The Weapon Genius: Anything I Hold Can Kill

Jin dusted his palms off on his pants as the golden shimmer of the portal flickered behind him, slowly fading. The building they’d landed in was quiet, low echoes of distant fire crackling through the blown-out windows, the skyline tinted red by the still-burning horizon. For the first time in what felt like hours, the air wasn’t choked with spores or thrumming with tension.

Just heat. Just the pulse of aftershock in his legs.

Across the room, Echo rotated his shoulder with a grunt. Joon leaned against a half-cracked beam, one of his orbs hovering near his head like a tiny sun. Seul stood near the edge of the blown-out wall, eyes locked on the direction they’d come from.

"He’s not here yet," she murmured.

Jin turned to her. "You mean Chul?"

Seul nodded, not looking away. "Yeah. Remember I laid him down on a rooftop. Two streets back. He was so tired after saving us. I didn’t want to risk pulling him through unless I had to."

"He’ll make it," Jin said quietly.

Beside him, Seo Yewon stepped forward, the black earpiece embedded at her temple catching a glint of light as she tapped it. "This is Yewon. I need a pinpoint check, rooftop, near the area you got your last set of people. Sweep high. Confirm target and pull him in clean if you see him."

A brief crackle answered back. She nodded once, then turned to Seul. "Don’t worry. He’ll be here."

Seul hesitated, then stepped back. "Thanks."

Jin exhaled, then looked to Seo. "So... it’s called Gugwe-mok."

She tilted her head slightly. "That sounds familiar."

"It is," Jin said. "My grandma used to tell me stories about it . Said it was an old spirit of the forest with bark for skin, roots for bones. And would take away anything that entered the forest without permission."

That got a small furrow from Seo. Not skepticism. Recognition.

"My grandfather told me something similar stories," she said, voice low. "But in his version, it was a thing that hid in trees. Watched children from the branches. Took them if they wandered too far or if they didn’t listen to their parents."

Jin blinked. "Dark."

"He also said it only came out when people cut down too much trees from the forest."

Jin absorbed that, the silence stretching a beat longer.

"Guess it we’ve finally taken too much."

Seo nodded grimly. "Seems so."

The air buzzed as another golden ring shimmered open behind them, soft and low, just above the scorched floor. A pair of civilians stumbled through, coughing, eyes wide and bloodshot. One of Seo’s squad members stepped from the shadows and wordlessly helped them toward a corner, handing them water and chew tabs.

Jin watched, then turned back to Seo. "That ring trick. Is that some new part of your skill?"

Seo shook her head. "No. That’s one of my men’s skills. A scout. He’s out there now, moving rooftop to rooftop, scanning for survivors and marking danger zones. The rings are his. Not mine."

"Transport type?"

"Yeah. His spatial field’s unstable, so he can’t do precision pulls. It’s messy, but better than nothing."

Jin’s brow furrowed. "He’s doing all this alone?"

Seo didn’t blink. "He’s fast. He trained for recon, not brawls."

Seul stepped forward. "Then could he look for my brother? I left Chul on that rooftop. If your scout’s still in the area he got us from—"

"I already gave the order to retreive everyone in the area," Seo interrupted gently. "He’ll be here soon."

Another moment passed.

Then a new ring formed, mid-height, humming as it stabilized. This one moved slower. More deliberate.

Chul stumbled through a second later, hoodie torn, limbs slack, but alive. Upright. Breathing. His eyes blinked once, then steadied.

Seul was already moving. She caught his arm before he collapsed and guided him down to a crate nearby. He gave her a tired thumbs-up that barely made it halfway up.

"You good?" Jin asked.

Chul gave a crooked grin. "Took a short nap, woke up on a roof. Got dragged through a golden donut. That your doing?"

"Not mine."

The shimmer flared again.

This time, the ring glowed wider, brighter than any of the ones before. Its edges pulsed like heat lines on metal, humming in a low resonance that thrummed against the floor.

A figure stepped through.

He couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen, tall, lanky, hoodie zipped halfway with a windbreaker layered over it in streaks of navy and cobalt. Black hair swept to the side, and a bold line of electric blue cut across his bangs. Three glowing discs spun gently at his hip, suspended on hooks like weaponized keychains.

The boy stepped through like he’d done it a thousand times, looked around, then dusted off his knees with both hands.

"You’ve got way too many damn rooftops out here," he gasped.

Seo raised an eyebrow. "Status?"

"Clear. Pulled four civilians from a stairwell, two from a bus, and your guy from a rooftop with some seriously weird plant growth. Oh, and that one dude tried to thank me by giving me a bottle of soy milk. So, you know. Good haul."

"You’re late."

The boy gave a lazy grin. "I’m fashionably late."

Seo didn’t smile.

She turned to the others.

"That’s my scout."

Jin took a second longer to absorb the kid’s look, especially the rings on his fingers. "That’s where the portals come from?"

"He calls them gates," Seo said. "Compression-based field. He can create jump-points within a certain radius. Light-based spatial compression, built from accumulated motion among other things."

The kid twirled one of the spinning discs with a finger and shrugged. "I move fast. Rings open. I fall through. Others do too. I have different methods for different rings. It’s a whole process."

Joon let out a low whistle. "That’s a real nice skill."

"Thanks," the kid replied, already crouching near a nearby vent, unhooking one of the rings to check something.

Seo turned back to Jin. Her voice dropped again. "Now... tell me what this thing can really do."

Jin glanced at the others, then spoke plainly.

"It’s massive, probably twenty meters now, maybe more. Covered in vine mass, bark-like plating. But it’s not just its size that’s the problem. It adapts and regenerates. Every time we land a real hit, it changes something. Grows thicker armor, releases new spores, builds new limbs."

Seo crossed her arms. "Spore defense?"

Jin nodded. "Not just defense. It uses them tactically. Last time, it blasted us with them like gas grenades, something that made us freeze up. When we thought we’d cornered it, it just grew out a new core mass and split the terrain with vine pressure. It’s not random anymore. It’s learning from us and getting stronger."

Seo’s eyes narrowed. "Have you tried using that destructive resonance ability?"

Echo stepped forward. "I hit it with a clean shot to the chest. At first, it cracked something but it shifted. The second time, it just... absorbed the frequency. No feedback, no recoil. Like it was processing it."

"We think it can store and respond to frequency types now," Jin added. "Like it’s rewriting how it takes damage."

"How wonderful," Seo muttered.

Then Jun-taek, quiet until now, finally spoke.

"I’ve been thinking about that," he said.

Everyone turned toward Jun-taek.

"I watched every attack we made. Every push, every collapse, every strike from above. The vines reacted. The arms adjusted. But the main body, the core? It never changed. Not once."

Echo frowned. "We saw it take damage."

"You saw it look like it took damage," Jun-taek corrected. "But my skill is momentum-based. If I speed something up, shift its vector, its force it moves. Doesn’t matter what it is. Person, rubble, air. Even if it hits something else, that impact carries the change forward."

He looked directly at Jin. "You remember when I accelerated Seul’s drop? That chain reaction sent two vines into the ground before she even landed. That’s what my skill does."

Jin nodded slowly. "And you used it on that thing, right?"

"I got a direct hit on its chest when it reared back. Should’ve staggered it. Or at least slowed it for a second. But nothing. Not even a twitch. Like I was trying to move stone with air."

Seo narrowed her eyes. "But you’ve shifted solid creatures before. Even heavier ones."

"Exactly. And the vines still react normally. I can toss them, twist them, crush them with redirected force. But the core, nothing."

He paused, expression tight.

"So unless the rules of physics decided to take a break in the middle of battle... I don’t think that’s the real body."

A low silence settled over the group.

"You’re saying it’s a shell," Seo said.

"I’m saying it’s an extension," Jun-taek replied. "A puppet. The real thing might be somewhere else. And if it’s plant-based, if it’s drawing mass from the environment, then the most obvious answer is that it’s connected to a root. A source."

Seul tilted her head. "Like a tree?"

Jun-taek nodded. "Exactly like that."

Joon made a noise in his throat. "So we’ve been punching branches this whole time."

"Seems like it."

Seo exhaled sharply and turned to Jin. "You buy it?"

"I’ve seen stranger things in the past three weeks," he said. "And he’s not wrong. That thing adapted too fast. Like it wasn’t afraid to lose pieces."

"So," Chul said, standing straighter now, "what do we do?"

Seo didn’t hesitate. "We go find the real body."

The boy in blue flicked one of his discs upward, catching it again without looking.

"I can hop you into a search pattern," he said, casual as if they were planning a hike. "Two or three blocks per jump. Drop you near any suspicious cluster, you tear through it, then we go again."

"You think it’s that easy?" Echo muttered.

The boy grinned. "Nah. But it’s fast."

Seo gave him a nod. "Start opening portals in rotation. Pairs only. Jin and I will take point on the first site."

The scout tapped his belt once. A low ripple of gold formed at his feet, arcs of light expanding into a flat disc. He stepped aside without theatrics. "You’re up."

Jin looked at Seo. "You sure you want to be on the first team?"

She raised a brow. "You messaged me for backup. I’m backing you up."

They stepped through together. No flair, no swirl—just a clean shift of space. The light passed over them like sun through water.