Kill Your X Chapter 70

“I, too, was shocked when I first heard the story. The incident dates back more than ten years. Song Gyujin, who found his father’s periodically repeated behavior strange, secretly followed him one night and witnessed his father’s crime scene right here. The scene of Song Jeonggun killing a fellow police officer and burying him in the ground.”

Just then, Hyun Jin nudged my side. The live broadcast was on his phone screen. The number of real-time viewers had surpassed a thousand, and the comments were scrolling by too fast to read.

“To cut to the chase, I will now show you the evidence. Song Jeonggun is completely denying all charges, from the past police disappearance case to the corruption involving collusion with gangsters. Let’s see if he can still do that after seeing the evidence that will come out. The truth will eventually be revealed.”

At a signal from Detective Nam, Hyun Jin and I began to dig. It had been so long that we couldn’t get the hang of it at first, but we both recalled our military experience and soon picked up the pace of our shoveling. Detective Nam watched us, holding the camera with a slightly anxious expression.

How much time had passed since then? Hyun Jin’s breathing became noticeably rough. Looking at the pile of dirt heaped up next to him, he asked in a small voice.

“Heok, Sunbae. How much deeper do we have to dig?”

“Just a little more. My father handled it alone, so he wouldn’t have buried them that deep. You go a little further to the side and dig.”

“Yes, Sunbae.”

As the shoveling continued for over ten minutes, the viewers found another source of entertainment instead of the broadcast. It was doxxing the ‘Song Jeonggun’s son’ who was involved in the exposé. Someone claiming to be my middle and high school classmate even appeared in the comment section, coming out of nowhere.

In the meantime, the digging continued. I remembered it being about this deep, but was my memory distorted because I was on the verge of death? As results didn’t come easily, I grew impatient.

Although he didn’t rush us, the complexion of Detective Nam standing nearby gradually turned ashen. He had bet his life on my claim, and if no evidence came out here, it would be a complete disaster. It was obvious that people would no longer listen to his exposés in the future.

“Wow. I was cyberbullied not long ago. I thought I had heard all the curses I would ever hear in my life back then, but I’ve set a new record today. I guess people are doing group buys for mops to stuff in their mouths these days.”

Hyun Jin, who checked the broadcast while pretending to catch his breath, clicked his tongue at the malicious comments. People, tired of the endless waiting, were pouring out bowls of curses.

Sweat poured down my forehead like rain, and I was out of breath. Just as I was starting to feel the limits of my stamina, I felt a different sensation at the tip of my shovel. I carefully touched it again, but the foreign feeling remained. A chilling sensation spread through my heart.

“Wait, Detective. Come over here.”

“Did you find the body?”

I threw down the shovel, got into the pit, and carefully cleared away the dirt with my hands. Hyun Jin, next to me, was horrified at the skull that was soon revealed.

“Heok, it, it’s really here!”

“That uniform! That’s Detective Kang’s. He wore it like a school uniform when he was on duty!”

I thought it would just end up as a farce, but when a skeleton suddenly appeared, the broadcast comment section went wild. Detective Nam’s hand, holding the hand-held camera, trembled like an aspen leaf. The number of concurrent viewers easily surpassed ten thousand as people, hearing the news, flocked in. The back pocket of my pants, where I had put my phone, vibrated incessantly. It was obvious who was calling without even checking.

An excited Detective Nam pushed us.

“More, dig faster! There must be one more. Stop dawdling and hurry up!”

The clothes and shoes we were wearing were all a mess. The sky quickly darkened, and we had to rely on the lights we had hung on the trees.

Once the evidence came out, Hyun Jin, who was as exhausted as I was, rolled up his sleeves and jumped into the pit. Hyun Jin, who was digging at the ground with his hands like a mad dog, suddenly screamed and fell backward.

“Sunbae, aack, Detective! Here, it’s here!”

The second skull was discovered by Hyun Jin. Just as I had done, he was carefully brushing off the nearby dirt when he suddenly stopped.

“What’s wrong?”

Hyun Jin looked up at me. His eyes were filled with fear.

“You said there were two missing fellow police officers, right?”

At his trembling voice, I took Hyun Jin’s place and started digging. I soon understood why his face had turned pale. After digging around a bit more, we were confronted with a daunting truth.

This… was a result that no one had expected. Detective Nam, having grasped the situation, covered his mouth.

Every moment, including the one where we were in a panic, was streamed live on the internet that day.

“There, there are more than two bodies buried here. We’ve found at least four so far. If we dig more here, maybe….”

I heard the sound of the sky collapsing, and then my vision suddenly brightened. Several helicopters were hovering in the sky. It was emergency personnel dispatched after hearing about the controversy.

The broadcast ended there.

That day, a total of seven bodies were discovered on Mt. Woojung.

✽✽✽

The interrogation room inside the police station, which I was visiting for the first time in my life, was much more bleak than I had vaguely imagined. Did my father become like that because he had been in this kind of environment for a long time? Or was he born evil? I wondered as I watched the people observing me from the corner of their eyes through the window.

I climbed the mountain, shoveled, and was arrested and interrogated. I had been up almost all night, so I was extremely tired. I had my eyes closed when suddenly, the surroundings became noisy. My father went into the room connected to the interrogation room and gave some instructions, and the blinds on the window were drawn. Soon after, the door to the interrogation room opened.

As if his instructions to the other staff weren’t enough, my father covered the CCTV camera in one corner of the ceiling with his own jacket. His next action was as I had expected.

“You son of a bitch.”

Crash!

My father kicked the chair I was sitting on hard. I tumbled to the floor without resistance.

“Song Gyujin, are you out of your mind!”

His angry voice thundered inside the interrogation room. I looked up at my father, who was panting with uncontrollable anger, and smiled brightly. In contrast, my father’s expression crumpled like a piece of paper in his hand.

“There’s a limit to causing trouble. Do you even know what kind of crazy thing you’ve just done? Do you know, and yet your eyes are so wide open?”

“I just acted as I was taught by you, Father. The realization of justice. We just didn’t nail it to the wall, but wasn’t that our family motto? What’s wrong with reporting a person who has committed a crime so they can be punished?”

A fierce volley of kicks rained down on my body. Still not appeased, my father kept spitting out harsh curses. His eyes were bloodshot; he had completely lost his composure.

“Wow, now violence too. This is a police station, right? Not some dirty gangster den.”

“Shut up! I told you clearly. There will be no special treatment just because you’re my son. Do you think you can get away with this after ruining a perfectly good meal? Huh?”

“Cough. So, are you going to kill me again?”

It was a bit of a gamble, but the momentary draining of color from his face convinced me. The moment I had so longed for had come, but instead of feeling relieved, I felt sad.

“What, you remembered.”

It seems that shock therapy is the best way to awaken memories submerged deep in the subconscious. Just as I had when I saw Seo Seunghan die and come back to life, my father seemed to have regained his lost memories after seeing me cause trouble on Mt. Woojung.

It was obvious that he was both furious to the point of exploding and confused at the same time. It’s not that I don’t understand why. I was the same way every time I recovered a piece of the past. I asked myself dozens of times a day if I was really crazy.

“Honestly, you’re curious, aren’t you? How I’m alive right now.”

“You….”

“You clearly choked the life out of me back then, so why am I perfectly fine now, more than ten years later? And why have you completely forgotten such an important memory until now?”

My father’s body staggered. I clearly heard him lean his hand against the wall and mutter,

‘Am I possessed by a ghost?’

I picked up the chair and sat on it. It was very comfortable to sit crookedly after always insisting on a straight posture. It was just that, but I felt as refreshed as if I had broken out of an egg.

“Song Gyujin, you… you know something?”

“You don’t need to know, Father. It’s too late, but you just need to take responsibility for what you’ve done now. That’s all I want.”

“……”

“Admit to everything: secretly colluding with the Kumto gang, sacrificing others to protect your own position. And tell them that arresting Seo Seunghan as a suspect was a complete fabrication.”