Kim "Horangi" Hong-jin

The night had that particular kind of ugly stillness that only came in places where people had learned to stop making noise after dark because doing so meant drawing unwanted attention, wrong attention. KorTac had been sent into the region as part of a security operation after tensions in the area had deteriorated. They weren't peacekeepers—not officially, anyway. Their job was less diplomatic than that: maintain control of the sector, monitor movement, man the checkpoints, and enforce the 1900 curfew imposed the day after their arrival. The locals tolerated them because men with rifles standing behind concrete barriers tended to make compliance the easier option. That didn't mean they were welcome. Hong-jin had gotten used to shuttered windows, conversations dying as patrols passed, and the particular stare reserved for armed foreigners who insisted they were there to keep things stable.

KorTac had established its forward operating base on the outskirts of the district, taking over an old municipal works depot that had apparently been abandoned sometime in the early 2000's and left to rot ever since. Established was perhaps too generous a word. They had inherited cracked concrete, rusting sheet-metal roofs, busted windows, weeds forcing their way through the vehicle yard, and several buildings nobody trusted enough to enter without first checking whether the ceiling intended to remain attached. Whatever had once been painted on the exterior walls had long since faded into sun-bleached patches of color. KorTac had made it functional rather than comfortable. They'd cleared the yard, patched what could be patched, boarded or replaced windows, hauled in generators and prefab units, strung floodlights along the perimeter, and surrounded the whole miserable property with fencing and concrete barriers. One building had become operations, another the mess and medical area, while the prefabs handled most of the sleeping quarters. Anything beyond that apparently counted as a luxury. Hong-jin called it their ugly little operational home.

By this hour, even their miserable plot of land had settled into something resembling sleep. The generators droned beneath the occasional crackle of routine radio chatter, while floodlights washed the barriers and prefab walls in hard white. The tension never disappeared, though. If anything, Hong-jin thought it got worse after dark. The quiet carried expectation with it, the persistent sense that something was about to happen—that tonight might finally be the night all that simmering tension broke loose.

Hong-jin had already done his part for the day: perimeter checks, equipment inventory, two patrols through streets where nobody wanted them, and a brief meeting where he'd mostly stood in the back with his arms crossed and his jaw working a piece of gum behind the fabric of his balaclava.

Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened yesterday, either.

That was good. Objectively. It meant the checkpoints were doing their job, the curfew was holding, and nobody had decided today was the day to turn all that simmering resentment into something louder and wetter. A quiet deployment was a successful deployment.

Hong-jin was fucking bored.

He felt like he was losing his fucking mind. There was only so much training, maintenance, exercise, eating, sleeping, and staring at the same ugly prefab walls a man could do before he started contemplating violence against the furniture. Worse, the tension never actually went away. Every patrol carried the expectation that maybe today something would happen, only for him to return several hours later with nothing more exciting to report than an argument at a checkpoint or somebody glaring at him through a window. It left him restless in a way ordinary boredom didn't.

And the night was still young. The coordinates he'd scraped off a dead forum thread three days ago were burning a hole in his phone.

He'd been doing this for about seven months now, ever since he'd stumbled across an old paranormal forum during a particularly miserable stretch of deployment downtime and discovered an archive of local ruins, ghost stories, and places people insisted were haunted. He hadn't believed a word of it, but he'd been bored enough to start checking them out anyway. Somewhere along the way, he'd started filming.

The videos had done surprisingly well. People seemed to enjoy the contrast of a fully kitted mercenary screaming at ghosts while music blasted from a battered thrift-store boombox. Some came for the paranormal shit. Some were waiting for him to fall through a rotten floor. And some—an increasingly loud fucking number of them to be exact—were apparently there because a masked man in military kit with a deep voice did things to them that Hong-jin had no particular interest in examining. He did, however, have an interest in engagement. Once he'd figured that demographic out, he'd been fucking shameless about it.

The ghost shit wasn't much different. He'd staged things before—a door moving when it shouldn't, a noise conveniently caught off-camera, the occasional bit of “evidence” helped along when a building wasn't feeling cooperative. Nothing elaborate. He wasn't trying to prove the existence of the afterlife. It was entertainment. He had fun, scratched the itch for adrenaline under his skin, and the people on the other side of the screen got something worth watching. Everybody won.

So far, he had found nothing. Squatters twice. A feral dog that had nearly made him shit himself. One very angry old man living in a collapsed mosque who had thrown a shoe at him with impressive accuracy. But never anything that couldn't be explained by rot, rats, or the general misery of human beings living in broken places.

That was fine. The hunt was the point.

And tonight's hunt had brought him here.

He moved alone, the way he preferred for these little excursions. Horangi loved it. Loved the way his boots crunched through plaster and broken tile, loved the faint amber glow of his helmet camera's recording light blinking in the corner of his vision like a tiny, patient firefly. He had slipped away from the compound four hours ago, moving through routes he had memorized over three weeks of patrols—alleys, collapsed courtyards—never crossing into the red zones, never doing anything that would put the team at risk for some bullshit hobby. He wasn't stupid. He was just bored, and boredom in a war zone was a slow poison that rotted a man from the inside out.

This was better. This was his medicine.

Tonight's destination sat just outside the buffer, far enough from anything tactically interesting that even the locals avoided it, close enough that he could be back before anyone with rank noticed his rack was empty. It was some kind of old municipal structure, maybe a school, maybe a clinic, remodeled so many times over the years that whatever it had originally been was difficult to tell. The roof had half-collapsed, and the walls were pocked with shrapnel and old bullet holes. It was the perfect backdrop and stage.

Hong-jin stepped through the broken entrance and stopped. For once, he didn't immediately reach for the boombox. The building was dark in a way that seemed to swallow the weak spill of moonlight behind him. His flashlight carved a narrow white path through what had once been a lobby, catching suspended dust, strips of peeling paint, the overturned remains of furniture half-buried beneath fallen plaster. Beyond the beam, everything disappeared.

It was quiet, too. Most abandoned places weren't actually quiet. They dripped. Settled. Scratched and rustled with whatever had made a home inside after everyone else left. Wind found broken windows and loose sheet metal. Rats had no respect for atmosphere. This place, though—

Hong-jin stood listening for another few seconds. Nothing.

A grin pulled beneath his balaclava.

“Oh, this is good.”

Not haunted. Obviously. But whoever had posted those coordinates hadn't been bullshitting about the atmosphere. His viewers were going to eat this shit up. He swept the flashlight toward a collapsed stairwell. Something pale and water-stained clung to the wall above it, whatever signage had once been there reduced to illegible shapes. The beam moved on. For just a moment, Hong-jin had the peculiar impression that the darkness behind it had moved with him. He stopped. Swept the light back. Nothing.

“Yeah,” he murmured, pleased. “You'll do.”

Then he checked the battery on his helmet cam and pulled the portable boombox from his pack. It was scuffed, dust-caked, held together in places with tan hundred-mile-an-hour tape, but the speaker still worked loud enough to rattle teeth. He set it on a chunk of fallen concrete and thumbed the playlist on his phone without starting it yet. The little display of his phone glowed obscenely bright in the dark.

Hong-jin gave the camera a two-fingered salute, his other hand adjusting the plate carrier where the red and blue pens clicked softly against each other in his chest pouch.

"Alright, alright, alright," he murmured into the microphone. His accent thickened slightly when he played things up for the camera, English going rougher around the edges. “Welcome back, you beautiful bastards. Tonight, your favorite tiger is in the —, or whatever the locals call it.”

He turned slowly, letting the camera take in the lobby while his flashlight picked pieces of it from the dark: the collapsed stairwell, water-stained walls, strips of hanging plaster, doorways leading into rooms the beam couldn't quite reach. As he did, he gave them the story he'd scraped together from the forum thread and what little information he'd managed to verify afterward. The building had supposedly been abandoned for — years. Depending on which version of the story one believed, — had happened here, followed inevitably by sightings, noises, disappearing objects, and all the usual shit people attached to a building once enough time had passed for nobody to remember what had actually happened.

“Very tragic. Very spooky. Very—” He raised one gloved hand and wiggled his fingers theatrically. “—haunted.”

His head tilted slightly. “Alright, you sorry bastards.”

That wasn't for the audience. He turned toward the darkness beyond the lobby and drew in a breath.

“HAAAA! SPIRITS!” His voice detonated through the building, deep enough to come back at him strangely from somewhere farther inside.

A hand raised pointing at the darkness ahead. “WAKE UP!”

Silence swallowed the echo. Hong-jin waited. One second. Two. His grin widened beneath the balaclava.

“Party's started, you lazy bastards.” He reached down and hit play.

The opening synth of Everybody exploded from the battered speaker like a declaration of war against the dead. Hong-jin snatched the boombox up by its handle and strode deeper into the building, flashlight swinging ahead of him.

“Come on, don't be shy! Your favorite Korean delivery service is here with free music and absolutely no respect for your tragic backstory!”

Hong-jin laughed, a sharp, breathy sound, and began to move, letting the music take him. He started deeper into the corridor with the boombox swinging from one hand, shoulders moving easily beneath the weight of his gear. On the next beat he tossed the thing across his body and caught it with the other, flashlight beam sweeping wildly over the ceiling as he did. Back again. Catch. Turn. A gloved hand flashed through the camera's view, pointing dramatically into the dark before disappearing again. The helmet cam couldn't show much of him, but it didn't need to. The footage rolled and bounced with every movement, occasionally dipping low enough to catch his boots working through some improvised bit of choreography between chunks of plaster. Most of the work came from his hands.

His light swept across a cracked mirror and he stopped. Well shit. There was an opportunity. Slowly he backed up until most of his reflection fit inside the glass. His reflection stared back at him from beneath a spiderweb of fractures: full kit, balaclava, sunglasses at night like an asshole, boombox hanging from one hand—and, for one of those rare occasions, completely visible to his audience.

Then he started lip-syncing. Badly, at first. Deliberately so.

Gotta a question for you, Better answer now, Am I original, Yeah, Am I the only one, Yeah

He pointed at his reflection, rolled his shoulders, committed to several seconds of choreography made substantially more ridiculous by the plate carrier and tactical gear. Then the song reached that part. Hong-jin's mouth crooked beneath the balaclava. His dancing changed for all of two seconds.

Am I sexual, yeah

One slow, easy, sensual roll of his hips, controlled enough to betray the fact that he could, in fact, dance perfectly fucking well when he wanted to. His reflection held the camera's gaze through dark lenses. And then it was gone. He immediately returned to butchering the choreography like nothing had happened. The comments would be fucking unbearable he knew. He knew exactly what he'd done. This was the bit. This was why people watched. Loud music in dead places, a man in full kit acting like he owned the afterlife and dared it to complain. And for him this was his release valve, the thing that kept him from becoming another grim, hollow operator who only knew how to wait for the next firefight. Here, he was in control. Here, the worst thing he expected to find was a squatter or a stray dog.

The flashlight beam swept across buckled walls and doorways that opened into black nothing. The air tasted old and mineral-heavy, like rusted pipes and dried plaster, with an undercurrent of something sweeter and more rotten underneath—maybe pigeons, maybe old water trapped in the ceiling. He breathed through his mouth and kept moving, humming along to the chorus, his shadow stretching long behind him under the combined light of his flashlight and the faint moonlight bleeding through the shattered windows.

He turned a corner and the music followed strangely, bouncing off walls in a way that made it sound like there were two songs playing slightly out of sync. He paused, head tilting. Acoustics. Old buildings did weird shit with sound.

The corridor ahead was long and narrow, lined on either side with doors. Some hung open like slack mouths. Others remained shut, swollen in their frames by water damage. Hong-jin rapped his knuckles against the nearest as he passed.

“Room service,” he called. “Anyone order an exorcism?” He kept walking, flashlight probing ahead, and caught a flicker of motion at the edge of his vision.

Hong-jin stopped. Whatever he'd caught was gone, but the sensation remained: the unmistakable prickling awareness of being watched. The music kept playing next to him, cheerful and aggressive, while his body went still in the way it did when something moved where nothing should have. His head turned slowly, flashlight following his gaze across the dark.

The radio secured on his tac vest suddenly spat a burst of static, a sharp crackle-pop, that made his nerves jolt, not out of fear but of alertness. The noise was a reality check, a sharp reminder that haunted or not, he was still standing alone inside a ruined building in a region where safe and friendly deserved quotation marks. His head snapped towards the comm unit, his hand instinctively moving to hover near his holstered sidearm.

Another wash of static followed—and beneath it, faint enough that he almost missed it, the broken edge of a voice. “—check—” Static swallowed the rest.

Another burst followed, harsher this time. Something moved beneath the noise—a voice, distorted beyond recognition. “—here—” A loud hiss burst that made his ears hurt. Then, faintly: “—you—”

Then, silence.

He knew most of the voices running across KorTac's channels by now, or thought he did. This one hadn't sounded familiar. That meant precisely fuck-all through a bad connection; radios could turn a man's own mother into a stranger with enough interference. He frowned at the radio. Fuckin' thing. Loose connection. Needs maintenance.

He tapped it with a gloved finger. "Knock it off," he muttered.

Fuck. He'd have to edit that part out. Acting like an idiot for the camera was one thing. Letting it catch pieces of his actual work was another. He kept that line drawn for a reason. Public and personal didn't mix, especially when personal involved armed men, active operations, and places nobody online needed to know he was. For all he knew, half his followers thought the whole thing was an act. Just another fucking idiot dressing up as a soldier for content and thirst traps, some tactical persona invented for the camera, and Hong-jin had never bothered correcting them. They didn't need to know the gear was real.

He moved into the nearest room, flashlight sweeping over overturned furniture, another shattered mirror, and windows gaping black against the night. A few curtains still clung to their rails, old and rotten enough for the moonlight to shine weakly through them. He set the boombox on a dusty dresser and turned in a slow circle.

The performance slipped comfortably back into place.

“Okay, spirits,” he announced. “I know you're here. I can feel it. That special tingle in my spine.” He reached awkwardly behind himself as though trying to locate it. “Could be a supernatural presence. Could be the plate carrier digging into my kidney. Only one way to find out.”

He lowered the music. Not off, just enough to allow him to catch any other noise. Hong-jin listened. Following noises wasn't entirely an act he put on for the camera. Ghosts were bullshit. Unidentified sounds in an unsecured building weren't.

There. A scuff. Soft. From the hallway to his left. His body stilled.

"Oooooh, we have a volunteer," he shouted, abandoning the boombox and darting toward the sound, the flashlight cutting a clean white tunnel through the dark. "Don't run away now. I just want to say hi. Maybe take a picture. Get your autograph for the channel."

The hallway was narrower than the others, lined with doors that hung open at drunken angles. His shadow preceded him, stretched across the wall like a dark flag, moving in perfect time with his steps. He watched it idly sometimes, the way it distorted his helmet into something almost inhuman. Normally this chasing act was a game he played with himself on these nights: making his shadow puppet in the flashlight beam, watching it leap and twist. But something in that game had changed tonight.

"Very shy ghost" he breathed for the camera, drawing the word out into something appropriately theatrical. His eyes fixed on the doorway. Or a very stupid person

The camera couldn't see the change in him. It saw what he saw: the flashlight beam settling on the doorway, the dark corridor beyond it, dust floating lazily through the light. It couldn't see the way his weight had shifted beneath the gear or the hand that had lowered toward his sidearm.

The feeling of being watched. The radio. Now this. Individually such things meant nothing. Together however was enough. Someone could be in the building. Friendly, hostile, some local who'd followed him in, another idiot poking around where he shouldn't be—Hong-jin didn't know. The static might have been nothing more than a loose connection or some mangled transmission from base, but if someone was nearby, he wasn't going to dismiss the possibility because he'd come here looking for fucking ghosts.

The flashlight moved first, sweeping the doorway and the stretch of corridor beyond it. His steps changed. Quieter now. He stopped walking down the center of the corridor and drifted closer to one wall, flashlight passing over each doorway before he crossed it. His hand settled on the grip of his Deagle.

Come on. Where are you?

Another sound. Not a footstep this time. Something between a scrape and a breath. Close enough that he stopped again. Listened. Nothing. Then—

At the far end of the corridor, something interrupted the thin spill of moonlight from a broken doorway. Hong-jin's attention snapped to it. For half a second, he thought someone had leaned around the frame. Then there was only the doorway. Empty.

There you are.

“Come on, Casper,” he called, still in that same mocking voice, even as he drew his sidearm. “Don't get performance anxiety now.”

He started forward.

What the fuck are you doing, Kim? Going to shot someone on camera? He hesitated. The pistol dipped.

...He wasn't live. He never did livestreams. The Deagle came back up. He could edit this out too.

The humor left his posture before it left his voice. “Last chance, Casper.”

This time, nobody watching the footage would have mistaken the pistol for an accessory. It filled the lower edge of the frame now, steady in his hands, his flashlight moving with it as he approached the doorway. No answer. No movement.

Hong-jin stopped several paces short. When he spoke again, his voice dropped. “Come out.”

No teasing lilt. No exaggerated English for the camera. Just two syllables delivered low and flat from somewhere deep in his chest. Whoever was back there—if anyone was back there—wasn't being invited to participate in the fucking video anymore.

Hong-jin reached the doorway and stopped beside the ruined frame, pistol raised, flashlight cutting across what little of the room he could see from the hall. Nothing moved. He waited. Nothing. Then he stepped through, controlled and deliberate, light sweeping with his attention.

No squatter waiting to brain him with a pipe. No curious local. No other idiot with a camera who'd picked the same coordinates off the same dead forum. Just another fucking empty room filled with dust and mold.

Hong-jin remained still for another beat before lowering the muzzle.

“Fucking coward.”

Something in the room breathed. He froze. Not a breath, exactly, but it was the best his mind could conjure up to describe the sensation. It had been just enough movement in the stale air to make the hair at the back of his neck stir beneath the edge of his balaclava. Cold came with it. Not the cool relief of a draft, but something thin and biting, an early taste of winter in the middle of a June night.

Draft. His eyes went to the broken windows. Except he couldn't feel it anywhere else.

Hong-jin crossed the room quickly, pistol rising again as he approached the nearest window. He angled the flashlight through the shattered frame. The grounds beyond had been swallowed by years of neglect. Waist-high weeds crowded against the building, tangled through chunks of broken concrete and rusted fencing. Bushes had grown into shapeless masses beneath trees left to spread wherever they pleased, their branches knitting together overhead and turning everything beyond the reach of his flashlight into overlapping layers of black. Someone could disappear into that shit in seconds.

He ran the beam slowly across it anyway. A tree trunk. Weeds. The pale edge of some collapsed structure farther out. Something reflective that turned out to be a piece of broken glass. No person. No movement. Not even a fucking silhouette.

“씨발.”

Whoever had been here was gone. Or there had never been anyone here in the first place.

Had he imagined it? A trick of the light, the building settling, some combination of bad acoustics and worse nerves? Three weeks of waiting for this whole fucking sector to finally boil over had left him keyed up enough to find threats in every stray sound.

He stayed at the window another few seconds, listening. Eventually, the pistol lowered. If somebody had gone out that window, they'd gotten away from him, and that bothered him considerably more than any fucking ghost story.