Blood-Written Truth

Thud.

My footstep broke the deep stillness of the mountains. I was already a fair distance from the villa.

"..."

I looked back. From far off, I almost thought I could hear them—their groans, the despair of defeat.

The special forces of the three-nation coalition. I had sensed their approach, at least in part. I could hardly have done otherwise. Whatever an Awakened was, it still belonged to an unknown realm no human had reached, and it was only natural that the eyes of the great powers would follow anyone who might uncover the source of that power, or its cause.

My trail? Tracing that was no great difficulty either. I was walking toward revenge. Until now the connections had been too thin for them to catch, but by this point they would have seen which way that revenge was headed, and narrowing the field would have become possible.

All of it was the reaction I had expected. The only question left had been when they would strike, and how.

They had come sooner than I thought. And they were stronger than I thought. Elite agents, cutting-edge equipment—the crystallized armed might the whole world prided itself on. They had joined hands to take down me alone.

They failed, of course. But this was only the beginning. The ones who had fallen were nothing more than an advance party.

Three nations with their pride in shreds would not withdraw like this, and the people I was walking toward in revenge were no easy marks either. Stronger ones would come. They would try to stop me by means more vicious, more intelligent, and more brutal still.

To hold that off, I needed to grow.

I had taken no serious wound in the fight, and yet my Indomitable Plate Armor was spent to the last. That was the blow dealt by the special operators other nations had sent after me. If they began to move in earnest, I could find myself somewhere far worse than this.

Growth could not wait. The problem was Karma. The stronger I became, the higher my abilities climbed, the more Karma they demanded—and simply cutting down criminals could no longer keep the pace. Days upon days, just to execute a single man. At this rate I was slow. Far too slow.

I needed a method. A countermeasure. And it did not take me long to think of one.

I tore straight through the air and drove on. From here, it was my turn to move in a way they had never imagined, and get ahead of every prediction they made.

He had committed a crime. So they locked him in prison. But that place was never a space of punishment.

His cell ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠had no iron bars, and no cold floor. A prison in name alone. In truth, it was a heaven built atop hell.

Foam-urethane mattresses covered the wooden floor, and the bed was latex. Seated in a massage chair shipped in from outside, he leisurely shook out his feet today as well.

"Today... I'll go with the uni and truffle pasta."

The order came in under the heading of an outside commissary deposit. Of course, every time he placed one, a staggering sum slid into the guards' pockets—but what did that matter?

The money had never been his to begin with. It came out of the interest on the jeonse loans his victims were paying back in blood and tears, the people his wicked tongue had deceived.

Mornings, one-on-one stretching with a yoga instructor. Lunch, freshly fried tonkatsu and imported beer. Afternoons, a hobby program that ran from loom embroidery and pottery all the way to psychological counseling.

The guards called him Chairman.

"Chairman, a luxury-watch catalog came in today. If you need it..."

"Leave it. I'll buy one when I get out."

Somewhere, someone was fighting for their life against a mold-stained wall in a rooftop studio. Somewhere, someone was drifting from motel to motel, clutching a child and weeping. And he, inside this prison, was savoring wine and timing how long to sear a steak.

Recovery of his assets? He had already moved every last one. Remorse? He had not offered a single apology anywhere. And still, no one had been able to punish him, or to judge him.

The television clicked on. Was it coincidence? Across the screen ran a news broadcast of victims' families wailing.

"Ha ha ha!"

He laughed out loud and bit down on a Cuban cigar.

"They sure are desperate. If they were that desperate, why didn't they just save more money? Getting all sensitive over pocket change. They're not even beggars. Hoo—"

Through the cigarette smoke spilled the victims' tears, their pain, their screams. Watching, he shook his head.

"Let's be honest here. If they got fooled, those idiots did it to themselves. Who are they blaming? I just seized an opportunity."

The world had locked him away, but it had not punished him. Far from a punishment, it had handed him a prize. He was still rich. He still lived in luxury. He was still alive. And all of that glory rested on the ashes of someone else's ruined life.

A prison. A place built to punish sin.

But I know better. This is not a place that punishes crime. It is just another hierarchy, shut inside a closed society.

Those with money buy heaven even in a prison. Commit the same crime, and one man lies on a latex bed slicing steak, while another chews stale rice beneath a wall furred with mold.

Sin is not equal. Neither is the sentence, nor the suffering, nor even the punishment itself. To the very end, this country divides human beings by their price.

And now I was standing face to face with that hypocrisy.

A citadel of hypocrisy raised by the system, harder than ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠iron bars. My reason for coming was simple.

The Judge. One who sunders sin, and grows stronger by the weight of it. Karma was the fuel of growth granted to me, and the system's reward for hunting sin.

And this place—the prison—was nothing short of a treasury of Karma.

With a boom that split the ground, my body was already in the air. Like that, I cleared the nine-and-a-half-meter outer wall and was inside the prison in an instant. And in the next moment—

A rasp of static, metal scraping metal.

At the appearance of an unknown intruder, the entire prison turned upside down.

Sirens wailed, and red light washed over the whole of the prison. Iron doors slammed shut one after another as the sector breakers dropped, and armored shutters came clattering down from the ceiling.

Then, from the speaker of the watchtower where I stood, a hoarse voice carried.

From the ceiling, from the walls, from the gaps in the doors, armed figures in black combat gear came bursting out.

CRPT—the Rapid Response Special Task Force. A special security unit prepared for riots, escapes, and assaults from outside. A layered fire team, equipped from nonlethal rubber rounds all the way to incendiaries, closed around me.

"Disarm! Move, and we fire!"

Armed. They meant the pair of kitchen knives in my hands. The weapon that, only a little while ago, had judged the fools who believed themselves to be justice, and the privileged class.

Gun and blade. By any ordinary reckoning, no contest at all.

But I moved despite their warning. I simply raised the knife and cut.

Blade-light flashed—a burst like lightning—and the air split with the crack of a sonic shock. Then the barrels split open. Before a single trigger could be pulled, the gun barrels snapped and dropped to the floor. Laser sights, underbarrels, muzzle brakes, all of it. They crumbled to powder as if they had been crackers, not metal.

"..."

Those who had witnessed the unbelievable sight went still. But one faith remained. A twitch. Faith in superior numbers, and in the firearm, stirred a minute movement. My eyes did not follow it.

Bribery. Graft. Assault. Abuse of power. Even murder. I followed the remnants of the sins they had committed, and the depth of that evil.

When I first thought of the prison, the greatest problem was the guards who would stand in my way, just as they did now. They were the ones who kept the sinners, and who kept the prison safe from the outside. But among them, clearly, there were those who deserved to die. No—there were more than I had expected.

And whenever I found one, the trajectory drawn through empty air took his head without fail.

I distinguished, without mercy, those who would die from those who would not. Someone would call that hypocrisy. You killed so many people for the sake of revenge, and now you hesitate?

Yes. It is hypocrisy. But that is the last boundary between a monster and a human being. If it collapses, I become a monster even I cannot control.

I had to keep at least this one conviction—that all of it was for revenge.

Those who had committed no sin. Those whose sins were slight. They were exempt from judgment.

In place of their lives, I cut down that faith of theirs: the weapon called a gun.

Faith, falling. Terror, ruling the hall. But it was not enough.

With the Karma I had gathered until now, I transcended Strength—the stat I had left uninvested for some time.

It was preparation for the enemies still to come. But instinct, the sense that belonged to me as the only Awakened, was telling me something else as well. Another reward, waiting on the far side of this.

Transcended Strength met Ki, and the enlightenment technique Surge was born.

In a single instant, I could bring forth a full one and a half times the force. What mattered was that the reward did not end there.

I had expected something of the sort. That once all three of the basic stats had been transcended, some phenomenon would follow—or some ability.

I did not yet know precisely what the effect was. But the transcendence of Strength alone had already made me different from the man I had been.

Feeling ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠that changed power, I drove my foot into the ground. Once. Exactly once.

An ordinary stamp of the foot. What followed was anything but ordinary.

Explosive pressure doubled the force in an instant, and the axis of the earth twisted under it. Rebar screamed. The steel-woven floor rippled like a wave. The whole prison flinched and shuddered, and the dust pouring from the ceiling mixed with the red light until it scattered like blood. The shock rolled out like an earthquake, and every CRPT operator and every guard lost their footing and staggered.

They faltered. The men who had been aiming guns at me only moments ago drew back before they even knew they were doing it. They had no choice.

"..."

A crater, left in the floor. A fissure as if something enormous—a meteor—had struck dead on. It was not a mark a human being could leave, least of all with nothing but a stamp of the foot.

Having witnessed that monstrosity, they were overwhelmed all the more easily by my oppression. I looked at them, stopped dead like prey that had sighted a predator, and quietly spoke a single line.

Time stopped. No—the scene hardened, as if the world itself had frozen solid. A storm of silence in which even the sound of breathing was not permitted.

"..."

No one moved. No one reacted. Even reflex had stopped.

Overwhelming. Absolute.

Not because their weapons had been destroyed. Not because their tactics had been nullified. They felt it in their instincts. That the thing standing before each and every one of them was not human.

I walked, slowly, toward the cells. And no one stopped me. They only held their places, unable even to breathe properly.

A barrier had come down in front of me, dropped by the security system. For all its tremendous thickness and strength, it tore before me like a sheet of paper.

He took a quiet swallow of wine. Biting through a plump black cherry, he narrowed his eyes in satisfaction. While the dense aroma of the red wine still lingered in his mouth—

A shrill noise rose outside.

"...Hm?"

He turned his head toward the sound. Red light strobed across the ceiling, and the whole cell drowned in a dim glow. Iron doors slammed, sector by sector, and the automatic shutters came down.

"Well, now. Something must have happened."

He snorted, the way he always did. The whole prison locking down and kicking up a fuss was hardly anything special.

Had someone tried to escape? A suicide commotion, or those idiots brawling again. Something of that sort.

As if the rising sense of crisis did not belong to him, he reached out slowly—far too slowly—and pressed the remote.

A variety show murmured quietly across the television, and he smiled without a care as he tipped his wineglass.

And why not? This place was less a prison than a small villa, and he had loyal servants who went by the name of guards. Everything was shut tight by his money and his influence.

Which was why he could ignore the first footstep he heard. At first.

But then—

Step. Step. Step.

"..."

It was strange. A regular tread. Not combat boots—something light, like dress shoes. And it was drawing closer.

"...What. This block should be sealed."

He set the remote down and rose slowly from his seat. But the footsteps stopped in front of the cell.

Stillness. After a brief silence, something shattered with a boom. And the solid iron bars he had believed in—the ones that had divided him from the world—burst apart and sprayed in every direction.

"...!"

The wineglass fell and broke. Red wine spread at his feet like a bloodstain. And through that gap, a man stepped in.

He lunged to hit the button that called the guards.

"Hey! Guards! Where are the guards? What the hell are you bastards doing?!"

No one came. Countless guards, CRPT agents, every sort of armed personnel. Not a single one of them moved. Not one.

"You... who are you... what are you...!"

The man was looking at him without a word. Beneath the dim light, black eyes gleamed. Those eyes were cold. As if he were not human. As if he were seeing straight through guts and blood and thought, through every sin of the past.

"L-let's talk. You and me."

The swagger of a moment ago was gone.

"D-do you need money? Say it! I'll give you as much as you want! A million dollars? Ten million?! Just give the order—I've got money! My lawyer—"

The man came closer. A bead of cold sweat dropped down the Villa King's spine. His knees shook. His tongue went stiff.

"...How much did you say you'd give?"

The man opened his mouth. The voice was low and dry. And yet inside it there was a chill like a sentence of death.

"I-I'll give you all of it! As much as you want."

"Don't make me laugh."

A cold smile. That smile was horrible, like blood going cold.

He took one step closer. The Villa King froze where he stood, a frog before a snake.

"That money isn't even yours, is it?"

For an instant, he thought something had flashed.

"Kkh—ghhk...!"

His feet left the floor. A monstrous strength closed around his throat. Hanging in empty air, he thrashed.

"P-please... please... spare me... ghk... I..."

"Spare you?"

"If you spare me... I'll do... anything..."

"Did you listen when the victims begged you to give their money back?"

"Kgh... th-that..."

"Because of you alone, someone ended their own life inside a house that had become a ruin."

"Someone knelt and wept in front of their parents."

"Someone took their family's hands and started living on the street."

"And you were here. Lying on a latex bed, cutting into a steak."

Astonishingly, the man saw straight through the Villa King's charges—through every last case.

"Even now, you must be thinking of your sin as a failure. That your greed was an opportunity, and your crime an accident."

The man shook his head, resolute.

"No. That was no accident. It was deliberate murder."

"...Ghk..."

"Blood isn't spilled by the blade alone. People die on the contracts you wrote. They die on a single lying sentence."

There was no deceiving him. The moment the Villa King understood that, his face became a mess of every kind of terror.

"So go on and be at ease. If you killed others, then you die too."

In that instant, bone broke. Breath cut short.

When his body hit the ground, it was already cold and stiff.

"..."

The man who had thundered that judgment down upon him began to write something on the wall. And the one who went on writing it in the Villa King's blood turned, and walked again.

Every time those steps came to a stop, a hideous scream rang out.

"Aaaagh!"

"Gaaaaahhh!"

The judgment the world had failed to pass. The sin the law had looked away from. That day, beneath the red lights, it howled.

Lee Gwangsu drew a long breath. The space beyond the iron door was horrific.

The smell was different from the very first. Disinfectant, blood, metal, something burning. The tangled stench stabbed at the nose, and in the red afterglow cutting across his vision, the prison was dyed a hellish crimson.

Blood. Blood spattered on the walls. Blood covering the floor. Corpses twisted past any hope of recognizing what they had been.

"...Han Seungwoo."

He had no choice but to call up that one name at once. If there was anyone who could walk into a prison under armed guard and kill the inmates, then in Korea—no, in this world—he was certain it could be no one but Han Seungwoo.

The investigators from the three countries moved off in another direction, though...?

Had their prediction gone astray? He was caught in that doubt when a voice reached him.

"Team Leader... over there. On the wall..."

He turned his head at his subordinate's words. Letters written in blood. In real blood. The moment he saw that red record, each character pressed down in careful, formal script, a shudder was inevitable.

It was the truth. The truth that they—public authority, and justice—had never been able to uncover.

And not only that. In every direction, inside every cell, the truth had been carved in blood.

"..."

Lee Gwangsu, and the detectives with him, could say nothing. The prosecutors. The guards. The special response team. They only looked. Truth, recorded in the blood of the dead. This country, this society, this system had failed to the very end to see that truth—and one man had dragged it out and set it down.

Lee Gwangsu's lips trembled.

"...What does it even mean, to be the police."

No one answered. One of the detectives standing beside him quietly approached the wall and set his fingertips to it. A trembling hand. What came away was blood. Someone's sin, someone's pain, and the remains of a confession revealed only now.

"We... what have we even been doing, all this time."

One detective bowed his head at last. No one could meet another's eyes. The names of the victims had been erased, and the perpetrators had smiled and drunk their wine.

The prison had been a heaven, not a punishment. The law had been blind, and the state had kept silent. But today, someone the world had ignored to the very end recorded the truth in blood.

Lee Gwangsu closed his eyes. And he let out words he should never have spoken.

Beneath the red light covering the prison, everyone quietly bowed their heads.

That day, no one spoke. But no one could forget. The weight of the truth written in that blood.