Chapter 85 - The Accomplice III

The final suicide squad had included large numbers of ordinary people as well as awakened, so in the immediate aftermath of their annihilation, Busan was as desolate as a ghost town.

Even after I hung up the [Open] sign and looked out at the street, not a single passerby appeared. Noh Doha and I simply sat on the bench outside the workshop, watching the scenery.

"..."

"..."

"Hmm. Would you like some coffee, Workshop Master?"

"Ah. Yes. I'm always happy to have coffee you've made, Assistant..."

The silence of the street did not feel strange.

If anything, it was the days we had spent pressing on until now, somehow maintaining a pretense of vitality and normality even at the end of the world, that had sometimes felt unfamiliar.

Streetlights with no one beneath them.

A crosswalk with all its white stripes peeled away.

Broad-leaved street trees. An aurora of sunlight. The sirens of cicadas not yet extinct, calling for mates not yet extinct.

"It's summer..."

Noh Doha murmured over a sip of café au lait, her breath rising like transparent smoke.

The world was peaceful, as though it had finally regained its original form.

Nine in the morning, eleven, lunchtime. On the menu was steak I cooked myself. One in the afternoon, three, five—even then, not a single customer visited Noh Doha's usually bustling workshop.

The sun set.

The night sky's eyelids were the color of sunset.

For the past eight years, the world, which should have fallen asleep long ago, had rubbed its eyes and resisted sleeping in. At last, it was gently closing its brows.

'Watching the end of the world firsthand, just the two of us, might not be so bad.'

That was when it happened.

As the reclining Buddha of the sunset lay on its side, quietly nodding its head, I suddenly heard footsteps.

My ears pricked up.

"Well, it's about time to close up. Hah. Business was absolutely disastrous today. You must be pleased to have had such an easy... Hmm? What's wrong, Assistant?"

"... Someone's coming this way."

"Oh...?"

The footfalls grew clearer. But they sounded odd. A step, a tap, a step, a tap—something overlapped each footfall.

It was a walking stick.

"Ah."

I rose from the bench to greet our customer. Sure enough, a familiar elderly man was swaying around the intersection, planting his walking stick into the summer.

I hurried over to support him.

"Sir! What brings you here today? Did you walk all the way from Bansong-dong?"

"Oh, our young Assistant is still in Busan. Eh? Why are you still here? Hmm? Goodness, Ms. Noh Doha is still here too. What are you young people doing, staying here like this? Eh? What are you going to do...?"

"..."

By the time I helped the elderly man into the workshop, Noh Doha was already in the workroom, wearing her usual white doctor's coat. She adjusted her monocle and picked up his chart.

"Mr. Sin Subin from Bansong-dong, isn't it? What brings you in...?"

"Mmm. Nothing much. It's just, this ankle brace has been creaking since last week. It's getting old..."

"Hah. You've knocked it out of alignment again, fiddling with it because it was uncomfortable. Didn't I tell you never to touch it? I suppose you find what I say laughable..."

"No, goodness. That's not—"

"And if the brace seems misaligned, you should come straight in for repairs. What kept you so busy that you put it off for another whole week...?"

"Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, ma'am. What am I to do? Hmm. Do you think it'll take long? If it does, never mind."

"No. It'll be done in ten minutes..."

Noh Doha took out her tools and repaired the assistive device, tapping and tightening its misaligned parts. All the while, she and her patient exchanged idle chatter about their lives.

Just as they always did.

CLANG

The hammer rang out.

"..."

Quietly, I went to the workshop entrance and checked outside.

A strange static filled the night sky being drawn down by the sunset.

Instead of starlight, red spots glimmered like scratches. Instead of the Milky Way, blood vessels resembling blue arteries pulsed.

The sky was turning into a void. No, this void phenomenon extended beyond the sky to the celestial bodies. It was proof that the world's end was truly close.

'... This isn't good.'

Even the sunset was being infected in real time. What had initially been a sky dyed vermilion and yellow was, little by little, acquiring a thick viscosity, as though it were blood spilling from the pitch-black night sky.

Would it be easier to understand if I said it felt like the sky was a laboratory beaker, with a red solution dripping into it?

Empty air was becoming a surface, light was becoming slime, clouds were becoming blades, and the ground was becoming the Milky Way.

If powerful anomalies were left alone instead of being periodically exterminated, they would mate and merge as they pleased, becoming a single mass.

Nut, goddess of the night. An anomaly and a void whose cause I could hardly begin to deduce at this point in my life. One of the end-of-the-world scenarios that occasionally appeared.

The world's night was swallowing the city in great strides.

Soon, everything on the surface would fall into eternal sleep. In less than ten minutes, at most.

"Workshop Master, it's about time—"

"Assistant."

I turned around. Noh Doha was emerging from the workroom with her patient.

Our eyes met.

A pair of black islands floating in the middle of a white sea gazed at me.

"Take Mr. Sin Subin home."

"..."

We exchanged a brief glance, and far more silence passed between us.

"Have you got steel rods stuck in your ears? Assistant. I told you to escort our patient home and come back. Fuck. The roads are bad enough already. Are you going to take responsibility if he falls on the way...?"

"Yes. Understood."

"Good..."

Noh Doha gave a faint, breathy chuckle.

"That's what my assistant should do..."

Beside her, the elderly man kept protesting that he was fine, that he could go on his own, but Noh Doha would not budge.

I easily lifted him into my arms and set off.

"Ohhh, I'm really quite all right. Honestly, Ms. Noh Doha's problem is that she cares too much about her patients... Ooooooh!"

The reason he switched careers to soprano toward the end was, of course, that I had begun using my lightness arts.

He looked around with eyes as round as saucers. The streets were flying past in an instant. I raised my aura to protect his body.

I moved with light taps of my feet, stepping on collapsed building walls, traffic lights, and the like.

'If I move as fast as possible to get him home to Bansong-dong... Then return to the workshop, it'll be just barely five minutes. With that much time, if I'm lucky, I might just make it before the world ends... No, but when the void reaches the workshop is another variable.'

"Young man."

As I traveled using my lightness arts, the elderly man suddenly spoke from my arms.

"Yes?"

"Put me down around here."

I blinked. We still had another four minutes to go before we reached his home.

"No, sir. I'll take you home."

"Oh, enough. Enough. Does home matter? It's the road home that matters. My ankle brace is working again, so I'd like to walk on my own two feet, at least at the end."

"Ah."

"I've lived in this neighborhood all my life. My elementary school used to be around here, and this was the road I took home. For decades, I went back and forth along this very road. Me. Today, I didn't want to die inside my house, so I came out for a walk, but there wasn't a soul around. I never imagined Ms. Noh Doha would be at the workshop. Truly. She's such a thoughtful person."

"..."

"Thank you, young man. You're worried about Ms. Noh Doha, aren't you? Then this road isn't yours. Let's each go our own way."

I set him down on the downhill slope of the hill road. With a few groans, he planted his walking stick on the asphalt.

It was a single-lane road Noh Doha had paid out of her own pocket to lay in Busan some time ago.

Resting about thirty percent of his weight on his stick, the elderly man waved a hand.

"I'm fine, so hurry back."

"... Thank you."

"What are you thanking me for? I'm the grateful one..."

He descended the hill, dragging his groans and the taps of his stick behind him like a shadow.

Cicadas sang. But from beyond the concrete forest, their cries kept shrinking away—a handspan, two, three.

It was closing in.

The world's night.

"I'll see you next time, sir."

I bowed, then turned around. And I moved even faster than I had while carrying him.

The workshop rooftop.

Atop Doha Workshop, which had been only a two-story building when I joined, but had risen to five stories through repeated extensions and renovations over the past eight years. On that rooftop, coated in the green waterproof paint so typical of Korean buildings, with not a shred of design sense to be found.

"Oh..."

Noh Doha stood there alone, holding a bottle of wine and a corkscrew.

I alighted on the rooftop like a butterfly with a light tap, and she looked at me as though it were perfectly natural. Even though this was the first time I had ever used my lightness arts in front of her.

"You're back sooner than I expected. You did take Mr. Sin Subin home properly, didn't you...?"

"He said he wanted to walk his final road on his own feet. I had no choice but to put him down."

"Ah. Hmm. I hadn't thought of that..."

POP

The cork came out of the wine bottle.

Noh Doha tossed the cork, corkscrew and all, over the rooftop wall.

"A glass...?"

"If it's from your collection, Workshop Master, I'd be a fool to pass it up."

"Hah."

The red liquid trickled down the glass—wine with the same viscosity as the wine-colored sunset staining the sky at this very moment.

"Cheers. Well, to something or other..."

"Cheers."

CLINK

The glass rang brightly. The glasses of red wine looked just like bleeding-heart flower buds suspended in midair.

Standing side by side, we gazed through our wineglasses at the sky above the city. The sky, too, had become transparent glass, so it felt like looking at glass-beyond-glass.

Five minutes until the end now. Perhaps six, at most.

"Assistant."

"Yes."

"Actually, I know how to make weapons..."

I looked at Noh Doha. She wasn't looking at me.

"What?"

"Weapons. Weapons. Equipment? Anyway, you know. In those games middle-aged men play, their characters get stronger when they acquire weapons and such... As you know, my ability is [An ability that makes replacement parts for limbs feel like one's own body]. Hah. The thing is, it works exactly the same way on other equipment, not just limbs..."

"...!"

My eyes flew wide open.

Of course. Human arms and legs were the very first implements and tools. Then what if Noh Doha made a sword or spear—something that could be called an extension of the arm?

"Unity of body and sword...!"

"...? What does that mean...?"

"Ah. Um. Nothing... I just mean it's incredible."

It was difficult to convey my amazement to someone who had no connection whatsoever to geek culture, a pure, born-and-bred, voluntary loner. (She hadn't even seen a single Marvel movie.)

"... Why did you hide an ability like that, Workshop Master? That makes you a truly born blacksmith. You could have established yourself in a position where Dang Seorin watched her step around you, Cheon Yohwa courted you, and the warlords fretted over you."

"Hah. You just listed all my reasons... Can't you plainly see that if word got out I could make badass weapons, those awakened fuckers who are already a fucking nuisance would come rubbing their goddamn dicks all over the place with even greater enthusiasm...?"

"Ah."

"But if I'd known the world would end like this, I should have made a weapon for at least one person. Someone who doesn't seem likely to spread the word to the others..."

"..."

The sky was stained. Red.

Then pitch-black night flowed down after it, like the falling blade of a guillotine. Arteries and veins spread across the entire sky, and the colors of that imitation Milky Way writhed.

"... Then please make me one next time."

"Hah. Sure, why not. It'll be a deadly nuisance. But since I'm going to die anyway, I can put up with that much nuisance now..."

"Promise."

"Yes. If I don't want to make it, try pestering me into doing it anyway..."

CLANG

Beyond the rooftop, near the traffic lights at the intersection, something broke. It sounded like steel crumpling.

The sound was so ridiculous it almost seemed playful, but the result was no joke. Every bit of the 'scenery' beyond the traffic lights was devoured by the night sky.

CLANG, CLAAANG. CLANG

The crosswalk and buildings sank one after another into the void of night. The tops of buildings were bitten off like apples with a bite taken out of them.

Three hundred meters, two hundred fifty, one hundred eighty, one hundred twenty. In an instant. From every direction, the pitch-black night sky descended, voraciously consuming space.

The world's embrace had narrowed until it could barely hold the sound of the two of us breathing.

"Assistant."

"Yes."

"Thank y—"

CRASH

The last sound I heard was the wineglass Noh Doha held—or perhaps my own—shattering as the teeth of the night sky bit into it.

A crescent moon appeared in the glass.

And the world closed its eyes.