By Zephyria 
I stood before the main gate and listened, but I couldn’t sense any presence. Then, I noticed that the gate was slightly ajar, unlike before. I considered calling Im Gyeong, but decided against it and went inside.
As I carefully climbed the stairs, the house came into view. Unlike when I had left, the residence was enveloped in a dark silence, without a single sliver of light leaking out. When I reached the porch, I saw that someone had opened the door and propped it open with a block of wood. Instinctively, I guessed that something had happened.
Should I report this to the police? What would I even say over the phone? That it looked like an attack? What if it wasn’t? The interior was so pitch-black that I couldn’t see an inch in front of me. I turned on my phone’s flashlight and searched for something that could serve as a weapon, eventually finding and pulling out a golf club from nearby.
“Im Gyeong…?”
I called out, but there was no answer. I headed toward the second floor, where we had last been together, when a loud crash sounded and a dark figure leaped down. Even in the darkness, I instinctively knew the glinting object was a knife.
The man shouted at me to get out of the way, swinging the knife. I swung the golf club and struck him; with a thud, he collapsed forward and slumped across the stairs. I hurriedly turned on my phone to check the opponent.
The man, completely drenched in blood, groaned and writhed. No matter how I looked at it, the wounds weren’t just from the blow I had just dealt. I quickly rushed past the man and ran upstairs. I called out loudly for Im Gyeong, and just then, the lights flickered on.
The moment I saw the scene before me, my entire body froze. The living room floor, where we had been watching a movie just a short while ago, was stained entirely in blood. Even if all the blood in a human body were drained, it didn’t seem like it would be this much. Gasping for air, I scanned the surroundings.
Just then, I heard footsteps. I gripped the golf club tightly and stared in that direction. The person who emerged from inside was Im Gyeong. Whether from whatever had happened, his clothes were splattered with blood, and blood dripped from his hair.
“Are you hurt?”
Startled, I tried to check on him, but Im Gyeong stopped me, telling me not to come closer.
“I thought you’d left?”
“…….”
His voice was calm. Only then did I realize there wasn’t a single scratch on his body. Then whose blood was all this? It was absolutely not an amount that the man collapsed downstairs could have shed alone. I had seen many murder scenes, but one person could not bleed this much.
A sudden chill ran down my spine, and my feet instinctively turned toward the inner bathroom.
Im Gyeong immediately blocked my path.
“That’s problematic.”
“What is this? Who died?”
“I can exercise my right to remain silent, right?”
At his brazen answer, I hurriedly pressed the 112 button.
The moment I was about to call, Im Gyeong stopped my hand as if soothing me.
“Don’t do this.”
“I am doing my duty. Please move.”
Just then, his subordinates rushed up. Instead of being surprised, they quickly cleaned up the situation—as if Kang Hee-shin were invisible.
As I tried to make the call again, Im Gyeong’s voice became firm.
“Those bastards broke into my home, and it was self-defense. Or what? Would Mr. Kang Hee-shin have felt more satisfied if I were the one dead?”
“There’s more than one or two of them!”
“True, but would it make a difference if one more was added to the count here?”
He meant that “one more” could be Kang Hee-shin. This bastard is threatening me after killing people right in front of a South Korean prosecutor? Even as I glared at him fiercely, sweat soaked the back of my neck from tension.
“The drugs those bastards smuggled in alone amount to dozens of kilograms. It was only possible because they used my maternal grandfather’s name. I was simply executing justice in my own way. But if you still don’t like it, don’t report it—arrest me here. If that is Mr. Kang Hee-shin’s justice, then so be it.”
“…….”
“But keep in mind. If I had left it alone, there would have been more victims.”
The bastard took one step closer. The smell of blood was nauseating. Between the tension and the foul scent, I finally felt a surge of nausea. As I covered my mouth and dry-heaved, he gripped my shoulder with a look of pity.
“Are you already carrying my child?”
This piece of shit! I sharply slapped his hand away, and he laughed quietly.
“Let’s go. I’ll take you to the downstairs bathroom.”
Forget it, don’t touch me. As I strode down the stairs, the man who had been collapsed earlier was gone. Instead, I witnessed employees moving something inside black cloth bags. Did he die in the meantime? Or did they kill him? As I walked toward them, several people stepped forward to block my path.
Their murderous glares signaled that they could kill me too if necessary.
“Let him through. He’s on our side.”
A hollow laugh escaped me at the voice coming from behind. Im Gyeong was already standing in the middle of the stairs.
Our side? Who decided that?
The people who received the order cleared the way, and I hurried out the main gate.
As soon as I stepped outside, I vomited everything I had eaten beneath the wall. The neighborhood was deathly silent, and no matter how hard I looked, there wasn’t a soul in the alley. The van parked in the corner had vanished without a trace, and another van was waiting in front of the gate.
I slumped down right there and pressed the 112 button several times, but in the end, no call went through.
From the moment I opened my eyes, I shoved painkillers down my throat to deal with a splitting headache. After returning home last night, I couldn’t sleep at all. Should I have made an on-site arrest? Should I have reported it to 112? All sorts of thoughts crossed my mind, but in the end, I couldn’t bring myself to act on any of them.
A mixture of helplessness, shame, guilt, and the self-justification that I had no choice—various emotions tore through me.
As I turned away after taking the medicine, the intercom rang. My expression hardened at the sight of a stranger’s face.
“Who is it?”
“Delivery.”
I slowly went to the entrance, slid the latch, and pushed the door open. I saw a man whose hair was a mess, likely because he had just taken off his helmet. Perhaps because of what I had witnessed last night, I was cautious about everything.
“Who sent you?”
“One moment, the sender is… Im Gyeong?”
When I opened the door, the man handed me a box. The box was about the size of a fist. I closed the door, went inside, and opened the box to find a USB drive. After plugging it into my laptop and opening the files, several voice recordings and slush fund documents appeared.
…He played with me and then finally let me go.
Just in case, I searched for last night’s incident. No notable articles caught my eye. How did they handle the bodies? Did they dump them? As expected, I shouldn’t have just left it as it was. I felt my headache returning as a flood of thoughts rushed in.
First, I need to get out. I didn’t have enough time to just dwell on it. I hurriedly stood up and grabbed the USB. I changed my clothes roughly, pulled a hat down low over my eyes, and called a taxi to the underground parking lot. After a thirty-minute drive, I arrived at an electronics market alley in the city center.
Calling it a market was a stretch; people had stopped visiting long ago. I got out of the taxi and entered the narrow alley, checking behind me the whole way to see if I was being followed. The place I reached was an old shop tucked deep inside the alley.
In front of the shop with the shutter down, a sign read “Electronics Repair,” but the letters were peeling off in places, making it hard to read. When I called, I heard a rustling sound from inside the shutter after a moment, and it slid up with a clatter.
The man who appeared from inside was wearing a cute character T-shirt and could barely keep his eyes open.
“Ha—seriously, isn’t this too much? Coming at this hour isn’t very polite, is it?”
Politeness, my ass. Are you and I in a position to worry about that? Hee-shin pushed the man and stepped inside. A moment later, the open shutter closed. The interior was ordinary, and the shop itself didn’t have much that was unusual. When the man pressed a button, one wall opened to reveal another space. Computers were running there, and a display case taking up one wall was filled with figures.
“Where’s the stuff?”
When I handed over the USB, the man plugged it into the computer. He ran a virus scan and then meticulously checked the files. Hee-shin perched on the edge of the desk, staring intently at the man working.
“I’m warning you, forget everything you’re seeing right now. You’re really in trouble.”
“Do I look like an idiot? If I opened my mouth, would the prosecutor let me be?”
While the man worked, Hee-shin rummaged through the refrigerator. Having moved on an empty stomach, he felt hollow inside. However, it was all cola, and there was nothing edible.
“Kid, stop drinking so much soda. Your bones are going to rot and you’ll end up walking with a cane.”
“You sound like an old man. Being stressed is worse, you know?”
Hee-shin glanced at the back of the man’s head as he talked back. The man’s name was Seo Im-sae, and his nickname was Baepsae. He was known in this underworld as the “Hand of God” because there was nothing he couldn’t fix, from broken phones to computers and more. But his abilities weren’t limited to that. Despite the talking back, he was a guy with an incredibly tight lip, so Hee-shin often stopped by for help.
“It’s the original. No signs of splicing.”
Baepsae handed back the USB and held out his palm. “Pay the service fee in cash.” Hee-shin frowned. He pulled out his wallet and opened it, but there were only three ten-thousand won bills. As he handed them over awkwardly, Baepsae’s face contorted.
“You’re seriously stingy. What do you even do with all the money you earn?”
“Shut up. I’ll take care of you later.”
“Always ‘later, later.’ Ugh, I’m sick of it. You cheapskate.” Hee-shin ruffled the grumbling guy’s hair. “Good work.” As he stepped outside, the shutter closed immediately. He left the alley, went to the roadside, and hailed a taxi. When the driver asked where he was going, Hee-shin answered without hesitation: “Central District Prosecutors’ Office.”