Chapter 31 - Hell Without Flames

The sound of a mechanism engaging lit the way ahead of us.

CLICK.

I lifted my poncho and switched on the light tucked inside my breast pocket, revealing the bleak scene in full. I was impressed by the Republic of Korea's construction techniques, which had withstood repeated shelling, and surprised by how much the scattered trash spoke of everyday life. Crushed plastic bottles and opened food cans littered the floor.

Deacon Min Hyeong-jun of the Taegeuk Cape Brigade, arriving a step behind us Supreme Mages, clicked his tongue softly too. The brigade wore neither gas masks nor ponchos, leaving their grimaces plainly visible. Min mimed pinching his nose and shook his head.

"Smells like it's gone a little bad. It looks like refugees really were here."

Meanwhile, Lee Se-jun adjusted his grip on his rifle, dropped to one knee, and inspected the discarded trash before tilting his head. He muttered as though he wanted everyone to hear.

"Did they scatter things that would make noise to warn them of intruders? If they wanted to hide, they should've dealt with this trash properly..."

In any case, we had roughly twenty-three minutes left. Lingering in Seoul was a bad idea: three identified species with established countermeasures and eleven unidentified species were running rampant here. I liked magic, but I didn't want to fight one monster after another.

Splitting up was usually a guaranteed kill in a horror movie—an instant-death move, practically—but time was short. We needed to find something quickly and get out. Picking up a clue about magic along the way would be ideal, but I couldn't expect too much. With that in mind, I suggested searching separately by organization.

Min brushed back his fine hair and gave me a worried look.

"There are only three of you. Will you be all right? It might be better to divide everyone evenly."

"All three of us use alteration-type magic, though."

"Alteration-type? Ah, the special abilities the Lord gave us. Hmm... With Na-in there, you should be fine."

And so our Supreme Mages trio and the Taegeuk Cape Brigade parted ways in the entrance hall. We would take the first-floor emergency stairs up and check the second floor, while the brigade finished searching the first. Assigning our roles neatly at the entrance made it easier to get moving.

There was just one concern: Shin Na-in's anxious condition. He kept muttering prayers, his slightly unfocused eyes suggesting that his grip on sanity was precarious. I snapped my fingers in front of his face to get his attention.

"Hey, Shitpants. Get it together and tell me what you hear."

"... Je-min, Se-jun. Something's strange. I keep hearing babies crying..."

Na-in unconsciously readjusted his grip on his gun and swallowed.

"I feel like I have to protect them. The thought that I have to protect the babies keeps welling up, as if it's only natural."

"Isn't that normal?"

At Se-jun's indifferent reply, Na-in finally opened his eyes wide.

"The children of infidels are not ours to protect. They must be enlightened and brought to repentance! Children who might be the bastard offspring of heretics are not lambs, but goats—the bloodline of Satan! I would try to convert them, as we are told to love even our enemies, but they are certainly not ours to protect without anything in return."

"..."

"And yet I want to protect them this badly. Something's wrong."

After listening to Na-in's impassioned speech, Se-jun looked between him and me. His wavering gaze, which made him look on the verge of tears, finally settled on me as he asked,

"What do you think, Je-min?"

"It's a crazy world."

I exhaled briefly through my gas mask's filter, activated Alteration-Type Eye, Stage One, and led the way into the ruins.

Na-in's personality and his many pigheaded qualities certainly made him unlikable. But there was one thing I could trust: his abilities and their usefulness.

"I'm following the lunatic's logic."

After parting with the Taegeuk Cape Brigade, we Supreme Mages advanced in a triangle. At the front was me, Baek Je-min, who could see ten seconds into the future. The fog had thinned a little inside the building, but it was still dense. Naturally, I took point, since I could predict monsters' movements through their red footprints.

On the left was Shin Na-in, who could hear the sounds inside the minds of monsters and humans. Frowning at the baby cries he said he kept hearing, he stepped forward even more cautiously.

On the right was Lee Se-jun, our tireless human catapult. His poor detection abilities made him incapable of spotting ambushes or surprise attacks, but his outstanding physical abilities would let him help teammates in danger or lay down heavy fire.

One blessing was that the thick fog left almost no magical backlash. My eyes were a little blurry, but that was nothing compared to the burning outside Seoul, which had felt like scrubbing them squeaky-clean with toothpaste. I kept my ten-second foresight active constantly, ready for approaching threats.

Fortunately, I saw no footprints at the emergency stairwell door. Still vigilant, I glanced at Na-in, and he nodded.

"Nothing there."

CREEEAK.

Tucking my gun under my right arm, I pushed the stairwell door with my left hand. It was a push door without a handle, and even leaning a little weight against it produced a loud noise.

Fortunately, the stairs were intact. Just in case, I shone my chest light down the lower flight. Benches and bookcases absent from the entrance lobby had been dumped there amid the trash, as though someone had tried to block off the basement. With time to spare, I might have cleared it all away and checked below.

But anyone could see that these things hadn't simply been discarded. They had clearly been thrown down in a hurry to barricade the route to the basement. If it were merely a dumping ground, at least one person would probably have pissed or shat there, yet it was remarkably clean. There weren't even any red footprints.

I beckoned Se-jun and Na-in inside, then adjusted my grip on my gun. Now that we'd confirmed the lower stairs were blocked, it was time to head upstairs to the second floor. As we climbed, I checked on the other two. Na-in remained tense, while Se-jun stole a glance downstairs and muttered,

"Maybe they barely used the stairs."

His words were followed by a long, heavy silence, broken only by our military boots treading on glass fragments and concrete dust shaken loose by the shelling.

CRUNCH, CRUNCH.

The sound of countless grains crushing and rolling beneath our combat boots made the inside of my gas mask grow damp. Beyond its lenses, the world was steeped in thick fog, creating a terrifying air of mystery.

People believed hell would be filled with flames that reeked of sulfur, but lately I'd changed my mind. Hell wasn't bright and lively. It was dark and damp, a place where humanity had been judged unworthy even of eternal punishment. A place where not even the yardstick of good and evil was applied to humanity. Hell was a place that denied us even the chance to give off light as we burned to death.

And right now, we were in hell.

The fog stirred faintly with each step we Supreme Mages took. The tension of knowing that corpses and monsters might lurk beneath it made my heart pound painfully. At the same time, we found signs that people had lived here.

"Candles?"

Melted wax and candles whose wicks had burned out lined both sides of the corridor.

I checked our surroundings with Alteration-Type Eye, Stage One, just in case, but saw no red footprints. I couldn't let my guard down, though. My foresight only predicted threats from moving targets—monsters—from ten seconds ahead. If a monster lay in ambush and lunged within those ten seconds, I could be helpless.

So I kept my rifle shouldered, watched corridor intersections, corners, and doors, and waited exactly ten seconds at each. After several dozen seconds without any red footprints, I asked Na-in instead.

"Shitpants. Hear anything?"

"Babies crying... Not nearby. They're deeper inside."

"Let's check each room quickly."

As Se-jun swallowed hard, we settled on our formation. I, Baek Je-min, would do the dangerous work of checking the rooms. Na-in and Se-jun would watch for monsters that might emerge into the corridor. Every door we passed through had to be closed again so we'd hear a monster attacking, and all three of us would remain within sight of one another. With those rules established, the search began in earnest.

I wasn't sure how much time we'd spent already. Ten minutes? Did we have about seventeen left? Without hesitation, I took advantage of the reduced backlash to use my magic freely, rounding corners and throwing open closed doors for a quick scan. Alteration-Type Eye, Stage One, greatly reduced the burden of staying alert for danger, making this possible.

I flung a door open. Empty.

RATTLE.

The next was locked. I immediately shifted my grip on my rifle, slammed the butt into the door, and kicked it.

BANG!

The beam of my light caught the swelling cloud of dust. Rifle shouldered, I quickly scanned the room. After roughly ten seconds, the dust settled a little, revealing a strange sight. Se-jun asked in a slightly trembling voice,

"Je-min, do you see anything?"

"Bloodstains and clothes."

I approached slowly and dropped to one knee to see what the dust and fog concealed. Clothes covered in dark bloodstains lay there: white shirts yellowed from going unwashed for so long, padded jackets with ragged collars. They seemed like unmistakable evidence that people had lived here. The problem was that these clothes were mingled with bloodstains.

On a hunch, I grasped the edge of a relatively clean garment and tried pulling it. With a crackle of scraping dried blood, the bloodstain split apart. It was old. Had monsters attacked them? I searched further, but there was nothing else in the room. What had once been an examination room was filled only with clothes covered in bloodstains of unknown origin.

There was too little time for deductions or speculation. Feeling a chill crawl up my spine, I stood.

"Everyone, get ready to fight. Monsters were definitely here."

"..."

Seeing Na-in and Se-jun silently readjust their grips on their guns, I went back to checking the other rooms.

I threw the next door open. The handle turned easily. Inside were signs of resistance. Bloody handprints trailed along the walls and floor before stopping abruptly. Whoever left them hadn't been dragged toward the window. Judging by the direction of the smeared handprints, they seemed to have been dragged toward the corridor, but the trail stopped short of reaching it. Instead, an intensely dark bloodstain, like an explosion about to burst, had dried near the entrance. Nothing else stood out.

I closed the door again, since its handle still worked. Time for the next room.

BANG, BANG BANG!

This door's handle was broken. I considered shooting it, but decided to use my rifle butt instead: carelessly firing might draw monsters in. Hell, there was no guarantee they wouldn't follow the smell of gunpowder. I'd set the selector to safe, though I still worried it might go off. But we were past caring now. After striking the handle several times with the butt, I gave the door a hard kick.

BANG!

I scanned quickly, waving away the billowing dust and opening my eyes wide. No footprints. A strange symbol instead. It looked like a bowl-shaped character. I examined it, wondering if it was magic script, but there was none of that distinctive sensation of my mind being forcibly stirred. The only notable feature was the vivid trickles of blood, as though someone had drawn it with a bloodied palm.

Was that all? This room resembled the second room too, with blood-soaked clothes strewn everywhere. The difference was the assortment of bags, including school backpacks, neatly lined up against the wall. I went over, slipped my rifle sling over my right shoulder, and quickly checked inside them.

Half-finished bags of snacks, spoiled triangular rice balls that looked ready to stink sour, opened tuna cans growing mold, drink cans stuck to the bottoms of bags with sticky residue... All the traces of people who had once lived here were laid bare. Then I spotted a notebook that had been violently torn apart. I picked it up and skimmed it quickly. There wasn't much in it: curses hurled at the people outside by someone left behind in Seoul. Summarizing the sentences that seemed at least somewhat sane, they read as follows.

-Our radio requests to stop the shelling were ignored.

-A vehicle came nearby. It wasn't an aid vehicle. The two newlyweds who approached it were killed.

-Babies were born even here. I want these babies to see sunlight.

After that came nothing but insane declarations: all you bastards outside should die; I'll break through the cordon and spread monsters everywhere so we all die together; let's help the monsters take revenge on the government and military. There was nothing else to gain. I tossed the notebook aside and gripped my rifle again. Only one room remained.

It was the innermost room, farthest from the stairs, where the baby cries were reportedly coming from. Back in the corridor, Na-in and Se-jun had their rifles shouldered and aimed, eyes fixed on the far end. Maintaining an unwavering standing firing stance, Se-jun said,

"Je-min, that one took a while."

"There was still some food left. They didn't starve to death. Something happened, so stay alert."

Our alteration-type trio, the Supreme Mages, quickly re-formed and headed deeper inside. There were still no red footprints. When I asked Na-in to check, he nodded too. Once we stood before the door of the innermost room, Se-jun and I could hear the babies crying as well.

WAAAH... WAAAH...

Emotion surged from a corner of my heart. It was far too complicated to reduce to a single feeling. First came sorrow that babies had been abandoned in a place like this. Then mourning for the noble spirit of the people who had tried to protect them even in such extreme circumstances. And then righteous anger rose at the conditions and events that had forced this absurd situation upon them.

If there was anyone capable of answering, I wanted to spit out the question: what had the Republic of Korea done wrong to deserve something so horrific? Why us? Why humans? Why had this catastrophe struck this tiny country, the Republic of Korea? I put those questions aside and was about to open the door.

A hand clamped down.

"Je-min."

Na-in gripped my shoulder firmly.

"You're not that heroic a person."

"..."

"You're here for magic. Se-jun is here to repay his debt of loyalty to his country. I'm here for a holy war of penance before God. Not one of us came here to save a pack of heretics."

I closed my eyes. It was madness, but I needed it to collect my thoughts. When I opened them again a moment later, the babies were still crying. Waa, waa. I pictured a baby vigorously waving its stubby limbs as it waited for a guardian, but my heart and mind were utterly cold.

Se-jun seemed to have experienced something similar. I could see him frowning through his gas mask lenses, but the way he tucked his rifle under his right arm and fingered the grenade on his ammunition belt suggested he'd steeled himself.

At that moment, I recited our Supreme Mages motto.

We are madness confronting madness.

Absurdity confronting absurdity.

To stop hell from seeping in, we march into hell.

"Hup!"

BANG!

I kicked the door and rushed inside.

Alteration-Type Eye, Stage One—my ten-second future sight—finally revealed red footprints. They were terribly slow, as though their owners were crawling along. Slow enough to defeat even without foresight. And the moment I saw their owners, two fields of vision overlapped.

One was ordinary human vision: what I saw when I wasn't using magic. In it, stained, abandoned babies lay wrapped in swaddling blankets that still held a faint trace of human warmth, crying and flailing their limbs. Compassion surged at their wailing, filled with a longing to live, pleading for their fading lives to breathe again.

"Waa, waa..."

But my magical vision showed something else. Wrapped in the blankets were silhouettes that resembled babies. Hidden by dense fog, swaddling cloth, and infant cries, the creatures revealed their true identities to my magical sight.

I remembered being tricked by an internet bait post long ago into looking at a malformed tumor. Was it called a teratoma? A kind of cancer that grew with useless teeth, eyes, and all sorts of organs dangling from it. And, however much I hated to admit it, cancer was alive too. Cancer only wanted to live as well. When its host died, it wanted to find a new one.

Wrapped in the blankets were teratomas, clumsy, blasphemous imitations of the human form. Those teratomas were pretending to be babies. They flailed limbs covered in teeth, exposed hearts pulsing meaninglessly, and rolled lidless eyes toward us. When the lips nestled in their throats opened, what emerged wasn't a monster's roar.

"Waa..."

CLICK-CLACK.

All three of us shouldered our rifles and aimed at once. Selectors to semiautomatic. Index fingers on the triggers.

"Aaaaaagh!"

Gunshots rang out with Se-jun's scream-like battle cry.

Casings fell heavily onto clothes already covered in bloodstains, and flashes rained down, bursting the masses of tumors. The teratomas stopped pretending and began crawling rapidly toward us with a waddling gait, constantly crying like babies to keep us from shooting.

"Waaaah! Waaah!"

Each cry blurred my sight, as if static had crept across it. At last I understood. It was a mental attack.

These monsters advanced while dangling humanity's instinct as a species—that noble compassion that told us to protect young children—as bait to shake us. Monsters that neutralized even humanity's survival instinct with the cries of utterly helpless babies. Nightmare creatures that allowed only those whose ruthless survival instinct could overcome compassion, or those who had awakened magic and recognized the contradiction, a chance to fight them!

"Waaaaah!"

In the brief moment our muzzles wavered, the teratomas closed the distance. Only then did I understand why we hadn't tossed in a grenade first. Why we'd insisted on entering. Our unconscious instinct as a species, the moral conviction that we couldn't casually kill babies, had made us choose the worst course instead of the best, hoping for a miracle even though we'd vaguely realized they were monsters. A miracle with just a one-percent chance. Hoping that noble human compassion had worked a miracle in this hell and kept real babies safe...!

"In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, begone, Satan!"

RAT-A-TAT-TAT!

Some of the red footprints vanished in an instant. It was Na-in. Amid a rain of muzzle flashes and acrid gun smoke, he aimed without hesitation at the approaching teratomas and shot them dead.

But he couldn't handle them all, and Se-jun and I prepared for close combat. There wasn't even time to use hand-branch magic and scatter blood from my right hand. I grabbed the slightly heated barrel and swung my rifle. Instead, I used Eye Branch, Stage Two.

My suffering is longer and longer than at any other time...

THUD!

A leaping teratoma struck the rifle butt and crumpled. The instant its red footprints broke off and it sprang up, the fog parted, predicting where it would fly.

Accounting for the ten-second time lag, predicting the future, and swinging my rifle to knock the teratomas away was demanding, but manageable. With Eye Branch, Stage Two, stunning them as well, fighting at close range was almost easier than shooting them. The unexpectedly strong performance came from Se-jun. By the time I'd knocked one teratoma away and tucked my rifle under my arm, he was sweeping them aside as though swinging a bat.

"Lee Se-jun, I'm going to close my eyes and open them again. Hold them off!"

I blinked.

"Aaaaaagh! Aagh! Agh!"

Listening to his vigorous battle cries, I bit down once on my left hand.

Eye Branch, Stage Two, worked unmistakably. The teratoma pack flinched and stopped, and Se-jun, now beyond screaming and into rage, kicked them one by one with his boots or stomped them repeatedly.

"Die! Die! Die!"

Na-in was relatively composed.

"I'm relieved they're not real humans. I won't let mere baby cries sway me again."

The bastard pulled his trigger swiftly and accurately, as if his earlier wavering had all been a lie.

BANG BANG, BANG...

I followed Na-in's lead and fired without hesitation. I was point-shooting, but they were so sluggish that hitting them was easy. They were so fragile that whenever a bullet ricocheted off the floor, an entire tumor mass burst apart. If you could withstand their mental attacks, the teratomas weren't much of a threat. They came in packs but were weak, and could leap but were easy to predict.

I blinked. When I opened my eyes again, every teratoma was dead. Apparently they weren't tough like Amalgams or predatory spines. I thought they were nothing special. But perhaps I only thought that in my head. As the adrenaline subsided and my senses gradually returned to normal, I began noticing things.

HUFF, HUFF.

My breathing was rough. The breath escaping through my gas mask filter carried a sweet smell mixed with rubber. Dried saliva clung around my parched mouth. Soon, tremendous fatigue weighed down my shoulders. I tapped my knee with my left hand to settle my slightly trembling legs. For a while, the room held nothing but the corpses of tumor masses and the sound of breathing through gas masks.

"Change magazines."

It didn't occur to me to retrieve the spent magazines. At my words, all of us swapped them out regardless of how many rounds remained. Apparently everyone had switched to thirty-round magazines; none were the rectangular box-shaped ones.

CLICK-CLACK.

Seeing the casings tangled in melted flesh made me sigh first.

"I'll finish searching inside. Shitpants and Se-jun, watch outside."

"... All right."

"In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, in the name of the Lord God."

I didn't know how many minutes we'd spent. Still, someone outside seemed to have heard the shots, because the static from Se-jun's radio grew louder. The problem was that reception was too poor to make out anything properly. Figuring I could explain later, I quickly scanned the interior.

Only then could I properly see the room, filled with gun smoke and bloodstains. Bloody handprints covered the walls. They didn't represent any symbols or writing. They simply looked like marks left by people writhing in pain, desperately clawing at the walls. Beneath those handprints, however, lay a substantial notebook and a pen. I approached, knelt, and opened it. It was packed with words written by someone anonymous.

* * *

Eye - cognition, distortion?

Ear - fate?, detection

Hand - intelligence, alchemy?

Heart - life?, enhancement

Tongue - acceptance, change

+Each stage induces particular thoughts. When asked to explain, mages commonly use the word recollection for Stage One and grief for Stage Two.

+Does magical aptitude vary according to how closely one aligns with what each body part symbolizes? It seems affected by thoughts and emotions.

+Stage One hand magic has many uses. Although it doesn't last long, handprints can block monster attacks to some extent. Coating a club with it and swinging dealt meaningful damage to a monster.

-Not enough blood.

--It seems to apply only to blood shed from the right hand.

***I caused them to die for nothing.

+Someone who knows the tongue symbol joined us.

New magic.

-Learned it. Acceptance and change.

--The side effects are worse than with the other body parts.

+I realized.

Humanity cannot win this fight.

-We cannot win because we love ourselves too much.

--We must accept that humanity is not special.

***Decided to give up tongue magic.

+The tongue symbol is on the final page.

-Baby cries echo.

--Everyone capable of killing them is dead.

+Avoid baby cries.

* * *

I thanked the owner of this journal. How wonderfully concise. It wasn't overflowing with sentimental phrases and embellishments like Father Jeong Yong-hwan's. How nice of them to write everything plainly in Korean, easy for the reader to understand. Without hesitation, I checked the back page.

Then I set the journal down in the thin fog mingled with acrid gun smoke. The meaningless symbol began transforming into something with a certain substance. What finally emerged was a semicircle with a vertical center line, branches extending alternately to either side. It looked a little like a key, I supposed. A very peculiar symbol. Naturally, the backlash from learning magic hit me in an instant.

"Gaaack, ack..."

"Je-min?"

"Gaaack!"

It was fucking spicy. Pain like my tongue being steeped in chili oil brought tears to my eyes. Fuck, the tears I'd decided to save for my parents' funerals were streaming down my cheeks...!

This was no time to be holding a gun. I practically threw it onto the floor, opened my canteen, and frantically poured water over my tongue. For a moment, the cold water seemed to cool it, but then the water itself began heating up as though steeped in chili powder.

"Haaaah! Haah! Aagh!"

I could guarantee that even gas-chamber training hadn't burned this badly. Feeling like I was dying, I lifted my gas mask slightly, and saliva mixed with bloody froth streamed out. Se-jun and Na-in seemed to be saying something, but I couldn't hear them. How long did I lie collapsed like that?

At some point, I felt my burning, stinging tongue cool. It was cold and a little sticky, like melted ice cream. Only then could I spit and put my gas mask back on. When I looked up, Se-jun was staring down at me as though I were pathetic.

"Je-min, isn't this what happens when you learn anything just because it's magic?"

"How about you learn some, Se-jun?"

"Hah. Why can't our magic throw fireballs and zap things with lightning...?"

The remarks of Lee Se-jun, that ordinary mortal, weren't important. What mattered was Na-in's icy stare.

"I can still hear babies crying. Let's get out quickly."

"Wait, wait."

I deftly tucked the journal into my waistband. With nowhere else to put it, I decided to rely on my underwear's elastic. Add my belt, and that made a double lock. After I secured the journal and picked up my rifle, Se-jun's gaze turned almost contemptuous.

"Ugh, fuck. You're going to turn it in with pubes on it?"

"There's plenty here that's more disgusting than my hair. Let's go."

We left quickly. As we'd seen on the way in, it was the roof and upper floors that had been smashed by shelling; the second floor and below looked safe. Despite the tension, I sensed no threat this time. The only threat was Na-in saying that he could hear baby cries. We faced that threat directly when we reached the first-floor entrance.

The Taegeuk Cape Brigade should have come, but they couldn't. All we got was Na-in aiming down the pitch-dark corridor beyond our lights and speaking in a slightly trembling voice.

"Babies crying..."

"What about the men and women who went in there?"

Na-in didn't answer Se-jun's tactless question. Couldn't answer was probably more accurate.

Unable to leave immediately, we waited a little while with our muzzles trained on the dim first-floor corridor. Looking beyond it with Alteration-Type Eye, Stage One, I saw red footprints. But they weren't approaching us. Instead, I sensed them circling beneath the dark shadows, facing off against us.

I didn't know how teratomas reproduced. If I had to guess, as monstrous cancer cells, perhaps they used our species' instincts as bait to approach, burrow inside, and spread tumors. Perhaps they whined like a baby nursing at its mother's breast, curled up like a soft infant held in its father's arms, sucked a pacifier, and intertwined flesh with flesh as they burrowed in and became one with their host. The victim would be covered in tumor masses—teratomas—and scattered apart.

And yet people couldn't kill them, because they imitated babies' appearances and cried like babies. Because those people were so noble and virtuous, because even in this utterly fucked situation they hesitated despite knowing these were monsters, they met a blasphemous death in tears. They might have flourished Korean-flag capes and proclaimed a flashy name... But they were undeniably people brave enough to march into this hell.

I patted Na-in's back as he stood rooted to the spot.

"Let's go."

Only our Supreme Mages trio returned.

The armored vehicle's machine gunner flinched when he saw us. As we climbed inside, the driver glanced our way and asked,

"What about those, uh, people in Korean-flag capes who went in with you?"

Unable to remove his gas mask, Na-in pressed his hands together and prayed. Se-jun took his mask off and squeezed his eyes shut. Only I could remove mine, look at the driver, and speak.

"They can't come back. Let's go."

Only then did the armored vehicle's door close and its wheels begin to turn. At last I bent forward and let out a sigh. There were no flames burning for eternity, no devils serving as wardens.

Even so, we were in hell.