The Community of Judgment Day
Lee Hocheon was browsing the internet.
He was looking for allies.
—MegaSquare.
The largest community in South Korea.
He searched for the Judgment Seat and found countless boards devoted to it. Among them, one community called Day of Judgment caught his eye.
It was a community where victims gathered, waiting for the Day of Judgment.
He checked the post written by the administrator.
📌 Posting Guidelines
- Do not post minor grievances.
Ex) Minor traffic accidents, petty theft
- Do not post mutual disputes.
Ex) Mutual assault, mutual threats, etc.
- Do not exaggerate or fabricate facts.
- Secure at least minimal evidence or witnesses.
It was an announcement about the criteria for posting, and it was remarkably objective.
Lee Hocheon's eyes gleamed.
The administrator here understood the Judgment Seat's standards.
If I use this place well...
He skimmed a few posts, and the truly horrific, heartbreaking stories filled the board's best-of list.
What mattered was securing the criminals' faces and evidence.
To do that, he would need to change the board's rules a little.
Just in case.
He left the house.
He needed to scramble his VPN and IP address beyond tracing.
Even if it took some time, he moved all the way to North Chungcheong Province.
He sent the administrator a simple message.
The reply came instantly.
As expected, no one believed him at first.
He switched his IP and sent another message.
The message came back just as quickly.
Apparently convinced it sounded genuine, the administrator had shifted to polite speech.
He named a method he had never once used before.
The reply took quite a while.
After ending contact with him, Lee Hocheon slowly browsed the board.
There's a whole truckload of people who deserve to die.
If every post on the board was true, then this place was hell itself.
The Crime Investigation Division kept replaying the footage recorded at the protest, over and over.
They were trying to find the person presumed to be the Judgment Seat.
"Using a skill would require some kind of preparatory movement, but there were so many people it's hard to pick anything out."
Kang Yeji rubbed her eyes.
She'd watched the footage so many times that her eyes were fatigued and stinging.
"Too many people were pointing at things to tell any of them apart."
Seo Gichan's eyes were bloodshot as well.
The moment someone died at the protest, they had rushed to the scene and hauled in five suspects—people who had appeared to use a skill on-site. All of them were far removed from the Judgment Seat.
"What if he can kill just by watching video?"
Exhausted beyond endurance, Kang Yeji blurted out whatever came to mind.
"Watching video?"
Seo Gichan's eyes flashed.
If watching video could kill, then nearly all of the man's inexplicable crimes could be explained.
Every celebrity he'd killed had appeared on video, and the two ordinary people he'd killed this time had appeared on video as well.
"Has any personal information about the latest victims been exposed online?"
"No. They were drunk drivers, so the information exists only within the police."
"Hmm."
He needed more data.
Because sd1234 might have seen police-side information.
"On the drunk-driving accidents—let's release only their faces, not their identities."
There was one trap he had already set.
A drunk-driving accident disguised as one that had killed two teenagers.
The perpetrator's identity had never been made public, and he had survived unscathed.
"Only the faces... Understood. I'll contact the press."
Kang Yeji went off to handle it, and Park Gwangdo approached Seo Gichan.
"Killing someone by watching a video? Does that even make sense?"
However boundless the skills awakened people could gain might be, the vast majority stayed within comprehensible limits.
Ninety percent were combat skills.
The remaining ten percent granted peculiar abilities—things like Thousand-Mile Sight, which drastically enhanced vision, or buff-type skills like Heal that treated the injured. A skill that killed people through a video screen was something even hunters couldn't bring themselves to accept.
"Then does everything that's happened so far make sense?"
"Hmm... no, it doesn't."
"Sometimes it's worth approaching things this way."
"Killing people by watching video... isn't that scope too broad? What if we narrow it to faces?"
"Faces?"
"Right. You see a face, and you can kill the person."
"That actually tracks better."
Seo Gichan nodded.
"If that's really how it works, could we even catch him?"
No matter how he turned it over, he couldn't conceive of a way to capture a man holed up in some room, issuing murder commands from the shadows.
"We drag him out. Make him come outside."
And for that purpose, Chief Kim Woocheol was already on his way to the National Assembly.
To catch prey, you needed bait.
Very delicious, very tempting bait.
"Propose a law strengthening punishment for drunk drivers, and hold a press conference?"
The National Assembly building.
Party leaders, the Speaker of the Assembly, floor leaders, the chair of the Legislation Committee, and more—a crowd of lawmakers had gathered.
One man stood before them.
Kim Woocheol, Chief of the Crime Investigation Division.
"Since when does the Hunter Management Bureau get to make law?"
Since the emergence of the Gates, the Hunter Management Bureau had risen to become one of the most powerful institutions in the nation.
Under the banner of protecting the country, it had absorbed the Ministry of Defense's authority along with judicial and investigative powers over hunter criminals, and demanded the largest budget of any agency.
The existing power structures had opposed it fiercely at first, but as Gates multiplied, they'd had no choice but to concede to every one of the Bureau's demands.
For that reason, the Bureau was kept in check by everyone—the National Assembly included.
"That's not the intent. The goal is to pass the bill, protect victims as quickly as possible, and lure sd1234 out."
"Absurd. Isn't the Crime Investigation Division supposed to exist to catch hunter criminals? Now we have to accommodate a criminal's demands?"
The lawmakers' attitudes were hardline.
This won't be easy, just like he said.
He'd gotten the Bureau Director's approval before coming, along with a warning that it would be anything but easy.
Lawmakers were hard to persuade even when the logic was airtight.
"We're not proposing to grant his demands. We're proposing to pretend to grant them."
"What do you mean?"
Kim Woocheol began calmly laying out the plan.
"You're all aware that public opinion toward SD1234 has turned hostile since Seo Arin's death. But before she died—remarkably—the dominant sentiment defended and excused his crimes. And what do you suppose caused that?"
"Hmm..."
The lawmakers weren't ignorant of what Kim Woocheol was saying.
But agreeing meant admitting their own failure to manage the law properly.
"It means punishment for drunk driving lagged far behind public consciousness. If we seize on that and announce a strengthened law, public opinion toward the government rises—and SD1234 is driven further into a corner."
It was a reasonable argument.
"Then couldn't we simply frame it as us revising the law ourselves, without ever mentioning SD1234's demands?"
There was no need to invoke SD1234 at all.
Kim Woocheol shook his head.
"We must state explicitly that his demand was accepted."
"Why?"
"Because that gives SD1234 a justification to stop killing. To be precise, we're manufacturing a justification for him."
SD1234 had said plainly, in the post he himself had submitted, that he wanted no more deaths from drunk driving.
If the government produced a powerful countermeasure, his reason to kill would vanish.
Kim Woocheol was counting on exactly that.
"And what do we gain by handing him a justification?"
"No more victims. Assuming he's rational."
"You think a man like that is rational? He'll just keep committing crimes."
"Then public opinion turns against him completely."
Everyone understood Kim Woocheol's plan.
We accepted your demand. So stop.
And if he keeps going?
Then he's nothing but a criminal who lied in order to keep killing.
Whatever SD1234 chose, the win was clearly theirs.
"What should the penalty be?"
"Thirty years should do it."
"What?"
The lawmakers were stunned.
Not manslaughter by drunk driving—thirty years merely for being caught driving drunk?
It was an outrageous punishment.
"No need to be alarmed. Passing a bill through proper democratic procedure takes time anyway, doesn't it?"
From proposal to review, even at its fastest, it took three months.
"And you intend to catch the criminal within that window?"
"Correct. Our target is to apprehend him during that period."
"And if we fail?"
"Then we quietly scale the sentence back down."
Kim Woocheol barely stopped himself from saying, Isn't that your area of expertise, gentlemen?
"We'll give it some thought. We need to deliberate, so step out for a while."
Kim Woocheol exited, and the lawmakers reviewed his proposal.
Eight members of the National Assembly were already dead over drunk-driving records.
Thirty members with drunk-driving histories remained, and beyond them, quite a few had family members with records as well.
That afternoon, the government held an emergency press conference, and breaking-news alerts carried it across every broadcast.
The National Assembly had accepted Kim Woocheol's proposal.
The government was cooperating with the Hunter Management Bureau, so the moment they secured the Bureau's consent, they held the press conference to deliver the announcement.
Public opinion convulsed.
There were dissenting voices too.
The existing maximum for a simple DUI arrest was five years, meaning the sentence had grown sixfold.
It would punish drunk driving more severely than most violent crimes.
Opinions clashed fiercely, but eventually everything converged on a single point of contention.
Whether the Judgment Seat would stop passing judgment.
Attention fixed itself on the next move of the man who had, all by himself, changed the law.
Meanwhile, just as everyone's gaze was locked on the Judgment Seat, exposés about Seo Arin began appearing on one community.
Exposés about the deceased, no less.
It was an uncommon thing.
The posts concerned her high-handed abuse of power after becoming a celebrity, and the school bullying she'd committed in middle and high school.
The abuse of power was bad enough, but the school violence went far beyond the pale.
The victim opened the post with a statement that she was still receiving psychiatric treatment because of what had happened back then.