3. Gimcheon Juvenile Prison (2)
I gave up my appeal. Naturally, my impassioned public defender all but foamed at the mouth urging me to file one.
"Ba-reum, this is insane. With that many mitigating factors, four years minimum and eight maximum? The bench is punishing you for your defiance, plain as day. We are appealing. No question."
"An appeal? Shouldn't I be counting myself lucky they didn't tack on contempt of court?"
"An appeal moves up to the High Court—a completely new panel of judges! If the first trial was this hostile, then we use public opinion as a lever and squeeze the appellate bench with it. Your last words in that courtroom are all over the internet and the news right now. Sympathy is boiling over. If we collect citizen petitions and borrow the weight of the press, the second trial will carve those years down for certain!"
Why was it, I wondered? Out of nowhere, the words that had appeared before me at the moment of my Awakening surfaced in my mind—and slipped from my lips.
"The temple of justice, looked down upon by blind justice."
"...I'm sorry?"
"Thank you, Counselor. But I have no wish to be judged in that courtroom again. This is far enough. It's not as though an acquittal is on the table anyway, and a year or two one way or the other won't change anything. I'm withdrawing the appeal."
The lawyer fell silent for a moment at my words before he finally spoke.
And this time, it wasn't the briskly professional manner he'd maintained until now—it was the expression and voice of a genuine adult.
"Ba-reum—no, Ba-reum. For this one moment I'm not your lawyer. I'm just an adult in this society, one who started working life a few years before you did, and I'm going to tell you the truth."
It was the first real face he had shown me since taking on my defense.
"I understand—truly, I do—why you've lost faith in this country's justice system, and why you're reacting the way you are. But this is wrong. It really is. You're only seventeen. Every single year of your life from here on is enormous. It matters more than you can know."
"And you have no idea what kind of place Gimcheon Juvenile Prison is. Juvenile offenders? Most minors get off with a protective order for just about anything. Kids who'd pull five-plus years as adults wrap it all up with a stay in a detention home. Do you understand what that means? It means Gimcheon only takes the truly violent among violent criminals—the vicious ones. Only the ones the state has judged impossible to rehabilitate get packed in there. A kid like you, who's done nothing but study at a prestigious high school, walks into that place and... you will die. I'm not speaking in figures of speech. You will actually die."
Perhaps because his sincerity was so palpable, my own truth spilled out before I could stop it.
"I'd die... And if I did, I imagine the Republic of Korea would call that a stroke of luck."
"Ba-reum!!"
The road to Gimcheon. The bus made a full loop of Seoul before rolling down to Daejeon.
"Gimcheon is Bus 7! Everybody move—let's go, let's go!!"
From every bus parked in the Daejeon Prison yard, dozens of inmates spilled out. It was a sight that made me wonder whether this country had always harbored this many criminals. And among them, the ones who looked especially young filed onto Bus 7 along with me.
Juvenile violent offenders, collected from every corner of the nation. According to that public defender, the worst of the worst—deemed beyond all hope of rehabilitation.
A forty-five-seater converted for prisoner transport had barely thirty places left, and two-thirds of them were already filled with inmates.
"That kid—isn't that him? The bastard who fired a gun in court."
"Oh!! The orphan whose whole family got turned into roadkill? Yeah, pretty sure that's him."
Murmured voices drifted from every direction.
"Quiet!! Everyone quiet down."
Even under the guard's bark, the snickering refused to die. But what was clawing at my nerves right now wasn't the muttering of bastards like that.
This status window was real. I had already confirmed that firsthand in the courtroom. I couldn't say exactly what a single point of value represented, but a Strength of 50 was more than enough to casually overpower two able-bodied adult male guards.
It wasn't some frictionless telekinesis, of course. Every ounce of force they exerted hauling at me came down on my bones and muscles as a heavy, grinding load. But that was all. Just as a hydraulic cylinder rated for dozens of tons of pressure doesn't so much as tremble no matter how desperately a human strains against it, my body took their strength head-on and held without a flicker of movement.
It felt like the raw might of a soldier jacked up on super-soldier serum in a movie. Not a weightless, magic-like psychic trick, but a force of dense, ponderous mass—strength that had only barely edged past the biological limits called "human."
And this wasn't even the end of it. Systems of this kind are, by their nature, built on the promise of growth. Figuratively speaking, I had just cleared the tutorial. If mere tutorial completion had already carried me beyond human limits, then the endpoint of this power surely leaned closer to the superhuman genre than the grounded one.
Of course, I still had no way of knowing exactly how this "Karma" was earned, or how difficult it would be. But I could extrapolate.
The instant I took Hong Chang-sik's life, his sins had been 'judged'—and converted into Karma. And the harm the process inflicted on the others in that courtroom had been subtracted as a negative. So wasn't the way to earn Karma simply this: to 'punish' a criminal without bringing harm to the innocent?
And seen in that light, the place I was heading now—Gimcheon Juvenile Prison—might just be the perfect hunting ground. According to my public defender, it was stocked with the kind of violent criminals you'd rarely encounter even in ordinary society or adult prisons. What else would you call a place where society's garbage—monsters not yet twenty, already judged beyond rehabilitation—was gathered in one spot?
—Pfft.
Ah. The corner of my mouth had crept up again, entirely without my permission.
And why wouldn't it? Wasn't there something comic about this—me, the very summit of everything society had ruled 'garbage,' preemptively branding every other bastard in that place as society's trash?
My gaze drifted to another line shimmering on the status window. A second notice, glowing beneath the stat readout.
◈ Test your luck.
I had no idea how or why this "Awakening" had come to exist inside me, or precisely what it was—but its form was deeply familiar, and devilishly convenient. A gacha ticket, the sort you'd grind to hoard in any mobile game until some event made spending it worthwhile. In reality, there seemed little reason to wait.
The moment I resolved to use the Roulette Ticket, a colossal slot machine shimmered into existence before my eyes, glittering.
I reached for the lever, which existed for no purpose other than to be pulled.
—Clunk!!
The instant I hauled the lever down, the reels began to whirl. One glittering something after another—rare-looking to any eye—swept past before me. In game terms, these would have been the bait items.
And where the spin ended, the first reel stopped dead on a grotesque emblem wreathed in a blood-crimson glow.
Two masks, facing each other as if about to devour one another. One's eyes bulged, pooling with blood, its jaw contorted in agony; the other smiled in pure rapture through a torn, ragged mouth. A shape modeled, it seemed, on the faces of victim and perpetrator alike. And a chain of sharp thorns wound the two masks together into a single circular emblem.
Congratulations! You have acquired the Unique Skill 'Resonance of Sin'.
'Resonance of Sin?'
No—before that: Unique?
By the standards of the games I grew up with, Unique sat at the very top of the ladder. Sure, thanks to endless tier inflation, today's mobile games string "Legendary" and "Mythic" ranks above it like sausages on a chain—but even so, Unique was a grade that never had to blush about its performance anywhere.
Had I somehow snatched the premium prize off the bait rack?
The moment I moved to check the skill's exact effects—
—the brakes groaned deep and heavy, and my body pitched forward. The slot machine and the emblem, still hanging in the air, scattered like smoke, and the stale stench of the transport bus stabbed at the tip of my nose.
"We've arrived at Gimcheon Juvenile Prison. All inmates disembark. Fall into formation and move swiftly."
The doors swung open beneath the guard's bark. Before us rose a gray concrete wall a dozen-odd meters high, wrapped in a dense coil of razor wire.
This was Gimcheon Juvenile Prison—where South Korea's youngest demons gathered.
Perhaps because it was a place where things less than human were collected, the intake procedure was hellishly humiliating. Before I could change into the pale-blue prison garb, I was made to stand waiting completely naked.
"Bang Hyeong-ju, Number 392. Jeong Ba-reum, Number 413. From this moment on, no one will be called by name. These numbers are your names. Memorize them properly."
A low, bone-dry voice—polite in form, respectful not in the slightest.
Next came what was officially termed an electronic imaging inspection—the so-called cavity check. Following the guard's instructions, draped in nothing but a blue gown, each of us had to squat and rise, squat and rise, over a camera-fitted sensor. A savage humiliation swept across every juvenile offender's face, without a single exception.
Then, cell assignment.
"Number 413. Cell 7. Move out with the escorting officer."
In that instant, the air in the holding room shifted in a way I couldn't quite name. Several pairs of eyes swung toward me, none of them bothering to hide it.
"That guy's so fucked."
A kid seated in the corner swallowed hard and muttered under his breath to the boy beside him.
"Why? You know something?"
"I told you I was locked up in here until a while back, didn't I? Fuck, Cell 7 is seriously bad news."
"Why? What about it?"
"The cell boss in there is Bae Do-hyeon."
"Bae Do-hyeon? You mean that pimp bastard who rounded up runaway kids over in Yeokgok, Bucheon, and ran sex-broadcast rooms with them?"
"Yeah. The one who beat the girls and made them sell their bodies. But what's he got to do with Cell 7 being hell?"
"Word is he's doing the same thing in here."
"What? In here? Pimping? Are there even girls in this place?"
"You think so, you moron?"
The kid asking the questions went chalk-white to the lips. He understood, all too clearly, what "pimping" meant inside a prison where nothing but men existed.
"Th-that insane son of a bitch..."
"He picks out the weak ones, wrecks the whole cell, and every night... whatever—fuck. Look at that kid, he's a textbook honor student. There's gonna be some real wailing in there tonight."
Leaving the whispers behind me, I was herded forward by the guard's rough gestures until I stood before the iron door. The massive slab of steel swung open with surprising smoothness.
Cell 7. The ordinary cell you'd see in any film or drama. But a sour, sweat-laden reek and a strange, oppressive pressure prickled at my skin—things no screen could ever convey.
Eight juvenile offenders lay sprawled about the room. And among them, one kid sat shirtless in front of an electric fan, lounging so as to display the crude tattoo spread across his chest.
"Number 469. Put your uniform on properly."
"Aw, come on, Officer. Cut me some slack. It's thirty-five degrees Celsius out today. My body runs hot—wearing all that could kill me."
"Number 469!!"
"Ugh, seriously. You keep doing this in front of the newbie—ruining my image. Fine, fine. Putting it on. Putting it on lightning fast, see?"
Grumbling, Bae Do-hyeon draped the sweat-soaked uniform top over himself with zero care. The guard raked the room with sharp eyes, then slammed the iron door shut with a bang.
The heavy door boomed home, and the clack of the bolt engaging rang down the cellblock. From this moment on, the room belonged entirely to them.
The instant the door sealed, the sly grin slid off Bae Do-hyeon's face as if it had never existed. Greasy eyes crawled over every inch of my body. They were the eyes of a butcher appraising meat hanging in his shop.
"Well, holy shit, look who it is. Everything about you screams honor student from a mile away. You're that 'Sniper' who's been all over the news every single day lately, aren't you?"
Bae Do-hyeon sauntered over and stretched an arm out to drape it across my shoulder. The classic delinquent's shoulder-drape—standard equipment for shaking down marks and breaking in the new fish.
And at that very moment—
[Continuous physical contact with a villain detected.]
Unique Skill 'Resonance of Sin' — activating.
— End of Gimcheon Juvenile Prison (2) —
Author's Note
Thank you for reading!!