By Zephyria 
“……If you isolate the Smiling Man, you intend to kill him even if you have to break through the Containment Sector by force, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Dammit.”
Kang Suk-young had hoped otherwise, but as expected. With an annoyed huff, she tossed the Substitute Blade. Jeil Heon caught the blade lightly in mid-air and stored it in the wooden sword case he had brought.
“Make sure you kill him and bring back the corpse. If you think your hand will shake because of old memories, don’t step forward in the first place.”
“As if that would happen.”
“Do you need backup?”
“Just track where he appears.”
“You’re asking for a lot.”
Kang Suk-young grumbled for no reason and leaned deep into the sofa. Thinking about the Smiling Man gave her a splitting headache, but since Jeil Heon had decided to take charge, she didn’t doubt the result.
“How does a man who used to be talked about as being cut into pieces by a Buddha end up not just as a serial killer, but as an Aberration? Was he some kind of psychopath, or something like that?”
“Who knows.”
“Tsk……. I actually thought Employee Yoo Jiha might be a second child Nam Hyeon-woo had later, but I was completely wrong.”
Jeil Heon gave a thin smile.
“The two of them don’t look alike at all.”
“Now that I look again, you’re right.”
Whether it was said as a mindless joke, Kang Suk-young let out a short laugh, and Jeil Heon stood up, waving his hand lightly in farewell.
Upon returning to the office, not only Yoo Jiha but other team members were waiting for him. It was impossible that they hadn’t heard the rumors about his ill-fated connection with the Smiling Man, yet Song Hilda and Kim Min-seop didn’t let it show. They were simply admiring the Divine Blade Jeil Heon had retrieved.
“Oh, even though this is a Divine Blade from someone who passed away 22 years ago, the sharpness is incredible. It’s like looking at my oldest sister’s Divine Blade.”
They were good people. Jiha felt lucky that these were his first colleagues. However, Jeil Heon knew that he was someone who could sacrifice even these kind people without hesitation if it meant protecting the jewel in his chest. Therefore, while grateful for their kindness, he once again thickened the line he had drawn in his heart.
“I learned a bit in class, but in Hwanghae Province, it’s correct to call the Divine Blade a Substitute Blade, right?”
“You learn things like that? I should have gone to the Folklore Department. The shaman robes of the Hwanghae Mansins are truly splendid…”
Listening to Kim Min-seop’s explanation, which was more vivid than a professor’s, Jiha drifted into thought again today. Jeil Heon had said he intended to kill the Smiling Man with this Divine Blade. Without resolving Jiha’s question regarding the whereabouts of his wife.
〈What would change even if you found out? Yeo-jin has already been dead at that bastard’s hands for nearly 20 years.〉
Judging coldly, his point was correct. Since the Smiling Man was an Aberration, the mere act of conversing with him was a burden for a human. While Jeil Heon wouldn’t be contaminated by him, there was no need to take an unnecessary path.
And yet, it kept bothering him. The way the Smiling Man spoke of Lee Yeo-jin. The photograph of Nam Hyeon-woo wearing a shy smile beside Lee Yeo-jin.
Before Yoo Jiha could clearly organize the disturbing thoughts unsettling his mind, the office phone rang. After receiving a call requesting entry into an Aberrant Realm, Jeil Heon returned from the Measurement Center and gave a briefing.
“An unfamiliar waveform has been detected in the ‘Red Floor Park Incident,’ an Aberrant Realm scheduled to close naturally within two to three days. It is neither an Aberration bound to the realm nor a newly entered one.”
Then what was it? Jiha was puzzled, but the expressions of the other experienced team members hardened.
“There is a very high probability that a victim the company failed to find has deteriorated. We are entering to neutralize that Aberration and recover the body.”
He had studied Aberrant Realms nearing natural closure, but this was his first time experiencing it firsthand. Even using the Opening Blade, entry into the realm didn’t happen instantly; they had to attempt it several times.
Upon entering the Red Floor Park Incident, a gloomy, decaying sky greeted the team. It felt strange to have such thoughts about an Aberrant Realm, which wasn’t a living organism, but it felt as if the space itself were an old man on the verge of death. The buildings were brittle, as if they would crumble at a touch, and the Aberrations creaked like broken dolls.
Yoo Jiha checked the Procedure Manual in the mailbox. Unless it was a realm with limited entry personnel like the Eight Phases Mental Hospital, they usually kept a generous twenty copies of the manual, but two were missing. Song Hilda murmured bitterly.
“The last search of the Park Incident was 10 days ago, so it seems two people were swept in during that time. The wavelength isn’t that weak, so I wonder why they weren’t detected…”
The owner entity guarding the counter was also worn out to the extreme. As it cackled while watching a CRT monitor showing a freak show using humans, Jeil Heon once again paid the lodging fee with a single drop of blood.
The Red Floor Park Incident was, as its name suggested, a sort of murder hotel where killings were carried out in every room until the floors were stained red. In this Park Incident, where the floors and room numbers changed randomly upon every entry, they had to find the only safe room. Otherwise, they would suffer deaths according to the room’s setting: being cut into pieces, dissected alive, served as a single meal, or having candles and soap made from human fat.
The safe room was ‘Room 213112.’ However, that room was empty. It wasn’t that the occupant had left the room after being contaminated into an Aberration; there was simply no trace that a human had ever stayed there.
“Since the room numbers are all written vertically as ‘One, Two, Three,’ there are victims who get confused and enter the wrong room.”
“For now, let’s search from the beginning.”
The group returned to the first floor and searched from the first room. It was in the sixth room that they discovered one Aberration—or rather, one that was presumed to have been a victim.
「Honey… please hold… me…¿」
Yoo Jiha instinctively gripped Jeil Heon’s wrist tightly. As if it were wearing human skin, every time it mimicked speaking or breathing, the skin across its entire body shuddered. However, what startled Jiha was not its form.
The Aberration was slicing its own body into bite-sized pieces, as if carving out meat. The Aberration carefully gathered the sliced pieces of flesh and pushed them one by one through the gap in the bathroom door.
While the group remained silent in the face of an eeriness that was hard to put into words, only Jeil Heon gestured as usual.
“Please neutralize it. Don’t kill it, as we need to verify if it’s the victim.”
“…A-Alright, Sunbae.”
The Enforcement Division Agents, who had been staring blankly, snapped back to their senses. The Aberration, possessing no attack or defense capabilities, was easily subdued by the agents.
「Nooooo… no…¡」
It struggled helplessly, trying to block the firmly closed bathroom door with its own body. Perhaps because of the awareness that it might have been a victim; even though he recognized that what was before his eyes was an Aberration and not a human, Jiha bit his lip as if he could feel its grief. The rest of the group seemed to feel the same, as the surroundings became deathly quiet.
Jeil Heon kicked open the bathroom door. Beyond the door lay the corpse of an Aberration, sprawled out and so long dead that even its bodily fluids had dried up. Along with it were the bite-sized pieces of flesh piled up in the corner.
「Honeyyyyy…¡」
The Aberration held by the agents writhed and wailed. Unlike the one found outside, the Aberration inside the bathroom had crumbled away, unable to mimic a human, a beast, or anything at all.
“There’s something like a diary here…”
Unable to bear the sight, Jiha looked around for any clues and found a leather diary. It was a diary placed among the belongings the Aberration had possessed in life. As soon as he opened the diary, two folded copies of the Procedure Manual fell out.
“…It was the victim.”
Kim Min-seop sighed as he skimmed through the diary. Just like the Aberration’s wailing, the victims were a married couple. The contents of the diary, which described the simple daily lives of a couple with a good bond, gradually changed. The couple’s only daughter had been murdered by her husband less than a year after her marriage. Unable to overcome the shock and pain, the wife suffered from severe depression, attempting suicide several times.
On a trip intended to comfort each other, the couple was swept into the Aberrant Realm. Upon realizing it was a place where there were no police or doctors, only monsters that ate people, the wife opened the door to any room and jumped in.
The diary that followed was written in a strained hand, struggling to suppress wretched dread and terror. The events that unfolded in this place in the past were more horrific than imagined.
The wife became a monster.