“Wow….”
Kang Yujun looked at the ID card in Lee Kanghyun’s hand with admiration.
“You could be a pickpocket instead of a hunter. You’d be really successful at it, wouldn’t you?”
Lee Kanghyun ignored Kang Yujun’s familiar nonsense that wasn’t even worth responding to. He also lightly ignored the grumbling about how our Kanghyun came out of detention even colder.
So fucking noisy, seriously.
After confirming that the researcher had completely disappeared from the corridor, Lee Kanghyun held the ID card up to the elevator reader.
Beep.
The door slid open with a sound. The two men got on the elevator.
Lee Kanghyun pressed the button for the bottom floor. When he didn’t respond to his nonsense, Kang Yujun grumbled again.
“Kanghyun-ah. Are you already ignoring me? We haven’t even succeeded yet and you’re being too much. Can’t you at least answer me?”
Lee Kanghyun was just too tired. Kang Yujun was draining his energy completely.
He just stared blankly at the floor number on the panel. He wanted to hurry up, check, go home, and lie down on his soft bed.
Suddenly, he remembered the period when he had been detained.
Doing nothing and just sleeping was fine for about four days. But around the fifth day, no matter how much he closed his eyes, sleep wouldn’t come.
His phone was confiscated, his comic books too, and he was even deprived of the freedom to look outside the window. Looking at the white ceiling, Lee Kanghyun thought he would die of boredom.
He was really so bored. It was quiet, nobody bothered him, everything was good. Boredom was the problem.
How bored must he have been to have the insane thought that he even missed the noise pollution of Kang Yujun’s incessant chattering?
Recalling his past self, he couldn’t help but laugh at himself.
Cancel that.
His brain must have malfunctioned for a moment back then. Missing him, my ass. Listening to Kang Yujun’s nonsense again was so agonizing it felt like his ears would bleed. He’d rather die of boredom. Living while enduring this noise was a shortcut to shortening his lifespan.
Ding dong.
A mechanical sound announced their arrival. Soon the elevator door opened.
“Huh?”
But as soon as the door opened, they came face to face with a security guard patrolling the corridor.
The security guard’s eyes widened when he saw the two unfamiliar men inside the elevator.
Before his brain could recognize the intrusion of outsiders and he could open his mouth to say anything, Lee Kanghyun’s body disappeared, leaving a faint afterimage.
In the blink of an eye, Lee Kanghyun, now behind the security guard, struck the vital point on the back of his neck precisely with his hand blade.
Thwack.
A dull sound rang out briefly. The security guard’s pupils rolled back, showing the whites of his eyes. His unconscious body couldn’t overcome gravity and collapsed to the floor.
Lee Kanghyun smoothly caught the falling security guard’s waist. Then he very carefully laid him gently on the floor.
Only then did Kang Yujun step out of the elevator. He looked back and forth between the security guard laid on the floor and Lee Kanghyun, who was managing his expression as if nothing had happened.
“Kanghyun-ah.”
“What.”
“Didn’t you say not to cause a commotion?”
Kang Yujun said while holding back laughter.
“You told me not to make things bigger. Isn’t knocking someone out a big deal?”
At Kang Yujun’s point, Lee Kanghyun shamelessly turned his head.
“Commotion? What commotion.”
He didn’t scream, and there was no sound of him falling. What was the problem?
“Wow, how polite. You’re a true hunter of the Land of Eastern Courtesy.”
Instead of responding, Lee Kanghyun let out a deep sigh and dragged the security guard’s body to a corner of the corridor, into a CCTV blind spot.
Lee Kanghyun’s hands, which had been carefully straightening the limp security guard’s clothes, suddenly paused.
No matter how quickly he’d knocked him out, they had come face to face the moment the door opened. It was just a moment, but the uneasy feeling wouldn’t go away.
“Hey.”
“What?”
“He didn’t see our faces, right?”
“Probably not. You knocked him out before he could even recognize who we were in the first place.”
Is that so? Still, he didn’t like that a variable had occurred in a place like this.
But it was already spilled milk. What they had to do now was confirm the corpse as quickly as possible and run away.
“Let’s go.”
Lee Kanghyun moved his steps toward the morgue.
Inside the morgue, cold metal drawers filled the walls. The two men quickly scanned down the identification tags attached to them.
“Found it.”
The place Kang Yujun pointed to was in front of a storage unit in a corner.
[Unidentified (Management Number XX-XXXX)]
Kang Yujun grabbed the handle without hesitation and pulled.
A blue light was emanating from inside the drawer.
“What’s this?”
Lee Kanghyun frowned. Above the white cloth covering the corpse, an elaborate blue magic circle was engraved.
Kang Yujun tapped the magic circle with his fingertip.
“It looks like a top-grade preservation spell. Such an expensive spell is on an unclaimed body.”
Normally, once an autopsy was finished, there was no reason to use a preservation spell.
Unless there were bereaved family members who wanted to hold a funeral with the body in its intact state from when alive and had paid a large sum separately to request it—but this corpse had no such family.
It was clearly a trace of someone having tampered with it.
“This is strange.”
Kang Yujun nodded and agreed with Lee Kanghyun’s words. He carefully removed the white cloth.
“……”
Three weeks had already passed since the intruder’s death.
Thanks to the preservation spell, the corpse of the man before their eyes was intact, as if he had just died.
Honestly, on the way here, Lee Kanghyun had secretly suspected that the corpse might have been switched.
Although he hadn’t seen a proper autopsy record, they said there were torture marks on the body. He had definitely only broken the guy’s arm, and before he could inflict any other injuries, the guy had died. But torture marks? Didn’t that not make sense?
So there was only one thing he could think of logically. Someone must have brought another corpse that looked similar to the guy, one that had already been thoroughly beaten, and switched them.
In an era where people flew around and used superpowers to control water, switching one corpse was nothing.
But….
Lee Kanghyun’s eyes wavered.
Contrary to his expectations, it wasn’t a switch. The face was identical. He didn’t feel any mana from the face area either, so there wasn’t an ability to change appearance at work. It was definitely that bastard who had been foaming at the mouth and dying on his living room floor.
The face was exactly as he remembered.
But the body was too different from his memory.
“What is… this.”
Lee Kanghyun’s voice trembled slightly.
The exposed naked body was truly horrific.
The entire body—chest, stomach, sides, everywhere—was covered with bright red bruises and torn wounds. It was so battered that there wasn’t a single intact spot to be found.
“Urgh….”
Lee Kanghyun bit his lips hard to suppress the nausea that was suddenly surging up.
He felt dizzy. He clenched his hand that was stuck in his pocket. As his nails dug into his palm, his mind barely held on.
Kang Yujun also couldn’t hide his surprised look. He had already seen the corpse’s condition once through the autopsy report. But facing it in person was a completely different experience from seeing it in photos.
It was horrible even in the photos, but the traces of violence faced in reality were much more stark.
He tried to maintain his composure while carefully examining the corpse’s wounds. He had to explain to Lee Kanghyun what he had heard. Since he was the person involved who needed to know this situation.
“These are injuries that occurred right before death.”
He pointed to the bruise marks remaining on the corpse’s chest.
“The bruise marks are too vividly red. They weren’t made after death, but while alive… and just before death. He died not long after being beaten.”
At those words, Lee Kanghyun stared down at the corpse blankly.
That night. Thinking about it, the intruder’s movements were strangely sluggish and he was sweating profusely like rain. He had thought it was simply because of nervousness. He had thought it was due to the pressure of infiltrating an S-rank hunter’s house.
But that wasn’t it. He was already dying.
“He was probably beaten somewhere right before entering your house. He infiltrated in a state of being beaten to the point of broken bones and ruptured organs.”
Someone had made this man half-dead, and when he still had his last breath, pushed him into Lee Kanghyun’s house.
And as soon as the man encountered Lee Kanghyun, he bit down on poison and died as if he had been waiting for it.
“In a situation where there’s no evidence of a third party’s involvement, what would happen if an autopsy was performed? The time of death and the time of the beating roughly match.”
“……”
“S-rank Hunter Lee Kanghyun cruelly tortured the intruder. The intruder, unable to endure it, eventually swallowed poison and committed suicide to escape the pain.”
Kang Yujun bit his lip after finishing his words. He hadn’t wanted to say such things in front of him. That’s why he had obediently come down here with him. Hoping that the autopsy results were fabricated. Unfortunately, his hopes were brutally shattered.
Lee Kanghyun got goosebumps.
He had known there was a scheme to frame him. But to assault a living person and then send him to my house to do that?
“Crazy bastards….”
The man before his eyes, who had seemed like an enemy, now seemed pitiful. To become someone’s chess piece and die a dog’s death, and even after death, to be used without being able to rest peacefully.
He felt nauseous. Thanks to the spell, there was no smell of a rotting corpse, but it felt like the disgusting malice of humans was piercing his nose.
Seeing Lee Kanghyun’s complexion turn deathly pale, Kang Yujun quickly covered the corpse with the cloth.
Once the horrific scene was hidden, Lee Kanghyun finally let out the breath he had been holding.
Kang Yujun stood blocking Lee Kanghyun’s front. He blocked his view so the corpse couldn’t be seen.
“Let’s stop looking. We’ve seen enough.”
Kang Yujun carefully wrapped his arm around Lee Kanghyun’s shoulder and led him toward the exit.
“Let’s get out of here, Kanghyun-ah. The air here isn’t good.”
Lee Kanghyun roughly swept his bangs back. They were slightly wet, whether from cold sweat. Not wanting to be caught being shaken, he deliberately grimaced more fiercely.
