Chapter 6
It felt as if the filth hidden beneath her elegant beige coat was stinking up the whole alley.
“Murder and corpse disposal.”
He could tell she was guilty, though he didn’t know the details yet.
He didn’t particularly want to know them, either.
Just seeing the guilt was disgusting enough.
When the bus arrived, the woman grabbed her bag and stood.
Her eyes were still full of the expression of a woman swept up in love, fluttering and bright.
But to Suhyeok, she was nothing more than garbage that deserved to crumble into black dust and scatter.
The bus stopped at the curb, and the woman in the beige coat stepped aboard with light, eager footsteps.
Suhyeok gently twisted the throttle and followed behind it on the scooter.
Fixed above the scooter’s dashboard, the Compass of the Wraith pointed at the bus.
It didn’t matter if he lost sight of it for a moment.
As long as he kept moving in the direction the compass showed him, that was enough.
After a few stops, the bus pulled over again.
When the woman got off, the compass shifted to follow her.
Suhyeok parked the scooter at the mouth of an alley a little way from the stop.
He opened the delivery box and took out the Reaper’s robe, slipping it on.
As he pulled the hood low over his face, Suhyeok’s presence seemed to vanish beyond the noise of reality itself.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
The café that was their meeting place came into view.
He was about to go in when he stopped short.
To Seo Yoonju, beauty was survival, and survival was capital.
Before meeting a man, she had to make sure there wasn’t a single thing out of place.
She turned toward the commercial restroom attached to the café.
Standing before the mirror, she opened her pouch.
She patted on cushion foundation and checked the color of her lips.
Seo Yoonju’s reflected eyes looked so clear and innocent it was almost sickening.
No man had ever looked into those eyes and failed to be deceived.
He’s supposed to be some research guy at a conglomerate, right?
She clicked her mental abacus.
This time, she might be able to ask for a bigger sum.
Maybe she’d play up some incurable disease and squeeze him for hospital bills, or cry that she was short on lease money because of wedding preparations.
Would eighty million won be enough? No, wait. Guys like that would lend out hundreds of millions without blinking.
A faint, greasy smile spread over her lips.
Imagining the man she was about to meet breaking down later, sobbing and pleading, then raging and collapsing into despair, filled her with a cathartic thrill.
Guilt?
She hadn’t been born with any.
In Seo Yoonju’s life, anything that blocked her path had always been stomped flat and thrown aside.
By now, the thought of that horrific crime had long since vanished from her mind.
As if it had never existed in the first place.
Only one thing filled her head now: how to strip the man she was about to meet bare and shake every last penny out of him.
Click.
The restroom door opened.
But in the mirror, the entrance behind her was empty.
The door had opened, then quietly closed again.
“A draft?”
She found it odd for a moment, but soon turned her gaze back to the mirror.
Thinking someone had come in and changed their mind, she reapplied her lipstick.
“There. Perfect. Time to go make money.”
She smiled again and checked her face one more time—just then,
“⋯⋯!!”
A bone-deep chill crawled up from beneath her feet.
It wasn’t simply the feeling of being cold.
It felt as though some invisible thing had brutally seized her legs and was crushing them.
“A-ahh! Wh-what is this!”
She screamed and collapsed onto the marble floor.
Her pale, smooth skin shriveled in an instant, like leaves stripped of all moisture.
Her muscles twisted, and the joints of her bones began to bulge grotesquely through her skin.
“Kehhk! Help—help me!”
She screamed with everything she had.
Someone had to hear her, someone had to come.
But the pain only kept rising, clawing upward until it crushed her chest.
She couldn’t breathe.
The Seo Yoonju in the mirror was no longer a refined beauty.
It was a grotesque old hag, eyes rolled in terror, screaming like an animal.
“Aaaagh! My face! What happened to my face!!”
She desperately reached toward the mirror, but starting from her fingertips, her hand crumbled into black glowing dust.
When the screaming was over, all that remained in the restroom were Seo Yoonju’s pouch and lipstick rolling across the floor.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
Suhyeok silently opened the restroom door and stepped outside.
The words murder, corpse disposal, and fraud that had been stinking up the place a moment ago were gone from this world.
He has judged a sinner.
As judgment reward, he obtained 10 Hell Points.
Fifty more Hell Points.
He mentally tallied the remaining points needed for Reaper’s Steps and headed back into the alley.
As he was about to take off the Reaper’s robe and put it back in the delivery box, the once-docile Compass of the Wraith began vibrating violently again.
What now?
Suhyeok followed the direction of the needle.
Two men were coming out of the café, each carrying a cup of coffee.
They wore casual clothes and worn sneakers that made them look easy enough to move in.
At a glance, they seemed no different from ordinary passersby.
They were heading toward a black SUV parked by the road.
Suhyeok stared at the two men.
Then, over one of their heads, black text bloomed like ink bleeding across paper.
Bribery
Leak of official secrets
Aiding murder
Aiding drug distribution
Concealment of crime
Abuse of authority
Suhyeok knew it at once, by instinct.
That bastard was the “straw” Chickengang had talked about.
Judging by the clothes and the sins, he was clearly a narcotics detective.
The police station was around here somewhere.
Suhyeok quietly started the scooter.
The SUV the men got into moved, as expected, toward the nearby police station.
Making use of the scooter’s maneuverability, he got ahead of them and waited near the station; before long, the SUV slid in through the front gate.
I need to squeeze information out of him.
Making a scene inside the police station would be suicide.
If an investigation started, things would get messy fast.
Better to catch him on the way home, get what I need, and send him to hell cleanly.
If he left no trace with Hell Punishment, the case would likely be treated as a simple disappearance and never investigated too deeply.
I’ll have to come back this afternoon.
It was still morning.
Loitering around would only make him stand out and waste time.
Suhyeok turned on the delivery app and spent the day doing his usual rounds through the neighborhood to make money for living expenses.
At five in the afternoon, he parked the scooter across from the police station and went into the café.
He took a seat at a corner by the window, set a cooling coffee in front of him, and stared blankly at the station entrance.
About two hours passed.
The black SUV he’d seen that morning drove out through the police station’s front gate.
Suhyeok quickly left the café and mounted the scooter.
Following it wasn’t especially difficult.
He trailed far enough behind to keep out of sight, letting the compass guide him to the bastard’s location.
After about twenty minutes, the SUV turned into the underground parking lot of an old villa on the outskirts of the new district.
The cramped, damp space could barely fit six cars.
Suhyeok took the Reaper’s robe from the delivery box and put it on.
The moment the robe settled around him, Suhyeok’s presence melted completely into the darkness beneath the parking lot’s low ceiling.
He silently approached the man as he got out of the car and stretched.
Then, with the Reaper’s scythe already summoned into his right hand, Suhyeok adjusted his grip and mercilessly brought it down on the man’s right shoulder.
Thwack!
“Aaaagh!”
The straw detective screamed and panicked at the sudden agony.
The scythe crashed down again toward his left shoulder, where terror had already bloomed.
Splurt!
“A-ahh! Wh-who are you!”
The screams echoed grotesquely off the parking lot’s low ceiling.
Without stopping, Suhyeok sliced through both of the man’s ankles one after the other.
The sickening sensation of severed muscle traveled through the blade and into his hand.
The man’s eyes, overwhelmed by pain he couldn’t even understand, fluttered and quivered without focus.
Facing that shameful, pathetic fear, Suhyeok’s eyes went cold.
I hate those frightened eyes of yours. You’re not even worthy of fear.
With anger boiling up inside him, Suhyeok seized the man’s wrist and cut through it as well.
When the bastard started thrashing in a fit of panic, Suhyeok clamped a hand over his mouth and forcibly swallowed the screams down.
“If you want to live, shut up. Information or not, I’ll kill you right here and now.”
“Hik⋯!”
An empty parking lot. A low, chilling voice coming from nowhere.
The straw detective froze, drawing in a ragged breath as the Reaper’s sentence fell over him.
The fear he must have spent his whole life inflicting on others was finally returning to its rightful owner.
The detective’s eyes, rolling wildly on the floor, trembled.
It was an unseen presence.
And yet the cold, firm pressure over his mouth was undeniably real.
The word discarded after use flashed through the detective’s mind.
The Cheolsu Party.
He assumed those pieces of trash no longer needed him and had come to erase the evidence.
Yesterday they said Chickengang and Kim Jongchan disappeared from XX Club all of a sudden. Is this connected to that? What are they planning—kill them, kill me, and clean everything up? Are they trying to shut the whole operation down?!
As the detective clung to his own theory as truth, Suhyeok’s low, murderous voice stabbed into him like a knife.
“Name.”
For a moment, the detective’s eyes flashed.
He was asking for a name?
If he really was sent by the Cheolsu Party, there was no way he wouldn’t already know it.
He’s not from the Cheolsu Party!
The instant he realized his attacker hadn’t been sent by them, his cringing fear turned into a ridiculous sense of authority.
“You bastard! You attacked a South Korean police officer, a narcotics detective no less! I’ll make sure you rot in a cell—!”
Shhk!
Before he could finish, the Reaper’s scythe ruthlessly sliced through the detective’s remaining wrist.
“Aaaagh!”
The scream tore through the damp air of the parking garage.
Blood sprayed from between the torn flesh and soaked the floor.
Looking down at the man writhing in agony, Suhyeok simply repeated himself in a flat voice.
“Name.”
Once again, the cold touch of the blade brushed his wrist, and the detective, trembling violently, hurriedly answered.
“It’s I-Ichisang⋯ Ichisang!”
“From now on, answer my questions quickly and accurately. Unless you want to die from blood loss. Keep in mind that I don’t have time.”