The Garbage That Never Ends
With that single word, Lee Si-hyun’s body swayed as if it might collapse.
Kang Ha-rin hurried over and gripped both of her shoulders firmly.
One of the detectives checked the body, then turned to Lee Si-hyun with a hardened expression.
“Are you the person who reported this? Did you kill her yourself?”
“No. It wasn’t me.”
Lee Si-hyun shook her head in panic.
Kang Ha-rin stepped up beside her and said curtly to the detective, “Please contact the Abyss Investigation Team. This involves an Awaker.”
The detective seemed to recognize Kang Ha-rin and hesitated for a moment.
“Ah, you’re from the Beyond Guild… Understood. I’ll call them right away.”
He carefully stepped back.
Kang Ha-rin turned to Lee Si-hyun.
“What happened?”
Her voice was neither scolding nor soothing.
It was simply calm, as if telling her it was all right to speak.
It sounded like she would listen to anything.
Lee Si-hyun opened her mouth, then closed it again.
She had no idea where to begin, or how to explain it.
In the end, she started with the simplest fact.
“My father… killed that woman.”
Kang Ha-rin’s gaze flicked to the body for an instant, then returned to Lee Si-hyun.
“Your father?”
“On the way home, I heard screaming and strange noises…”
Just thinking about her father committing something so horrifying made her hands start shaking again.
“Where is your father now?”
“He was… sent to hell.”
The detective, listening from nearby, furrowed his brow and cut in. “Hell? What exactly do you mean by that?”
Kang Ha-rin raised a hand toward him, calm and restrained. “I’ll explain when the Abyss Investigation Team gets here.”
The detective stepped back again.
Lee Si-hyun’s eyes fell to the ground.
The last moment, when her father had dissolved into black dust, still clung before her eyes like an afterimage.
Nothing remained. Just an empty patch of dirt.
For a long time, she couldn’t say another word.
“Si-hyun.”
Kang Ha-rin called her name a little more softly.
Lee Si-hyun slowly lifted her head.
Her voice came out thin, as though all the air had leaked from it.
“Dust… was here.”
At once, Kang Ha-rin’s expression hardened.
It was the name Lee Si-hyun had reported after returning from the gate yesterday.
The name that had quietly circulated only among the upper ranks of the Awaker Association and the heads of the five major guilds, now surfacing again in this very place.
“You mean the one you saw at the gate yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Kang Ha-rin was silent for a moment.
Her gaze drifted toward the body, then back to Lee Si-hyun.
“That bastard killed your father.”
It wasn’t a question.
Lee Si-hyun couldn’t answer.
She only nodded slowly.
Before the Abyss Investigation Team arrived, Kang Ha-rin sat down beside Lee Si-hyun.
The two of them remained silent for a while.
Kang Ha-rin checked Lee Si-hyun’s condition first.
Despite the shock and confusion wracking her, Lee Si-hyun was holding herself together better than expected.
Kang Ha-rin asked quietly, “Can you give a statement?”
Lee Si-hyun nodded slowly.
“There are probably more than just that woman. People who died by my father’s hand…”
Instinct told her this was probably not the first time her father had done something like this.
Kang Ha-rin couldn’t say anything else.
Nothing she said would truly comfort her anyway.
Not long after, the Abyss Investigation Team arrived.
The first thing Choi Su-min saw when she stepped onto the scene was the victim’s body.
“I’m Choi Su-min, team leader of Team 10, Abyss Investigation Team. Who reported this?”
Kang Ha-rin looked over at Lee Si-hyun.
Lee Si-hyun quietly raised a hand.
“I did.”
“From the report, you said it was Dust. Is that correct?”
“Yes… that’s right.”
Choi Su-min’s eyes swept over Lee Si-hyun for a moment.
“You’re the Awaker, Lee Si-hyun, who entered the gate yesterday.”
“Yes.”
Choi Su-min shifted her gaze from the nodding Lee Si-hyun to the victim’s body.
“Was this killed by Dust?”
“No.”
Lee Si-hyun answered briefly.
“This woman… my father killed her.”
Choi Su-min’s eyes moved almost imperceptibly.
She had already guessed this body wasn’t Dust’s work.
Up until now, not a single corpse had ever been found at a scene connected to Dust.
Not at the Yacha Gang parking lot. Not at Changho Building. Everywhere had been the same.
And all the Cheolsu-pa members tied to Changho Building vanished without a trace.
The Cheolsu-pa information uncovered during the Changho Building investigation.
While investigating Cheolsu-pa, Choi Su-min had learned that all of its members were listed as missing.
From that information, she had inferred that Cheolsu-pa had been wiped out by Dust.
No—she was certain of it.
Dust’s usual trace was a bodyless scene, not even a drop of blood left behind.
Yet this time, a corpse remained.
If Dust hadn’t killed her, did that mean he had left the body on purpose?
Choi Su-min’s eyes narrowed.
After giving a short order for a team member to secure the body and the scene, she turned back to Lee Si-hyun.
“Please give your statement.”
Lee Si-hyun slowly began to speak.
She started with what she had witnessed inside the gate.
Park Cheol-min, Kim Yong-han, Choi Young-o.
The three of them disappearing one after another.
And then, what had happened here today.
Choi Su-min listened in silence, jotting everything down in her notebook.
She already knew most of what had happened inside the gate; the Association had issued official notices and directives, and the investigation was underway.
Still, Choi Su-min dutifully took notes and listened to Lee Si-hyun until the end.
When the statement ended, silence settled between them.
“The three people who disappeared inside the gate—Park Cheol-min, Kim Yong-han, and Choi Young-o. Did you know any of them personally?”
Lee Si-hyun shook her head.
“Entering the same gate was the first time I’d ever met them. We were only loosely acquainted because we were the same rank.”
Choi Su-min’s gaze drifted briefly into space.
They were registered A-class Awakers with the Association, normal Awakers active in their respective guilds.
And so was Im Dong-seop today.
Only through this incident had they learned he was a monstrous criminal; before that, he had simply been an ordinary father of a family.
At present, there was no clue as to why Dust had chosen these people and killed them.
Then Lee Si-hyun spoke again, carefully.
“There was something that person said to me.”
Choi Su-min’s pen stopped.
She looked up from the notebook and fixed her eyes on Lee Si-hyun.
“Did you talk with him?”
“Yes. Very briefly.”
Choi Su-min adjusted her posture.
Her face remained expressionless, but her eyes sharpened.
“Was the voice… male or female?”
“Male.”
“Young? Or did it sound older?”
“On the young side. About my age, or maybe a little older.”
“Any accent or dialect?”
“No. Nothing that stood out.”
“How was the tone or manner of speech? Did it sound excited, or agitated?”
Lee Si-hyun thought for a moment.
“No. It was a voice with almost no emotion. Not exactly cold—just… dry. Like it didn’t matter at all.”
“It didn’t matter at all. It didn’t matter. Hmm.”
Choi Su-min murmured the words as she wrote them down.
“Did you notice anything unusual? Any smell, sound, footsteps? From what direction did the voice come?”
Lee Si-hyun closed her eyes and opened them again.
“There were no footsteps… At some point, I just heard the voice. I’m not sure about the direction either. I couldn’t see him.”
Choi Su-min wrote quickly.
“What exactly did he say?”
Lee Si-hyun slowly opened her mouth.
“‘I came to clean up some filthy trash, but you just happened to be standing there. You’re not my concern.’ He said it exactly like that.”
Choi Su-min stopped writing.
For a moment, silence hung there as if she were chewing on the sentence.
“You’re the only person to report hearing Dust’s voice. You’re the first, Lee Si-hyun. Everyone who has met Dust either turned to dust or was recorded as missing.”
Lee Si-hyun stiffened.
Kang Ha-rin’s eyes also wavered slightly.
Choi Su-min went on.
“Why would Dust say that to you? He wouldn’t have needed to explain why he was sparing you.”
“I asked him if he’d come to kill me.”
“So you were the first one to speak to him.”
“Yes…”
While writing it down, Choi Su-min asked, “He said, ‘you just happened to be standing there.’ That means he didn’t know you were there. In other words, he came for Im Dong-seop alone from the start.”
Choi Su-min closed her notebook.
She didn’t ask anything more.
There was nothing she could confirm yet, but unlike before, she had found a few clues.
“Thank you for your cooperation. If you remember anything else, please contact us.”
Choi Su-min gave Kang Ha-rin a brief bow.
Kang Ha-rin answered with a silent nod of her own, and Choi Su-min turned and left the scene.
She let out a long breath into the night air, her head already aching with the weight of it all.
“What a headache.”
Back at headquarters, Choi Su-min sat down and opened her report.
She went over the connected cases one by one: the Yacha Gang, the Cheolsu-pa members who had disappeared in connection with the Changho Building incident, the trio from the gate case, and today’s incident on top of all that.
She searched each thread for a common point.
“A grudge?”
Yacha Gang and Cheolsu-pa were criminal organizations.
There were plenty of ways they could be tied together by some old hatred.
But the trio from the gate case and Im Dong-seop today had no point of contact at all, no apparent connection.
And yet one clue from today stood out clearly.
“He’s definitely targeting them.”
Why, how, and what exactly he was targeting still remained a mystery.
“Came to clean up trash… trash…”
The word trash kept circling through Choi Su-min’s mind and mouth like a stubborn echo.
* * *
System message:
He judged a sinner.
As judgment reward, he obtained 10 Hell Points.
Only 10 Hell Points.
Not long ago, those 10 Hell Points had felt precious enough to treasure. Now they only seemed meager.
Even so, Suhyuk had no intention of only going after targets that were worth Hell Points just because he was cleaning up trash.
After glancing at the message, he took the Judge’s Compass from the dead man’s pocket.
The needle was still reddened, trembling violently toward a new sinner.
Seems about as much trash as Im Dong-seop.
Suhyuk looked down at the compass and muttered under his breath, “There’s no end to trash, no matter how much you clean up.”
It wasn’t anger, and it wasn’t fatigue.
It was just a dry, matter-of-fact acceptance that the world had always been this kind of place.
Suhyuk climbed onto the scooter and twisted the throttle, following the direction the compass pointed.
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