“Wow….”
Kang Yujun stared admiringly at the ID card in Lee Kanghyun’s hand.
“You could make a living as a pickpocket instead of a Hunter. You’d be wildly successful.”
Lee Kanghyun ignored Kang Yujun’s familiar nonsense, which was not even worth responding to. He also casually ignored the complaining that followed about how our Kanghyun came out of detention even colder than before.
He’s so damn loud. Seriously.
After confirming that the researcher had completely disappeared from the corridor, Lee Kanghyun tapped the ID card against the elevator reader.
Beep.
The doors slid open with the sound, and the two stepped inside.
Lee Kanghyun pressed the button for the lowest floor. When he still did not react to his nonsense, Kang Yujun started complaining again.
“Kanghyun. Are you already ignoring me? We haven’t even succeeded yet. That’s harsh. At least answer me, would you?”
Lee Kanghyun was simply exhausted.
Kang Yujun was draining the life out of him.
He stared blankly at the floor numbers on the panel. He wanted to check the body as quickly as possible, go home, and lie down on a soft bed.
Suddenly, he remembered his time in detention.
Doing absolutely nothing but sleeping had been fine for about four days.
But around the fifth day, no matter how long he kept his eyes closed, sleep would not come.
They had taken his phone, his comic books, and even his freedom to look out a window. Staring at the white ceiling, Lee Kanghyun had thought he might actually die of boredom.
He had been so unbelievably bored.
The quiet was nice. Nobody bothering him was nice. Everything about it was nice.
The problem was the boredom.
How bored did I have to be to have the insane thought that I kind of missed Kang Yujun’s nonstop noise pollution?
Thinking back on his past self made him scoff.
Never mind.
My brain must have malfunctioned for a while back then.
Miss him, my ass.
Now that he was hearing Kang Yujun’s bullshit again, it was so painful he felt like his ears might bleed.
I’d rather die of boredom.
Living with this noise is the fastest way to shorten my lifespan.
Ding.
The electronic chime announcing their arrival sounded.
A moment later, the elevator doors opened.
“Huh?”
But the instant they did, they found themselves face-to-face with a security guard patrolling the corridor.
The guard’s eyes widened at the sight of two unfamiliar men inside the elevator.
Before his brain could fully register the intrusion and his mouth could form a word, Lee Kanghyun’s body vanished, leaving only a blurred afterimage.
In the blink of an eye, he appeared behind the guard and struck the precise pressure point at the back of his neck with the edge of his hand.
Thud.
A short, dull impact sounded.
The guard’s eyes rolled back until only the whites showed. His unconscious body gave way to gravity and began collapsing toward the floor.
Lee Kanghyun smoothly caught him around the waist.
Then, with extraordinary care, he gently lowered him to the ground.
Only then did Kang Yujun step out of the elevator.
He looked back and forth between the unconscious guard lying on the floor and Lee Kanghyun, who was already arranging his expression as though nothing had happened.
“Kanghyun.”
“What.”
“Didn’t you tell me not to make a scene?”
Kang Yujun spoke while suppressing a laugh.
“You told me not to make things worse, but knocking someone unconscious doesn’t count as making things worse?”
At Kang Yujun’s criticism, Lee Kanghyun shamelessly turned his head away.
“A scene? What scene?”
The guard had not screamed.
He had not even made a sound when he fell.
What exactly was the problem?
“Wow. Such impeccable manners. What a model of courtesy.”
Instead of answering, Lee Kanghyun let out a deep sigh and dragged the guard’s body into a corner of the hallway, into the CCTV blind spot.
As Lee Kanghyun carefully straightened the limp guard’s clothes, his hands suddenly paused.
No matter how quickly he had knocked him out, the moment the elevator doors opened, they had looked directly at each other.
It had only been an instant, but Lee Kanghyun could not shake the uneasy feeling.
“Hey.”
“What?”
“He didn’t see our faces, right?”
“Probably not. You knocked him out before he even had time to figure out who we were.”
Is that so?
Even so, Lee Kanghyun did not like that an unexpected variable had appeared in a place like this.
But what was done was done.
What mattered now was checking the body as quickly as possible and getting the hell out.
“Let’s go.”
Lee Kanghyun headed toward the morgue.
Inside, cold metal drawers filled the walls from end to end.
The two quickly scanned the identification labels attached to them.
“Found it.”
Kang Yujun pointed to a storage drawer tucked away in the corner.
[UNIDENTIFIED — CASE NO. XX-XXXX]
Without hesitation, Kang Yujun grabbed the handle and pulled.
Blue light poured from inside the drawer.
“What the hell is this?”
Lee Kanghyun frowned.
An intricate blue magic circle had been inscribed across the white sheet covering the body.
Kang Yujun lightly tapped the magic circle with his fingertip.
“Looks like top-tier preservation magic. That’s expensive stuff to use on an unclaimed body.”
Normally, once an autopsy was complete, there was little reason to go as far as using preservation magic.
It would be one thing if the deceased had a family who wanted the body preserved in pristine condition for the funeral and had paid a huge amount separately to have it done.
But this body had no such family.
This was clearly evidence that someone had intervened.
“This is weird.”
Kang Yujun nodded in agreement with Lee Kanghyun.
Then he carefully pulled back the white sheet.
“…….”
Three weeks had already passed since the intruder died.
Thanks to the preservation magic, the man’s body before them looked as intact as though he had died only moments ago.
To be honest, on the way here, Lee Kanghyun had privately suspected that the body might have been switched.
He had not seen the actual autopsy records himself, but they had said the corpse bore signs of torture.
He knew for certain that he had only broken the man’s arm.
The bastard had died before Lee Kanghyun even had time to inflict any other injuries.
So signs of torture made no sense.
Which left only one explanation that made sense.
Someone must have brought in another body that looked similar to the intruder, one that had already been beaten half to death, and switched them.
In an age when people could fly through the air and use supernatural abilities to control water, swapping out one corpse would hardly be difficult.
But….
Lee Kanghyun’s eyes trembled.
Contrary to his expectations, the body had not been switched.
The face was identical.
He could not sense any mana around it either, which ruled out some Ability altering the man’s appearance.
This was definitely the same bastard who had foamed at the mouth and died on Lee Kanghyun’s living-room floor.
The face was exactly as he remembered it.
But the body was far too different.
“What… is this?”
Lee Kanghyun’s voice trembled faintly.
The exposed body was horrific.
The chest, stomach, sides—every part of it—was covered in dark-red bruising and torn wounds.
There was hardly a single intact patch of skin left.
“Urgh….”
Lee Kanghyun bit down hard on his lip to suppress the sudden surge of nausea.
Dizziness washed over him.
He clenched the hand buried in his pocket.
Only when his fingernails dug into his palm did he barely manage to keep himself grounded.
Kang Yujun could not hide his shock either.
He had already seen the condition of the corpse once in the autopsy report.
But seeing it in person was completely different from looking at photographs.
It had looked horrifying even in pictures, but the traces of violence laid bare before his eyes were far more graphic in reality.
He forced himself to remain calm and carefully examined the injuries.
He needed to explain them to Lee Kanghyun exactly as he had been told.
Lee Kanghyun was directly involved in this.
He needed to understand what had happened.
“These injuries were inflicted shortly before death.”
Kang Yujun pointed to a bruise across the corpse’s chest.
“The bruising is still too vivid a red. It didn’t happen after death. He was alive when he was hit… and it happened right before he died. He died not long after the beating.”
At those words, Lee Kanghyun stared blankly down at the body.
That night.
Thinking back, there had been something strangely sluggish about the intruder’s movements.
He had also been sweating as though someone had poured water over him.
Lee Kanghyun had assumed it was just nerves.
He had thought it was because of the pressure of breaking into an S-rank Hunter’s home.
But that had not been it.
The man had already been dying.
“He was probably beaten somewhere right before he entered your apartment. He broke in after being assaulted badly enough to fracture bones and rupture internal organs.”
Someone had beaten this man half to death, then shoved him into Lee Kanghyun’s apartment while he was still barely breathing.
And the moment the man came face-to-face with Lee Kanghyun, he had bitten down on poison and died as though he had been waiting for exactly that moment.
“If you perform an autopsy without any evidence that a third party was involved, what conclusion are you going to reach? The estimated time of death and the time of the beating more or less match.”
“…….”
“Lee Kanghyun, an S-rank Hunter, brutally tortured an intruder. Unable to endure it any longer, the intruder eventually swallowed poison and killed himself to escape the pain.”
Kang Yujun bit his lip after finishing.
He had not wanted to say something like that in front of Lee Kanghyun.
That was why he had come down here with him so readily.
He had hoped the autopsy results had been fabricated.
Unfortunately, that hope had been thoroughly crushed.
A chill crawled over Lee Kanghyun’s skin.
He had known someone was working to frame him.
But to do that, they had beaten a living person and then sent him into his home?
“Crazy bastards….”
The man in front of him, whom he had once regarded as an enemy, now seemed pitiful.
Turned into someone else’s pawn, killed like a dog, and then denied even the peace of death as his corpse continued to be used.
Lee Kanghyun felt sick.
The preservation magic kept the smell of decay away, but it felt as though the disgusting malice of human beings itself were stabbing into his nose.
Seeing Lee Kanghyun’s face turn white, Kang Yujun quickly pulled the sheet back over the body.
Once the horrific sight disappeared from view, Lee Kanghyun finally released the breath he had been holding in a rush.
Kang Yujun stepped directly in front of him, blocking his view so the body could no longer be seen.
“That’s enough. We’ve seen everything.”
Kang Yujun gently wrapped an arm around Lee Kanghyun’s shoulders and guided him toward the exit.
“Let’s get out of here, Kanghyun. The air’s bad in here.”
Lee Kanghyun roughly swept his bangs back.
They were slightly damp, probably from cold sweat.
Not wanting Kang Yujun to realize how shaken he was, he deliberately scowled even more fiercely.