Tonight's Dinner Is Chicken...
Tonight's dinner is chicken...
A beautiful woman polished a glass with delicate care. Standing in the place she always stood, Han Suyoung — the owner of this café — finished the last of the day's work and set the thoroughly cleaned glass down with quiet precision.
Her face held a deep calm. Then, a gentle smile touched her lips as she looked at the daughter she loved so dearly, who was, as always, absorbed in her own work right in front of her.
She spoke to Han Ran.
"Ran, Mom's all done. How about you?"
"I've still got a little left. This is... harder than I expected."
"It's fine. Take your time. The schedule's finished for today anyway, and no one's going to come in."
"Mmm... but I want to finish as fast as I can so we can go get chicken together."
Ran frowned slightly, her voice thick with frustration. Watching her, Suyoung let out a soft laugh and answered with pure affection.
"Heh. Is that so? Honestly, Mom feels the same way. If you're that eager, why don't we leave the rest and go right now?"
"Mmm... th-that..."
Her mother's offer clearly tempted her. Ran hesitated for a moment, then after a stretch of quiet deliberation, she shook her head.
"...No. Even so, you finish what you start. You always said so, Mom. Quitting halfway is worse than never starting at all."
"Well... you're not wrong. My daughter's right. Then how about Mom sits here and watches until you're done? I want to see how well my girl is doing."
"Mmm... even so, that's a little embarrassing."
"What does it matter? I'm your mother."
With that, Suyoung slid into the seat right beside Ran and rested a hand on her daughter's far shoulder. Drawing her halfway into an embrace, she pressed a light kiss to Ran's forehead.
Ran's face flushed with shy embarrassment under her mother's unreserved affection. For a brief moment the two of them simply looked like any warm mother and daughter —
And then —
Crack!
"Gaaaaaah!!!!!"
A raw, agonized scream filled the café. Blood sprayed into the air.
In the same instant, the girl who had been resting peacefully in her mother's arms only a second before put on a face of pure ice.
"How can someone be this bad at reading a room? In a situation like this, you scream instead of spitting out the information I asked for? Ro — pull out one more of his remaining fingers. What he's done so far is already disgusting, and now he can't even take a hint. Mercy is wasted on trash like him."
"Yes, Chairman."
At Ran's word, the woman standing before the bound man — Ro Dae-seung — seized one of his fingers. Then, drawing fully on the superhuman strength of a hunter, she began to tear it free with deliberate, grinding slowness.
"Guh... gaaaaaah!!! St-stop! I-I'll talk! I'll talk, so please stooooooop!!!!"
Crrrack!
A wretched scream, and the finger tore free in a spray of blood.
Watching it all while still holding her daughter close, Han Suyoung spoke in a voice utterly unlike her usual warmth — so calm it carried a chill.
"For a man who's killed about ten thousand people, you're awfully noisy. I expected a little more grit from someone who spent half his life in the military."
"I know, right? He is a lieutenant general, after all. I thought he'd show at least a scrap of backbone. I was an idiot for expecting anything."
Both of them spoke with thick disappointment. But in that moment, their casual conversation barely reached Ro's ears as she tortured the man in front of her on Ran's orders.
Of course it didn't.
What Ro was doing right now was the very thing she had longed for over years — the thing she had dreamed of even in her sleep.
Far from mercy, she felt pure exhilaration, joy, and a deep, cleansing satisfaction as she brought every method she had ever learned to bear on the man. At the same time she called up the faces of people she could never see again, and cried out to them in her heart.
Are you watching...? No — you are watching, all of you! Lee Simyeong! Choi Sonbin! Watch carefully. Watch what is happening to this bastard, Lieutenant General Lee Jaeseong!
"Gaaaaaaaaah!!!!"
Lieutenant General Lee Jaeseong.
An officer of the Republic of Korea Air Force, cousin to Vice Minister Lee Jaemin, a man who had ridden the power of his relatives to wield considerable influence inside the Air Force. Years earlier, as a major general, he had directed the Pyongyang reclamation operation and used bombers to massacre the members of the 13th Guild — the guild that had included Ro and Gwon-sun. Only days ago he had ordered that if the Hamhung front collapsed, the same bombardment be poured onto it again.
In this fashion he had manufactured countless "patriots" and steadily piled up military merit. Word had it that on the strength of those achievements he was about to be promoted to full general.
But the man who, mere days ago, had swaggered as if he owned the sky could now do nothing but scream in agony.
"Guhk! Gaaaaah!!"
Fingers and toes torn off one by one. Iron spikes driven through every joint. Lips sliced away. Eyeballs gouged out. Genitals cut off raw.
It was a hell of pain that would have killed an ordinary man from shock long ago — yet the drugs administered beforehand kept him from dying, forcing him to remain fully conscious and scream.
After roughly four hours of merciless torture, once he had poured out every scrap of information he possessed and even the drugs could no longer hold him past the limit, Lieutenant General Lee Jaeseong's breath finally stopped.
The moment Ro delivered her regretful verdict of death on the human garbage in front of her, Ran took out her phone and made a call.
"Yeah, Bones? Work's done, so clean it up. Weight the body with rocks and dump it in Daecheong Lake so it's never found again."
On the heels of the order, black-suited men entered the café under the direction of Bones Bore. Just as they had the last time trouble had broken out here, they set about erasing the scene with practiced speed.
In twenty minutes every trace — corpse, bloodstains, all of it — had been wiped clean, and the café looked exactly as it did when it welcomed ordinary customers.
With the situation so neatly resolved, Ran rose slowly with her mother, a bright smile on her lips.
"Okay, let's go get chicken. As always, I want Soy Garlic."
"All right. Should I order cheese balls as a special treat?"
"Yes! Those too! Oh — Ro, wait here a little. I've got good news to give you while we tear into the chicken."
"...Yes. Understood."
Without so much as a glance back at the hellscape that had just unfolded, the two of them walked out. They vanished into streets that, only moments earlier, had been empty of a single soul, yet now — as if by a lie — were filling with people again.
Watching the mother and daughter act with such terrifying ordinariness, Ro felt a chill far colder than anything she had known while smiling through the torture slide through her chest.
Maybe... someone like me doesn't even rank among the real monsters...
Red blood sprayed across her vision.
In an instant the whole world turned crimson, and Gwon-sun's expression went rigid. An unexpected catastrophe, and with it a terrible aura of death — a shock that seemed to freeze her heart solid. Pure terror flooded her face without filter.
And yet —
In that moment, the pain she had braced for never came.
What stood before her was only a figure of pure white skin, drenched in blood, staring back at her with an expression of pure shock. The source of that blood was its waist — and there, breathing hard, sickle wet with gore, stood Are, who had cleanly severed the dragon's neck.