Just for Being Unlucky
Hyuk-jin sat on a bench in the Han River park and let out a long sigh. Night had fallen, and the tourist cruise ships lit up as they drifted over the water. But after the downpour, the river ran so murky that nothing about them felt remotely romantic. What did it matter if some scow floated over sewage with its lights blazing?
Still, after days of unbroken rain the weather had finally eased, and tonight the park was full of people on inline skates and bicycles. The forecast said the real heat wave started tomorrow—maybe everyone had decided to enjoy the night while they still could. For whatever reason, the Han River park looked unusually crowded.
"Must be nice."
Hyuk-jin propped his chin in his hand and watched the skaters. So people could actually be happy just from something as simple as sliding around?
Wholesome leisure sports like that could never touch the boredom chewing through him. Addicted to violence and forever thinking too much, he only ever got to be a mindless high-schooler when he was facing Seo Rin. Which was probably why, ever since Seo Rin had quit school and completely vanished, the days had become unbearable.
"Hey, Hyuk-jin. What's wrong?"
His friends—or more accurately, his underlings—came over. All of them looked at him with worried eyes. If they'd had tails, they would have been wagging them.
These were the guys who had completely folded under the notorious Choi Hyuk-jin. Unlike Seo Rin, they weren't equals he could share real friendship with. No matter how much time he spent with them, nothing ever filled the hole. He only kept them around because they were useful tools. Hyuk-jin sighed and ignored their concern.
"Leave me alone."
"Must be because the missus dropped out of school, huh?"
One of them nailed the exact reason. The nickname, though, was another matter.
"You looking to die?"
"No way. Hahaha."
They all flinched back at the threat. The way he snapped made it easy for an outsider to assume the guess was wrong.
But everyone already knew that Hyuk-jin had started sighing the moment Seo Rin left school. Before that, he'd been too busy hanging around with Seo Rin to bother with nightlife; lately he showed up all the time. Connecting the dots to Seo Rin was the only thing that made sense.
"So why the hell did Hyuk-jin get so stuck on that nerd anyway?"
When he stopped answering them, they started gossiping among themselves.
"Dunno."
"Rumor says the nerd actually beat him."
"No way. Choi Hyuk-jin competes in amateur wrestling, and his family's got a dojo. What random guy could take him?"
Their school didn't even have a sports team, but Hyuk-jin trained like a dedicated athlete. These idiots, of course, always assumed he trained just so he could fight better, so every conversation circled back to brawling. There was a reason school-violence comics kept sneaking into every boys' magazine.
"He was already beating high-schoolers back when he was in middle school!"
"Whatever. Doesn't matter. We're just lucky he's back."
"Yeah, yeah. Best news ever. I was this close to quitting everything and becoming a good little boy."
They kept chattering just far enough away that Hyuk-jin couldn't quite catch every word. He sighed, pulled a pack of cigarettes from his jacket, and shook one free.
"...Shit. I'm going crazy."
He stuck the cigarette between his lips and lit it. One of the guys watched him, puzzled.
"Didn't you quit?"
"I did."
Hyuk-jin exhaled. These guys were exhausting too. Maybe sitting alone would be better. But alone only made him feel more pathetic, so that wasn't an option. Experience had taught him that when his mood sank, it was better to be around people—even if he took it out on them.
"...So why start again now?"
"Shut up. Who the hell are you to lecture me? You my wife or something?"
Hyuk-jin kept the cigarette in his mouth and suddenly coughed hard. After so long without one, his body wasn't taking it well.
"Hahahaha!"
Right then a man and woman walked past, laughing loudly. A couple out at the park for the first time in a while, by the look of them.
"So like I was saying, I really landed one on the guy. Senior or not, getting that wasted? Give me a break. So he starts staring me down, but, well... I used to be pretty good, you know."
The half-drunk war story was thick with booze and bluster. The woman was tipsy too. Probably ducked out of some nearby beer hall for air. Hyuk-jin thought all that as he stood up from the bench.
"...Hey."
"We doing this?"
The kids around him felt a chill the second they saw the change in his eyes, but they still fell in behind him. Hyuk-jin smirked and glanced back.
"Shall we have a little fun tonight?"
Everyone understood exactly what he meant and answered with the same knowing look.
Clatter-clatter-clink!
A chain rasped through an iron ring set into the steel beam. Below the grinding metal hung a man in casual clothes.
"Gaaah!"
His scream filled the dark warehouse. The chain was looped around his neck and his feet no longer touched the floor. A classic hanging—except they were lifting him slowly, so his neck didn't snap. A few delinquent kids hauled on the chain with everything they had, and his body rose higher.
"Careful. If he swings around too much the neck bones break. You don't actually want to become murderers, do you?"
Choi Hyuk-jin sat among the kids and muttered through a yawn. He would have loved nothing more than to kill someone, but the law was the law, so he settled for not killing.
They left the man dangling for a few more seconds, then slowly fed the chain out and lowered him back to the ground. After thrashing in midair, the man finally felt solid floor under his feet and gasped for air through tears and snot.
"Hah... hah... hah!"
He'd been a decent-looking guy once. Now he looked like a drowned rat. The torture wasn't over. They yanked the chain again and his feet left the floor.
"Aaaaagh!"
The scream ripped through the warehouse a second time—a sound so raw it was almost impossible to describe. You would have to hate someone with real venom to keep torturing them while listening to that. Hyuk-jin just kept urging the kids on.
They were nothing more than a couple the group had run into by chance along the river. Both a little drunk, the man had been showing off—maybe bragging, maybe telling the truth—about how he'd once been somebody. That had rubbed Hyuk-jin the wrong way, so he'd dragged them here.
The steel-frame warehouse doors were locked tight, but a section of rotting plywood had left a hole big enough for people to slip through. Inside, they had started their private little lynching.
"S-stop it! Please! What the hell is wrong with you?! You're all insane!"
The woman who'd been with him screamed, blood streaming from both nostrils. Hyuk-jin only snorted. If "stop" had ever been an option, he never would have started.
"What do we do?"
The kids who'd followed him asked, a little uneasy. This was the first time they'd gathered since Seo Rin quit school, and Hyuk-jin had gotten even rougher in the meantime. At school he still played the model student, but losing Seo Rin had clearly cut him deep.
"...Fine. Fine."
Hyuk-jin clenched his teeth. During jobs like this they never used real names. They weren't going to kill the witnesses, so there was no point making it easier for the cops to track them later.
A woman alone might stay quiet. A man and woman together almost always reported, no matter how badly they'd been hurt. But even the worst of it got buried under the flood of violent crime hitting Seoul lately. These jobs rarely left a trail—mostly because Hyuk-jin had drilled the kids hard. Friendship didn't usually involve training, but he had taught them one by one how to leave as little evidence as possible.
Still, before anything serious they always asked him first. Not because they didn't know what to do. It was a way of dumping every last scrap of responsibility on the leader so they could feel a little less guilty themselves.
Hyuk-jin clicked his tongue and glared at them.
"What do you mean, what? You assholes even got dicks, or are you just empty down there with all that whining? Take turns with her."
The second the words left his mouth the kids rushed the woman like they'd been waiting for the order. The ones on the chain liked that idea better too; they eased the man down to the floor.
"Cough! Gah... hrrk!"
He'd been holding himself up by pure neck strength. The moment his feet hit concrete he pitched forward and sprawled. Hyuk-jin watched and sighed.
These idiots really were a mess. Someone should have been watching the man. If he ran and called the police in a situation like this, everything went to hell. They weren't the infamous terrorist Han Se-gun—ordinary people got caught nine times out of ten in a chase with the cops.
"Damn it."
He walked over to the collapsed man, grabbed him by the hair, and hauled him up. The guy still looked dazed, like he couldn't believe any of this was real.
Terror was written all over his face; his whole body shook. A normal person might have felt pity. Hyuk-jin, who had walled off that part of himself long ago, only felt irritation.
"Ah, I really can't stand this. So fucking annoying. Hey. Do yourself a favor and just kill yourself."
"Cough..."
The man clutched his throat and stared at him like he hadn't heard right. Hyuk-jin yanked him upright by the hair.
"Listen carefully. You die clean right here, and we leave the girl alone. But if you want to live... then watch. Keep both eyes wide open while she gets raped, you pathetic piece of shit!"
Choi Hyuk-jin slammed the man's head into the floor. Just looking at people walking the streets like nothing was wrong made something boil and churn in his gut until he couldn't stand it.
People who drifted through each day without a single doubt, without a shred of suspicion—they were aquarium fish. Scoop them up in a net and slice them into sashimi whenever you felt like it, and somehow they still believed they were safe. What exactly were they counting on?
Goodwill? Morality? To Hyuk-jin those were pure shit. If a nuclear launch button had been sitting in front of him, he would have pressed it without a second thought. If it let him escape this boring, empty world for even a moment, he didn't care if he died in the blast.
"Remember this: there are people out there who'll kill you just for being unlucky. Got it? You walking around in front of me is unlucky and it pisses me off! Die! Don't make me dirty my hands—just kill yourself!"
Hyuk-jin ground his shoe into the downed man's head like he was putting out a cigarette.
Then, abruptly, applause rang out.
"Well now. What a splendid attitude!"
The awkward foreign accent arrived together with the heavy metallic snap of a chain being severed. Everyone spun toward the warehouse entrance just in time to see someone smash the doors open and fling them wide.
Car headlights blazed behind the figure, blotting out his face. They squinted and scrambled as the massive man filled the doorway. Despite the heat he wore a leopard-print coat and carried a cane; he looked every inch a thoroughgoing villain.
He lifted the cane and tapped it lightly against his palm while he surveyed the warehouse. Only the silhouette was clear, but every movement was exaggerated, almost theatrical. The over-the-top body language instead of quiet Korean understatement left no doubt he was a foreigner.
"A very fine attitude indeed... but you lot are every bit as unlucky yourselves. Tell me, boy—who guarantees that you are lucky?"
"Tch!"
The instant the words hit him, Hyuk-jin kicked off the ground and charged. Getting caught in the middle of something that absolutely could not be witnessed was bad enough. This guy was wrong on a deeper level. Either they got out of here fast or they put him down too.
Hyuk-jin lunged and snapped out a left jab at the same time, planning to steal the man's eyes and follow with a high kick or a tackle. That was the moment everything went wrong.
Thud!
The world spun.
"What—?!"
Sparks exploded across his vision. It happened in the exact same instant as the jab. Everything was so fast Hyuk-jin had no idea what had just occurred.
Pat-pat.
Dark blood spattered the floor. What the hell? His blood?
He tried to lift a hand to his cheek. His body felt crushed under concrete. Nothing moved. Then the dizziness hit hard.
"Urgh!"
His legs gave out and he dropped where he stood. Staring at the ground, he watched black drops fall and soak into the concrete. His own blood.
Only then did the pain arrive in a flood. Somehow this enormous man had fired a counterpunch with lightning speed that didn't match his bulk at all. The strike had been so clean, so sudden, that a single blow had stripped Hyuk-jin of every scrap of control. It was a miracle he was still alive.
"Impressive. Still conscious, are we?"
The giant looked down at him with something like fondness and stroked his chin. Hyuk-jin was just as surprised himself. That lightning fist was a kind of force he had never felt before.
No... if he had to name anything similar, maybe Seo Rin's attacks came close.
"...N-no way!"
The students all stared in pure horror. Out of nowhere a movie-villain foreigner had dropped Choi Hyuk-jin with one punch. Shock and fear locked every eye on the newcomer.
"Well then—shall we begin the cleanup? Just as you said: let's kill people simply for being unlucky."
The giant snapped his fingers. Two men who had been standing silently behind him stepped forward. Both wore long coats and round sunglasses over slightly pale skin; something dangerous glittered in the eyes behind the lenses.
"Oh, sh—!"