In Kim Jae-hwan's arms lay his older sister, bleeding and dying.
It had definitely been a simple errand.
A slaughter that had happened in the ten or so minutes he'd been gone.
In such a short time, how could something like this happen?
Jae-hwan had lived his whole life with no one but his sister, just the two of them.
Twenty-some years of leaning on each other, with no parents and no adults.
"Sis, snap out of it...! Open your eyes! Please..."
Jae-hwan grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her.
Barely managing to open her eyes, his sister parted her lips to speak to him.
"Jae-hwan... behind you..."
"...Behind?"
An unexpected word from her lips.
An ominous premonition flashed through Jae-hwan's mind.
Gripped by tension and fear, Jae-hwan turned around.
There stood a person he had never seen before.
No, there was something that resembled a person.
Wild, disheveled hair.
A huge hole sitting where its ears should have been.
A twisted face and a lolling tongue.
The creature hung from the ceiling, staring at Jae-hwan.
"Uh...?"
For a moment, Jae-hwan froze where he stood.
But the fear lasted only a moment.
Jae-hwan shielded his sister and got to his feet.
With a single-minded resolve to save her, no matter what.
"Run... you idiot..."
He didn't listen.
His only family was dying before his eyes.
No one could have ignored that.
Jae-hwan hastily snatched up a broken desk leg.
Jae-hwan raised the makeshift weapon toward the monster that kept crawling across the ceiling.
"...D-don't come any closer! Get lost!"
The meaningless warning rang out.
Hearing Jae-hwan's words, the monster abruptly began slamming its head against the ceiling it had been crawling on.
"Too loud, too loud, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up!!"
Bending its joints at wrong angles, the monster lunged straight at Jae-hwan.
"You crazy... monster son of a bitch...!"
Jae-hwan drove the desk leg straight into the monster as it charged at him.
But the monster paid no heed even to the wound punched into the middle of its torso.
"SKREEEEEEK!!!!!"
The monster seized Jae-hwan just like that.
Then the monster hurled Jae-hwan to the floor.
"Ghk...!"
Unable to bear the pain, Jae-hwan let out a scream.
The monster began to stagger toward him.
'I can't... let it end like this...!'
He felt something warm flowing.
At the same time, his back grew damp.
It seemed shards of the broken furniture had stabbed into him, and he was bleeding.
"Khk... Sis..."
The moment he reached out toward his dying sister.
CRASH!!
People suddenly burst in.
A man and a woman, both dressed in pitch-black suits.
They weren't the least bit shaken, even with the monster right before their eyes.
"We're late."
"Yes. We're late."
A man who looked to be in his mid-forties, and a woman who seemed to be his junior partner.
"I'll handle the aberration. You treat the patient for now."
The moment he finished speaking, the man pulled out a telescopic baton and charged at the monster.
The woman in the suit slowly approached his collapsed sister.
After examining his sister briefly, the woman shook her head and stood up.
"Too late."
The words he hadn't wanted to hear spilled from the woman's mouth.
"Sis... please..."
But Jae-hwan couldn't accept reality.
A groan full of despair burst from Jae-hwan's mouth.
Even as he bled, Jae-hwan tried to force himself to crawl toward his sister.
The woman looked at him with pity for a moment.
Then the woman came toward Jae-hwan.
The moment she reached out a hand to him.
Jae-hwan lost consciousness on the spot.
***
A rush of headache, an onslaught of fatigue.
The place where Jae-hwan opened his eyes was a dark, closed-off room.
Above his head, a fluorescent light glowed feebly.
'Am I... still alive?'
Jae-hwan hurriedly looked around.
'Where's Sis?'
His sister wasn't there.
There was only Jae-hwan.
A hollow laugh leaked from Jae-hwan's mouth.
It had been one strange thing after another, the kind of thing you'd only see in a dream.
A repulsive monster shaped like a human.
A man and a woman who had leapt at that monster.
And... his sister, miserably murdered by the monster.
Clutching his head, Jae-hwan agonized.
Just then.
"You're awake."
A man in a suit spoke to Jae-hwan.
Hair still black, but with gray strands showing here and there.
A carelessly grown beard, as if meant to hide a scar on his left jaw.
Eyes steeped in exhaustion, looking at Jae-hwan.
He seemed to be the same middle-aged man who had charged at the monster earlier.
"So it wasn't a dream after all."
"Right. Sometimes reality's more horrible than any dream."
The man shrugged. Jae-hwan gritted his teeth and asked a question.
"What happened? My sister..."
"Ah, I'm sorry about that."
The man offered a soulless apology, as if he didn't care.
But he soon calmly sat down in a chair and faced Jae-hwan.
As if he'd been through this far more than once or twice.
"You look curious. Then I'll explain things from here."
Pulling a cigarette from inside his jacket, the man lit it and went on.
"That was an aberration."
"An aberration?"
"A kind of phenomenon. Do you often read the society section of the news?"
Jae-hwan nodded.
"All the incidents you see there. Murder, robbery, rape, arson, stalking, and so on... The kind of incidents that make you doubt human nature."
"......."
"Aberrations are phenomena that form under the influence of negative incidents like those. The fundamental evil in humans, negative emotions, flaws of character, and so on. When those pile up, they gain power and take on physical form. A victim can become an aberration, and so can a perpetrator."
"Then that monster I saw..."
"Right. We looked into it a bit, and that one-room place you two were living in. Apparently the noise between floors was pretty bad."
"I think it was."
"That's where this aberration was born. That aberration was the resident downstairs."
"So that's why the monster kept yelling about the noise and telling us to shut up?"
Only then did Jae-hwan understand the whole story.
It made no sense, but having witnessed it with his own two eyes, he had no choice but to believe it.
And yet Jae-hwan felt wronged.
"But that noise... It wasn't coming from our place!"
"Hm...?"
"It was the noise from the people next door who moved in a few months ago... and my sister had to die over something like that...?"
"That's unfortunate."
The grief boiling in Jae-hwan's chest quickly turned to rage.
'My sister died because of such a petty misunderstanding.'
Filled with rage, Jae-hwan clenched his fists.
Smoking his cigarette, the man stared at Jae-hwan.
And when, after a long while, he had finally calmed down.
His eyes bloodshot, Jae-hwan asked the man what he most wanted to know.
"That monster... is it dead?"
Stubbing out the cigarette, now no more than a butt, the man sighed.
"No. It got away."
The man stood up as he finished speaking.
"Then our talk is over. We have to go catch that monster again, you see."
"W... wait a moment. I still have things to say..."
"No, it's over."
The man quietly raised his hand toward Jae-hwan.
"Wh... what are you doing...?"
"I told you. Our talk is over. Surely you didn't think I'd just hand you the most classified of classified information?"
"Wait, classified?"
"Yes. Top secret, known only to those in the know. So now I'll erase your memories. We'll take your revenge for you."
"No, I can't let you do that."
Jae-hwan rose to his feet and began to protest.
"My only family is dead. And you want me to look away from that? If your daughter died and someone told you that, how do you think you'd feel?"
For an instant, the man's pale face twisted in displeasure.
But only for a moment.
As the man's face regained its calm, a faint smile flickered across it.
"Fair point. Then I'll give you a choice."
The man went on as he pulled out a second cigarette.
"First. I erase every memory related to aberrations, right here and now. You go back to your peaceful daily life."
At the words "peaceful daily life," Jae-hwan's eyebrows twitched.
"And second. You join our organization and take your revenge on the aberration."
At that moment, life returned to Jae-hwan's eyes.
"There's no quitting. You'll have to exterminate aberrations until the day you die. You'll live seeing every kind of filth there is. So I'll give you some time, think it over..."
"I'm in."
"What?"
"I'll join the organization. I don't care what kind of filth I see from now on. As long as I can get revenge..."
The man looked at Jae-hwan, as if lost in thought for a moment.
But only for a moment.
"Good. We've had a few who joined on revenge alone. They regret it now, though. Then let's go."
When he'd finished, the man began taking something out of his bag.
"Uh... what's that?"
"Ah, this?"
With a sly grin, the man poured a sleeping drug onto a handkerchief.
"Congratulations. As of now, you're a civil servant. If you survive, that is."
And just like that, Jae-hwan lost consciousness once again.
***
"...Heart rate good. Blood pressure, no problems. No chronic illness. Perfect."
"Since when did you ever care about that stuff? Just do it."
"Still, there's such a thing as procedure."
The voices of strangers reached his ears.
Jae-hwan struggled to open his eyes and look around.
"Where...?"
"Ah, the applicant's awake."
"Poor guy."
"I know. He'd have been better off staying asleep."
"Wait, wait a minute... I'm sure the aberration..."
Jae-hwan squirmed and protested to the people exchanging words he couldn't understand.
But all he got back were cold looks.
"What an idiot. What did Team Leader Lee Chang-ho lure you with? Money? A civil service job? Revenge?"
"How do you know about that...?"
"It's obvious. You think there are only one or two guys like you? And how many of them do you think have walked out of here alive?"
"Ready. Shall we begin?"
"Wait, what on earth is...?"
"I'll keep it simple."
The masked man waved a blood-red liquid in front of Jae-hwan's eyes.
"We're going to put this into your body. If you die, that's the end of it. And if you survive... you officially join the Aberration Security Department."
For an instant, Jae-hwan felt fear.
But that fear wasn't strong enough to overcome his thirst for revenge.
"I'm in."
"That's what they all say."
The researcher indifferently started the machine.
The blood-red liquid slowly began to flow into the body of Jae-hwan, who was bound to a cross.
A chill began to spread through his whole body.
But before long, the cold turned into a pain that seemed to cut into his flesh, and it began to torment Jae-hwan.
As Jae-hwan endured the pain, countless images flickered through his mind like a revolving lantern.
A happy moment with his sister.
His dying sister.
The aberration.
A chance at revenge.
And an angel's wings, bleeding.
Jae-hwan felt a moment of puzzlement at that last scene, whose meaning he couldn't fathom.
But only for a moment.
As the waves of pain crashed over him again, Jae-hwan's curiosity was swept away and vanished.
And so a long time passed.
At last, the waves of pain began to subside.
'Is it over?'
Jae-hwan didn't even have the strength left to move a fingertip.
"...it is. It's now in the stabilization stage."
The researchers' murmuring voices reached Jae-hwan's ears.
"So it worked. Congratulations."
"D-Director?"
"I heard a rookie had joined us. I came to welcome him."
A man in a lab coat, with a deep and dignified voice, approached Jae-hwan.
"Hm."
For some reason, a satisfied smile hung on his lips.
"You're saying he survived even though the numbers went far past the limit?"
"That's right. These numbers are unprecedented. It seems..."
"Enough. That sort of thing isn't important."
The Director came over to Jae-hwan and quietly met his eyes.
But unlike the smile on his lips, Jae-hwan could read no emotion at all in the man's empty eyes.
"Kim Jae-hwan, was it?"
Slowly opening his mouth, he welcomed Jae-hwan.
"Welcome to the Aberration Security Department."