“Park Dae-chul… talk.”

“Talk about what, punk!”

“Where you buried the people you killed who never deserved it.”

“C-crazy bastard! I never killed anybody!”

“Is that right? Then where your men buried the ones they killed who never deserved it!”

“Shut your mouth!”

Park Dae-chul threw himself forward.

Nobody in this world hands over the evidence of his own murders unless he has lost his mind.

At some point a bottle was in his hand.

He had years on him now, but there was a time when he was a fighter with a name in these parts.

Whoosh.

He threw the bottle in his hand straight at the intruder.

His eyes weren’t used to the dark, but he could hear the guy’s breathing.

At the same time his foot struck out in the direction the guy would run.

You’re dead!

Even by Park Dae-chul’s standards it was a clean, perfect attack.

Thwack!

Right up until stars flashed suddenly across his forehead.

Smash-crash-crash.

The bottle Park Dae-chul had thrown hit the wall and shattered with a racket.

Glass flew in every direction.

In that moment Park Dae-chul was rolling on the floor.

He had no idea what was happening.

Thud! Thud! Thud!

And then kicks landing like electricity on every part of him, down on the ground.

They were merciless.

Only the places he had already been hit got hit again.

He was beaten exactly to the point short of a broken bone or a ruptured organ.

By instinct Park Dae-chul curled up and wrapped his head with his hands.

The fear of dying came over him.

For Park Dae-chul, who had done nothing but beat people all his life, the pain of being beaten was past imagining.

The guy was a lunatic, no question.

“Aaagh! S-stop! Stoooooop!”

“Where do you get off talking down to me~.”

Thwock! Thud-thud-thud!

His back and shoulders took a concentrated beating.

The strength went out of his arms.

Every bone and muscle in him screamed and throbbed.

The guy was practiced at beating people, no question.

He laid into him without hesitation, like somebody who had done a fair amount of it.

“Stop, please! Please stop!!!”

“Where do you get off raising your voice!”

Thwack! Thwack-thwack-thwack!

Park Dae-chul was a step away from his mind walking out of him.

The guy really did mean to beat him to death, no question.

In the past he had beaten a man who left the organization to death the same way.

The member came into his head: beaten for a solid hour, every bone in his body broken, blood pouring out of every hole in him until he died.

H-he might really kill me!

Under hands with no mercy in them at all, Park Dae-chul came to his senses.

He didn’t know who this one was.

But he was certain the guy had a grudge against him.

“Kuh… I was wrong. J-just spare my life, please.”

Dead stop.

Impossibly, the kicking stopped.

When the beating stopped, Park Dae-chul opened his eyes carefully.

His eyelids were swollen.

The attacker in the dark had no face to see.

He had a stocking pulled down over it.

On his hands were tight-fitting latex gloves.

He was thorough, this one — not so much as a fingerprint.

“Talk.”

“Wh-which case should I talk about?”

“How many did you kill?”

“…Nine.”

“That’s plenty of killing. You butcher’s bastard.”

The attacker’s mouth was rough.

The voice was not an old one.

“You killed at the department store too, didn’t you?”

“…Yes.”

This bastard… he came knowing all of it? Who talked!

He had only ever done that work with men he could trust.

And yet the guy knew the exact places.

“But you. Why are you lying?”

“What???”

“It’s ten!!! There was the schoolgirl in the old uniform too!!!”

“Huk!”

The shock hit Park Dae-chul hard enough to stop his breath.

The murder from thirty years ago that he had wanted hidden all his life.

He had raped the girl from the next village that he liked at the time, and buried her in the ground.

He had confessed to her and she had refused him coldly and he had snapped.

Park Dae-chul had been somebody in that village.

Full of himself, Park Dae-chul had done something terrible.

Craaack!

This time his jaw really went.

It was a strike with an open palm and his head rang with it.

The shock left him a step from his mind walking out entirely.

Park Dae-chul shook all over.

The guy knew him far too well.

He was like a reaper.

“A thing like you has no value alive. But you should still pay for your crimes.”

With the words, the attacker took hold of the back of Park Dae-chul’s neck.

And in that moment Park Dae-chul felt an enormous energy come rushing in at the back of his neck.

“Kuuuuuh… kuaaaaaaaaaargh!”

At first the energy was faint, and then it ran through him like a rising flood.

Everywhere the energy ran, it twisted Park Dae-chul’s bones and flesh.

Crrrk, crrrk-crrrk-crrrk.

“Kuaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!”

The strange sound of twisting bone rang through the house.

Screams followed after it.

Nobody came out.

Lee Gi-dong, out cold, did not wake.

The place stood on its own, and the screams were buried in the dark.

“Talk. Everything you remember. It’s your last chance.”

The pain was vicious enough that he could not even faint from it, and at the end of that hell Park Dae-chul saw hope.

If he could get away from this lunatic, even prison would do.

He was past pain and a step from going mad.

He didn’t know what method the guy was using, but he had never felt pain like this in his life.

“Call 112.”

Thump.

His own cell phone was thrown down in front of Park Dae-chul, who was drooling foam.

With shaking hands Park Dae-chul opened it.

Astonishingly, after all that twisting of bone, his arm stretched out as though nothing had happened.

It was pain that should have left him half a cripple, and yet his body moved.

“I know all of it. If even a little lie gets into this…”

The intruder brought his hand to Park Dae-chul’s neck once more.

“A-all… all of it. I’ll talk! Kuh…”

In his alarm, Park Dae-chul dialed 112 in a hurry.

Startled as he was, he pressed the number pad exactly.

His voice came out clearly too.

It was a truly astonishing method of torture.

“H-hello! This is the police, isn’t it! I want to turn myself in! I killed people!”

And so Park Dae-chul’s confession began.

He gave up in detail the personal particulars of everyone he had killed and the places they were buried.

The center officer taking the 112 call issued a red code at once.

Every officer standing by at the station was thrown into it.

The emergency call chain was activated too.

It was a murder case with the makings of an enormous shock to society.

“There’s one more.”

At that, the intruder whispering into Park Dae-chul’s other ear, the one without the phone at it.

“Yes?”

“Hong Jang-hyeok putting you up to it.”

“!!!”

He was thorough and he was frightening.

He hadn’t known the guy would have that too.

Park Dae-chul realized it was all over.

Calls to 112 were all recorded.

It was evidence he could not slip out of or step around.

And he knew the pigs would be racing to his house at full speed by now.

“And… the attempted murder involving the high school students the other day was on my orders. I was put up to it by former city councilman Hong Jang-hyeok…”

“Park Dae-chul! You stay exactly where you are! There’s an all-points bulletin out on you in real time! There’s nowhere in the Republic of Korea for you to run!”

Since it could turn into a chance at promotion, the officer taking his statement got excited and ordered Park Dae-chul to stay put.

Click.

The phone cut off.

A short silence came.

Park Dae-chul had the thought that he had been possessed by a ghost.

In a single moment everything was finished.

The organization he had built up until now would be finished after tonight too.

It wasn’t to be believed, and it was unmistakably real.

“Well done~ You’ll come out of prison dead, but do your reflecting in there, and do it right. And take all the trash under you with you. If you leave any of them behind… I will hand your family exactly this pain you have taken tonight.”

He was a devil of a man.

The guy left those words behind and walked slowly out of the room.

Park Dae-chul gave up on running.

The guy was cruel enough to know to bring the family into it.

Park Dae-chul nodded weakly.

The family at least had to live.

He had sent the children to Seoul early because he wanted them, at least, to live ordinary lives.

An empty feeling came over him, thick and heavy.

And with it came a feeling he had forgotten until now: being sorry.

The pretty schoolgirl he had violated, who had died.

She had been Park Dae-chul’s first love.

If she had begged him for her life, if she had gone along with what he wanted, he would have stopped.

But she never begged for her life, however she was beaten.

It made him angry.

And he broke her as much as he wanted.

And then he killed her.

He remembered the blood-colored eyes that cursed him to the last.

He had the illusion of her face shimmering in front of him.

A single mistake had made the Park Dae-chul of today.

“I’m sorry… Sun-rye…”

And the hot tears Park Dae-chul shed.

They beaded and fell to the floor, drop by drop.

But Park Dae-chul knew.

That tears like these could never bring her back to life…

(End of Chapter 29)