Chapter 30 - The Cries of a Recovering Birth Rate

The convoy of trucks carrying the mage candidates headed toward Songpa-daero.

Apparently, it was one of the most thoroughly devastated areas on Seoul’s outskirts, with even the reinforced-concrete buildings mostly smashed to pieces. It had therefore been judged to have the fewest monsters and designated as an entry route into Seoul.

Inside Seoul, however, the fog was so thick that it was a hellish space aircraft could not properly enter.

As the helicopter rotors that had been audible until moments ago gradually faded into the distance, the officer riding up front called out.

“Don’t worry. We’ve sent drones ahead to scout. They’ll report back.”

I had no idea whether that was true.

Before long, though, a sound like gigantic hornets buzzing came from various points in the sky, so I figured he probably wasn’t lying, at least.

If those weren’t drones, they’d be monsters buzzing like hornets.

Silence settled over us for a while.

Coughing. Unnecessary throat-clearing. Quiet prayers offered according to each person’s beliefs or religion.

Then Deacon Min Hyeong-jun, supposedly the leader of the Taegeuk Cape Brigade, looked at us and gave a bitter smile.

“Was Shin Na-in the one among you who believes in God?”

“Yes, sir, Deacon.”

“Young people these days come to church to meet women. It’s rare to find someone this devout. Most wouldn’t want to come somewhere so terrible.”

“Not at all. Isn’t starting a family also God’s will—that we be fruitful and multiply?”

“Well, now. Your faith is something else, Na-in.”

At that, several middle-aged men and women from the Taegeuk Cape Brigade murmured among themselves and joined the conversation.

“You’re such a handsome young man, Na-in. Would you be interested in meeting my daughter?”

“Oh, lucky you! If I had a daughter, I’d set them up too!”

“Do you drink, Na-in?”

This feeling... I knew it.

Memories came flooding back of the day a senior from college had begged me to fill an empty spot at a group date between departments. I’d followed him to the drinking party, sat tucked away in a corner, and done nothing but eat the snacks. Only after getting home had I realized I hadn’t spoken to anyone.

Na-in seemed used to all this attention. He even took off his gas mask to laugh and chat, while Se-jun came over and sat beside me, looking distinctly unimpressed.

“Je-min. Doesn’t Shin Na-in kind of piss you off?”

“What else is new?”

If someone pisses you off for no reason, you simply dislike them.

I think trying to tack on a reason is downright cowardly. I, Baek Je-min, a man so upstanding he needs no laws, don’t stoop to searching for reasons to dislike someone.

Making up clever-sounding reasons for an irrational feeling wasn’t something a real man did.

I’d merely gained one more reason to hate Shin Na-in, that obnoxious Christian nutjob I’d disliked all along.

“Se-jun, when you already dislike someone, you just want to use anything as an excuse to trash them. If Na-in hadn’t been chatting with those church people, we’d have said, ‘Look at that bastard. Even the church crowd won’t have him.’”

“... You’re a deeper thinker than you look, Je-min.”

“So don’t be cowardly and petty about finding reasons, Se-jun. Just say you dislike someone.”

“I-I actually dislike you, Je-min.”

See? There wasn’t a single reason to dislike me, yet that was how frightening first impressions could be.

I decided to make Se-jun a more rational, reasonable person.

SMACK!

“Ow! What the hell!? Why’d you suddenly smack my back!”

“Now you have a reason to dislike me. From now on, say you hate me because I smacked your back.”

“...”

In the end, it was true that Shin Na-in, that crazy Christian nutjob, had made getting along with the Taegeuk Cape Brigade easier.

They wore Korean flags as capes, with crosses crammed around the four trigrams, so I’d assumed they were complete lunatics. But the way they chattered and fussed was just like any other middle-aged church crowd.

Though I did wonder whether we should be making this much noise while pushing through such thick fog.

Still, Se-jun and I—and the driver and officer up in the cab—probably understood it on some level. The Taegeuk Cape Brigade was talking to forget its fear and tension.

The damp, cold fog was heavy with moisture, giving the illusion that we were sinking into the dark depths of the sea. It almost felt as though stopping breathing for even a moment would leave us bubbling out our last breath and dying.

I didn’t know what the middle-aged men and women of the Taegeuk Cape Brigade had been through. Still, I doubted it was as bad as what our alteration-type trio had experienced beneath Suwon Station.

Of course, there was no denying they had volunteered to come all the way out here. At least their patriotism or faith had to be genuine, didn’t it?

It was funny, really.

Back when the world—or rather, the Republic of Korea—was fine, these people had seemed nothing but ridiculous, and I’d seen only their faults. Yet now that monsters had appeared, I was trying to find something good in people like them.

That was when the truck stopped.

“Dismount! Visibility in the fog is under a hundred meters. Let’s check.”

We followed the officer out. The headlights of the armored vehicles and trucks at the front and rear illuminated ash and dust floating in the thick fog.

The soldiers kept their distance as they both guarded and watched the mage candidates. Between them, we and the Taegeuk Cape Brigade prepared to open our Magic Crash Course booklets.

“Same precautions. Open them, and report if you’re all right.”

Even the officer’s instructions had become extremely terse. He seemed unable to lift the corners of his mouth, however hard he tried to smile.

Everyone opened their booklets, and candidates and mages alike retched together in perfect harmony. I was no exception. I tried to learn Stage One of the heart branch on page five, but all I got was dry heaving.

“Urgh... fuck...”

Looking back, I’d charged headlong into everything so far through sheer guts, without a single proper theory.

Was I reaching the point where I couldn’t learn magic without a well-established theory, without something to aim for? Did I seriously have to believe that stuff about multiplying five by five to get twenty-five, splitting twenty-five into two and five, then adding them to spit out seven?

I closed my eyes and endured the mounting dizziness for several dozen seconds.

When I opened them again and looked around, I had to acknowledge the correlation between fog and the success rate of learning magic. At two hundred meters of visibility, every last person had retched, but at a hundred meters, about six were fine.

A monk, a prisoner, a woman with tightly curled hair, an elderly person with a slightly stooped back, a sickly-looking middle-aged man.

The officer talked to them, scribbled diligently in his notebook, and nodded.

“I think this is enough for us to head back. We’ll do a quick head count...”

“Captain. A moment, please.”

A soldier wrapped in chemical-protection gear and a gas mask approached with a shotgun, raising a hand.

The officer and soldier moved a little way off and talked at length between themselves, but that trick wouldn’t work on our alteration-type trio. I jabbed Na-in in the ribs with my elbow. Nutjob though he was, he had plenty of uses, and he began whispering their conversation to us like a radio.

“They say several soldiers are missing.”

“Aren’t rescue attempts supposed to be strictly forbidden?”

“And they think a few Operator candidates have disappeared too.”

That was more serious.

It seemed to be giving the officer a headache too; I could hear him groaning from here. Losing a few soldiers was an acceptable loss. Painful as it was, it was better than everyone getting wiped out trying to save a handful of them.

The problem was the Operator candidates—the prospective mages.

Even if they hadn’t awakened magic yet, what if they were capable of becoming mages? Besides, our alteration-type trio knew that when monsters ate mages or used them to reproduce, they were put to use in other forms.

I could still vividly picture Father Jeong Yong-hwan and Madam Geulmun after their deaths.

The officer looked like someone stationed at the first cordon. There was no way information on those unidentified species hadn’t been shared with the front lines. What were we supposed to do if a mage’s corpse could be reborn as a more powerful monster?

After a long deliberation, the officer checked the analog watch on his wrist and sighed.

“Ten minutes, no more. Any longer is dangerous. Get all the Operator candidates aboard. Soldiers, keep your backs to the trucks and armored vehicles and maintain all-around security. We’ll wait just ten minutes for the stragglers to rejoin us. Everyone, assume combat readiness and stay prepared.”

Our alteration-type trio and the Taegeuk Cape Brigade joined the soldiers in guarding the convoy.

The doctrinal magic Soteriological Conviction obviously helped keep soldiers alive, and the magic our trio possessed was certainly a big help too.

Of course, Se-jun’s heart branch was a little crappy, but even that was overwhelming compared with an ordinary soldier. Thirty seconds or thirty minutes were just numbers; seeing how he barely tired even in extreme situations, we could at least count on his staying power in combat, provided his mental state and equipment were up to it.

Perhaps because the fog was so thick, there was almost no magical backlash either.

When I activated Stage One of the alteration-type eye branch to see ten seconds into the future, all I felt was a little fatigue in my eyes. It was like feeling reasonably refreshed despite not having slept deeply.

My range had expanded too. The fog cleared from my sight enough for me to faintly make out red footprints far beyond the concrete rubble. They were almost five hundred meters away, and whoever they belonged to was clearly wary of us.

After all, the red footprints soon disappeared.

“If there weren’t monsters in the fog, I’d live here.”

“What would you do about the mold living somewhere like this?”

“Mold, huh. Didn’t think of that.”

Se-jun was bursting with energy too. Aside from his tension, his body was visibly in peak condition. He kept lightly stamping his feet, busy burning off his overflowing stamina.

The one suffering most was Na-in.

With earbuds in his ears, he grimaced and rubbed his earlobes until they turned bright red. I’d never seen him struggle like this before.

“Ahh... Lord...”

“Hey. Shin Na-in. What’s wrong with this bastard?”

“Na-in, can you see this? Want to study Chinese characters?”

Se-jun waved his hand right in front of Na-in’s eyes with only his middle finger raised. Only after seeing Se-jun’s bodily rendition of the character for “mountain” did Na-in finally come to his senses.

Sweat mingling with the moisture of the fog, Na-in looked north with slightly haggard eyes.

“There are people still alive. They’re all calling for God. Some are angry. They’re cursing the government and military for abandoning them here.”

“...”

“What’s worse is that I can hear a baby crying nearby.”

“Probably a monster’s offspring.”

I spoke indifferently, extending my index finger over the trigger of my gun.

But Na-in remained pale as he let out a faint sigh.

“I can’t tell. It really cries like a baby. All I can hear is a cry saying it wants to live...”

With that, Na-in went back into devout-believer mode.

Tears streamed down his face as he recited some kind of prayer. From what little I caught, it was a bizarre language full of things like “Ali ali allashong,” so I decided not to decipher it.

Maybe I’d try an AI translation later.

Se-jun, however, wasn’t as dauntless as me and seemed a little unhinged.

After gulping repeatedly, he slowly opened his mouth.

“Je-min. If a baby appears in front of us, are we supposed to consider it a monster and shoot it?”

Someone else might have dodged that question, saying it was a difficult one.

Of course, I had something of an answer.

“Se-jun, it probably won’t look like the cute little things we know. Amalgams, predatory spines—look at the monsters we’ve seen so far. They’re not exactly so adorable you’d want to keep one instead of a cat.”

“Well...”

“They’re considerate monsters. They give you a million reasons to hate them the moment you see them. You don’t have to pretend you’re clever and invent reasons. How convenient is that?”

If there was a flaw in their consideration, it was only that every encounter made you want to piss and shit yourself.

We continued keeping watch, each with our own thoughts, questions, and answers. That was when it came.

EEEEEE—

A noise like the feedback from a speaker turned up loud just before a broadcast pressed down on the whole convoy. The mage candidates quietly chatting atop the trucks with their guard down, the soldiers anxiously scanning their surroundings, the Taegeuk Cape Brigade, and us Supreme Mages all stopped breathing at once.

KZZT... KZZZT...

That distinctive static leaked from the small radios carried by the convoy’s soldiers and officers.

Just in case, I used Alteration-Type Eye, Stage One, to scan our surroundings, but there wasn’t a single red footprint anywhere.

It wasn’t an attack. Even if it certainly seemed to herald something.

Before long, the ringing that seemed to come from a speaker subsided, and voices burst out of the radios instead.

The first was a baby’s cry.

[“Wah... waah...”]

The instant I heard it, I pictured a teary-eyed baby vigorously flailing its tiny arms and legs. A feeling almost like a species-wide instinct surged up in me: protect that cute, innocent baby.

Next came the voices of the missing soldiers and mage candidates.

[“This is Staff Sergeant Kim... We followed the accounts of the candidates who awakened the ear branch and found a real survivor in what used to be a hospital. It’s a baby... A group of refugees trying to escape seems to have somehow hidden it...”]

[“It’s a baby. It’s crying out that it wants to live. Oh, a baby in a place like this...!”]

Someone might have thought of a miracle here.

The last hope left by people who had braved their fear to protect a tiny life in this Seoul, where thick fog raged and monsters ran rampant. They would feel moved and awestruck that an innocent being had survived countless sacrifices and hard decisions to finally meet people from outside.

Indeed, the moment the Taegeuk Cape Brigade overheard the radio transmission, they began praying.

Unlike anything they’d shown so far, their demeanor was utterly solemn and earnest. They might not have attended seminary, and their Korean-flag capes might look ridiculous, but they hadn’t volunteered to come to Seoul for nothing.

“Lord, at last we understand why You have led us here today. You who dwell in the darkest and lowliest places, we now fully understand that You have charged us to save the child left in this most terrible and twisted place...”

But there were also people who got goose bumps for reasons other than religious awe or love of humanity.

Namely me, Baek Je-min.

A baby had survived in this terrible hell?

I didn’t know whether that was possible. Probability existed, so sure, it could happen. Of course, even if the heartwarming story about refugees setting aside their selfishness and sacrificing themselves to save a single baby was true, the problem remained.

Were humans—were human lives—worth enough right now to make such a miracle possible?

Then the captain raised his radio to his mouth without hesitation and shouted.

“Hey. Staff Sergeant Kim. You fucking moron. That’s a monster. Leave it and get out!”

[“Captain... Are we not even allowed to save one baby?”]

“Hey... Hey, hey, hey! Don’t you know the rules of engagement? Get out! Run, you idiot!”

But the transmission cut off at that moment.

It seemed clear the other side had cut it first. Insubordination. Something I hadn’t expected to see in this terrible place. The officer couldn’t hide his bewilderment either, pacing and checking the analog watch on his wrist.

“Ten minutes... ten minutes...”

Soon, he appeared to be contacting headquarters over the radio.

The soldiers, the candidates aboard the trucks, and us mages all waited in silence for his decision. At last, he made it and approached us.

“We’ve confirmed a phenomenon apparently caused by an unidentified entity within fog visibility of a hundred meters. Under the fifth rule of engagement, which prioritizes obtaining information from inside the fog, we are switching the mission to approximately thirty minutes of rapid reconnaissance.”

Unidentified species.

Apparently, only us Supreme Mages truly understood the weight of those words. The Taegeuk Cape Brigade looked steadfast and determined, as though they would have tried to talk the officer around if he’d told us to flee.

We Supreme Mages had some idea how grotesque and bizarre an unidentified species could be, so we couldn’t help feeling tense.

Forget learning magic—we were meeting a new enemy.

The conditions we’d been given were no less difficult.

“I’ll assign one armored vehicle to you Operators. Any more would be difficult, since we have to protect the convoy. The drone command conducting reconnaissance contacted us. There’s a former internal-medicine clinic nearby. They say that’s probably the place.”

“Can we reconnoiter it in just thirty minutes?”

“You Operators know how to use localized penetrative alteration activity, don’t you? Find out what you can from outside. If you go in, sweep it quickly. If you confirm the bodies of Staff Sergeant Kim and his squad members, or the mage candidates, withdraw immediately. I’m not even asking you to incinerate them. Identifying the unknown species would be good, but if you judge survival unlikely, just run.”

As he spoke, the captain called over several soldiers.

I wondered what was going on, but he collected a grenade from each soldier and handed them to us mages.

“I hear civilian Operators have to buy grenades too, with that military scrip stuff? Take these. Whether you blow up a monster or kill yourself, they’ll be a big help.”

“Captain, we Christians do not commit suicide. Even if we must die fighting.”

Deacon Min Hyeong-jun answered firmly even as he accepted a grenade. The captain quietly averted his eyes and muttered.

“You’d be better off just killing yourselves.”

* * *

February 29, 2028. 2:45 p.m.

After being crammed into a tiny armored vehicle, I barely managed to squeeze back out. I wondered if this was how Father Jeong Yong-hwan or Han Myeong-un had felt when they’d been mashed together with an Amalgam.

The operation began the instant we scrambled out, before I even had time to stretch my stiff body.

The convoy had stopped to wait near Jangja Bridge. It had taken us roughly four minutes to reach the nearby internal-medicine clinic, leaving about twenty-six minutes.

As I looked around, wondering what we could actually accomplish in that time, the hornet sound came from the sky.

At the same time, the radio the captain had given me, now tucked in my breast pocket, crackled loudly and emitted a voice.

[“We’re attempting an exterior reconnaissance with the drones. No abnormalities reported. Please conduct detection from your end.”]

That was about when I learned what magic the Taegeuk Cape Brigade possessed.

Of their four middle-aged men and two middle-aged women, Deacon Min Hyeong-jun and one woman were alteration-type mages. The rest were probably doctrinal. The deacon had the heart branch, and the woman had the eye branch, but each seemed to have awakened a slightly different variation.

Deacon Min swung his mop handle fairly convincingly like a staff. The force was so fierce that it almost seemed to push the fog aside.

“Whew. Nothing wrong.”

Was he really a melee strength-build mage?

The woman with narrow eyes frowned, then even clicked her tongue.

“Ominous. Everything’s red. This is definitely a dangerous place.”

Only then did I begin to understand the Taegeuk Cape Brigade’s composition.

As alteration-type mages, Deacon Min and the narrow-eyed woman seemed to handle actual combat strength and danger detection, while the other four supported them with the doctrinal magic Soteriological Conviction.

They were more serious about this than I’d expected.

Or the military was making them that way.

I discreetly turned my eyes toward Se-jun.

“I don’t like the way you’re looking at me, Je-min.”

Lee Se-jun, you fucking mediocrity.

As the spiritual pillar of the Supreme Mages, I couldn’t allow Se-jun to fall behind. Just as I resolved to help him level up, Na-in was removing his earbuds and putting on his gas mask.

“Can you figure out what those Taegeuk Cape Brigade people can do?”

“The Taegeuk Cape Brigade? ... Oh, you mean the Taegeuk Jesus Advent Eastern Magi Corps.”

Se-jun and I put on our gas masks too as we listened to Na-in’s deductions.

This mind-reading Christian nutjob might be obnoxious, but there was no questioning his effectiveness or utility.

“Deacon Min temporarily enhances his muscular strength. Sister Jeong over there has danger detection, allowing her to distinguish dangerous areas.”

“Can this Sister Jeong see the future like me?”

“Not quite... It seems she can only tell where it’s dangerous without being able to identify the danger itself. There’s no mention of time.”

Hearing that, I began to get a rough idea.

It was very likely a given that none of us was using magic at one hundred percent of its capabilities. Father Jeong Yong-hwan’s hypothesis had been quite plausible.

That was why the extent to which an ability manifested differed according to aptitude.

I started by seeing ten seconds into the future, Father Jeong Yong-hwan detected heat, and this Sister Jeong distinguished dangerous areas. Perhaps at one hundred percent, we could use all of those abilities? Rather than their capabilities varying wildly according to aptitude or worldview.

But just when I was finally putting my thick skull to work, circumstances wouldn’t allow it.

Feeling a little disappointed, I put on my gas mask, pulled up the hood of my poncho, checked my gun, and fiddled with the hilt of my bayonet. I handed Se-jun another grenade while I was at it.

“Here, our grenade thrower. Take another.”

“You’re trying to treat me like a catapult.”

I hoped Se-jun would thank me for finding him a use as a human catapult.

And, as always, the most helpful person in this situation was Na-in.

He seemed to listen silently for a moment, then spoke in a voice that cracked with bewilderment.

“There are more babies crying now.”

“What?”

“I can’t hear the soldiers or the other mage candidates. All I hear are babies crying.”

Na-in’s words bewildered not just our alteration-type trio, but the entire Taegeuk Cape Brigade.

There were more babies?

I checked the straps of my gas mask once more and gave a hearty laugh.

“So this is the secret to fixing the low birth rate. Let’s go.”