Chapter 148: An Unexpected Adventure

[Translator – Aren]

It was nice and all, coming down the stairs looking all cool, reading to aim at a moment’s notice, but I’d seriously overlooked the fact that the first-floor concourse beneath Hwaseo Station was still perfectly intact.

-Tap.

I carefully quieted the sound of my steps, hearing the strange noise coming from below. Apparently, this was the pastor’s first time underground as well, because I saw him tighten his grip on the gun. But the scene waiting for us at the bottom made both of us doubt our eyes.

"Jokgu?"

"Have these guys lost their minds?"

The soldiers had placed a four-legged robot with a gun mounted on it in front of the stairs leading down to the 2nd-floor platform, while they themselves were playing a makeshift game of jokgu by kicking a crumpled chocolate wrapper back and forth with the tips of their combat boots.

Unlike the soldiers above ground, they had taken off their gas masks and weren’t even wearing CBRN protective suits. They were dressed relatively lightly, and every last one of them was armed with nothing more than a shotgun or a K2 rifle, without a flamethrower in sight.

They had even rolled up their sleeves and exposed their bare arms for a more comfortable working environment.

What made it especially weird, though, was how utterly silent they were despite playing jokgu. Not a single word, not even anyone telling someone else where to kick it. They just took turns tapping the crumpled piece of trash around. There seriously wasn’t anything normal about that.

There were about six or seven people there. 

No one could possibly mistake this for people seriously standing guard or them showing intense vigilance. If they were going to screw around, they could at least do it properly. Instead, every one of them wore a vacant expression as they kicked the piece of trash around and occasionally licked their lips.

If I had to compare it to something… It felt like an empty funeral hall with no bereaved family and no mourners. There wasn’t any anger or resignation in the air either. The soldiers were simply full of irritation and indifference. The pastor and I, who had come down tense despite my Ears-branch, Stage 2 [Hearing Monster Voices] magic just in case, somehow felt like the outsiders.

Why was discipline this bad among the soldiers stationed in the most dangerous place?

Startled, I slowly lowered my muzzle slightly. But reflexes ingrained in my body had already turned the selector to semi-auto without me even thinking.

Though I belatedly considered switching it back to safe in case of an accidental discharge, the moment I thought about the soldiers’ condition, I made up my mind. If I went as far as putting it on safe too, I had this ominous feeling I’d get caught in some monster ambush.

I was Baek Jemin, man among men.

I’d rather accept shooting an innocent person than accept the possibility of being brutally murdered myself.

-Click.

At the metallic sound of the selector switching, every soldier who had been playing jokgu with the chocolate wrapper turned toward us at once. Seeing the guys who’d been kicking trash around with rifle slings over their shoulders and full combat gear turn in perfect formation like they were performing a drill was almost creepy.

They weren’t even wearing gas masks, so I could see their eyes clearly.

That was when I felt a chill run down my spine.

Every single one of their pupils was dilated. 

The moment I saw those vacant pupils, I shoulders my rifle. Just as Instructor Song had taught me, I kept the wall on my right. I only had one working eye, but aligning the sights itself was easy thanks to all the training I’d gone through. More importantly, even when I raised the muzzle, the soldiers didn’t react at all.

Normally, if someone pointed a gun at you, you either freaked out or responded with hostility, but they did neither.

The soldiers simply stood there staring blankly like ghosts. As a wizard, there was no way I could let my guard down.

Magic? Some kind of soul-subduing spell that stripped humans of their reason?

Just a bead of cold sweat ran down the back of my neck, and I activated Ears-branch, Stage 1 [Mind Reading], to make sure.

The pastor lowered his gun slightly and spoke in a somber voice.

"They’re wrecks.”

“......”

"They survived but got addicted to drugs.”

I didn’t need to ask how he knew. I didn’t even need [Mind Reading] to figure it out.

Following the pastor’s gaze, I saw dense marks of injections covering the forearms of the soldiers kicking the piece of trash around. Their arms were horribly disfigured, riddled with bruises and scars from scabs repeatedly forming and being torn away.

The dog-tag armbands marking them as soldiers from the blockade line were still there, so whenever they made any large movements, I could hear the dog tags jingling.

That was when a relatively normal voice came from somewhere outside our field of view.

-Beeeep—.

"Communication secure."

[Communication secure. Lee Junho, you guys are standing watch properly, right? Quarantine Command just sent people down there, so you need to show them  what Blockade Command is made of. The civilian Operators under Quarantine Command are gathering outside and will be coming down soon as well, so you’d better show some military discipline…]

"Major Park. Just shoot me dead.”

[Hey. You little punk, Lee Jinho! I swallowed my pride in front of the men, convincing those uptight Quarantine Command bastards, and got you priority supplies, so what the hell are you so unhappy about? It’s not like I abandoned you. And sure, we’re in this state, but we still can’t forget our duty as the people’s military!]

"I’d rather be shot dead than torn apart by monsters. I'm not doing any demolition or any of that shit. Stop fucking with me. Over.”

-Click.

He cut off the walkie-talkie connection on his own.

Curious what kind of lunatic had the balls to talk to a major like that, I turned my head.

Beyond the glassy-eyed soldiers playing jokgu with trash and beyond the four-legged robot busily swiveling its lenses around was an eara tangled in cables. Beneath a sign readingDeli Manjoo, boxes of supplies, ammo crates, and various communications devices were piled up like a mountain.

Someone had gathered the boxes together into a makeshift bed, taken off his field jacket to use as a blanket, and sprawled out on top of them.

A crew-cut soldier who had even taken off his combat gear, monitoring the drones and robots while fiddling with a walkie-talkie.

And judging by the rank insignia on his field jacket, he was only a sergeant.

He was so completely relaxed that him lying there hugging his rifle made it seem like the last line he hadn’t crossed yet. I never expected to find a  lunatic like this underground at Hwaseo Station, a place everyone kept insisting was the most dangerous of all.

Unlike the drug-addicted wrecks whose thoughts were practically meaningless to read, Sergeant Lee Jinho’s mind came through properly.

'Enough with this fucking bullshit. And enough with all that ‘the people’ crap. Why the hell should I care about the people who shoved my back and told me to go die? Don't those bastards have a country to protect too? You think I don’t know what happened to the guys in Seongnam just because nobody tells us? In the end, they quietly shut up about rotting us to the rear and just started spewing crap about strengthening quarantine management. Goddamn sons of bitches. They can’t even let us die, so they pump us full of drugs and shove us in here, then do nothing but run their damn mouths. Getting shot would be a damn god death, fuck.’

Ah… His screwed-up attitude was at least understandable.

His mouth was filthy, but he did have his reasons.

The drug-addicted wrecks had thoughts like, ‘Jokgu is fun,’ or ‘I’m making the national team today.’ In other words, completely pointless shit that was awful in a different sense. Sergeant Lee Jinho, on the other hand, was perfectly rational by 2028 standards.

The pastor’s eyes, of course, instantly turned vicious.

"You there. Soldier. What the hell are you doing? You know what kind of place this is, and you’re still acting like that?”

"Ah. Are you the Quarantine Command people Major Park said he was sending down?”

"Don't change the subject. What the hell is all this? No matter how bad things are, you still have to do your job properly. You know what kind of monsters we’re dealing with, and you think this kind of lax attitude is acceptable?!”

"Wow…Fuck. They sent one hell of an old-school hardass.”

"You little punk!”

But Sergeant Lee Jinho didn’t budge.

He raised the arm holding the walkie-talkie and gestured, pointing at the boxes one by one. The pastor had been about to argue, but the moment he saw the countless needle marks left on Sergeant Lee Jinho’s forearm, he froze.

Regardless, Sergeant Lee Jinho only lowered his eyes and spoke with a mocking sneer.

"Ah. Whatever. Looks like you’re short on ammo, so grab what you need. Take some grenades too. If you don’t like it, shoot us all dead. Jesus, Buddha, Allah, some dragon god, or whatever, I don’t fucking believe in any of that shit, so if you’re here to preach, kindly fuck off.”

"You really have a filthy way of talking.”

"Is there supposed to be a clean way to talk? Even if my mom and dad, who died in Seoul, came back as monsters with greasy hair, I’d have to ask them why the hell they gave birth to me while shooting them dead. So who the fuck are you that I should behave myself around you?

As the very incineration of respect for one's elders and Confucian order, to the point that if I were a Dogma-type, I probably would have awakened Confucian Dogma-type magic, I couldn’t stand by any longer.

Whatever had happened to these soldiers’ lives, there was no reason our Supreme Archmages should have to put up with this kind of treatment. Just as the thought of giving him the firing squad execution he wanted started rising in me…

Sergeant Lee Jinho, who had been about to flip us off, took a closer look at what we were wearing. His expression suddenly turned serious as he asked.

"Bloodstained ponchos. Aphorism?”

The muzzle that had slowly been rising lowered again.

"Quarantine Command sent Aphorism? Not some random nobodies?”

"Ahem. Hmm.”

Sergeant Lee Jinho.

True to his soldierly nature, even after being worn down by drugs and losing his discipline, he apparently heard the name of us Supreme Archmages. Still, the fact that he knew Aphorism meant he wasn’t completely rotten at the core.

The pastor finally recovered and spoke in a somewhat gentler voice.

"Soldier. Feel like listening now?”

"...Hsss, hoooh."

Sergeant Lee Jinho sighed and straightened himself up.

He tried pressing down his short crew cut, which somehow managed to stick up like a bird’s nest despite how short the hair was. Eventually giving up, he rummaged through the gaps between the boxes and soon handed us a yellowed notebook that reeked of gunpowder.

"It’s safe as far as the underground platform at Hwaseo Station. The lights are still on. When you head toward the tracks, keep your distance from anywhere water’s dripping, never take your shoes off, and if you think you’re fucked, run for the fog.”

"Have you scouted underground before?”

"Everything I remember is written in there, so read it. And the people down there…If you meet them, just think of them as monsters wearing human skin. Whether they’re human or monsters, it’s easier to shoot everything that isn’t part of the military."

"That’s how I’ve always done it.”

"Didn’t know that.” 

I took the yellowed notebook from him instead of the pastor, who seemed strangely reluctant when it came to things like this. Sergeant Lee Jinho gave an incredulous shrug and laughed.

"The ammo cans are already opened, there are loaded magazines lying around, and we’ve still got some grenades. If you’re taking supplies, take plenty.”

"Aren’t the soldiers coming with us?”

Even when the pastor pressed him, Sergeant Lee Jinho remained resolute.

"If you shoot them dead and drag them along, sure.”

He had absolutely no intention of following us, so even the pastor gave up.

Between the magazines we already carried and the loaded ones we took from the ammo boxes, the pastor and I decided to bring 10 each. We crammed them into every pocket we had. We also took 2 grenades each, and just in case, I decided to reapply the effects of Hands-branch, Stage 2 [Enchant].

Keeping out of the way of the wrecked soldiers’ trash-jokgu and Sergeant Lee Junho’s slacking, I tucked myself into a corner and repeatedly slashed my left palm with a combat knife.

"Baek Jemin. Don’t go shooting yourself up with too many drugs just because it hurts.”

"Pastor. There’s no way I’d rely on filthy disposable syringes.”

This fucking awesome Great Archmage Baek Jemin overcame that problem by synthesizing drugs inside his own damn body.

Unlike ordinary people who relied on drugs manufactured through chemical processes outside the body, I had truly reached the pinnacle of alchemy. Of course, it still stung like hell, so every time I made a cut, I let out a few teensy screams.

"Agh! Aagh! Agh!”

"Jemin. What are you doing?”

"I was empathizing with my body’s pain. My left hand doesn’t have vocal cords, so it can’t scream. I have to scream for it.”

Honestly, it fucking stung, hurt, and burned like hell, but I couldn’t let myself look pathetic in front of Sergeant Lee Jinho, who knew Aphorism’s reputation. So I came up with the manly excuse that I was screaming on behalf of my left hand.

Honor.

That was what moved me.

"Baek Jemin. Cut the bullshit and take this.”

-Tap.

What I caught from the pastor was a thick syringe. The needle was sealed in plastic, and the body of the syringe had a caution label stuck on it.

"What’s this?”

"Morphine. If things get bad, just stab it into your thigh. If things are desperate enough for you to use it, the medical personnel who’d normally find a vein and inject you properly are probably already fucked anyway. You’ve done CBRN training, right? Do it like that.”

"Why’d they give it to you instead of me?”

"Why do you think? Tsk.”

Anyone watching would think I was a drug addict.

What an outrageous accusation against a man who hated getting needles in his ass so much he didn't even like going to the hospital.

Still, I did what needed to be done.

I neatly inscribed [Purification] on the gas masks, [Cooling] on both the pastor’s poncho and mine, [Reliable] on the receivers of our guns, and [Waterproof] on our combat boots. For my left forearm in particular, I sliced open the palm of my right hand and smeared Hands-branch, Stage 1 [Blood of the Right Hand], all over it. The pastor absolutely refused to let me put any on him, though.

I’d lost a fair bit of blood in a short period, so a slight wave of dizziness came over me, but it was a necessary procedure for a comfortable and safe expedition.

The pastor looked conflicted after realizing it was cool even underneath his poncho.

"One-day youth-group leader. You little punk, have you been keeping something like this all to yourself?”

"At your age, Pastor, you’re supposed to fight heat with heat. I’m MZ, so I get air conditioning.”

At the same time, I quickly skimmed through Sergeant Lee Jinho’s notebook before we headed down.

Following Baek Jemin-style summary came Baek Jemin-style speed reading. Apparently, he’d written things down whenever they came to mind after returning from whatever incident had happened, because the notes were rambling, disorganized, and completely lacking any form of context. Most of it looked meaningless, but a few passages stood out.

+Caution when acquiring and reading records.

-Impossible things happen. Hard to explain. But escape through normal means is impossible. Run toward the fog.

+Flooding Danger.

-Unidentified species present.

Unidentified species. 

The moment I read that, I became suspicious of the grimoire the pastor had packed into his backpack.

"Pastor. This underground area doesn’t sound remotely fit for people to live in. Are those rumors really true?”

"That’s what we’re going to find out. Another reason we’re exploring the underground is that the last known movements of the missing people are clustered around subway stations. And if other civilian Operators or military forces get involved, it’ll be harder for us to take the lead on the investigation.”

The pastor and I chatted a bit while crouching on the floor, giving the magazines one final check  to make sure they were properly loaded. Right. If not a Supreme Archmage, who else would voluntarily walk into hell?

Lastly, I checked the L-shaped light I always carried on me for emergencies to make sure it was working.

Once all our preparations were complete, there was nothing left to say.

The pastor and I silently stood up and headed for the stairs. The wrecked soldiers were still busy playing jokgu with trash, while only Sergeant Lee Jinho, sprawled across the boxes, stared impassively at his monitor and clicked at the controller.

We passed the four-legged robot in this chaotic, indifferent silence.

This adorable little four-legged robot, which looked like  a headless puppy, swiveled its lenses around as we passed, focusing on recording us. Well, damn. I hadn’t realized AI could already recognize a Great Archmage.

I decided that this minor incident would inspire me to become a robot-rights activist someday.

Then I looked down the stairs at the platform floor below, brightly lit yet completely devoid of human presence. Basement Level 2.

The platform area was a completely ordinary station, the kind you could find anywhere. A skincare-lotion ad featuring a famous actress flickered on an electronic billboard, and aside from a few darkened sections, the station lights were still working properly.

None of the shutters were down, and there were no severed cables.

It felt as though this place had somehow escaped all the chaos.

Or perhaps everything had ended so quickly that it hadn't even been given the chance to descend into chaos.

-Huuuuff....

My breathing through the gas mask filter sounded unusually loud. Despite the True-Body Sarira prayer beads wrapped around my left arm and the countless Stages I had cultivated since then, despite being unquestionably the greatest of the Supreme Archmages… Despite all the effort I’d put in to earn myself a heroic reputation and fame.

I hesitated slightly at the stairs leading down to Basement Level 2.

My desire to study Ritual-type magic and my curiosity had brought me this far, but at the crucial moment, the fragile ego of Baek Jemin, the non-wizard, was feeling afraid. If it had been the kind of beta fear that made me shriek and squeal like a little girl, I could’ve at least gotten it out of my system by bawling my eyes out.

This was more like the fear of slipping on a tetrapod and getting trapped, with the tide coming in and the water slowly rising toward your chest.

A strange certainty that if I found myself in danger, no matter how loudly I screamed for someone to save me, nobody would hear. That certainty turned into a cold wind that clawed through every converter of my burning heart.

My boiling blood went cold.

The pastor was no different.

In front of the flickering skincare-lotion billboard, we simply stood there in silence, watching the wrecked soldier kick trash around in their game of jokgu. The only sounds in the world were the low hum of the four-legged robot’s motors and the clicking of the controller.

If the surface was a palace where people struggling desperately to survive tangled together and shouted over one another, then underground was a palace where people could only hope death would be merciful.

-Tic, tick.

Only after the electronic billboard had flickered several times did the two of us finally step forward.

-Huuff—.

Our breathing through the gas masks grew heavier.

Any room for jokes vanished in an instant. Without hesitation, I activated Ears-branch, Stage 2 [Hearing Monster Voices]. Shin Nain had always been vague about the backlash for Stage 2, and considering the way he’d had a fit when I used Tongue-branch magic against the Human-skin Jellyfish, that vagueness felt pretty ominous.

Maybe hearing a monster’s inner thoughts itself was the backlash.

Even so, in a situation where all kinds of bizarre phenomena could happen, there was no detection method as accurate and reliable as Ears-branch magic. The pastor and I descended past the flickering billboard, keeping the wall covered in ads for premium bottled water to our right while holding our rifles tucked firmly beneath our arms.

The station was bright enough that I didn’t need to turn on the L-shaped tactical light at my chest, but I couldn’t stand the tension. I lifted my poncho and switched the light on anyway. Concerns about battery life or unnecessary power use meant nothing in the face of anxiety. The station lights would suddenly go out at any moment.

-Click. 

With a mechanical click, a faint beam of light joined the existing lights, and a sense of relief washed over me.

Even the usually nitpicky pastor didn’t nag me much about it this time. Behind us, I heard a beep followed by voices over the radio, but I couldn’t spare them much attention.

-Thud, thud, thud…

For a subway station near Seoul in 2028, with the city in ruins and monsters running around, it was remarkably clean and well-kept. It almost looked like a subway station from before everything happened. Maybe they’d cleaned it up so it could function as a supply route.

And finally, the pastor and I reached the platform on Basement Level 2 of Hwaseo Station.

-Thud.

Only our footsteps echoed through the empty platform. I took the left, the pastor the right. Without exchanging a single word, we stood back-to-back, covering each other’s blind spots as we raised our rifles and aligned our sights.

-Clack.

Once I had my rifle shouldered, I thoroughly surveyed the area. If there happened to be a monster like the Human-skin Tapeworm that could evade magic to some extent, I needed to raise my level of perception even slightly to detect it.

I hated to admit it, but until recently, I had the weakest aptitude for Ears-branch magic. Even though I'd overcome that weakness, I had no intention of letting my guard down.

Eternity.

If I wanted to avoid reaching its end, I had to be thorough about everything. Having lost one eye only made me even more cautious.

Even so, Ears-branch, Stage 2 [Hearing Monster Voices], detected neither a sound nor a sign. Was there really nothing here?

I crushed that faint spark of hope the moment it started to rear its head.

Our opponents weren’t wizards or non-wizards. They were monsters.

Hunters that desecrated human flesh and preyed upon humanity.

As a wizard, I had earned the right to hunt those monsters. That didn’t mean victory was guaranteed.

I’d smeared as much [Blood of the Right Hand] as possible onto my combat uniform beneath my poncho. It would serve as a way to fend off monster attacks if things turned into a chaotic melee. I needed to keep my left arm and left leg forward whenever possible, using them to protect my right side.

I still wasn’t completely used to Instructor Song Smith’s teachings, but I was getting the hang of things.

Yet despite our continued vigilance and cautious standoff, the platform remained silent. The platform screen doors seemed to be broken, frozen open. The benches sat there looking only slightly dirty, and there were even crushed plastic bottles thrown into the trash cans.

It felt lived-in. Signs of a normal everyday life.

Not the harsh, worn-down kind of everyday life that had existed since the monster disaster of 2028. It felt like ordinary life from before any of this had happened.

Still holding his rifle at the ready, the pastor spoke with a hint of confusion in his voice.

"Baek Jemin. You can see the past, right? You’ve got that bald monk’s prayer beads too.”

"So that’s why you brought me.”

"Our youth group leader is a jack-of-all-trades, right?”

We traded a few halfhearted jokes, but it wasn’t like he was wrong.

My Eyes-branch magic itself was far superior to Shin Nain’s, so when it came to gathering information beyond simple detection, there were clearly areas where I was slightly better than him. I felt some pride as a Great Archmage swell up inside me.

That didn’t mean I could just put down my rifle and carelessly use [Past Vision].

I was damn lucky the True-Body Sarira prayer beads could bear the backlash for Tongue-branch, Stage 1 [Degradation] in my place. Thanks to that, I could afford to be even more cautious. Before looking into the past, there was something I had to do first. Prepare for any danger that might come in the future.

Eyes-branch, Stage 1 [Cognitive Expansion] 100%.

Within 10 minutes. Hostile threat. Hwaseo Station Basement Level 2 Platform. Around the Supreme Archmages.

Eyes-branch, Stage 1 [Cognitive Expansion], which originally only showed me things like red footprints, could now reveal far more through the form of signs. The platform lights shone steadily without so much as a single flicker. No dark shapes or shadows crept toward the shadows cast by the pastor and me.

No ambush.

I relaxed, dismissed the spell, and prepared [Past Vision].

Of course, that only doubled the unease I felt.

This was just bizarre.

There were no monsters, so there was no fog. Yet even though the station was deserted, it wasn’t wrecked, nor were there any traces left behind by refugees. It looked exactly like what you’d imagine an empty station after communing hours would look like. There wasn’t even that much trash either since there were no people around.

How far back should I look into the past?

If I just started guessing and checking dates one by one, I could spend my whole life trying and still never see everything. I needed a clue. Just then, I noticed a plastic bottle inside a transparent trash bag. Someone had finished it, peeled off the label, and properly sorted it for recycling.

There might be a use-by date stamped on it, so I figured I could use that somehow to find a clue.

-Step.

I advanced with my rifle raised, and the pastor followed without a word, keeping watch around us. He naturally covered my right side and watched our flank and rear, while I kept my attention on the edge of my vision and guarded the left as I went closer to the trash can.

Though all there was on that side were the open platform screen doors and the empty subway tracks beyond it.

For some time, only our footsteps echoed across the platform.

The moment I reached the trash can, I turned my head slightly and checked the bottle first. The label had clearly been torn off, but fortunately, most people didn’t go so far as to scrape away the numbers printed directly on the bottle.

Usually, those numbers showed the manufacturing date…

.....

...Did I read that wrong?

"Baek Jemin. Did you find something?”

"I’m going to take it out.”

"What do you need to take out to look into the past?”

Keeping my rifle tucked under my arm, I reached out with my right hand and pulled the plastic bottle from the trash.

The distinctive crackle of crushed plastic greeted me. Rummaging through a trash can with my cut-up right hand and pulling out a dented bottle made me feel like my life truly had hit rock bottom, but the numbers printed on it didn’t let me dwell on such petty sentiments.

Manufacturing date.

"Manufactured June 17th, ‘38. Good until June 16th, ‘39.”

"What?"

There was no way something manufactured in 1938 could have been distributed commercially, much less in a subway station.

Besides, the Republic of Korea wouldn’t even have existed back then. I wasn’t even sure plastic bottles existed in that era.

At that moment, a chill far worse than the shivering cold of coming down with a fever sped all the way into my bones. The right hand holding the bottle looked deathly blue, as though the biting cold had given it frostbite. It was a hallucination. I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them again. My hand was back to its normal color, still clutching the bottle.

I could still hear the pastor‘s bewildered voices.

His presence hadn’t disappeared.

No, he was obviously fighting the urge to turn around and look for himself, forcing himself to keep watching our surroundings as he demanded an answer.

"Baek Jemin. What is it? What happened? What do you mean, ‘38?”

"We can’t go back up.” 

Something had changed.

Thankfully, the change hadn’t happened to the pastor or me. And that only made it more horrifying.

Until moments ago, [Hearing Monster Voices] had been completely silent. Now it was screaming all kinds of noise at me, like it had gone insane. Shin Nain had originally described what he heard as the sound of nails scraping across a black board, an unpleasant dissonance…but to me, it sounded completely different.

Countless noises began pouring down from the stairs we had descended.

-Kegh, cough, cough.

It sounded like someone choking and vomiting. Like they had something caught in their throat and were forcing themselves to gag it back up.

And there weren't just one or two of them. Not dozens, but hundreds. beyond hundred into thousands, and far, far beyond thousands into tens of thousands…

The murmuring of people whispering somewhere far away mixed with those nauseating retching noises and echoed inside my head.

'Why can’t I walk? ‘My eyes. What’s wrong with my eyes? Is anyone, anyone there?’ ‘My eyes are weird. They're moving on their own. Ugh. I don’t want to see!’ ‘Mom, Mom, your teeth are scratching my cheek. Mom, are you crying?’ ‘I can't breathe. Breathe. I can't breathe, breathe!’ ‘Gun. Someone with a gun. Gun. Gun!’ ‘I-I’m a woman. I’m not a man. I've never been in the army. Dad? Mom’s face looks wrong. No… I hate this mess!’

Broken souls, kneaded like clay in a cruel grasp and crushed between molars, still struggled to make some kind of sound, trapped by memories they could never forget.

Their reason had already shattered and scattered away. Their memories had been mixed together at random. All they could do was roll words they had repeated so often they had become habits across their tongues. They had forgotten every function of language and were desperately struggling to remember how to make sounds at all.

Then they forgot even why they had been struggling. Those who could no longer remember why they had tried to resist were crushed and pulled together, screaming through a single fused mouth the wails they released upon their death. The last traces of what they had been.

Flickering selves. Memories still alive and breathing despite being hopelessly tangled together. A cursed immortality that made them beg for death instead…

That was their final defense. Desperately insisting on the one fact they could still remember in flashes. That they were human.

"Mom, where are you?” “Excuse me, please don't stand so close.” “Aagh! What is this?!” “Uuuurgh…” “Someone call the police! He’s molesting me!” “No, I don't want this. Save me!” “Don’t open the door, don’t open it! I said don't open the door!” “What's the driver doing? Stop! Someone didn’t get on yet!”

Amid those horrifying screams, the pastor’s eyes met mine.

And without either of us saying a single word. We slowly and carefully began moving in silence, heading away from the monsters upstairs toward one particular place. There was something that absolutely had to exist in a subway station that still retained this strange sense of ordinary life.

The pastor and I swallowed hard and kept walking despite telling ourselves the possibility was absurd.

And the moment we stopped in front of the subway map, we finally understood.

The pastor slowly lowered his rifle and spoke in a hollow voice, already half resigned.

"Right."

-Thudthudthudthud.

As the two dark-clad men stood side by side staring at the subway map, the footsteps of monsters that had noticed living, breathing humans began pounding against the ceiling above us.

We had to survive.

That thought filled my entire mind.

"Hwaseo Station doesn’t have an underground level. And ‘Praise be to Jesus’¹ isn’t something Protestant churches in Korea say…”

Only then did I finally make out the markings on the track wall beyond the platform screen doors, in the area the lights hadn’t properly reached.

Hwaseo Station.

Shinbundang Line.

Even as someone from Gyeonggi Province, I had ridden the Shinbundang Line before, so I could say this for certain.

There is no Hwaseo Station on the Shinbundang Line.

Goosebumps rose across my skin, chills swept through me, and my teeth began chattering, but none of that mattered right now. Magic. I almost wished this was something magic had done.

Without hesitation, I threw myself down beneath the wide-open platform screen doors.

Faint lights still illuminated the empty subway tracks. But I was certain they wouldn’t last much longer. The footsteps upstairs were growing more violent by the second.

"Pastor!”

"O Lord, protect Baek Hemin and me!”

The pastor awkwardly climbed down from the platform as well.

I thought he’d be fine since his hands were steady, but I realized that that wasn’t the case when I saw him nearly collapse. His legs were trembling. Even so, the pastor didn’t fall.

"Let’s move."

"Yes."

The pastor and I immediately started walking without hesitation.

-Thudthudthudthudthudthud....

Footsteps echoed across the entire platform.

A subway station where every person had vanished. Only the instinct that we couldn’t go back aboveground kept us walking along tracks with no trains running on them. I wanted to break into a spring right then and there, but reason barely held my panic in check by reminding me that we had to conserve our stamina.

Even if we ran, could we actually shake off whatever was chasing us?

I could only hope our steady pace proved that we weren’t terrified and that we were maintaining a standoff.

I reminded myself that, as wizards, we had more than enough means to defeat enemies. Even so, I was certain we couldn’t handle that entire horde.

-Thump, thump, thump.

This time, the sound of my heartbeat joined our footsteps. The vein bulging from my forehead under the mounting tension pulsed in time with my heart so strongly I could actually feel it.

Carefully, one step at a time, we moved forward with the pastor covering the right and me the left. My L-shaped tactical light illuminated the dim tracks in place of the faint station lighting.

That was when I heard the sound of dripping water. 

Had a pipe started leaking?

If the monsters knew about wizards, they would definitely try to make us spam magic until we exhausted ourselves. As the prey, I couldn’t afford to run out of patience so easily. I had to push my non-wizard senses as much as possible and tactics to their limits and delay the need to use magic.

With that judgement in mind, I lowered myself slightly and aimed at the ceiling, but all my light and muzzle found was water dripping steadily from a narrow crack overhead.

It really did seem to be a leak.

Then we’d have to avoid the puddles gathering on the tracks. Just in case. Imagine how damn unfair it would be to die from electrocution. Suppressing the fear rising inside me with that stupid thought in mind, I shine my light toward the middle of the tracks, where the water was dripping.

At that moment, a primal disgust inherent to the human species surged through me.

-Drip.

A shallow, wide puddle, just deep enough for ripples to spread each time a drop fell.

It looked completely unsuitable for life. The temperature was so cold that even mosquitoes would probably have trouble laying eggs there. And yet, every time a drop struck the puddle, things inside it writhed.

The little puddle was only about 60cm across and looked barely 4cm deep, yet it was packed full of parasite-likeannelids.

Pale, milky white, smooth-skinned, twisting and tangling around one another, filling the puddle so densely they formed a taut surface… Parasites were the first thing that came to mind when I looked at those things.

But the most horrifying part was something else.

Ears-branch, Stage 2 [Hearing Monster Voices].

That damn spell activated on its own and carried the voices of the swarm of parasites swimming in the puddle directly to my ears.

People…

Need people.

Help me!

"Fuck."

"Don’t tell me those are…”

"Let’s go around."

An Unidentified Species.

I’d never seen them before, didn’t want to see them now, and had no desire to ever learn anything about them.

The pastor and I quickly circled around to the side, silently agreeing that from now on we would alternate between watching the ceiling and the floor. At the same time, I tried to quickly recall what Sergeant Lee Jinho had written in his notebook.

It’s better to shoot them dead, whether they’re human or monster.

That meant there had to be people down here.

Amid the crushing tension, the pounding of my heart, the dripping water, and the sickening sound of those parasite swarms occasionally slapping against the surface of the puddle along the subway tracks.

I found myself considering the worst possibility of all.

We, our world…

Might already be over. 

_________________________________________________________________________

¹Actually a Catholic-style greeting