How a Person Dies
Through the gap in the window, a pale wash of dawn light was seeping in.
I pushed my stiff body upright. Beside me, Park Ajeong slept with her back turned, breathing in soft, even little snuffles.
Under the blanket, I pressed myself flush against her from behind as she lay turned away.
Her heat transferred to me at once — nothing like the damp, closed-in air of a room shut all night. Hot. Immediate.
I rubbed my cock, already hard with want, into the cleft of her ass, then pushed into her half-asleep body and drove myself home.
She made a small sound — nnngh... — like sleep-talk, but she didn't open her eyes.
I worked out the morning's lust the way you empty a bladder.
Inside, Ajeong was hot with the fever of sleep, and because she was still half-dreaming she clenched around me with a particularly dense, sticky grip. I locked onto nothing but the raw sensation and slammed my hips into her again and again, rough and relentless.
Hot, wet membrane fluttered and coiled around my cock in time with every thrust. The ceaseless squeeze of her vaginal muscles shut down every rational thought in my skull.
Just instinct. Wherever it pointed...
Schlick.... schlick.... schlick.... schlick.....
At the edge of climax I pulled out and spilled the hot load against the inside of her thigh.
Spurt, spurt...
A few more twitches, and thick white fluid ran down over her pale skin.
Breathing hard, I wiped the last bead of cum from the head of my cock against the soft give of Ajeong's ass, then left the bed without a second glance.
And I went to the desk to begin my private ritual.
I took out an oil-based marker and gripped it reverse, like a blade.
Cock still dangling, slick with Ajeong's juices that hadn't dried yet, I started thrusting the marker into empty air.
The same stupid shit I'd been doing since middle school, side by side with the demons in my right arm.
Setting play.
Stab. Cut. Slash. Dodge.
The same motions I'd repeated hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of times toward the vital points of enemies no one else could see.
I stopped for a moment and caught my breath.
Slow at first. Deliberate.
As if performing a fixed form, I broke every movement clean and repeated it. The contraction and release of muscle. The shift of my center of gravity. I carved every sensation not into my head, but into my body.
Then I raised the speed.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat again. Repeat.
Faster and faster.
Swish. Thuk. Whip.
At the tip of the marker cutting the air, I almost heard a sharp whistle of parting wind.
Sweat beaded on my forehead. My breathing turned rough.
Kim Sung-jin. Twenty-eight. One hundred eighty-three centimeters. Ninety-eight kilos.
I painted the tattooed pig's outline in my mind.
How to kill him.
From the front?
No.
With all that fat, an ordinary dagger wouldn't even reach the organs. I'd need a long weapon. The longer the weapon, the harder it is to hide and the harder it is to use. In the end, nothing but bigger risk.
Front approach: rejected.
Then—
The neck?
The second you open the carotid, blood erupts like a fountain and leaves marks on you that you can't erase.
From behind again?
Too close to the method I used on Park Kyung-chul. Oh Sae-ah would link the two cases in a heartbeat.
I traced, one by one, the places where Kim Sung-jin's life could end.
Temple.
The artery under the collarbone.
Under the armpit.
The femoral.
In another corner of my mind, cold reason kept asking the same question.
How does a person die?
Damage the organs and they die.
Bleed too much and they die.
Stop eating, stop drinking — they die.
And....
Stop breathing and they die.
Breath?
Breath, huh....
With that thought, I stopped the dogshit training I'd been carrying on since middle school, since the days the Black Flame Dragon was sealed in my right hand.
Sweat poured off me like rain, gathered at my chin, and dropped to the floor with soft little ticks.
At some point Ajeong had woken up. She was staring at the TV with vacant eyes.
"Ajeong. Come here a second."
At my words she glanced at me, got off the bed, stripped off the pants and panties she'd been wearing, tossed them aside, and walked over.
"Mind if I choke you a little?"
Park Ajeong blinked once.
No fear. No refusal. Just a look of pure, blank curiosity.
"I mean, you can, but — that your thing?"
"....I'm not trying to fuck. I want to test something."
She seemed to think it over for a moment, then nodded.
".....Don't kill me."
".....I won't."
That was all. Park Ajeong turned her back and stood quietly.
White back. Full hips. Completely unguarded.
I stepped in behind her. My sweat-slick body met her bare skin. My cock, still soft, brushed Ajeong's ass; a low, warm pressure started building from my lower belly into the shaft.
Slowly, I reached both hands toward her pale throat.
"Struggle as hard as you can."
"Okay."
Hearing her answer, I locked my right arm around her carotid and squeezed.
A choked khk — and Park Ajeong's body thrashed hard.
The force of her thrashing was stronger than I'd expected. We lost our balance and went sprawling to the floor.
The position collapsed.
Exactly the way I'd learned watching MMA, I hooked both legs around her long body from the broken posture and locked her down.
Back mount.
I felt her sharp nails open the skin of my forearm. Bright, clean pain.
Pain was familiar enough to ignore. I arched my hips back and poured more force into the arm crushing her throat.
Her thrashing weakened by degrees.
Arms and legs flailing at empty air slowed as if someone had dropped the footage into slow motion. A brain starved of oxygen was screaming its last.
Then Park Ajeong's brain simply stopped for lack of air.
All resistance went out of her. The sensation of her body going slack traveled up my arms.
Only then did I let go of the limp weight of her.
No coughing fit. No khuh, khuh!
Park Ajeong just lay face-down on the floor, not moving at all.
I stretched out beside her, my own sweat-soaked carcass heaving for air.
Around her body where it lay so neatly on the floor, a thick ammonia stink began to rise.
I scratched hard at my head.
Overdid it?
Not regret. Not guilt.
Just an unexpected variable. One more piece of cleanup I now had to deal with — annoyance. And a cold debrief of the data the experiment had given me.
She stayed out longer than I thought. Even matching weight classes, Ajeong's resistance had felt like work. Against Kim Sung-jin, several weight classes up — impossible.
The second I locked that conclusion in place, Park Ajeong came back. She blinked both eyes.
She turned her head slowly toward me, as if trying to piece the situation together.
"You okay?"
When I asked, she answered like nothing had happened.
"Yeah. You gonna choke Kim Sung-jin to death?"
"Thought about it. Weight class makes it a no-go."
"Ahh. Hey, though....."
She went on like something had just occurred to her.
"Hm?"
"I think I just... came."
"Huh?"
"Felt like I fucking gushed...."
I glanced at the wet floor and sighed.
"You gushed, all right. Piss."
".....I pissed myself?"
"Yeah. You made the mess, you clean it."
"It's your fault, so you clean it."
.......Not exactly wrong?
I shrugged and started to get up to find a dry rag when Park Ajeong's voice, still lying on the floor, snagged my ankle.
"Ah, right. Client messaged."
"....What'd they say?"
Park Ajeong was sprawled on the floor in a full starfish, as if the violent thrashing a minute ago had been a lie. Her empty, unfocused eyes were pointed at the stained ceiling of the old villa.
A low, flat voice drifted into my ear the way someone might recite a grocery list that had just floated up.
"If you don't kill that bastard soon, they're gonna call the cops and die before they can kill themselves."
Fuck me.........
Every direction was blocked.
The client was threatening suicide, I had no money, and I still didn't have a clean new method of murder.
Then Park Ajeong, still on the floor, opened her mouth.
Her tone had the flavor of someone patiently schooling an idiot.
"Just do what you're good at, okay? Stop overthinking it."
What I'm good at.
I knew exactly what she meant.
Slide. Thunk.
Stabbing the kidney from behind.
....The easiest method. The surest one.
The only talent I'd ever proven I had.
The problem was.....
Do it that way, and I become a serial killer.
That title, at least, I wanted to avoid.
The second the word serial attaches, this stops being Mujin PD's problem. Every media outlet in the country starts hunting my face, and the support stacked behind Oh Sae-ah multiplies past anything she has now.
I couldn't answer.
The easiest road was also the fastest road to ruin.
As if laughing at my hesitation, Park Ajeong kept her eyes on the TV and asked,
"What you're worried about is the cops clocking it as the same guy's method, right?"
"...Yeah, basically."
"Then just stab the shit out of him."
"Huh?"
Only then did she turn her head and look at me with those empty eyes.
"Start the way you always do. Hit the spot they can't even fight back from. After that, just go fucking wild — stab stab stab. That should do it, right?"
".....Holy shit?"
"Anyway, with that bastard's line of work, nobody's gonna blink if he gets knifed wherever, whenever. Am I wrong?"
To erase a pattern, overlay an even messier one.
On top of a professional's precise assassination, paint an amateur's rage-fueled butchery.
Out of this crazy bitch's empty head had come a solution so vicious it was almost perfect.
In her vacant pupils I saw the smiles of the demons sealed in my right arm.
What the hell is this kid?
Hunting murder clients on SNS is, on its face, an incredibly stupid move.
Just...
To my eye it was an ordinary account with nothing special about it — a little depressive aesthetic, that was all. But Park Ajeong had read, with perfect accuracy, that this was a suicide hopeful and someone carrying a deep grudge.
And in the DMs that played out on SNS, not a single word that could serve as circumstantial evidence ever appeared. Just the pose of listening to someone's troubles, then a suggestion to move the deeper conversation to a private chat app.
And the app where they actually talked was a global secure messenger famous for ignoring even the FBI when it asked for data.
The same place countless shady conversations travel in perfect safety.
Every scrap of evidence, sealed off completely.
This little shit....
Was she secretly a high-INT character?
My gaze drifted on its own to Park Ajeong, watching TV with that indifferent stare.
She had already moved back to the bed and was lying on her side.
Looking at her like that, I remembered the wet piss stain on the floor this morning and the thick ammonia stink that had come with it.
"....Hey. Did you wipe the piss off before you got back in bed?"
She thought for a second, then answered like she'd genuinely forgotten.
"Ah. Right...."
At that answer, I took every conclusion I'd just drawn about her and dumped it straight in the trash.
High-INT character?
No. Just...
a crazy bitch with something broken somewhere in her brain.