Ripple Effect (3)
One by one, the mouthwatering cuts of beef were laid out over the grill.
The employee moved briskly, flipping the meat with practiced hands. “In order, this is hanger steak, top blade, and skirt steak.”
Na Sang-min and Lee Ji-jun both lit up at once.
“That’s it! Now we’re talking.”
“Worth it, eating that tasteless flower bullshit.”
But there was one face that had gone dark.
“……Ha. Ha. Ha. Since I’m paying, please eat to your heart’s content.”
It was Prosecutor Ryu Su-hon.
This was Uwolgwan.
A place Ryu Su-hon had never even mentioned.
Because…
The employee had said, “Uwolgwan is the most refined and most traditional restaurant in all of South Korea….”
In other words, to put it plainly.
The most expensive place in the country.
The beef itself was outrageous, and even a bowl of doenjang stew cost more than 40,000 won.
Lee Ji-jun glanced at Ryu Su-hon.
“So who’s this guy?”
“Ah, if you must know, I’m from the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office….”
“Let’s gooo!!”
Before he could even finish, Na Sang-min shot out a pair of chopsticks.
“Hah! Hunter-nim, eat with us!”
Lee Ji-jun, unwilling to be outdone, lunged in aggressively and started grabbing meat too.
Facing the two frantic hunters, Ryu Su-hon laughed awkwardly.
“Heh heh. Hunters really do have impressive appetites.”
The assorted platter they’d ordered vanished in the blink of an eye.
“Would you like anything else?”
At the employee’s question, Na Sang-min shot his hand up.
“The rhythm can’t be interrupted when it comes to meat. Another ten orders of hanger steak!”
For reference, hanger steak here was 150,000 won per 100 grams.
Lee Ji-jun added his own order too.
“You’ve got marinated ribs too, right? Ten orders of that as well!”
I followed suit and ate with them.
With every bite, rich, savory juices flooded my mouth.
Yeah. This is good.
I should bring Grandma and Sung-min here next time.
As the meat kept coming without end, Ryu Su-hon swallowed hard and drank only water.
“Aren’t you going to eat, Prosecutor-nim?”
“My stomach’s a little off. Ha ha.”
And after that monstrous meal finally ended…
“Ugh. I’m stuffed.”
“Me too. I can’t eat another bite.”
Na Sang-min and Lee Ji-jun patted their bellies with satisfied expressions.
By rough estimate, each of them had eaten 1.8 million won worth of beef.
Including what I’d eaten, we’d burned through well over 5 million won in one meal.
Ryu Su-hon glanced over the menu again and started sweating buckets, his face blank with shock.
“I’ll step out to the restroom for a moment.”
He lifted his ass from the seat and left the private room.
Na Sang-min was picking at his teeth with a toothpick when he spoke.
“Choi Yongki.”
“Yeah.”
“Where were you on the fifteenth of last month?”
It was a strange question.
Who the hell remembers every single day of a whole month, anyway?
“The fifteenth? Uh….”
Without meaning to, I pressed my lips shut.
At once, the air turned icy.
The fifteenth of last month meant…
The day Gyeongso Daejeon broke out.
Na Sang-min held the toothpick between his lips and worried it with his teeth. His gaze never left me.
“You. Were you in Gwanghwamun that day?”
I was.
With a purple mask pulled over my face.
I’d even met Na Sang-min face to face as the Purple Devil.
A faint, ominous current of mana began to rise from Na Sang-min’s body.
Did he figure it out?
A careless lie would only make things worse.
But I couldn’t exactly tell him the truth either.
Thank God.
I was an experienced liar.
I kept a straight face and acted as if nothing was wrong.
“I was at a club.”
“With who?”
“A friend.”
“Which friend?”
The tug-of-war tightened, neither side yielding an inch.
That confirmed it.
He’s suspicious.
Na Sang-min was definitely entertaining the idea that I might be the Purple Devil.
But.
It’s still just suspicion.
If he’d been one hundred percent sure, he would’ve asked bluntly, right then and there, You’re the Purple Devil, aren’t you?
I quietly pulled out my phone.
Then I opened the album and showed him one photo.
“This guy.”
“Huh. This is….”
Na Sang-min sucked in a breath.
It was a photo of me with Karki, arms slung over each other’s shoulders.
Karki was making a V-sign with his fingers and smiling brightly.
Lee Ji-jun leaned in, interested.
“Who’s this guy?”
“You don’t know? He’s the chairman of Dio Guild.”
“Oh, really?”
Out of everyone here, Na Sang-min was the only one who recognized Karki’s face.
“This was taken that day?”
“Look. Last month. The fifteenth.”
Before heading out for Gyeongso Daejeon, Karki had made me a new suit.
And before I changed into it, he’d said it was a historic day and insisted we take a photo together.
Nice one, Karki.
Who would’ve thought that a picture with Karki would become the decisive proof of my alibi?
“Hmm.”
Na Sang-min’s pressure eased.
Of course, if anyone wanted to nitpick, there was still more to dig into.
The time the photo was taken didn’t line up perfectly with the timing of Gyeongso Daejeon.
Still…
He won’t be able to press further than this.
He could just assume I took the photo and then went to the club.
Na Sang-min wasn’t the sort to carefully go to a club himself and comb through CCTV frame by frame, either.
Then—
“Choi Yongki.”
Suddenly, mana burst from Na Sang-min’s body like wildfire.
“You looking to die?”
Lee Ji-jun felt the killing intent and jerked back in his seat.
“H-Hunter-nim. What’s with you all of a sudden? We’re in public.”
Goose bumps rose all the way up my spine.
“Get fucked.”
Na Sang-min wasn’t the type to put on a bad performance, nor was he capable of doing it.
He was genuinely pissed.
Damn. Did he find out?
Where had the hole in my story been?
Did he know Karki was my factory friend?
No way.
I’d underestimated Na Sang-min too much.
At this rate, I thought, we might end up brawling right there in the barbecue restaurant.
And it wouldn’t stop at a brawl.
Na Sang-min suddenly shot up from his seat.
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me! If you were meeting the chairman, you should’ve called me!!!”
Silence fell, utterly hollow.
“You sneaky bastard. Going around getting friendly with the chairman behind my back. And now that I think about it, that pisses me off even more. There’s an S-class hunter right here, so why the hell were you meeting some nobody like this?”
Hearing him gripe like that, I let out a quiet breath of relief.
Lee Ji-jun relaxed too, leaning back in his chair and pressing a hand to his chest.
“Ah, Hunter-nim. He probably had important business to discuss. Right?”
“That’s right. He said he’d called me separately to commend me for what happened with the Dirty Kraken.”
“Ugh.”
Na Sang-min pressed a hand over the spot near his heart.
The Dirty Kraken was his sore spot.
He’d ignored the request that had come to him, and I’d taken it instead, with explosive results.
“Tch. I’m out.”
Na Sang-min got up from the seat.
Then he stared at me for a long moment.
“…….”
“…….”
He looked like he had something else to say, but in the end he didn’t.
“People in this line of work die young if they’re too sharp-edged. Watch yourself.”
He left me with those odd words and opened the door.
Lee Ji-jun stood as well and followed him out.
“I should head out too.”
After the two of them were gone, I let out a long breath.
“Whew. That was close.”
Ryu Su-hon returned to the room a little later.
“Huh? Everyone’s gone? Not even a word of goodbye to me….”
The employee came in with the bill.
“Customer, how would you like to handle payment?”
I looked at Ryu Su-hon without saying a word.
“I’ve eaten well, Prosecutor Ryu.”
“Ah, yes….”
Ryu Su-hon’s hands trembled as he took out his card from his wallet.
“Twelve-month installments, please.”
I took a seat under the wisteria trellis in front of the barbecue restaurant with Ryu Su-hon.
“The coffee’s on me.”
I pulled two cups of instant coffee from the vending machine.
“Th-thank you, Hunter Choi.”
Ryu Su-hon, who’d been so full of swagger earlier, had gone through a brutal initiation and now sat there as docile as a lamb.
In truth, that had been my intent all along.
In my previous life, corruption wasn’t limited to the police.
There were cops who didn’t investigate properly.
And prosecutors who didn’t indict properly.
Same shit, different pile.
Prosecutors took bribes from villains too.
If you knew that and still showed up unannounced, acting all high and mighty, of course it would piss you off.
That was enough for the lesson.
“So what is it?”
Ryu Su-hon had come looking for me because of Dark Alliance business.
Since I’d already been gathering information on villains lately, anything connected to Dark Alliance was worth hearing out.
“Is it true that Black Bear is dead?”
“It is.”
Ryu Su-hon continued.
“Not just Black Bear. Ha Young-su, Park Jae-man, Kim Do-young—every last one of them is dead.”
He listed the names of the villain executives one by one.
Dark Alliance had executives assigned by province.
The ones he just named…
South Chungcheong Province, North Chungcheong Province, and North Gyeongsang Province, in that order.
If I had to rank them…
B-class, A-class, B+ class.
Ma Cheol-hui and Han Gae-seok had been unusual cases.
The rest of the executives weren’t all that high-ranked.
“Who killed them?”
Of course, I already knew the answer.
The bastard who killed my younger brother.
“We haven’t identified him yet. For now, we’re calling him Quarter.”
Ryu Su-hon went on with his explanation.
“He cut villain executives into four pieces and killed them, so that’s how he got the nickname.”
I crumpled the paper cup I’d finished drinking.
In my previous life, Quarter had never been caught.
He’d never been punished.
He’d simply lived on in comfort, ruling the underworld.
“According to our information, Quarter intends to wipe out Dark Alliance and build a new organization in its place. The name is….”
“New Dark.”
“Oh. You knew?”
In my excitement, I’d blurted out a memory from my previous life without thinking.
It didn’t matter.
“I’ve been investigating villains too.”
“I see. But why you, Hunter Choi? May I ask the reason?”
A hunter’s duty was to exterminate monsters and close Gates.
There was no reason to obsess over villains.
“Personal reasons.”
“…….”
At my answer, Ryu Su-hon shut his mouth, then got to his feet.
He tossed the paper cup he’d been holding into the trash can.
The cup bounced off the rim and fell back out.
“Aw, damn!”
Ryu Su-hon turned in a circle and looked at me.
“Hunter Choi, I’m sure I look like some ordinary prosecutor to you. One blinded by money, blinded by honor and success—a nothing special kind of prosecutor.”
Once a person seized power, their true nature tended to show itself.
What kind of person was Ryu Su-hon, exactly?
“Why? Am I wrong?”
“Ha ha. You saw right through me. My goal is to become chief prosecutor, nothing more, nothing less. I’m not really interested in anything else. But….”
Ryu Su-hon smiled bitterly.
It was less sleazy than before.
A much cleaner smile.
“That wasn’t how I was five years ago. When I first came to the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office, I was a prosecutor full of justice.”
He raised one finger.
“Have you ever heard of the Myeongdong Unwed Mother Murder Case?”
I dimly remembered it.
“It was the case where a villain killed a woman in her mid-thirties. She’d had a child at seventeen, and I think her daughter was in high school at the time.”
Ryu Su-hon spoke calmly.
“I handled that case. I pushed for the death penalty for the villain who’d been arrested.”
For a young prosecutor back then, it had been an audacious move.
But the judge sentenced the villain to life imprisonment instead of death.
And then…
“He got out not long after.”
Ryu Su-hon went quiet at my words.
“That’s right. On retrial, he was found not guilty for lack of evidence.”
The murderer was Black Bear’s cousin.
Black Bear had pulled strings from behind the scenes and gotten him out safely.
“Do you know what happened after that? The bastard killed the unwed mother’s daughter too, saying he wanted revenge.”
“…….”
I hadn’t known that.
It hadn’t made the papers.
“It felt like everything was my fault. If I hadn’t arrested the villain? If I’d given him a lighter sentence? Then maybe the unwed mother’s daughter would still be alive.”
Ryu Su-hon lowered his head.
“After that, I gave up completely. I started wondering if the justice I was chasing was just a pathetic joke. I even began to suspect that my beliefs might hurt other people.”
The act of pursuing justice, of holding to one’s beliefs, could hurt someone.
It was a new way of looking at justice.
“So I decided to become a sellout prosecutor. If I just chased money and success, at least I wouldn’t end up hurting anyone.”
Ryu Su-hon smiled faintly.
It was a simpler smile than before.
Less greasy. More honest.
“As the prosecutor representative, I chose you, Hunter Choi. Why? I suppose you could call it species hatred. Or maybe envy. It was a complicated feeling.”
Ryu Su-hon held out his hand.
“This time, I want to succeed with you, no matter what. I know it might sound selfish, but please prove me wrong.”
Then he grinned.
“And make sure we get the rewards that come after.”
I had no idea how much of that was genuine.
Even if I pressed him, I doubted I’d find out.
Still…
For now, at least, he sounds sincere.
I tossed the paper cup in my hand into the trash.
This time, it sank neatly through the opening with a satisfying swish.
“I’m not shaking your hand yet. But….”
I stood and walked past Ryu Su-hon.
“I’ll work with you.”
Behind me, Ryu Su-hon’s oily laugh rang out.
“Let’s go together, Hunter Choi. First, we should come up with a team name. How about Brave Prosecutor!? Hahaha!”