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Sangwoo finds the sound of his knife making contact with Gihun’s neck to be utterly sickening, as the man beneath him gags on his own blood for a while before eventually going limp, and the words of the robotic voice feel like ringing in his ears: “Player 456, eliminated.” The rest of his day was a blur of black as a guard knocked him out with the end of a gun.
When Sangwoo wakes up, he can hear the sound of the bustling city before he sees it, the uncomfortable feeling of lying on the hard plastic of a credit card feels like a knife stabbing into his stomach, and when he opens his eyes, he’s almost blinded by the bright neon lights of the city. His body aches as he moves into a seated position, and he can feel a migraine starting to come on as the recent events all come crashing down on him. He gets to his feet groggily and stumbles his way to the bank, noticing the fact that whoever was in charge had left him so close to one, so he could take out enough money to pay for a cheap motel room in some dirtbag motel for at least tonight. The motel he finds certainly fits the label of “dirtbag motel”, which he pays for with the cash, barely managing to make it to the filthy room to pass out.
In the years after Sangwoo had gained the seemingly unending wealth, he managed to escape from his debts with ease, just barely managing to avoid going to prison for it, started investing some of the money, giving him more money, and gained a bad habit of drinking so much alcohol that he passes out, almost every day. He’s shoved himself into a corner booth at the moment in some fancy enough bar, listening to the conversations happening around him. The waitress had given him a rather expensive-looking bottle of champagne. It was wrong, the fact that he was here, able to do whatever he liked with the money, yet Gihun was probably… Sangwoo doesn’t even want to know what could have happened to that man after his death… It’s not fair that he’s dead, yet Sangwoo is still here. Sangwoo moves on with his life, but Gihun would have mourned. Sangwoo wastes his money getting drunk, while Gihun would have used it to help people. Sangwoo can feel the irritation about his actions beginning to bubble up, so he drowns it down with the champagne, glass after glass, after glass, he drinks until the bottle is empty, and until there are several empty bottles littered around.
Sangwoo wanders along the streets, stumbling and swaying. He doesn’t know where he’s going, but as he gets closer to the bridge, the sounds of Gihun choking on his own blood seem to echo in his mind as clearly as they did all those years ago; the sounds only seem to grow louder as he climbs the railing until the voice of Gihun speaks clearly to him, and the one word is all it takes for him to halt his movements “Sangwoo”, he whips his dead around looking for Gihun even though he knowns he won’t be able to see him. Instead, he sighs, climbing down from the ledge and vowing to himself and Gihun that he’ll at least try to help people from now on, because Gihun would have wanted to help people.