The Medical Student Lim Seong-bin (1)

So shattering his shoulders and knees really had done the trick? Or maybe it was that he'd watched me tear through those gangsters with his own two eyes.

Whatever the reason, Park Min-jae had grown a good deal more docile.

"The son. It's the Chief's son."

"The son? Are you certain?"

"Certain!! I couldn't stop wondering why the Chief would hand me a job like that, so I did some digging—personally, just on my own. The media picked it up and it made some noise, but even then, I couldn't see why anyone needed to rush out and manufacture a culprit that badly."

My hand closed around his one still-intact shoulder—the left.

"Be honest with me."

Min-jae, gone white as a corpse, opened his mouth fast.

"Leverage!! I figured I could get leverage on him. Once you cross the line, you need insurance of your own, right?"

"And?"

Leverage.

How very fitting, for a backroom pact between villains.

"The Chief's son already knew that girl from before. And at the time of the murder, he had no alibi. That's it!! Digging any deeper than that was more than I could take on..."

"And right at that moment, the Chief happens to arrange your promotion?"

"...Yeah. The timing was too convenient. Like he knew exactly what I'd been looking into. So I took it as a kind of unspoken bargain."

"Which means, in the end, all you have is circumstantial evidence?"

"Th-that's why!! If you give me time—if you let me keep digging, I might actually turn up hard evidence. So—!"

I nodded.

Hope bloomed across Park Min-jae's face. He plainly believed he'd just proven how useful he could be to me.

"Then here's my second question. Do you remember Park Eun-ji?"

"Park Eun-ji?"

A puzzled look crossed his face.

Well, I'd anticipated as much—but at least now I had my answer. Grabbing him by the collar, I hauled his sprawled body upright, ruined knees and all.

"W-wait, hold on!! Let me think. No!! I remember—I think I remember her. Yes!! Park Eun-ji. That's her, right? The girl who worked at the One-to-One behind Bucheon Station? I just don't hear her real name often, that's all—I got mixed up for a second."

A frantic survival instinct flickered in Park Min-jae's eyes.

One-to-One... so that was the room salon's name. Truly admirable, the way he'd transformed a girl who'd been begging him for her life into just another hostess on the floor.

Should I kill him?

No. Not this one.

I am not a butcher who kills without reason. I have clear standards for it. And much as it disappointed me, this man never came close to crossing them.

My hand slid toward the small of his back.

"Don't move. Take a hit in the wrong place and you'll be hurt far worse."

"Fuck!! Who gives a damn whether it's Park Eun-ji or whoever? You need me if you're going to find proof that the Chief's son is the real killer."

"No. I don't."

—Crunch.

I crushed the exact point of his spine where the nerves pass through.

What was it they said—anything can be done if you set your mind to it? The same went for this kind of work. After turning half a body dead once already, I'd apparently picked up the knack; it went off remarkably smoothly.

"AAAAAAAARGH!!!!"

A scream like a butchered beast tore out of Park Min-jae's throat.

Leaving the man to his screaming, I started to walk away.

"Ah..."

Come to think of it, there was one thing I'd forgotten.

I turned back around and asked him.

"Where would I go to find the Chief's son?"

"Fuck, my legs!! FUCK!!! You son of a bitch!!"

Was it possible that when pain grew vast enough, it drowned out fear entirely?

Maybe so. It was different for him, granted—but back in that courtroom, I too had forgotten to be afraid of the future rushing toward me, because the pain of the present was simply too immense to feel anything else.

—Smack!!

"Park Min-jae. Listen carefully. Don't waste what's left mourning what's gone—think about what's still intact. I'll ask one more time. Where would I go to find the Chief's son?"

A single blow to the cheek sent his teeth clattering loose from his mouth.

The fury that had filled his face vanished entirely, leaving it blank and dazed.

—Grip.

My right hand moved to his left shoulder, the only limb on him still whole.

Vicious, dreadful fear welled up in his eyes all over again.

"Yeonseo University!! It's Lim Seong-bin—second-year med student at Yeonseo University!!"

"There we go, Park Min-jae. See how nice this is? When you answer this easily, nothing has to be difficult."

"Grandma, this is the medication your doctor's been keeping safe for you. Thirty minutes after meals—so you have to take it thirty minutes after you eat, every single time. If you skip it because it upsets your stomach, I'll be so upset too. You promise?"

"Aigoo, you dear boy. Why does a doctor keep fussing like this over ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠an old woman with one foot in the grave?"

"'One foot in the grave'? Well, I'm correcting that, Grandma. Next week I'll come back and count every bag of medicine you have left. So you take every last dose. Okay?"

"Yes, yes. I know."

Lim Seong-bin clasped the grandmother's wrinkled hands tightly in both of his and beamed a warm, winning smile.

"Sunbae, seriously—how are you this impressive all on your own?"

"At what?"

"I mean it, though. You're about to enter third year, and from next year you'll be on clinical rotations nonstop—you must have mountains of prep to do—and yet you've never once missed a weekend of volunteering. And your grades are always among the very best on top of it."

"Studying? I just do it because it's the only thing I'm any good at."

"Everyone who makes it into med school is like that, though—it's the only thing they ever knew how to do! I mean, I'm dirt-poor, so I have no choice but to grind, but that's not your situation, is it? Your father's a high-ranking police officer and your family's comfortable. You could easily be out clubbing like the other sunbaes. But watching you come here every weekend and hold these grandmothers' hands like this—honestly, it amazes me."

Lim Seong-bin flashed a wide grin.

"I tried the club scene a few times with the others. It never really suited me. I'd say this suits my tastes better."

"Your tastes?"

"Yeah—how should I put it? Coming here reminds me, all over again, of why I wanted to be a doctor. Clubs were places where I didn't need to be a med student—anyone with a nice car could get in—but this is a place where everything I've bled and sweated for is genuinely needed. Wouldn't you say?"

"Ah, sunbae, keep this up and you're going to turn into a saint."

"Well, that wouldn't be so bad. Honestly, after studying this hard, I'd rather become a real doctor than spend my life in some Gangnam clinic firing lasers for a little extra money. That's the more admirable life, I think."

"Ha, seriously. Every time I look at you, I get this silly urge to become a real doctor too. Ugh, no—I'd better not. Hang around you any longer and I might catch that crazy bug myself, the one that gets your whole year flunked."

"Haha, if that's what frightens you, then run along. We've done plenty for one day."

"Yeesh, how could I just leave? Cleanup's a team effort."

"No, honestly, go. You've got your major exam tomorrow, don't you? There's hardly any equipment left to sort—I'll handle it on my way out. All of you, head home and study. Keep this up and, doctor-envy or no doctor-envy, your grades will flunk you right out."

"Ugh... that I can't have..."

"Which is exactly why you should hurry home and study."

Having at last sent every classmate and junior on their way, Lim Seong-bin was left alone in the shabby old village hall, humming a tune as he began sorting the medical waste.

Truthfully, even speaking in understatement, it was no pleasant environment. And yet the blind reverence and praise of patients pushed to society's very margins, gazing up at him—it satisfied him more than enough to bury all the hardship beneath it. It even made him wonder, at times, whether the senior doctors now grinding through seventy-hour weeks at university hospitals hadn't chosen that brutal path because they, too, could never forget this feeling.

Yes.

I will become a doctor. Not one of those laser jockeys in the neon districts, zapping skin for money all day, but a true doctor—light and salt to the world.

Cleanup finished, Seong-bin switched off the hall's lights and stepped outside.

The alley had gone dark sometime in the last hour. The slope down to the empty lot where he'd parked—a stretch of roughly 800 meters—ran through a neighborhood so run-down it was hard to believe such a place still existed in Seoul.

Broken streetlights dead in patches, old CCTV units with their wires torn out. A strangely greasy slick on the pavement, and somewhere unseen, the yowl of a stray cat. And everywhere, the word DEMOLITION sprayed in red paint, rendering the whole streetscape that much more grotesque.

—Trudge, trudge.

He was hurrying along, skirting the puddles pooled in the cracks of the broken concrete, when—

"...Hm?"

Seong-bin stopped.

In a corner of the alley, beyond the reach of the streetlight, someone sat slumped against the wall in that thin band of darkness. A slight figure in a black hoodie pulled low. Judging by the clothes and the lines of the body, probably not an old man.

Should he steer clear? A moment's hesitation.

But Lim Seong-bin soon found himself walking closer. It was winter. If the man had collapsed drunk in the cold, it could turn dangerous. At the very least, flagging down the police was a decent person's duty.

"Excuse me?"

A sliver of caution. Seong-bin called out, keeping a polite distance.

"Are you all right? It's freezing out. Sleeping here like this is dangerous."

A voice brimming with warmth. And yet from the man slumped against the wall came no reaction at all—not even the sound of shallow breathing.

'No smell of alcohol.'

In places like this, the ones who caused trouble were nearly always drunks. Knowing the man wasn't intoxicated cut the danger by half, by his reckoning. The wariness in Seong-bin's chest thinned considerably.

And into the space it left behind rushed a different thought entirely: what if this man was, in fact, a patient?

Seong-bin reached out carefully to check whether he was ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠conscious.

"Excuse me—if you can hear m—"

The very instant Seong-bin's pale hand was about to touch the stranger's shoulder—

—Snap.

The hand that had stayed silent all this time closed around Seong-bin's wrist.

Shock—and a spike of danger. As a med student who had made a study of the human body, Seong-bin knew at once: this was not a grip a man of that size should be capable of. He reflexively wrenched his arm, tried to tear free—useless. Like an ancient tree rooted deep in bedrock, the grip simply held his hand locked fast.

"Let go of me. What is the meaning of this!!"

His voice climbed.

But in that desolate alley, not one soul was watching them.

Slowly. Very slowly.

The man seated on the ground against the wall lifted his head from where it had hung buried between his knees.

Darkness. And a hood pulled down deep. The face that emerged from within it was, absurdly enough, a cheap mask of the sort you'd find on a Daiso shelf.

But in that moment, Seong-bin found nothing about that face the least bit funny.

The eyes.

Look at the eyes showing through the holes of the mask. Could any word suit them better than ablaze?

The large eyes that had been fixed on him—as if gazing clean through the darkness itself—curved slowly into crescents.

— End of "The Medical Student Lim Seong-bin (1)" —

Author's Note

Thank you!!!