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There are disasters that guarantee a death toll.
Not a mere possibility of death, but an unavoidable casualties dictated by the ghost story itself.
Sometimes the rules are disgustingly simple.
The first person who enters the room will be chosen as a sacrifice.
The shark will always target the proactive one.
At the exit line, a random person would disappear.
Attempting to extract a child would kill said child.
Like a law written in the very fabric of reality, something that is impossible to challenge and change.
Agent Choi always hated these disasters. Where any effort is meaningless, where each and every decision will not bring the desired outcome, where resistance simply futile.
The satisfaction he feels when he manages to break them is vile. Oozing from the too wide smile, vindictive and hateful, as he cleaves through the unshakable law and forces the reality to yield.
The agents tend to openly joke how the world seems to favor Choi’s choices. Allowing him to push and break when others had to bend themselves. If so, the world ought to stop birthing living nightmares rather than favor one measly human.
More often than not, agent Choi too had to play whatever game the ghost story decides to be.
Including those that demand sacrifices.
But guess what?
“Hey~”
The Distribution Team, a relatively small division responsible for assigning regular rescue operations, seems to freeze at his call. Leaning in the doorway, Choi notices how the senior members are suspiciously absent.
“Who was it that assigned my cute little junior to the mountain lodge?”
Taking lives is a burden that must be assigned to those who are known to bury it in the backyard.
Ryu Jaekwan was not that person.
Oh, Choi’s junior was an amazing agent. He’d never had anyone better, – except for the elder, – and he can’t wish for anyone better, honestly. Ryu Jaekwan was scarily efficient in what he does, unflinchingly performing his duties with a perfect, acute knowledge that they constantly toe the end-line.
He has that core of steel that would make him move even when all hope is lost. Rationally, methodically, just to give that hope to someone who still could have it.
Yet Ryu Jaekwan was also fondly compassionate.
A quality many would think that Choi has.
Precisely the reason why his dear junior shouldn’t have been ever assigned to the mountain lodge disaster.
Met with silence, Choi slinks into the room.
“Why, if you needed someone to fill in, you could have called me over~”
He almost sing-song the last part, and the agent at the nearest desk flinches, squeezing his hands.
They likely chose Ryu Jaekwan because he’s efficient. His junior would aim to eliminate the root of the disaster as quickly as possible, meaning he’d don the serial killer mantle and immediately start to clean the house.
Choi would have left them to their own devices. Checked the lodge, poked the keeper if the entity was still on the premise. Nag the civilians he’d encounter, prodding and poking until he gets a reaction, then backtracks and lets them stew in it. Someone would be picked as a murderer, start their spree, and Choi would cut them off, then withdraw again.
The difference is that Ryu Jaekwan would have to psyche himself on killing civilians, albeit guilty according to the ghost story.
Choi would be taking out contaminated targets that proved they are rotten.
It didn’t quite matter that Ryu Jaekwan returned with almost no blood on his hands.
His junior was still shaken, though largely due to the civilian that destroyed the ghost story completely, preventing it from happening again, and Choi would find time to properly celebrate and pester about it, – should have tied that civilian up and borrowed them for the bureau, – yet it didn’t change the fact that Ryu Jaekwan was assigned to the disaster that demanded from the agent to kill all the rest of the participants.
It scarcely mattered that the rest were sinners or criminals.
Ryu Jaekwan didn't become an agent to be an executioner.
Choi...
Well, that wasn’t his intention too, but the point stands. There's a reason why certain disasters get funneled through certain agents, and the mountain lodge – with its quaint little death game of find the killer or become one – was not good for his junior’s empathetic heart. It’s Choi who exposes the rotten ones like pulling weeds, easy and almost meditative.
The silence in the Distribution room stretches, thick and cloying.
Choi taps his finger against the doorframe. Once. Twice. The rhythm of it carries something worse than shouting ever could.
"I'm not mad, you know?"
He is. Enormously. But not in the way they think.
A junior agent – can't be more than a year on the job, trembling like a rabbit in a wolf's den – opens his mouth. "S-Senior Agent Choi, the assignment was approved by Team Lead Park before he..."
"Left early? How convenient."
Choi's smile doesn't waver. That's the worst part about him, the Distribution Team has collectively decided at some unspoken point. The man smiles the same way whether he's buying coffee or dismantling a high threat anomaly with his jakdu.
He steps further inside, and the room seems to contract.
"Park Jihoon approved it," Choi repeats, rolling the name over his tongue like tasting something unpleasant. "Park Jihoon, who has been in the bureau for – how long now? Eleven years? Twelve? Long enough to know the lodge demands an agent comfortable with targeted elimination. Long enough to know Ryu Jaekwan's profile."
He plucks a pen from the nearest desk, twirling it between his fingers. The owner of said pen doesn't dare reclaim it.
"Which means either Park Jihoon didn't read the disaster brief, which is unlikely, since he's annoyingly thorough, or he read it and decided my junior was expendable enough to throw at it anyway."
The word expendable lands like a slap.
Agent Choi has a personal vendetta with this word. Sometimes, the Bureau would get employees from that company in their custody. The way agent Choi’s eyes light up each time he gets the approval to have a chat with them is damnable. Better yet if they get there after a nice run-in with him inside the disaster.
"Neither option makes me happy, you see~"
Choi leans against the desk now, crossing his ankles, the picture of leisure. He examines the pen like it's the most fascinating artefact he's encountered this week. The junior agent beside him has gone so pale he might as well be a ghost story himself.
"I... We tried to suggest alternatives," another voice pipes up. Braver. Female. Choi tilts his head and recognizes Agent Sulphur from logistics support. She meets his eyes, though her jaw is tight. "Team Lead Park said the priority was speed. Agent Bronze was the fastest available."
"Fastest available," Choi echoes.
"You were on a suppression in Incheon. Unreachable for the deployment window."
Ah.
So that's how it was.
Choi stops twirling the pen. The room collectively holds its breath, and he lets them marinate in it. Three seconds, five, seven. He sets the pen down with a soft click.
"Then I have no quarrel with any of you."
The exhale that ripples through the room is almost comical.
"But,"
Choi straightens, brushing invisible dust from his sleeve.
"Do relay a message to our dear Team Lead Park when he graces us with his presence tomorrow."
He pauses at the doorway, half-turning. The overhead light catches something in his expression that the smile can't quite hide.
"Tell him agent Choi from Hyeonmu Team 1 would like to have a chat about resource allocation. And that I'll be bringing tea, so he needn't prepare anything~"
The promise of tea is, somehow, the most threatening thing any of them have heard all week.
Choi leaves the way he came, – light steps, hands in his pockets, humming something tuneless, – and the Distribution room doesn't unclench for a full three minutes after his presence fades from the hallway.
He finds Ryu Jaekwan in the recovery wing.
His junior had been cleared physically hours ago, so not as a patient. Ryu Jaekwan is sitting in the hallway outside one of the occupied rooms, legs stretched out, head tipped back against the wall. Eyes open, staring at the ceiling like it owes him answers.
Choi recognizes the posture. The decompression period after a disaster where your body is fine but the rest of you is still catching up to what your hands did.
He doesn't announce himself. Simply drops down beside his junior, mirroring the pose, and stretches his own legs out until their shoes are nearly touching the opposite wall.
Silence. Comfortable but slightly inquisitive, from Choi's end. Still necessary and a tad contemplative, from Jaekwan's.
A minute passes. Two.
"The civilian," Jaekwan says, finally. Choi quickly gauges his voice. Doesn’t seem like Jaekwan forces it to be steady, which is already a good sign. "The one who broke the ghost story."
"Mm."
"They shouldn't have been able to do that."
"And yet~"
Jaekwan turns his head, and there it is, the crack in the composure. It’s relieving to see it’s not distress. Something closer to bewilderment, like the universe handed him an answer in a language he hasn't yet learned.
"Senior. They weren't an agent. They weren't even aware. They just, they followed the rules but they also didn’t. They tricked the disaster into thinking the rules were followed, refused the tangible reward and chose to uproot the disaster itself.”
Choi hums, low and pleased.
"Sounds like someone I want to meet."
"I thought you'd say that."
"Did you get their contact information?"
"...I left them my personal number."
Choi barks a laugh at that. He grins, for real this time, nothing like a polished weapon he offers in conference rooms and recently in the distribution office, but the crooked, slightly unhinged one that Ryu Jaekwan has long since stopped being alarmed by.
"That's my junior~"
Jaekwan exhales, something loosening in his shoulders. Uncoils just enough to know that his junior will sleep, will eat, will show up tomorrow still carrying the weight but not buckling under it.
Choi bumps their shoulders together, a brief, grounding pressure.
This pressure wouldn’t have been enough if the culling had had to happen like it was supposed to be. Choi’s mood threatens to sour again, yet the warmth beside him is a two-way road.
"The lodge is done. You did well."
"I barely did anything. The civilian..."
"Jaekwan-ah."
His junior stops.
"You walked into a disaster that asked you to become something you're not. You held the line until an impossible thing happened. And you had the sense to let it happen instead of getting in the way." Choi tips his own head back, mirroring the ceiling-stare. "Half the senior agents I know would have botched that last part. Control issues. You know the type."
A beat.
"You mean you, senior?"
"I absolutely mean me."
The ghost of a laugh. Quiet, exhausted, but there.
Choi lets the silence settle back in, warm this time, and begins mentally drafting the very pointed, exquisitely polite email he's going to send Park Jihoon before their little tea meeting.
Taking lives is a burden that must be assigned to those who are known to bury it in the backyard.
Choi has a lovely backyard. Spacious and well-tended. Room enough for every ugly thing he's ever done and every uglier thing he'll do before whatever waits for him at the end decides he's kept it waiting long enough.
Ryu Jaekwan does not have a backyard.
Choi intends to keep it that way.