I Decided to Be a Bad Guy
Cho Miyeong stared at the balance listed in her bankbook with a look of pure glee.
Ten million won.
A large sum if you thought of it as large, a small one if you thought of it as small.
But large or small, it made no difference to the fact that it was money she desperately needed.
“I just popped out one son and look what happens. Hoho!”
With bloodshot eyes she carefully read every single digit of the ten million won displayed on her phone. With this much money she could finally go to the place she had dreamed of and really cut loose.
She was a gambling addict.
She had abandoned her husband who never brought home enough and her nagging son in search of a new life, but the life she found after leaving her family was never rosy. Things had gone wrong, then wrong again, until the only happiness and pleasure left to her was gambling.
She had even started taking out loans because she never had enough money to play, yet no matter how much she borrowed and spent, her thirst was never quenched. Just as she was fretting over where to borrow more, her son died and she received a call telling her to come collect the compensation. She had rushed out at once.
Compensation for the death of Hunter Lee Sangmin.
Honestly, until the person from the Ministry of National Defense told her, she had not even properly known her son’s name. She had left him when he was so young that the name itself had grown hazy.
But that did not matter.
What mattered to her was using this money to chase a spectacular jackpot.
Praying that this time the god of baccarat would smile on her, she began preparing to leave at once.
“Please hit big this time. Hit big.”
Humming with laughter, she started packing her clothes.
Her solitary apartment would sit empty for a long while again, but she did not care.
At least she would not have to look at the landlord’s face screaming about the rent.
Giggling as she dressed, she suddenly felt a presence behind her. She spun around—and felt a terror so absolute it seemed her soul might leave her body.
A man she had never seen before stood quietly watching her, a cane in his hand.
She tried to scream, but her body froze faster than the sound could leave her throat.
“Where do you think you’re going with the money that came from Sangmin’s death? Huh? That’s the price of your own son’s life. You think you can treat it that lightly?”
The man ground his teeth as he spoke to Cho Miyeong, whose body had gone rigid. She could not utter a single word. Then invisibility and ghostification magic settled over her.
“When unawakened civilians are exposed to the mana inside the gates, they usually get one of three reactions. First, awakening. Second, death. Awakening only rarely appears in healthy bodies, and death almost never happens unless the body is already quite weak.”
Cho Miyeong became completely transparent, fully ghostified. The man cast the same magic on himself and lifted her body.
“So what happens to most people? They get mana infection. Your whole body feels like it’s on fire, then suddenly goes numb. Your body won’t move properly. Your arms and legs will refuse to obey the brain’s commands. They say it’s a symptom caused by the body’s functions overactivating from the mana.”
Cho Miyeong desperately rolled her eyes, staring at the man.
But the man—Go Jaewan—showed no intention of helping her.
“You treated your son’s death lightly, so we’ll treat your life lightly too. Look forward to it.”
And just like that, Cho Miyeong vanished from her room.
The landlord. The neighbors. Even the family that no longer existed.
No one would look for Cho Miyeong.
Ironically, because of her own choices, she had become the kind of person whose disappearance no one would ever notice.
“Fucking hell!!”
Division Commander Ji Jacheol lit a cigarette and dropped into a chair inside his official residence.
“If there’s a single Korean soldier who skimmed less than I did, let him step forward! You bastards act like you’re so clean a search wouldn’t turn up a speck of dust. Why the hell is everyone only coming after me?!”
He shouted, but it did nothing to ease the knot in his chest.
There was no helping it. The incident had become too big an issue; a reassignment to a dead-end post had been inevitable. Still, the situation was not entirely bad. The public was busy tearing each other apart along progressive-versus-conservative political lines, and given enough time people would forget a few hunters’ deaths soon enough.
“Right. No need to rush. Time will take care of it. Time will take care of it.”
A nation of pigs and dogs, wasn’t it?
People got offended by the phrase, but Ji Jacheol, who had climbed high enough to see the view from the top, thought those words explained the Republic of Korea better than anything else. Problems piled up everywhere, yet the citizens neither knew how to fix them nor possessed the will to try. They would bark for a while at some sensational news story and then forget it completely.
All he had to do was endure.
That was what Division Commander Ji Jacheol believed.
Thinking that way, he felt a little calmer. He stubbed out the spent cigarette in the ashtray and reached for his lighter to light another. And in that exact moment—
“What……?”
He saw a man who looked exactly like himself, wearing the exact same military uniform, slumped beside him with a vacant expression. Horror seized him and he tried to scream.
But he could not scream.
His body had frozen solid.
He could not move.
As he trembled, staring at the man who was his perfect double, a hunter in combat gear stepped forward and plucked the lighter from his hand.
“Don’t you know the phrase ‘fire safety’?”
A cold, mocking tone slipped from the man’s mouth. He set the lighter on a nearby bookshelf. The flame that escaped from it instantly came alive like a living creature, devouring the shelf and the books inside, growing larger by the second.
It looked as if magic itself had been used.
“All right. Let’s go.”
Division Commander Ji Jacheol’s body turned transparent and became able to pass through solid objects.
He tried to cry out, but his rigidly frozen body could produce no reaction at all.
The fire that had been consuming the bookshelf spread through the entire residence in an instant.
“Uuugh.”
Only the doppelgänger that looked exactly like Division Commander Ji Jacheol remained, slowly burning inside the flames.
The fire was extinguished before long.
And inside the residence they discovered the completely charred corpse of Division Commander Ji Jacheol. A few days later the Ministry of National Defense announced that it appeared to have been an accident caused by carelessly setting down a lighter while smoking.
The land inside the gate.
Eldorado.
A place where countless monsters swarmed and periodically tried to open rifts leading to the human world.
A place where mana existed and magic could twist the laws of physics.
A place where no electronic device could be brought in—literally a place where, as long as the witnesses kept their mouths shut, no evidence and no testimony would remain no matter what happened.
In a dense forest outside the Korean base, Lee Yeonghak quietly looked down at the man and woman lying before him.
“Mana infection, huh. Fucking ridiculous, isn’t it? Body won’t listen to you properly?”
Lee Yeonghak blew out a stream of cigarette smoke and smiled.
“That’s what happens when you don’t awaken. It’s not because your physical abilities drop. It’s the opposite—your body overactivates while taking in mana. You can’t move right, you can’t even talk right. Right?”
Lee Yeonghak chuckled as he looked at Cho Miyeong and Ji Jacheol. Both of them lay on the ground, thrashing weakly, staring up at him with terrified eyes. They struggled, but their limbs refused to obey the brain’s commands, so the thrashing amounted to nothing more than futile flailing.
“Lee Sangmin and Seo Yeongcheol. Both of them are dead. They died like dogs. No matter how hard you try to dress it up with pretty words, there’s no other way to describe what happened except a dog’s death. And this country didn’t even treat those deaths properly. So we kidnapped the two of you.”
At Lee Yeonghak’s words, Division Commander Ji Jacheol, still sprawled on the ground, opened his mouth. His voice stammered badly from the mana infection, but fortunately it still managed to convey meaning.
“Th-this… is a c-crime. I-illegal…”
“Illegal? A crime? You’re right. Not wrong at all. Kidnapping people on purpose out of personal grudge and taking revenge—yeah, that’s not exactly a justified action. It’s a bad thing to do.”
Lee Yeonghak lit another cigarette.
Lately the rage had grown so intense he could barely stand it without smoking. He mixed the deep drag of smoke with the hatred in his heart and exhaled it, then looked at Cho Miyeong and Ji Jacheol again.
“But you two… that kind of talk only works in a country where the social system actually functions properly, doesn’t it? Let me ask you one thing. If we had just sat still, would Sangmin and Yeongcheol have been recognized as dying in the line of duty and buried at the National Cemetery? Or would they have just been quietly forgotten?”
Cho Miyeong shrieked at that.
“Th-that… and what you d-did to us… wh-what the hell does that have to do with anything?!”
“What does it have to do with it, huh.”
She was right.
It had nothing to do with it.
Even if he gave these two a cruel end, nothing would change. The Republic of Korea would remain exactly the same, and Lee Sangmin and Seo Yeongcheol would never come back to life.
Yet Lee Yeonghak had still kidnapped them, and he still intended to give them a cruel end.
Why?
“Because if I don’t do at least this much… I don’t think I can hold on.”
Lee Yeonghak burst out laughing.
He was laughing, but as always his eyes were crying.
“I think I’ve already gone half crazy, you two. Every time I think about those two kids dying in such a ridiculous way… I just… I keep feeling like I have to tear something apart. I was holding it in, you know? I was holding this fucking urge in pretty well. Then a few days ago Yeongcheol’s mother came and cried in front of me… and fuck. Something just snapped inside my head.”
He started to light a new cigarette, then stopped.
He looked down at the two people sprawled on the ground.
“Would it have been so hard to just bow your heads? ‘I’m sorry. I’ll take responsibility. It won’t happen again.’ That would have been enough. But you didn’t. So I can’t hold it in anymore. I decided to just be a bad guy. The kind of bastard who kidnaps people whenever he feels like it and kills them.”
Lee Yeonghak grabbed Cho Miyeong by the throat and started dragging her somewhere.
“L-let go, let go, leeeet gooo! Let gooo!!”
She thrashed, but a body that would not move properly stood no chance against a physical-type awakener.
Lee Yeonghak hauled her to the mouth of a burrow. From deep inside came a sound that made the skin crawl.
The sound of dozens of multi-legged creatures skittering about.
“An Arachnid nest. Once they hunt something they paralyze it, wrap it tight in silk, and eat it later. But when breeding season hits they don’t just use the prey for food. They use it as a breeding facility for their young.”
Cho Miyeong’s face went deathly pale.
“D-don’t. D-d-don’t!!!”
“And right now happens to be breeding season. The moment you fall in, the mother Arachnid will grab you, wrap you in silk, and inject a few eggs into your body. The eggs will grow by feeding on the nutrients in your blood, and before long baby Arachnids will hatch inside you.”
Lee Yeonghak playfully wiggled his fingers.
“Those little bastards will slowly—but thoroughly—eat you from the inside. It’ll hurt like hell, but… don’t worry too much. They spray a very special venom that keeps you from dying of shock. Want to hear something fun? I once raided an Arachnid nest and found prey that had been eaten alive for nearly three years. How many years do you think you’ll last?”
Cho Miyeong began to shake violently.
“S-save… please save me…”
“You used your son’s death however you damn well pleased. So now you get to be used however the Arachnids please until you die. Got it?”
Lee Yeonghak hurled Cho Miyeong into the burrow.
A scream.
The sound of spiders swarming toward discovered prey.
The shrieking cut off almost at once.
She simply could not scream anymore; Cho Miyeong would live for a very long time.
Lee Yeonghak gave a short snort of laughter and turned back toward Division Commander Ji Jacheol.
“That bitch was just a bonus, really. My real target for revenge is you. Isn’t that right, Jacheol? I heard you skimmed a lot in Daejeon. Sangmin dying, and trying to cover for that fucking bitch who killed Yeongcheol—that was all you, right?”
Division Commander Ji Jacheol wet himself.
He began to writhe.
“Save me… I was wrong… s-save me…”
“It’s okay, Jacheol. Compared to Cho Miyeong, yours will be over relatively quick.”
Lee Yeonghak started dragging him somewhere.
A short while later he arrived at a small clearing in the middle of the forest.
“Ta-da! A Red Orc settlement. These bastards are real sadistic psychopaths. They love catching people and roasting them, and they especially enjoy eating while listening to the screams. That’s why they made that thing.”
A rectangular iron box sat in the center of the clearing.
A crude box with a single trumpet-like pipe sticking out of it.
While Ji Jacheol trembled like an aspen leaf, Lee Yeonghak gently stroked his head.
“I thought nothing like that existed in the real world, you know? But when I looked it up, there was something pretty similar. Say hello.”
Lee Yeonghak smiled brightly—and poured every ounce of his rage into telling Ji Jacheol the name of the instrument that would execute him.
“It’s called Phalaris’s Bull. You’re going to sing a pretty song right up until the moment you die.”