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This is certainly a situation, J3 thinks, reading the sign before him.
Certainly, he’d be able to survive, but the problem was whether he would be able to get out. After all, it wasn’t as though the company was going to be assigning anyone to look for him.
And, worst of all…
‘Ah… it’s him again…’
Chief Researcher Kwak Jaekang looks at him, a gleam in his eyes and a manic smile on his face.
J3 boots up his brain, doing his best to run it at the speed it had been at Before.
That bastard was saying something… but J3 didn’t really care to figure out what he was saying.
After all, him and that guy being in a Darkness together was a fairly wild claim.
…Eh, it’s not like J3 had anything left to lose anymore.
Perhaps one. Perhaps two things. Two people.
But it would be so easy to get rid of the problem, wouldn’t it?
The madman before him was rambling again, but J3 cared not for the disgusting river of words flowing out of the bastard’s mouth.
Instead, he stretches his arms, makes sure he wouldn’t put too much strength by accident and then decked Kwak Jaekang across his face.
The researcher falls silent for a second.
‘Oh… he’s finally quiet…’
Well, that guy would be quiet if J3 just killed him, but since it wasn’t like anyone else was going to witness it anyways there was no reason J3 couldn’t take his time.
…He put Roe Deer through that, after all. J3 thought of himself as a person who had mostly let go of grudges because they were useless to him now. He hasn’t let go of this one, though. Because it wasn’t just about him, and J3 had always taken responsibility for those under his care.
The shocked expression fades from the researcher’s face, replaced with indignation and some level of twisted amusement. He opens his mouth, perhaps to complain, so J3 takes the opportunity to knock his teeth out.
The guy beneath him lets out a choked yell, but J3 just sort of ignores him. What else was he supposed to do?
With a feeling of happiness he hasn’t had in a long time since Park Minseong got him donuts and J3 found Kim Soleum, J3 twists the madman’s arms until he hears a satisfying snap!
No more experiments would be done by these hands.
There is pain on the bastard’s face. There is also a blush on it. J3 always knew he was insane and a freak, so he wasn’t really surprised. He breaks the other arm for good measure. He doesn’t bother with the legs, though. If the guy managed to get away, it certainly would be a good chase for J3.
He had been docile for too long. Too many days spent underneath that dreary company, too many days without action. Now that he was outside– or in the wilderness of a Darkness, he should let loose a bit, right?
The guy’s saying some nonsense again. If J3 were to focus, he would be able to read the shape of his mouth, hear the sound of his words–
He doesn’t want to, though?
‘...I really can’t be bothered.’
Perhaps, in a distant past, J3 would have been ecstatic at a chance to get back at Kwak Jaekang. Perhaps, in a relatively nearer past, J3 would have felt satisfaction at being able to take revenge for his teammates. Perhaps, once upon a time, he had let that anger and hatred consume his entire being.
Now–
Now, well, J3… doesn’t really feel anything? Sure, he feels a bit happy, but that’s more for getting rid of this guy for his juniors than it is on a personal level of satisfaction.
J3 doesn’t like him, sure, but he’s a bit surprised at himself for not feeling too much. He’d dreamt about this day for a long time, after all. Dreamt of bashing his head in or tearing him apart or any other way to viciously kill him and yet–
Perhaps he had sincerely wanted it, once. It feels strange, to have that want fulfilled before him and yet there is nothing but an absence of where his rage should be.
The pain is still there, though. Even if it was a lot milder than it had been for a decade.
‘...I guess time changed me as well.’
So noisy.
Couldn’t he just… shut up?
J3 puts a hand on the researcher’s throat.
He squeezes.
Perhaps it is the wolf that does, perhaps it is J3, perhaps it is both or neither and it doesn’t really matter because J3 is trying his best not to put strength into it because that would just kill the researcher and that wasn’t his current goal.
That guy tries to move his arms. Tries to pry J3’s arms off. It’s fascinating, watching the way the limbs bent at odd angles tried to move inward. J3 didn’t think they’d be able to.
J3 watches Kwak Jaekang’s face turn blue. He’d finally stopped spouting bullshit, now trying to gasp for air. His glasses had fallen off his face at some point– probably when J3 punched him, he guessed– and yet that disgusting look in his eyes hadn’t faded yet.
‘Ah…’
Even if J3 found no satisfaction in the act of engaging in violence with Kwak Jaekang, it still soothed him that at least he was removing this piece of garbage from the world.
It’s really inconvenient. That this bastard has to have his position as Chief Researcher.
J3’s part of the Security Team. Daydream would make him prioritize the company’s profits, but…
J3 was being… what was the term again? “Morally upright”? By taking this piece of trash out of the company. He thinks an employee from a certain elite team would like what he was doing as well.
…Oh, what was he thinking again?
J3 carelessly takes his hand away, shaking it until it looked less like a wolf’s arm and more like a human’s arm. The researcher beneath him gasps for breath, wheezing that sounded like laughter escaping from his throat.
…Ah. So annoying,
The noise rips through his brain like nails on a chalkboard; J3 can hear the guy’s whimpered words, but he can’t be bothered to decrypt them at all. The noise swims through his head, looping around the childish melodies and chanting he has never escaped from.
…He should stop speaking, J3 decides. Even with his teeth fallen out, he was still able to speak a bit.
He should cut off this waste of space’s tongue.
So he does just that.
He holds the guy’s mouth open with one hand– there’s the sensation of blood and saliva and filth but it’s not like he has any other option at the moment. He’s trying to bite J3’s fingers– but it won’t work, he knows he doesn’t have fangs like J3 does. Knows he doesn’t have strength like J3 does. All he has is his brain, and it’s most certainly not going to help him here.
J3 focuses for once.
He focuses on his other hand, making sure it was only the tips of his fingers that turned.
The nails are sharp.
Perhaps J3 should have bitten out his throat instead, but that was probably going to just kill him. And he would have ripped his tongue out with his fangs, but that would probably just please him.
‘...Actually… I can’t really tell what won’t please him right now…’
J3 puts more care than he wants to has he reaches his fingers into that guy’s mouth; as much as he’d like to just rip out his tongue, if he lost too much blood he’d be a lost cause.
Ah, but he was losing a lot of blood right now…
‘Does it even matter?’
…It really didn’t. So J3 makes a sharp cut with his hand and pulls out the guy’s tongue. He no longer needs to focus to decipher Kwak Jaekang’s words; he’s simply unable to produce any with his missing teeth and tongue.
J3 lets out a small hum. It might be a tune that Park Minseung had been humming a couple days ago.
…That thought made J3 a bit angry.
…He really doesn’t know what to do with the tongue in his hand, though. Should he feed it to the guy beneath him? He didn’t want to keep it as a souvenir; that’d be incriminating proof.
Shrugging a bit, J3 opens his mouth and within the blink of an eye and a dozen snaps of a crude jaw it’s gone.
‘...As disgusting as his personality, huh…’
Pushing down his instinctual craving for more flesh and the pleasure of finally consuming something fresh and delicious, J3 licked his lips.
‘That’s one problem solved, then…’
Kwak Jaekang barely has any focus left in his eyes. There’s a wild smile on his face, pain and pleasure and only a bit of fear.
The fear’s nice. He was only ever afraid of unknown variables, after all. Only ever afraid in situations out of his control. He’d underestimated J3, and now he was paying for it.
‘He’s losing a bit too much blood…’
J3 sighed. His clothes were already messy and covered by blood, but he could deal with the stickiness and general unpleasantness of knowing this guy had any part of his being on J3.
‘At this rate… won’t he die of blood loss?’
Oh. That would be a shame, wouldn’t it?
J3 doesn’t bother to glance at the guy’s expression, turning his upper body over to inspect the back of his head.
Strange. How strange, that the only useful asset he had was his brain. J3 would like to rip it out of the back of his head, would like to tear his skin and puncture his skull, would like to hold it in his hands to admire and hate and taste and feast but there’s no point, was never a point, and it doesn’t matter to J3 any more what the him a long, long time ago had wanted.
His mind focuses. For a moment, everything is clear. For a moment, J3 can see every hair and hear every whimpered sound and smell the iron scent of blood and its lingering taste in his mouth.
For a moment, J3 is no longer bound by his original body.
Dutifully, he sheds the skin of a human, and it is the wolf that swallows the Chief Researcher’s upper body whole.
With the snap of his jaws, with the gaze of a dozen eyes, with teeth that are made to tear and claws that are sharp to cut and nothing but the instincts of a hungry predator J3 consumes the blight of his life.
J3 isn’t particularly bothered by the blood or the taste, of course, and despite how much his instincts try to convince him that the bastard was delicious and that he needed to feast more, more, more, the disgust of eating Kwak Jaekang of all people pulls him back to his senses soon enough.
Standing up, J3 pats his clothes. It’s a lost cause; the blood’s pretty much a part of it, now.
‘...It’ll be a hassle to get it out…’
J3 was probably just going to borrow clothes from someone else until he figures out what to do with this uniform.
J3 gazes at the remains beneath him. Aside from the remaining pieces of his legs, intact but covered in blood, there’s pretty much nothing remaining of that researcher.
‘...It’s good that he won’t be able to bother Soleum or Minseong anymore.’
…Unless he had set something up in case he ‘mysteriously’ vanished one day. Even so, J3 is smart enough to take care of that. He still has many year’s worth of instincts from working in this place, after all. And if he bothered to look high enough at the people who owed him but begged that they could do nothing about the researcher, then–
Kwak Jaekang is no longer the bigger threat to them, is he?
It’s been maybe years or a decade since he last brought it up. They wouldn’t dare do anything to J3. Not when he is so very simple to please.
‘Best to get it over with… or so they’d say.’
He doesn’t really know at this point. He’s not even sure how many of the guys who owed him are still alive, but it’s probably enough.
Shrugging, J3 kicks one of that guy’s legs for good measure, watching it fly off into the distance and roll into the grass. If he squinted, he might spot the red amongst the green.
He doesn’t bother to, though. Instead, he ambles back to the sign he spotted earlier.
“[CONGRATULATIONS]”, it now read, where [ONLY BLOOD SHALL GUIDE YOUR PATH]” was written before. J3 isn’t particularly impressed by this Darkness, but seeing as it was relatively simple and easy to resolve, J3 just moves in the direction of where the arrow that had not been there before pointed to. He gets the feeling this Darkness wouldn’t lie, anyway. Call it instinct. It was rather straightforward; the only complicated thing is probably the entry requirements, but he really doesn’t want to think about that right now so he just doesn’t.
As he ambles slowly through the woods, fog rises to cover the path. J3 closes his eyes, sinking back into the familiar pull of fog and childish melodies.
‘...It was worth it.’
When J3 feels the path turn from grassland to concrete, he finally opens his eyes.
It’s night. Pretty late, maybe two or three a.m. if he had to guess. He looks up at the moon.
‘...Ah, so it was a full moon tonight.’
The night of a full moon wasn’t too surprising of an entry requirement.
J3 listens. It’s quiet, but not the deathly quiet of the Darkness, where only the rustling of trees and leaves existed.
Here, he can hear the faint rumbling of cars, can hear the buzz of electricity, can hear the faint breathing of the man lying not far ahead of him on the ground.
Wordlessly, J3 walks over to Kwak Jaekang and nudges him with his foot not-at-all gently.
Sighing, he throws away the scraps of the plan he had made. No point, if this guy was still alive. Now that they’re no longer in a Darkness, J3 doesn’t plan to act unless necessary.
‘...He’s out cold… Doesn’t seem injured, either.’
Except for his missing trouser legs and shoes, it looked as though he had never walked into a Darkness.
‘...He’s missing his glasses as well.’
Good. J3’s sure he probably rigged or trapped or enhanced his glasses somehow. He wouldn’t put it above the guy.
There’s no blood, at least. Not on that guy. Not on J3’s own clothing, either, now that he’s properly using his brain. He’s not sure how his dulled senses managed to not notice it– perhaps it was because there was no reason J3 would miss this bastard’s blood of all things.
J3 doesn’t really know what Darkness that was, and he doesn’t want to recall it, either. And seeing as the researcher didn’t actually try to put up a proper fight, he probably knew what it was.
‘...Eugh. Disgusting…’
J3 contemplates leaving the guy outside on the streets, but gives up at the thought this guy would bother Minseong or Soleum again. He stretches his arms, yawns while making sure he wasn’t doing it with the wrong set of jaws, and, resisting the incredible urge to drag the creep by the foot and let his head bump into everything on the way, he proceeds to throw that guy over his shoulder and start walking to the nearest public transport station he could see.
‘...That guy looks fine.’
It’s annoying. J3 put so much effort into beating him up, yet he still looks so healthy. J3 probably should have killed him properly. Or maybe it was that he ended up eating him instead of letting him bleed out in the Darkness. Whatever the case is, that guy isn’t a cold corpse lying abandoned and unremembered somewhere with the only thing coveting him being flies and maggots, so J3 is understandably upset.
J3 is a certain amount of disappointed that the guy isn’t actually dead, but it was probably a gimmick of the Darkness that they were in. Next time he kills that researcher, he’ll make sure it’s not somewhere that will return things to their original state after leaving.
That rotten guy is still flashing that smarmy smile at people, still dissecting them with his eyes, probably actually dissecting some guy who doesn’t matter somewhere as well, and his hair was pretty greasy from a lack of showering. All in all, as disgusting as the last time J3 had seen him.
He doesn’t bring it up, though.
It probably would have been problematic. There was no way he was going to tell people that he snuck into a Darkness himself. He’d get called an idiot for not even bringing a Dream Collector at the very least. It’d put his position in jeopardy, so like the cunning rat he is he sweeps it all under the rug.
That guy says nothing about it, so J3 doesn’t either.
The gaze that follows him through hallways and the box of donuts sent to him that he likes but hasn’t had the time to buy are disturbingly familiar. J3 hadn’t missed it at all over the years; he does wonder though, why getting eaten only made that guy rekindle his interest in J3.
‘...There’s no use reasoning with freaks.’ J3 concludes, and eats the donuts. Because donuts have committed no crimes. It was probably poisoned, but if he actually managed to find something that could affect J3 then he’d welcome it.
Disappointingly, the donuts are his favourite. He should probably be concerned about why that guy still remembers what he likes to eat after years, but he probably wrote it down in an elaborate document somewhere that included J3’s full legal name and date of birth etc.
J3 doesn’t really care. He’s above caring, now that time has tempered him. That guy wasn’t making a fuss, so J3 wasn’t going to either. Killing him was enough stress relief for the month.
If he acts like a madman to Minseong or Soleum, though, J3 would really have to reconsider the whole “not killing him outside of a Darkness” thing. Even if Soleum asks him not to. It’s worth it for the mental health of his friends.