The Guillotine of the Livestream
"...So he really was an angel?"
At her daughter's words, the mother blinked. Only moments ago her heart had been pounding as if it might burst; now a strange calm lay over her, the kind that comes when you step out of a dream.
She had been certain they were about to die. And yet not a single drop of blood had been spilled.
All of it was thanks to the man who had thrown himself in front of the car. At a glance he had looked barely into his twenties...
"...I think... he may have been an angel of judgment."
She murmured it as she carefully drew her daughter's head against her chest.
No such being could exist in this world. Reason insisted on that. But the scene she had just witnessed was greater than any miracle—and it had been real.
"Really...? An angel of judgment?"
"Yes. An angel who punishes bad people. People like the ones from a moment ago."
A guileless smile had already found the child's mouth.
Her father stared blankly around them, then began slowly clearing the dents and shattered fragments from the car. His hands still trembled faintly, and only after several deep breaths did he seem to steady himself.
And then came footsteps. Someone was drawing near.
A gray trench coat, and a fedora pulled low. A composed figure who had been nowhere to be seen in the chaos of a moment before. He approached without hurry and asked, in a voice that held no rise of feeling at all:
"The ones who caused this accident. Where did they go?"
Blunt. Informal. And yet the child's father could not bring himself to resent it. The eyes showing beneath the brim were cold beyond words.
It was less a question than an interrogation.
"...Th-that's..."
This was bad. He meant to lie.
It was neither a command nor a plea. It was a notice.
He looked back at his family once more. His daughter was gazing up at the sky, as if certain that angel would return at any moment, while his wife knelt with a face gone soft with relief, sweeping debris from the ground.
Husband, and father, he understood. If he claimed not to know, he would not be able to protect these precious people.
He bit down hard on his lip.
"...They went to the end of the western alley."
Had the man decided that was the truth? He nodded, slowly, and then he walked on.
Watching him go, the child's father felt a cold sweat slide down his spine. His heart began to race again. The sense clung to him that something—something other than an ordinary person—was closing in around them.
"Dad."
Innocent of all of it, his daughter asked:
"Who was that mister just now?"
The father could not answer. Unlike the angel, that one had been a being fit to be called a devil.
Kang Minseok clutched his shaking legs, braced himself against the wall, and barely managed to stand. A shirt soaked in blood. Fingers twisted out of true. Jo Jaejin, unconscious. And the corpse of Jeong Suhyeok—the man he himself had killed.
His breath came ragged. A rib might have been broken; every inhale brought a pain that felt as if it would tear his windpipe apart. And yet—
"Haha..."
He laughed. He laid that laugh over all of it.
"...I'm alive. Fuck... I'm alive...!"
There was no guilt in the smile. The terror of having killed came second. The rapture of having survived came first.
"Son of a bitch. You try to kill me just so you can live? Ptui! Good riddance!"
He spat at Jeong Suhyeok, who lay twitching with a knife buried deep in his heart. Even that seemed to cost him.
He dropped to the floor and lifted his head.
"You..."
Bloodshot eyes found the only witness. Han Seungwoo.
Seungwoo's face, still gazing quietly down at him, was that of an executioner determined to watch until the very end. Kang Minseok dragged breath through his teeth and spoke.
"...You said you'd let the winner live. You promised. You definitely promised, right?"
Han Seungwoo said nothing.
"We didn't touch that bastard anymore either. Your friend. Yeah, we messed with him, but... he killed himself because he was weak. We didn't kill him."
At that, Han Seungwoo gave a small nod.
"Right."
"...!"
"A promise ought to be kept."
"Fuck! I'm alive!"
At those words—that the promise would be kept—all the tension, the anxiety, the terror of the last stretch fled him at once.
I'm alive. I survived this time, too.
He had endured a crisis in which he should certainly have died. For a moment he looked as proud as a hero who had overcome his trial.
But in the next instant, Han Seungwoo drew out a phone.
"...Wh-what is that?"
Afraid of what the man might do, Kang Minseok stared at it with unease already gathering in his eyes. A heartbeat later he shook as if lightning had struck him. A red icon floated at Seungwoo's fingertips.
Everything he had just done—every moment of Jeong Suhyeok's killing—had been going out as a Nutube livestream.
With a hand that would not stop shaking, he took the phone.
There was no sound at all. And yet it seemed to ring, perfectly clear, in his ears: the storm of rage, condemnation, and contempt from the thousands watching the stream.
It was a kind of habit. Whenever something happened, he opened his phone and checked social media.
"Haa—"
A blood-soaked face. Breath slipping, unthinking, through split lips. What frightened him more than that breath was the hell he was looking into now.
DMs kept surfacing without end. Dozens. Hundreds. Alerts chiming in real time. As if devils inside the phone were gnawing his flesh, they were eating away at Kang Minseok's mind.
None of it felt real. Until yesterday, he had been someone this place envied and admired.
Luxury watches. A sports car. A high-end yacht. The photos he posted had been buried in comments: Looks amazing. Jealous of you, hyung. The life of an elite. Now that same social media had become a thousand hands of hatred, seized him by the collar, and would not let go.
"...No..."
Kang Minseok muttered it like a man talking to himself. One step, then another, he was driven back toward the end of the abandoned school's corridor.
His shoulders shook. His legs buckled. His vision blurred.
A vibration. The phone in his hand was ringing.
It was not a hand reaching out to save him. It was a hand closing around him. Family. School. Lawyers. The hospital. Reporters. People who had been his friends. And... his father.
They had seen the livestream, and every connection that might have hounded him or condemned him had instead cut him off. Isolated him.
"I... I just wanted to live..."
He wept without a sound. The weeping was empty. It saved no one.
"That friend... your friend, I mean."
Kang Minseok lifted his head and looked at Han Seungwoo. In his eyes there was something like a last rationalization, offered to the dead.
"We... we didn't do anything else to him. He just... he killed himself."
Han Seungwoo did not answer. But the silence weighed more than an answer would have.
Kang Minseok took one more step back. His toes were already past the railing. The fifth-floor rail of an abandoned school. Below it, a pit of darkness choked with concrete rubble.
That was when it happened.
A soft tap, a click. The fallen phone's camera buzzed, as if it had taken a picture on its own. Startled, he looked down.
Was it the drug he had inhaled a little while ago? His vision was hazy. And out of that haze, something was slowly taking shape.
From the bottom of that darkness, someone was climbing up. A school uniform. A black bruise beneath one eye. One arm hanging limp, as if broken. Lips split, and blood running from them.
Han Seungwoo's one and only friend. A boy whose name Kang Minseok did not even know looked up at him from beyond the railing and asked, quietly:
"Why did you hit me...?"
Kang Minseok sucked in a breath.
"N-no... that was... that was you..."
"Why did you kill me...?"
"I... I never killed anyone. You died! Fuck, you killed yourself!"
The shape was no longer a hallucination. From the empty dark below, a hand rose. The hand of that only friend—a hand of vengeance in which death and salvation were tangled together—came up over the railing and began to close around Kang Minseok's throat.
"...No... no... don't..."
Kang Minseok stumbled backward. He did not even realize he was retreating on his own. In the instant he believed that hand had pushed him—
His foot missed. His body left the ground. A bloodstained shirt fluttered. The smartphone struck the floor. The livestream was still on.
What pushed Kang Minseok was no person. It was the chat. It was the comments. It was the DMs.
Thousands of likes that had once remembered the luxury goods, the cars, and his parents' name—the things he had posted like trophies—had become fingers that mocked him and shoved him, and they pushed the edge of the railing.
A guillotine that went by the name of social media passed judgment upon him.
The impact came from far below.
Han Seungwoo, who had watched the scene through to the last, looked down at the phone without a word.
From the thing in his hand there still rose a lukewarm heat, and thousands of gazes were still fixed on Kang Minseok. He had finished the judgment at last, and he was about to move from that spot.
Something came flying. He was too late to react.
A blow struck his head. His body folded, and he went down.
A high-rise rooftop, 1.8 kilometers from the abandoned school on the city's outskirts. A man seated atop a firing drone closed his scope and let out a breath. Sand-colored camouflage. A custom-modified M200 Intervention. The rifle kept its report to a minimum and still carried enough force to punch through a ballistic helmet.
He was a hunter come home from war.
"Lee Joong-ik. Contract complete. Target eliminated."
The mercenary outfit Sigma. He was a former regular-army sniper who had run dozens of operations in conflict zones across the world.
Assassination. The suppression of key figures. Urban pursuit. This time, they had taken the job as an exceptional civilian contract.
The target had been moving to put Park Geuntae down. But once the intelligence section sensed that his movements would not stop at a single mark, they began mapping the whole of Park Geuntae's social network—everyone tied to him, the next targets in line.
Of course, the candidates were not limited to Kang Minseok, Jo Jaejin, and Jeong Suhyeok.
His colleagues, mercenaries of Sigma, were already guarding the objectives inside that network.
The routes of the three who had slipped out of downtown Seoul. A direction that had bent without warning. The sniper fitted the pieces of intelligence together and, at last, intercepted the one he judged to be the objective.
Then came the transmission of his report.
But the radio gave no answer. Silence was permission: the work was done. He began, slowly, to pack his gear.
On any other day he would have vanished as if nothing had happened. But his hands, midway through the work, stopped.
A cold sensation touched the nape of his neck. There was no sound. There was no wind. Even so, instinct seized him—the sense that something was coming.
The first signs were small. Sudden static from the radio. A scope whose focus would not hold. And, most decisive of all, his breath caught. His chest was pressed flat.
He was a man who trusted his gut. The moment he turned his head on reflex—
A tremendous impact, as if it had punched through a plate of steel. His body flew.
Body armor was useless. With half his consciousness already gone, he barely managed to look at the one who had done this to him.
Unbelievably, it was the target he had eliminated only moments ago.
"...This can't be..."
On a job he never let a feeling show, and yet he was aghast. Because he understood, all at once, that what he had set out to hunt was not prey. It was a beast. No—a monster. And that he, and the mercenary company he belonged to, had provoked that monster's ire.