GBH 82

The veins bulge on the back of the hand gripping Song Yi-heon’s short hair as if to pull it out by the roots. The pain Song Yi-heon felt wasn’t from his scalp that seemed about to be torn off, but from the contemptuous gaze of Kim Dong-soo, the subordinate he had trusted and relied on. His slitted eyes pierced coldly like an awl.

“Why…?”

As his hair was yanked, Kim Dong-soo swung his fist. Once again, Song Yi-heon followed the fist aimed at his abdomen with a dazed gaze. Like the hair grip, he could have easily dodged it, but his body wouldn’t move, paralyzed by the hostility from a trusted subordinate.

The fist connected, but there was no twisting pain in his internal organs. Se-kyung’s forearm, wrapped around his abdomen from behind, took the punch instead.

Se-kyung, hugging Song Yi-heon’s abdomen from behind, grabbed Kim Dong-soo’s wrist that was holding Song Yi-heon’s hair with his free arm. Kim Dong-soo’s eyebrow twitched. In this pure contest of strength without technique, the grabbed wrist began to tremble. As Kim Dong-soo’s jaw clenched tighter, grinding his molars, Se-kyung’s black eyes gradually darkened.

Not just the grip strength holding his wrist, but as he continued to meet Se-kyung’s eyes that held a calm darkness that seemed about to devour him, Kim Dong-soo felt a chill run down his spine.

“…”

I’m going to be eaten. With that thought, Kim Dong-soo threw down Song Yi-heon’s hair and shook off Se-kyung’s arm.

The pushed Song Yi-heon collided weakly with Se-kyung’s chest. Even as his body was wrapped in Se-kyung’s arms and pulled back, Song Yi-heon’s eyes remained fixed on Kim Dong-soo. His lips moved, wanting to ask why he was looking at him like that, with a gaze beyond contempt to murderous intent.

The glaring Kim Dong-soo looked like someone who could commit murder with his eyes alone.

“I wondered who the brainless bastard impersonating the boss was.”

“Ah…”

Song Yi-heon belatedly realized who Kim Dong-soo was addressing. Absorbed in the news about Chilseong Faction at the bar, he hadn’t been aware of his appearance. Kim Dong-soo was addressing Song Yi-heon, not Kim Deuk-pal.

“You kept your life thanks to the boss, and now you’re selling his name?”

Kim Dong-soo recognized Song Yi-heon, whom he had dragged to Kim Deuk-pal’s funeral with his own hands. After cremating the body and scattering the ashes by the river, he had lurked around the hospital, intending to exact the same revenge on Song Yi-heon.

If it weren’t for the life saved as Kim Deuk-pal died, if the movements of surrounding organizations hadn’t been suspicious, Song Yi-heon would have already had a knife in his back.

After staging a suicide and killing an innocent person, Song Yi-heon hadn’t shown his face except when dragged to the funeral. The woman named Lee Mi-kyung who appeared as the guardian was even worse.

At a place where she should have apologized and compensated, Mi-kyung immediately sneered at what they did. She didn’t even call it a profession. Though Kim Dong-soo wasn’t proud of being a gangster and didn’t rage about that point, they hadn’t lived so shamefully that Kim Deuk-pal’s sacrifice could be disrespected by Mi-kyung.

Before the business stabilized, they had engaged in illegal activities, but this field was where dirty bastards fought fiercely among themselves anyway, and they didn’t touch uninvolved civilians. At least they hadn’t lived so viciously that they couldn’t express the grief of losing a family.

Mi-kyung tried to secure eternal silence using money as collateral. And as if she were granting them a favor. She was skilled at disrespecting people and knew well how to desecrate the death of the deceased. Chilseong Faction took out the knives they had put away after their business stabilized.

Wrapping a sashimi knife in newspaper and tucking it into their waistbands, they tailed Song Yi-heon and Mi-kyung.

The prosecutors were watching Kim Deuk-pal’s death closely. The time when prosecutorial surveillance was lifted was the promised time for revenge. While tailing Mi-kyung and Song Yi-heon until their eyes became sunken and bloodshot and their beards grew dark, they were betrayed by surrounding organizations. The gang’s boss was dead, and the scattered subordinates became drifters working day labor jobs.

They had no face to show the dead Kim Deuk-pal, and when they caught the one spreading false rumors that Kim Deuk-pal was alive, it turned out to be Song Yi-heon who had driven Kim Deuk-pal to his death.

Were they mortal enemies in a past life? Kim Dong-soo ground his teeth at this persistent ill fate.

“If you want to die, you should have died quietly in some corner. Are you going to sully the boss’s name again?”

“No, I…”

Song Yi-heon tried to detach himself from Se-kyung and move towards Kim Dong-soo.

He wanted to tell them it wasn’t like that, that he had been looking for them out of concern, that he wanted to convey his sincerity. He wanted to discuss their hardships and future plans. He wanted to reclaim their home and business for them.

But his tangled identity left him confused about who he even was.

As he searched for his subordinates as Kim Deuk-pal, he couldn’t actually recall Kim Deuk-pal’s face, yet he wasn’t Song Yi-heon either.

The catalyst for this confusion was trivial. It started with self-hypnosis to avoid repeating the mistake of ordering the wrong name tag when buying a new school uniform. He tensed up, mentally repeating Song Yi-heon’s name to respond to roll call. He turned when classmates called his name. On the way home from school, mixed among numerous students, he responded to Kim Yeon-ji calling “Song Yi-heon.”

There was no room for will to intervene in these small daily occurrences. He gradually became Song Yi-heon.

Song Yi-heon’s eyes lost focus. As an image formed in the distance, he saw subordinates fighting beyond Kim Dong-soo’s shoulder. The shouts of subordinates swinging baseball bats, chasing those going up the downhill slope, grew increasingly faint.

The eyes of subordinates occasionally turning back to look for Song Yi-heon were also filled with contempt. They were the same as Kim Dong-soo.

Song Yi-heon leaned his trembling body against Se-kyung.

He was alive, but to them, Kim Deuk-pal was dead and gone.

* * *

Meow-!

A cat rummaging through garbage bags piled like a mountain around a utility pole hissed. The cat, arching its back and bristling its fur, bared its fangs at the boy who pounced on the bag it was searching, then leapt over a wall and disappeared as a group of humans surrounded the pole.

A black shadow covered Song Yi-heon, thrown and buried in the pile of garbage.

“Tough bastard.”

Kim Dong-soo cracked his knuckles, the ones he had driven into Song Yi-heon’s abdomen, looking pale. Song Yi-heon hadn’t resisted much, just taking the blows without even a groan. His head hung low under the streetlight’s incandescent glow, face hidden in shadow.

Kim Dong-soo grabbed Song Yi-heon’s collar, forcibly lifting him. As Song Yi-heon’s head, unable to support itself, fell back, his exposed cheek revealed a mesh of burst capillaries. Kim Dong-soo, aiming a fist at the reddened cheek, sneered.

“You don’t think it’s over after just a few hits, do you?”

Chilseong Faction, moving around the outskirts of Gyeonggi Province, biding their time and looking for opportunities, heard rumors in an old motel in Pyeongtaek that the dead Kim Deuk-pal was alive. An anonymous tip came through the youngest member’s social media. Judging from the poorly spelled private message, the informant, likely a nightclub tout, said rumors were circulating in Seoul that Kim Deuk-pal was alive.

The subordinates in the same motel room were those who had carried Kim Deuk-pal’s coffin to the crematorium. To those who had seen off Kim Deuk-pal on his final journey, rumors of his survival weren’t hope, but deception. Though they were on the run, they couldn’t let the bastard who disgraced their deceased boss roam free.

There was no mercy for being a minor either.

With a thud, Song Yi-heon’s head turned, and blood sprayed on the ground. Kim Dong-soo readjusted his grip on the collar without giving time to wipe the nosebleed. As he was about to drive his fist into Song Yi-heon’s tilted head, a groan erupted from among the surrounding subordinates.

“Ugh!”

It was the gangster restraining Choi Se-kyung’s hands behind his back. Se-kyung, as if about to fall, leaned his body to tackle the gangster and immediately stomped on his instep with his heel.

“Argh!”

As the gangster stepped back to free his foot, loosening the restraint, Se-kyung turned his body and swung his leg. The long, solid leg struck the gangster’s side. The fighting skills Se-kyung had picked up by eye while following Song Yi-heon were quite impressive, and the hit gangster fell, but numbers prevailed.

Gangsters on either side alternately swung baseball bats at Se-kyung’s back.

“Huk……”

Se-kyung’s back arched, his eyes wide with shock from the unprecedented impact. As Se-kyung fell from kicks to his thighs, a barrage of kicks rained down indiscriminately.

“Stop it!”

Song Yi-heon, who had been taking the beating like a dead man until now, shouted with blazing eyes, and the kicking stopped.

“Don’t touch him. He has nothing to do with this.”

“And what did you have to do with it, to let the boss die and then deceive his memory?”

“That’s…”

The subordinates’ gazes fixed on Song Yi-heon held deep-rooted disgust. A disgust that would never be uprooted unless Kim Deuk-pal came back to life.

Song Yi-heon scanned the subordinates arrayed in a semicircle. The subordinates who had always looked so young now appeared menacing.

“…”

Should he just tell them outright? That he was the dead Kim Deuk-pal? That his soul had entered the body of the boy he tried to save? Song Yi-heon scoffed at himself. As if they’d believe that. Even the sensitive and clever Choi Se-kyung took half a year to notice the soul switch. It would be fortunate if these rough subordinates didn’t just throw punches accusing him of lying.

They might believe him if he tried to persuade them by recounting memories Kim Deuk-pal shared with them. But what would come after was the problem.

What would be the point of revealing it? It’s not like he would turn Song Yi-heon’s life into that of a gangster, and he was supposed to disappear when Song Yi-heon returned anyway.

How pathetic.

Song Yi-heon’s shoulders shook with laughter at the pitiful sight of being beaten and his foolish behavior of getting excited about going to school.

“You’re laughing? In this situation?”

Kim Dong-soo stood askew, as if dumbfounded. Song Yi-heon wiped his philtrum with the back of his hand and shook off the blood. Despite being beaten bloody, he calmly spat out the blood in his mouth without showing fear. Though his behavior of taking the beating until Kim Dong-soo’s anger subsided was irritating, his question was absurd.

“What happened to the organization?”

Kim Dong-soo couldn’t suppress a laugh. How had he ended up in a situation where a wet-behind-the-ears kid was worried about the welfare of the organization? The subordinates behind him seemed to feel similarly; as Kim Dong-soo took out a cigarette and lit it, several of them also pulled out crumpled cigarette packs and lit up.

“Cheeky bastard.”

The smoke that circled through Kim Dong-soo’s lungs maliciously enveloped Song Yi-heon’s face as he exhaled.

“Would you understand if I told you?”

“Tell me because I do understand.”

“Even if you know a little, what could you do?”

“…”

“At best, you’re just a high school student.”

“…”

“Can you even run cigarette errands?”

The subordinates surrounding the utility pole sneered at the obvious mockery.

“Right, I can’t do anything.”

Song Yi-heon’s lips twisted along with them. His lips, wet with blood from his burst mouth, were sickeningly red. It was both self-doubt about his powerlessness and resentment towards his brothers who had lost the organization.

“It’s gone, just like that.”

Kim Dong-soo, sucking his cigarette to the filter between his thumb and index finger, raised an eyebrow crookedly. The perceived temperature, which had been heated by sneers, dropped suddenly as they sensed something ominous. Song Yi-heon grinned defiantly.

“Kim Deuk-pal, if it was going to collapse just because he died, then it deserved to disappear.”