Your Lackey? No, My Lackey. (3)
As soon as the situation finally registered, Je-gyun’s face flooded with pure horror.
“J-Je-gyun? Are you the one calling me that right now?”
After that, Je-gyun—who had been about to spit more venom based on some twisted notion of seniority—glanced at the people standing behind me, sensed the threat, and clamped his mouth shut like a terrified clam.
I glanced back as well. The man with the bicycle chain wrapped around his arm was staring down at Je-gyun with a look that said he was ready to rip him apart at any second. When our eyes met, the man asked me,
“I was told to handle this however you want. What should I do? If you say cut off his hands or feet, I’ll cut them. If you say throw him into a mental hospital, I’ll do that too.”
Whoa. Hearing it directly in the moment like this was genuinely frightening. So if I had failed to strike a deal with Seok Dong-hoon, that could easily have been me in his place.
Je-gyun flailed one hand forward, grasping at the faintest sliver of hope, and screamed desperately.
“T-that’s right! Cut off this bastard’s hands and feet instead and throw him in the mental hospital! I gave you 1.7 billion won, didn’t I? If you’re upset about the three hundred million discount, I’ll pay it. The second I get out of here, I’ll give it to you. So please!”
The bicycle-chain man lifted a palm that looked larger than most people’s faces, clearly uninterested in listening. Since I had no desire for violence or bloodshed, I quickly raised my hand to stop him. As the man lowered his chain-wrapped fist, no blood was spilled, but my intervention apparently couldn’t hold back the terror itself.
Snickering came from the men behind me. Following their gazes, I saw the truth. This was real. Oh. My. God.
Overwhelmed by fear, Je-gyun had wet himself. Not a small dribble—a complete, unmistakable flood. His face, unable to endure the fear and shame, flickered between red and blue like a broken traffic light. Then, as if this was the only way left to salvage any pride, he thrust his face toward me and shrieked.
“Hey, you bastard Kwon Ho-gyun!”
Pow-.
The next instant, Je-gyun’s fist—swung with every ounce of strength he possessed—smashed squarely into my jaw. Having caused the whole mess himself, Je-gyun seemed startled by his own action. He stumbled backward a few steps, then collapsed, staring up at me with a face drenched in terror.
It seemed he hadn’t considered until after the fact that one word from me could result in his own hands and feet being severed by that bicycle chain—or worse, smashed to pulp by a hammer. Then again, in a situation like this, how could any normal thought possibly form inside that head?
Tsk. As for Kwon Je-gyun’s circumstances, I had deliberately chosen not to dodge, but damn, it hurt. My jawbone throbbed from his punch, and a blood vessel inside my mouth must have burst; blood kept sliding down my throat.
I wiped the blood that had spilled from my lips with the back of my hand and took one step forward.
“Je-gyun, didn’t I tell you I hated being called that? How about Big Brother Je-gyun? Does that one suit you better?”
I had meant the words to help stabilize him mentally, but they appeared to have zero of the intended effect. Je-gyun’s eyes darted wildly, unable to focus anywhere, as though he were suffering a psychotic break. On top of that, he mumbled incomprehensible nonsense for a long time before finally spitting out something I could understand.
“(……) G-go away. What do you want? Don’t come near me! Stay there and speak from there!”
Did I look like the Grim Reaper in his eyes right now? He had grown up pampered as the second son of the QS Group, so his fear of violence wasn’t hard to understand. But where on earth had he gotten the idea that it was perfectly fine to inflict that same violence on others?
Was it his overblown faith in the measly 1.7 billion won he had given Seok Dong-hoon? It seemed he believed money alone could solve everything. In that sense, Je-gyun might still be stuck at the same level I had been before my regression. The only real difference was that I had believed the law stood above all values, while he believed in money instead of the law.
Viewed that way, it was only natural that I—who had grown one step beyond that level—could now crush him so thoroughly. Still, even when things went wrong, I had never wet my pants. This guy had shown up in expensive clothes only to end up like this. What a sight.
This piss-pants had ignored quite a few of my questions today, but I would still kindly give him an answer.
“What I want?”
“Yeah! What the hell do you want from me to do something like this? Don’t come closer—stay there, stay right there and talk!”
Honestly. He was the one who had tried to cut off my hands and feet and lock me up. What exactly had I done? If anything, I had stopped him from getting punched just moments ago.
If I listed everything I wanted from him here, he would probably agree to it all. Fully accept the resignation recommendation passed by the executive board. Never interfere with QS Group affairs again. But in this place, I had to present myself as completely lawful in contrast to Je-gyun, who had committed clear crimes. Only then, once I walked out of here, could I bury him completely without any backlash landing on me.
That didn’t mean I had nothing to say.
“Stop acting up already!”
“O-okay. And… is there anything else? I’ll do whatever you tell me to!”
“That’s enough. We’ll talk later.”
Whew. My chest felt refreshingly clear.
Compared to Je-gyun, the old troublemaker Ho-gyun’s antics had been almost tolerable. At least assaults and property damage had limited scope. But this Kwon Je-gyun had committed embezzlement on a scale that defied imagination, and now he had tried to use that money to illegally confine someone else. Left unchecked, that body of his would have grown into a full-blown social evil.
My remark about talking later must have sounded to Je-gyun like a guarantee that he would survive this place. After breathing roughly several times, he finally answered in a voice that carried a trace of relief.
“All right.”
Around the time our damp meeting with Je-gyun was drawing to a close, voices drifted in from outside the abandoned building.
“Is this the place?”
“Yes.”
“For some reason I’m reluctant to go inside. So Je-gyun and Ho-gyun are both in there?”
“Yes. That’s what I was told. If anyone tries to harm the young master, I will stop them with my entire body. That’s what I get paid a salary from the security team for.”
“Let’s go in, then.”
Both voices were familiar. Kwon Seong-gyun and Kim Chul-joong, deputy of the security team.
Kwon Seong-gyun stepped into the abandoned building, rushed over to the horrified, collapsed Je-gyun, and helped him up. Then he glared at me.
“Ho-gyun, what the hell have you done to your brother…?”
Seong-gyun hurriedly swallowed the rest of the sentence. Aside from Je-gyun wetting his pants, there were no visible injuries, yet blood was still flowing from my lip. He must have noticed.
“I didn’t do anything. Big Brother Je-gyun said we needed to look at Father’s will together, so I came here. He called it an important family matter, so I thought all of us brothers should see it together. That’s why I called you too, but it seems I made you come for nothing.”
“What are you talking about—a will? And what happened to your face? More importantly, who are those menacing people standing behind you?”
“Come on, Brother. Even if it’s your first time meeting them, you shouldn’t speak so rudely. These people weren’t brought here by me—they were brought by Big Brother Je-gyun. If you want to know what happened, why don’t you come over and watch this?”
When I extended my hand behind me, the only one among the five men holding a phone instead of a weapon stopped filming, then handed the device to me.
After watching the fresh video that had just been recorded, Seong-gyun’s face filled with shock once more. This time he glared at Je-gyun instead of me.
“Je-gyun! I told you we shouldn’t do things like this even among family. You tried to harm Ho-gyun and got beaten instead? It’s so pathetic I don’t even know what to say.”
“I’m sorry, Brother. I should have listened to you.”
Despite Je-gyun’s tearful voice, Seong-gyun coldly withdrew the arm supporting the back of his neck.
“From this moment forward, I am not your brother.”
“Brother, don’t do this. We agreed to drag that Kwon Ho-gyun bastard down from the Central Management Headquarters together, didn’t we?”
Ha-. Seong-gyun let out a hollow laugh at Je-gyun, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“When did we ever make such a promise? You said you would remove Ho-gyun yourself, take the Central Management Headquarters director position, and that I shouldn’t even look at it. The word ‘brother’ disgusts me—could you change it to CEO Kwon Seong-gyun?”
“Brother, please!”
When Je-gyun looked ready to drop to his knees, Seong-gyun delivered words that sounded like a death sentence.
“Everything I witnessed today, I will tell your wife and your son and daughter. They are your immediate family, but they are also my sister-in-law and my nephews and niece. I believe they need to know exactly what kind of person you are—someone who could do such things to his own family.”
“That’s not fair! How can you do this to me, Brother? After all the years we’ve spent as brothers…”
“Shut up, you immoral bastard.”
As if he couldn’t stand to hear another word of Je-gyun’s babbling, Seong-gyun spat out the short rebuke and strode straight out of the abandoned building. The sound of a car engine starting immediately afterward suggested he was utterly disgusted by Je-gyun’s actions.
I handed the phone Seong-gyun had returned to the man in charge of filming. He reopened the camera app and resumed recording.
“Mr. Kwon Je-gyun, as you just saw, every action you took today has been recorded. Do you have any final words?”
“……”
“It seems you have nothing more to say, so we will take our leave. I am Kwon Ho-gyun, Director of the Central Management Headquarters of QS Group. Today’s date is January 18th. Everyone, thank you for your hard work.”
I had just taken the phone—now containing our final scene—and stepped out of the abandoned building when a desperate, sobbing wail echoed behind me.
“How can this be happening? I’m Kwon Je-gyun—the man who was supposed to become chairman of QS Group. Is it really ending like this? My company? My family? Seung-taek, Yoon-ah, honey… I’m sorry.”
Kwon Je-gyun’s cries, which seemed as if they would never end, called out the names of his family members and then, at some point, fell silent. Perhaps because we had gotten into the car and moved far enough away from the abandoned building.
The news about Je-gyun—someone I thought I wouldn’t have to deal with for quite a while—arrived far sooner than expected.
I had stayed up all night and slept until late afternoon. When I woke, my phone showed thirteen missed calls. One was from Seong-gyun. The rest were from unknown numbers. It seemed strange that anyone would call twelve times even though I never answered, if they were merely spam.
I considered calling back immediately, but decided I should first find out who was on the other end. I pasted the number into the portal site’s search bar.
Seoul Geumcheon Police Station