The Hell You Made
Thud.
Something had fallen.
I snapped my gaze up at once, but my vision was hemmed in. The sound, though, went on — so faint that anyone not straining for it would have let it slip past.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
A timer.
“—!”
The realization came a beat too late. This was no ordinary machine noise. An electronic igniter. A magnetic-induction circuit. The last signal tone you only ever heard off explosives.
“A bomb!”
A bomb. I hadn’t planned for that, and I couldn’t have. It hadn’t been in the hunter’s memories. Through him I thought I had taken the whole of it — the operational route, the tactical layout, the team composition, the withdrawal, the equipment specs. I had not anticipated the commander’s final mission. Black’s.
A commander’s last responsibility. The reason he steps onto the field himself. A mandate to erase everything.
He had judged that this place must never come to light. He had concluded that the mercenary unit’s very existence had to be blown away with the blast.
Could I get clear? Distance, time, a path — I had none of them. Shift a single step and the timer would run out. My body was hard; it could stop even a bullet. An explosion, I could not swear to. And worse—
The durability’s nearly spent.
The Indomitable Plate Armor was not invincible. It carried a fixed value, and once that value was consumed, it had to be recharged. Between the car and the gunfire, the armor’s charge was all but gone.
At this rate I might be roasted alive. And even if I kept my life, should my hearing, my sight, or my nerves be left ruined, revenge would be a long way off.
It was a span brief enough to be called an instant. But inside a time that seemed to stretch that instant long, my mind spun furiously, and it reached a conclusion.
Fire Resistance Lv. 1 → Lv. 2
Fire Resistance Lv. 2 → Lv. 3
Fire Resistance Lv. 3 → Lv. 4
Fire Resistance Lv. 4 → Lv. 5
Lv. 5 and above — conditions for an additional option met
Organ Protection +20%
Subcutaneous Temperature Protection +50°
Karma in the hundreds of thousands was consumed. The price of raising a special ability was staggering.
And in the instant every part of that process finished—
BEEEEEEEEP!
The world turned over.
BOOOOOOM!
A rupture.
WHOOOOSH!
A tidal wave of heat crashed over the abandoned school. My organs shook. My vision charred at the edges. My eardrums tore, and my skin boiled up like hot blood.
I held my breath. I locked my muscles, bit my tongue, and clung to my mind.
FWOOOSH!
Hell opened, and I was inside it. Alive. The clothes on me were burning, my skin stung, my eyes had gone dry — and still my heart was beating.
Smoke hung thick. Inside a fire burning on every side, I moved.
Step.
The Indomitable Plate Armor was scorched black, and the air leaking down my throat was sulfur sharp enough to cut flesh. Pain raked me as if my whole body were burning away, and then it dulled until it no longer felt like pain at all. With every step, and the next, my speed climbed. And then—
CRUSH!
I seized Black by the neck, just as he was about to leave.
“Ghk!”
Hoisted off the ground by a grip like a vise, he called me a demon. I kindly corrected him. The Judge.
Flare.
Skin seared. Flame was still alive in my hand. And Black, sunk in that pain, suddenly began to laugh. Veins knotting, throat closing — even then, he laughed.
“…Kh! Waste of effort. You get nothing. The intel’s been purged. My mouth stays shut. We’re forgotten.”
He had failed to remove me, but he had erased the traces of the mercenaries called Sigma.
“I don’t need them.”
That, of course, was his mistake.
“…What?”
“I already know all of it.”
He stared at me, thrown.
“What are you—?”
“Lee Joong-ik.”
Their client. The moment I spoke the name, his pupils shook hard.
“Not a contract of employment. A private armed group. For removing his political enemies.”
In that instant his face tore open. Shock. Confusion. Denial.
“…H-how?!”
I watched the tremor and said it without interest.
“Don’t worry.”
The grip closed.
“Soon… your client will be going with you.”
CRACK!
The neck bone broke, and his breath cut off. In my hand — slowly, quietly.
FWOOSH!
I threw his corpse into the red-roaring fire. Then, without a word, I took one more step forward. Judgment for this filthy sin was not yet finished.
The garden was broad in depth, not in width. The lawn was trimmed as if a blade had tailored it, and the fountain’s jets danced to a steady rhythm. Beyond that stretched a wooded garden finished by the labor of landscapers, ordered so completely that not even a single clipped leaf felt out of balance.
The ground was all fine stone. The iron doors of the front gate were a custom forging of special metal. Entry was set in triple lock — fingerprint, iris, and voice.
And at the center, the mansion. Built with an old and dignified grace, it boasted a presence greater than an embassy. White brick married to a vermilion roof; balconies dressed in golden lattice, as if one were looking at the house of a medieval noble.
The interior was quieter than the grounds. A Nordic chandelier turned slowly, shedding a frail light, and beneath it sat a dining table of a scale far beyond ornament. It could have seated twelve. Only four people sat at it.
White hair on his head, a Chinese-style robe on his body. He was Lee Mando, once a true power of the Republic of Korea’s military regime. Across from him sat a middle-aged man in a crisp suit, his features neat and well cut — Lee Joong-ik, the practical holder of power, his reach spun like a spider’s web through politics, the press, and the prosecution. At his right sat his wife, Han Seung-yeon.
In a cream blouse and tidy pearl earrings, she wore a refined smile. Skin and beauty elastic enough to shame an age nearing fifty — all of it a symbol of desire, taken by plundering the lives of others.
Everyone at the table knew. One more presence that ought to have been there had died only a few days ago.
“Dongha, that boy… useless.”
Lee Mando spoke first. Plain. Not a scrap of feeling went into the mention of his dead grandson.
“They say a tiger sires no dogs. There’s a prosecutor general’s brat who threw his life away on drugs, and even that one managed to do something. Dongha was nothing but… bluster.”
“…It is as you say, Father.”
Lee Joong-ik nodded.
“Unable even to dispose of a single person. Unable to stamp out one piece of filth, and struck down instead… I am disappointed.”
It was quiet, as if the word death had already passed the date on which feeling was still valid. They seemed to have replaced a dead son’s absence with family harmony. Even his mother, Han Seung-yeon, carried food to her mouth with composure as she spoke.
“Even so, revenge must be had. However lacking the boy may have been, he was a whelp inside our fence, was he not?”
Lee Joong-ik nodded again.
“Of course. I have made preparations. The revenge will be certain. And it will be cruel.”
“Yes. When you stamp a man down, you stamp him flat. Citizens who don’t know their place, and anyone who dares try to climb — you roll tanks over them and kill the lot. That’s how you leave no mess behind.”
In this house of iron and blood, death and revenge were far too familiar words. And just as it had always been, those who dared challenge their stronghold would not survive. As if that were the natural result, they all returned their attention to the meal.
But.
A hard, flat rap — a sound far too alien for a quiet dinner.
“…?”
Lee Joong-ik set down his utensils and turned his head. What entered his sight was faint at first. Then the window frames began to tremble, and from beyond the door came the sound of thick steel breaking.
The kitchen door burst open as if it had exploded.
The security system did not activate. Guards, surveillance, the hounds on their chains, the automatic alarms — none of it was any use.
Step.
Someone was walking in. An uninvited guest. A body that looked as if it had walked out of the fire came straight for the table.
But no one could move. These were people who knew the mansion’s security better than anyone. They had prepared with a thoroughness equal to the grudges they had earned. If all of that had been rendered useless and an intruder was standing here, then matters had already passed the point at which they could do anything.
The one who finally arrived. The hand of a young man still marked with soot, as if the fire had scorched him.
CRUSH!
It seized Lee Joong-ik by the nape.
“Ghk…!”
The sound of breath stopping. Wine spraying like a fountain. Inside Lee Mando’s hideous silence — a man who was not even surprised.
“A harmonious family.”
A voice as cold as sheet ice slipped out. But inside that cold, the heat of the abandoned school still seeped through. There was no flame, and yet real hell was about to open at this table.
Slipped from my hand, Lee Joong-ik gasped and looked up at me. A man with death in front of him. And yet there was neither fear nor rage in his eyes.
“I do not know who you are…”
He spoke slowly, rubbing at his neck.
“…If you require a life, take it. I will accept that.”
The voice was, unexpectedly, calm.
“But my family…”
He looked back. His father. His wife.
“…These people are guilty of nothing.”
“They truly… know nothing.”
There was no hesitation in it. No anger, no excuse. Anyone would have been forced to take it as sincere.
I sat slowly in a chair and met his eyes. His lips were moving. I gave him nothing.
“They’re innocent, so don’t kill them?”
Instead of an answer, I turned my head. Hair gone white. A hardened fist. Lee Mando — the ghost of a military regime that had practiced torture and murder.
“The schoolgirls crushed to death under the tanks.”
“The citizens shot, their faces blown away.”
“You tortured children still warm with life, and you burned them.”
Breath stopped at my words, as if the smell of blood had risen out of an old memory. I stood and seized him by the scruff.
Above his head—
A staggering measure of sin surfaced.
“Dog of the military regime. Were the children you killed guilty?”
“I—”
I gave him no room to finish.
CRACK!
The neck turned. Bone joints snapping. A face twisting right up to the moment the eyes were about to burst from the skull. Even then, Lee Joong-ik did not move.
But those eyes trembled for the first time. I turned my head toward his wife.
“You had fetuses ground up to keep that skin of yours.”
“Illegal transfusions. Cord blood meant for experiments…”
“Countless children died so you could preserve a single layer of skin.”
“That… I didn’t know… I only… they told me it was good for the skin…”
She gasped and backed away. The moment I took one step closer, that movement stopped.
CRACK!
The same. The neck turned.
THUD!
She collapsed across the table.
“You son of a bitch!”
Unable to hold it in, Lee Joong-ik lurched up from his seat. He swept the table clear, slammed it again and again, and screamed.
“Y-you… you demon bastard!”
“You can just kill me!!”
“I told you to kill only me!!!”
I looked at him quietly. Blood sprayed from his mouth. Veins burst along his neck. Rage and despair, and at the same time an instinctive savagery for his family. I stared into eyes that looked ready to tear.
“Have you ever spared a political enemy — or anyone you’d set your mind on killing — and their family?”
The method I was using now was the one Lee Joong-ik had favored. Of course he had never moved himself. He had used the Sigma mercenaries under his command, and he had used these very means to remove a rival, or to take whatever he wanted into his hands. Kill the family before the target’s eyes. Drive the one begging — please, kill me instead — into the worst pain possible, and so obtain the words he wanted, the things he wanted, the ends he wanted.
Dozens of cases. Hundreds. And he—
“Didn’t spare a single one.”
Lee Joong-ik bit through his lip. He could not say a word. He did not cry. He only panted like a beast. Onto that breathing, I laid the last of it.
“You son of a bitch!”
He lunged. And so—
THUD!
One blow. The skull rang.
CRACK!
Another. Now half the face was caved in.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Blood sprayed, teeth broke, and I beat him until the heart was on the verge of stopping. And at last—
He folded.
Blood spread across the floor, and above it I looked at the wreckage I had made. A cruel death, blood and scraps of flesh snarled together. The deaths of the house of Lee Joong-ik were filthy and ugly.
And that was precisely the way they had lived.