Castration
The weather was clear today.
The sun was sliding down the ridgeline. The mountain face had gone black in its afterglow. The sky burned red.
Nice enough out that I walked home. The streets were full of office workers and students dragging themselves back, faces slack, expressions hollowed out to nothing. Nobody looked well. I wondered why.
Not that it was any of my business. On the way home, I turned down a different street.
It was the road to the slums.
After I came back from the other world to my original hometown, I'd wandered around here and there. Nothing had really changed all that much. People scraping by day to day. Office workers. Cops. Students heading home from school. Just ordinary life.
If anything had changed, it was that the slums had spread. When Gates started popping up one after another and monsters poured out of them, the people living in those areas fled in droves. That was how the slums grew. Public safety there tanked, of course — the police had no interest in patrolling places like that.
Housing prices dropped thanks to the expanding slums, and corporations snapped those districts up without breaking a sweat. The mana stones coming out of the Gates turned out to be surprisingly useful, so they bought the land out from under them. Under government permit, they hired mercenaries from overseas to clear the Gates. Awakeners were in short supply, so they couldn't be used freely.
The corporations never destroyed the Gate cores, though. Leave the core intact and the monsters keep getting summoned. Why bother, then? Simple. Destroy the core and the Gate vanishes. No Gate, no mana stones. They wanted to butcher low-grade trash like orcs and goblins and harvest mana stones the easy way. Gates that kept pumping out powerful monsters cost too many lives, so they focused their mining on the low-grade ones and figured the Awakeners would handle the rest.
The Awakeners, however, were always negligent in their duties. They'd worked hard at first, apparently — and then later they just sat around getting high. That was why Jeong Gyeongtaek had been having such a miserable time of it. There was a reason he'd agreed to use Shin Eunyeong as a Breeding Matrix.
Maybe I should deal with the Awakeners later too...
They were useless anyway. At best they barely kept the monsters from spilling out of the Gates.
I'll keep it in mind for now...
That said, if the Awakeners disappeared, it would apparently cause social chaos. Don't know why, but that's what they said. Hell, if the National Assembly vanished for a day or two nobody'd notice — leave them gone a month, though, and society might actually fall apart.
Before I knew it, I'd arrived near the slums.
"This... the place...?"
It had been a newly completed planned city a few years back, they said. Now, thanks to the Gates, it was a complete ruin. Not that people didn't live here. The houses and buildings still held their shape, so the homeless came in from outside to squat, and delinquent kids used it as a place to get high.
The streets were slick with vomit in every color. Cockroaches and rats skittered through the mess. The stench rising from the sewers stabbed at my nose.
"Better wrap this up quick..."
Just take care of the Gate and go home. I'd come here to clear one. Of course, I hadn't told Jeong Gyeongtaek. Do a job nobody asked for and something annoying might land on my plate again. And as a gift for all his hard work, I figured something like this was fine. It was just one Gate, after all.
Besides, having a slum like this near my house had been pissing me off for a long time.
I walked the streets of the slum.
This is grim...
People were sprawled all over the street. They weren't dead. Though the occasional corpse showed up too — little more than skeletons, at that. All of them people who'd lost the will to live and fallen into the gutter. That was how they'd ended up flowing down here.
In one alley, a woman and a man were going at it.
"Oppa... go a little easier...!"
"What's it matter...! Nobody even comes around here...!"
"Still, those homeless bastards...!"
"Are those homeless fucks even people? They're bugs..."
And just like that, the two of them were happily going at it, laughing it up. Well. A matching pair, I supposed. I ignored them and walked past.
A moment later, a couple's screams echoed from behind me. Must have been my imagination.
I destroyed the Gate.
The monsters inside weren't particularly strong. There was a castle in there, and tin knights came at me, so I blew the whole castle apart. That was it. Later, someone who looked like a princess came walking out with a smile on her face. I killed her on the spot. The malice was too obvious.
Shall I head back... no.
Might as well look around a little more.
Streets boiling with sewer rats, roads overflowing with filth. It felt like I'd gone back to my time in the other world. A bit of PTSD, sure, but I found myself wanting to savor the moment anyway.
And exploring the streets wasn't entirely useless. If you looked carefully, there were men and women being raped. Just a moment ago, I'd even saved a couple who'd been stripped naked and were getting passed around by the homeless.
I probably shouldn't say this about a victim, but why were they going after the guy's ass?
I yanked one homeless man's arm clean off while thinking that, and the rest all ran.
"Ah... uwaah..."
"Oppa! Snap out of it!!"
"My... my ass... my hole...!"
"Fuck... you asshole! You think I feel any better right now...?!"
"...So. You two not heading home?"
I said it to the couple still bickering in the street.
"Ah... we should go, yeah..."
The woman pulled her clothes on, covering her chest and groin with her hands.
Looks like they didn't finish inside, at least.
Was that the silver lining? Her mental fortitude was surprisingly solid, though. I found that almost impressive. The man, on the other hand, had his psyche blown to pieces over one torn-up asshole. Back when I was in the army in the other world, guys doing each other was a daily occurrence. I never got hit with it myself, though.
The woman forced the man's clothes onto him and they left.
"This is all your fault...!"
"Uwaah... aaaah..."
This is why you don't wander into the slums without a clue. Looking at them, they'd been the type who already drifted around places like this getting high, so they'd never felt the danger.
After that I saved several more people being assaulted in alleys.
"No... no... Mom... Mom...!"
The ages varied.
"Waaaaaah!!!"
The genders varied too.
"Why... why... me..."
But every last one of them had come here with malicious intent, so I felt no sympathy. The men had come to rape homeless women lying in the street. The women had come to threaten ordinary homeless people. Then they'd gotten a taste of their own medicine.
Is this all there is? These kinds of people?
Carrying that considerable disappointment, I went home.
"......."
My mood was fucked. Seriously fucked.
I checked the perfectly intact doorknob in front of my house.
"....."
Someone had entered my home. Who? Some random thief? Possible, but a petty crook would have broken the door down. Which meant they likely knew my door-lock password. I'd never given that password to anyone.
In that case. Let's go in and check. Need to see what happened to Aria, too.
I teleported inside in an instant.
And there—
"Fuck, this bitch... she's got no arms or legs..."
A man in a tank top sat slumped on the floor, on the phone with someone.
Name's Lee Haru...
Tanned skin, blonde hair. A name like Golden Sun would have suited him better, but being an acquaintance of Shin Eunyeong's, I supposed a lot of them were weird.
The hell is this bastard...
Judging by his reaction, he hadn't jumped Aria yet. I looked at her. She had her eyes squeezed shut, shaking her head, trembling with fear. Tears welled at the corners of her eyes. Her outfit: white panties and a single apron.
Enough to stir up lust, honestly...
"But... man... this bitch is so fucking hot...!"
Of course.
"Her tits? They're huge too...! Completely like... an onahole...!"
—Crack!!
I brought my hand down on the man's head.
"Euhik?!"
Lee Haru's skull wobbled on his neck.
"Put that head back where it belongs."
"Wh-what the fuh...?!"
—Crunch!!
I hit him again.
"Can't you hear me?"
"You fucking—!!"
The voice coming through the phone. I stomped it to pieces under my heel.
"Hey, what the fuck...!"
"......"
"Stop hitting me, you bastard...!"
Lee Haru lunged at me anyway. I snatched him by the throat and lifted him clean off the floor.
"Guhk!!"
The height difference was obvious. Lee Haru clawed at my neck with both hands, driving his nails in, thrashing. But stimulation like that didn't even register. Compared to the pain of having my heart carved out, this was nothing.
"Haru. Eunyeong looking for you?"
"....?!"
Lee Haru's eyes went wide. Then the capillaries burst, and they turned red. His strength surged past what it had been a moment ago. Useless against me, though.
Lee Haru. Shin Eunyeong's affair partner. This was the bastard who'd pushed her into killing my parents. I'd been wanting to meet him anyway. Convenient.
"Then I'll send you to her."
I set him down. Lee Haru's body dropped like a sack of meat.
—Thud..!
"Cough... cough....!"
Lee Haru clutched himself, gasping for air. Aria watched it all in a daze, staring at me.
"Mas...ter..?"
"Yeah. I'm back."
"Ah.. ah... sniff.."
"......"
"Masteeeer...! Waaah...!"
She's a goddess. Why does she cry this much? But Aria was a secondary concern right now.
"Hey."
"Cough..! You... cough! You bastard..! What did you do to noona..!"
Lee Haru lunged at me in that instant and grabbed me by the collar. Huffing through his nose, shaking me. But—
"Noona? Shouldn't it be unnie now?"
"What?"
—Thud.
I kicked him square in the groin.
"Guehk..?!"
Those were wrecked, no question. I'd never had mine burst, so I couldn't say for sure — but it was castration in all but name.
"Ah.. ah.. ah.."
He came to in hell. The pain arrived slowly.
"HAAAAAAAAAH!!!"
Lee Haru crumpled, clutching his groin, curling in on himself. His face went ashen, his brow knotted tight. His mouth trembled; the muscles in his face clenched and released, clenched and released. His complexion turned paper-white. Cold sweat and drool ran down in streams.
"Uwaaagh!! Aagh!! Graaaagh!!"
"Don't make such a big deal out of it."
I nudged his stomach with the toe of my shoe.
"Don't.. don't.. uwaaaaaagh!!"
So the pain in his lower belly was on par with the groin. Looking at him like this, I almost felt a little sorry. Maybe I should show a bit of mercy.
"Hey."
"Uwaagh? Aagh? Grah?"
Lee Haru twitched and flinched, trying to respond.
"Want me to help? Make it stop hurting?"
"......."
Too far gone to tell what was happening, maybe. Lee Haru nodded, hard and frantic.
"Then you'll handle what comes after. Got it?"
"....."
Nod, nod.
"Alright. I'll help you."
And then—
Shhhhhhhhhh...
A pale white steam rose from Lee Haru's body.
"Ah.. agyaaaaaaagh...!"