The First Target
Soft RGB lighting washed the room in a gentle, shifting glow, but the world on the screen was nothing but blood and despair. Streaming on NovelTV under the handle Uni, the popular creator Yoo Jimin sat hunched over her keyboard and mouse, her brow knotted tight.
"Oh my god! How am I even supposed to beat this?!"
Her cheeks puffed out in a sulky pout, her wide eyes glistening as if she might burst into tears at any second. The contrast with the monitor could not have been starker. Her character was already dying a gruesome death for the umpteenth time.
It was her first attempt at a notoriously brutal game, and of course nothing was going right. The viewers, as if they had been waiting for this exact moment, piled on.
The cheap little donation chime rang without a pause. Low-rent mockery and useless backseat advice crowded one corner of the screen. Uni — Yoo Jimin — forced the corners of her mouth up into a smile and huffed.
"I know, okay?! My hands just can't keep up! Can you please stop backseating?! I can't concentrate!"
She put on an exaggerated show of slamming the desk, then irritably yanked her mouse cord straight, and the chat flooded with lmaos and patronizing aww, poor babys. Inside, though, she was cold as ice.
What a bunch of idiots… they actually get off on throwing their money at me.
She flicked a glance at the stream software's revenue tracker. The number was already sitting there, crisp and unmistakable.
All she had done was pretend to suck at a game and put on a little show of being annoyed. Was there an easier way to make money anywhere on earth?
Dumb whale bastards. They actually think they're somebody.
Every contemptuous word in the language ran through her head, but on the outside she pushed her lower lip out in a pout, looking for all the world like she might kill the stream any second.
"Ugh, seriously! If you keep backseating like that, I'm just gonna end the stream! Hmph!"
She whipped her head away in a sulk, and the chat and the donations only burned hotter. Unseen by the camera, Yoo Jimin allowed herself the briefest, most satisfied little smile. The suckers' cash bonanza was nowhere near over.
Honestly, she had already made enough. Eleven hundred dollars. A few hours of fake gaming and fake irritation, and that was what had rolled in. She glanced again at the donation total stacked in the corner of the screen and clicked her tongue.
She was getting tired. How much longer was she supposed to humor these morons? She had started weighing the angle for a clean sign-off when a donation landed that was almost too perfect.
There it is.
Uni snatched her hands off the keyboard as if she had been waiting for exactly that and let her lips start to tremble. The smile she had been forcing vanished without a trace. She arranged her face into the look of a girl one breath away from bursting into tears.
"I mean, even so… wasn't that way too mean? I'm a person too. That actually hurts…"
Even her voice came out thin and shaky. The sudden shift in mood stuffed the chat with question marks.
"I'm really hurt… I think… that's it for today's stream."
She even mimed the tears rolling down, then cut them off with a declaration as cold as if their reactions meant nothing to her at all.
"What? I can't? No. I genuinely feel awful. I can't keep streaming. I'm ending it for today. Bye, everyone."
She hit End Stream without a flicker of hesitation. The screen went black in an instant. She killed the webcam, then the mic, one after the other.
"Hahh—"
Every light in the room went out, and only the dead black of the monitor looked back at her. Yoo Jimin let out a long breath, peeling the mask off like something she could simply throw away. There was no trace of the girl who had been on the verge of tears. All that remained on her face was a thin, icy contempt.
"It's so fucking exhausting humoring those retards."
She sank deep into the chair back and muttered it to herself, unkinking the scowl from her brow and rolling her stiff neck from side to side. She was starting to feel human again. She had just started to stand, meaning to stretch, when it happened.
Ding-dong.
The doorbell cut through the silence.
"…What?"
Who would be here at this hour? She hadn't ordered food. She wasn't expecting anyone. Yoo Jimin frowned for a second, then shuffled toward the front door in her slippers. Irritation still written across her face, she reached straight for the handle instead of checking the intercom screen.
Out on the landing, the echo of that irritating chime had not quite faded. Lee Dongwoo stared at the tightly shut door with eyes gone cold and still. His heart burned hot with vengeance, but his head was ice.
A moment later, a rustle of movement came from inside, and the door eased open a crack. Through the narrow gap, a face appeared that was familiar and strange at once. No — a face he hated now. Yoo Jimin.
"Who…?"
She scanned the hallway with a wary look, and then her expression flooded with bewilderment. A man she had never seen in her life. A man who gave off something faintly, deeply wrong.
"Hey, what the hell! Who do you think you are, just showing up at someone's—"
The rest of the shout, meant to go with the slamming of the door, scattered into empty air. Dongwoo shoved his body through the opening without a second's pause. A physique tempered in the Other World overpowered an ordinary woman's strength as if it were nothing.
"Ah! What the fuck are you doing?!"
Yoo Jimin staggered backward, off-balance, and Dongwoo showed her a thin, crooked smile. Then he swung his right fist without the slightest hesitation.
The blow landed with a dull, meaty thud, driving straight into her abdomen. The shock rattled the organs hidden under the soft-looking flesh above that narrow waist.
"Ghk…!"
A choking sound tore out of her, and both of her eyes rolled white. There was no trace left of the streamer who, minutes earlier, had been performing cute and performing annoyed for a camera.
Dongwoo looked down at her collapsing body with no expression at all. Twitching faintly on the floor, she looked like an insect.
The voice that settled over the floor was cold as ice. Dongwoo nudged the fallen Yoo Jimin with the toe of his shoe, once, then again. One week had passed since his return to Earth.
He had moved for one reason only: revenge. He had hunted down the whereabouts of the subhuman bastards who had driven his father and his sister to their deaths. And at last, he had found his first target.
They'd all grown up and were living just fine. Each of them with a respectable career, even.
Yoo Jimin. She had been one of the girls in the delinquent clique that had made his school years a living hell. A conventionally pretty face, a glamorous figure pushing an F-cup, and a personality that loved dressing flashy.
She had put all of that to work and was now a successful personal streamer — putting on that nauseating act of hers and bleeding suckers for their money.
Dongwoo bent slowly and seized a fistful of her hair. Her head snapped back, and the nape of her neck, bared to the light, looked especially white.
"You were the first one I found. Consider yourself lucky."
There was not a shred of feeling in his voice. Only a cold, flickering intent to kill.
The words burrowed into Yoo Jimin's slack ear like a whisper out of hell. And then hours went by.
"Nngh…"
A thin moan, and a faint thread of consciousness rose up out of the dark. Her head felt like it was splitting open, and a heavy ache still sat in her lower belly.
What happened…? Someone rang the doorbell…
Groping through her last memories in a haze, Yoo Jimin snapped suddenly, fully awake.
That's right. Some psycho barged in the second I opened the door… and hit me in the stomach…!
Nausea surged up her throat. She tried to jerk her upper body upright, but nothing obeyed her. Her arms and legs were as heavy as if someone had hung lead weights from them.
"What… what is this…?"
Only then did she understand that something was badly wrong. She looked down at herself in a panic — and froze in horror.
A cold metallic bite at her wrists and ankles. What swam into focus were gleaming chains, fixed fast to the wall, or the bedpost, something immovable, locking down every inch of movement. What the hell was this? A kidnapping? A robbery? Her mind went white.
"Fuck, what is this! Let me go! Let me the fuck go right now!"
The scream that tore out of her was terror and rage twisted together. She thrashed as hard as she could, but the chains did not so much as shiver. The more she moved, the deeper the metal bit into her skin, adding a raw, stinging pain on top of everything else.
She had even forgotten that this was her own apartment. She just screamed, wild and mindless.
That was when it happened.
The bedroom door eased open with a low creak, and a shadow fell across the floor. A shape that was familiar and strange at once. The man who had rung the bell. The man who had driven his fist into her stomach. He looked down at the struggling Yoo Jimin with eyes like frost and spoke, very quietly.
"If you're awake, keep your mouth shut. Why is that mouth of yours so filthy?"
There was no anger in the voice. No agitation. Only a chill as still and absolute as ice.