Chapter 48 - The Beginning of Eternity

Thanks to Hamza’s doctrinal magic and the map the military had provided, we knew where to set our sights.

Konkuk University.

It might not rank alongside the SKY universities among Seoul’s prestigious schools, but if even a country bumpkin like me had heard of it, it had to be a good school. I wished I were heading there for an entrance exam. Instead, all I could think about was having to push through the countless dangers teeming through Seoul.

Besides, I had a feeling crossing the Han River was guaranteed to hold us up.

There might be a group of survivors living on a bridge, or monsters preying on survivors crossing it. We couldn’t even rule out a monster making its home in the Han River, like in that old movie.

But monsters and local mages weren’t our biggest concern.

Pastor Park Yo-han moistened his dry lips with his tongue and pointed out something we’d forgotten.

“We have to avoid the bombing. The original plan was to link up with the advance reconnaissance unit, but this whole situation is a shitshow.”

“Bombing?”

“Didn’t you see the fighter jets? They’re probably flying above the fog and dropping bombs.”

Me, Shin Na-in, Lee Se-jun, and Hamza.

The four of us exchanged glances as realization hit. Our days had been so packed that it was easy to forget, but we were inside Seoul while it was actively being bombed.

Avoiding the shelling aboveground was precisely why we’d spent hours at Jangji Station before coming up.

The pastor’s faithful yes-man, Shin Na-in, adjusted his headset and chimed in.

“Yesterday, April fifteenth, when we entered Seoul, the deployment of a United Nations coalition force was confirmed, and the U.S. president issued a declaration. They’re probably bombing away even now, primarily with the fighter wing stationed in Suwon. The number and frequency of strikes still seem limited, given the constraints on our armed forces, but I expect them to intensify once foreign troops arrive.”

“Uh, didn’t they say an American aircraft carrier was coming too?”

“The Seventh Fleet in the Pacific.”

As I struggled to remember, Se-jun answered with a much more serious face.

Gone was the childish idiot going on about piss and shit. He looked as grim as an NCO about to face an inspection by the division commander. Stroking his coarse beard, he frowned.

“That ought to set China and Russia off, but both of them let it slide relatively quietly. And considering the Chinese People’s Liberation Army moved into Ganghwa Island on April third, there might have been some sort of agreement.”

“Oh. Right. We don’t have a government anymore.”

“Now, now. The ROK–U.S. Joint Command in Pyeongtaek has effectively succeeded our government.”

The days had been so intense that I’d forgotten one piece of news that had passed me by.

Our president and administration had evacuated to Incheon, only to fall under Chinese influence when China forcibly moved into Ganghwa Island. ‘Under Chinese influence’ was putting it gently. They might as well have had their throats plugged shut.

Fortunately, our government hadn’t failed to consider this worst-case scenario. They’d drawn up a contingency plan to transfer even administrative authority to the ROK–U.S. Joint Command in Pyeongtaek. As a result, the Republic of Korea’s administrative authority now rested with its commander.

But why had China tacitly accepted the U.S. Seventh Fleet in the Pacific?

Se-jun suspected that our military’s first cordon had already been breached in practical terms.

“They say a hundred and fifty thousand troops have blocked the major roads and railways, but they couldn’t have caught every person or monster escaping through the hills and open country. Fog appeared in Gyeonggi Province and broke through there before, remember? They say things are fine now, but it’s an established fact that Gyeonggi Province was breached. They’re probably deploying their forces with that in mind.”

According to what Se-jun had glimpsed over the officers’ shoulders at Suwon City Hall, the military’s detailed defense plan was as follows.

First: the hundred and fifty thousand troops maintaining the first cordon were survivors under Capital Defense Command and troops scraped together from the front near the armistice line—South Korea’s very last genuine frontline units.

Apparently, they had been deployed while suppression operations were still underway inside Seoul, to seal off the most densely populated urban areas and major roads.

After suffering roughly thirteen thousand casualties, they were now down to around a hundred and forty thousand. They were so desperate to hold the Seoul cordon because their ranks included veterans who had escaped Seoul when it crossed the critical threshold or had been fighting monsters since the crisis began.

Calling them veterans after barely a month of combat felt a little odd, but apparently they were firm believers in rules of engagement that amounted to shooting everything without getting hung up on humanity or righteousness.

“That fellow Park Se-hyeok was another mage who managed to escape when Seoul crossed the critical threshold.”

“Park Se-hyeok...?”

I frowned at the name, which I’d never heard in my life. The pastor clicked his tongue and explained.

“You remember that whiner who listened to heartbeats. The kid who got all the way there, then tried to run off alone and got shot dead by the soldiers guarding Suwon Station.”

“Ohhh.”

Calling him the whiner brought back a hazy memory.

He’d acted like he was going to troll us, then actually pulled his weight without sabotaging anything—only to try deserting at the very end and wind up gasping after getting hit by machine-gun fire.

Se-jun had picked up a few more stories from officers he’d gotten to know.

Second: naturally, sealing off all of Seoul with a hundred and fifty thousand troops was madness. Besides, fog and monsters had already appeared outside Seoul, in Gyeonggi Province.

The military therefore considered the first cordon breached through hills and open country, even if it hadn’t completely collapsed. The second cordon, around Gyeonggi Province, was what they regarded as the true last line of defense protecting the Korean Peninsula.

To maintain it, they had introduced a military-scrip economy to discourage even evacuation, while employing mages like mercenaries under the title of civilian Operators. That was the reality we had just left behind.

Se-jun went further and told us the actual size of the force holding the second cordon.

“They said roughly two hundred and forty thousand reservists, plus every active-duty soldier they could spare from Chungcheong and Gangwon Provinces, for about two hundred and forty-seven thousand total. That was already two months ago, though. I also heard they were mobilizing the police, with orders to treat civilians found outside authorized areas as potential Amalgams and shoot them on sight.”

“They issued a nationwide mobilization order, didn’t they? And they only got two hundred and forty thousand?”

“They stationed martial-law troops in the rear cities too. Judging by the deployments, the higher-ups seem to be considering the worst-case scenario, where some specimens have already spread across the entire peninsula. It’s just talk from the officers at Suwon City Hall, so take it with a grain of salt, but there’s probably some credibility to it.”

If that worst-case possibility was true, then factoring in the nationwide protests that had erupted in the rear cities on April fifth, South Korea was already far, far beyond the red line.

Now it really came down to two choices: the whole world helped us, or they wiped out the Korean people and vitrified the entire peninsula in a baptism of nuclear fire.

Fortunately, apart from the first cordon, the peninsula was still under control. And above all, there was the honey pot that was magic.

Se-jun’s theory was that this had led to China taking responsibility for the west and north of Seoul, once a metropolis of ten million, while the United States and we took the east and south.

That was when the pastor tapped the spot Hamza had pointed out.

“Islam. What about that mage, Go Ryeo-ha? Does it say she’s dangerous?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve never even seen her face, so I guess I can’t judge.”

“Does it get more dangerous the longer we delay?”

“That, I’m not sure about either...”

“Ah, shit. If you don’t know anything, what are you even here for!”

That was the biggest drawback of Hamza’s doctrinal magic, [Angel's Intuition].

It kept him away from the most fatal wrong answers, but its effectiveness plummeted when it came to comparing options to find the wrong ones. Sure, even a guessing game that only identified wrong answers was better than nothing, but for all its limitless potential, its actual performance was abysmal.

In the end, we had to settle for the broad outlines of a plan.

And by ‘we,’ I meant mostly the pastor’s ideas.

“We have to assume the bombing and shelling will get heavier with time. The way things are going, we can hardly count on linking up with the advance reconnaissance unit... Let’s give ourselves a generous deadline of about two weeks. We’ll keep following Line Eight, moving between the surface and underground. Conserve our food as much as possible and forage locally. Always conserve drinking water, too. And don’t forget to check whether the water pipes are full of those monster bastards.”

“The advance reconnaissance unit must have been trying to contact Go Ryeo-ha too. What if they’ve even found out we’re planning to cross the Han River?”

Having seen what inverted Tongue, Stage One could do, I raised a question we couldn’t ignore.

There was no way only one Seoul mage used inverted Tongue, Stage One, and it was unlikely that only one or two soldiers had been sucked dry.

Even special forces with ample drone and air support seemed unlikely to avoid losses against Seoul’s mages. If the mages knew why the soldiers had been sent in and the background of the operation, I really did worry about how they would respond.

The pastor took off the glasses that made him look sly and sighed.

“What else can we do? We won’t go looking for them, but if they come after us, we fight.”

* * *

April 16, 2028, 8:46 p.m.

Still only the second day of the expedition.

Night had arrived in fog-filled Seoul. I’d thought the dense fog would erase any distinction between day and night, but I was wrong.

Hamza and I were walking around to double-check the safety of the department store’s seventh floor.

All of us felt uneasy that there had been no particular reaction despite the tremendous gunfire and the pile of corpses we’d burned.

As we patrolled the seventh floor in gas masks, the clouds of fog beyond the broken windows weren’t even gray anymore. They were pitch-black. Seoul was a deep sea on land, where every last ray of light was devoured.

The store’s fog-filled interior was no different.

If Seoul beyond the windows was the deep sea, then inside the store was muddy water. It was more like a cave where we had to gently part the floating fog particles with our hands as we went. True darkness, where even clicking on a tactical light meant nothing.

Further reconnaissance was pointless.

The subway tracks, which at least still had power, might be another matter. But I decided moving aboveground at night was madness.

Hamza kept nodding, apparently in agreement.

“It’s more dangerous at night. We have to hide.”

“More dangerous because we can’t see?”

“More dangerous because more dangerous things are roaming around.”

Hamza had a talent for saying the most obvious things with utter seriousness.

When I returned to our position looking unimpressed, everyone had already tucked themselves into their sleeping bags.

Maybe it was the intense fight with the Seoul mage, but I was exhausted too. The moment I took off my gas mask and set down my gun, I fumbled my way into my sleeping bag.

The pastor and Se-jun were already out cold.

Only Na-in, who was on watch, was leaning against the back of the barricade, nodding his head as he read the Bible and recited a hymn very quietly.

“Keep a good watch.”

“Warriors of Jesus~ Drive away Satan the devil~”

“Ugh.”

Without expecting an answer, I pulled up my sleeping bag’s zipper.

ZZZIP.

The place was damp, dark, and shitty, but once I knew it was safe, I didn’t need a soft bed.

Baek Je-min, the man. Look how much I’d grown.

Right up to twenty-seven, I’d been a coward who loved horror movies but called Mom afterward because I was scared. Maybe I’d reached the stage where testosterone came gushing out. Now I could sleep like a baby not just beside a shit pit, but in Seoul, surrounded by heaps of corpses and roaming monsters.

As soon as I closed my eyes, I could feel myself dropping off.

A lot had certainly happened.

It was only day two, and I looked back over everything I’d experienced in Seoul.

Every soldier who’d come with us disappeared as soon as we reached the station. We killed about a hundred monsters fighting our way through the subway, learned what had happened to the Jangji Station survivors, fought a Seoul mage, and cremated the soldiers to give them a funeral.

Baek Je-min was really living a full life...

...

“... Je-min!”

... My body was shaking.

I couldn’t even tell whose voice it was.

Unwilling to open my eyes, I barely managed to work my floundering tongue and force out a few words.

“Ahhh. I’ve got last watch today.”

“I have last watch. Never mind that—wake up. Everyone’s awake!”

That whisper sounded familiar... Hamza?

Still half asleep, I struggled to open my eyes.

Then I saw the pastor, his hair a bird’s nest, and Se-jun, his eyes bloodshot, lying flat behind the dining-table barricade, hiding.

I snapped awake.

Without needing to be told, I reached to unzip my sleeping bag.

I would have done it, too, if Hamza hadn’t laid his hand over mine.

His face deathly pale, Hamza cautiously raised his index finger and made the faintest sound.

“Shhh.”

Hamza began lowering the zipper little by little, moving very slowly for fear of making too much noise.

Being jolted out of sleep had given me a slight headache, but I clenched my teeth and endured it.

I could tell this wasn’t the time to moan about a headache.

Once the zipper was low enough for me to get out, I slipped free without delay, smooth and graceful as a cockroach, and grabbed my gun first.

CLACK.

The feel of that heavy, cold metal calmed my pounding heart. Now I understood why a gun was your lover.

You pass.

After appointing the short-barreled AR-15 my concubine, second only to my lawful wife, my right hand, I smoothly lay down beside Se-jun and the pastor.

Only then did I wonder where that shitting bastard Na-in had gone. He’d been on first watch, so why was Hamza the one waking me?

The answer lay in the black shape Hamza was sitting on like a bundle of luggage. I’d thought he was sitting on his sleeping bag. It was Na-in.

For a moment I wondered if Hamza was finally waging jihad against the Christian nutjob, but the glimpse I caught of Na-in’s face quickly killed that theory.

I’d seen Na-in absolutely furious exactly twice.

The first was when monk Wonhaeng restored his mental strength by reciting a mantra. The second was when he learned what the Seoul mage’s magic did—the mage he’d nicknamed the Dubai Chewy Witch.

And now, for the second time, I was seeing Na-in terrified.

His lips were blue, his pupils shrunken, and foamy saliva dribbled through his slightly parted mouth. His hair was soaked with cold sweat and plastered to his cheeks. With his headset pressed tightly over his ears, Na-in recited a prayer without stopping.

“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

He’d already lost his mind.

Still pinning Na-in beneath his backside, Hamza was pressed tightly against the barricade, hiding himself too. When he noticed me looking at Na-in, he brought his index finger to his lips again and let out a breathy sound.

“Shhhh...”

At this point, I might have wondered if this was some hidden-camera prank—if a vibration hadn’t sounded from my trouser pocket.

BZZZ.

Everyone’s eyes swung toward me at once.

The pastor glared as if he wanted to kill me. Se-jun shot me a look with his bloodshot eyes. Hamza silently flailed his hands, and Na-in squeezed his eyes shut altogether.

Calmly soothing the Supreme Mages, I took the phone out of my trouser pocket.

“Let’s think positive. Inner peace.”

“Positive? Inner peace? Baek Je-min. You wanna die?”

“How about first being grateful that I’m considerate enough to have put it on vibrate?”

As I said that, I checked the phone.

My own phone was already off. The vibrating one was the dark navy phone we’d brought from the phone graveyard. That strange phone that received messages without data or Wi-Fi.

[Songpa side agitated. Escape and hide.]

Instead of speaking, I carefully showed them the screen.

Unfortunately, its battery was built in and couldn’t be removed, so I had to settle for turning it off.

The information was so fragmentary that there was hardly anything we could make sense of.

Still, judging by Hamza’s alarm and Na-in’s mental breakdown, this was no ordinary sign.

Just as I thought that, Hamza finally whispered.

“It’s coming.”

At that moment, I instinctively curled up.

Hugging even my gun against me, I shrank down to hide both my body and shadow behind the barricade. Curiosity about what it could possibly be? Normally, I might have felt a little. This time, not a trace.

The fog was pushed aside.

A heavy, low wind blew gently through the gaps in the barricade, tickling my hair.

I saw the fog that had drifted lazily beneath the black shade whirl as a weighty presence forced it aside. Another layer of shadow was being laid over the darkness on the department store’s seventh floor.

Then I felt a gaze.

A colorless resignation settled into my mind, like that of an ancestor confronted by a starving tiger, or a stranded traveler facing an emaciated bear.

Despair more bottomless than an adventurer’s fall into a gaping crevasse coiled inside me.

A vague yet absolute intuition stopped all of us breathing.

Someone falling into a crevasse or over a cliff can reach toward the light. They can close their eyes when they realize they’re falling, or die of shock from terror.

But anyone discovered now would not even be allowed to die.

Before emotion or conscious thought, my muscles contracted on their own, clenching rigidly. Only afterward did my mind understand why my body had reacted that way.

I had to breathe less. I had to slow my heart as much as possible.

That was the only way to survive.

THUMP.

I bitterly resented the heartbeat that had once told me I was alive.

THUMP. THUMP.

If I could have squeezed my heart until it stopped before I was discovered, I would have. Every day that I, the human being Baek Je-min, had lived and breathed and rejoiced since birth was a curse.

Agony surged through me as I barely breathed and my heart began stopping of its own accord. But an even more dreadful intuition was settling over everyone here.

If you can die, it is better to die.

I felt an enormous gaze sweep the seventh floor’s interior.

If all I’d sensed were vast hunger, I could at least have understood that I was about to be eaten. This wasn’t even survival of the fittest.

It was an indifferent, greedy gaze, like someone opening a bag of snacks they’d bought on sale at the supermarket, leaving it lying around, then rummaging inside with their fingers to see if any crumbs remained.

It also resembled the gaze of someone handing over a cream bun six months past its expiration date in the name of kindness, then smugly demanding credit for it.

Indifferent, greedy, arrogant, and hungry.

Beyond the barricade, the gaze touching my back belonged to an enormous being swimming and frolicking through this deep sea on land.

Something whose annihilation not even a nuclear fireball could guarantee was swimming through Seoul’s night fog, peering through shattered windows.

To that gaze, buildings were canned food and tin cans. Humans were prey and snacks, pets it had to care for, and itself.

Nausea surged.

My paralyzed organs convulsed and twisted all at once, bringing on extreme dizziness.

My entire body went cold and trembled as though gripped by chills. In my mind, the magic script I’d learned—the seals of eyes, tongue, and hands—flashed, forcing pain upon me as if branding me with a hot iron.

Only pain held my collapsing flesh in its shape.

The visions of magic script brought phantom pain that seemed to brand every corner inside my skull, and tears streamed down my face. As I forced back vomit, rising acid filled my mouth.

It was the unpleasant feeling of my brain being roughly wrapped in scratchy plastic and rubbed until it squeaked, the revolting sensation of an eyelid blinking inside my head and its lashes scraping my brain.

Yet, paradoxically, this pain and discomfort prevented my body from shutting down completely.

At last, the gaze moved away from us.

When I barely managed to lift my eyes, I saw an ominous, brilliant yellow light illuminating one corner of the seventh floor like a lighthouse. That was the gaze. I had to avoid that eerie, sinister light shining through the fog.

This was an instinct that preceded knowledge or magic.

It was a survival sense far more primal and intuitive than knowing not to touch fire because it burned. An instinct that held absolute precedence over life’s drive to eat when hungry told me:

Fail to evade that gaze, and it’s over.

We Supreme Mages lay motionless for a while, unable to breathe, our hearts slowing to a stop.

By some true miracle, it could have been no more than thirty seconds. People die if they don’t breathe and their hearts don’t beat. That was when the gaze departed.

The fog that had been pushed aside swayed as it was sucked away again. Something swimming through the fog clouds had left.

Only then did we release our breath.

“Hah, hah...”

Se-jun’s breathing was the loudest.

Rather than worrying that the sound would give us away, I was too busy gulping down air. The others were no different. Terror or not, with pain burning through our entire bodies, all we could do was breathe.

After we’d spent a long while gasping like that, the pastor slumped and spoke.

“Two weeks? No way. Let’s just get there fucking fast.”

“Lord, rebuke my weakness for contemplating suicide.”

As soon as the pastor lamented, Na-in made the sign of the cross, tears running down his face.

He was revealing his Catholic background now, but apparently he had no room to care. Hamza was panting just like the rest of us.

“Hah, hoo. Hah, hoo...”

I was no different.

I was busy wiping the saliva from my mouth and the tears that had run down to my chin with my sleeve.

Then a memory suddenly came to me.

I finally understood the meaning of the apocalyptic song, and its single word, sung underground at Suwon Station by Father Jeong Yong-hwan and Madam Geulmun, with their drooping tongues and perforated vocal cords.

I saw Na-in’s shoulders twitch as he heard the voice in my mind.

Only now did the two of us fully understand why Father Jeong Yong-hwan had called for the Lord even after becoming a monster.

“Lord. So that was why...”

Eternity.

True terror is not the end, but the beginning of eternity.

An eternity in which death is forbidden and offers no escape. An everlasting reign of terror in which even suicide cannot guarantee release. Endless days earned by screaming, trapped in a monster’s flesh.

That is terror.

Na-in and I looked at each other, then turned our heads away.

These monsters might still retain their human selves and consciousness.

Na-in and I decided to keep that horrifying possibility a secret between the two of us.