Becoming an Anomaly
After setting dinner on the table for Han Sia, Han Yuhyeon retreated to his room, sank into the desk chair, and began clacking away at his laptop keyboard. To a casual glance, he might have looked like any other student engrossed in an assignment, but his eyes were completely hollow.
He was enduring it. He was barely keeping a lid on the boiling fury that threatened to rupture every blood vessel in his body.
Clack, clack, clack!
With each keystroke, the force behind his fingers mounted. His rigid shoulders trembled faintly. Though his jaws were clenched shut, the sheer pressure forced his teeth against one another, grinding and scraping enamel away in silent torment.
Ever since their parents passed away, Han Mina had thrown herself into the workforce at a tender age, toiling late into the night just to raise him and Han Sia. Yuhyeon had reposed absolute respect in his older sister. She was someone who had willingly sacrificed her own share of life to give everything to them.
She deserved happiness more than anyone. He had felt certain that one day she would meet a good partner, build a warm home, and live a life filled with joy. He, too, had been desperate to land a job quickly, hoping to lift that crushing burden from her delicate shoulders.
Yet all that had returned to him was her cold, silent corpse, her diaphragm crushed flat as dried jerky.
The memory of that day remained seared into his mind, agonizingly vivid. Han Mina, her lungs mangled into pulp, jagged shards of fractured ribs puncturing straight through her flank. Those eyes, once so bright, sparkling with boundless life, had unraveled into a murky haze, staring blankly into empty air.
Slam!
Yuhyeon brought his fist crashing down onto the desk. He gripped fistfuls of his hair and buried his face low.
His sister could never come back.
Yet what about Kim Jeong-sik?
Why had that wretched piece of human filth been let loose back into society?
Because serving out a court sentence expiated a person's sins? Who in the world had the right to grant that pardon?
Yuhyeon slammed the laptop shut with a violent crack.
This world was utterly rotten to the core.
Perpetrators strutted freely under the open sun, trampling over the blood-soaked tears of their victims, while those who were harmed were left to wither in irreversible agony, their lives reduced to ruined husks. True justice meant reclaiming the rightful share stolen by another. But if what was stolen could never be restored, then the culprit had to be subjected to the exact same agony.
Yet Kim Jeong-sik had suffered nothing. How could four miserable years locked behind prison bars ever equal the horror of having one's entire future and life ripped away? That bastard deserved to die in the exact same manner. He should have been struck once by a truck, then made to savor every second of agonizing torment as the slowly reversing tires crushed his bones and burst his organs into paste.
Yuhyeon swept his hair back and glared up at the ceiling.
There was far too much trash cluttering this vile world. Rather than being swept away, the streets were overflowing with abandoned refuse. The foul stench rising from the heaps of garbage choked the very air, making it impossible to breathe. Try as one might to ignore them, the vermin paraded openly down the streets. Worse still, the law shielded them with its ironclad embrace, rendering it impossible to even touch them.
He despised it. He loathed a world like this with every fiber of his being. The law that was supposed to stand impartial was tipped irrevocably to one side; even as countless victims wept tears of blood, the world refused to budge an inch. The law forgave the abusers, leaving the victims to collapse, coughing up swallowed grief.
That was why things needed to be set right.
They needed to be eradicated from this earth entirely, so they could never crawl back out into the light.
At that exact moment, cold sweat poured in sheets down Yuhyeon's brow.
Before he realized it, his breathing turned ragged and a suffocating weight bore down upon his chest.
“Huff... hah. Wh-what... why all of a sudden...?”
A grotesque sensation gripped him, as though an invisible hand had plunged into his ribcage to tear his heart out. Clutching his chest, he staggered to his feet.
“Gahk... H-Han Sia...”
He strained to call out for his little sister, but only a faint rasp, thin as an insect's buzz, leaked past his lips. A dark foreboding washed over him—something was horribly, terribly wrong.
His heart hammered at an abnormal tempo, thrashing against his ribs as if poised to detonate. His limbs went limp, refusing to obey his commands, and his mouth cracked like parched soil in a drought. The sheer agony was enough to drive him mad.
Thud!
Yuhyeon collapsed, his head striking the floorboards with a dull crack. His body convulsed violently, flopping like a live fish hauled fresh out of the water onto dry land. Even though he had not closed his eyelids, he noticed his field of vision rapidly shrinking into a pinprick. The last remnants of his voice died in his throat, and darkness consumed him entirely.
Then, an uncanny phenomenon began to erupt across his entire frame.
A dark, crimson-black fluid seeped copiously through the pores of his skin. The viscous liquid quickly hardened, coalescing into an unbroken shell that swallowed Yuhyeon's body whole. Right in the middle of the room, an pitch-black egg materialized. Through its translucent surface, Yuhyeon's silhouette could be seen pulsating within like a beating heart.
Before long, a sharp crack split the surface. With a concussive blast, the shell ruptured, sending shards flying in every direction.
Simultaneously, the lights overhead died, plunging the room into total darkness.
From the heart of that gloom, a crimson sphere steadily ignited. A piercing beam of red light flared to life, painting the entire bedroom in a wash of blood.
“...”
The entity born from the egg stood in eerie stillness. Thick, dark bandages were wrapped tightly around its arms and torso, while a cyclopean helmet encased its head. Its fingertips tapered into razor-sharp talons, and wild hair fanned out in all directions like the bristling mane of a lion.
“What is this? What just happened to me?”
Yuhyeon muttered in disbelief, shocked by the grotesque state of his own body. While the silhouette vaguely resembled a human form, he could feel it with absolute certainty: the raw power coursing through this flesh transcended the boundaries of humanity.
Vrrrrm—
The single-eyed helmet encasing his skull hummed with a low vibration. The scattered crimson glare illuminating the room converged into a single concentrated beam, locking onto a distant point beyond the walls.
A holographic window had materialized out of thin air. Yuhyeon fixed an unblinking gaze upon the crimson streak of light stretching out into the night.
“Hic! Ugh, nothing in this damn life ever goes my way.”
In the chill of the late-night air, Kim Jeong-sik stumbled beneath the yellow glare of a streetlamp, his face flushed beet-red from drink. A half-empty liquor bottle swung loosely from his grip.
“If it wasn't for that fucking cunt... huh?”
He halted mid-stride, blinking dumbly into the distance. Standing before a pedestrian crosswalk was an attractive young woman. Her taut, shapely silhouette was clearly defined through her clothes, and Kim Jeong-sik smacked his dry lips at the sight.
“Well, don't she look just like that bitch? Hic!”
Veering off his path, he stalked toward her. The woman was tapping away on her smartphone, waiting for the pedestrian signal to change, typing a message to a friend about how exhausted she was from working late. That was when it happened.
“You fucking bitch!”
Lurching up from behind, Kim Jeong-sik seized her by the hair with a savage yank.
“Aaaah! Wh-what are you doing?! Let go of me!”
“This is all your fault! If it wasn't for cunts like you, I wouldn't have to suffer like this!”
“H-help me! Somebody please help!”
The woman shrieked at the top of her lungs, pleading for rescue, but at this ungodly hour, not even a shadow was in sight along the empty street.
“Shut the fuck up, you cunt!”
Jerking hard on her hair, he slammed her violently onto the asphalt.
“Sob... P-please, don't do this! What did I ever do to you...?”
As the weeping woman begged for mercy, Kim Jeong-sik jabbed a dirty finger toward the crosswalk.
“You think I don't know you're trying to pull another insurance fraud scam? It's because sluts like you pull this crap that innocent victims like me get ruined!”
Snorting hot breath through his nose, Kim Jeong-sik grabbed the collar of her blouse and ripped the buttons off with one hand.
“Eeeek! St-stop! Don't touch me!!”
“Hold still! Shameless whores like you need to be taught a lesson!”
The woman thrashed wildly, desperate to stop him from tearing her clothes away. In the struggle, the sole of her shoe caught him square across the face.
Smash!
Kim Jeong-sik shattered the liquor bottle against the pavement and jammed the jagged neck against her throat. The sharp glass bit into her tender skin, drawing beads of crimson blood.
“Fuck, I told you to stay still. Thrash around one more time, and I'll peel that pretty face right off your skull.”
Pinned beneath the broken bottle, the woman could only watch in helpless terror as the rest of her blouse was torn away.
“Mister, pl-please... please don't do this. Th-the police will catch you...”
“So what? You think I'll let you off just because I might get caught? Go ahead, call them! I'll record you whimpering under me from start to finish and blast it all over the internet!”
Kim Jeong-sik fished out his phone, flipped on the video recording, and dragged his tongue across her cheek. The woman shuddered in revulsion, curling into a tight ball as violent tremors racked her frame.
“Heheh, we're just getting started, so... huh?”
Kim Jeong-sik's eyes went wide. Within the pupils that had been peering into the dark, a tiny red dot bloomed into view.
He realized with sudden dread that the dot was expanding rapidly.
Something was rushing straight toward him.
A terrifying, suffocating pressure radiated from the darkness ahead, prickling violently against his skin. Every hair on his body stood on end, and an icy chill plunged down his spine. Breath caught in his throat; his tongue turned to sand. Every survival instinct screamed inside his head: Run! Get the hell out of here right now!
Yet his trembling knees refused to budge.
The very instant the figure lurking in the shadows stepped beneath the amber cone of the streetlamp—
Crack!
With a sickening, concussive smack, Kim Jeong-sik's world spun out of control. His heavy bulk skidded and tumbled across the asphalt several times before grinding to a halt.
“Ugh... urgh... u-uuh...”
He couldn't even form words. Clutching his mangled, ballooning cheek, tears pooled in his eyes. His brain couldn't even comprehend what had just struck him. From his slack jaw, a torrent of dark blood poured out onto the street, pooling with bile, saliva, and shattered teeth. As his dazed gaze fell toward the red puddle—
“Aagh! It hurts! IT HUUUUURTS!”
The delayed agony finally crashed over him like a freight train, and he writhed across the ground in shrieking convulsions.
A beam of crimson light descended over him.
Startled, Kim Jeong-sik lifted his quivering head.
With wild, mane-like hair whipping through the night air and a single-eyed helmet casting down a blood-red glare, an unidentified entity stood towering over him, looking down with chilling detachment.
Yet its gaze was not fixed on Kim Jeong-sik himself.
Rather, it was focused on the floating profile window hovering just beside his head.
NAME:Kim Jeong-sik
GENDER:Male
AGE:48
THREAT LEVEL:Low
Rape, Abandonment of a Corpse, Murder (4 Years Imprisonment), Assault, Extortion/Blackmail