A Perfectly Twisted World
The reek of blood clung to the air—or, more precisely, the foul stench peculiar to the Gangnam Back Alley, rusted iron braided together with the smell of mold.
Han Jiho lay with his cheek crushed to the cold asphalt, dragging in ragged breaths. Something in his mouth had split; a metallic tang circled the tip of his tongue, and every inhale sent a stabbing pain through the ribs. Rain, tears, and blood smeared his vision into a spreading red.
"Since when does a mutt get to breathe that loud?"
A cold voice dropped from overhead. In the same instant the combat boot pinning the back of his head stamped down without mercy, driving his skull into the ground.
"Ghk—!"
His forehead scraped the asphalt, and the pain of living skin tearing open flared across his face.
The woman grinding him underfoot was a giant, well over 180 centimeters. It was not merely that her frame was large. Muscle carved as if from steel, and the faint blue Mana flowing over her skin, testified to a violence no ordinary body could match.
Her name was Kang Haeryun—the loan shark come to collect the debt Jiho's parents had left behind, and a D-ClassAwakened.
"I told you. Miss this month's interest and I'll start carving your organs out one by one and putting them up for auction. Or I'll sell you off as a Meat Shield at the Northern Gate."
Haeryun crouched and seized a rough handful of his hair. Pain like his scalp being ripped free tore a strangled groan from his throat. Her grip was not a human grip. Before the superhuman strength peculiar to an awakened woman, the bone and flesh of a Non-Awakened man were soft as mud.
"I—I'm sorry... If you could please just give me a little more time—just a few more days..."
"Time? Looks like you still haven't learned that time is money. Then again, what could that inferior male brain of yours even understand?"
Smack—!
Haeryun's huge, slab-like hand cracked across his cheek. A rupturing sound, as if his jaw had been knocked out of joint, and Jiho's body went tumbling two meters away like a bundle of rags. His ears rang. The world spun. It had been nothing but a slap, and yet a beating charged with an Awakened's strength was more than enough to rattle his brain.
"Hey. Drag him over."
At the jerk of her chin, the two women standing behind her came up snickering. They, too, had bodies that could tear two or three ordinary grown men apart without effort. They seized Jiho by both arms and hauled him upright as roughly as if he were cargo.
This was the natural order of the world Jiho lived in—no, merely endured. The world had twisted exactly thirty years ago. A mysterious energy had seeped into the atmosphere, and people called it mana. It had pushed humanity one step further up the ladder, but the blessing was viciously one-sided. Only women, those who carried XX chromosomes, could take mana into themselves and awaken.
Women's bodies grew explosively powerful, and they gained supernatural abilities that commanded mana. Men, poisoned by the same force, suffered the opposite—a degeneration of the flesh. It was an absolute gap in violence without precedent in history, and in only a few years it perfectly overturned a social order that had endured for thousands.
Politics, economy, military, law. Every power and every scrap of wealth in the world passed into the hands of the women who held the strength to keep it. Under the fine name of fragile creatures who needed protecting, men were driven all the way to the bottom of society. Protection? It was nothing but a well-dressed fraud. What the powerless received was merciless violence, exploitation, and a caste contempt that left nothing standing.
A man was property bound to a woman, a consumable, or a Breeder kept solely to leave behind superior genes. For a man to resist a woman was suicide, in law and in the flesh alike.
"Aagh—!"
One of the crew drove the toe of her shoe into the broken ribs. Jiho coughed blood and tried to fold, but the iron hands on his arms did not let go, and he hung there awkwardly in the air.
"Quit your sniveling. You're pissing me off."
She hit him in the gut again. Tears sprang up at a pain that felt as if his insides were tearing. Today, too, had been hell.
Jiho worked as a cleaner in a luxury lounge in Gangnam reserved for the Awakened, and there he was treated as less than human from morning to night. For the crime of accidentally flicking a drop of water onto a B-Class hunter's shoe while wiping a table, he had been made to lick the instep clean with his tongue. The women around them jeered and laughed at the sight, and all he could do was tremble with shame and press himself to the floor. The meager day's wage he earned being worn down and wiped away from dawn to dusk was taken off him, intact, by Kang Haeryun's crew lying in wait on the way home.
"Han Jiho. The debt your mother left when she croaked is three hundred million won in principal alone. Three years of interest ballooned it to five hundred million. Those pennies you earn working your cock off all day wouldn't cover the interest if you slaved for a hundred years. You get that?"
Haeryun clamped his jaw in a brutal grip and forced his eyes to hers. A glare as savage as a beast's cinched tight around him.
"So sign like a good boy. The Northern Gate Mana Stone Quarry. Roll around in there for three years and I'll write off whatever's left."
The Northern Gate Mana Stone Quarry. They called it the graveyard of men. A killing ground where you cleared away the leavings of monsters that poured through without end and swung a pickaxe with your bare body in a mine spewing toxic mana. Send a non-awakened man there, and his average survival did not last three months.
"Th-that place, at least... please... If I go there, I'll die..."
Jiho begged in a cracked voice. Shame was nothing. He wanted to live. However hellish this life was, he wanted to drag it on a little longer.
"And what am I supposed to do about it? Whether you croak or not isn't my problem. Right?"
Haeryun snorted as if he were a joke and tapped his cheek, once, twice.
"Choose. You want me to tear your limbs off right here and hand you to an organ trafficker, or you stamp the contract and go to the quarry? Oh—and for the record, we don't use anesthetic when we take the organs out. Medicine's wasted on a male."
Behind her, the woman who had been rummaging through her clothes drew a butchering knife, its edge a cold blue gleam. This was no joke. The law of this world did not protect a man's rights. If one man were chopped to pieces and dumped in a back alley, the police—composed, of course, entirely of female Awakened—would treat it as nothing more troublesome than illegal dumping.
Jiho's body shook like a leaf. Despair sank into the marrow. There was nowhere to run, and no one to help him.
Why... why do I have to be the one living like this...
The resentment he had swallowed hundreds of times lifted its head again. The sin of being born unable to receive mana. The sin of being born a man. The sin of being born weak. In this world, all of it was original sin.
"Don't drag this out."
Haeryun snatched his wrist. The pressure felt as if the bone would shatter. With her other hand she produced a pad smeared with red ink paste and forced his thumb down onto it.
"No...! I don't want to!"
Jiho wrung out what strength he had left and thrashed, but he could not overcome the women pinning his arms, nor Haeryun. Like a grown woman toying with a newborn's hand, his resistance was crushed—powerless, and wretched.
Press.
In the alley under the cold rain, his thumb left a vivid print on the scrap of paper, red ink and all. It was as good as his death sentence.
"Good choice. If you'd come out with this sooner, you would've taken fewer hits."
Haeryun smiled, satisfied, and tucked the contract away. At a jerk of her chin, the women holding him let go.
He dropped.
Jiho collapsed to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut. Cold rain struck his wounded face, but the despair crushing his chest was worse than the pain in his body.
"Seven tomorrow morning. I'll send a transport to the front of your place, so don't run—wait there. If you bolt and I catch you..."
Haeryun bent and whispered at his ear.
"I'll pour molten iron into every hole in that carcass of yours."
Leaving the chilling warning behind, the three women laughed loud and easy and walked out of the alley. Until their footsteps faded, Jiho could not move. No—he was unable to.
"Haa... haa..."
The rain thickened. Caked in mud and blood, Jiho slowly curled in on himself. Every breath drove the pain in his ribs straight through his skull, but from the mouth panting like an animal, not even a sob would come.
The quarry. Go there, and he died. But there was nowhere to run in all the vast reach of this country. For the men at the very bottom of society—men who needed permission even to breathe—no utopia existed.
Through his blurring sight he looked up at the enormous billboard blazing between the towers. The most beautiful and arrogant face in the country looked down on the world: Seo Taehee, South Korea's greatest S-Class hunter, an absolute power, Guild Master.
A brilliant civilization raised on the blood and flesh of men crushed like ants beneath their feet.
This fucked-up world. In this viciously, perfectly twisted Gender-Reversed World, there was no utopia.
Jiho's consciousness was sinking, little by little, into a deep dark. Come morning, he would be dragged helplessly off to a killing ground. No miracle was going to happen. He believed that, and was on the verge of closing his eyes—
A low thrum.
In a corner of the dark back alley, a strange blue light began to seep from the ground where his blood had pooled. It was a pulse of mana—something never once permitted to a single man, monopolized until now by the rulers of this world alone.
But Jiho, driven past his limit by pain and blood loss, had already lost consciousness completely.
While only the bleak sound of rain filled the alley, that strange light began, little by little, to wrap itself around his body.
Inside an endless cycle of suffering, a very small crack was beginning.
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