Kim worked with the silent, surgical efficiency that had been his trademark. The multi-tool found its mark in the junction box, and a faint, almost imperceptible buzz died in the corridor outside. The watchful red eyes of the cameras winked out, leaving only the sterile, indifferent light.
He was back inside the cell in twenty-eight seconds, his breathing barely changed. "Blind for five minutes. Possibly six if their diagnostics are slow." His eyes swept over Jin-woo, taking in the new set of his jaw, the stillness where there used to be tremors. "The boy is gone."
"He ran out of time," Jin-woo said, his voice low. He wasn't being poetic. It was a simple statement of fact. The boy who needed a thousand repetitions to understand a single kick was a luxury the clock had devoured. What remained was something more urgent, more focused. A weapon with a singular purpose. "Which way to the Curator's descent?"
Kim pointed a thumb towards the end of the utility corridor, opposite the guard's patrol route. "Private lift. Biometric, voice-keyed, likely motion-tracked. A fortress."
"Every fortress has a delivery entrance," Jin-woo said, already moving. "He doesn't carry his own coffee."
They slipped out of Cell 3B, leaving the door slightly ajar—a small piece of misdirection. The utility corridor ended at a solid metal wall with a single, seamless elevator door. No call button. No keypad. Just a small, dark lens of a retinal scanner.
Time: 9 minutes.
Jin-woo ignored the door. He looked up. The ceiling was a grid of acoustic tiles and HVAC ducts. Standard commercial design, even in a secret prison. He pointed. Kim nodded, cupping his hands. A boost, a silent push, and Jin-woo was up, sliding a tile aside and hauling himself into the crawlspace above.
It was a tight, dusty maze of piping, conduits, and humming electrical lines. But it followed the architecture. The main air duct leading away from the elevator shaft was wide enough to crawl through. It would be filtered, monitored for air pressure changes, but not for a single, careful body moving with glacial slowness.
He lowered a hand, pulled Kim up. No words were needed. They had moved past teacher and student. Now they were two components of the same machine.
Jin-woo led, following the flow of the freshest air, the subtlest vibration in the metal. He was navigating by the memory of sensation now, a skill Kim had only hinted at. The facility had a pulse—the thrum of generators deeper down, the whisper of air being pulled towards its heart.
The duct descended at a gentle slope, then terminated at a heavy grate overlooking a space that was not a lab, not a cell block.
It was an office.
But not like any office Jin-woo had ever seen. One wall was a single, flawless sheet of dark glass, overlooking the monstrous circular training chamber they had seen from the observation deck. The other walls were lined not with books, but with artifacts. A worn hwarang sword in a glass case. A set of sai with intricate carvings. A framed, yellowed photograph of a man demonstrating a brutal throw—the caption read Shanghai, 1937. In the center of the room stood a vast, minimalist desk of polished black stone. And behind it, staring at the dark window, stood the Curator.
He was speaking, his voice amplified slightly by the room's acoustics, carried on the air flow to the grate.
"…the Vault 7 disturbance is irrelevant. A contained fire. The loss is statistical noise." He paused, listening to a reply Jin-woo couldn't hear—an earpiece, likely. "The priority remains the Source Code project. The 'Faulty' iterations are too volatile. We need the pure algorithm. And we are close. The subject from the garage… his neural mappings show near-perfect pattern assimilation without degradation. He is the key. Find him. Extract him. The Guardian Memory is hiding him, but they are sentimental. They will make a mistake."
Jin-woo's blood turned to ice. The subject from the garage. Himself. They hadn't given up. The vault was a sideshow. He was the main event.
The Curator turned from the window, and his face was illuminated by the cool light of his desk monitor. On its screen, displayed in a rotating 3D model, was a human brain. Neural pathways lit up in brilliant colors, and superimposed over them were skeletal wireframes of martial arts movements. A kick flowed along the motor cortex. A block fired across the parietal lobe. It was a map. A map of Jin-woo's own ability.
"The boy isn't just a copy machine," the Curator murmured, more to himself than to the person on the call. "He's a compiler. He doesn't just store the data; he rewrites it into native code. That's what we need. Not the library. The librarian's mind."
Time: 4 minutes.
Kim tapped Jin-woo's shoulder, his face grim. He pointed down, then made a cutting motion across his own throat. We abort. This is too deep.
But Jin-woo shook his head. His eyes were locked on the Curator's monitor, on the beautiful, horrifying visualization of his own gift. This was the source. This arrogant man in his museum of stolen arts, looking at Jin-woo's soul as a piece of software to be reverse-engineered.
He wasn't here to rescue Kim anymore. He was here to delete the source code.
He pointed to Kim, then to the grate, miming a descent. Create a distraction. Then he pointed to himself, and to the duct branching off to the left, which likely fed air directly into the office's climate control. Kim's eyes widened in protest, but Jin-woo's stare was absolute. The plan was insane. It was also the only one that mattered now.
A silent, furious argument passed between them in the span of two seconds. Finally, Kim's shoulders slumped in resignation. He gave a sharp nod.
Time: 3 minutes.
Kim positioned himself under the grate overlooking a junction outside the office. He took a deep breath, then drove his elbow down with all his remaining strength against the metal.
The CLANG was deafening in the enclosed space. The grate buckled, then tore free from its moorings, crashing down into the hallway below.
Alarms immediately began a soft, pulsing chime—intruder alert, internal breach.
Inside the office, the Curator spun towards his door, his hand going to his ear. "Security to my anteroom. Now."
It was the moment of focused chaos Jin-woo needed. He scrambled down the left-hand duct, which narrowed sharply. He ignored the tearing of his clothes on sharp edges, the dust choking his lungs. He could see light ahead—another grate, this one feeding into the office ceiling.
He could hear the Curator's voice, calm but tense, just below him. "Seal the level. It's a diversion. Find the primary target."
Primary target. Him.
Jin-woo reached the grate. It was smaller, screwed in from the other side. No time for subtlety. He braced his feet against the duct walls, gathered every ounce of strength from months of brutal training, and kicked.
The grate exploded inward in a shower of metal screws and dust, clattering onto the Curator's pristine stone floor.
Jin-woo dropped down after it, landing in a crouch between the desk and the wall of artifacts.
The Curator stood five feet away, having drawn a small, elegant pistol from a drawer. He didn't aim it. He simply held it, his expression one of profound, almost clinical interest. He wasn't afraid. He was fascinated.
"The compiler," he said, a smile touching his lips. "You came to debug yourself."
"I came to unplug you," Jin-woo said, his eyes darting to the monitor. The brain model still spun.
"And how will you do that? With fists? Kicks?" The Curator chuckled. "You are a masterpiece of applied memory. But I am the architect of the system that contains you. Every move you've learned, I have catalogued. Every weakness you might exploit, I have anticipated."
He was right. Fighting him here, on his ground, was suicide.
So Jin-woo didn't fight.
He remembered.
He looked past the Curator, to the dark glass window overlooking the training pit. He remembered the woman's arm breaking. He remembered the exact, disjointed rhythm of the "Faulty" subject's attacks. He remembered the guard's bored posture, the technician's routine.
And then he spoke, his voice flat, reciting data.
"Your Subject Gamma in the pit. His attack pattern degrades after the fourth combination. There's a 1.2-second lag after a right-handed hook where his left shoulder drops 4 centimeters. It's a flaw in the original Hapkido data set you used, from Master Yoon, 1981. He had an old rotator cuff injury you failed to filter out."
The Curator's smile faltered, just for a microsecond.
"The air filtration cycle in this room," Jin-woo continued, not moving a muscle, "changes every 74 minutes. It just changed 3 minutes and 18 seconds ago. The humidity drop makes the polymer floor near the window 0.3% more slippery. You adjusted your stance when you turned from the window. You know it."
The pistol in the Curator's hand didn't waver, but his eyes betrayed a flicker of something—not fear, but cognitive dissonance. Jin-woo wasn't acting like a weapon. He was acting like the system itself, reporting its own errors.
"The security team responding to the noise outside," Jin-woo said, his gaze locked on the man's. "They will enter in a standard diamond formation. The lead man has a slight limp in his right leg. He will be 0.5 seconds slower to clear the left corner of the doorway."
As if on cue, the office door hissed open. Four armed guards poured in, weapons raised.
Just as Jin-woo predicted. Diamond formation. The lead man, a slight hitch in his step.
For a single, paralyzing instant, the Curator's supreme confidence fractured. His eyes flicked towards his lead guard, verifying the flaw Jin-woo had just narrated into existence.
It was the 0.5-second opening.
Jin-woo didn't attack the Curator. He threw himself sideways, towards the wall of artifacts. His hand closed not around a weapon, but around the framed photograph from Shanghai, 1937. He flung it, not at the Curator, but at the towering, dark glass window overlooking the pit.
The heavy frame struck the center of the window with a terrific crack.
And the window, designed to be impregnable from the outside, but perhaps less so from a precise, internal impact at a manufacturer's flaw, spider-webbed.
A collective gasp from the guards. The Curator's head snapped towards the damage, a look of pure, unadulterated horror on his face. That window was his throne, his one-way mirror to godhood. And it was cracked.
"Stop him!" The Curator's voice was a shriek, losing all its smooth control.
But Jin-woo was already moving. He dove towards the shattered grate in the ceiling as the guards, confused by their master's panic and the bizarre, non-violent assault, hesitated for a critical second.
He hauled himself back into the duct as the first bullets sparked against the stone where he'd been standing.
Below, he heard the Curator screaming orders, his voice raw. "He's in the ducts! Seal the vents! Flood them with sedative!"
But Jin-woo was already scrambling back the way he came, towards the utility corridor, towards Kim, towards the impending fire. He had done what he came to do.
He hadn't stolen a file or killed a man. He had injected a virus.
The virus was truth. He had shown the perfect, omniscient Curator the seams in his own perfect world. He had reflected the system's own data back at it, and for a moment, the architect had seen the cracks in his own blueprint.
And in that moment, Jin-woo knew, the invincible system had begun to doubt itself.
Somewhere, deep in the facility, a muffled whump reverberated through the ductwork. The incendiary charge. Vault 7 was burning.
The hunt would be apocalyptic now. But as Jin-woo crawled through the darkness, a strange calm settled over him. They would hunt the compiler, the weapon, the asset.
But he was no longer just any of those things.
He was a glitch in the code. And glitches, as any programmer knows, are the hardest things of all to catch.