The Official Enemy

"On site, on site! Hold the perimeter! Weapons deployed!"

Blue emergency lights swept the scene. Barely twenty minutes had passed since the report came in, and already the police special mobile unit and a joint suppression team were pulling up before Seongjin Group Headquarters.

What met them was neither gunfire nor screaming. It was blood. A ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠sea of it.

Drip. Drip.

Red had soaked into the walls, the floor, even the ceiling. The lobby desk had collapsed, and someone's arm lay sprawled across it. Beyond the glass wall, a twisted body was crumpled into a sofa. In the staff break room off one corner, corpses had gone black, as if boiled in scalding water. Blood had spread inside the smashed refrigerator and beneath the shattered cabinets.

"...What in the world... is this..."

Terror of this kind was rare in the Republic of Korea, and the mobile officers and detectives alike were veterans who had worked every sort of case there was. Even so, this was a scene without precedent for any of them, and without any likely sequel.

Someone had not killed these people. They had processed them. It was not violence, and it ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠was not murder. Processing—no. It looked like collection. Like refuse being hauled away.

"Chief... this... a person didn't do this."

One of the mobile officers sank down as he said it.

"..."

Lee Gwangsu did not agree aloud. Panic was the last thing this scene needed. Inside, he was nodding, hard.

He was not speaking only of the carnage laid out in front of their eyes.

Twenty minutes. That was all.

From the moment the report landed to their arrival on scene, twenty minutes at the outside. When the first word came through—murder, terrorism—no one had pictured losses on this scale. And yet in those twenty minutes, hundreds had been taken down. Hundreds of Seongjin Syndicate members, men and women hardened by life inside an organization.

A rival syndicate? The police, or the army? No. One man. The impregnable fortress called Seongjin Group had been ruined, obscenely, by a single person.

Lee Gwangsu climbed the stairs without a word, and the building offered itself up on every side. The elevators were wrecked. Blood marked every flight, along with torn dress shoes and scattered bracelets and employee badges. When they reached the eighth floor, the ground was mire. Blood, bone, tissue—unidentifiable wreckage ran all the way to the doors.

Then the tenth. The reek of raw blood hit them the instant they arrived, and several detectives began to retch.

"This is... a butchery..."

Someone muttered it, and this time Lee Gwangsu could not help but agree. It was a butchery no one could believe had been committed by a fellow human being. No—it was a scene wretched enough to be called a massacre.

Mid-level chiefs from every relevant desk had been pulled in: Criminal Investigation, the Special Mobile Unit, Counterintelligence, the Cybercrime Unit, and the rest.

In the heavy silence, Team Leader Lee Gwangsu opened his mouth.

"Ten-thirty a.m. This is the individual confirmed on the tenth floor of Seongjin Group Headquarters. Rolling the footage."

The CCTV playback began, and the conference-room lights dimmed on their own. Every eye went to the screen.

"What?!"

"Wh—what?!"

The shock broke out of them all at once. Ordinary steel would have been hard enough to believe. A security shutter, and one of monstrous thickness, ripped like a scrap of paper.

"This is the scene in question."

Lee Gwangsu hit pause as he said it.

"In this stretch, the man appears to strike a woman, attack an elderly man, and execute a child."

"Isn't that exactly what we're looking at? Or is there some other reason?"

Lee Gwangsu gestured, and the next slide came up. On it waited separate personal files, and the linked material the investigative team had gathered.

"Afterward we ran a complete sweep of the electronics recovered inside the building. Employee records, security IDs, access badges, digital documents, call logs, messenger apps. And the result..."

He went on, heavy.

"Every civilian killed in that footage has been identified as a member of the Seongjin Syndicate. To be precise, they were an assassination cell that Kim Seongjin positioned himself."

The projector changed, and the records came up one after another: an old social-media account belonging to an operative disguised as a child, a forged identification card, traces of contact with poison, a log of specialized training.

"..."

The briefing room sank into a suffocating silence.

"And this ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠man. The identity of the man who did all of it."

Lee Gwangsu froze the footage and brought a new photograph up on the adjacent screen. What appeared there was a name.

It was the file on the serial killer whose name had already been passing, far too often, through the police.

"By analyzing the blood and bodily fluids left at the scene, we were able to arrive at one fact."

He said it heavily.

"The man in the footage is the same person as Han Seungwoo, the serial killer the police are currently hunting."

In that instant, astonishment broke among the chiefs.

"A serial killer... no. Is this even possible?"

"How does a human being tear a fire shutter? With no weapon? No tools?"

They were not pressing him about the man named Han Seungwoo so much as about what had happened on the screen—the thing no human ought to have been able to do.

Through the flood of questions, Lee Gwangsu spoke with a hard finality.

He knew how grave the matter was, and so he went on in a voice that stayed low, and certain.

"That one man killed hundreds. That he has the monstrous strength to tear a shutter apart. And beyond that, the simple fact that a being like him is cutting down evil while still keeping to law and ethics... it will overturn the board this world is playing on."

Evil. Without quite saying so outright, he had named Seongjin Group, named them, as evil.

In truth, there was no one in that room who did not already know it. Had they not been wired into the ranks above, Seongjin Group would long since have been a target for arrest.

Having let his conviction show, if only at the edges, he pointed at the screen again.

"Which is why cooperation with the government is essential. From this moment, every material related to this case is designated Class-1 secret. Footage, documents, and everything said here—no external leaks. The media response will be coordinated with the Office of Government Public Relations, and the incident will be dressed as a clash between violent organizations."

"But there are already dozens of witnesses, and rescue calls came in, didn't they?"

"We're locking mouths down even now. Where necessary, we'll handle them in bulk—anonymous compensation, blocked testimony, and the cover of identity protection."

The measures for preventing social chaos were already in place. Society was not yet ready to meet a monster of this kind. His existence would be made known only after the government and the public authorities had prepared the means to control him.

"This is a matter of the highest gravity. If this footage is released, we get panic, copycat crimes, the collapse of military discipline, a diplomatic crisis. In three hours the world could lose its mind. That is why we are not controlling the truth. We are controlling the timing."

Right now, that came before everything else. But then—

The door banged open, and a man came through.

"What's going on! We're in the middle of a briefing—"

"Chief! It—it's serious!"

The officer from Intelligence paid no attention to Lee Gwangsu. He gasped the words out. At the look of him—

"What. What happened?"

"Just now, on Nutube... a video went up. Footage of what happened in the lobby of Seongjin Group..."

Astonishment spread through the conference room.

The video began. Something whipped out from behind a pillar, and red liquid sprayed away on a diagonal. The camera jolted. There was Nutube's familiar shake, the hunting autofocus, and behind it all the filmer's rough breath, smothered as if he were trying not to be heard.

People pushed out a few at a time. A middle-aged man wearing an employee badge. A woman clutching documents.

At first it looked as if he were only passing between them. Then the one who had been hiding behind the pillar came out with a riot baton, and a black shadow launched.

Boom!

He came down as if driven out of the air, and the lobby floor cracked beneath him. What followed was the rest of it.

Thud. Crunch.

It was not a man's movement. It was a monster's. A wrist folded. A face caved in. A body flew, punched through the glass wall, and dropped. An expressionless face. Movement without a shred of hesitation.

Like a machine, like a judge passing sentence, the man cleared the people in the lobby one by one. At the end, on the floor spread wide with blood, a single overturned nameplate.

The Nutuber who had filmed it whispered, very quietly.

"...This actually happened? This is really... this isn't a movie...?"

The video ended there, on the back of one man wading a sea of blood as he walked toward the floors above.

A war of arguments broke out over whether the footage was real. Faced with something they could not believe, most people still answered it as a fake—as anything but reality.

The government's response had a great deal to do with that. In the comments and across public opinion, they recast what had happened at Seongjin Group as a contest between syndicates, and so the immediate chaos was avoided. Even so, the ember remained. And the powerful were the sort who watched, with extreme wariness, an ember that might catch at any moment—one that might be the very thing to burn them—so long as it was left alive.

Across the tabletop, tension and unease lay in a tangled mess.

In the central conference room of the government complex, the highest officials of the state had all gathered: the Director of the National Intelligence Service, the Commissioner General of the National Police, the Prosecutor General, the Minister of National Defense, and the rest.

"We will begin the meeting."

The Chief of Staff to the President announced it in a heavy voice, and his eyes sank dark.

"The Seongjin Group incident, and the individual known as Han Seungwoo. I trust you have all reviewed what was reported."

The Director of the National Intelligence Service spoke, his face grim.

"As of this moment, the number of people Han Seungwoo has killed is approximately three hundred. Even granting that they belonged to the Seongjin Syndicate, a private individual has carried out a mass slaughter on the soil of the Republic of Korea with no legal process of any kind."

The Minister of National Defense took it up, heavy.

"At the same time, the superhuman ability he displayed isn't something we can ignore from a military standpoint, is it?"

"And the chances of... turning him?"

At the Prosecutor General's words, the air in the room changed all at once. Everyone watched everyone else, and hoarded what they might have said. Into that pause, the Commissioner General of the National Police spoke, carefully.

"I believe it's impossible. Han Seungwoo killed Chairman Kim Seongjin of Seongjin Group. Consider how many people tied to Chairman Kim are sitting in this very room. Even here, we are in no way impartial."

It was an unofficial meeting. And so the true insides of it showed themselves bare.

The Chief of Staff's expression hardened cold. He, too, was a man with ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a connection to Chairman Kim Seongjin.

"Then all that remains is elimination?"

Someone had spoken. It was the Minister of the Interior and Safety. His fingers tapped the table.

"Law, ethics—that all sounds very fine. What matters is how that monster is going to look at us. Kim Seongjin of Seongjin Group has already been removed, and a number of the assemblymen, the chaebol, and the prosecution figures who stood behind him are already sick with fear."

He swept the room with a sharp gaze.

"He can designate any one of us as evil whenever he pleases. Is there any guarantee we won't be the next target?"

The chamber went silent. No one could refute it. Perhaps that silence itself was proof that most of the people seated in the room were closely bound to Seongjin Group.

A moment later, the Chief of Staff drew a deep breath and spoke.

"The present situation has already left the reach of the law and of the state system. A being we cannot control has appeared in the world. The standing of public authority will shake, and the authority of the state itself will be challenged."

"But..."

The Commissioner General, who had been listening, carried the thought on.

"If Han Seungwoo is eliminated this way, the public may well make a hero of him."

The Director of the National Intelligence Service cut in at once.

"That can be adjusted through an opinion campaign. Demonize him through the press, recast the dead as innocent victims, and we can turn public sentiment to our side easily enough. We're already carrying out that work, as it happens."

These people were not idle. Least of all when their own power came under threat. Opinion around the name Han Seungwoo was already moving, and briskly.

Hearing it, the Minister of National Defense nodded.

"Then there's no reason to delay any further. We remove him—and starting now, we also prepare the scenarios for when a superhuman we cannot control appears."

The Chief of Staff looked up from the materials he had spread across the table once more.

"Then I will consolidate our position. From this moment, the government officially defines Han Seungwoo as a threat to the state—as evil, as a dangerous terrorist—sets him as the highest-priority target, and will eliminate him completely. Any objections?"

After a brief silence, every head nodded, slowly. Confirming it, the Chief of Staff rose from his seat and declared, coldly:

With his words, the air inside the conference room sank cold.

In truth, that was the natural result. A power that could not be controlled was worse than no power at all. If it was a being capable of threatening their own power, then removing it was only proper. Even if that being was a superhuman who might save humanity. Even if he was a hero.