The Night the Heads Rolled
Since Black Moon had started the war, Yacha Sect would be the one to finish it.
The Yacha Sect boss growled as he opened the safe.
Inside lay a single black handgun, cold and gleaming.
The look in his eyes was savage with the intent to finish off the Black Moon bastards tonight, once and for all, in return for the first blow they had landed.
“Boss, it looks like Black Moon came prepared. This won’t be easy.”
The deputy boss spoke heavily, rubbing at the bandaged arm he had slung across his chest.
“Get the men ready. Tell them to empty the armory and bring everything out.”
“Understood.”
Loading live rounds into the pistol, then yanking back the slide, the boss muttered through bloodshot eyes.
“I hoped I’d never have to use you again.”
He took the sword hanging in the display case beside the safe and gripped it in his left hand.
It was a fight that would not end until one of them was a corpse.
A moment later, the deputy boss came back in and opened the door.
“We’re ready, Boss. Let’s go.”
The Yacha Sect boss gave a silent nod and led the way.
The underground parking garage was wide and cavernous.
More than ten black sedans and passenger vans waited there with their engines running, and nearly a hundred members of the organization, each clutching a steel pipe or a meat cleaver, bowed in unison toward their boss.
“Boss, you’ve arrived!”
At that moment, as the grave atmosphere filled the garage—
“Ugh?”
A stifled groan burst from one of the men in the front row.
“What the hell? Why are my legs like this?”
“Hey, what’s wrong with you?”
When the man beside him nudged him, he simply collapsed onto the floor.
That was the beginning.
“Aaaah!!”
“W-what is this! Guh, kuhk!”
All over the garage, the men began clutching their legs, their stomachs, their hearts, and toppling over one after another.
The screams that rolled across the concrete floor swelled in an instant, spiraling beyond control.
“What the hell is going on!”
“I-I don’t know! They’re just dropping all of a sudden!”
The Yacha Sect boss paled and yanked out his pistol.
Even the men who rushed over to support the ones collapsing one by one began writhing on the floor and spitting up blood.
In the blink of an eye, a third of the hundred men were sprawled on the ground, twisting in agony.
“I can’t breathe! H-help me!”
“My arm! My body’s shrinking!”
It looked as though something invisible was strangling their throats and sucking the life out of them.
Faced with a nightmare he had never seen before, the Yacha Sect boss bulged with veins and roared, “Black Moon bastards! They hired an Abyss! Find them! Now! There has to be some bastard hiding and pulling strings!”
Having once worked as a D-rank Awaker before falling into the Abyss, the boss instinctively recognized this as the work of an Awaker.
But there was no way a bunch of non-Awaker thugs could understand, much less respond to, a mystery like this.
No—this was a phenomenon even he, a non-Awaker no longer, had never seen in his life.
Nothing was flying in from the outside. No hidden bastard was swinging a blade from the shadows.
They could only stand there and watch as their men flailed at empty air and begged to be saved.
“Aaaagh!”
Then the body of the first man to fall began to wither like a gaunt mummy, and in the next instant it crumbled into a spray of black dust that scattered into the air of the garage.
“W-what the—?!”
“H-he turned into dust!”
The Yacha Sect boss was stunned by the grotesque sight unfolding before his eyes.
Complete annihilation, with not even a corpse left behind.
Even he, who had always boasted of being a veteran of countless battles, could only tremble and wave his gun around in confusion.
“What the hell is happening?! Where are you! Show yourself, you rat bastard!”
As he screamed curses into the air, a voice so low and dry it made his skin crawl brushed against his ear.
“What do you mean, what’s happening? It’s judgment. Hell is waiting for you. You should consider yourselves lucky. Be grateful you won’t die after suffering through punitive torment.”
“...!!”
Behind him.
He spun around in a hurry, and only then, catching the faintest trace of presence, did his eyes widen.
There had been so much screaming everywhere that he had missed the slightest hint of movement.
But there was nothing to see.
The owner of that low, chilling voice was nowhere in sight.
He kicked off the ground, trying to create distance by instinct, but the other man was faster.
Swish—!
With the dreadful sound of air being cleaved, the Yacha Sect boss’s vision lurched grotesquely.
The ceiling flashed into view, then the garage floor.
His body, still clutching the handgun, stood off to one side, and before he could even realize that only his head was rolling across the floor, consciousness went black.
Thud, roll, roll, roll.
The sound of the Yacha Sect boss’s head falling.
Next to him, the deputy boss, who had just been reaching for his own gun, stood frozen without understanding anything at all—then his head dropped too, and he fell forward in a fountain of blood.
“H-hiiik!”
“R-run!”
That was the signal.
As the necks of the officers flew off one after another under the unseen reaper’s scythe, the minds of the remaining men, those still uninjured, shattered completely.
“Move, damn it! Move!”
With screams that sounded like shrieks, the rest abandoned their vehicles and began sprinting like mad toward the parking garage exit.
Of the roughly hundred men in the organization, about two-thirds, those untouched by the punitive torment, scattered in a panic.
Soohyeok brushed the blood from his scythe and watched their backs recede.
Chasing all of them down would be impossible.
He had tried to use Reaper's Steps to wipe them out in one sweep, but in a parking garage this wide, it was physically impossible to pursue dozens of men fleeing in every direction and kill them all by himself.
Well, whatever.
Not a single one of the fleeing Yacha Sect members had seen Soohyeok’s face.
All they had witnessed were their comrades screaming and withering to death, black dust scattering into the air, and their boss’s head suddenly rolling across the floor.
Even if the police launched a massive investigation because of the chaos, there would be no evidence to trace back to him.
From the beginning, he had already taken that risk into account when he stepped into a massacre of this scale.
The rumor’ll spread like wildfire.
With flat eyes, he looked around and silently recited the Punitive Judgment in his head.
Hissssss.
The parking garage, which had reeked of blood only moments ago, was already clean—no corpses, no bloodstains—and messages were surging up across his retina like a waterfall.
Judged a sinner.
Judgment reward: 10 Hell Points.
Judged a sin—
Judgment reward—
The price for cleaning up 42 worthless non-Awakers.
In an instant, 420 Hell Points had piled up.
And then came two special messages.
Judged an Awaker sinner.
Judgment reward: 100 Hell Points.
Judged an Awaker sinner.
Judgment reward: 50 Hell Points.
Level up.
Level-up reward: 10 Hell Points.
Soohyeok stroked his chin as he looked over the messages.
When I killed Kim Jongchan, the club guard, I got 30 Hell Points. This time, it’s a lot more.
The non-Awaker thugs had all given the same 10 Hell Points apiece.
But the boss and deputy boss had given 100 and 50 Hell Points respectively.
Looks like the Hell Point payout is set differently depending on Awaker rank. That boss bastard must have been pretty high-ranked.
There was no way to know exactly which rank was worth how many points just yet.
But one thing was clear: the more Awakers he hunted, the more overwhelming the haul.
He had earned a total of 580 Hell Points in one shot.
That was the reward for cleaning up the bodies scattered across the Yacha Sect parking garage.
Honestly, he had not expected to make this many points in a single night.
For a reckless attempt at mass slaughter driven by the Hell Shop’s price hikes, it was better than he had hoped—an excellent result, really.
For now, I should get out of here.
The urge to go straight home and buy Bag of the Dead and Echoes of Hell surged up to his throat.
After leaving the Yacha Sect building and getting home safely, Soohyeok took off his coat and went straight to the Hell Shop before he even thought about anything else.
Then, without hesitation, he pressed the purchase buttons for Echoes of Hell and Bag of the Dead.
When he bought the skill Echoes of Hell, a faint black light wrapped around his body and slowly faded away.
And right after that…
Ding-dong.
The doorbell rang.
The Bag of the Dead had arrived by courier.
Soohyeok opened the door and picked up the unlabeled box left outside.
He tore the packaging open at once and pulled out the contents.
It was a black lucky pouch, about the size of an adult’s palm.
In the center, the character for prison had been embroidered in vivid red thread.
He untied the cord at the opening and peered inside, but there was nothing there—just an empty black void.
Will Reaper’s robe even fit through this narrow opening?
As a test, he took out the fluttering robe from the delivery bag and shoved it into the pouch’s mouth.
Then, as though the tiny opening had nothing to do with it at all, the robe was sucked smoothly inside like smoke.
“Oh.”
At the strange sight, Soohyeok kept taking things in and out again and again—not just the robe, but also the Soul Compass attached to his scooter and various small objects around the house.
The mechanism was slightly different from summoning and dismissing the Reaper’s scythe, but it was intuitive enough that he got used to it quickly.
Even after stuffing it full of items, the pouch’s weight and size remained exactly the same as before.
Even when Soohyeok crumpled the Bag of the Dead into his pants pocket, he didn’t feel the slightest inconvenience.
“Good. Now let’s try Echoes of Hell.”
Soohyeok lay down comfortably on the bed.
After recalling the skill’s description in his head, he immediately activated Echoes of Hell.
For a split second, his vision spun—and then his body became unbelievably light.
It was a bizarre sensation, like an out-of-body experience, as though his soul had split in two.
One soul remained within the body, aware of the quiet air and the ceiling of the room.
The flesh itself had become utterly defenseless, unable to move even a fingertip.