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"Aaaah! What are you doing?!"
"Hehehe. Stay still, you bitch. Oppa's gonna give you something good."
"Don't! I'll report you!"
"Report? Go ahead. The world's gone to shit, who are you gonna report to?"
"...Please stop. I have a husband."
"Really? Even better. You'll have a mature flavor."
"Please..."
A fifty-something man was raping a woman who looked to be in her early to mid-thirties, heedless of her pleas. They were both Westerners, so I didn't know who they were, but their expressions and reactions were so vivid that it was impossible to see it as acting.
'Why the hell did they make something like this?'
What I was watching was a movie titled 'D-7' that was currently a hot topic all over the world. Actually, I wasn't sure if the title was 'D-7', but it was a video attached to a post with that title, so everyone was calling it that.
The content was third-rate movie material itself.
Suddenly, the Earth was covered in a mysterious fog, monsters crawled out of the sea and rivers, and then the movie showed how people were broken down in a week in a world destroyed by monsters. It was a 60-minute fake documentary film.
If it had just shown ordinary people, I would have thought it was made to show the cruelty of humanity, but it had pyromaniacs throwing fireballs, crazy physiques jumping up a floor at once, and it was a mixed bag of superpowers, disaster, and even porn.
Even the cause and the ending were never explained.
It was like watching a web novel that only uploaded free chapters and then went on hiatus. The content was the same. If I tried to find similar novel openings, I could find dozens.
The content itself wasn't particularly well-made or innovative enough to attract worldwide attention.
Of course, it was rare to see such a high level of explicit expression of serious crimes such as murder and rape.
But this movie hadn't come down from the world's hot topics for a week now.
It wasn't because of the movie itself. It was because the movie was simultaneously uploaded to every site in the world, big or small. It was even on encrypted sites, and even on the bulletin board of a rural elementary school, so it couldn't help but become a hot topic.
'I thought 'D-7' might mean D-Day, but there's still no announcement. Did it just mean showing a week?'
It's none of my business that excessively violent and sexually explicit videos were exposed to minors without any filters.
I don't care that the movie content is only stimulating and boring as hell. I didn't pay to watch it, so what does it matter if it's fun or boring?
I'm just curious about the intention behind doing this.
I can understand uploading a video to an elementary school bulletin board with poor security.
If it was just one or two public institution sites, I could accept that another great madman had appeared in this industry.
But uploading a 60-minute video simultaneously to every site in the world?
As someone who's even slightly involved in this industry, I knew better than anyone else how absurd that was. Naturally, I couldn't help but wonder why the hell they did that.
That's why I kept replaying the movie, looking for any clues.
"Turn on the lights, you bastard. Who would look at this place and think someone's working?"
I was thinking about why someone would use such a movie to cyber-terrorize the world and who would be capable of such a thing when Hyung Jin-ho came into the room, turning on the lights.
Usually, when a job comes in, he sends it through a messenger, not coming all the way to the officetel. The fact that he came all the way here meant it was another bust.
"There's no work, so what am I gonna work on?"
"Sigh. They say there are so many cheating couples, why don't we have any customers?"
"..."
I was about to say that the state of the shop would make even regulars run away, but I stopped myself. All he would do is spout some bullshit philosophy that skill is the most important thing.
In fact, our skills aren't that great either, with a detective who got fired from the team for taking kickbacks and a third-rate hacker who works with pre-made programs, but we're still better than those guys who only investigate with legal methods, just poking around on social media and blindly barging in.
However, a private investigation agency isn't an industry that gets a lot of word-of-mouth. Unless the case is big, most of our small shops get requests to investigate cheating partners, so word doesn't spread well.
So first impressions are important, but it's frustrating that he's just leaving the office like a cramped room and talking about skills.
"What's that, that weird movie? Why are you watching it again?"
"Just because. I'm wondering why they uploaded something like this."
"Aren't they promoting themselves? Like, we're so awesome, if you have a hacking request, hire us."
"Who promotes themselves by posting on elementary school bulletin boards? They'd have all their assets seized if they tried to promote themselves like that. Besides, there's no signature or anything in the movie, no matter how you look at it."
"Could it be something that only people in the know would recognize?"
"I guess it could be."
If it's a place that can really do something like this, it's possible. A place with technology that's so unimaginable wouldn't take on requests to investigate cheating partners like us.
"You haven't eaten, have you? Let's go out for a meal."
"I don't want to. Let's just order in."
"Food tastes best when you eat it as soon as it comes out of the restaurant. Don't argue and come on out."
Even though Jin-ho Hyung runs a private investigation agency full of thugs, he's the one who's been feeding me for almost 10 years because I can't do anything and I have poor social skills.
Of course, he didn't just help me out for no reason. I got the job as an electronic document organizer at the agency, but it was enough to be grateful for the fact that he hired me, a middle school dropout runaway who was wandering the streets at the time, and provided me with room and board. I started studying programming to help Hyung, who's hopeless with digital technology, and ended up becoming his business partner.
If it weren't for Jin-ho Hyung, I wouldn't be living a normal life like I am now, so he's definitely my benefactor.
But regardless of whether I think of Jin-ho Hyung as my benefactor, it was hard to put up with his stubbornness.
He doesn't like doing anything with his smartphone, he has to go to a restaurant to eat, and the Chinese restaurant he orders delivery from has to be called directly using the store number written on the wooden chopstick wrapper. You could believe he came from the past 20 years ago.
"Sigh. Okay, let's go."
There was no point in resisting, he'd drag me out even if he had to, so I put on a hat to cover my greasy hair and went outside.
"What? It was bright a minute ago?"
But when I came out of the officetel, the fog was so thick that I could barely see the buildings across the street. The visibility was so short, I doubted it was even 10 meters.
"Does fog suddenly set in like this?"
"I guess so."
"They say there's a lot of abnormal weather these days, maybe it's something like that."
"It's not like it suddenly rains, but fog suddenly sets in like this?"
Come to think of it, this scene feels familiar.
"Huh?"
"What's wrong?"
"Hyung, doesn't this look like something we saw in that movie earlier?"
"Movie? Oh, that movie. Yeah, it starts with a sudden fog there too, doesn't it?"
Jin-ho Hyung seemed to think it was just a thick fog, but I'd never seen such a thick fog before.
The movie I watched earlier naturally came to mind. In that movie, an incredibly thick fog spread all over the Earth just before the disaster started.
"Nah, no way..."
But I shook my head. Even if I conceded that the fog was possible, the idea of monsters crawling out was something I couldn't accept logically.
"Hahaha. What are you thinking? Surely monsters aren't gonna come—"
Screech—
Crash—
"Aaaah!"
"Fuck! What the—!"
Jin-ho Hyung, who had been laughing in disbelief, stopped as if he had pressed pause at the sound of the collision and screams coming through the fog. I also stopped walking and turned my head, following the screams.
But I couldn't see anything because of the fog. But I didn't need to see it to know that the screams weren't the kind of exclamations you make when you trip and fall. It was a scream of desperation, a scream that made my skin crawl.
"What is it? Was there an accident?"
"Hyung. Let's go inside. I have a bad feeling about this."
"Nah, it's probably just an accident. Monsters are gonna co—Aaaah!"
Just as I was about to tell him to go back because of a strange sense of unease, someone suddenly appeared through the fog and clung to Jin-ho Hyung's back, biting his neck. It bit so hard that blood gushed out like a fountain from the back of his neck.
"Aaaah!"
"Jin-ho Hyung!"
The scene was so surreal that I just stared blankly, but Jin-ho Hyung's scream snapped me out of it. This wasn't the time to be spacing out.
I immediately rushed to tear off the crazy bastard who was clinging to Jin-ho Hyung's back.
'What the hell is this?'
When I grabbed his shoulder, I felt an unpleasant stickiness and a cold temperature. When I looked closely, it was clearly the shape of a person, but the all-black eyes and the pale, almost bluish skin didn't look like a person at all.
'Why is this for real?!'
But I'd seen this bastard before.
It was the monster from 'D-7'.
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