Chapter 5
The instant the man clutched at his throat and collapsed as if his legs had been cut out from under him, Kim Jongchan shot forward like an arrow.
He had pinpointed exactly where Suhyuk’s voice had come from.
The moment that irritating fried chicken was out of the way, the man’s knuckles sliced through the air and came flying in.
Clang!
By pure instinct, Suhyuk swung the Reaper's Scythe up to block.
The sharp crack of metal striking metal rang through the dark alley.
“So you’re nothing but a sneak.”
Kim Jongchan’s eyes hardened with certainty as he felt the clumsy force transmitted through the knuckles.
He’s right. I’m still too inexperienced to waste time playing along with him.
Suhyuk, who had awakened only recently, had no real combat instincts to speak of.
Forcing a contest of strength was suicide.
That bastard’s an Abyss, isn’t he?
Awakers could be divided into two broad types.
There were the normal Awakers who entered Gates and fought monsters, the majority by far.
And then there were the Abyss Awakers.
A kind of loser, or criminal.
Runaways who didn’t want to fight monsters, or bastards who had committed crimes and were hiding out.
He didn’t know which kind Kim Jongchan was.
Judging by the fact that he was working club security, he didn’t seem like a wanted fugitive.
He wouldn’t be able to walk around so brazenly if he were.
Probably just a defeated coward.
That didn’t make him an opponent Suhyuk could ignore at his current level.
Suhyuk calmly silenced his footsteps and took a step back.
Still concealed within his robe’s disguise, he reached out toward the man.
Let’s see whether this works on Awakers too.
When Kim Jongchan’s attack sliced through empty air, he looked around in confusion.
And when even the faint presence he’d been tracking vanished completely, his brow furrowed.
“Where are you! Did you run?”
The ability he’d judged Suhyuk to have was pathetic.
A rat with nothing going for him except stealth.
Kim Jongchan tightened his grip on his knuckles, convinced Suhyuk was hiding somewhere and waiting for an opening.
But Suhyuk hadn’t run.
Three meters behind Kim Jongchan, squarely in his blind spot, he murmured in an ice-cold voice.
Judgment and Punishment.
When Judgment and Punishment is used on an Awaker, the activation chance decreases. The reduction rate varies depending on the target.
What? There’s an activation chance?
It seemed he couldn’t simply cast Judgment and Punishment on anyone at will.
Since no such message had appeared when he used it on ordinary people, non-Awakers must have a one-hundred-percent success rate.
At that moment, the black energy stretching up from the ground had already wrapped around Kim Jongchan’s shoe soles, licking at them before he even noticed.
Good. It triggered after all.
“Huh? What the hell?”
Kim Jongchan frowned and shook his foot.
His Awaker-honed senses had apparently caught some unpleasant foreign sensation.
But that was all.
This wasn’t some trivial effect like binding a monster scare enough to make it run, then slipping into a criminal organization.
“A binding skill, huh. Heh.”
Thinking Suhyuk had merely used a skill to pin his feet in place, Kim Jongchan dismissed it and took a step, preparing to follow Suhyuk’s presence again.
In that instant, his face went the color of wet dirt.
“...?! Khh! What the hell, you fucking—! My legs!”
A rough scream burst from Kim Jongchan’s mouth.
It wasn’t merely that his feet were bound.
The black energy that had climbed up from his ankles had begun forcibly siphoning away the life force flowing through his entire body.
“Khh! You bastard! What did you do?”
He’d thought it was just a binding skill. The sensation of something invisible stealing away his strength left him unable to think straight.
For Suhyuk, it was a symptom he’d already seen more than once.
The only difference was that, unlike the tattooed thug or the junkie who had been ordinary humans, the black shadow of Judgment and Punishment was advancing much faster this time.
Awakers taste better, huh.
The black energy that had risen from hell was devouring the Awaker as if it wanted him more, swallowing him in a frantic rush.
The man’s bulky muscles shrank little by little, as though someone were letting the air out of a balloon.
He withered into a gaunt old man, as if decades of age had been compressed into a few seconds and forced onto him all at once.
Suhyuk watched the spectacle with his back against the wall.
This was on a different level from the tattooed thug who had simply crumpled without resistance.
Kim Jongchan could feel the mana and life being torn from his body in real time, and he shrieked in despair.
“N-no... My... my power! Aaaagh!”
He desperately tried to squeeze strength into the hand that held his knuckles, but his fingers had already become so wasted that the knuckle bones jutted sharply beneath the skin.
With a dull clatter, the knuckles hit the ground and echoed faintly across the alley.
Suhyuk, his eyes hidden beneath the Reaper’s robe, stared straight at Kim Jongchan’s fading focus.
Of course, his reflection wasn’t visible in the man’s eyes.
“Go rot in hell.”
Above Kim Jongchan’s head, his sins hovered in plain view.
Assault
Murder
There were fewer sins on him than on the trash Suhyuk had seen so far, but that didn’t make him any less rotten.
Trash was trash in the end, and it was Suhyuk’s job to clean it up.
Kim Jongchan didn’t even have the strength to answer.
His rib cage had shrunk, choking off his breathing, and his neck and arms were already dried out like branches.
Suhyuk turned his gaze to the fried chicken.
The man was already sprawled on the ground, dazed by the sight of Kim Jongchan turning into a living mummy.
Blood from his neck had already pooled out enough to practically make a river, so even if Suhyuk left him alone, he was going to die anyway.
But a corpse left behind, traces left behind—those were not what Suhyuk wanted.
“You too. I’ll take you out with me. To hell.”
The black energy greedily swallowed the fried chicken whole.
As expected, since he was an ordinary person, it progressed more slowly than it had with Kim Jongchan.
Hissssss—!
The shapes of the two men dispersed into black flecks of light and dissolved into the air.
The luxury watch and clothes they had been wearing, along with the pool of blood that had spread across the ground, vanished as well.
The alley went quiet as if nothing had happened.
Clean, silent, and utterly incapable of hinting at the murderous intent that had filled the place only moments ago.
I thought only things in direct contact with the body disappeared, but apparently that’s not the case.
Through repeated experience, he had learned that objects not in direct contact didn’t vanish.
But he hadn’t known blood would evaporate and disappear like this.
Does that mean blood counts as part of the body even if it isn’t directly attached?
Then wiping away traces would be far easier.
To be honest, stabbing the fried chicken in the neck had been an impulsive act.
He could have killed him cleanly and left no trace using Judgment and Punishment, so there had been no need to use the Reaper’s Scythe at all.
But through this experience, he once again realized just how excellent Judgment and Punishment really was.
You have judged a sinner.
You gained 10 Hell Points as a reward for judgment.
Your level has increased.
You gained 10 Hell Points as a reward for leveling up.
You have judged an awakened sinner.
You gained 30 Hell Points as a reward for judgment.
Suhyuk’s level rose to 3.
Overall Rank: 3 / 3
The system message was sweet as a victory anthem.
A total of 60 Hell Points.
The Soul Compass cost 20 Hell Points, right.
He wanted to save up for Reaper's Steps, the best skill in the Hell Shop, which cost 100 Hell Points, but it might be better not to get greedy.
The Soul Compass would make it easier to find sinners.
It was an important item that would cut down on the time he wasted wandering around pretending to be a delivery driver and searching for them.
Black Mask, he said.
Cheolsu-pa’s boss, Black Mask, the one the fried chicken had mentioned.
There was no doubt that bastard was an Abyss, and he might even be a high-ranking Awaker.
I need to prepare.
Through this, Suhyuk understood something.
No matter how urgent his revenge might be, he had to make himself stronger.
Meeting an Awaker had made painfully clear how badly he lacked in combat ability and experience.
He knew better than anyone that taking one step back for every two steps forward was nothing to be ashamed of.
When Suhyuk returned home, the first thing he did was throw himself onto the bed.
More than fatigue, it was the strange sensation he had felt clashing with the Awaker Kim Jongchan that was cluttering his head.
“I’m definitely still lacking power.”
He did have a body enhanced by Reaper Body, but that was only the foundation.
If he didn’t have finely honed technique or real combat experience to back it up, he’d have to rely on variables like stealth just as he had today.
Suhyuk opened the Hell Shop.
A shop window splashed with red and black blood appeared before his eyes.
He had 60 available Hell Points.
Without hesitation, Suhyuk selected the Soul Compass.
Purchase.
The moment he pressed confirm, a familiar doorbell sounded in his ears.
Ding-dong.
At the sound of the bell breaking the silence, Suhyuk sprang up from the bed and headed for the front door.
When he opened it, there was a single box sitting all alone on the hallway floor.
There was no shipping label, no sender’s name—only a red symbol of two crossed Reaper’s Scythes stamped across the top.
He carried the box inside and sliced through the tape with a utility knife.
Inside was a single compass, shining with the dull luster of old brass.
As soon as he placed it in his palm, a chill slid up his wrist along with a heavy, unpleasant weight.
Suhyuk opened the compass lid.
“It’s not moving.”
The needle only pointed as his hand moved, following gravity as it shifted.
The limitation listed in the item description, a radius of ten meters, felt far larger than he’d expected.
At the very least, it meant there were no sinners inside this villa—or anywhere outdoors within ten meters.
So I can’t find them just sitting at home.
Suhyuk decided to get some sleep first.
After washing up and lying down on the bed, he drifted straight into sleep.
The next day, he set out for deliveries.
A scooter was convenient for searching within such a short ten-meter range.
He didn’t turn on the delivery app; instead, he fastened the compass to the scooter and rode around from place to place.
He watched the needle’s movement with sharp focus, and just as he was passing through a residential neighborhood and turning onto a main road, the listless needle finally began to tremble.
It’s reacting.
The needle pointed northeast.
It stopped, indicating the direction of the bus stop.
Suhyuk hid in the shadow of a nearby alley.
Then he swept his gaze over the people standing at the stop, one by one.
His eyes came to rest on a woman sitting at the end of the bench, smiling brightly as she looked at her smartphone.
She wore a beige coat and had her hair neatly tied back.
At a glance, she looked like an ordinary, decent woman.
But the sins hanging above her head told a very different story.
Murder
Body Disposal
Fraud
Suhyuk’s brow twisted before he even realized it.
It was ironic that she had committed crimes like those with such a smiling face.
A monster who had killed someone and dumped the body.
That filthy trash was smiling among normal people as if nothing were wrong.