ABVSA 01

Chapter  01

A sharp pain stabbed through his abdomen.

No, “stabbed” wasn’t enough to describe it.

It felt like a red-hot iron rod was gouging through his insides.

‘Kkhh…! It hurts! Someone… help!’

He wanted to scream, but no sound came out.

Blood rose up his throat, choking off his airway.

Every ragged breath carried the metallic stench of blood deep into his lungs.

“Cough!”

A clot of blood spilled from between his lips along with a violent cough.

Han Suhyeok clutched his convulsing abdomen.

Through his fingers, hot, sticky fluid kept pouring out without end.

The life in his body was seeping away through that opening.

‘Where… am I?’

Through his blurred vision, he could make out a dark alley.

Only when the cold cement touched his cheek did he finally begin to remember what had happened to him.

‘I… am I dying…?’

He had definitely been stabbed.

Not once—but multiple times.

Along with the sensation of being butchered came the vile curses of his attackers.

Why would an ordinary job-seeking college graduate end up with such a hellish fate?

A random attack? A contract killing? Revenge?

‘I didn’t do anything worth getting assassinated for.’

—“Seriously, why’d you stick your nose into the Cheolsu gang’s business, you bastard.”

‘…So there was a reason.’

The voice of the man who had whispered while plunging the knife into his abdomen replayed like an auditory hallucination.

Yes. It was revenge killing.

Suhyeok’s memory passed through the blood-soaked present and rewound to a few days earlier—his ordinary life.

That day had been utterly unremarkable.

Like any other job seeker, he had overslept and was walking to the convenience store in front of his house to grab a late lunch.

As he trudged along, a black car with heavily tinted windows stopped in front of him.

At the time, he didn’t sense anything unusual.

It was just a normal urban street scene anyone would ignore.

But in that moment, something unfolded that would completely change his life.

A delivery motorbike rider wearing a Chinese restaurant uniform pulled up next to the car.

Then, in a split second, the rider tossed a white powder-filled bag through a gap in the window and vanished like smoke.

It all happened in an instant.

It was so fast that most people would have missed it, but Suhyeok happened to see it directly.

“…Wait, is that the drop method you only see on the news?”

He had heard about the seriousness of drug distribution in society, but he never imagined witnessing a crime scene firsthand.

He could have just pretended not to see it.

If he had simply closed his eyes for a moment, he could have gone on living peacefully, grinding raids like always.

No one would have blamed him for looking away.

But his hand had already pulled out his phone and dialed 112.

He casually walked into the convenience store and reported the vehicle and motorcycle plate numbers in detail.

Even he didn’t know why he did it.

Sense of justice?

Inability to tolerate wrongdoing?

Neither.

He was just an ordinary person who could be a bit cowardly like everyone else.

‘It’s annoying.’

That was all.

It simply annoyed him that criminals were running around in his neighborhood.

It wasn’t like he lived in a luxury villa complex where property values mattered.

It was just an instinctive rejection—like seeing trash on the street and feeling compelled to clean it up.

‘I reported it. The police will handle the rest.’

He had memorized the license plate number without meaning to.

A strange day indeed.

Normally, he wouldn’t have been able to remember something like that just from glancing at it.

‘I should go home and play some raids.’

And just like that, he forgot about it.

His mind was filled only with Monday’s job interview and weekend raid plans.

Then Monday came.

On his way home after the interview, a man suddenly jumped out of an alley and slashed at him without hesitation.

“Ugh.”

He couldn’t even scream before being stabbed in the abdomen and dragged into the alley.

It wasn’t late at night, but the area wasn’t busy enough for anyone to witness Han Suhyeok’s murder.

That was the last fragment of memory he had before death.

‘Live… I need to survive.’

From the deepest part of his brain, a survival instinct surged up violently.

He had to crawl out of the alley and call for help.

‘No… even if I just show myself like this…’

Someone would call an ambulance.

But that hope was short-lived—sleep began to overwhelm him.

His vision narrowed, and he instinctively realized death was right in front of him.

‘I only reported it because it was annoying…’

It felt unfair.

And then a question arose.

‘How did they know I reported it? They said Cheolsu gang… so that’s them.’

The question remained, but his consciousness could no longer hold on.

Like a dying candle, his awareness flickered and sank into darkness.

And then—

Flash!

His eyes suddenly snapped open, emitting a strange black glow.

A dark energy oozed from his eyes, clinging viscously to his entire body.

“Gghh… agh…! Kghh!”

His supposedly dead body convulsed violently.

The alley filled with inhuman groans and twitching spasms.

Then the sound twisted into a horrifying scream that didn’t seem human.

“AAAAAAGH!!”

After thrashing like a freshly caught fish, his body gradually calmed down.

An unbelievable event had occurred.

The heart that had clearly stopped began beating again.

Color returned unnaturally to his pale face.

Even more shocking—the wounds on his abdomen began to close with grotesque sounds.

Torn muscle reattached. Skin regenerated.

His eyes opened again.

“Ghh!”

He sat up abruptly, gasping for air.

The pain and fear of death had vanished like a mirage.

Realizing instinctively that he was alive, he touched his abdomen.

Smooth skin. No scar.

Not even a trace remained, as if the stabbing had never happened.

“W-what… is this?”

Even seeing it with his own eyes, he couldn’t believe it.

There was a pool of blood where he had collapsed, and his clothes were soaked with it—clear evidence of what happened.

Yet his body was completely intact.

Even his internal organs seemed to have stabilized; the blood no longer rose in his throat.

“Maybe it’s not a dream… then what?”

Only one conclusion came to him.

“Did I awaken?!”

He had given up hope of awakening after reaching his late twenties.

And only now, at the edge of death, had the door finally opened.

“Well… at least I awakened in time.”

Otherwise, he would have been a corpse rotting in a cold, dark alley.

What mattered was that he had survived.

And figuring out his ability was the priority.

“First… I should go home.”

He pushed himself up from the blood-soaked alley floor.

It was early dawn, and he didn’t encounter anyone on his way home.

Once he arrived, he threw his blood-stained clothes into the trash and stood under the shower.

He checked his abdomen in the mirror again.

No wounds. No trace at all.

Only his complexion looked unusually pale.

“Probably because I lost so much blood.”

He stepped out and cooked a meal.

An overwhelming hunger surged through him.

It felt like all his energy had been consumed for reconstruction.

Even as he ate desperately, his mind was focused entirely on “awakening.”

He deliberately did not summon the System immediately.

He wanted to steady himself first before opening the status window only awakened individuals could access.

Like opening a long-awaited package.

“Phew.”

He put down his spoon and exhaled deeply.

“Alright… let’s open the gift.”

This was a gift from God.

Not only had it saved him from death, but it could completely change his life.

His heart pounded with excitement, but he forced it down and called the system internally.

‘System.’

In an instant, a blood-red status window flickered before his eyes.

Han Suhyeok stared into the void, steadying his breath.

[Name] Han Suhyeok
[Class] God of Hell, Reaper
[Level] 1
[Condition] Mark of Hell
[Skills]

• Reaper’s Eye
• Judgment Punishment
• Hell Shop
• Reaper Body

He stared at the status window.

Each skill name alone sent a chill down his spine.

But what drew his attention most was the strange phrase in the condition field.

“Mark of Hell?”

He instinctively checked its details.

[Mark of Hell]
If you do not send one sinner to Hell within one month, the marked individual will be dragged into Hell instead.

It was a death warrant.

A sentence declaring that if he did not commit murder within a set period, his soul would be dragged into the depths of Hell.

Normally, a human would be consumed by terror.

But Han Suhyeok was different.

“…Ha.”

A low chuckle escaped his lips, soon turning into laughter that filled the room.

“Hahahahahaha!!”

He clutched his stomach, laughing hysterically.

But there was no madness in his eyes—only exhilaration beyond description.

This was not the scream of someone driven insane by fear.

It was the eruption of dopamine from a man thrilled to become an agent of Hell—thrilled that he could now “clean up trash” from the world.