episode_0102

102.

Back alley in Dongdocheon City, Gyeonggi Province.

A faint crescent moon hangs high in the sky.

The dark night street, shrouded in darkness, was as quiet as ever. There was hardly a sign of anyone around. It was a deserted alley where people rarely ventured.

Being a neglected area, there were no CCTV cameras. There were no black boxes or parked cars either. It was truly a place where human eyes did not reach.

The alley seemed even more gloomy today.

Was it because of the series of murder cases that had occurred over the past few years?

The mysterious murders that occurred late at night in deserted back alleys, remote neighborhoods, and outskirts, where the victims had no connection to each other and the clean murder methods led the authorities to classify them as a series of murders by the same perpetrator.

Despite a considerable amount of time passing since the first incident, the investigation was still at a standstill.

The perpetrator had been committing crimes sporadically across Gyeonggi Province, making it extremely difficult to identify them.

The case was truly a puzzle.

“……Ddalguk, ugh.”

In the middle of the alley, a woman was wandering aimlessly.

She staggered as if intoxicated, unable to control her body properly.

Her steps seemed precarious, as if she might collapse at any moment. She stumbled and fell to the ground, gasping for breath.

For a moment, she bowed her head deeply, and a young man passing by quietly spoke up.

It seemed he was concerned about a woman wandering alone in the back alley late at night.

It was indeed worrying to see a woman alone in a deserted alley.

If she had been an ordinary woman.

“Are you okay?”

“….”

“Excuse me?”

“….Yes.”

The woman raised her head with a hazy gaze and looked at the man’s face. He was a quite sturdy young man. It seemed he couldn’t just leave a woman intoxicated and collapsed in the alley.

The woman struggled to get up in a swaying position, but she seemed quite drunk and her body didn’t seem to cooperate.

After a few more attempts, she managed to stand up with great effort.

But soon, she stumbled and the man reflexively reached out to support her.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes, thank you for helping me.”

“Oh, it’s nothing… What?”

Thud.

The man could no longer speak.

A sharp, dark blade pierced through his abdomen.

The woman manipulated the blood flow, causing chaos inside the man’s body. Vital organs were torn apart and spilled out. It felt good. It was satisfying.

“Haaa~♪”

The man’s lips trembled a few times before he breathed his last. His face at the moment of death. It was so cool.

The woman smiled as she slowly withdrew the blade.

Although blood could have gushed out, thanks to the woman’s supernatural ability, she could silence the man cleanly without a drop of blood staining her.

Already accustomed to murder, the woman effortlessly turned the red blade back into liquid and inserted it back into her body.

It was a tool for murder that could be solidified and liquefied at will, allowing her to use it multiple times.

She had disposed of the murder weapon as if it had never existed.

“What if you approach a stranger woman recklessly? You don’t know how dangerous people can be in this day and age.”

The woman sneered.

She mocked the foolish man’s kindness.

If he hadn’t been so meddlesome, he might not have died today.

The man’s kindness took his own life.

Oh, but the sensation of cutting off a life is so exhilarating.

In her heart, she wanted to gaze down at the fading eyes, wanting to fall into the pleasure of it, but she couldn’t stay in one place for long.

Because she could get caught if she made a mistake.

Of course, when she looked around with her superhuman senses, it seemed like there was no one within dozens of meters.

Nevertheless, she had her own rules.

All crimes, from murder to escape, had to be completed within 15 seconds.

It took her about 5 seconds to kill the man. She wasted another 4 seconds doing something else, so she still had 6 seconds left. With 6 seconds, she could escape far from this scene. If she hurried and left before anyone arrived, it would be over.

Her method of murder was very primitive, but the likelihood of getting caught was quite low.

In the limited night view, in the alley without CCTV and black boxes, in the neglected place with few people’s footsteps, her superhuman senses, and so on.

Thanks to various factors, the probability of getting caught in the crime was quite low.

The fact that she had never been caught before gave her more confidence.

She glanced at the man’s body and thought.

“Oh… I wish I could collect some blood… but I can’t leave any decisive evidence at home…”

Like the protagonist of a crime drama, she wanted to collect the blood of the victim she had killed as a souvenir, but she had to be careful because she was afraid of getting caught by the police.

The blood samples of the victims who died in the serial murder case.

Isn’t it an undeniable piece of evidence?

“It’s ridiculous. If you’re afraid of getting caught by the police, you shouldn’t do this kind of thing…”

But now she couldn’t stop.

Because murder is addictive.

When was the first time she committed murder?

It was probably when she killed a middle-aged man she happened to pick a fight with while wandering the alley after dropping out of the academy.

At that time, she was afraid of hurting someone and couldn’t leave the scene for a few weeks, trembling with fear, unable to go outside the room.

Afraid of getting caught by the police, afraid of being caught by a hero.

She spent her days in anxiety, but fortunately, the case remained unsolved, and the police couldn’t find her.

So Han Ji-hyo buried the murder deep in her heart and tried to live as a novelist, giving up her dream of becoming a hero…

…But she couldn’t forget the feeling of hurting someone.

The pounding of her heart, the fading eyes of life, the feeling of violating human dignity, the sense of unknown superiority, wouldn’t she want to feel it again?

It was a kind of thirst and longing.

The first murder had awakened the deep-seated nature of evil within Han Ji-hyo.

“Now, let’s slowly get out of here… huh?”

Fwishhh.

Smoke rose from the man’s body.

With a mysterious smoke, the man’s body dispersed like dust.

As if the man’s body had never existed from the beginning. The corpse, blood, clothes, everything disappeared.

“Could this be… a doppelganger?”

Doppelganger ability.

She had seen it a few times during her academy days.

The ability to create a doppelganger of oneself and deceive the opponent.

“Why a doppelganger? Could this be a decoy?”

Feeling that something was wrong, Han Ji-hyo clenched her lips tightly and quickly moved her steps as she tried to escape.

“Han Ji-hyo, right? Surrender.”

“Y-yes… please surrender…”

“Is this woman really the serial killer?”

Several people who had been hiding their bodies with concealment abilities began to reveal themselves.

About ten people. Heavily armed. They were staring at Han Jihyo, taking a combat stance.

Are they all supernatural ability users? It must have been a trap after all. They couldn’t be detected because of their concealment abilities. Damn it. What is this all about?

“Who are these people, and who are they?”

Police? Association? Clan?

Who are they, really?

Could it be a pursuit?

How did Han Jihyo identify the culprit?

It was impossible to know at the moment.

But now, that wasn’t important. What was important now was how to escape from this place.

“Han Jihyo, give up. You’re a suspect. We already filmed you stabbing the doppelganger.”

“…You know my name?”

Did they know something about Han Jihyo after all?

No, the fact that they filmed her using the doppelganger to capture the moment of her crime was evidence that they were convinced she was the culprit of the murder case.

“Sigh… This is awkward.”

Han Jihyo let out a deep sigh.

It seems that the longer the tail, the easier it is to catch.

Well, she had expected to be exposed by the police or heroes at some point.

She wasn’t optimistic enough to think she wouldn’t be caught forever. It was already a series of murders that had been reported in the news several times.

It would be unrealistic to think that she would never be caught while the authorities were struggling to find the culprit.

But she didn’t expect it to happen today…

“It’s a bit disappointing to be caught so soon.”

But it couldn’t be helped.

It seemed like it was time to give up her identity as an ordinary person.

From now on, she would have to live as a full-fledged villain.

Ah, does that mean she doesn’t have to sneak around and harm people secretly anymore because she’s a villain?

She felt slightly relieved at the thought of being able to harm people openly as a villain.

“Well, I guess I’ll have to rely on that kid, Yoo Dahee…”

When she first met Yoo Dahee and was recruited into the strange organization called Rebellion, she was skeptical.

But now that the situation had turned out like this, she felt like she would have to rely on her for a while.

Well, she would think about the details after escaping from here.

“I don’t know where you belong, but if you don’t want to see blood, it’s better to step aside peacefully, don’t you think?”

Han Jihyo used the blade part of her self-defense ring to cut her finger.

She enlarged the wound that had opened when she absorbed the blood-made blade earlier.

Soon, blood began to well up from the wound.

Blood droplets floated in the air.

The murky blood circled around Han Jihyo, threatening the people.

“Indeed, a blood manipulation ability.”

“It seems like you’ve investigated me. You knew everything anyway, didn’t you?”

Han Jihyo’s supernatural ability was blood manipulation.

It was a highly versatile ability to manipulate blood freely.

For example, she could accelerate the blood in her body to enhance her physical abilities, shoot out blood like a water cannon, coagulate or harden the blood to make it sharp.

It was almost versatile, but most blood ability users had a major drawback.

That was the fact that they could only manipulate their own blood.

The average adult male’s body contains about 5.2 liters of blood.

Losing about 10% of it could lead to anemia, and losing 40% could lead to death.

This meant that there were clear limits to using blood manipulation abilities.

It was closely related to exerting power by sacrificing life.

But Han Jihyo didn’t have that problem.

That’s why Han Ji-hyo could control not only her own blood but also the blood of others or any blood that came into contact with her hands.

Han Ji-hyo’s ability to manipulate blood flow was far superior to that of ordinary blood flow ability users.

The range she could control was much wider.

Thanks to this, Yoo Da-hee had high hopes for Han Ji-hyo’s potential and future prospects.

Han Ji-hyo was an ideal superhuman for battle, as she could gain more power the more she injured her opponents.

“Well… because of that, she had a fatal weakness that other blood flow ability users didn’t have.”

Shall we call it a fatal flaw?

Although she had never been caught by others, Han Ji-hyo’s ability to manipulate blood flow had a very fatal flaw.

And that was…

“Ah, w-wait?”

Splash.

Suddenly, a man splashed water.

He seemed to be a water-based ability user.

As soon as the water touched the blood droplets, the dominance was disrupted for a moment, and then numerous blood droplets fell to the ground, losing their form.

The blood mixed with water was no longer controllable.

“I heard about it, but was water really the weakness?”

“No, you? How?”

Han Ji-hyo, with a fatal flaw in her superhuman ability.

It was water, water.

While ordinary blood manipulation ability users were unaffected by water, Han Ji-hyo was different.

Could it be that her ability to control others’ blood came at a cost? Perhaps due to the destruction of red blood cells from osmotic pressure, in her case, she couldn’t control blood mixed with water.

But how did they know about Han Ji-hyo’s weakness?

How on earth? Up until now, she had hidden it so well that no one should have known about her weakness.