Kang Mari.
Kang Mari.
Click.
Jeong Seong-hoon 9-dan's hand had barely pulled it from the go bowl before the stone went right back in. I stared at it.
"...?"
"Honestly... are you really Yuja12?"
"Want me to prove it?"
"...Good lord..."
Lee Gi-seok looked over as if wondering what we were talking about.
Jeong Seong-hoon, who hadn't been able to focus on the game, answered.
"...There's a user who was suspected of being an AI... goes by the handle 'Yuja12'..."
Lee Gi-seok listened quietly, and Jeong Seong-hoon 9-dan went on.
"Professional 9-dans like myself have been challenging this Yuja user frequently lately. Treating it almost like practice against an AI."
"...Is that so... and the results?"
"All losses. And then 'Yuja12' vanished as abruptly as they appeared."
"Huh..."
Jeong Seong-hoon refocused on the board and placed a stone.
Maybe because he was preparing to retire from the 9-dan seat.
His concentration had already been broken once, and he seemed to be struggling to find his pace.
So, I'd mixed things up for fun, playing second-best moves instead of the optimal ones.
Even so, the game kept tilting further.
Time passed. The moment move 210 was crossed, he bowed his head.
"I resign."
"Ah, thank you for the game~"
"Would you mind reviewing it with me...?"
"Sure~ go ahead."
Once the review came to a natural end, Lee Gi-seok gave an order and Kim Seon-hwa and Jeong Seong-hoon stepped outside.
I thought maybe he was planning to give me something besides the private jet.
But Lee Gi-seok watched them leave, then looked at me.
"Si-yoon, watching you play Go... you really do take after your grandfather."
"You keep saying I take after my grandfather... oh, right. Back when you first saw me, you got all happy saying I looked like my grandfather. Does that mean you knew my grandfather back then?"
Lee Gi-seok chuckled from the bed.
"Nah, I don't mean Kang-woo."
"...? Then who?"
"Your maternal grandfather."
"My maternal grandfather? How do you know my maternal grandfather when even my dad doesn't?"
"Hmm... it's been so very long... right, the name was..."
They say some things come without any warning at all.
He thought for a moment, then Lee Gi-seok opened his mouth.
"Right. It was Kang Han-seong."
...What...?
Wondering if I'd misheard, I stared at Lee Gi-seok.
"......? Excuse me?"
"He was a truly remarkable man."
Maddeningly, Lee Gi-seok was saying something bizarre.
Even though that wasn't the important part...
"Wait! Wait... what? His name was?"
"Kang Han-seong."
"......."
In an instant, my mind went completely blank, as if all thought had simply stopped.
And then countless memories flashed by like a revolving lantern...
Fucking hell... no, this really is fucking hell...
I tried fast to claw back my reason, but the words that followed from Lee Gi-seok left me unable to react at all.
"Arguably the best fighter in the world... Si-yoon?"
A lie... no... it can't be. There's no way.
No, this genuinely makes no sense.
My ability to think... started racing faster than ever, and I combed through the memories of my past.
Amy Allen, who vanished without a trace and came back as a corpse...
The woman I'd loved more fiercely than anyone in my life...
Using being busy as an excuse, never having seen her—even now, that was my deepest, most unbearable regret.
Never once imagining that the way she looked then... would be the last time...
Fury and resentment had tangled together, but the endless waves of futility and guilt had driven me to drink, day after day.
But... what...?
No, no... it was too soon to jump to conclusions.
Right in front of me was Lee Gi-seok—the one person who could answer this bewildering truth.
"...Then... my grandmother's... name was..."
"Hmm... ah! Right! According to what I've looked into, her name was Amy Allen. A Russian! Though there's no surviving information about what she looked like or what kind of person she was."
"......."
"Si-yoon?"
I bolted straight outside.
"Si-yoon!!"
The sheer volume of information flooding in all at once felt like it would split my head open; I needed time to sort it out.
I ran, vaulting up toward the rooftop, thinking.
Lee Gi-seok, who'd marveled in the past that I took after my grandfather...
Of course, he hadn't meant my paternal grandfather.
That maternal grandfather he said I resembled...
Was, in fact, myself.
I sprinted up, locked the rooftop door behind me, and slumped to the ground.
Dad, who'd wept at the painting I did of Amy Allen, saying she looked just like Mom...
Everyone around me, who'd thought I was drawing an imaginary mother...
Then why had Lee Gi-seok...
Come to think of it... Lee Gi-seok had never even seen Amy Allen's face, and he'd seemed to barely recall even her name.
And... Mom's name was Kang Mari...
Why... why on earth hadn't I suspected a single thing...
I remembered Dad's story from when I was little—how he'd teased her, saying a foreigner with the surname Kang had just stuck it on like a Korean name.
How had I never thought about it... Mom... no, my daughter... her face was so full of Amy Allen...
Amy Allen had... given birth to Mari alone and died...?
Then why... why... didn't she tell me...
A single memory drove straight into my brain like a blade—piercing, violent—and a jolt like an electric current left me reeling.
Amy Allen spoke in that clumsy, endearing mix of Korean and Russian she'd learned for me.
"Do you have to go...?"
"I'm sorry... if I can take down the Child Family this time, we can be together safely."
"...I don't... want you to go either... I know all that... but just for today... just this one day..."
"I'm sorry, just one day... wait for me. I'll be back soon. This is our chance..."
I'd held Amy's head and kissed her forehead, then left.
As if time had frozen, I saw Amy's expression from that moment again.
The sensation of being a third party, looking at that scene back then...
Amy sighed with a sorrowful expression and clenched her fist tight.
"I'll wait....."
That was the last image of Amy I remembered...
The Amy who'd said she'd wait—when I returned, she was nowhere to be found. I'd asked everywhere, but no one could find her.
And a long time later, just when the grief had begun to fade into numbness...
She came back—a corpse, colder even than that Russian air that could freeze the very atmosphere solid.
Her clothes torn as if she'd been brutalized, bruises covering her everywhere...
Every tooth pulled out... and her eyes....
All kinds of tattoos carved into that pale body... carrying a message meant for me...
And countless cigarette burns, punched deep into holes...
Her fingernails and toenails were gone, part of her tongue was missing... and one side of her chest... had been cut away...
My head began to spin.
With a guilt I couldn't put into words.
In a despair that felt as if my body would never move again...
With an overwhelming fury—nothing could restrain it—rising until my head felt ready to burst...
I cradled Amy Allen's body in my arms...
I couldn't make a sound. Couldn't pull myself together, just gasping for air.
Like a pathetic wreck...
One day...
Two days...
Without doing anything. Without taking a single action. I just sat there, collapsed, holding Amy in my arms, staring at her without a word.
Time passed, and I wanted to press a gun to my head and pull the trigger... but my arm wouldn't listen.
Almost as if there was still something I could do—no, something I had to do...
I had to gather my strength...
To find whoever had done this to Amy—someone I still didn't even know—
And make them exactly the same...
I roamed the world like a madman, building power, training like a madman, living like a madman.
And I had the talent to match that fury that drove me.
The person before my eyes—was not a person...
The one before my eyes... was absolutely not a person...
And I, too... could never be a person.
I repeated it, over and over again.
And so I returned to Russia.
The moment I came back... the long, long night in Russia began.
Every time that cold Russian air touched my skin... the memory of that day stabbed into my skull, fueling every move I made.
Soldiers? Government men...? Whoever it was, I simply killed them—fairly, impartially, more miserably than anyone.
With Amy's unforgettable image in my mind, I lived more and more like a beast.
And in the end, I became a beast.
Memento Mori.
I will not stop until I die.
As long as I draw breath, I will never quit.
Remembering that I would die someday—thinking I might die any moment now—I moved, and kept moving.
With my own two hands, I killed and killed again: hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people.
If they belonged to an organization—women, children... it didn't matter.
No, if they tried to stop me, even civilians were no exception...
Even if an organization was friendly to us... if they were Russian-affiliated,
I killed them—no, worse... more wretchedly—like Amy, who'd died so horrifically.
Because I couldn't find the one who'd killed Amy...
I didn't stop until I'd exterminated every last organization in Russia.
Praying and praying that somewhere among those I killed... was the one who'd done that to Amy...
I killed them more cruelly, more wretchedly, over and over.
Before I knew it, I had become to people... as if a defenseless person were facing a ravenous predator, a 'Tiger'...
To them... I had become 'the Tiger.'
At some point, every organization inside Russia had vanished.
So I began to hunt down those who'd once belonged to them.
And night after night, I never stopped drinking at the local pubs.
It was on one of those nights, just like any other, that I was drinking.
A man in a group of patrons looked at me, stretched his eyes with both fingers, and went, 'Chino, chino.'
The owner and everyone else in the pub were snickering.
Drunk, I walked over to the man stretching his eyes.
"Oh... our Chino's angry~"
I shoved a glass into the mouth of the man who'd said it, shattering it, and with the remaining shard I tore the eye of the man who'd been mimicking pulling his eyes—just the way he'd been doing.
"GYAAAAAAAHH!!"
"HYAAAAAHH!!"
The place filled with screams, the mood shifting in seconds...
The owner pulled out a shotgun, so I hurled a shard of glass straight at his eyes.
Immediately the man whose eyes I'd torn—now blind—was trying to draw a pistol.
I seized his hand, wrapped his grip over the gun with mine, aimed at the owner's head, and pulled the trigger for him.
BANG!
There was a group of women trying to flee in the chaos, so I left them be.
As one of the women opened the door, a subordinate outside put a bullet into the head of the woman at the front.
BANG!...
I spoke in Russian.
"Шумный... (Noisy...)"
Scores of people in black... and the shop had gone quiet now... inside...
The man who'd swallowed glass began to vomit blood.
I casually uncorked a bottle of vodka one-handed and drank.
"Kh..."
I got up, staggering, and inside that shop, which had been filled with only two people's screams, I began adding one more scream at a time.
People trying to run like idiots, people pissing themselves in filth, people grabbing my pants and starting to beg for their lives.
So that all of them could scream...
So that the path I walked could become utter carnage...
So that the screams inside the shop would fill up and drown out this desolation...
I made it so.
When I'd finished the bottle and turned around, Park Gi and Jae-hyeong—still young—were standing there rigid, their eyes full of fear.
The brats I was raising...
"Kahahahahahahah!!"
I laughed as madly as I could... as desperately as I could... as pathetically as I could.
I... had to.
"Ahah~"
How had I never suspected... there'd been so many hints, and the answer... had already been decided...
How many times had I heard people around me say I took after my mother in personality...
And Mari... is my blood, so it'd be stranger if she didn't take after me...
And Amy Allen—I'd never once seen her drink...
With every piece of the puzzle snapping into place in my mind, my head plunged into the most extreme confusion, spinning dizzily.
I was looking at a photo on my phone of Mom's... no... of my daughter Mari.
Tears fell before I'd even realized...
Amy had died because of me... and my daughter... had also died because of me...
Died... for my reincarnation...
"Fuck. Fuck... fuck... why... to me..."
The tears began to fall in streams and wouldn't stop.
"Why... fuck... why is this happening to me... if there really are some bastards called gods... you can't do this... this is... this is wrong..."
My mind had gone white—no thought could continue—and by pure instinct, I stroked Mari's face on the screen with a trembling hand.
The tears on the phone kept it from registering properly...
I quickly wiped the tears with my sleeve and tried to zoom in again, but...
My heart was so suffocated, so frantic, I couldn't bear to look at Mari's smiling face...
CRASH!
To snap myself awake, I slammed my head hard against the steel door.
My forehead started burning hot, blood running down, but I didn't care.
The head that felt ready to burst seemed to calm just a little...
Of course, even if it calmed down, there was nothing I could do...
I'd lost the nerve to look again.
Lost the nerve to let it surface in my mind again...
In the past, I'd thought that by taking revenge, I could at least hold Amy in my head as a cherished memory.
And with those thoughts, I'd even painted her.
Now, I can't even do that...
Because my daughter, too... was killed by me.
BAM BAM BAM!!!
"Si-yoon!!!! Si-yoon!!!!"
Kang Jong-hyeon's voice...
Right. I have no lingering attachments anyway...
I've already enjoyed everything there is to enjoy.
The more I face the truth before me, the more unbearable and agonizing it becomes...
I saw Team 7, who'd forced the door open.
"Si-yoon!!! Your face!"
I smiled at them, the way I used to, and spoke coldly.
"Get lost. Before I kill you."
"".....""
Still, Jong-hyeon approached slowly, so I tilted my head.
"Asking to be killed first...?"
"Please stay calm... Si-yoon."
Rather than self-recrimination...
Like my old self, wanting to vent my rage like an ignorant brute, I walked toward Kang Jong-hyeon.
Drops of blood dripped steadily along my jawline.
Just as I was closing in on Jong-hyeon, a voice far too familiar rang out.
"Si-yoon!!"
Dad... the one who'd shown me—who'd had no family—what family truly meant... Kim Ji-ho.
With the overwhelming excitement and dizziness too much to bear, every ounce of strength drained from my body, and I let go of the consciousness I'd barely been clinging to.
The sensation of floating through the sky.
I know this feeling better than anyone.
It resembles the final sensation from my life as Kang Han-seong...
Ha... yeah... it really is so fucking gentle... just for a little... just a very little... I want to stop thinking...
'Yeah... let's just rest a little...'