The Sinner Hunting System

"Unauthorized use? So the card was lost at some point?

Of course, sir, let me pull that up for you right away."

The young receptionist accepted the card without suspicion, scanned the barcode, and brought up the account history.

"...You can relax, sir, there’s no recent activity on this card. The last visit was in the first week of last month."

He turned the screen around. A column of transaction records, and at the very top, the registration information, name and address included.

Raphael didn’t bother with the name. He had no interest in learning the stalker’s name. He noted the address, nodded once, and turned to go.

"By the way, your membership is coming up for renewal soon, we’re currently running a promotion, if you’d be interested..."

The receptionist’s professional instincts had already kicked in. Raphael waved a hand. Maybe next time.

He left the gym and asked a few passersby for directions. The address was close, walking distance.

He stopped at a convenience store on the way and bought two packs of gum and a bottle of water.

He chewed the gum, worked some water into it, and kneaded it into a soft putty between his fingers.

That done, he told the gate security he was visiting a friend and walked into the residential complex without difficulty. Standard security, no complications. He went directly to the right building.

"Only one camera per floor. Sloppy."

He scanned the corridor. A tenant was coming back just then, keys out, Raphael turned toward the wall and pretended to read the water meter, using his peripheral vision to catch the door number before it closed.

Not that one.

With the tenant gone, he pinched a small piece of the gum putty, found the angle, curled his finger, and flicked it. It hit the corridor camera lens cleanly and stuck.

He worked his way up the building floor by floor, using the keys to try each door and the gum on each camera before security could notice anything, eliminating rooms one by one.

On the sixth floor, in a room near the corner, the key turned.

"Finally."

From somewhere in the stairwell, he could already hear the building guard’s voice, baffled and getting louder.

"What is this, gum? Some kid’s idea of a prank? If I find you—"

Raphael stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind him. He peeled off the thick hoodie, exhaled, and immediately encountered the smell.

Mold. The cold damp of a drain. Fish.

"Dead rat... even lives like one."

He covered his nose and crossed to the window, pushing it open. Outside air came in. He waited while the room began to breathe.

When he turned on the light, the floor came into focus.

How to describe it.

A survey of the terrain: aluminum cans distributed across every surface, most of them with residue still inside, which had attracted a colony of ants working in organized lines across the carpet.

Half-eaten canned food abandoned in the corner, open to the air. Cockroaches, various sizes, appearing at intervals along the baseboards to observe him with whatever cockroaches have instead of curiosity.

In the trash can: a full load of used tissue paper generating its own climate.

From behind the couch, under the television cabinet, from somewhere in the kitchen, a constellation of small squeaking sounds. Mice, and not a small number of them, living well.

"If I were still Red Gloves, the psychological damage from investigating this place would qualify as a workplace injury."

He took two steps and felt something adhere to the bottom of his shoe. He looked down. A thick stratum of grime had attached itself, black as soil, not budging.

"...God."

He stopped talking. Every time he opened his mouth he invited the air in, and the air was punishing him for it.

The environment raised genuine questions about what kind of organism had been living here.

He searched the main rooms and found nothing useful, only evidence of the stalker’s various hobbies and a thriving indoor ecosystem.

The single locked door at the end of the flat remained. The stalker had apparently been concerned about intrusions.

No cameras in here made things much simpler. Raphael found a flat-head screwdriver and broke open an old lightbulb, extracting the copper filament inside.

He crouched at the locked door, fed the wire into the keyhole, and began working the pins up one at a time, ear against the wood, listening for the specific sound each one made.

Pin by pin. A careful turn of the screwdriver. The right click, confirming angle. The door opened in a few seconds.

He pushed it.

The room had no bed. A rug on the floor, an armrest cushion propped beside it, with a magazine cover image of a female model, her face cut away and replaced with a hand-drawn anime face, the features clearly modeled on Elena.

He looked up.

Every wall. Floor to ceiling, edge to edge, photographs.

Elena shopping. Elena talking to a service worker. Elena eating dessert at a café table.

Elena laughing. Elena bored. Elena annoyed.

Elena not looking at the camera and Elena looking directly at one by accident.

Hundreds of them, thousands, fixed to the walls with pushpins and connected to each other with string in the pattern of an investigation board.

He looked more closely at the string.

It wasn’t holding the photos together arbitrarily.

The lines were covered in tiny handwriting, date annotations, notes on what she’d done that day, records of who she’d spoken to, ratings of perceived threat level for each contact.

"...Should I admire the dedication? Dead rat."

Raphael shook his head. The memory of his own post-rebirth naked sprint through a rainy alley felt considerably less embarrassing by comparison. Context was everything.

In the corner: a stack of handmade books and a radio.

"The rat reads. Didn’t expect that."

He picked up the first book and started turning pages. His expression changed as he read, becoming progressively more unusual.

The first book was titled What Elena Ate Today.

A comprehensive log of every meal she’d consumed outside her residence, breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea.

Each dish annotated with frequency of consumption, price, and a full recipe for replication.

The scholarship was genuinely impressive. More rigorous than most university essays.

The second book: Where Elena Went Today.

Every shop visited, every landmark passed, every purchase made, accompanied by the author’s own psychological analysis of her hobbies and interests based on behavioral patterns.

The third book: Protecting Elena: A Complete Guide to Rivals.

This one was particularly interesting. Every service worker who had spoken to her, every stranger she’d asked for directions, catalogued by name where possible and rated on a threat scale from low to extreme.

The most recent entry was Raphael. There was even a photograph of him.

The annotation read: extreme danger, eliminate immediately.

Raphael laughed out loud. He whistled once, tore that page out carefully, and folded it into his jacket pocket as a keepsake.

The remaining volumes he couldn’t get through in their entirety, titles including Why Elena Is the Goddess of Beauty.

100 Love Poems to Offer Elena When the Time Comes, 100 Ways to Confess My Feelings to Elena, and 10 Original Songs Composed for Elena.

"You are genuinely the peak of your field. The highest mountain, the longest river. An unrepeatable achievement."

He set them down, picked up the radio.

"Please don’t be Elena-related. Give me something useful for once."

He pressed play. The device picked up exactly where it had last been left, an encrypted broadcast channel, the last received transmission still queued.

A date. A time. A location.

"2027, July 7th, 11 PM. Eastern outskirts, abandoned vehicle processing plant."