Chapter 171 - Diver III

"... Frogs croaking."

Lee Hayul shuddered. Instinctively, she kept spreading and curling her fingers, as though the sensation of frog webbing sprouting between them still lingered somewhere, wet and slimy.

"Did they all turn into frogs?"

Young as she looked, Lee Hayul was a veteran who had explored countless voids alongside me. Even for a veteran like her, six seconds of bodily mutation was enough to leave profound trauma.

I took Hayul's hand and squeezed it firmly.

"Ah."

We exchanged body heat. The warmth of primates who had evolved to clasp one another's fingers at the cost of swimming freely underwater.

"You're cold. Draw up your aura and dry yourself off first. It may look like ordinary water, but every single drop is void poison."

"... Okay, big brother."

Golden aura suffused her hair. Her soaking chestnut locks quickly dried.

But the drying process was strange. Rather than describing it as droplets drying, it was more accurate to say that insects as transparent as water were burning and evaporating.

They writhed and squirmed. The insects, constantly wriggling into the shape of the character for rain, were roasted by the golden aura.

The water insects twisted desperately, trying to crawl between Hayul's chestnut hairs to escape her aura. Then they burned to a crisp, spewing steam.

"Ugh..."

She shuddered. Even in Hayul's eyes, though she showed far less emotion than most people, the disgust was unmistakable.

"The water's bugs. Water looks like bugs. Is this kind of water crawling around inside me too?"

"Don't scratch your arm. Scratch too hard and you'll bleed, and then your blood will start looking like insects. Once even your blood starts forming the character for rain, it's over."

"... You sound like you've seen this a lot."

Of course I did. I had seen it a lot.

I had witnessed myself, Hayul, and everyone else turn into frogs, or bleed themselves to death out of disgust and fear of water, about five times.

One run to learn that if I let the Great Monsoon be instead of steering it toward Busan, the Japanese archipelago or the Korean Peninsula would sink.

Two runs to learn that even if I steered it toward Busan, we would helplessly drown, swept away by the "tsunami," unless we prepared facilities such as arks and the necessary spells.

Another run to learn that even with an ark, we would be flooded unless we performed the act of bailing water. And so on.

"When I was underwater, turning into a frog, it felt strange."

Hayul murmured. Her hair was dry now, yet somehow her eyes seemed submerged in watery shadow.

"A feeling of longing. A happy feeling. I couldn't breathe, but it was like I was breathing somewhere other than my nose or mouth. No. Through my whole body... Through my skin. So just breathing felt like it had opened up my entire being. As if the world and I had become one—"

"Don't dwell on it. It'll bewitch you."

I tightened my grip.

Reason abruptly returned to her eyes. I met her gaze head-on.

"Let's go. We need to help the others."

"..."

"The puppet strings are broken over there. Let's repair any broken threads we find as we go."

Hayul gave a small nod.

The corridor, too, was flooded calf-deep, hindering our steps.

SPLISH, SPLASH.

Whenever we kicked through the water as we walked, droplet insects scattered in every direction, fleeing.

Hayul shook her head and gently touched the puppet strings. Golden aura spread along the web throughout the ark.

"How is it, Hayul? Are you picking up signals through the puppet strings?"

"... Isolation Section Fifteen, all clear. Twenty-one, thirty-seven, all clear."

BEEP. BEEP-BEEP. BEEP, BEEP.

BEEP-BEEP-BEEP, BEEEP-BEEEP-BEEEP, BEEP-BEEP-BEEP.

Shortly after Hayul sent out her aura, a multitude of different auras came back from every direction. They were signals from the people in charge of each isolation section.

The sound of the webs connected throughout the immense vessel transmitting Morse code was like the ark's heartbeat.

Hayul, who linked those arteries and veins, raised her head.

"... Thirteen, seventeen, twenty-three, twenty-five, no signal. Ah. Twenty-five just sent an okay signal."

"The others?"

"Silent. No response."

However thoroughly we prepared, casualties were inevitable. I had my limits, too; I couldn't be everywhere at once.

We immediately headed for the affected sections.

The instant I opened Isolation Section Thirteen's iron door, a human figure lunged at us like a zombie.

"Uuughhuuughaaa!"

"...!"

Startled, Hayul reflexively scattered her puppet strings. The figure's limbs were instantly swathed in webbing, and they fell with a splash.

"Uuugh—uuugh. Uuughh."

Half their body had melted. And instead of bleeding, the melted flesh sprouted green skin. Each time skin grew, the flesh quivered and croaked.

"Uuughhh. Uugh, uuugh."

They seemed to have already lost both intelligence and reason. Their eye sockets were open, but the eyeballs and irises were entirely water, constantly spewing more water from the two globes.

"Big brother."

The bizarre sight held my attention only briefly before Hayul pointed into Isolation Section Thirteen.

"There."

The space was filled with water.

Though I had just opened the iron door, the water filling the room did not pour out. It remained there, as though an invisible, transparent glass door stood across the threshold.

And there was no one underwater.

Each isolation section held anywhere from a hundred to a hundred and fifty people.

Yet the only things floating in the waters of Isolation Section Thirteen were blue, yellow, and pitch-black shirts and trousers.

The missing.

Humans swallowed by the great void and vanished.

The clothes that had lost their owners swam through the aquarium like tropical fish.

RIBBIT, RIBBIT, RIBBIT.

Only the frogs' croaking echoed softly through the refractions underwater.

I swallowed a groan.

"... So preventing Thirteen from flooding really is impossible."

Four and thirteen.

The quintessential unlucky numbers.

The Operations Control Office, where Noh Doha and the rest of the leadership had gathered, was none other than Isolation Section Four. I had taken the most dangerous section, the fourth, and stationed veterans in the thirteenth.

Even so, Isolation Section Thirteen had been wiped out.

Asking why we didn't simply leave the room empty was pointless. If we did, a "thirteenth room" would be randomly selected according to some other criterion.

'In the end, if I protect Four, Thirteen falls. If I protect Thirteen, Four falls. I'll have to reduce the number of sections to twelve or fewer, even if it means pushing things a little harder.'

That was something to improve in the next run.

"Let's go. To the next section."

"Okay. ... What about this person?"

"It's already too late. Once the bodily mutation has progressed that far, even Aryeon's healing ability can't reverse it. That isn't human."

"Then, kill them?"

"Yes. Step aside."

"No."

Hayul shook her head.

"I'll do it."

She opened her palm, then clenched it tight.

SHRIIIP!

The victim's body, wrapped in puppet strings, split into hundreds upon thousands of pieces. If you've seen the opening scene of the first <Cube> movie, it should be easy to imagine.

The difference from <Cube> was that instead of dropping limply to the floor, those thousands of pieces of flesh immediately became transparent liquid and leaped into the water like frogs, splashing.

SPLASH. RIBBIT. SPLASH. RIBBIT.

The croaking rapidly receded into the distance.

Along with it, the water filling this end of the corridor dropped from shin-height to our Achilles tendons.

"..."

Hayul gripped her own forearm tightly.

Fortunately, the remaining sections had not been completely wiped out like Isolation Section Thirteen. The rescue work proceeded smoothly.

In Isolation Section Twenty-five, seventeen people had drowned or gone missing, "losing their existence." Twenty-one had suffered severe injuries through bodily mutation. Two had been injured in fights between survivors.

Thanks to swift intervention, all the severely injured were able to return to human form. Our tireless efforts to drill the "survival guide" and "precautions" into people, both on SG Net and in person, had paid off.

"... ..."

But one of the severely injured had been a little late returning to humanity.

He was a crusader who had followed Sim Aryeon from the Holy State of the East to lend assistance. An awakened who had armed himself by adding genuine faith to false doctrine.

Not only his fingers but his toes, thighs, and nape had turned into those of a frog, and he had existed in that mutated state for six minutes.

Humans are frail. Six minutes is by no means a short time. When breathing and blood flow cease to function properly during cardiac arrest, the brain suffers permanent damage in just five minutes.

And void poison did more than poison the physical body. It dripped toxins into consciousness, the mind, and human memories as well.

"Parasites."

The crusader mumbled under his breath.

"People often say humans are insects that parasitize nature. But isn't there also nature that parasitizes humans? Isn't blood like an insect that lives by parasitizing me? All things consist of matter, and are nothing but matter, yet boundaries are drawn around that matter to rear and contain other matter. What is freedom? If a parasite leaves its host, its flesh will perish, but the will to escape existed, if only for a single fleeting instant. Thus escape from the flesh is both death and freedom. A leap beyond matter is a miracle that lasts only a moment. The only difference is whether it comes through one's own decision or another's coercion..."

"Shut up!"

One survivor screamed desperately.

"Someone tell that bastard to shut his mouth!"

It wasn't just one person. The people huddled under blankets had been watching with anxious eyes the whole time as the crusader poured out his torrent of tongues, as though possessed.

The strange thing was that the crusader had never raised his voice.

His confession was actually quite quiet. It could hardly have been any louder than the cough of an old man hacking in a corner of the isolation section.

Nonetheless, every survivor gathered in Isolation Section Twenty-five listened to his monologue.

Even the least perceptive person could sense that concentration. Hearing had a direction, just as a human gaze did.

"O God. No, O One, for even the word God is insufficient."

The crusader continued murmuring, unperturbed.

"Not He who is one by existing within me, but the One whom I must at last go outside to see off. The flesh is a prison, and the mind an escape. At last I understand why escape from the flesh is called freedom. All matter is no different from insects parasitizing other matter. O One, now I, too, shall take refuge there—"

"Kill him!"

THUD.

A survivor picked up a food can and hurled it.

Objectively speaking, this was simply an act of violence against a patient muttering quietly to himself.

Yet for some reason, no one intervened.

"That bastard's an anomaly! An anomaly!"

"Fucking bastard! So fucking loud!"

"Kill him before we're infected too!"

Tuna cans. Water bottles. Dozens of survivors picked up every material object they could get their hands on and hurled it at the crusader.

RIBBIT. RIBBIT. RIBBIT-RIBBIT. RIBBIT.

Frog croaks seeped between the crusader's monologue and the survivors' shouts.

But everyone only raised their own voices, as though they couldn't hear the frogs at all.

"Enough."

I stamped my foot forcefully.

BOOM.

A vibration traveled through the vessel's floor and reverberated in the isolation section. The survivors froze.

"You're all suffering from void poisoning right now."

"..."

"I know. The voices of the constellations who used to look after your mental well-being have fallen silent, too. Those of you who are awakened have lost SG Net, which you clung to all day. This is a loneliness you'll have to get used to for a while."

"..."

"Since different forms of existential contamination may occur in each section, we, the leadership, will continue to maintain isolation. Please use the puppet strings to communicate with other sections and send messages to command. Members of the command staff will patrol at least twice each day to check on your situation."

I glanced at the crusader. He was still muttering.

"I'll take this contaminated man to the infirmary. Please remember that he is an awakened who came from Pyongyang to help Busan, a city to which he originally had no ties at all."

"..."

I didn't rebuke them any further. It wasn't their fault.

As I slung the crusader over my shoulder and left the isolation section, Hayul hurried after me.

SPLISH. SPLASH.

Walking down the corridor, I looked out the window.

Rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain.

A view like being beneath the sea. The ark was still entirely submerged.

According to Genesis, the "Great Monsoon" is said to have lasted forty days.

And this was still only day one.