Chapter 40 - Traces of Life

The subway tracks weren't in uniformly good condition. Repeated shelling and the cutoff of electricity had left some stretches in total darkness, without a single working light. There, all we could rely on were the L-shaped flashlights clipped to our chests.

That was one reason the military had been trying to demolish or seal off underground passages since the crisis began. Those cramped tunnels made it easy to concentrate firepower, but once you were pushed back, you could keep losing ground just as easily. And predatory spines crawling along the ceilings and walls, lying in ambush in the shadows, must have placed considerable strain on the military's existing tactics.

Poorly trained conscripts. Monsters that could take a beating and moved in intelligent, alien ways. The sudden outbreak and escalation of the crisis. The reasons were endless.

The Republic of Korea Armed Forces were organized to fight humans, not monsters. A single eight-man infantry rifle squad had to overcome panic and expend countless rounds just to repel an Amalgam.

But we, advancing along the tracks now, were different.

HOOF.

Shin Na-in exhaled deeply into his gas-mask filter and tapped the headset beneath his hood. I immediately knew it was a signal. He, too, had begun dispensing with unnecessary embellishments and getting straight to the point.

"Spines and faces. Multiple contacts. Coming from behind, too."

At that, I removed my gas mask, hung it from my left arm, and tightened the strap in one pull so it wouldn't slip. Seeing it secured to my upper arm like an armband or an epaulet sent excitement surging through me.

Then I raised my rifle in one motion and stuck my tongue all the way out.

Target, monster, one minute, route.

My tongue, which had seemed to be healing a little, split open again and spilled blood. Perhaps because we were in fog-shrouded Seoul, the injury wasn't as bad. I drew my tongue back in and gulped a mouthful of blood down my throat.

"Hamza, Pastor, keep low. Se-jun, get a grenade ready. Shitter, take the faces' legs."

The instructions were short and mangled, but by now we understood them perfectly.

A moment later, familiar-looking monsters began charging into the beam of the tactical light ahead. Most conspicuous was a five-legged Amalgam with the body of a child about five years old dangling from it like an old man's dangling lump. We already knew these monsters attacked our humanity, so it shook us less.

We had overcome the baby-mimicking teratomas, too. Our alteration-type trio had become professional mages who knew how to respond with fury and hatred instead of dismay and sorrow.

Lee Se-jun, who had once trembled and screamed in a thoroughly unmanly fashion, had changed the most. His fear transformed into anger, he pulled the grenade pin and muttered,

"These fucking bastards."

BANG!

For a moment I wondered whether I'd accidentally pulled my trigger first, but no. A hole had been punched through one of the lumpy Amalgam's legs, throwing it off balance. Se-jun, with his Heart Branch, Stage Two, had hurled a grenade like a pitch aimed at the batter.

At its metallic clang against the tracks, we all instinctively ducked and turned our heads away.

EEEE.

Through the brief ringing in my ears, I heard things pattering down, but there was nothing to fear. The only exception was the predatory spines. Those that used the grenade blast as an opening to scuttle across the ceiling like spiders received an answer from my muzzle.

Gunshots pierced the ringing, and sounds like watermelons splitting echoed through the cavernous space. Na-in and Se-jun raised their guns as well, aimed in different directions, and kept pulling their triggers.

With every assault of gunpowder's acrid, piss-like smell and the sound of falling, rolling casings, the disgusting monsters' bodily fluids streamed across the floor. But even amid that, there were monsters we couldn't let our guard down against.

While our attention was fixed ahead, the clacking of bones crawling along the wall struck my eardrums. I turned, biting lightly on my tongue, still stinging with sores.

My suffering stretches longer than ever before.

"I've seen you, bastard!"

Three predatory spines just about to leap off the wall were caught in my field of vision. Normally, they would have anchored themselves by driving their mutated ribs—their legs—into the wall, but one that had already begun to jump couldn't do so. It smacked into the ground and twitched, struggling to right itself.

Having finished off all the monsters in front, Na-in turned and aimed his muzzle.

"Satan's demons, demons~. By the grace of the Lord~."

BANG-BANG! BANG!

He might be a shitting bastard, but he must have been a by-the-book ace in the army. That was what I thought as the heads of the two predatory spines hanging from the wall burst apart. They seemed a little softer than actual human skulls, judging by how readily they split.

Meanwhile, Se-jun raised a foot over the predatory spine twitching helplessly on the ground.

"Hup!"

CRUNCH!

At first, I thought I'd misheard. Naturally—I had just heard the sound of a big, sturdy dog chewing chicken bones.

Se-jun's combat boot had punched through the predatory spine's head. Apparently still unsatisfied, he raised his foot again and crushed the skull with a series of crunches, like a child dancing in the snow.

I had kept my eyes open the entire time, tears streaming down my face because I was afraid the bastard would let his guard down and get taken by the predatory spine.

I blinked.

"Lee Se-jun, you fucking idiot. Just shoot it. If it lashes out while you're stomping on it and your spine ends up like that, don't expect any mercy."

"It's a waste of bullets."

"Right now, pack mules are more precious than bullets."

"... Je-min."

Seeing the emotion welling in Se-jun's eyes, I smiled contentedly too. He was the only one here who could lug around two ammunition cans without a care.

It was around then that Na-in approached, changing his magazine.

"Replace your magazines now. There are more monsters than we expected, and we're burning through ammunition. Se-jun isn't entirely wrong."

That was true. Our current destination was Jangji Station. Normally, it was such a short stretch that a train would cover it in five or ten minutes, yet we'd already encountered two groups of monsters. Not one or two at a time, either—dozens.

Still, I wasn't feeling bad about it. Why?

Because Pastor Park Yo-han and Hamza were looking at us as though we were insane. The pastor, in particular, was marveling at the way we'd fought these terrifying monsters without hesitation or fear and without sustaining a single injury.

"Baek Je-min, who are you to spout my inner monologue however you please?"

"Some things I can tell without borrowing Shitter's ears."

A man like Baek Je-min was highly sensitive to the difference between looks of praise and admiration and looks of contempt and pity. If the pastor usually considered me ninety percent weird, that had now improved considerably to about seventy-five percent.

I also possessed an exceptional talent for distinguishing sincere praise from flattery meant to save face. What Hamza said this time was sincere praise.

"Incredible. No, really, incredible! Soldiers can't fight them like this!"

Hamza revealed that, back at Suwon City Hall, command had summoned him and used him like a wrong-answer detector. He also shared the minor detail that a squad of roughly eight infantry riflemen who didn't panic could generally engage and kill Amalgams or predatory spines if they chose their positions brilliantly—but most soldiers capable of that were concentrated at the first cordon.

Knowing he was giving us all this detailed information to build us up, I was delighted. A migrant worker tempered by real-world experience was apparently a master of social interaction, too.

But I didn't hog all the credit.

"Isn't it because our Supreme Mages are so fucking awesome?"

Apart from monk Cheong-hwi, who had deserted, the five of us here were probably the strongest mages outside Seoul.

Our detector, Shin Na-in: a fanatic who spent more than twenty minutes singing hymns while taking a shit to control his sphincter every time he entered a bathroom, and who wouldn't shut up about heresy—but who got the job done impeccably, by the book.

Our all-purpose pack mule, Lee Se-jun: unassuming and seemingly useless, but not only able to punch a hole through a human limb with a thrown grenade, also able to carry two thirteen-kilogram ammunition cans without showing the slightest fatigue.

Hamza, who had shared my Richam.

The pastor, always putting his brain to work.

And me, Baek Je-min, who needed no further description.

We re-formed our line and continued toward Jangji Station.

"Aren't you changing your magazine, Je-min?"

"Only fired about fourteen rounds. I'll use up what's left."

I decided to keep wearing my gas mask as an armband for a while, until we reached Jangji Station.

SMACK, SMACK, SMACK...

I was busy swallowing the blood seeping from my tongue. It was just a nagging feeling that if I wore the gas mask now, the smell of blood might soak into its interior. Of course, that would still be milder than the foul stench rising as we stepped through the fluids leaking from the monsters' corpses.

SPLASH, SPLASH.

"Ugh, fucking disgusting."

Using up my remaining rounds was easy.

GRRR...

I aimed at the lumpy Amalgam, which was still groaning.

"Mommy, I can't breathe..."

The five-year-old child's body flailed its arms, making a show of beating at the melted faces, as though searching for its own face, which was already gone.

Just in case, I glanced at Na-in. He gave a faint chuckle.

"I don't hear a human voice."

"No calling out to the Lord like Father Jeong Yong-hwan?"

"No."

Fucking figures.

I pulled the trigger without hesitation.

* * *

Household garbage awaited us at Jangji Station. Crushed plastic bottles and snack wrappers had been tossed onto the tracks, along with swarms of shit flies drawn by the smell of feces. Even documentaries touring the world's slums looked cleaner than this.

Before entering the new area, I looked at Hamza to check that it was safe. He nodded, his expression tense.

"It's safe."

Safe or not, Jangji Station was filthy.

The platform floor itself was clean, but grimy clothes and torn bags lay strewn everywhere. What immediately caught our attention, though, were the bloodstains.

Even browned with age, they were readily recognizable as blood because they were handprints. Marks like hands dragging along the floor were everywhere. Flies somehow kept circling them, savoring the smell of rotten blood. Our detector, Na-in, examined them with his own Eye, Stage One—past sight—but found nothing.

Well, anyone could tell this scene was far more than an hour old.

Na-in glanced my way.

"Want to give it a try, Je-min?"

"No."

The bloodstains had turned brown, and the garbage looked old too. I had no intention of using tongue magic to rewind the past without knowing the exact point in time. I could enjoy pain because I loved magic; I wasn't an ascetic enduring suffering for trivial results.

It was obvious that monsters or some lunatic mage had swept in and wiped everyone out anyway. Why should I put myself through pain just to confirm that?

While Se-jun gave a small yawn, Pastor Park surveyed our surroundings and breathed heavily into his gas-mask filter.

"Were they afraid to go aboveground? The bathrooms should be upstairs, yet they went out of their way to shit near the tracks. Stay together and look around carefully. See if they left any records."

"Who would leave a diary or records in a hellhole like this?"

The research journal I'd found last time had only been left because its author was a mage with a strong experimental streak. I doubted a seemingly unrelated group of survivors would have left anything like it.

But the pastor firmly rebuked that narrow-minded thinking.

"You idiot. How would anyone survive in Seoul without a mage? Unless this place fell right at the start of the crisis, there must have been at least one sorcerer. Probably the group's leader or someone else important. With no mobile data or Wi-Fi, you can't rule out them leaving notes on their phones or scribbling things down."

"I see..."

It was quite plausible that survivors who had secured a bare minimum of safety, only to realize they were surrounded by monsters, would have scribbled a few lines for lack of anything else to do. Perhaps some of Jangji Station's survivors had been among the two groups of monsters we'd encountered on the way here.

The pastor tilted his neck a couple of times and stroked his K2.

"Don't go toward the bathrooms for now. Proceed on the assumption that there was a reason they went out of their way to piss and shit by the tracks. Let's search only the platform."

And so the Supreme Mages searched for traces of the survivors.

Then an odd thought struck me. Was there a reason the filthy clothes had been scattered so haphazardly?

I nudged them aside with my toes and found bloodstains that hadn't been completely wiped away. Apparently, they had used the dirty clothes as rags to try to clean the blood scattered over the platform.

The others cautiously moved some clothes aside too, sighing even as they grimaced at the smell.

Only Se-jun gave a forced little laugh inside his gas mask, attempting a joke.

"They didn't resort to cannibalism, did they?"

"With a department store right outside?"

"That's why I'm asking."

We Supreme Mages surveyed this section of Jangji Station, sweeping the platform from end to end. Whether for better or worse, we discovered a strange space at its far end.

Melted candles stood there, their wicks burned out. In front of them, phones with cracked screens or dead batteries had been laid out neatly. Clearly, someone had arranged them with care.

None of us could easily find words before what looked like a place for mourning and praying over phones instead of bodies. The pastor reached for his glasses out of habit, then remembered his gas mask and quietly lowered his hand.

There were roughly seventy phones. Here at Jangji Station, where not even a human corpse could be found, they were evidence that at least seventy survivors had once lived.

On the surrounding walls, pillars, and floor, writing made from chunks of rotten flesh and browned bloodstains remained clearly visible.

[KILL THEM ALL FUCK]

[Why us? Why only me?]

[I won't forgive you]

HOOF, HOOF.

There was no mystical power in those words. But the resentment and curses they held struck deep in us, who had come from outside Seoul.

The pastor let out a deep sigh, then turned to us.

"Find an outlet and see if we can charge these phones. Let's stay here for a while. I... ought to pray for them."

Pastor Park shrugged. Na-in narrowed his eyes sharply at those words and asked,

"Pastor, we don't even know whether they attended church. How can you open the gates of heaven—"

"What are you talking about? They'll be burning in hellfire, but I should pray that their circumstances are taken into account and they're burned a little more gently."

"As expected of you, Pastor. I'm ashamed of myself."

At that, Se-jun, Hamza, and I immediately put some distance between ourselves and those two, forming a trio. That was when Hamza whispered,

"How about Islamic heaven?"

"You can't eat pork."

"But Allah will arrange a marriage for you when you reach heaven."

"Will He turn you into a cute girl, too?"

The instant Hamza heard Se-jun's question, he moved away from us. I understood his reaction, and couldn't hide my dismay.

But Se-jun, displaying an entirely unwarranted sense of camaraderie, turned to me with a proud expression.

"If He can't turn a guy into a cute girl, He's not omnipotent. Right?"

"Quit talking shit and find an outlet."