Chapter 24 - As I Shed Blood from My Right Hand

I crawled into a gap beneath the grotesquely twisted train and lay prone, catching my breath.

HUFF, HUFF.

It was hard to hide the sound of breathing through a gas mask.

Whenever I inhaled, the rubber pulled inward slightly, brushing my cheeks with the distinctive feel of wet rubber. Whenever I exhaled, the breath that failed to escape lingered inside the mask until it condensed into a dewy drop.

The fog, already thigh-deep when we came down, left everything beyond the lenses a whitish blur. The chill of the damp, cold marble floor tiles seeped through my clothes into my skin.

But I couldn't make any rash moves.

Beyond the pale fog, I could see the shadow of a tangle of capillaries contracting and relaxing as it returned to the ceiling. At the same time, the monster's distinctive moans mingled with its footsteps.

GURGLE...

I'd learned eye magic, not ear-branch magic, so I had no idea what that monster was babbling to itself. Today, I was profoundly grateful for that. For the first time, I felt sorry for that shitter Shin Na-in.

CLACK.

The sound of the priest monster's foot striking a rail echoed through the underground cavern.

CLACK, CLACK.

The one who must once have approached the altar and knelt in prayer no longer knelt. The eyes that must once have looked up at a cross were nowhere to be found, yet it still wandered in search of the living.

But the limits of an eyeless creature were clear.

The priest monster abruptly stopped walking along the tracks below the platform. I could see its shadow move beyond the fog.

It raised both dangling arms and carefully felt the place where its head had been. Not even a gurgling moan escaped it. Its futile hands, expecting to find what was gone, merely came into contact with its reality.

They touched the aorta extending long and straight from its spine, rooted in the ceiling.

The priest monster stayed motionless for a while, as though time had stopped.

It stroked and clasped its throbbing aorta in both hands, feeling the pulse of that alien life stretching all the way to the ceiling.

THUMP.

The capillaries overhead writhed in unison and glowed red, bright enough to momentarily drive out even the flickering fluorescent light.

Beneath that strange red light, the priest monster remained silent for a time. Instead, as though performing a sacred rite, it caressed its aorta with the utmost reverence and holiness, singing with its dangling tongue.

That was its attack.

It was a song sung by a priest whose lips, mouth, and even vocal cords were no longer properly intact. Gurgling moans and the dangling tongue striking its ragged lower jaw took the place of drums and a music box, as bizarre rhythms and melodies began colliding inside the underground cavern.

The problem was the dizziness.

With my rifle tucked under my arm, I hurriedly clutched my chest, but couldn't hold back the rising nausea.

Back when I lived alone, I'd once gotten enteritis from eating week-old delivery food because throwing it away felt wasteful. My vision spun, accompanied by a weakness even worse than that.

This... If I tried to hold it in, I'd just keep vomiting.

"Urk...!"

I pulled off my gas mask and turned my head in one swift motion.

"Bleeergh..."

Sour stomach acid came straight up. Thank God I hadn't eaten a proper lunch. I was insanely grateful to my past self for developing the habit of eating light breakfasts.

Relieved that I'd finished before getting vomit inside the mask, I spat and immediately put it back on.

There might still be something like a blood agent down here. Or that monster might do something similar. With those dangers in mind, I adjusted my grip on the rifle under my arm.

But a chill ran down my spine when I saw the priest monster looking this way.

It had no eyes, yet I felt as though our gazes had met. It stood silently, facing me. It was watching me through the fog as I hid beneath the crushed subway train.

"..."

A burning sensation accompanied my glimpse ten seconds into the future. Red footprints were already stamped on my right hand.

At that instant, I wriggled faster than I ever had in my life.

I curled up like a shrimp, then stretched out. I rolled first, not caring that vomit got on my trousers. As I tumbled away, I could see what had happened where I'd been.

Amid a gray cloud of dust from ceiling panels and shattered flooring mixed with fog, capillaries covered the train like a tightly woven net.

Extending from the ceiling, they began softly, stealthily enveloping the spot where I'd been, like a mother's hands caressing her precious baby.

Whenever the capillaries wrapped tightly around the car writhed with a pulse, I wondered whether the entire car had become a lump of meat.

A bead of cold sweat ran down my spine at the sight.

There was no sound. An attack plunging down from the ceiling would normally at least make a whoosh as it cut through the air, but there was none of that. It had simply moved quietly and stealthily.

As though trying to avoid our detection.

A chilling question crossed my mind.

Did it know?

I gripped my rifle with hands that had begun to tremble slightly. Still lying prone, I slowly turned my head toward the priest monster's shadow in the fog. It was still watching the gap beneath the train where I'd briefly sheltered and vomited.

I aimed and made my judgment.

I had to shoot. Should I use Stage Two eye magic as well?

I didn't deliberate long.

I'd choose the sure thing.

I secured the rifle under my arm, set my right index finger on the trigger, and finished aiming. The pain needed to be quick and powerful. There was no time to take off my glove.

I clenched my left hand and slammed it against the floor. Keeping the rifle as steady as possible, I immediately pulled the trigger.

BANG, BANG-BANG!

First came the sound of spent casings bouncing and rolling across the floor. Only afterward did I confirm the spray of blood. But at that moment, someone grabbed the back of my neck and desperately yanked me away.

The rifle struck the floor, and I rolled over it. Pain dug into my shoulder and back, bringing tears to my eyes.

Before I could even groan, gunfire began ringing out.

RAT-TAT-TAT...

Perhaps because we were underground, the shots echoed so fiercely that my ears rang. Only then did I lift my head to see who had dragged me away.

"The Lord is with us."

That one sentence told me who it was.

Instead of offering an excuse, that shitter Shin Na-in jerked his chin toward the spot where I'd been firing prone. I couldn't even groan.

Red, writhing capillaries were embedded in the place I'd occupied, swaying limply like a fishing net.

But the strangest thing was that the priest monster, which I was certain I'd shot and hit, was no longer visible in the fog.

There was no way I'd finished it off. I didn't even know where its weak point was. A few lead bullets in its body couldn't have killed it. While I stood briefly bewildered, Shin Na-in rapidly tapped my shoulder.

"I can hear you even if we split up, so think it in your head. I'll try to coordinate with you."

"What about Lee Se-jun?"

"We'll regroup with him later."

We immediately scattered again.

Shin Na-in headed toward the last gunshots, while I carefully advanced along an intact section of the platform. Now that we knew how strange the priest monster's attacks were, and how overwhelmingly powerful it was down here, staying too close together risked getting us all wiped out.

I kept my left hand free so I could stop an attack immediately if necessary. I needed to be able to slam it against anything at any moment, or at least pull off the glove and bite it.

Holding my left hand slightly raised, I glanced around and advanced slowly, one step at a time.

Point shooting with the rifle tucked under my right arm would have shit accuracy, but I had no choice. Better to immobilize it when it attacked me and have someone else shoot toward the gunfire.

But as I kept thinking, silence fell.

It was quiet enough that I could hear the soft crunch of broken tile beneath my combat boots.

CRUNCH, CRUNCH...

My breathing nearly grew ragged.

Worried that the sound would escape my gas mask, I deliberately held my breath.

Then my heartbeat began pounding against my eardrums instead.

As I inhaled and exhaled very slowly, my body, steeped in tension and fatigue, screamed and shed cold sweat down my cheeks.

I found myself stopping. The sounds echoed too much. I'd walked roughly fifty paces from the middle of the platform, and the fear that I might have been left alone in the second basement came over me.

Given the priest monster's quiet, stealthy ambushes, couldn't it have gotten both of them already?

What if I was the only one still alive, walking here now?

GULP.

I became conscious of swallowing.

A terrified voice echoed in my head, telling me to run. But reason, intertwined with my most faithful instinct—survival—told me a cold, clear truth.

Run? Where?

Those monsters weren't mere corpses or abominations. They were creatures born from twisted human flesh, predators and parasites that knew patience and how to hunt. They would be waiting for me to flee.

That would make the hunt easier.

And they wouldn't intend to let me escape alive. Having their existence exposed would be a devastating blow to a hunter. If they possessed intelligence, even without instinct driving them, they would be certain to kill me now that they'd been seen.

Then where was it watching from?

I decided to stop thinking of the priest monster as something that had once been human.

Regardless of its human shape, I would treat it as nothing but a monster.

Then I caught a glimpse of their bizarre biology and purpose.

I reached out with my raised left hand, pulled my rain poncho aside, and switched the tactical light in my left breast pocket back on. With the click of its mechanism, proper light entered the underground cavern, which had been filled with flickering fluorescent light and an ominous red glow.

The beam clearly revealed the platform floor and the area around the rails, previously obscured by swirling, flowing fog.

Bloodstained combat uniforms and torn clothing lay scattered haphazardly. We hadn't seen them properly when the reconnaissance drones only inspected the area near the platform stairs.

At that instant, I remembered the background to this operation.

[Heavy gas deployed for decontamination over two weeks.]

I hesitated no longer.

I snapped the muzzle upward. Toward the ceiling. I pulled the trigger at the ominously pulsing blood vessels, paying no attention to what my light illuminated.

BANG! BANG-BANG!

The recoil shook my shoulder wildly.

Amid the ringing that muffled my hearing, I found myself making noise with my mouth open. A battle cry closer to a groan—a scream I hoped was a battle cry.

Then, when pulling the trigger no longer ejected casings and produced only clicking noises, I threw myself aside while biting off the glove on my left hand.

THUD!

What fell onto the place I'd occupied was a corpse. A living, breathing corpse.

But it wasn't the corpse I'd expected.

Instead of a black cassock with its sleeves torn off, this monster wore slightly roguish-looking casual clothes and a prayer-bead necklace. With only its lower jaw and dangling tongue remaining, it moaned as the aorta extending from its spine throbbed.

GURGLE...

Madam Geulmun, too, had become something resembling the priest monster. He flailed arms grotesquely twisted by the impact of the fall and swung his dangling tongue. Then our eyes met.

He had no eyes, yet he recognized me precisely and faced me.

Someone grabbed my rain poncho and dragged me away.

"Get down!"

At Shin Na-in's shout, I rolled once more and lay flat.

That was when the deafening blast erupted.

BOOM!

Fragments scattered.

A high-pitched ringing shook my head. When I involuntarily cracked my eyes open, I saw the fouled platform.

Tiny fragments of flesh and metal swept through the entire underground space. A shock incomparable to mere gunfire shook the air, its blast pressure enough to push the fog back slightly.

I lifted my head. The Madam Geulmun monster, having lost his right arm and entire lower body, was writhing upward toward the ceiling as his aorta contracted.

Dangling there, he extended his tongue, soaked in cold saliva, even farther and let out a bizarre moan. At first I thought it was a gurgle, but within three seconds I realized it was an entirely different sound.

The moment I heard it, a painful sense of dread seized me.

An unpleasant sensation surged up, as though a piece of rough—not sharp—plastic had lodged in the center of my brain and was squeaking there.

Disgust washed over me, like the eyelashes of an eyeball that had spontaneously formed in the middle of my head were scraping against my brain cells. Abdominal pain followed, as though my stomach were dancing of its own accord, twisting and squeezing in ecstasy.

A song whose meaning humanity's base language could never dare to fully contain.

Through that monster seeped a prophecy bordering on a curse, something the frail, inadequate vessel called a human could never utter. Reeling with retching and dizziness, I understood only one word.

[... Eternity...]

That was when the second explosion came.

Something struck the singing Madam Geulmun monster dangling from the ceiling with a thud.

What I'd mistaken for a stone instantly exploded.

BOOM!

I instinctively shielded my eyes with my left arm and heard pieces of flesh pattering down.

Only then did I realize that Shin Na-in, standing behind me, had his hands clasped in prayer.

"Almighty Lord God, let not Satan and his devils lead me astray. Though their terrifying power overwhelms me, grant me courage and hope, that my journey toward the gates of heaven may not end... Only say the word, and I shall be healed..."

I knew instinctively.

Even without looking ten seconds ahead, I could tell Shin Na-in couldn't exert himself anymore. His ear-branch magic apparently made him more vulnerable to the sound. Then was Lee Se-jun the one who'd just thrown those two grenades?

Insane accuracy. He had to be incredibly far away, yet I'd glimpsed it flying almost straight rather than in an arc.

That meant Lee Se-jun was likely to become its target. He could inflict meaningful damage.

My eyes burned, but that was enough.

Alteration-Type Eye, Stage One.

Without hesitation, I decided to aim at the ceiling and pour out my last remaining rounds.

I swiftly changed magazines, pulled the charging handle, and raised the muzzle. Aiming where the red footprints appeared, I placed my index finger on the trigger.

Now I knew how it was fooling my foresight, too.

BANG-BANG!

Casings tumble to the floor. The capillaries writhing overhead twitch and shrink back.

BANG!

Heavy recoil presses against my shoulder, but my shots are putting just as much pressure on the monster overhead. The priest monster is still out of sight, but this is enough.

Those blood vessels are its true body!

"Shin Na-in! Snap out of it! Report to the people upstairs! Have them set off smoke grenades!"

"Lord God... What? Smoke grenades?"

Hearing Shin Na-in's bewildered voice, I couldn't help shouting in frustration.

The idea had struck me that detonating smoke grenades could thicken the fog, with the momentary pressure helping it reach the ceiling.

Beating the shit out of the priest monster wasn't the point now.

I'd been given a chance to learn on-site, without going through a booklet or someone else.

Then I had to use it!

"We have to learn magic! Don't you see the symbol those overlapping blood vessels make? We need to spread the fog! Let's set off smoke grenades!"

"Mr. Baek Je-min, in this situation..."

CLICK.

My ammunition ran out just then. I immediately turned my head and dropped the magazine.

As it bounced over the spent casings already on the floor, I leaned toward Shin Na-in with my eyes wide.

"There's magic right there!!!"

Only then did Shin Na-in hurriedly gather his equipment and head for the stairs.

The blood vessels overhead writhed at his movement, and the priest monster finally revealed itself. It had been hiding, dangling beyond the tracks where the light didn't reach.

Like a moving claw-machine crane, the aorta extending from its spine wriggled, carrying the priest monster along the ceiling.

Its target clearly seemed to be Shin Na-in.

Without hesitation, I lifted my gas mask slightly. Then I opened my mouth wide and brought my left hand to it.

Alteration-Type Eye, Stage Two.

My pain is longer and more enduring than ever before...

CRUNCH!

Blood seeps out. I open my eyes wide at the sensation of my teeth tearing through my skin and sinking into my flesh.

When I pulled my mouth away, blood welled from the bite marks, mingling with saliva. The lingering damage from my previous injuries magnified the pain. An electric agony strong enough to make my spine shrink and then stiffen, along with a searing heat, ignited in my nerve endings and spread.

With my left hand trembling in pain in the foreground, I watched the priest monster frozen motionless where it hung from the ceiling and shouted.

"Lee Se-jun!"

As my voice echoed through the underground cavern, Lee Se-jun finally emerged from his hiding place in the tunnel.

Even in this mess, he showed no sign of fatigue. He ran forward bravely, adjusted his stance, then crouched behind cover and nodded.

"I have one grenade left. I'll pull the pin, so..."

"No, you dumbass! Don't throw it!"

"What?"

"Wait until the smoke grenades get here! Put on your gas mask!"

But my eyelids couldn't hold out much longer.

As I used my profusely bleeding, bitten left hand to pull my gas mask back on, I must have put it on wrong. The lens pressed slightly against my right eyelid. My body twisted involuntarily from the tingling pain, and tears kept spilling out.

They blurred my vision.

Which meant the magic's effect was fading, too.

I'd cast it again.

"Lee Se-jun, I'm going to close my eyes once! The magic will wear off, so try to hold it back with your rifle! Shoot the blood vessels!"

I blinked.

The instant I closed my eyes and opened them again, gunshots cut across my ears.

"Aaaaagh! Die!"

Lee Se-jun's cry, not quite a scream, rang out alongside echoing, gurgling moans. But the monster was already out of my sight. Did Stage Two magic have some separate penalty? Was there a cooldown after using it once? Or did I need to inflict a different kind of pain?

But my magic tool, my left-hand staff, guaranteed reliable performance.

With the lingering injury providing a baseline of pain, adding more was all too easy. I'd already bitten it and slammed it against the floor, so this time I'd cut it with a blade.

I threw my rifle aside, drew the bayonet from inside my clothes, and readied myself to grip my palm against its tip and give it a shallow cut. My eyes turned toward the sound of ricochets.

But we were underground and indoors.

With gunshots colliding and echoing, it was difficult to tell where bullets struck and bounced away. The monster had already learned to hide deftly among the flickering lights.

But Stage Two wasn't my only magic.

With pain like burning mint toothpaste smeared thickly over my eyes, I held them wide and quickly scanned the entire underground platform. Red footprints rained down everywhere.

It was trying to neutralize foresight through sheer area.

It had spread its true body thinly across the entire ceiling, transforming itself into something capable of attacking anywhere, anytime. Now it was aiming for the time lag within those ten seconds. Its tactic was to exploit my inability to see anything before the ten-second mark and attack within that interval.

But ever since learning that I could immobilize it with Stage Two, it had been reluctant to attack me.

The risk was too great.

A smart hunter doesn't take excessive risks. Even if it attacked me within ten seconds, failing to finish me off completely in that time could mean getting caught by me and hurt. Its intelligence had shifted its target to Lee Se-jun.

It probably figured it could hunt me after killing Lee Se-jun, who could inflict substantial, meaningful damage.

I realized it anew.

Our opponent was something that had been human, but was human no longer. We were fighting a monster, and that monster was a smart hunter. It was eat or be eaten between us. The monster simply had more cards to play.

And it tried to incapacitate us through song again.

GURGLE...

The rising nausea nearly made me close my eyes instinctively, but I endured, breaking out in cold sweat. Clenching my teeth, I pounded my chest to force myself calm and scanned the ceiling.

Now I understood what those gurgling moans were.

They weren't really gurgles. They were the sound of a language humans couldn't comprehend leaking out through human vocal cords.

At that moment, something rolled down from the stairs above the platform amid a hubbub of voices.

CLINK, RATTLE...

"Signaling smoke grenades! Put your gas masks on!"

The instant I heard First Lieutenant Baek Han-seong's shout, the sound of escaping smoke swept through the underground space.

HISSS...

Yellow smoke mixes with white fog, blurring everything.

That was when the priest monster appeared. It had been lying in ambush near the platform stairs, dangling overhead. To use its black cassock as camouflage, it had grotesquely bent both arms and tucked them inside. Now it moved in response to the hissing smoke.

GURGLE...

Like a claw-machine crane opening its pincers and descending to grab the desired toy, the priest monster lowered itself, relaxing and lengthening the aorta at its spine. Formed from endlessly tangled capillaries, that aorta still flaunted the pulse of an alien life.

THUMP.

The priest monster twisted and pulled out the arms it had forced inside its torn cassock. Its bent arms opened in an embrace, replacing the crane's claws. Its dangling tongue dripped cold saliva and twitched faintly, singing in a bizarre, ominous rhythm and melody.

[... Eternity...]

Not yet.

As yellow smoke spread and mingled with the fog, and the priest monster entered it and became a shadow, I calmly kept my gaze fixed.

No footprints were visible.

At that moment, I finally knew the time had come and looked up at the ceiling.

The fog had risen rapidly, as though answering the smoke grenades, and already reached the tip of my nose. The harsh, nauseating smell peculiar to chemical gas seeped through my mask's filter as the view beyond its lenses grew murky.

But when I lifted my eyes a little higher, the fog swirled and enveloped me.

More precisely, the blood vessels drawn across the ceiling.

The capillaries writhed.

And showed the symbol more clearly. This time, the magic script didn't rearrange itself on its own.

Instead, the capillaries forming that symbol emitted a brighter, clearer red glow.

Two sets of five lines. Crossing horizontally and vertically.

What was rearranging itself was the inside of my head.

However stupid I was, I had no choice but to understand. The magic script forcibly twisted and altered my mind, making me grasp its meaning. My vision flashed, as though this were a plain truth that even a brain-dead dumbfuck couldn't fail to understand.

This symbol was hands. Two sets of lines representing five fingers, the left and right hands crossing.

The evolution that began when humanity became primates, and the origin that made humanity the foremost of creatures.

A thrill swept down my spine.

This was...

This was the hand branch.

Magic symbolizing human intelligence.

A branch the military hadn't discovered yet...

Magic from a branch I might be the first to have awakened!

At that instant, I instinctively understood what Stage One of the hand branch was.

And so I adjusted my grip on the bayonet I'd intended to use to cut my left palm.

Instead, with burning eyes, I looked ten seconds into the future.

I can see the future.

Red footprints were stamped on the back of my hand and along my arm. It had sensed it: I was now more dangerous than Lee Se-jun.

But that ten-second lag was an interval in which the unexpected could happen, for both it and me. Without hesitation, I stripped off my right leather glove.

Then, with the bayonet I'd repositioned, I slashed my right palm.

SLICE!

Blood welled up instantly. I'd been careful not to cut off any fingers, but a burning sensation surged up a moment later.

Without hesitation, I raised my right hand toward the capillaries plunging vertically from the ceiling, as though offering them the blood flowing from it to drink. I offered the monster my right hand and my blood.

The capillaries seized the opportunity with relish.

An opportunity to feed and reproduce. Thinking I wasn't resisting, the smart hunter inserted its capillaries through my skin.

I can feel it. Beneath my thin skin and flesh, I can feel the monster's capillaries connecting to my blood vessels. That spine-chilling sensation seemed to intertwine our vessels into one.

But just as my capillaries and the monster's were about to touch, it realized something was wrong and tried to withdraw.

Of course, I didn't allow it.

I instantly clenched my hand, grabbing a bundle of capillaries with my blood-soaked right fist.

And at last, Stage One of hand-branch magic took effect.

Hand Branch, Stage One.

Blood shed from my right hand can harm those monsters.

The capillaries that had absorbed my right hand's blood rapidly wither. They begin melting away as though poisoned, or like a snail that has sucked up a massive amount of salt water.

CRACKLE...

The sound of dried blood crusts tearing apart erupted all across the ceiling. Blood dust burst from overhead, drifting into the yellow smoke and clouds of fog.

Before I knew it, the bundle of capillaries in my grip had become a handful of dried blood crusts. Without hesitation, I crumbled them.

"Hehehehe..."

Laughter slips out.

At the same time, Lee Se-jun, who had been panicking, approached with panting breaths. Grunting with effort, he clambered up onto the platform.

"Mr. Baek Je-min, what is this?"

He'd been through a lot.

Feeling unusually generous, I decided to grant Lee Se-jun a very special privilege.

I showed him both my bloodstained hands, left and right, and gave him a cheerful smile.

"From today onward, address me as the esteemed Archmage Baek Je-min."