Prey
"Hello? Yeah? Nothing going on? What is it?"
Having made up her mind, Lee Seo-hyun was the picture of composure.
She began by doctoring the footage from the outdated security camera mounted in the office.
"What is it? Something's wrong with Dad, isn't it? Why, what's going on?"
And that wasn't all.
She brushed off her father-in-law's call just as lightly.
As if nothing had happened. In the same easy voice she always used.
"It's really nothing? Something's wrong, I can tell. I'm heading home right now—"
"It's fine. I guess I just had a strange dream. You're busy, so get to work. We'll talk later."
"All right, then. I'll hang up. Call me if anything comes up."
Everything looked utterly familiar to her.
Falsifying the security footage.
Deceiving her own father-in-law.
"...Dad said his dream was about me living an ordinary life."
Perhaps because she could feel Ki Tae-jun's piercing gaze on her, Lee Seo-hyun offered an excuse that wasn't really an excuse, her tone flat and unbothered.
"That much of a wish, I can grant him. It's a daughter's duty, after all."
"And you actually think you've granted it?"
"If he believes it, that's as good as granting it."
She had taken the whole thing in stride—far more easily than he'd expected.
The fact that Tae-jun had come back from death.
The fact that he was no longer human, all of it.
"I didn't expect you to be this calm about it."
"You said you endured tens of thousands of years in Hell, didn't you?"
"I did."
"I can't compare to that, but my life alone afterward was its own kind of hell."
"I'm sorry."
"Good that you know."
She moved past it as if it were nothing.
And yet Tae-jun could sense the deep wound buried inside her.
Lee Seo-hyun's life as a human had been anything but smooth, he was certain of it.
"Well, I'd say the clean-up is about done."
A short while later, having finished doctoring every trace of the security cameras in the Magazine F office, Lee Seo-hyun asked:
"So what exactly do you need my help with?"
"The things I can't do right now."
"Hm. Right—technically, you died fifteen years ago, didn't you, brother-in-law."
He would need a spare identity, cards, communications equipment—things to fall back on in an emergency. Grasping it in an instant, Lee Seo-hyun handed over her own card as a stopgap.
"Use my card for now. And a phone... here, pick whichever one you like. They're all burners anyway."
Inside the drawer sat a neat row of disposable phones.
What kind of life had this woman been living?
"...."
Tae-jun chose a black one and pocketed it.
"Anything else you need?"
"I need my strength back first. Help me with that."
"So—how, exactly?"
"Soul Stones."
"Soul... stones?"
After a beat of puzzlement, something clicked in Lee Seo-hyun's mind.
"You mean... that black orb from earlier?"
A nod.
Instead of answering, Ki Tae-jun simply inclined his head. He had swallowed the Soul Stone he'd claimed just moments before, when he'd finished off the last of the hired thugs.
Whoooooooosh—!
In that instant, a dark blue-green light erupted from Tae-jun's body.
The demonic script etched into the back of his hand shifted as well, warping into something new.
To any observer, it was a scene that defied belief entirely.
Truly, seeing was believing.
"Hunt the wicked, and you get an orb. I can grow my power back by consuming them."
"Following that logic... don't tell me the fouler the trash, the better the yield?"
Tae-jun nodded once more.
If someone could identify the worst offenders and seek them out directly?
The pace at which he recovered his strength and authorities would skyrocket.
"You said your goal, brother-in-law, is the public execution of the ringleaders from fifteen years ago—and everyone who sheltered them... Then yes, you really will need staggering power."
If he went after everyone involved right now?
He could kill a handful. Perhaps more than a handful.
The problem was that the trail ended there.
Fierce resistance would come pouring down on him soon enough—whether they fled overseas or mobilized the power of the state.
That was why Tae-jun wanted his strength back first.
Power enough to round up every last one of them in a single stroke.
"Okay. I get the gist."
As the mechanism fell into place, a flicker of elation and anticipation stirred in Lee Seo-hyun's eyes.
This time, she didn't seem to be making any effort to hide it.
And no wonder.
Screeech!
Another drawer slid open, revealing a dense stack of documents packed inside.
Every one of them was a 'target' that Magazine F had been investigating.
"Care to pick one?"
Lee Seo-hyun—or rather, Lee Seo-hyun's Magazine F—was in that business.
The filth from every walk of life gnawing away at this society.
A kind of 'sniper press' that investigated them and then exposed them to the world.
"Take your pick, whatever suits your taste."
"There are quite a lot."
"Ugh, there's no end to them."
She was right.
The world was overflowing with trash.
So much of it that the cleaning would never, ever be done.
One look at this stack of documents made that plain.
"...Hm?"
Turning the pages one by one, Tae-jun's eyes narrowed.
He had found his first prey—an almost ideal one.
"This guy looks familiar somehow."
"It would. It's a case from seventeen years ago."
The name on the document was that of a man in his mid-sixties: Cho Geun-shik.
Seventeen years ago, he had been the most notorious child rapist in the country—the scandal of the decade.
Sentenced to fifteen years, he had been living in a run-down villa in Yangju since the year before last.
"Some people say this: he paid his debt to society, so what's the problem? But brother-in-law—the man has nineteen prior convictions. Nineteen. Do you really believe someone like that was reformed after seventeen years?"
Anger was seeping into Lee Seo-hyun's voice, little by little.
"I don't buy it. Left alone, he'll just make another victim. It's only a matter of time."
But before her fury, Tae-jun weighed a different factor first.
The efficiency of the hunt—what he stood to gain from taking down a creature like Cho Geun-shik.
'It's not as if simply piling up evil deeds guarantees a high-grade Soul Stone.'
The grade of a Soul Stone was determined by a great many factors.
Not merely the number of atrocities, nor the nature of the crimes alone.
'More than that...'
The innate malice a demon bore.
Or a human, for that matter.
At times, that malice alone was what decided the grade.
'Judged on that measure, this one isn't a bad catch at all.'
A human piece of trash who had committed dozens of felony crimes—not for any gain of his own, but purely at the behest of his instincts.
A creature like that could promise a high-quality Soul Stone.
No—almost certainly would.
"This one, then."
"Son of a bitch."
Assault. Attempted murder. Sexual violence. Crimes against children.
Cho Geun-shik, nineteen-time offender, was once again displeased with the world today.
With every last person in it.
"Did I play around? Huh? I paid my damn debt! The honorable judge himself said all I had to do was sit for fifteen years, so what's with these bitches squawking? I'll grab every last one of them and rip their hearts out—!"
In his own mind, Cho Geun-shik was genuinely, sincerely wronged.
He'd served the exact sentence the state handed down and walked free.
Fifteen whole years, rotting away in prison, that's what he'd done.
He had paid his debt in full—and still the world wouldn't leave him alone.
From the day he was released, hundreds of them had swarmed him—TV stations, whatever those internet streamers were—and now, two years on, the police still shadowed him everywhere. Even walking to the corner store, a cop came trailing behind.
"I can't breathe! I'm suffocating! Ah, dammit all!"
That was why.
Why, on every pre-dawn when the police surveillance—or 'protection,' in truth—grew slack, he slipped out for a night walk.
He felt stifled. Sleep wouldn't come. And above all, he was dissatisfied.
However old he'd gotten, wasn't this the age of the hundred-year life?
He was still plenty spry.
Sixty-eight and in his prime, plain and simple.
"Still, the world's gotten better, I'll give it that. Why are girls these days all so pretty, huh..."
Muttering one nonsense after another under his breath, Cho Geun-shik walked on—until he realized he'd left his neighborhood far behind and reached the outskirts.
A scrub-covered hillside. A road where not a single car passed. A streetlight flickering on and off.
Even there, his footsteps carried on for a long while before they finally stopped.
A beat-up sedan sat parked squarely in the shadows.
No—'hidden' was the more accurate word for it.
"Heh heh heh..."
A repulsive chuckle.
Cho Geun-shik pulled a bottle of soju from a black plastic bag and drank straight from it.
Then he approached the sedan's trunk and slid in a key.
Click!
The trunk at last swung open.
And inside, unbelievably, was a person.
A woman, bound tight from head to toe, her face twisted with terror.
"Mmph! Mmmph, mmph...!"
"There, there. You wanted to see me, didn't you? So did I. Been thinking about you since yesterday."
At the sight of her, Cho Geun-shik bared his yellowed teeth in satisfaction.
He'd held out a long time, all things considered.
Fifteen years in prison, two in society—hadn't he?
"Prison was better, honestly. No perfume-drenched bitches in there teasing a man half to death."
Well past sixty.
Fifteen years rotting in a cell—and nothing had changed.
This was the result of taking trash that should have been quarantined from society forever and setting it loose beyond the bars.
"Don't blame me for this. If anyone's at fault, it's you. Who told you to dress like a bar girl, huh? Who told you to go around dripping perfume everywhere?"
Just as that revolting parade of twisted logic climbed to its crescendo—
"...!"
Sensing a sinister presence at his back, Cho Geun-shik tightened his grip on the soju bottle.
"Who the—"
In the same motion, he swung it with all his strength toward the direction of the sound, screaming:
"—you some kind of dog?!"
But the bottle never touched anyone.
Something faster had already moved—Ki Tae-jun's hand had snared the man's wrist mid-swing.
"Y-you bastard, do you have any idea who I—"
"Do I need to?"
"...What?"
"You're dying anyway."
Krrrrrunch—!
It was a sound Cho Geun-shik had never once heard in his entire life.
The sound of dense, thick flesh being torn away in one whole piece.
It didn't take him long to grasp what that alien noise was.
"Ugh—ghh, AAAAAAGH...!"
Blood spattered.
A forearm dropped to the ground with a wet thud.
It was Cho Geun-shik's own arm—the one that had swung the bottle—ripped off not by any blade, but by sheer strength alone.
"Don't blame me."
The hunt that Tae-jun had followed here on the stench of evil did not end there.
He stamped down on the thrashing limbs of the man writhing in agony.
"Blame yourself."
Reality is not the movies.
People, as a rule, do not die instantly.
Which only makes the suffering that much worse.
"Who told you to go around dripping that stench everywhere?"
"S-save me... please..."
"Is that how you say it?"
Tae-jun handed the man's own words straight back to him.
Thrust.
Not that he returned them unchanged.
His fingertips had already punched straight through the base of Cho Geun-shik's skull.