Chapter 60. Those Not Worth Purifying
Chapter 60. Those Not Worth Purifying
Words failed me. He was the last person I'd expected to see.
He flashed a grin, rolled his wheelchair forward, and pulled up to the table.
"You look like you've seen a ghost."
"No, it's just... even at the bar back then, I never..."
As if it were nothing, he lifted the cuffs of his trousers.
Where his legs should have been, there were prosthetics.
Both of them.
"Heh heh... In the dim lighting of a bar, it's pretty convincing, isn't it?"
I hadn't noticed at all back then.
Between the dim lighting and the distance, I'd missed it completely.
"But what brings you here...?"
He tilted his head back and stared blankly at the ceiling.
Then he let out a long sigh and began to tell his story.
"Friend, do you remember the story I told you at the bar?"
"You distinctly said you had a wife and a five-year-old child..."
"I did... once."
"..."
Esteban Rojas.
He was another corrupt politician who had spent his career taking bribes from the cartel.
But when his son was born, something in him changed. He began gathering their vulnerabilities and slowly, bit by bit, pushing back.
"But, of all people, my own subordinate turned out to be an informant..."
On his son's fifth birthday, he was attacked.
On a day that should have been a blessing, his family was shattered.
He tapped his thighs and let out a hollow laugh.
"I ended up a cripple in both legs... Heh heh. I suppose this is karma for all the bribes I took?"
His wife had been tortured and violated by cartel members in ways too terrible to describe, then dumped on the street.
And beside her cold, dead body lay his child, just as cold and just as dead.
"..."
I didn't know what words of comfort to offer a man who had lost his wife and child.
No—I was afraid that even the act of offering comfort would only wound him further...
"So I think about it sometimes. I wish they'd just killed me then, too. It would have been easier..."
I didn’t know why the cartel chose to let Esteban live.
But the man himself offered his own grim theory, his voice utterly calm.
"They probably needed a clown."
"A clown?"
"Yes... A clown to show the world what happens to anyone who dares to stand against them."
He suddenly reached out and grabbed the stainless steel cup on the table.
And then, without warning, he started slamming it down.
Slamming it as if he meant to smash his own prosthetic leg to pieces.
— Crack! Crack! Crack!
He kept striking as if he didn't care whether the prosthetic broke or not.
And when a fissure finally spread across the hard surface, he shoved his fingers inside and began digging around.
"When they took everything from me, this is the one thing I protected to the very end."
Incredibly, what he pulled out from inside the prosthetic was a USB drive.
He held it out toward me, waving it as if he meant to hand it over.
"This contains information you'll find... satisfying."
I rose from my seat and leaned forward, reaching out to take it.
But he grabbed me by the collar and pulled me closer.
For some reason, I didn't want to resist.
I simply let him pull me in.
— A trickle...
Tears were sliding down his face.
"Friend, please... Make sure no one else ever ends up like me."
"..."
"With my own power... I can't even bring them to judgment, let alone get my revenge..."
I nodded and took the USB from him.
Then I met his eyes and spoke.
"I'll be right back..."
---
A quiet bedroom.
The cartel boss, a woman nestled on each side of him, listened silently to the report of the subordinate who had just opened the door.
"...The estimated damages are as follows."
"So you're telling me he knew we were the ones tearing through his businesses, and he just... let us do it to him?"
"Th-that's not...!"
— Bam!!!
Without a single change in his expression, the boss shot the man in the head.
The women beside him flinched in terror, but they struggled to look away, feigning indifference.
"Stupid bastard..."
The boss calmly assessed the situation.
Getting entangled with an S-rank was a major crisis for the organization.
"Get rid of this trash."
At the boss's command, several burly men threw open the door, hurriedly collected the body, and cleaned up the blood.
'It had to be the bottom-rung nobodies...'
The crime of embroiling the organization with an S-rank and creating a potential threat.
On those grounds, he had every one of them beheaded.
'Song Hoon, was it...?'
But the boss chose to see this crisis as an opportunity.
He knew Song Hoon was powerful, on a whole other level compared to other S-ranks.
But in the end, he was just a muscle-headed fool who killed monsters.
'This was my home ground.'
Santiago del Norte.
He had personally absorbed most of the cartels and effectively reigned as the true king of Mexico.
And his ability was, astonishingly, 'Brainwashing.'
He could control anyone with a weaker will than his own.
He wasn't a mindless brute who relied only on force.
He had trained relentlessly to understand and develop this power.
'I blocked my senses, endured pain, and even joined wars as a mercenary on purpose.'
He pushed himself to his psychological and mental limits, constantly stimulating his brain.
He had even injected himself with drugs to drive his mind to the very extreme.
And through that growth, he discovered his power could work not only on A-ranks, but on S-ranks as well.
'Tch, if only I didn't have a warrant out for me...'
Regrettably, he was unable to leave Mexico.
And Mexico, lacking in talent, had no S-ranks other than himself and his puppets.
If that weren't the case, he would have already dominated every hunter and ruled over the entire Earth.
'If I could make that guy my puppet...'
Santiago's smile deepened.
An S-rank known to transcend even the S-rank classification.
If he could turn him into his marionette, he believed he could build his very own kingdom.
'There was definitely another S-rank next to him, too.'
A mysterious woman with blue hair.
She was also known to be an S-rank.
The thought of the two hunters soon becoming part of his collection made laughter bubble up inside him.
'Anyway, only a handful of people know the organization's critical locations. And those people could never, ever talk.'
After mulling over the idea of going to find the man himself, he shook his head.
He casually instructed his underlings to let the location of this place slip.
He was planning on changing hideouts soon anyway, since this one had already been exposed.
'The mental fortitude of a twenty-something drunk on newfound power...'
What did it even matter how many monsters you could kill?
The body might be tough, but the brain would be soft as mush.
He had also thoroughly scrutinized the man's career history.
His gate experience was so scant it was hard to believe he was a hunter at all.
How much mental strength could a hunter like that have possibly forged?
'Keuh heh heh... I was about to get an S-rank for free.'
He decided to have this base, which would soon be a battlefield, cleaned up.
Then he looked at the women beside him with cold eyes.
When his hand touched their heads, blood began to pour from their eyes, noses, mouths, and ears, and they collapsed.
'Tch... A gun was cleaner... but guns were so messy. That's the problem.'
He stood up, opened the door, and went outside.
He ordered his waiting subordinates to burn all the documents.
"And... burn these ones, too."
He commanded his puppets, who had always guarded his side, to eliminate the organization members in the building.
Like machines, the puppets wiped out every single member present, their faces utterly blank.
'He'll probably just smash up a few of the known storefronts.'
Santiago still didn't know.
Someone had been meticulously collecting evidence against Del Norte, driven by a burning desire for revenge.
---
He wiped his tears, and as if a weight had been lifted, he turned his wheelchair around.
Before he left, he looked back at me and said one thing.
"Stay safe out there."
And with that, he departed, and the manager from before came back inside.
"You may use the laptop as you see fit..."
The manager had turned the CCTV lenses in each corner toward the walls.
It seemed like a courtesy so I could be at ease.
"..."
I opened the laptop and plugged in the USB.
There was a vast amount of data. Documents, photos, videos.
The residences of key members, drug manufacturing plants, warehouses holding slush funds.
And also, the ledgers of bribes pocketed by this nation's politicians.
"This is... a cartel?"
It was no exaggeration to say their level of weaponry rivaled that of a small country's military.
Guns, grenades, anti-tank rockets were the basics. They even had tanks and submarines.
"Huh..."
Then, the videos.
They were so brutal it was hard to believe human beings were capable of such things.
People killing people with smiles on their faces.
"Hero, how can people do such things..."
"..."
It didn't matter if they were men or women.
It didn't even matter if they were children.
"..."
And finally, I clicked on the last remaining folder, one labeled 'not over 19'.
Inside it were even more videos than all the others combined.
"This is..."
The cartel's atrocities were notorious. I had expected as much.
Murder and plunder were the baseline. They were scum who peddled drugs.
But this... this was beyond the pale.
"Heretics... No, demons..."
Laila's eyes went cold.
I could feel the killing intent radiating from her.
"These people are not worth purifying..."
Her body trembled with rage.
"Filth that no purification can ever make clean... Judgment is what they require."
At Laila's words, I, too, had a thought.
That I could very well end up killing people in Mexico.