Chapter 23: Crash Landing (1)

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“Gasp.”

Su-myeon woke with a start.

His familiar room. His comfortable bed.

His breathing came hard and fast, as though he had just finished a sprint, but gradually, it began to settle.

As his ragged breaths quieted, the ticking of the clock’s second hand filled the silence.

“.......”

Silence.

And above him, the same familiar ceiling of his room.

Had it all been some [N O V E L I G H T] impossibly vivid dream?

Su-myeon slowly got to his feet, opened the bedroom door, and stepped outside.

“......Mom?”

No answer.

[AM 10:10]

The moment he glanced at the clock on the living room wall, an inexplicable chill ran down his spine.

Just a coincidence.

Telling himself that, Su-myeon opened the door to his parents’ bedroom.

“What the.......”

The room was empty.

But not simply empty of people.

The clothes that should have hung from the rack, the bed, the furniture—everything was gone.

And the photographs displayed in the master bedroom.

In every single one of them, his parents’ faces had been cleanly erased.

Then Su-myeon realized something else.

He was wearing the jacket.

The Nemean Hide.

That gaudy sukajan supposedly made from it.

“.......”

Suppressing the urge to scream, Su-myeon carefully reached into his pockets.

Clink.

The clear metallic sound of coins.

Several of them, knocking against one another.

Su-myeon turned out his pocket and dumped everything onto the floor.

Coins scattered across the ground with a loud clatter, and among them, his phone landed with the heaviest sound.

Thunk.

Su-myeon snatched it up.

Thankfully, it wasn’t a Heartphone.

It was his own familiar phone, its surface covered in scratches.

But the objects scattered across the floor were unmistakably Rose Coins.

More than ten of them.

And then—

[Belle’s Secret Shop]

“AHHH!”

The moment Su-myeon saw the strange yet painfully familiar app installed on his phone, he finally screamed.

His hands shook violently, but he forced himself to calm down and began working his fingers frantically.

Contacts. Computer files. Photo albums.

Everything.

He searched through every possible source for proof that his parents had existed.

But something was wrong.

Every trace of them had been erased so completely that it was as though a piece of reality itself had been surgically cut away.

“......They’re gone.”

Everything related to the game had disappeared as well.

Or, more precisely, every trace of it had vanished from the internet.

“.......”

If everything had simply disappeared without exception, he might have dismissed it as evidence that he had finally lost his mind.

But the game files remained intact on his own computer.

Every walkthrough he had downloaded.

Every guide he had written himself.

They were all still there in his local files.

Only the internet had been wiped clean.

‘Have I really gone insane?’

Su-myeon sat frozen, his grip on reality beginning to slip.

How was he supposed to make sense of a reality this incomprehensible?

After agonizing over it for a moment, he grabbed his things and rushed out of the house.

***

Something was wrong.

“.......”

Han-su woke in the station’s on-duty room and slowly sat upright, staring blankly ahead.

He had just experienced an absurdly vivid dream.

And yet something inside him refused to accept that it had been merely a dream.

It was an inexplicable feeling, but there was nothing he could do about it right now.

Even if he picked up his phone, who was he supposed to call and tell about a dream he had just had......?

“A dream...... was it?”

No.

Han-su couldn’t bring himself to believe that.

But neither did he have anyone he could talk to about an experience even stranger than a dream.

After sitting there lost in thought for a long while, Han-su finally headed for the Violent Crimes Unit office.

It was work hours, after all.

Whatever had happened, he still had a job to do.

“......?”

But the moment he stepped inside, something felt strange.

Han-su looked around.

“Oh, you get enough rest?”

“Hey, I left the file for your case on your desk. Give it a read.”

The senior detectives who clapped him on the shoulder as they passed behaved exactly as they always did.

Familiar.

Ordinary.

It was the same everyday life he knew.

And yet an inexplicable sense of wrongness clung to him, tugging at his ankles like an ill omen.

As though something that should have been there......

was missing.

“......Where did Chief Yun go?”

Han-su had finally found the gap.

But no one answered.

“Excuse me, Detective Park. Where did Chief Yun go?”

He stopped one of the senior detectives nearby and asked him directly.

The answer only made things stranger.

“Huh? What?”

“I mean...... Chief Yun.......”

“What about him?”

It was as though anything connected to Chief Yun simply failed to register in his ears.

“What the hell’s with you? Quit wasting my time.”

Detective Park brushed him off as if Han-su had called him over for no reason, then returned to his work.

Unease crept up the back of Han-su’s neck, leaving it stiff.

He rose from his seat and began stopping every detective he could reach.

It wasn’t just Detective Park.

Strangely, no one responded whenever he asked that particular question.

Chief Yun.

The man who had influenced Han-su’s career more than anyone else.

Everyone carried on with their day as usual.

But his seat alone stood empty.

“What’s today’s date?”

When Han-su changed the question, everyone answered him without hesitation.

But even that answer was difficult to accept.

Three days had passed since the last day he remembered.

‘Three days.......’

Exactly the amount of time he had spent inside that dream.

Or whatever that anomaly had been.

Three days had passed while he had apparently been absent, and yet whenever he asked what he himself had been doing during that time, everyone gave only vague answers.

“Working. Same as always.”

“How should I know what you were doing? You came to work, I guess.”

No matter how much he pressed them, they all dodged the question with awkward, strangely unnatural responses.

What in the world had happened......?

“Han Su-myeon.......”

As Han-su stood trapped in a reality he couldn’t comprehend, one name surfaced in his mind without warning.

The person who had always understood their situation better than anyone else.

‘He might know something.’

But how was Han-su supposed to find him?

Su-myeon had never told them much beyond the fact that he lived somewhere in Seoul.

Han-su didn’t know his exact age, his educational background, or even what he did for a living.

The only way they had ever been able to contact each other was through the Heartphone inside the hotel.

‘And that phone is gone.’

All Han-su had now was his own plain, old phone.

“......Nothing.”

No evidence.

No trace.

Nothing.

“Hey, hey! HEY! Shut the hell up, will you?!”

“Ah, fuck. First thing in the morning. Just my goddamn luck.......”

The stream of suspects being brought in, along with the commotion that followed, shattered Han-su’s train of thought.

No detective working in Seoul had the luxury of a quiet morning.

He barely survived the chaos until lunchtime, and only then did Han-su finally get a chance to breathe.

Even during his meager cigarette break, his mind remained hopelessly tangled.

The suffocating stench of blood that still lingered in his memory.

The crushing tension that had felt as though it would cave in his lungs.

‘And all of that was just an illusion?’

Maybe he really had cracked under the pressure.

He had never thought of himself as particularly imaginative.

Had years of staring into the ugliest side of humanity finally driven him into this elaborate kind of madness?

“Detective Kang, there you are. Someone’s here to see you.”

A senior detective approached the smoking area, pulling Han-su out of his thoughts.

“......Sir?”

“Go take a look. Young guy. Doesn’t seem like he’s here about a case.”

The senior detective waved him away before taking out a cigarette of his own.

Han-su headed back toward the Violent Crimes Unit.

A young man.

Not there about a case.

Those two details immediately brought one person to mind.

“Su-myeon.”

Han Su-myeon.

The person who occupied the largest part of Han-su’s memories from that ordeal.

And there he was.

Sitting in front of Han-su’s desk with his head lowered.

At the sound of his name, Su-myeon—who had been nervously bouncing one leg beneath the chair—shot to his feet.

“Oh, shit. Thank God.”

The instant Han-su saw him, he felt exactly the same way.

Su-myeon’s very existence seemed to prove that Han-su hadn’t gone insane by himself.

That the two of them had truly gone through something insane together.

Then Han-su’s eyes narrowed.

He looked Su-myeon up and down.

“That jacket......”

Su-myeon was wearing the jacket he had bought inside the hotel.

Han-su himself had woken wearing the exact same clothes he had been dressed in when he first entered the hotel.

Compared to that, Su-myeon’s appearance was unmistakably different.

He had returned to reality carrying something he had obtained inside that bizarre hotel.

“Something’s...... wrong. When I woke up, my parents were gone.......”

“My unit chief disappeared.”

Han-su immediately understood.

Their situations were the same.

And paradoxically, that realization brought with it a strange sense of solidarity—and relief.

At least this wasn’t happening to him alone.

If they were in it together, then perhaps they could find a way to understand it.

“.......”

Could they?

“Something’s...... wrong. Something, something is.......”

“Let’s calm down first.”

The situation was enough to drive anyone mad, but Han-su somehow managed to regain a measure of composure.

His own hands were trembling, yet he steadied them and made Su-myeon a cup of instant coffee.

He clung to the vague belief that if they were together, they could somehow find a way forward.

After all, what Su-myeon had shown them inside that bizarre hotel had been enough to earn that trust.

Without him at the very end, none of them would have made it out alive.

“Excuse me...... is there a detective named Kang Han-su here......?”

Then a familiar voice drifted into the Violent Crimes Unit.

“He’s—here!”

It was Ju-hee.

The moment she spotted Han-su and Su-myeon, she collapsed into the nearest chair, relief washing over her face.

As the two hurried over to steady her trembling legs, more familiar faces began appearing one after another.

“Su-myeon! Han-su! You really are here! I’m not crazy, right?!”

“Detective! I came to the right place, didn’t I?”

“......Ha, Su-myeon, you’re here too. Thank God. Thank God.”

Ha-min.

Du-pal.

Young-cheol.

One after another, familiar faces filed in, each caught somewhere between terror and relief.

They hardly needed to exchange more than a few words before realizing that all of them were in the same situation.

Three days had simply vanished from their lives without leaving behind a single memory.

And someone precious to each of them had disappeared as though they had never existed.

“Kang, what the hell is going on here?”

When a group of people who clearly had nothing in common suddenly crowded around Han-su’s desk, Detective Park approached them cautiously.

Some were crying.

Others looked as though every ounce of life had been drained from them.

It was obviously not a normal scene.

But how could Han-su possibly explain any of this?

People who couldn’t even perceive Chief Yun’s absence would never believe a word of their story.

They would be lucky if they didn’t all end up in a psychiatric ward.

After thinking for a moment, Han-su answered.

“......I’m taking a half day.”

“What? Are you kidding me? Just like that?!”

Han-su gathered his things and stood.

“Let’s talk outside.”

No one objected.

Six people—different in age, gender, and temperament—filed out of the police station together.

Now the only question was where they could have a conversation this absurd.

“......Let’s go to my place.”

Su-myeon spoke with the expression of someone who had just made a grave decision.

With the memories of the hotel still vivid in their minds, the others agreed as though it were the most natural choice in the world.