Three months of chasing shadows. Of knocking on doors that never opened. Of making calls that never got answered.
Kim Taehyung had followed every lead, questioned every name in his notes, but Jonas Ngoni's murder remained a dead end. The witnesses went quiet. The evidence led nowhere. Even the docks, once teeming with whispers, had turned into a void of silence. It was as if the case had been swallowed whole.
By the time evening settled over the precinct, the exhaustion had set deep into his bones. Kim sat at his desk, flipping through his notes one last time before admitting—if only to himself—that there was nothing left to find. Maybe Lee was right. Maybe this case was never meant to be solved.
He let out a slow breath, rubbing his temples. Then, just as he was about to leave, something caught his eye. A stack of neglected case files sat on the edge of the desk. Abandoned. Forgotten. Kim frowned and pulled one from the pile. Medean child missing. Possible latent mutant genes. Last seen four nights ago.
He scanned the pages quickly. The child's name was Iman Daro. Eight years old. Disappeared from his home in the lower districts. Parents filed the report, but no follow-up had been made.
Kim's grip on the file tightened. A missing kid. A possible mutant. And no one had bothered to investigate? He pushed back from his desk, already moving.
Lee was exactly where she always was—at her desk, drowning in paperwork and cigarette smoke. She barely looked up as Kim dropped the file in front of her. "I want this case," he said.
Lee sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. "Of course you do."
Kim ignored the sarcasm. "No one else is handling it."
"Exactly," she muttered, picking up the file and flipping through it halfheartedly. Tap, tap, tap. Her nails drummed against the page.
Kim clenched his jaw. "It's a missing kid, Lee."
Lee exhaled, leaning back in her chair. "Do you even hear yourself? You couldn't crack Ngoni's case, and now you want to chase another dead end?"
Kim stayed silent. She studied him, lips pressed in a thin line. Then, after a long pause, she tossed the file back onto the desk between them. "You really don't know when to stop, do you?"
Kim didn't answer. Lee sighed again. Slower this time. Tap, tap, tap. "This is your mess now," she muttered, shaking her head. "But don't say I didn't warn you."
Kim grabbed the file and turned to leave. Behind him, Lee's voice cut through the quiet. "Mutant cases don't go unsolved, Kim."
Kim Taehyung's apartment was a shrine to unfinished work. Stacks of files littered the floor, coffee cups—some half-full, some long forgotten—crowded the small wooden table, and the dim glow of a flickering desk lamp cast jagged shadows along the walls. The air was thick with the scent of paper, ink, and something else—somethingstagnant, the kind of stillness that settled in places where questions outweighed answers.
He sat at his desk, shoulders hunched, fingers tapping against a notepad. Outside, the city breathed in restless murmurs—distant sirens, the occasional shout from an alley, the hum of tires against wet pavement. A storm was coming, the kind that turned the streets into rivers and drowned secrets before they could surface.
Kim's eyes flicked back to the open file. Iman Daro. Eight years old. Medean. Last seen four nights ago. A child. A mutant. A missing person that no one had cared to find.
He leaned back, exhaling slowly. The case was thin—barely more than a whisper in an ocean of louder crimes. But something about it gnawed at him, the same way Jonas Ngoni's case had. It was too clean, too conveniently forgotten.
Kim picked up his pen and began to draw connections.
1. The lower districts. The place where people disappeared every day, slipping through the cracks of a system that never wanted them in the first place.
2. Latent mutant genes. Not confirmed, but suspected. And if it was true—if—then Iman wasn't just a missing child. He was something else. Something dangerous.
Kim's mind raced. Mutants weren't just criminals in the city's eyes—they were problems. Problems that the right people knew how to make disappear. His pen scratched across the paper.
3. Four nights ago. The timeline mattered. The city was restless that night, he remembered. A protest in the industrial sector. Riot police stationed across the bridge. Could be nothing. Could be everything.
He flipped the page. The case had no official suspects. No witnesses. No leads. It was like Iman had simply—Vanished.
Kim's fingers tightened around the pen. No. That wasn't how this worked. People didn't just disappear. That alone make Kim barely sleep well at night.bSleep never came easy these days.
Kim Taehyung had tried—closing his eyes, letting exhaustion pull him under—but the missing boy haunted the back of his mind, stringing together half-formed theories and dead-end questions. Even in sleep, his thoughts refused to quiet.
Then came the knocking. At first, it was a few dull thuds against the wood. Then more. Louder. Persistent.
Kim groaned, dragging himself out of the haze of sleep. His head pounded as he forced his feet to move, each step heavy with exhaustion. The knocking didn't stop. It came in sets of three, pausing just long enough to let him hope it was over before starting again.
He reached the door, running a tired hand through his hair before unlocking it. The door creaked open, and there he was—his landlord.
The old man stood hunched, short and wiry, with a permanently sour expression. His bald head gleamed under the dim hallway light, beads of sweat forming along his wrinkled forehead. He wore an unkempt tank top, stained at the edges, and a pair of loose shorts that had probably seen better decades. In one hand, he clutched a chipped ceramic mug, steam curling from whatever cheap coffee he was sipping at this ungodly hour.
"Finally," the old man muttered, squinting at Kim like he had just crawled out of a gutter. "Thought you died in there."
Kim sighed, leaning against the doorframe. "What do you want, Mr. Han?"
The landlord took a slow sip of his coffee before answering. "Rent."
Kim closed his eyes for a second. He should've seen this coming.
"You're two months overdue, Taehyung," Han continued, shifting his weight. "Jinjahan ain't cheap, you know that. You owe me 35,000 Lyd total. You got it, or am I wasting my time?"
Kim rubbed his face, trying to will away the exhaustion creeping back in. 35,000Lyd. He barely had a fraction of that in his account.
His salary as a cop? A joke. Just enough to scrape by if he lived like a monk. But after months of chasing dead-end cases—late nights, skipped meals, half-hearted IOUs at the corner store—his bank balance had become an inside joke between him and his debt.
Han took another sip of his coffee, smacking his lips. "I don't run a charity, kid. Either you pay up, or I find someone who can."
Kim let out a slow breath. "I just need a little more time."
Han snorted. "That's what you said last month."
Kim stayed silent.
The old man eyed him for a moment, then clicked his tongue. "Look, I ain't heartless. I know cops don't make much. But I need my money. So, I'll give you till the end of the week. After that? Your ass is out."
Kim nodded, rubbing his temples. "Understood."
Later on, morning came like a dull blade—slow, heavy, and painful. Kim Taehyung arrived at the precinct with a headache from hell and an even worse sense of reality. He barely had enough money to eat, let alone pay his rent, and now he was back at the Jinjahan Police Department, chasing a case no one cared about.
The station was its usual mess. Phones rang unanswered, officers lounged at their desks half-asleep, the scent of burnt coffee and cigarette smoke mixing in the stale air. Papers piled up on neglected corners, and the only people who looked remotely busy were the ones writing reports just to bury them in bureaucracy.
Kim exhaled through his nose and started making rounds. He asked Morales first—an older detective who had been here long enough to stop pretending to care. "Iman Daro. Missing kid, possibly mutant. You hear anything?"
Morales barely looked up from his desk, stirring his coffee with the enthusiasm of a man watching paint dry. "Nope."
Kim waited. Nothing. Morales just took a sip, grimaced at the taste, and went back to whatever meaningless paperwork was in front of him.
Kim moved on. He tried Jinwoo, the youngest in the department, fresh enough that some part of him still believed in justice. But even he just scratched his head and shrugged. "Never heard of it, hyung. And, uh… if it's mutant-related, maybe you should leave it alone."
Kim clenched his jaw. "It's a missing kid, Jinwoo."
Jinwoo gave him a look that said And? before awkwardly turning back to his desk.
The next few were worse. Dismissive glances. Shrugs. Half-hearted excuses. Some outright ignored him.
Finally, he reached Detective Kang—a grizzled officer with a cigarette permanently dangling from his lips and an expression that suggested he'd seen everything and cared about none of it.
Kim dropped the file on Kang's desk. "Iman Daro. Eight years old. Missing for four days."
Kang flicked his cigarette ash onto the floor and barely glanced at the papers.
"Why are you bothering?" he muttered.
Kim's patience was wearing thin. "Because no one else is."
Kang snorted. "JPD doesn't work like that, kid. There's no goodcop, badcop bullshit here. We threw our ideals away just like this city did with its scrapheap of a system." He leaned back, exhaling smoke through his nostrils. "You wanna play hero? Wrong place."
Kim's fists tightened. "This isn't about playing hero. A child is missing."
Kang rolled his eyes. "Then let the right people handle it."
Kim narrowed his eyes. "Meaning?"
Kang gave him a pointed look, tapping his cigarette against the ashtray. "Mutant cases don't just disappear, Taehyung. They get handled. You know who does the handling?"
Kim didn't answer.
Kang smirked. "CPG."
The Capitol Patrol Guard. The real enforcers of entire Edenia. If a case involved mutants—evensuspected mutants—it was their jurisdiction. And everyone in this department knew what that meant.
Kang leaned forward, lowering his voice. "Take my advice, kid. Stay your ass back."
Kim stood there for a moment, staring at the man in front of him—the embodiment of everything wrong with this city. A veteran officer, too jaded to care, too afraid to step out of line. Kim picked up the file without a word. Then he turned and walked away.