No Bait in the Trap
"Wh-what's wrong with her!?"
Kang Yeji panicked, checking Seo Arin's condition.
Her breathing had stopped mid-cycle, and her face was turning an alarming shade of blue.
"Cardiac arrest! Park Gwangdo!"
Kim Woocheol called out to Park Gwangdo, who was seated a short distance away.
He crossed the room at a speed no eye could follow and shoved Kang Yeji aside. She hit the floor with a heavy crash.
Bzzzt!
Sparks crackled from Park Gwangdo's fingertips. Electricity — his ability, unmistakably. He pressed his hands against Seo Arin's heart.
"Gaaah... ugh."
Seo Arin's chest convulsed like a fish flopping on ice.
Again and again, Park Gwangdo touched his hands to her heart and pulled them away, cycling the charge like a human defibrillator.
A minute passed like that.
"She's back."
Park Gwangdo caught Seo Arin's body as it crumpled. He had pulled her back from the brink of cardiac death.
Kang Yeji took her from him and laid her out on a nearby sofa.
"Park Gwangdo, Kang Yeji. The two of you stay with Seo Arin at all times. Tight monitoring. I'll attach a healer to her as well."
Kim Woocheol said. If another cardiac arrest came, they would need to respond instantly, so he contacted the Management Bureau immediately and requested a healer.
"Why would a heart attack hit her out of nowhere?"
Seo Gichan, who had been quietly observing the situation from the side, spoke as he adjusted his glasses.
"Acute stress, probably. Or genetics. Or high blood pressure."
Kang Yeji offered the textbook explanation.
"Can acute stress actually cause a heart attack?"
"Absolutely."
"Hmm..."
"Don't tell me you think sd1234 caused the heart attack?"
Kim Woocheol asked. The hunters' eyes sharpened.
"I'm keeping that possibility on the table."
"Isn't that impossible, though? A-rank and above hunters have been guarding this woman since yesterday. And this place — even most hunters couldn't find it."
They were currently in the underground of Rando Guild, a facility with extremely tight security.
"True. If sd1234 were behind the heart attack, then the other targets would have died the same way, wouldn't they?"
"Then let's verify it."
Kim Woocheol called the Crime Investigation Division and asked whether any of the targets under surveillance had died.
"None. The heart attack was just a freak accident."
"Then that's the working assumption."
Seo Gichan conceded.
"Today is critical. We're gathering every drunk driver into one place for surveillance. And how is the ongoing operation progressing?"
The Crime Investigation Division had manufactured drunk-driving criminals themselves. They staged an incident on camera, then spread fake news claiming there were victims. That was the situation Lee Hocheon had seen on the news.
"We haven't exposed the death-row inmate's face or personal information."
They were using a death-row inmate to stage the crime.
"With zero information released, can he even kill the man?"
"That's exactly what we're trying to find out."
"Couldn't he just deliberately not kill him?"
Seo Gichan shook his head.
"He'll kill him. Without question. It's the deaths of two teenagers. The entire nation is waiting for it — waiting for the suspect to die. If the justice sd1234 preaches is real, then he has to deliver on this. It's non-negotiable for him."
The hunters nodded at his words. It was a persuasive argument.
"We'll release the inmate's information slowly, piece by piece."
Seo Gichan's eyes gleamed.
Lee Hocheon had tried to uncover the circumstances behind the drunk-driving incident. But not a single media outlet had reported on it properly.
The criminal's identity is completely sealed. No face, no name — not even the time or place of the accident.
Like this, he couldn't kill the man even if he wanted to.
He tried digging into the victims' side instead, but the information vacuum was exactly the same.
If it's a trap, shouldn't they be luring me in?
At minimum, a certain amount of information had to be made public. You had to throw the bait for the fish to bite.
And yet there was nothing.
As expected, this is hard to do alone.
Lee Hocheon checked the mail that had come from KMS. A journalist who called himself Jang Seon-woong — the man who had appeared on the news before and broadcast Lee Hocheon's message exactly as delivered.
"Hmm."
There was a good chance Jang Seon-woong would cooperate if he requested information on the case.
The problem of being traced, however, still remained.
Nothing to be done, I suppose.
For now, this case had to be set aside. And he needed to find a communication channel that was harder to trace.
He left the house and bought out every relevant book on the subject. He studied artificial intelligence, academic papers, and real-world cases, researching methods that couldn't be caught.
"Ah, right."
Evening came, and he remembered something he'd forgotten — checking whether Seo Arin was dead.
He didn't even need a skill for that. If she were dead, he simply couldn't designate her as a target at all.
Design the instant-death type.
"She survived?"
The skill had engaged on Seo Arin. He canceled it immediately.
How on earth did she survive? Was the skill not actually applied?
There were too many variables to pin down a cause. Maybe the skill hadn't activated, or maybe some other power had intervened.
This was the age of hunters. Just as he possessed an instant-death skill, other hunters could well harbor powers of equal mystery.
Resurrection, maybe. Or reversing time.
He searched through every record, but neither ability was known to exist. Of course, that didn't mean it wasn't hidden from the internet entirely — his own instant-death ability would never come to light unless he himself chose to reveal it.
"Hmm..."
Things were going less smoothly than he'd hoped. But it wasn't as if he had no options.
The instant-death ability was boundless, and there were countless ways to kill.
He compiled the list for tomorrow's deaths.
Nine in total.
It had been ten, originally, but he had already spent one use on Seo Arin during the day.
Seo Arin plus the three others who didn't die yesterday — four. Then five ordinary drunk drivers.
It needed to be tested.
Everyone knew hunters protected celebrities. But could they protect ordinary drunk drivers?
There's no more meaning in disguising them as suicides.
Strangling by one's own hand was a kind of signature — a mark announcing that the Judgment Seat had done it. That value had already been spent. The public now understood: when a drunk driver died, the Judgment Seat had killed them.
I need to muddy the investigation.
The same method had reached its clear limit. The government had contained the deaths in under a week.
He designed instant deaths for the four celebrities.
[In the early hours of today, brain function ceases, resulting in death.]
Brain death.
Cardiac arrest could be countered if people were nearby. But brain death? How would they ever notice a brain stopping? It could only be confirmed after breathing had ceased — and by the time anyone was moved to a hospital, it was already too late.
Should I mix in other methods?
He considered it, but that didn't seem wise. For the countless deaths to come, he needed to keep a variety of methods in reserve.
Then the ordinary people I'll have to find myself.
Lee Hocheon dressed and stepped outside.
"Enough drinking. Let's go."
"Ugh, why? Drink more. I'm not drunk yet."
Inside the club's private room, a man grabbed a woman's arm and tried to drag her out. Up front, two other idiots were raising hell.
"Come on, let's drink somewhere else. You really want to keep drinking while watching those clowns?"
Shim Seokhun had splurged on the room with a friend today. It had burned through far more money than expected, but the results were satisfying — mostly because the girl beside him right now was very much to his taste.
He'd had a fair amount to drink, and he wanted to work off his urges, slowly but surely.
"Drink where?"
"I know a good spot. Let's just go."
Shim Seokhun stood, and the woman reluctantly rose with him.
She wore a tight black dress with a plunging neckline. Her name was Jang Surim, and she'd come to the club for much the same reason as him.
"Your friend's in heat or something, oppa?"
Once they stepped outside, she lit a cigarette and asked.
"That bastard would screw anything whether his friend's there or not. He's an idiot."
"Pfft. And you came out here 'cause you want to screw, didn't you?"
Jang Surim tugged at her dress just enough to flash her bra. When she made the appeal that blatant, Shim Seokhun immediately put a hand on her shoulder and whispered.
"You've got me so damn hard right now."
"So what are you gonna do about it?"
"Buy some liquor and get a motel."
"Ugh, the motels around here smell like ass."
Jang Surim scrunched up her face. Shim Seokhun fretted that he might lose her. But if he suggested somewhere pricier, money was the problem.
"Oppa, do you have a car?"
Jang Surim asked.
"Yeah. Why?"
Shim Seokhun had secretly taken his father's car to the club.
"Then let's go to my place. I live near here. About ten minutes away. There's a convenience store out front, so we can grab drinks there."
Shim Seokhun agreed without a second thought. What a stroke of luck, he thought. He'd save the motel fee, and he could do whatever he wanted with her.
The two walked to the car and got in.
"Can you drive?"
"You said it's only ten minutes. That's plenty."
"I'll read out the address. Punch it into the GPS."
Despite the alcohol, neither of them hesitated for a second — one driving, the other abetting.
"Nice car, by the way, oppa?"
Jang Surim said to him as he drove. It wasn't the kind of car a twenty-something would typically be seen in.
"It's my dad's. Snuck it out."
"Ah. Interest gone, just like that. You booked an expensive room, so I figured you had money."
Her words rattled Shim Seokhun badly.
"If you want it, take it. My dad's got a few more. He says I have to graduate college first, so I took this one out on the sly."
A complete lie, of course.
"Oh? So you're a college boy. Park here — we'll walk. There's no parking inside."
At her word, Shim Seokhun pulled the car to the curb. He cut the engine and half-rose from his seat — then froze, hunched in place.
"What are you doing?"
Jang Surim spoke to him, but there was no answer.
"Hey. What are you doing? Get out."
He simply sat there, upright, doing nothing. Then suddenly, both his hands began squeezing his own throat. In an instant, his face flushed crimson.
"Kyaaagh!"
Jang Surim screamed, made no attempt to stop him, and scrambled out of the car. She shot upright — and then her body abruptly refused to obey.
What's happening to me?
Her own hands moved on their own, rising toward her throat. Beside her, Shim Seokhun had gone limp and toppled out the door.
I want to squeeze. Desperately.
Crack!
She strangled herself so hard her own vertebrae crunched. Moments later, her body, too, went lifeless and spilled out the door onto the pavement.
The next morning.
South Korea and the Hunter Management Bureau were thrown into turmoil yet again. The news broke that five ordinary citizens had strangled themselves to death inside their own cars.
The coverage was wall-to-wall, and the online communities were ablaze.
The topics ranged far and wide, and a few commenters began questioning the staged teen deaths from the day before.
So that's how it is.
Lee Hocheon had confirmed every last detail of it. It was a trap, just as he'd thought.
They still haven't figured out how to counter me.
The results of today's skill check were in: Seo Arin, and every name on the list, were dead.