The Man’s Identity
The man in the black coat pulled a knife from inside his jacket, and Song Tan shot forward without hesitation.
It was less a conscious decision than a reflex of the body.
Just as the man was about to drive the blade into the woman standing nearby, Song Tan slammed into him with his shoulder.
"Gah!"
The man reeled backward and hit the floor, rolling across the tiles.
Clang—
With a heavy crash, the knife slipped from his hand and clattered to the ground.
The sharp ring of metal drew every eye in the station, and then—
"Aah!"
Screams broke out, and people scrambled away from the man in a panic.
They shoved and collided with one another, and in an instant the platform dissolved into chaos.
Song Tan couldn’t help but frown.
He’d wanted to subdue the man in one clean motion, but the bastard had reacted faster than expected.
At least no one had been killed.
If he hadn’t stepped in, the woman whose face had gone paper-white would have been dead for sure.
The man understood exactly where to stab if he wanted to kill someone on the spot.
But then an unexpected variable sprang up, one Song Tan hadn’t accounted for.
A small child came running toward the man in the black coat, laughing brightly.
"Dohyun!!!"
The mother, horrified, rushed after him, but by then the man had already picked up the knife and seized the child.
"You fucking idiot! Don’t come any closer! I’ll— I’ll kill him!"
"Waaaaah!!"
"N-no, please! Please, I won’t do anything! Don’t hurt him! Please!!"
When she saw the blue-white blade hovering at the child’s side, the mother’s face turned deathly pale.
Then she broke down, tears and snot streaming down her face as she begged and pleaded.
"Please, let my Dohyun go! Hic—please!"
"Don’t try anything funny!"
The man’s voice rasped out, rough and cracked.
"Anyone comes close and I’ll slit the brat’s throat."
The crying child went white, unable to withstand the murderous pressure pouring off the man.
His breathing turned ragged, so unstable it looked as if he might pass out any second.
The mother, too, was shaking so violently she looked ready to collapse.
"P-please, help us! Someone please save our Dohyun... Anyone, please..."
A man walked past the sobbing woman.
Song Tan stopped at a cautious distance.
"What the hell are you!? Get lost!"
"Eek."
With the knife pressed to the child’s throat, the man provoked another reflexive scream from the people around them.
The child’s mother, frozen in terror, collapsed onto the floor and trembled like a seizure patient.
Song Tan’s cold gaze swept over the man.
Back when he had been an informant for the Murim Alliance, he had met plenty of demonic cultists driven mad by their wicked arts.
He had tried persuasion, torture, and threats alike, but prying information from those bastards was never easy.
They had never been sane to begin with.
That was why, with men lost to madness, one had to approach them in a completely different way.
"What are you going to do with a kid who doesn’t know anything? Do you really think he can understand you?"
"Wh-what the hell are you talking about?"
The man looked flustered by Song Tan’s calm voice, which did not match the situation at all.
"What are you going to do with a kid who can only cry? A real hunter like you wouldn’t be making such a fuss over something so pathetic, would he?"
At the implication that he was being understood, the man’s pupils wavered slightly.
"Let’s play to the right scale. Release the kid and take me hostage instead. That’ll make for a much better picture."
"Who the hell are you?"
"Me? Just this kind of person."
Song Tan flashed his Central Police Academy student ID.
He’d cleverly covered the word student with his fingers.
For a man half out of his mind, there was no way to tell whether it was a student ID or a police ID.
"P-police!? You’re really saying you’ll be the hostage?"
"Yeah. Someone like you, a real one, should suit a prey like me better, shouldn’t I?"
Song Tan knew all too well about that ridiculous sense of privilege such men carried.
With people who believed they were special, it was more effective to flatter them gently than to scold them or beg for pity.
In fact, the man in the black coat seemed torn as he looked back and forth between the child in his grasp and Song Tan.
Song Tan took off his coat and even turned out his pants pockets.
He was making it clear he had nothing on him.
"What’s this? Are you really hesitating? Did I misjudge you?"
The man twitched at the faint disappointment in his voice.
"Put your hands on your head and come over slowly. If you try anything at all, the kid dies."
At the man’s demand, Song Tan placed both hands on his head and approached at an unhurried pace.
Then, shoving the child aside as if tossing him away, the man immediately brought the knife’s point up toward Song Tan’s throat.
"Waaah!"
"Dohyun!!"
The startled child burst into tears again, and the mother clutched him in her arms, completely frantic.
Even with the knife at his throat, Song Tan asked calmly, "And what exactly do you gain from this? What are you so resentful about that you’ve caused all this trouble?"
"Shut up, you bastard! This is all because of you cops! You know that!? You fucking pigs!"
"What exactly did we do?"
"My life was ruined the moment you bastards threw me in prison for drunkenly groping a woman. Nobody will hire me anywhere. You useless, pathetic pieces of shit... Fuck... Fuck."
The man, now worked into a frenzy, pressed close to Song Tan’s shoulder, knife still in hand.
His breath was so near it brushed against Song Tan’s ear.
"You hear it too, don’t you?"
"Hear what?"
"There! What’s talking over there!"
The man swallowed hard, then grinned at the empty air.
"Tick-tick... over and over, like a machine. It keeps saying this world’s people are rotten. That someone chosen like me has to clean up those trash heaps. You really can’t hear it?"
The man twisted his face and tapped Song Tan’s temple with a finger.
"I just wanted to live quietly. I never wanted to touch anyone. But something was planted in here! So I had no choice but to follow it. Heh, heh... You understand me, don’t you? You said I was a special person too."
The man’s breathing grew rougher by the second.
"I’ll show you. I’ll show you just how amazing I am. I’m going to... kill them all. Every last human here. Heeheehee."
His mouth curling upward, the man’s eyes flashed with dangerous light.
"And you’ll be where it begins. A police officer as the first sacrifice—hehehe, what an honor, isn’t it!? So then... die!"
His breathing shortened, and in that instant the knife flashed.
The blue-white blade lunged toward Song Tan’s neck.
"Aah!"
The citizens watching with frantic little foot-stamps couldn’t help screaming.
The worst-case scenario they had feared was unfolding right before their eyes.
But Song Tan had already anticipated the move.
Once anger swallowed a man whole, his strength might increase, but his balance always broke down.
He twisted his neck slightly and lifted his body just enough to escape the cut.
The knife edge grazed his skin and swept past with a hair’s breadth to spare.
A spray of blood scattered into the air, but Song Tan’s eyes fixed on the blade with terrifying calm.
He spun in an instant, covering the wrist holding the knife from above.
"Nngh!"
Taking the man’s instinctive attempt to wrench free and turning it against him, Song Tan rotated smoothly, drawing a circle with the motion.
"Ghk—"
The man’s wrist bent at an unnatural angle, and the knife flew up into the air.
Clang—
Song Tan kicked the dropped blade far away, then slipped into the inside of the man’s body as fluidly as water.
Thud-
He drove a shoulder into the man’s chest to break his balance, then hooked one hand behind the neck and the other around the elbow, placing the man’s body across his own axis of rotation.
"Gah!"
The man was spun once and slammed into the floor, coughing harshly.
Song Tan pinned his back with a knee and wrenched the arm harder.
"You fucking— Let go of me!"
The man thrashed violently, but the more he struggled, the more pain he earned, until at last he went slack.
A moment later, armed police officers rushed into the station from all sides.
"Police! Don’t move!"
One officer retrieved the weapon from the floor, while four others handcuffed the man Song Tan had subdued.
Click.
Only after confirming that the man was fully restrained did Song Tan release him.
"Oh! Your injury... Are you all right?"
An older-looking officer approached Song Tan and asked the question, his gaze fixed on the thin line of blood at Song Tan’s neck.
"Yes, I’m fine."
"What on earth happened?"
"That man suddenly drew a knife and tried to hurt people. If you check the CCTV, you’ll see the details."
He said it in the same tone one might use after taking a leisurely walk and enjoying a cup of coffee.
Which left the police with no way of knowing.
They had no idea that the assailant, after being stopped mid-rampage, had taken a child hostage; that Song Tan had volunteered himself in the child’s place; and that, with a blade at his throat, he had turned the tables and subdued the culprit anyway.
"Waaah, thank you! Thank you so much!"
The child’s mother pushed through the crowd and bowed repeatedly to Song Tan, thanking him over and over through tears and snot.
Seeing the scene, applause erupted around them.
"If it hadn’t been for you, sir... Hic. Just thinking about it... Uhgh."
As the mother kept bowing, Song Tan gave an awkward smile.
"I only did what I had to."
In truth, he felt more guilty than anything else.
He had known from the start that the man wasn’t sane, and because he hadn’t taken him down immediately, the child had ended up hostage.
That one moment of hesitation had nearly crushed a freshly sprouted sapling before it had ever seen the light.
The self-reproach pressed heavily against Song Tan’s chest.
Then the child slipped free of his mother’s arms and stood before him.
The tears around his eyes had dried, but his gaze was bright and starry.
With both tiny hands clenched tight, the child bowed his head.
"Big bro... th-thank yooou."
For a moment, Song Tan simply looked at the child, at a loss for words, before he finally reached out and patted the round little head with a gentle smile.
That made the child grin and wiggle with delight.
Meanwhile, the officers who had lifted the knife-wielding suspect to his feet dragged him away roughly.
The remaining police officers began clearing the chaotic scene, and before long detectives had also appeared.
While receiving a report from the station officers, the middle-aged detective glanced around.
"So where is the man? The one who subdued the suspect."
The officers looked at each other.
"Well... he was just here a moment ago..."
"Did he just leave? Damn it."
The detective frowned as if inconvenienced.
Of course, that didn’t mean they could legally hold the man by force.
Under Article 212 of the Criminal Procedure Act, a civilian subduing a criminal caught in the act and turning him over to the police was entirely lawful.
And it wasn’t as though the suspect had been injured during the restraint, either.
"Damn it, we should’ve at least gotten a statement."
Honestly, it was hard to believe.
He had volunteered to be a hostage in place of a child, exposed himself to a blade, and then turned the situation around to subdue the suspect.
That was not something an ordinary person could do.
But there were too many witnesses to doubt it outright.
"What kind of guy was that, anyway? Was he some kind of special forces man?"
As they were speculating about the man’s identity, the detective’s sharp eyes came to rest on one spot.
"Hm?"
In the dim crack where the platform pillar met the floor, a round plastic case lay abandoned there.
The logo of Central Police Academy was stamped boldly on the lid.