The detective had been traveling for a month straight, chasing every clue. Each one, no matter how small, led him down the same road—towards the ruins of an orphanage. And now, finally, towards the man who had once run it.
The director.
The old man sat in a dim room, lit only by a weak lamp, his hands trembling yet his eyes strangely alive. When Yohan asked him about the orphanage, the man only smiled, a smile too calm for the horrors he was about to confess.
"The orphanage," he began slowly, "was never an orphanage. It was an experiment base. They used the children like clay… trying to mold them into super soldiers. The kind who feared nothing, whose intelligence was greater than a thousand men. Each child either died, or became a monster. But there was one… one I still remember."
Yohan's chest tightened. "Who?"
The director leaned back, eyes gleaming with memory. "A boy. A twin. Abandoned. We called him the masterpiece. He used to sit here with me, quiet as a ghost, always reading. A fragile thing, but his mind… terrifyingly sharp. Before we could test him, before the experiment began—" The director chuckled, as though the memory amused him. "—the entire orphanage burned to ashes."
Yohan froze, his breath shallow.
"What happened to the boy?"
The old man's smile widened, unsettling. "His face was completely burned. I admitted him into a hospital. He died there."
Yohan's knees gave out. He sank to the floor. Every road, every clue, had led him here—only to uncover a truth more disgusting than he could bear. Children used as weapons. Children turned into corpses or monsters for the sake of men's conflicts. And all of it buried, hidden as though their screams never existed.
The old man poured him a glass of water, his wrinkled hands steady. Yohan drank, though his throat felt hollow. Then his eyes caught something on the table.
A book.
Its title burned into him like a curse: Incomplete Angel.
He shot up, grabbed it with trembling hands.
The director laughed softly. "That one… it was his favorite. He read it endlessly. Along with two others."
Yohan stared as the man pulled them down from a dusty shelf and set them before him.
Deal with the Devil.
God of the Trumpet.
The Incomplete Angel.
The detective held all three, his mind spinning. His hands shook not from fear, but from the weight of something monstrous closing in.
The director watched him with a smile that never broke.
Yohan turned and walked out without a word, clutching the books. The night air hit him like a knife, cold and endless.
"What horrors am I stuck in?" he whispered to himself, his voice breaking. "What kind of monster have I been chasing?"