunatic! Why are you going there?!’

Cursing him inwardly, she scurried and teleported after him. She had to keep him away from the childcare facility, whatever it took.

Fortunately, she didn’t have to resort to her last-ditch plan of tap-dancing in front of Bellows to attract his attention. He went somewhere else entirely.

[... What?]

She had chased him until her little bird feet ached, only to watch him enter a shop without so much as a glance toward the childcare facility.

[Why go in there? He can’t have come all this way to shop.]

Bellows leisurely inspected the merchandise on display, as if he really were shopping. He looked so relaxed that, if not for the shop’s wrecked door, she might have taken him for a customer who had wandered in.

“Hmm. Not here either, it seems.”

Whatever he had expected to find, he shook his head and walked out. Then he gave a small laugh.

“Then again, however blind and ignorant the fools of the Seven Dragons Society are, they wouldn’t have left it here.”

‘It?’

Clinging to the sign of a fried chicken shop and pretending to be a chick, Na-gyeong narrowed her eyes.

‘He’s looking for something? What?’

She didn’t know the details, but this whole uproar at Leviathan was clearly something Bellows had arranged to infiltrate the hotel. And after going to all this trouble, he was searching for an object in a place like that? Na-gyeong could only gape.

A moment later, she snapped her beak shut.

“It can’t be helped.”

RUSTLE!

Bellows wore a cold smile. The instant he reached into his pocket and pulled out a palm-sized book, a chilling murderous intent closed around her throat.

“I’ll just have to kill everyone and search the place.”

‘No!’

Na-gyeong swallowed a scream. Instinctively, she knew that by “everyone,” he meant every person in the Underground Dragon Palace. If he set his mind to a massacre, none of them would survive. And she had no power to stop him.

‘What do I do? What can I do?!’

For a moment she struggled desperately to think of a way. Then her eyes flashed.

‘The book! If I take it from him, maybe...!’

Madman or not, he surely hadn’t taken out a book because he was bored. If Bellows was the sort of player who needed a particular item to activate his skill, taking the book might stop him.

Of course, it was a gamble. She had no idea whether her guess was right. Even if it was, trying to snatch the book in this baby bird’s body was a suicidal move, with over a ninety percent chance he would kill her first. But Na-gyeong was frantic to protect the younger children from the orphanage. Those odds were enough for her to stake her life on.

‘Damn it, I can only die once!’

Bellows opened the book. Na-gyeong clenched her beak, about to throw herself at him—

JINGLE!

“Hmm?”

The murderous intent vanished without a trace. Na-gyeong nearly launched herself at him anyway and had to scramble to pull back. Meanwhile, Bellows reached into his pocket and took out the source of the sound: a small bell. He set it on his palm and slowly moved his hand.

JINGLE! JINGLE!

“Oh... It hadn’t reacted at all, so I thought it was broken. Apparently it isn’t defective after all.”

He nodded as he watched the bell ring on its own whenever his palm faced a certain direction. Then he followed its sound.

Na-gyeong was baffled by his erratic behavior, but the facility he entered gave her a genuine shock.

‘Why is he going in there now?!’

It wasn’t merely that the place was unexpected. It was so familiar that the moment she saw Bellows break through its entrance, a thought flashed through her mind.

‘Wait. Could what they’re looking for be...?’

Na-gyeong cautiously followed him inside. She knew the place intimately, having come here with Limon almost every day: a practice room stocked with nothing but top-quality instruments, from pianos to guitars and drums, befitting Leviathan’s reputation.

At the very back of the room, Bellows stood before a long box, fiddling with the bell.

“Ha. I had my suspicions, but they really were keeping it like an ordinary instrument... I had no idea the Seven Dragons Society was such a fucking stupid organization.”

At those words, Na-gyeong understood why Bellows, after checking Leviathan’s heavily guarded penthouse and vault, had gone to an instrument shop first. She also understood why the mighty Liberation Brigade had caused all this chaos to find a single object.

They were after something very special. Whether they paid a fortune, pulled off an elaborate swindle, or took hostages and made threats, there was no way they could obtain it by any ordinary means. Especially when its owner was a stubborn swordsman who would laugh off threats from the Liberation Brigade.

‘That violin! That’s what the Liberation Brigade wants!’

Na-gyeong caught her breath as she looked at the box containing the Violin of Deepest Black—the only thing in the world Limon could use to dissolve a constellation’s power.

“What an anticlimax. If I’d known the Seven Dragons Society kept it like this, I wouldn’t have needed to go to so much trouble...”

Bellows reached for the box containing the Violin of Deepest Black. Without thinking, Na-gyeong moved.

POP!

“...?”

[... Ah.]

Bellows froze at the sight of a baby bird suddenly appearing on top of the box. Her body had acted before her mind could catch up, and now Na-gyeong found herself face-to-face with a murderous lunatic. She broke into a cold sweat.

[H-hello! Lovely weather today, isn’t it?]

Was Bellows startled because a bird had spoken to him? Or was he dumbfounded by a greeting so out of place in the middle of the night? His expression grew stranger still. Na-gyeong raised one wing high and called out brightly:

[Well, goodbye!]

POP!

Na-gyeong vanished in an instant, just as she had appeared. So did the long box. Bellows stared at the empty spot where it had lain only moments before and fell into a silence as deep as death.