MRDA 2

Chapter 2

I waved my hand dismissively and walked past Heewoo toward my desk.

“But, Senior.”

“What is it now?”

“What’s that in your pocket?”

“…Huh?”

Following the direction Heewoo was pointing, I lowered my gaze.

The head of an adorable pink rabbit plushie was poking innocently out of my pocket.

Oh, right. I put it in there yesterday…

On my way home from work, I had stopped by a pop-up store for my favorite novel and bought a whole bunch of merchandise. I must have forgotten that I had shoved one of the items into my pocket.

Trying to act as though nothing was wrong, I pushed the rabbit’s head back into my pocket and deliberately looked away.

“Senior, is that the kind of thing you’re into?”

“It’s for my niece.”

“Ah~ So you stole your niece’s plushie and brought it to work in your pocket.”

“…I told you it’s not mine.”

“Oh, I see. So even though you’re an only child, you suddenly have a niece you never had before.”

Wheeeeeeng.

While Heewoo and I were bickering over the incriminating plushie, the piercing sound of an emergency siren suddenly rang throughout the station.

[Code Zero, Code Zero. Armed rampage in progress. The perpetrator is currently roaming near Hansol Intersection and is armed with a weapon approximately thirty centimeters in length. As this is rush hour, there is concern for civilian casualties. Immediate dispatch requested. I repeat…]

“Hey, hey! Grab your stab-resistant vests!”

At the sudden alarm, my colleagues rushed out of the office all at once.

Bang!

I was the last to climb into the van, slamming the door shut behind me. The vehicle immediately tore down the road with a deafening roar.

I hurriedly put on the stab-resistant vest I’d grabbed on the way out and tapped Heewoo, who was on the phone.

“What’s the current situation?”

“It’s been about ten minutes since the rampage began. There are five confirmed victims so far, and all of them are in cardiac arrest.”

“Five victims in ten minutes? Are you sure you heard that right?”

“I’m not entirely sure myself, but according to the information we’ve received, there are five.”

“Do we have the suspect’s identity?”

“Male, presumed to be in his twenties. He’s wearing a black zip-up hoodie and a hat, so identification is difficult.”

Behind Heewoo’s grim voice, brilliant flashes of emergency lights swept past.

I turned my gaze toward the window.

The air was filled with overlapping sirens, while a dazzling procession of flashing lights raced in the same direction, filling the streets around us.

The mood inside the van, where everyone had climbed aboard almost reflexively, changed in an instant.

An indescribable sense of ominous tension settled over us.

Screeeeech!

The vehicle lurched violently before coming to a sharp stop with a piercing screech.

“What happened?”

I grabbed the driver’s seat and looked ahead, but aside from the fact that we’d been forced to stop in the middle of the road, I couldn’t see much through the vehicles surrounding us on all sides.

“The road is too congested. I don’t think we can get any farther in.”

It was a Code Zero situation.

If we delayed any longer, there was no telling what might happen.

Thud!

I hurriedly opened the door, jumped out, and started running toward Hansol Intersection.

Five people were already dead.

The perpetrator was already so worked up that he seemed to have lost all reason. There was no telling how many more people he might kill.

“Aaaah!”

“Everyone, run!”

Terrified civilians fled away from the intersection, while cars littered the road, tangled together after colliding with one another.

It was utter chaos—completely beyond anyone’s control.

I ran against the flow of the fleeing crowd, avoiding the screaming civilians as they escaped. As I drew closer to the center of the intersection, the number of people around me rapidly dwindled, as if warning me that I was nearing the heart of the scene.

And then I saw the crosswalk in the center of the intersection.

I had no choice but to stop.

An ambulance-filled street.

People collapsed here and there, bleeding.

Cries so desperate they were almost screams, begging to be saved.

Bodies slowly slipping away without even being able to make a sound.

Five victims?

Even at a glance, there appeared to be thirty or forty people lying on the ground around me.

“Aaaaaaagh!”

A man’s agonized scream pierced the sky.

Another victim had been added.

I have to stop this. No more victims!

Almost instinctively, I ran toward the source of the scream.

Right in the center of the X-shaped crosswalk, something black came into view amid the blood-soaked people.

A middle-aged man in a suit had been forced onto the white pavement, and a man was savagely hacking at him with a weapon.

The young man wearing a black hooded jacket had already lost all reason.

He looked like a beast.

Tap-tap-tap.

Drawn by the screams, the police officers who had gathered around the scene surrounded the perpetrator in a circle, tasers in hand.

A loudspeaker blared from a police car someone had driven over.

“You are surrounded. Drop your weapon and surrender. If you refuse to surrender, we will open fire. I repeat…”

At the sharp mechanical voice, the perpetrator stopped hacking.

He slowly stood up and raised his head toward the sky.

The situation had deteriorated to the point where ground operations were virtually useless—neither entering nor controlling the scene was possible.

A police helicopter dispatched in an emergency illuminated the man with its spotlight.

His face came into clear view.

For some reason, it looked familiar.

The perpetrator shifted his gaze back and forth beneath the helicopter’s blinding light.

Then he slowly curled the corners of his mouth upward.

…Is he smiling?

That smile, dripping with ridicule, sent a chill down my spine and made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

Then our eyes met.

At that instant, the man’s expression suddenly hardened.

The ear-splitting sirens vanished, as though the entire world had stopped.

At the same time, a cold sensation wrapped around my body.

What is this…?

An intense, inexplicable anxiety slowly began to consume me.

My heart started pounding wildly, as though my feet had been bound by something beyond my ability to resist.

Clang!

The perpetrator, who had been standing perfectly still and staring into my eyes, suddenly dropped his long weapon onto the ground without resistance.

His pupils had lost all color. They wandered blankly through the air, like someone who had just suffered a devastating shock.

“Hands up! Make one wrong move and we’ll shoot! Raise both hands and walk forward!”

I shouted while keeping my taser aimed at him.

But he didn’t move.

His indifferent gaze, as though he were watching the world on the other side of a movie screen, seemed to squeeze the breath from my lungs.

Even after several warnings, the man continued staring directly at me.

Then, as though he’d suddenly thought of something, he let out a light laugh.

“Hahaha. So that’s what it is?”

The man collapsed onto the ground.

With a chilling expression, he picked up the knife again and looked toward me with a playful smile.

“Don’t move! Put the knife down! This is your final warning! Take even one step and we’ll open fire!”

“Try it.”

“What…?”

“I said, try it.”

The man taunted us without the slightest concern.

Then he sprang to his feet and closed the distance between us in an instant.

Just as I was about to pull the trigger with him close enough to reach me—

Thwack!

“Ugh!”

Both of my feet left the ground.

The man’s hand had seized my neck, twisting and wrenching the back of it with brutal strength.

I struggled with everything I had, but it was useless.

The bizarre man lifted me by the throat with one hand, completely unmoved.

He merely twisted the corner of his mouth upward.

He looked down at me leisurely, wearing the arrogant expression of an almighty being who had transcended humanity.

“How dare you… pretend to be her?”

His vile face was filled with the ecstatic certainty of victory.

“You really are an idiot. You should have realized something was wrong the moment you stopped hearing the sound.”

“Urgh!”

Yes.

Something was wrong.

Ever since my eyes met the perpetrator’s, the entire world had been silent.

There were countless fellow officers surrounding me.

So why… why was it so quiet?

I desperately rolled my eyes, searching my surroundings despite the terrifying feeling crawling over me.

I could see the officers aiming their tasers.

I could see them busily tending to the victims.

They were still there.

They were right beside me.

Then why weren’t they moving?

Why wasn’t anyone trying to subdue him?

I was the one holding him—

No.

I was the one being held.

“Haaah… haaah.”

My colleagues were standing there with serious expressions, tasers aimed at the perpetrator.

In front of them, I saw the team leader attempting to speak to someone, as though the criminal and the police were simply standing opposite each other in a standoff with knives drawn.

I couldn’t breathe.

I was reaching my limit.

I couldn’t endure the man’s grip any longer.

The feeble struggle I had been making gradually weakened, and the thoughts racing frantically through my mind began shutting down one after another.

Thud!

Had the man heard the sound of death as well?

He stared at me for a long moment after my movements stopped.

Then he slammed me onto the asphalt.

He raised the knife high into the air and seized me by the hair with brutal force.

And then—

My entire body was torn apart.

An unimaginable agony ripped through me as my skin was shredded and my organs were torn out.

No matter how desperately I tried to block the blade, the man’s frenzied assault only left the hands I used to defend myself mangled and torn to pieces.

My lungs had been pierced.

I couldn’t even scream.

I couldn’t breathe.

Amid the unbearable pain, I reached toward my mutilated body with trembling fingertips.

I desperately searched through my torn clothes for soft flesh, trying to stop even a handful of the blood pouring from me.

Then my fingers brushed against something hard.

Something familiar.

The protective equipment I had put on myself.

The stab-resistant vest… I was wearing a stab-resistant vest.

Blood surged back up my esophagus.

Yet the hollow laugh that escaped me refused to stop, lingering around my lips.

A knife that can cut through a stab-resistant vest… There was no way I could have stopped something like this.

The man continued gripping my hair and repeatedly bringing the knife down.

All I could do was stare at him.

Eventually, even he seemed to tire himself out and collapsed backward.

The criminal gazed vaguely up at the sky.

Then he removed the pitch-black hood covering his head.

Hair of a dazzling silver color—hair that could never have belonged to anything of this world—sparkled brilliantly beneath the moonlight.

It was so vivid that I would never forget it, even in death.

That was my final memory.