Medical Student Lim Seong-bin (3)
"Your name, your affiliation, and everything you did in that third-floor restroom of the Daewoo City commercial building in Bupyeong—start to finish, in exacting detail. Recite every last bit of it. Not one piece missing."
I thrust the smartphone's camera into the face of Lim Seong-bin, sprawled across the ground of the dark alley. Caked in the blood pouring from his shattered nose and mouth, the bastard glared savagely at the lens between ragged breaths.
"F-filming this is useless and you know it. A confession recorded under coercion can't be used as evidence in court anyway."
"Did your high-and-mighty daddy teach you that?"
"That much is common sense.... Wait. You're planning to kill me. So this is—you're planning to shoot some kind of snuff film."
The bastard swung his arm and hammered a blow into the hand holding the smartphone. Naturally, the hand holding the smartphone didn't so much as tremble.
"Fuck off!! You're going to kill me either way—do you think I'm insane enough to dig my own grave with my own mouth? If I'm dying regardless, then just— AAAAAAGH!!!"
— Crack.
I caught the index finger of Lim Seong-bin's right hand—the very one that had struck at mine—and bent it straight back. The joint shrieked as it came apart. Looking down, expressionless, at the bastard banging his head against the ground and thrashing like a beast, I spoke.
"So. What exactly can you do to me?"
My hand drifted toward his middle finger, next in line.
"Nine fingers remaining. Ten toes. Every joint still intact except that busted knee. Care to recite them? Or would you rather just scream yourself to death right here?"
"S-spare me. I swear I'll show real remorse and pay back every last debt. I'll go to prison—so please!!"
Crushed under that overwhelming agony, the bastard bawled and pleaded.
"There, got it. Now recite."
"My name is Lim Seong-bin. Second-year medical student at Yeonseo University...."
His quaking voice filled the alley. He retched out the whole of it—how Kim Min-ju had insulted him, and how, in a flash of rage, he had wrapped his hands around her throat and strangled her to death.
"...and so I wiped the blood off good, went home, and went to sleep."
"So the frame job on Kim Jin-hwan had nothing to do with you, is that it? The bleach sprayed over Min-ju's body, too?"
"I swear on my life, I knew nothing about that. All I did was confirm she was dead and then call my dad because I was scared out of my mind. That's everything."
I ended the recording. Then I opened the accounts synced to his smartphone—the tip-off mailbox at the KBC broadcasting station, the incident desks of the major portals, and a YouTube channel—and fired the footage I had just captured off to every one of them in a single burst.
After confirming the message on the screen, I flung the smartphone to the ground.
At the sound of the messages going out, Lim Seong-bin's eyes flickered wildly. Even through agony like nothing on earth, the bastard was still hunting for a way to live.
"Y-you sent it, right? Just now—to the media. That's what you did, yeah?"
"That's right. My life is over now. Expulsion, and prison after that. You've gotten what you wanted. But... you can't kill me here."
Truly the logic of a man at the end of his rope.
"If I'm found dead like this, that video stops being evidence and becomes exactly what it looks like—a threat, a snuff film. The story will be that I only opened my mouth because I couldn't take the torture anymore. And my father is no ordinary man. Public opinion? He'll flip it, guaranteed. And then that delivery bastard just goes on rotting away right where he is."
It was almost convincing.
Heaving for breath through the pain, the bastard kept straining to win me over.
"So let me live. Just dump me at a police station as I am. I'll turn myself in, and I'll testify to everything in court, too. Everything in that video is true. I'll even sing about how my father destroyed the evidence—I'll see justice done for you. That's what you want, isn't it? Rescuing the wrongfully accused. Making a more just world."
"Selling out your own father to survive? How admirably rational of you."
"Yes!! Taking down one high-ranking cop gets you far more than snuffing some college student!!"
"Except you've got something badly, badly mistaken."
— Crunch.
"AAAAAAGH!!!"
"I couldn't care less about 'delivering justice.'"
"Th-then what the hell do you want!!"
"I'm just angry. Why do they get to sin and then skip the punishment? The victim never forgave them—so who gave them the right to forgive themselves? Who the hell decided that law, anyway, that lets them declare their debt paid any way they please, when the fucking victim—me—doesn't accept it one bit?"
"Th-that's...."
I seized Lim Seong-bin by the collar and wrenched his body upright. That was when, between the torn buttons of his shirt, a tattoo on the left side of his chest caught my eye.
"ORGAN DONOR? An organ donor?"
"Th-that's right. I truly repented. I wanted to be of use to the world right up to the moment I die...."
"Nice. Let's put it to the test, then. I'll help you."
"N-no."
I added a measure of strength to the hand locked around his throat—a crushing pressure, clamped with precision over both carotid arteries.
"Ghk—khhk...!"
In an instant, the flow of blood to his brain was severed completely. His eyes bulged grotesquely from their sockets and his face shaded an ugly purple. He kicked and thrashed, desperate to pry my arm away, but his fingernails couldn't bite so much as a single millimeter into skin of transcendent durability.
"Four minutes, exactly, once the blood stops feeding the brain. Considering the arrival time of the ambulance crews who'll have tracked your phone by now and be screaming toward us, that's just about the right window. A heart that beats, breath that holds, and nothing behind the eyes. Just meat. The perfect condition for you to become that salt and light of the world you were so keen on."
Lim Seong-bin's violently bucking body faded into twitches. Then, at last, it went limp.
Incomplete Retribution has been completed. A portion of Karma will now be settled.
Weight of the punished sin (Murder): baseline 500 Karma
Physical restraint (permanent brain damage and vegetative state) — 50% ratio applied: 250 Karma
Resonance of Sin bonus (×1.1) applied → 275 Karma
Final settlement: 275 Karma acquired
A state of perfect brain death, guaranteed by the System.
I released the throat I had been gripping. The chest of the body sprawled across the ground rose and fell, faintly. A shell with breath still in it, and a consciousness that would never come back.
Far off, the faint wail of sirens was slicing through the night air, drawing closer.
"Now then, let's just see. Whether your dear father gets his way and donates those precious organs of yours to someone in need. Or whether they lay you out on an autopsy table instead—all in the name of securing the evidence."
The VIP room of the Police Hospital funeral hall.
Deep inside a reception room heavy with the scent of incense, a cold stillness filled the inner chamber, sealed against every outsider.
"Chief Lim."
The Director of the National Investigation Headquarters spoke in a voice low and heavy. Sunk deep into the sofa, he faced Bucheon Police Chief Lim Ki-man—dressed in mourning clothes, head bowed.
"You're well aware this whole affair has gone straight to shit, right?"
"...I have no face to show you."
"Right, and you shouldn't. Ha.... Here I am, sitting in front of a father who's lost his own child. What a thing this is. It's enough to drive a man out of his mind."
"I'm sorry."
"So—alternatives? Got anything in mind?"
Lim Ki-man raised his head slowly. The grief and fury of a father bereft of his child—and, beneath them, the deep calculation of a man plotting his way through this mess. He opened his mouth.
"Director, that video is a fiction fabricated under torture."
"A fiction?"
"Seong-bin's body has already made the rounds of the National Forensic Service. The bastard broke my son's nose and his teeth and smashed his shins to pieces. As if that weren't enough, he even snapped his fingers. Anyone with eyes can see those are the marks of torture."
A chilly venom ran beneath Lim Ki-man's voice.
"Director, do you truly believe this was ever about exposing the crimes of me and my son? This is the dirty work of a gangster or an ex-convict with a personal grudge against me. A police family has been struck down. To yield to this would be to capitulate to a criminal's challenge against our police. Please, stand up a nationwide Special Investigation Unit. I will tear the bastard limb from limb myself and show every moth that dares fling itself at our organization exactly how it burns away to nothing."
The Director toyed with his teacup without a word.
"...Fine. You're right—this is a frontal assault on public authority. Our police cannot be jerked around by the coerced drivel of some common criminal."
"Thank you."
"The Special Investigation Unit will be organized at once. But you will not be the one commanding it."
"Director!!"
"Lim Ki-man, you fool!! You're a party to this case. If you took charge, would that make a damned shred of sense? You know Goo Dae-cheol, don't you? It goes to him. You just stay faithful to your role as chief mourner."
The Director's eyes flashed, sharp as knives.
"And one more thing—I ask only because it never hurts to be sure. There is absolutely no chance—none—that anything in that video is true, is there?"
"Good. But if so much as a scrap of evidence ever surfaces suggesting the contents of that video are true... then it won't be you alone who gets stripped of everything, Ki-man. And it won't be something that ends within my purview, either. If it ever comes to that, I genuinely cannot say what will become of you. You understand what I mean?"
"I will keep it foremost in my mind."
"Right. Go and see to things. Your nephew—the proud boy who was studying medicine—we'll make certain his revenge is carried out, thoroughly."
The brief meeting over, the Director stepped out of the inner chamber.
The first-floor lobby of the funeral hall had already been staked out by dozens of reporters. With a face set in stone, the Director took his place before the photo line beside the National Police Agency spokesperson. That the second-in-command of the entire police force was fronting the briefing in person made the institution's stance on this case unmistakably clear.
Dozens of flashes erupted at once.
"I stand before you today with a heart weighted by the deepest anguish."
Gripping the microphone, the Director's voice was low and resolute.
"The murdered Lim Seong-bin was, from his school days onward, a student who never once strayed from the straight and narrow—a boy devoted to nothing but his studies. After entering university, he became an upright, diligent young man who traveled faithfully to the city's poorest neighborhoods every weekend, saying only that he wished to help the sick. He was a member of this society so decent and so earnest, one who had vowed to become a fine doctor and to be the salt and light of the world. Lim had even completed his registration as an organ donor, true to his convictions. And yet that noble wish—to give of himself so that other lives might live—was ultimately undone before the harsh necessity of an autopsy, that the truth might be known. This vile crime trampled even a young man's beautiful last act into the dirt."
His voice climbed little by little as he pressed on.
"The statements in the video now spreading online are in no sense the truth. The National Forensic Service's autopsy found Lim Seong-bin's legs crushed and his fingers broken. He was nothing more than a fragile victim who, in extremities of terror and agony, was forced by some unknown murderer to speak the lies he was made to speak."
The barrage of flashes grew fiercer still.
"This case is not merely a murder. It is a grave provocation against the public authority of the Republic of Korea—an act of terror. Effective today, the police will organize a nationwide Special Investigation Unit under the National Investigation Headquarters, and we will bring this monstrous killer before the bar of the law without fail."
Rage, mourning, and beneath it all the iron resolve of a guardian of judicial power.
It was a briefing of such polish that anyone who watched it could not help but come away believing Lim Seong-bin had been the victim all along.
Naturally, not everyone bought a word of it.
On the TV screen, a man in a black suit stood before a thicket of microphones, his eyes boring fiercely through the lens as he spoke in a firm, level voice—the public defender who had taken up Kim Jin-hwan's case.
"Two years ago, the key evidence with which the police bound the crime to Kim Jin-hwan consisted of the GPS record of the motorcycle left on the building's first floor, and the fingerprints lifted from the bleach canister found in a garbage bin nearby."
"And yet that investigation was riddled with holes no reasonable person could square. The police's less-than-convincing account of how the building's CCTV went dark to a lightning strike—precisely, and only, in the hour of the crime. And then the contorted, barely believable choreography of a teenage delivery boy who had killed on pure impulse: that he meticulously scorched the scene clean with bleach, then walked that very canister three minutes through the rain to a nearby trash bin, returned to the building, and hopped back on his motorcycle to resume his rounds."
"I will not bother to debate whether the testimony in the late Lim Seong-bin's video is true or false. I will say only this: the murder case against Kim Jin-hwan was forced ahead on a narrative that did not add up. Our office has continued its own investigation of this case without pause, and on the strength of the evidence we have gathered, we will be petitioning the court for a retrial."
The screen cut to the studio anchor.
[Wielding the grim autopsy results that forced the deceased to abandon even his lifelong wish of organ donation, the police have defined this case as an act of terror against public authority and launched a Special Investigation Unit. But with Kim Jin-hwan's side abruptly announcing its intent to seek a retrial, controversy over the police's past coercion and manipulated investigation is spreading beyond containment. The tragedy of a noble medical student, or the ugly exposure of a buried truth? With the two sides' claims locked in tense opposition, public suspicion is expected to linger....]
Click.
I pressed the remote and the TV went dark. With its glow gone, the living room sank into blackness.
"In the end, you couldn't even manage to be the least bit of use to the world."
A dry smirk scattered into the dark living room.
And at that very moment—
The Scales of Karma have righted their tilt.
You have lifted a false charge from an innocent man and delivered the recompense he was due.
Karma is being settled.
Before my eyes, in the empty air, golden text—subtly different from the kind that appeared when I executed the wicked—blazed brilliantly across my retinas.
You have acquired a shard of the First Limit Breakthrough Rune.
Current holdings: 2 / 3
It was the moment that proved my conjecture correct.
— End of Medical Student Lim Seong-bin (3) —