Chapter 41 - The Subway Station's End

If there was one saving grace on Jangji Station's platform, it was that the area around the phone graveyard was relatively clean.

Apart from the chunks of flesh and writing in rotten blood, that is. Not that they weren't disgusting and frightening. Had I seen them back when the world was normal, I might have puked and trembled in terror.

But over roughly four months, my threshold for shock had risen as high as it could go. After everything we'd witnessed, if mere writing in human blood could send us into hysterics, we'd never have made it into Seoul.

We sat on a broken, toppled vending machine near the phone graveyard, using it as a bench while we regrouped. Lee Se-jun tore open a bag of hardtack he'd brought and chewed away, stuffing handfuls into his mouth.

"Phone graveyard sounds kind of weird."

"Se-jun, how can you stomach hardtack here?"

"Oh, right. Should I cook some ramen?"

He'd interpreted You sure have a strong stomach as Are you going to hog all that fucking hardtack?

Fortunately, our all-purpose migrant worker, Hamza, stepped in. He stopped Se-jun from rummaging through his military pack and opened his own duffel bag. It was packed with useful supplies, from a portable gas stove to a lighter.

"They say ramen isn't very good for emergencies like this. I read that it's oily and takes too much water to cook."

"Really? I brought five packs."

"Crush it up and eat it dry. That might be better."

"Then why bring a gas stove?"

At my question, Hamza patted his chest and shrugged, as though he'd been waiting for me to ask.

"We don't even know if Seoul's water supply is functioning properly. It could be contaminated, so we boil our drinking water too."

Pastor Park Yo-han plugged a charger into a phone and tapped its screen, speaking in a flat voice. Anyone could tell he wasn't particularly curious. It was a thoughtless remark tossed out simply to keep the conversation going.

"Islam. Where were you from again? Pakistan? Don't they drink water straight out of the Ganges there? You drink Ganges water, but you still bother boiling your water?"

"Hey, you Jesus-freak motherfucker."

"Huh?"

"Are North Koreans and South Koreans the same to you?"

We'd never seen Hamza this furious before.

According to Hamza, Pakistan and India followed different religions and had long been bitter enemies, so lumping them together made everyone furious. Some people didn't mind, but apparently Hamza was an exception.

Only Shin Na-in remained utterly unruffled by Hamza's anger, merely raising his eyebrows.

"Why do India and Pakistan fight? They're both heretics who don't believe in Jesus."

"You people will get executed if you come to Pakistan. Seriously."

In the end, Hamza surrendered first. His resigned expression seemed to say there was no point talking to these assholes. Only then did I reflect on my behavior. Until now, I'd treated Hamza as something like an AI drone-bot that warned us of danger, but he was human too.

I glanced at the gas stove and pot and raised my eyebrows.

"While we're on the subject, should we get some water and boil it?"

Being able to obtain water locally would certainly be convenient. I figured it was time to see whether Hamza's preparedness would pay off.

"Don't even think about it."

Until the pastor shot me down, still tapping the phone screen.

"We have to assume there was a reason these people dumped their shit in front of the tracks beyond the platform doors. Living with their own feces just because they couldn't be bothered going up one floor? We shouldn't make any rash moves until we have some clue how much pressure Seoul's survivors were under, or whether there's something in the bathrooms."

"Maybe they just couldn't be bothered moving."

I said that remembering an incident from ninth grade, when I'd been seriously considering the school equivalency exam. One of my friends had gone to an internet café, pissed himself in his gaming chair because he couldn't leave in the middle of a crucial fight, and gotten kicked out.

For once, Na-in chimed in.

"That's chilling."

"Right?"

"The possibility that you might be that 'friend,' Je-min, is chilling."

The bastard wasn't agreeing with me. He was digging through my memories without permission.

Despite invading my privacy, Na-in looked irritated, his lower lip pressed tight as though he were the wronged party. Just how awful could the ear branch's drawback—hearing everyone's thoughts without a filter—possibly be to warrant all that fuss?

Obviously, I'd never once thought going to the bathroom was too much trouble. In an online multiplayer FPS popular when I was young, I'd gone to take a piss, washed my hands, and decided I might as well shower while I was at it. I'd been gone for about forty-five minutes and gotten chewed out by my clanmates, but I swore I'd never pissed in my chair.

Though I might change my mind if there were a monster in the bathroom.

"Well, then. Nothing else to do, so let's clean our guns."

"Oh, Je-min. Mine too."

"You have to maintain your own gun if you want it to repay its owner's love."

I immediately shut down Se-jun's sneaky attempt to foist his work on me. Then I disassembled my gun and took a cleaning rod and some oil from my pack.

You had to put in regular effort if you wanted to avoid getting screwed by a gun that jammed at a critical moment because you'd neglected it. As I oiled a cloth and scrubbed away powder residue with the cleaning rod, a quiet peace settled over Jangji Station.

Everyone had taken off their gas masks, complaining that they were hard to breathe in. As befitted the Supreme Mages, they couldn't have been more relaxed.

Hamza idly flicked his lighter and stared at the flame. Se-jun finished stuffing himself with hardtack, then tipped even the crumbs into his mouth. Na-in checked his phone's playlist while humming a hymn through his nose. Pastor Park adjusted his glasses and tapped at the phones of people who hadn't even left bodies behind.

Jangji Station felt like a quiet subway station on a weekday afternoon.

If not for the bloody handprints, grime-soaked clothes, torn backpacks, curses written in blood on the walls and floor, and the stench of feces seeping through the platform doors.

That was when the pastor frowned slightly and grumbled.

"If you've got nothing to do, come help me look through these phones."

"Once I'm done cleaning my gun."

Of course, the gun cleaning never ended.

That was because I made a sacred sacrifice to increase the Supreme Mages' combat strength. After finishing the cleaning and reassembling my AR-15, I volunteered to become a sacrificial offering in the mission to boost our firepower.

With Na-in, Hamza, and Se-jun watching, I very carefully pricked my left index finger with the tip of my bayonet. Goose bumps rose at the unnerving sensation. Eyes squeezed shut, I asked,

"Is it bleeding?"

I cracked my eyes open to see all three looking at me like I was pathetic. Na-in in particular clicked his tongue and scolded me.

"Je-min. What happened to the nerve you had when you shot your left hand and grabbed a hot gun barrel with it?"

"It fucking hurt, so cut the shit."

"What happened to the nerve you had when that tentacle bastard burrowed into your right hand and tried to connect its blood vessels to yours?"

"That didn't hurt."

I really fucking hated this, but it was for magic, so I endured it and poked a little deeper.

A sharp sting.

As a drop of blood welled up, my fussing vanished and my mind settled into calm. Baek Je-min was a dauntless man: he might squirm his ass around and struggle to escape a dreaded injection, but once the needle was in, he was perfectly fine.

I turned to Hamza, Na-in, and Se-jun and calmly asked,

"One item you want enchanted. One enchantment effect."

Se-jun propped his chin on his hand and seemed to give it some thought before asking with a completely serious expression,

"Je-min. Can we get enchantments like invincible, perfect, unmatched, or munchkin? Or one-hit kill?"

"Try it."

My guess was that it would be possible.

The problem was my intuition that the enchantment would apply equally to whoever used the item. Just like a sharp knife cuts indiscriminately through friend and foe once you swing it.

If enchantments like invincible or one-hit kill actually worked, there was a strong chance they'd manifest as 'you no longer perceive hostility, so you have no enemies' or 'you and everyone else die in one hit.'

Munchkin might give you a munchkin cat rather than the badass overpowered protagonist we knew from novels.

One-hit kill might at least be useful, but at my current level I could only manage a single word. Even then, the more characters it contained, the weaker its effect became. One-hit kill was likely to be downgraded to hundred-hit kill.

When I explained that enchantments anyone could easily understand, with little room for interpretation, were more practical than vague, extreme effects like those, disappointment crossed Se-jun's face.

"That seriously sucks."

"It's decent at strengthening a function something already has. Writing one-hit kill on a bullet probably would do something."

But we'd brought two eight-hundred-round ammunition cans. Writing one-hit kill in my blood on sixteen hundred bullets would leave me collapsing from anemia.

Only after making the three understand those restrictions did I begin enchanting in earnest.

I gave Hamza's duffel bag [Sturdy], Na-in's gun [Clean], and Se-jun's military pack [Bulletproof].

Even if they didn't produce spectacular, noticeable effects, they should at least be better than nothing. Naturally, since there were no obvious visible changes, everyone looked uncertain.

"Hmm. Isn't this just a placebo effect?"

"I feel better already. A sturdy bag is reassuring."

"Being able to maintain a firearm's reliability even if you miss a cleaning is a modest but powerful effect. Surely the Lord has bestowed this power upon us in support of our holy war."

"While we're on the subject, all of you should learn hand-branch magic when you have time, if you can. It should give you the killing power Se-jun wanted against monsters."

According to the journal we'd found in the abandoned hospital, a baseball bat coated in blood from the right hand could be used to fight monsters.

In fact, the blood-net monster clinging to the ceiling, an Amalgam subspecies designated Bloodcord Delta, had died as though poisoned upon contact with my right-hand blood. Its power was worth looking forward to.

If we Supreme Mages went around enchanting our bullets with Hand Branch, Stage One—blood from the right hand—we could defeat monsters with overwhelming firepower.

Pastor Park, however, recoiled from these enchantments and kept his distance. Really, it was Hamza, a Muslim who ate pork with soju, and Na-in, a self-proclaimed Christian who insisted alteration-type magic was alteration-type holy-war arts, who were the weird ones.

Wouldn't any devout believer normally recoil at the sight of someone inscribing words in human blood and calling it enchantment?

Instead, looking weary, the pastor handed us one of the dozens of phones he'd already checked.

"I think I've found something. Take a look."

Apparently he'd found something while we were cleaning and enchanting our guns. I shook my aching left index finger, carefully wrapped the wound in a bandage Hamza gave me, and took the phone. I saw the pastor grimace at me.

"I thought you were a hard-boiled tough guy. What's with that cute little cat-character bandage?"

"It's fucking filthy here. What if I get tetanus?"

Why, out of all the available bandages, we'd chosen one with a cat character wasn't a question for me to answer.

As everyone's eyes turned to him, Hamza humbly clasped his hands and smiled contentedly.

"Cats were beloved by the Prophet Muhammad. They are sacred beasts that will protect our journey."

"Did that Angel's Intuition or whatever magic tell you that too?"

"No. Koreans call them furry angels, don't they? This is a foreign land in the distant East, but I think that's a lovely expression. We couldn't bring a cat on this journey, so I at least chose cat bandages."

I could tell he'd explode if he learned there was also the expression 'fur-roach,' so I kept my mouth shut.

Instead, I smacked my lips for no particular reason and decided to examine the phone the pastor had handed me. Its owner had left all sorts of entries in the default notes app. They'd either had a lot on their mind or nothing to do.

Either way, I figured there might be a clue and tapped the screen with my thumb.

* * *

-Shells landed near the department store. Fucking bastards. According to people who joined us along the subway tracks, they're shelling the areas around department stores and big supermarkets first. Plenty of people don't know why, but anyone with a brain can figure it out. Sons of bitches. How the fuck can they go this far...

-One of the children is sick with fever and body aches. Burning up. We barely have any cold medicine left.

-Mr. Jang Han-su from the buckwheat noodle restaurant and Mr. Park Seok-ju, the butcher, volunteered to find a pharmacy.

They're good people. I called them aside and told them it was all right to go if they were planning to run, and gave them at least a few cans.

-Why does this always happen to good people?

-I hear sounds. Countless voices overlap inside people's bodies. Too late. Quarantine those returning from outside.

-It's contagious. I got the order of events wrong.

-The military has no intention of letting us escape. I'd have done the same. Herded them into the bathrooms.

-March 27, 2028. All 73 Jangji Station survivors dead. Do not search for them.

* * *

April 15, 2028, 10:14 p.m.

That was the current time displayed on the phone containing the meaningful records.

We Supreme Mages put our gas masks back on and headed for the bathrooms on the first basement level. We climbed the stairs, opened the small access door in the emergency shutter, and lit our surroundings with tactical lights or phone flashlights whenever it seemed too dark.

Fortunately, the first basement level was in better shape than I'd expected. Many fluorescent lights had been broken along with the shattered ceiling, but the station apparently still had power, and the area up to the bathrooms was properly lit.

In front of the shared entrance to the men's and women's bathrooms lay a human figure burned pitch-black. Around it were scorch marks, a discarded fuel can, and scraps of plastic that had melted and hardened again. Wondering if it was a monster, I examined it with Eye, Stage One, but it showed no movement whatsoever.

I turned to Na-in, who let out a short breath.

HUFF.

A moment later, he spoke in a subdued voice.

"I hear bubbling from inside the bathrooms. It sounds like speech, but it's too quiet to make out."

Apparently there was something in there.

In a cold silence, we Supreme Mages walked over the broken, scorched floor in our combat boots. The burned human figure was clearly a corpse. It looked liable to topple and crumble at the slightest touch, so no one approached it.

We all gave it a wide berth. Just as we were about to enter the bathrooms, a strange sound reached us.

BLOOP.

It sounded like a bubble rising and bursting in thick soup as it boiled.

I immediately examined our surroundings with Eye, Stage One. That let me spot tiny red footprints beneath the bathroom tiles. Faced with evidence that a monster would appear in ten seconds, I raised a hand to signal.

"Back up."

Perhaps because we'd already tussled with monsters, everyone moved smoothly. I backed away too, putting distance between us until I was right in front of the burned corpse, then raised my muzzle and aimed at the red footprints.

But what overlaid the red footprints wasn't some grotesquely shaped monster. Its appearance was, if anything, relatively familiar.

Something like thick, shapeless, flesh-colored jelly crawled stickily across the bathroom tiles. It extended pseudopods that looked both springy and sticky, laboriously gripping the gaps between the tiles to drag its large, formless bulk along.

It resembled a giant amoeba, but the pseudopods reaching for the tile gaps were unpleasantly reminiscent of webbed human hands.

It was a slime distinguished by its flesh color, pale rippling patterns like geological strata, and a surface where bubbles occasionally burst with little bloops.

The eyes were its most notable feature. Inside the opaque, flesh-colored slime, relatively close to the surface near the edges extending pseudopods, lidless human eyeballs stared at us, clouded white like dead fish.

Not just one or two. Many.

Like the eyes of a shellfish packed tightly along its shell.

Surprisingly, Na-in was the only one who gagged.

"Urgh, ugh!"

He pulled up his gas mask to expose his mouth and retched toward the wall.

BLEEEURGH...

Pastor Park, Se-jun, Hamza, and I all had our guns trained on it, so none of us could comfort Na-in. Really, we simply weren't retching. Every one of us was five hundred times tenser in the face of this new monster.

But whether because it was as sluggish as it looked or because it had seen our guns, the flesh-colored slime stopped approaching. Instead, it rolled the pale human eyeballs clustered along its edges and began creeping back into the bathrooms.

The pastor groaned inside his gas mask.

"I suppose that's the third identified species."

"What was it called again...?"

"Degenerative cellular colony."

"It's got eyeballs."

As the flesh-colored slime divided between the men's and women's bathrooms and disappeared, Na-in forced his gas mask back on and approached. His voice was slightly hoarse, perhaps from the violent retching.

"It's freedom."

I furrowed my brow, wondering what bullshit he was spouting now.

"Unlimited freedom, not for humans, but for the things that make up humans."

"..."

"Instead of the minimum order required to form a human, every cell composing that human is granted unlimited, chaotic freedom. Those things are colonies. Monsters formed from a human soul split into tens of trillions of pieces, hunting other humans."

GRIND.

For the first time, Na-in ground his teeth as he glared into the bathrooms. Yet he didn't dare approach. He merely kept swallowing to soothe his throat, raw from stomach acid.

I raised the phone with the records and examined the rest of the journal. Then I looked at the burned corpse, probably the phone's owner, and couldn't help smiling bitterly.

"If you were going to burn, you should've burned those things too. Why burn all by yourself?"

It wasn't my phone. It belonged to the person who'd burned themselves to death.

I switched it off again and set it down in front of the burned corpse.

We Supreme Mages observed a brief moment of silence. Then, just to be safe, we checked with future sight, past sight, and even Na-in's ear-branch detection magic before reaching a conclusion about the flesh-colored slime—the freedom colony.

"It's weak."

Slow. Bullets might be useless, but it seemed likely to die from blast pressure or absorbing right-hand blood.

It was definitely far slower than an Amalgam or predatory spine, and being infectious wasn't unusual; the other monsters had that trait too. Though it did spread somewhat more readily.

The problem lay in its amorphous, slime-like nature. Hamza pointed that out and frankly admitted that the gas stove and pot he'd brought in his pack were useless.

"If I turned on a tap and that poured out and attacked me, I'd faint. I don't think I could boil that and drink it."

"And they said that thing was why the Armed Forces gave up on Seoul... Doesn't that mean Seoul's sewers are packed full of them now?"

"Could they be weak to salt? If they get into seawater, maybe osmotic pressure would shrivel them up."

"Hmm. Even apart from that, given salt's purifying power, a higher salt concentration might weaken them more than you'd expect. They might somehow survive in the sewers but get washed away in seawater. That's an optimistic outlook, but... we can at least consider the possibility."

Pastor Park was considering how to deal with the monster in his own way. Apparently he hoped spraying it with salt water or holy water would inflict meaningful damage. Its sticky body looked as though it might burn surprisingly well if doused in fuel and set alight.

But it could also smother flames with its body, even if some of it got cooked, so we all agreed that if we burned it, we'd have to burn it thoroughly.

Se-jun clicked his tongue and looked back at the burned corpse.

"Poor bastard."

Apparently this person had herded all the infected into the bathrooms, intending to burn them to death before they transformed into that flesh-colored slime, but had failed and ended up burning alone.

We didn't know how the infection spread. Still, given that this person, presumably an ear-branch mage, had burned to death without transforming, we could only surmise that mages had some resistance to the slime's infection.

Pastor Park examined the bathroom entrance and tapped his gas mask before turning around to speak.

"Nothing's been barricaded, but that fucking monster stays in the bathrooms, so humidity might matter. And having too many infected people gathered in one place might accelerate the transformation. From now on, whenever we use tap water, Islam checks it first, then Na-in listens. We only use it once it's judged safe."

"Should we stay here, or go back down?"

At my question, the pastor shuddered and pointed down the stairs.

"I'd rather be beside the shit pit and the graveyard. Let's go down."

We all followed him downstairs.

There were no prayers.

Only a strange silence, as though each of us was steeling our resolve.

Pastor Park alone spoke, letting out a deep sigh.

"Tomorrow, let's scout the surface."