The State Bears No Responsibility (2)
Evening. The restaurant was quieter than it had any right to be. All that moved through the room was the clink of soju glasses and the soft tap of chopsticks.
Judge Choi Seongwoo took a slow drink of soju.
The young judges who followed him sat at his side. Across from them, a few judges well on in years — warm-faced men, a strange dignity showing through the white of their hair.
"It's been a long time since we had a gathering like this."
One of them smiled, and the smile was bitter. It was not a talkative meal. Even so, everyone at that table was of one mind.
After the Unnamed Awakened, the rotten flesh had at last begun to be cut away. For people who had spent their careers watching the corrupt for cues, unable even to hand down a proper verdict, this felt like true judgment.
Choi Seongwoo set his chopsticks down and let out a breath. Every eye turned to him.
"I'll speak plainly."
His voice was low, and it was clear.
"I do not believe that we, in all the years since the founding of this nation, have ever stood before a change this great in the world of law."
The young judges nodded. Light flickered in the eyes of the old ones as well.
A brief silence followed, and then the heavy sound of applause, gathering little by little. The young judges' hands moved first. The mid-career men followed, and even the elders smiled and found the rhythm.
"We stand at a crossroads."
Choi Seongwoo did not pause.
"Will we bow to money and power, as our seniors did before us, or will we hand down true verdicts for the Republic of Korea? I trust that everyone here came to this table with the same heart. Now, while most of the rotten judges are gone, is our chance. If we do not set the precedent ourselves, we will surely slide back to what we were."
The elder judges' eyes grew damp, as if the days they had spent studying in the dark, long ago, were rising up in them again.
"Thanks to the Unnamed Awakened, the reporters are no longer hiding the truth. Many of those people are dead, but the ones still living, and the ones who have yet to stand in a courtroom, are not finished. We must not waver. We no longer have to glance over our shoulders. The people are watching."
A potbellied judge laughed, broad and hearty.
"I like this young fellow. Bold as anything!"
"You're telling me. With spirit like that, we'd better trust our junior and follow him. What's left to watch our step for?"
Choi Seongwoo lifted his glass.
"Seniors, juniors — I ask this of you. If the people's anger is ever to cool, it has to begin with us. Please. Hand down righteous verdicts. Only then, I dare to believe, can this world, this country, change into what it ought to be."
They looked into one another's eyes. The awkwardness in the room seemed to loosen, if only a little. A mere handful of judges — the ones who had not rotted. Remembering the bitter years when they had known, and still been forced to look away, they touched their glasses together.
Choi Seongwoo believed the small change in front of him would come back, in time, as something vast. Given the nature of this country, the road would not be an easy one, but he swore to himself once more that he would not break.
Quietly, he was grateful to the Unnamed Awakened. The only person who had overturned a reality that had no answer.
Until that man stopped passing judgment, he would fight beside him to the very end. He carved the name of judge into his chest again. Even if oppression came down on him from somewhere, he vowed — and vowed once more — that at least now, he would not run.
The Korean Hunter Association.
A long row of people sat before a great table.
The meeting was to divide the gates that had belonged to D.K, in the wake of Park Jeongho's death and the collapse of D.K Guild. Seated there as well were the masters of what had now become the Three Great Guilds — Nemesis, Jeongbeol, and Baekdu. A scatter of small and mid-sized guilds had taken the corners.
The Association President wore a grave face. His ties to Park Jeongho ran deep, and the news of the man's death had gone past shock. What weighed on him more than grief was regret. The tower he had built with such care had come down.
And the fact that not even an S-rank hunter was a match for the Unnamed Awakened was a result that bordered on despair. He could no longer do his filthy work from the shadows, the way he always had. He let his gaze travel the length of the conference room, quietly hunting for a second Park Jeongho.
"Next is Nemesis Guild."
Association staff portioned out the gates according to the scale of each guild.
Most of the smaller guilds had smiles caught on their mouths. Even a few more gates to clear meant profit, and the wall of the great guilds — a wall they had never been able to cross — almost seemed as if it might be climbable now.
D.K had been a formidable guild, no question. But there were more than enough people to fill the empty seat. That was how many gates the guild had held in its grip.
Lee Nayeon kept to her usual smile. Her thoughts did not.
They were feasting on all those gates by themselves? That Association President. That man...
Anyone in the Three Great Guilds had known the Association President and Park Jeongho were hand in glove. The number, though, was staggering beyond anything they had guessed.
She and the masters of Jeongbeol and Baekdu laughed as if the sheer gall of it had knocked the wind out of them.
"I don't even have it in me to be shocked."
"Better they're being divided now than never. Still, that Park Jeongho was really something. How much did the man gorge himself on?"
The eyes of the three guild masters turned on him. The Association President swept his white hair back and looked from one face to the next.
I couldn't take my eyes off the television.
The armed forces of the Republic of Korea.
Truth is, this was another outfit that should have been torn apart a long time ago. Anyone who's been through the service knows how rotten that place is. Rotten all the way down.
They love to talk about burning your youth. About a place that turns into meaning instead of waste.
Everyone knows the reality is nothing like the speech. There's a reason people say it, blunt as the words are: when they call for you, you're the nation's son; when you die, you're somebody else's.
I enlisted at a dead sprint the moment the college entrance exam was over. One year and nine months in uniform, and I know perfectly well that outfit doesn't have an answer either.
This is a conscription country. You throw this person and that person into the same barracks and tell them to live together, so of course there's going to be trouble. The bigger problem is the officers who are supposed to deal with it. Every last one of them is busy burying it, turning their heads and pretending they didn't see, and so the place can never change.
Only now are the articles even starting to trickle out. There must be no small number of accidents that got quietly buried in there. I saw it a few times myself, back when I was on active duty.
They always act so clean. These bastards are just one more rotten piece of this country. The ones I pity are the kids serving under them who never did a damn thing wrong. When the heads up top are out of their minds like that, what exactly is supposed to change just because the kids keep their heads down?
I fixed on one of the articles.
It went like this.
The company commander, a bastard crazed for promotion, had no sooner taken his post than he set his sights on turning every man in the company into a special-class warrior, the army's highest fitness grade. On days with nothing in particular to do, he ran the whole unit through endless drills in full combat gear.
And of course, even on days when they had specialty training, if any time was left he forced them to keep at physical training right up until personal maintenance. A historic piece of stupidity.
The problem was that this was the middle of the July and August heat wave. A man could cook just standing still, and if you drove soldiers like that, an accident was only a matter of time.
In the end, one soldier died of heatstroke in the line of duty.
The company commander was shameless. A man was dead, and the division commander — that bastard — was desperate only to hide it. In the end he went around spouting garbage that didn't even qualify as an excuse. Outdoor activity had been banned, he said, and the soldier had died because he went out and made a scene on his own.
It was obvious the division order banning outdoor activity had come down only after the soldier was already dead. Truly impressive pieces of shit.
The funnier part was that all of this had happened last year.
Whatever strings they pulled at the time, the case never drew much notice, and it was buried. Only now were reporters, tipped off by men who had finished their service, putting articles out without bothering to look over their shoulders.
These days, sure enough — judges, S-rank hunters, every rotten one of them dying off — even old sins were being dug out of the ground.
It almost made me laugh.
How many cases had they waved through on the strength of the military's closed little world? A precious son enlists with his head shaved to the scalp, saying he'll go and guard the country. When he comes home overnight as a cold corpse, what do his parents feel?
I can't claim to know. It must feel like the world has been taken from them.
Other military cases kept being reported alongside it. They poured out as if they had been waiting — as if they were asking for what I could do. I felt the same way.
Of course there are good soldiers. There are just more unhinged idiots. I got mine. The kids coming up after me don't have to get theirs.
I sat down at the computer and sent a message to With Crime.
Short of ripping it open by force, it will never change. Not the armed forces of the Republic of Korea.
The division commander's office.
Division Commander Kim Incheol's face had flushed a deep red. His desk was a clutter of papers, and before it several officers stood rigid at attention, drawn tight with tension.
"What the hell is this? How do you people do your jobs?!!"
The roar broke over them like thunder. The officers flinched.
"How old is this case, and it's still crawling back out? Didn't you drill the discharged men properly? Well?"
The officers kept their eyes to the front and moved only their mouths.
"We're sorry, sir."
"You think sorry ends it?"
He began kicking them in the shins himself.
"It's because you lot are idiots that the brats under you are pulling this shit, isn't it? Running their mouths about officers — who gave them the right! The world's dangerous enough as it is!"
"We're sorry, sir."
"Anyway, if I go down over this, every one of you is getting stripped out of that uniform too! Understand? I don't care what it takes — kill that article!"
"Yes, sir!"
Kim Incheol knew plenty about the Unnamed Awakened. Turn on the morning news and there he was. The general put on a strong front, but underneath it he was quietly shaking.
The officers filed out. He sat and pressed a hand to his brow.
"They're not going to kill me over something from last year. I'm a division commander in the Republic of Korea Army."
He was trying, as hard as he could, to talk himself down. Look how far he had climbed to get here. Like the company commander, he was a man with eyes for nothing but promotion.
When an accident happened, he buried it. Soldiers, whatever they were — results came first. Always.
Should I apologize right now? Or get out while I can and discharge immediately? Would it help if I went to the bereaved family?
He sank into worry after worry. It never rose past regret. There was no reflection in it.
He did not look the least bit guilty about the incident. To him, a soldier was nothing more than a tool that helped him get promoted, and nothing less.
Kim Incheol lifted his phone and looked at a photograph. A picture of his family. His wife and his son, smiling, happy.
"Right. Times like this, I have to steel myself even harder."
He could not let himself fall apart and leave these precious people behind. Kim Incheol was a soldier. A soldier with stars on his shoulders, at that.
He forced himself to recite a soldier's spirit he had never actually possessed, and he swore that nothing was going to happen.
Then, worn out from a night without sleep, his tired eyes slowly fell shut.