The Villainous Director Is Raising a Child!

The words were barely out.

"Bang—!!"

Park Wonjin kicked back his chair and shot to his feet, ready to flip the desk over.

"You! You! You crazy son of a bitch!! What kind of bullshit is this?!"

"Witness! Sit down! Sit down!"

"I did it? Where does a shameless bastard like you get off lying?!"

As Park Wonjin thrashed, foaming at the mouth, the guards beside him hurriedly bore down on his shoulders and pinned him.

But it was already too late.

Fwip-fwip-fwip—! Fwap! Fwap!

The hundreds of camera lenses that had been trained on me swung toward Park Wonjin all at once, as if on cue.

"Mr. Park Wonjin! Is Director Chae's testimony true?!"

"Is it correct that you led the experiments yourself?!"

Bursting flashes, shouting, and Park Wonjin's flailing curses all tangled together, and the hearing chamber turned in a flash to uncontrollable bedlam.

"Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!"

Even the sound of the gavel coming down hard enough to shatter the platform was on the verge of drowning in the noise of the frenzied crowd.

Committee Chair Number One's face flushed red with dismay.

"Order in the hall!! Everyone, calm down! Calm down!!"

He screamed loud enough to tear the microphone apart.

"Bailiff! Bailiff, what are you doing! Restrain those people right now! Drag them out!!"

It took a full ten-odd minutes more before a mass of guards was thrown in and the free-for-all of shouting and scuffling was forcibly put down.

Only an eerie stillness lingered in the hearing chamber the storm had swept through.

Park Wonjin, agents bearing down hard on his shoulders from both sides, glared at me through his tangled hair as if to kill me, breathing hard.

"Everyone, settle down. One more disturbance and I'll have you forcibly removed."

At Committee Chair Number One's steely warning, the murmuring hall went quiet as if doused with water.

"Witness. Continue your testimony."

I'd kept my eyes softly shut through the commotion, and only now slowly lifted my eyelids.

"Yes, of course."

I straightened my clothes again and, putting on the most grave and earnest expression in the world, opened my mouth.

"Honorable Chairman. As I said earlier, 'Project R' was already under way long before I took my post here at Nest."

My voice settled low over the hushed hearing chamber.

"The whole thing was organized so secretly and so meticulously that even the Bureau — its own supervising body — couldn't grasp the ugly truth of it."

"You! Ngh!!"

The more I spoke, the more violently Park Wonjin's body heaved.

He worked his mouth as if he'd go mad from the injustice of it, but with the agents on either side wrenching his arms down, he couldn't so much as get out a scream.

I watched him a moment, then fixed my eyes forward again and landed the finishing blow.

"But thirteen months ago, the Bureau's leadership finally caught wind of something amiss inside. And to cut out the rotted, festering wound… they dispatched me to that place."

"……Dispatched? What is that supposed to mean?"

The chair frowned and asked back, as if he couldn't make heads or tails of it.

I slowly resettled my grip on the microphone.

And I met, straight on, the hundreds of pairs of eyes that filled the hearing chamber — no, the whole nation, watching this scene through the cameras.

"I am the 'secret auditor' the Bureau dispatched in strictest confidence."

In that instant.

———.

The noise in the hall evaporated, as if by some trick.

A suffocating stillness.

"Wh-what does that…?"

The hands of the reporters who'd been out to tear into me a moment ago froze in midair, and the chair's mouth fell open, dumbstruck.

It was a stunning declaration — one line, and the whole board had turned over.

"Wh-what does that mean…?"

"A secret auditor…?"

Questions laced with gasps went up all over.

The wastrel Director, whom everyone had taken for nothing but an incompetent parachute appointee riding on his connections, had in fact been a secret royal inspector?

Just then Number Three, the government man, slammed the desk and shouted with a sneer.

"Ha! A secret auditor? A dog trotting past would laugh!"

He jabbed a finger at me and raised his voice.

"Witness! It took a full seven months from your appointment to your seizing full control of the institute. An auditor, of all people, wasted over half a year just to lay hold of that much authority? Does that make any sense?"

"……"

"If you'd truly gone in as an auditor, you should have wielded full authority the moment you arrived and cut Park Wonjin down! Dragging your feet all that time, useless — it doesn't add up!"

Number Three's point was sharp.

Rather than dodge his attack, I countered calmly.

"For that question, I'll summon a witness to answer in my place."

"What did you say?"

"Someone who can testify to what went on inside the institute during those seven months."

I turned toward the closed entrance doors and called out.

"Researcher Lee Jinwoo of the Nest Research Institute."

Thrown by the unexpected turn, the chair's hand trembled on the microphone.

"H-hold on! A witness?! This is not a courtroom! You are not an attorney, and to bring in a witness not agreed upon with the committee beforehand, so high-handedly…."

Instead of cutting the chair off, I smiled gently and bowed my head.

"I fully understand your concern, Chairman."

"Then why, knowing that—!"

"But, honorable Chairman."

I put on a pained expression, looked around at the audience and the cameras, and calmly went on.

"At this sacred hearing, convened to bring the truth to light, if we shut out the key witness who knows the internal circumstances best… would the people watching right now truly find that acceptable?"

"Th-that's true, but… still, there are procedures to—"

While the chair floundered, at a loss for words, a sharp shout broke the silence from somewhere in the spectator seats.

"He's got a point! Let the witness in!"

That one cry was the fuse.

"The one hiding things is the culprit! Open it all up!"

"Don't trample the people's right to know!"

"Let him in!!!"

"Order! Order! Everyone, quiet down!"

Fed up with the flood of demands, the chair rapped the gavel irritably.

In the end, unable to withstand the pressure of public opinion, he let out a sigh.

"……Very well. The witness is permitted to enter."

Creeeak—.

The heavy wooden door swung open, and a man appeared, guided in by the security guards. It was Lee Jinwoo.

When the countless camera flashes went off, he trembled like a leaf in the wind and took the auxiliary seat beside the witness stand.

"Witness. State your identity."

"Y-yes. Nest Research Institute… Project R team… senior researcher, L-Lee Jinwoo."

Scared stiff, tongue tangling, Lee Jinwoo rattled off his name and rank.

"When did you join the institute?"

"About three months after Director Chae Junhyeok took his post, sir."

"What duties, specifically, did you handle at the time?"

"I was on the data management team. My job was… saving and managing all the experiment results and records the institute produced, storing them on the servers."

Once the basic identity check was done, the chair laced his fingers on the desk and asked the crux of it.

"Good. Witness, describe the situation inside the institute at the time and Director Chae Junhyeok's conduct, as you saw it."

Lee Jinwoo gulped down a dry swallow.

He stole a glance at me, then worked his trembling lips.

"Well… when I first arrived, the Director's reputation was… truly the worst."

"His reputation was the worst?"

"Yes. Every staff member utterly ignored the Director. They filed no work reports to him, treated him like a man who wasn't even there… there was a kind of freezing-out going on."

"Freezing-out?"

"Freezing-out, you say…?"

The room stirred.

Because the word 'freezing-out' fit that man standing before them far too poorly.

Lee Jinwoo pressed on with even more shocking testimony in a trembling voice.

"And… the Director, even while being ignored like that, did nothing to stop it."

"……?"

"He just… beyond the lab's glass wall, the children were being abused… screaming from those horrific experiments…."

He swallowed his breath a moment, then forced it out as if dragging up a painful memory.

"He didn't even try to stop it. He only watched."

"……!!"

At Lee Jinwoo's bombshell, the hall stirred in a flash.

"What? He stood by and did nothing?"

"A secret auditor who just watched the abuse? Does that make any sense?"

Seizing his chance, Number Three lunged, eyes glinting.

"By that testimony, the witness saw the abuse plain as day and left it be! This goes beyond dereliction of duty — it's plainly a crime, aiding and abetting abuse!"

He slammed the desk, tang, and raised his voice.

"This committee member finds even that 'secret auditor' testimony suspect to begin with. If he were truly an auditor, there's no way he'd have stood there watching children die! He should have stopped it at once!"

"That's right! Isn't he a fake?"

"How do you just watch kids get hurt? He's exactly the same as the rest!"

Just as the mood in the hall, swept up by Number Three's provocation, threatened to turn ugly again.

"Ha!"

At my laugh, everyone turned to look at me.

"Committee Member Number Three, whatever you do, never go in for undercover work. The moment they put you in the field you'd be blown, and you wouldn't die a natural death."

"……Wh-what did you say?"

I fixed him with cold, still eyes and ground the words out, one by one.

"Do you think I walked into that hell just to switch off some experiment machine?"

"……!"

"There was one reason and one only that I went there. Not to pluck a single leaf off the evil, but to tear it out root and all and haul them up for judgment."

The steely force in my voice bore down over the whole hearing chamber.

"Think about it. If I'd rashly played the crusader for justice with no evidence in hand, would Park Wonjin — who had the institute for his own private fiefdom — have sat idle?"

I jerked my chin at Park Wonjin.

"Of course he'd have destroyed the evidence, severed the tail, and slipped clean away! And then who, exactly, would wipe away the bloody tears of the children those men trampled?!"

"Th-that's…."

Seizing the moment Number Three was struck dumb, I began, in a trembling voice, to 'perform.'

"To deceive them… I had to become the very same kind of monster they were."

"A monster…?"

"When they cackled while abusing the children, I laughed along. In front of their cruel experiments, I even clapped, pretending to enjoy it."

The hall held its breath.

I clenched my fist tight and put on a look of humiliation.

"Because only then would they let their guard down and show me the deepest reaches of 'Project R.' To seize flawless evidence… every night… with a heart that felt like coughing up blood, I wore the mask of a devil."

A brimming film of tears welled at the rims of my red, bloodshot eyes.

By anyone's eyes, the very picture of an anguished, star-crossed hero.

"But… in the midst of that, a moment came that I simply could not endure with reason."

I drew a USB drive from my coat and held it up high.

"The record of that very day… the day that made me forget even what I was there to do."

A security officer took the USB from my hand and pressed play.

Soon, along with crackling noise, footage appeared on the huge screen at the front.

[Crash—!]

On the screen, a red fire extinguisher went flying through the air.

The institute's glass shattered, and a blond man burst in, treading over the sharp shards.

Out of the thick pit of dust, the man appeared again.

Cradled in his arms was a small child, limp and slack.

A frail little body that looked ready to break at any moment.

The man wrapped the child up like the most precious treasure in the world and vanished off-screen.

"……"

Silence.

A hush so complete not even a breath could be heard ruled the hearing chamber.

"That day… was an especially hard one to bear."

I bowed my head a moment, then spoke in a wet voice.

"I told myself hundreds of times that if my cover was blown it was all over… but the moment I saw that child's eyes, my body moved before reason could."

With faintly trembling hands, I gripped the microphone tight.

"I have no regrets. To me, a small life flickering out came before any auditor's mission."

When my confession, masquerading as heartfelt truth, ended, gasps broke the silence throughout the seats.

"Ohh…."

"My goodness… to think there was a story like that behind it…."

Eyes that said sorry we misjudged you, moved expressions.

A few people had pulled out handkerchiefs and were dabbing at their eyes.

But amid that moving atmosphere, one man and one alone.

Only Park Wonjin was thrashing.

"Mmph!! Mmmph!!! Mmph!!!!"

Maybe because he'd carried on too loudly earlier.

At some point a gag had been fastened firmly into his mouth.

He writhed all over with the injustice of it and glared at me with bloodshot eyes.

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