Please, Please Pick Up
Lee Ji-yoon.
An ace sales agent at Seosan Life Insurance, a subsidiary of one of the most powerful conglomerates in the country. She was the female employee who had walked out of that office a few weeks ago, back when they caught the parasite masquerading as a director at Seosan Life.
Ordered by a superior who sensed something was off, the investigator had gone into hiding and quietly watched her life — and found it every bit as regular and devoid of humanity as their own. Thirty-one years old, unmarried, and outside of selling insurance she maintained nothing but a businesslike demeanor and a clockwork routine, pouring every spare hour into self-discipline.
Wake at dawn, exercise, eat a breakfast full of things that tasted like punishment, head to work. At the office she was treated as the ace as always, putting in overtime without a single word of complaint before returning home. The next morning, wake at dawn again, exercise, eat, and back to the office — an endless loop. Throughout the entire surveillance, she had never once been seen in contact with anyone besides her coworkers.
There were other minor details as well, but her life overall ran with the changeless precision of a machine, leaving almost nothing worth writing in a report. Several weeks of watching had produced no hint that she was secretly eating people, and to their senses she carried none of the telltale wrongness of a parasite. And yet there was more than one thing that made it impossible to simply conclude she was an ordinary human.
If she wasn't a parasite herself, only two possibilities remained: common-sense alteration — or a Fake Brain. If either of those held true, then the enemy they were facing was almost certainly a rank somewhere between upper-tier Knight and Rook. Either way, this was not a matter two people could handle on their own initiative — a freshly minted Class A direct superior and a Class B like herself. Upper-tier Knights alone called for a minimum of three Class B agents per engagement protocol, five being the recommended number.
And if it was a Rook, the situation had to be treated as far graver than anything they'd budgeted for. Even a lower-ranked Rook was a monster that required at least five Class A agents — and that was under the assumption of a frontal confrontation, with the creature neither taking humans hostage nor hunting from the shadows behind one disguise after another.
The reasonable course was to report everything they'd found to the superior who had issued the order and request backup from headquarters. The problem was that two full weeks had passed since the initial investigation, and they still hadn't produced a single piece of hard evidence. They couldn't ask headquarters for support on a hunch alone, and there was a strong chance the superior wouldn't be convinced either.
Whether a Fake Brain or altered common sense, whoever did this must have had a reason to leave the woman alive — which meant there was always a chance a parasite would come into contact with her eventually. The trouble was that no one could say when that contact would come, and so they had no choice but to keep lurking near her like this, week after week, with nothing to show for it.
But the puzzle that had given them weeks of headaches resolved itself with astonishing ease the moment the investigation shifted to a different angle.
Tak, tap…
It happened while sitting in a corner of the cafe inside Ji-yoon's office building, combing through her records on a laptop: a history of visits to gambling dens and auction houses — venues that were legal in this country but could be counted on one hand. And the decisive detail was that the visits had taken place during the very hours she was supposed to be at work.
Unless a person had two bodies, no ordinary human could exist in two places at the same time. There were still things that needed verifying more precisely, but either way, they finally had evidence pointing with high probability to a parasite's involvement.
At the same time, a question arose: why would a parasite bother visiting gambling dens at all? If that was their game, they could have masqueraded as wealthy humans, or simply rewritten such a man's memories and knowledge, and taken the money effortlessly.
Tap, tap…
Staring at the list of repeat visits on the laptop screen, drumming fingers against the table out of habit, they turned the question over and over — and came up with nothing. In the end, they folded away the conclusion that refused to arrive, drew a phone from a pocket, and dialed someone.
Riiing… click.
"About what you mentioned before — I've looked into it, and just as you expected, she does appear to be a human connected to the parasites. The rank looks to be at least an upper-tier Knight, possibly a Rook, but before we file an official support request with headquarters, I think we need to make contact and observe her to some degree."
The moment the call connected, they reported the findings and their assessment in a flat, mineral voice, condensing the investigation into a few measured lines. On the other end, silence held for several seconds as if the listener were turning something over — and then a voice answered, threaded with laughter.
"Good… Where are you?"
"The cafe I mentioned last time."
"I'm coming."
Click.
Before another word could be said, she cut the line. Even anyone could have told how worked up she was just from hearing her speak. And no one knew better than her longtime subordinate that the excitement came from one thing only — the thrill of being allowed to kill a parasite. They had been attached to each other for years.
"Mmm…"
I lay alone on my bed, staring holes into the cracked screen of my phone. Come to think of it, when had I even bought this thing… seven, eight years ago? If the average lifespan of a phone these days was two years, then this poor thing had been worked well past the point of exhaustion. I had no interest in phones to begin with, and my ingrained habit of penny-pinching meant that as long as one still ran, buying a new one felt like an extravagance.
But even for me, it had reached the point where the battery was not merely dying but stuttering and lagging enough to make the thing barely usable. The phone was all but silently begging me to end its misery, so I made up my mind to buy a new one.
…Come to think of it…
That was when I remembered the phone Arin had handed me — the same kind as Seong-ha, the kinswoman I'd bumped into on the street a few weeks back. I'd powered it off that day and shoved it into a drawer without a second thought, and only now, with my own phone breaking down, had it surfaced out of nowhere.
"Hmmm…"
Scratching my bedhead, I deliberated for a moment before getting up and fishing the phone Arin had given me out of the drawer.
"Oh — it's a recent model."
Turning it over and examining it with what little knowledge I had, I gathered that the phone she'd given me was a flagship released less than a month ago — and completely brand new. Should I just use this one, then? For an instant I wavered, tempted — but no matter how I looked at it, using something this suspicious felt wrong.
And while I was inspecting the phone, something else stored alongside it drifted into view: her jet-black lace panties.
I stared at them blankly for a few seconds, then carefully picked them up — and, glancing around the empty room for no reason at all, brought them cautiously to my nose.
"Sniff, sniff…"
From the underwear rose a scent of lilac fabric softener mingled with the particular warmth of a woman's skin. It was a clean smell, untouched by anything foreign — and despite the obvious artificiality of the softener, it struck me as eerily similar to Seong-ha's.
Clothes worn by an ordinary person are bound to soak up their owner's scent. People usually call it the smell of the house someone lives in, or describe it as laced with the body's own honest emissions — sweat and the like. But both Seong-ha and Arin, while undeniably pleasant, gave off nothing but a cleanliness so thorough it was unsettling. To put it unkindly… it was a smell with no humanity in it.
"…What am I even doing."
The sheer pathetic spectacle of myself sniffing another woman's underwear — a woman who wasn't even my girlfriend — hit me all at once, and I let out a dry, self-mocking laugh before powering on the phone Arin had given me. I had no ulterior motive; it just happened to be the very model I'd been planning to buy, and I only meant to see what it felt like in hand.
…Huh?
The first thing that caught my eye was that dozens of text messages sat waiting on a screen so pristine it didn't have a single app installed. Curiosity got the better of me, and I started reading from the very first one.
The tone was so utterly different from the woman I'd met that day that at first I assumed it had been sent to the wrong person. But the message kept referring to me, so no — I was reading exactly what I was supposed to be reading.
…This is giving me the chills, somehow.
I moved on to the second message.
Attached to the message was a photo of her pressing that pretty bare body of hers flat to the ground in a full dogeza.
At this point it was starting to tip over into outright horror.
Dozens more messages of the same tenor followed, and then at some point they changed — as if she had torn out everything inside herself and thrown it away.
…That person?
A faint unease prickled at me, but the desperation in the messages stirred less sympathy than fear, and I moved to power the phone off and be done with it.
I'd been about to shut the power off when that final message — the one I couldn't have avoided seeing — dragged my eyes back to it. I narrowed my gaze and read it over and over for a long while…
Buuuuung…
"Gah—! Jesus…"
The phone suddenly rang out, and I jerked my shoulders in fright before looking down at the caller ID glowing on the screen.
Incoming Call — ThatFuckingGorgeousBitch
I had a pretty good idea who it was, and I hesitated over the answer button for a long time — but the last message came back to me, and I pressed accept, raising the phone to my ear.
"AAAAHHHHH!! Why are you only answering me NOW! Aaahhh!… I— I'm so happy, there has never been a moment since the day I was born into this world as gratifying and joyful as this one — even when I became a Knight it wasn't this wonderful, aahhh… Hello? Hello?? Hello!?… Oppa, you can hear me, right? …NO! Please don't hang up!! I have something I must tell you! Please, don't hang up, just liste…!"
Click.
"…I don't know. What even is this… it's terrifying."
The sobbing that had burst out as if it had been waiting for this exact moment, and that voice I knew far too well, put genuine fear into me. I killed the phone and stared at the dark screen, face frozen in disbelief.