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Lee Seonghee (Dolphin) by berriefarm on bluesky
Lee Seonghee believed in kindness.
The kind that bled.
They called her crazy and ruthless but that was only because they saw the aftermath. The trail of dismantled lives, the precision of her choices. What they didn’t see—what they refused to see—was that every decision she made was to protect something soft. Something fragile. Something worth preserving.
Kindness.
Not the shallow kind passed around like charity. Not the performance of goodness that asked nothing of you. She meant real kindness. The kind that left you vulnerable. That required you to look someone in the eye and choose to be gentle, even when no one would know. Even when it cost you something. The gut-deep kind. The hold-someone's-hand-while-they-bleed-out kind. The give-everything kind.
That kind of kindness never survived long in this world.
She had watched the world rip it to pieces. Not out of necessity but out of convenience.
So now, she smiled when people called her ruthless. Because if kindness was to survive, someone had to get their hands dirty. Someone had to slit throats and clean up the blood with a purpose.
Her mother was the kindest person she’d ever known.
And the world had chewed her up for it. Not all at once, but slowly. Patiently.
The Church of the Luminous Unknown hadn’t looked like evil, not at first. It looked like community. It looked like hope. It looked like the answer to all the things her mother had quietly carried for years—grief, poverty, loneliness.
They spoke of Ireum-nim, the Unnamed Light, and whispered of becoming a meaningful existence in a world that had already discarded so many like her. They said that stories—ghost stories—were the world’s true bones, and if you just believed hard enough, if you sacrificed enough of yourself, the world would finally see you. Finally choose you.
Her mother reached out with trembling hands, and the world smiled back—and took everything.
That’s what Lee Seonghee remembered most.
Not the rituals. Not the doctrine. Not even the loss of her home or the hollowing of her childhood.
What stayed with her was that moment—standing in the kitchen, watching her mother cry over the gas bill, and then smile through it like everything was okay.
Because her mother had believed.
Because her mother had been kind.
And it had killed her.
That was when Lee Seonghee understood: the world didn’t punish cruelty. It punished softness.
It wasn’t the vicious who got swallowed whole—it was the gentle. The ones who hesitated, who gave others the benefit of the doubt. The trusting, the honest, the ones who tried to do everything right—they were the ones chewed up and forgotten. Meanwhile, the cruel twisted systems like puppet strings and walked away with everything. They weren’t just untouched; they were celebrated for it. Elevated. Given promotions, airtime, book deals. The world didn’t just tolerate cruelty—it fed it.
She remembered asking once, when she was still a child, still trying to understand how it all worked, why the kindest people always seemed to suffer the most. Why the good ones were always the ones who died first—or worse, the ones left behind, sobbing at hospital beds or eviction notices or funerals with nothing in their hands but a memory. Her mother had gone quiet, folding laundry with trembling fingers, eyes fixed on nothing in particular. And then, with a voice barely above a whisper, she’d said, “That’s just how the world works.”
Lee Seonghee didn’t ask again after that. But she never forgot the answer.
For a while, she tried to play by the rules. She tried to stay soft, believing it was the right thing to do. She held doors open, bit her tongue, forgave people who didn’t deserve it. She said “please” and “thank you” and “I’m sorry” more times than she could count. She thought maybe—just maybe—the world would see her trying and give her a chance.
But the world didn’t notice kindness unless it came with a cost. It didn’t see her until she bled. It didn’t listen until she screamed.
So Lee Seonghee stopped waiting for permission. She stopped asking for fairness. And she fixed it.
She joined Daydream with a smile on her face and steel in her spine. Played nice with the creeps, the liars, the barely-contained murderers. She knew what they were. She knew what she was becoming. But it didn’t matter because she wanted that wish potion more than anything. Not for herself but so that the world could breathe again without monsters hiding under every bed, without kind people having to build armor just to survive.
If someone had to die to make that future possible? Good. Let it be someone who deserved it. That was fine. It was green even.
“It’s environmentally friendly for evil people to die,” she said once, during a mission debrief.
“We don’t gut the wolf because it howled,” she continued. “We gut it because it’s already in the sheep pen. Just think of all the sheep we’re saving by killing the wolf.”
She remembered the room going dead silent.
A pen slipped from someone’s fingers—hitting the table with a click, sharp and soft, like a punctuation mark. It sounded like a full stop. Like no one knew where to go from there.
Across from her, Supervisor Park looked up from his notes, eyebrows drawn together in an expression somewhere between confusion and concern. Like he was trying to decide if she was joking. Like he hoped she was. One of the new field agents—she couldn’t remember his name, just the nervous energy—shifted uncomfortably in his seat, like he suddenly wasn’t sure if he was on the right side of the table. Another agent stared down at their tablet, pretending to scroll, their posture a quiet retreat.
Lee Seonghee didn’t blink. She didn’t explain.
She’d almost laughed. Not because it was funny. But because it was so obvious—and still, they looked at her like she’d just kicked a puppy.
But that was the thing: she wasn’t hurting puppies.
She was saving them.
And the people who lit them on fire for fun? The ones who built myths out of violence and wore their cruelty like a badge?
They didn’t need a second chance.
They didn’t need to walk away.
This was humanism. Not the sanitized, peer-reviewed kind. Hers was splintered, and bloodstained. Hers had bite marks.
The thought came to her sometimes.
In the quiet moments.
Between kills. After the reports were filed, and the blood had been scrubbed away. Sometimes she’d catch a glimpse of herself in a reflection—mirror, window, scalpel—and wonder:
What would I have been in a kinder world?
Not everyone got to wonder that. Most people didn’t need to.
But she did.
Because she had loved soft things, once. Books with happy endings. Tea on rainy mornings. Holding her mother’s hand as she fell asleep early. That version of herself wasn’t fake. It was just… unprotected. And the world had eaten it alive, tooth by tooth, until all that remained was bone and will and a very particular kind of clarity.
So now if she smiled while she carved justice into monsters, well—that was the least of their worries.
There was another thing they never understood: the blade wasn’t proof she’d given up on the world. It was proof she hadn’t.
Because she still believed in people.
The right people.
She didn’t like killing.
She just accepted it. Like gravity. Like rot.
Like a surgeon accepts amputation: not because they enjoy it, but because they’re trying to save what can be saved.
It hadn’t been a decision. Not really. It had been a conversion. A reckoning. If the world punished kindness, then it was the world that needed to change—not the kind. And if no one else was willing to make that change, to become the thing that stood between the wolves and the lambs—then she would.
“I’m not a monster,” she once said, flashing a bright grin at a man who begged for mercy—after he had chosen to sacrifice a well-meaning teammate just to save himself. She thought it only fair, then, to repay him in kind when the time came. “I’m what happens when good people are left to rot.”
“The world doesn’t filter for goodness,” she explained to one of the rookies who tried to argue with her after she came back from that mission. “It filters for whoever screams loudest and has the most teeth.”
She smiled, bright as daylight.
“I just scream louder. And carry knives.”
And that made her terrifying.
It didn’t help that sometimes, Lee Seonghee laughed while she killed. Not out of cruelty—but out of disbelief. Disbelief that the world had let it go this long. That bad people, horrible no good people, kept getting chances while others like her mother—quiet, soft, achingly human—had been erased for being too kind.
Her sense of justice wasn’t fragile—it had fangs. And she wielded it with the grace of a surgeon and the cheer of someone who genuinely liked her job.
They’d stared. Silent.
She liked that part, too.
Her justice wasn’t broken. It just had edges. She loved people. Not all of them. Just the right ones.
Because she did. She liked saving people. She liked being the one who stood between a predator and their next victim.
And if that meant someone called her unhinged, or dangerous, or inhuman?
Well, that was fine with her. She’s rather be the scalpel than the wound. She wasn’t ruthless because she enjoyed it. She wasn’t cold because she wanted to be. A scalpel was not like a blade. She didn’t kill meaninglessly. She cut so something could heal.
It wasn’t about rules. Rules bent all the time. They had to. She bent them too, sometimes. But not for herself. Never for herself.
Intent mattered. Impact mattered.
Sometimes, she had dreams. Of silence. Not peace. Peace was too far off—too clean. But silence? That was possible. The absence of screaming. The stillness that came after the storm, when the wolves were gone and no one had to look over their shoulder anymore.
She didn’t hate the world. That was the hardest part.
She loved it.
It was the world that made that love impossible. The world that made kindness a liability. And she was just trying to carve out a space where kindness could exist again—quietly, safely. Even if she didn’t get to live in it herself.
And deep, deep down—below the smile, below the sharpness—there was still a version of Lee Seonghee who wished none of this had been necessary. A girl who could have stayed soft. Who could have studied plants, or medicine, or poetry. Who could’ve gone her whole life without ever holding a knife for anything other than dinner.
But that life had slipped through her fingers a long time ago—soft as steam, irreversible as breath. In its place was this one: forged in grief, edged in necessity. And most days, she didn’t let herself mourn it. There wasn’t time. But every now and then, when the mission was over and the mask came off, when the world finally stopped screaming—there was space.
The dorm room was quiet.
Too quiet.
Not the kind of quiet that comforted. The kind that settled over her like dust, heavy and stale.
Lee Seonghee sat cross-legged on the bed, a wet towel draped around her neck. Her hair was still damp, sticking to her jaw. She stared at the ceiling, blinking slowly, letting the silence crawl into her bones.
It was rare, this kind of pause. Between reports and prepping for the next exploration, there were usually people to talk to—cowards to needle, killers to correct, liars to smile at until they flinched.
But tonight, it was just her. No blood on her hands. No fresh screams in her ears. Just… nothing.
She hated it.
Because it made space for thoughts.
Like: What if I’d been someone else?
She closed her eyes.
She didn’t believe in alternate universes. That was someone else’s kind of hope. But sometimes, she couldn’t help it. Couldn’t stop the image from rising—her, in another life. Soft clothes. A small garden. Maybe a clinic somewhere rural, where she treated minor injuries and made dumb jokes about tetanus shots.
Maybe she still smiled, but it wouldn’t be this smile—the one that made people flinch.
Maybe she would’ve stayed kind.
Not weaponized. Not sharpened to survive.
Her fingers curled in the blanket beneath her. Not tight. Not angry. Just... thoughtful.
She remembered reading books as a child, where the good guys won just by being good. Where monsters were beaten with truth and love and maybe a sword, but mostly, just by believing hard enough.
She’d wanted to be one of them.
And then the world had answered: No.
So she became something else.
It was still kindness, in a way. Just the kind that bled. The kind that didn’t flinch when mercy had to be measured. She still believed in good people. That hadn’t changed.
But she didn’t believe they would survive without someone like her clearing the path.
And sometimes… sometimes that was the hardest part. Knowing that if the world had been different, she might’ve been one of them.
She looked at her reflection in the dark dormroom TV screen. Her face was faint, distorted, but the smirk was still there—faint, automatic, razor-edged.
“Hi,” she whispered to the girl she might’ve been. “I’m sorry you didn’t make it.”
The smile dropped, just for a second.
Then the moment passed.
The quiet wrapped back around her shoulders, and she let it. Folded it neatly, like a blanket.
She would move again soon. Another Ghost Story. Another monster wearing the skin of a man. Another justification waiting to be peeled back and judged.
She would smile again. She would make it clean.
But tonight, just for a breath, she sat in the stillness and mourned the life she never got to live.
And then—like always—she let it go.
The quiet lingered.
But it didn't suffocate her. Not entirely. She wouldn't let it.
Lee Seonghee exhaled slowly, the kind of breath that almost felt like surrender—but wasn’t. She didn’t do surrender. Not even here. Not even now.
She stared at her reflection in the dark screen again. Still faint. Still warped. But behind the tiredness in her eyes, there was a spark. Steady. Undimmed.
Yes—she mourned the girl she might have been. The version of herself that could’ve lived in a gentler world, laughed more easily, touched without flinching. She mourned that loss the way a surgeon mourned a ruined limb. With respect. And without hesitation.
Because what she became was better.
Necessary.
The world had made its choice. It cheered for monsters in suits and ties. It protected predators with regulations and PR teams. It looked away when the kind were broken.
So no, she wasn’t like them.
The evil ones—the ones she hunted—they killed because they could. For power. For control. For the thrill of getting away with it.
But she? She killed because she had to. Because the alternative was worse. Because letting them live meant more bodies, more victims, more of the rot that no one else was willing to carve out.
Her blade was mercy. Her justice, brutal but clean.
And if no one else had the stomach for it? Good.
She wasn’t interested in moral approval from cowards.
“I’m not like them,” she said aloud.
The room didn’t argue. The silence didn’t press. It listened.
She stood, moved to the mirror over the sink. Stared at herself this time, real and clear. No distortion. Just her—Lee Seonghee, surgeon of the rot, smiling executioner of monsters.
“They hurt for gain,” she whispered. “I hurt to end the hurting.”
A beat. Her eyes narrowed slightly, just enough to harden the softness that tried to creep in.
“They kill because they like it.”
Another breath. Calm. Steady.
“I don’t.”
A smile pulled at her lips again—small, sharp, and real.
“I kill because I believe people deserve to live in a world where they don’t have to become me.”
Her voice didn’t shake.
She picked up her coat, shrugged it on. The next assignment would come soon. It always did. Another monster, another lie, another stain on the world.
She’d cut it out. Like always.
Because someone had to. And she was the only one who could.
So she let the grief stay, tucked like a photo in the back of a wallet—quiet, folded, and never shown. It didn’t make her soft.
It made her sure.
Sure that the weight she carried had meaning. That every cut, every choice, every terrible thing she’d done had carved the path for someone else to walk safely. That her life—sharp, haunted, necessary—was still an act of love, just shaped differently.
But the girl who once believed love would be enough?
The one who cried at bedtime stories and thought monsters could be reasoned with?
But that girl was gone.
And the world didn’t mourn her.
So Lee Seonghee didn’t, either.
Not out loud.
She just worked. She smiled. She bled evil dry.
And if someday, in that dream where silence finally came, she got to meet the version of herself that never had to kill—
She hoped that girl would understand.