Chapter 54 - The Ticking Doomsday Clock

This wasn't the first time we Supreme Mages had come under mental attack. Thanks to the inoculation we'd received from the teratoma—a monstrous lump of malformed cancer that imitated a baby—everyone reacted quickly. Besides, we could be even more coldhearted when the sound wasn't an innocent newborn crying, but older children running around and playing.

Some people might smile fondly at the sound of children happily playing. But I, Baek Je-min, had lived downstairs from kids whose laughing and running kept me up until two in the morning. I was a hot-blooded man whose heart would never be warmed by the sound of children running around.

But unlike Na-in, Se-jun, and me, who had experienced the teratoma, the pastor and Hamza couldn't help being shaken. Some things simply couldn't be overcome, no matter what you told yourself.

Even so, the pastor needlessly wiped the condensation off his gas mask before speaking.

"Satan the devil slips into people's most vulnerable places, trying to make them turn away from the mission the Lord has given them. Baek Je-min, I can at least tell when a voice is truly asking for help. Don't worry."

"It's dangerous. We mustn't go near it."

Hamza waved his right hand in warning too, but his gaze was fixed on Olympic Park, where the fog was thin. He was looking at the withered, skeletal trees deprived of proper sunlight for four months, the grass soaked through with moisture, and the little stone-tiled plaza between them.

Intellectually, everyone understood. We knew the obvious truth: there couldn't possibly be children playing in the wreckage of Seoul.

It was eerie, too. To the left of the road, dense fog limited visibility to less than ten meters. To the right, thin fog with visibility of about a hundred meters settled over the skeletal park, carrying children's laughter.

It all came down to one vanishingly remote possibility.

What if there really was a child there?

I snapped my fingers to draw the attention of the pastor and Hamza, who were silently wrestling with that worry. Half-assed humanitarianism got everyone killed. There was a certain romance to it, sure, but when death might not be the end, you couldn't ask for a more fucking idiotic stunt.

We had to distinguish what we could do from what we couldn't. We Supreme Mages were good at killing monsters, but frankly, we sucked at saving people.

"We're not a rescue team. Let's just go. We can't cross the Han River with a kid in tow."

"If there's a kid, can't we go back once and come out again?"

"Back where?"

"Seongnam."

That single answer conveyed the pastor's true feelings: he couldn't leave even one little lamb behind.

We'd fought our way here through all that bullshit. If we broke through the monster swarms massing along the front, identified ourselves to the Korean troops shooting indiscriminately, and returned just because we'd rescued one unknown kid, that would be one hell of a rescue operation.

We still hadn't properly answered our questions about magic, fully uncovered the fog's nature and cause, or determined where the monsters originated. I didn't want to discuss retreat when we hadn't even made contact with the friendly survivor group associated with Go Ryeo-ha.

Of course, I did look back with a hard stare in case those weak-willed Aphorism members changed their minds. Fortunately, everyone seemed to agree with me, watching the pastor with indifferent expressions.

Supreme Mages indeed. Above all, even that lunatic fanatic Shin Na-in was on board.

"Pastor. It's true the children have been given a chance to repent, but they're fundamentally likely to be heathen children. If they attended church, that might be different, but we warriors of the Lord cannot risk ourselves to save children whose faith is uncertain."

"Hmm... You have a point. Whew. Still, children are so likely to be brought to the Gospel..."

Na-in's logic was fucked up, but if the result was good, maybe that made it all right.

Se-jun seemed to be recalling his own struggle with the teratoma. He took short, sharp breaths inside his gas mask, showing his tension without a word. As one of the three alteration-type mages who knew better than anyone how harmful mental attacks were, he apparently couldn't even spare the composure to speak.

The pastor looked around at the other Supreme Mages in the hope that someone might disagree, but we were all the same. We were prepared to march into hell, but we had no intention of turning back here to save one poor soul.

Even so, he stubbornly persisted until he finally proposed a compromise.

"We won't go out of our way to save them, but we will if we can. Handing them over to another survivor group is acceptable, isn't it?"

"Oh, for..."

When I sighed in resignation, the pastor raised his eyebrows behind his gas-mask lenses.

"Listen, you. A person mustn't lose faith, even in difficult times. Anyway, that's what we're doing. Let's go."

And so the strange scenery continued. Olympic Park was considerably larger than we'd expected; ten minutes of walking wasn't nearly enough to reach its end. The clear boundary along the broad road we were following made it feel even stranger.

The roadside trees, apparently planted to serve as a median, had long since suffocated in the fog that had settled over them for four months.

Using the broad road's centerline as the boundary, fog grew abruptly thicker over the apartment complexes and buildings to the left. To the right lay the park, where the thin fog revealed damp, moldy, rotting trees and lifeless grass.

Whenever we caught a faint glimpse of a decorative column or statue in the park, everyone would briefly stop to inspect it. Some sculptures and columns were so bizarre that my aesthetic sensibilities couldn't begin to comprehend them. Seoul people really did like grotesque things, unlike people from the provinces.

Maybe they'd actually embraced life as monsters, too?

As I walked along thinking that, an obstacle more formidable than expected blocked our path. Abandoned vehicles were packed tightly together where the dense fog from the left drifted lazily toward the thinner fog on the right, tangled up with streetlights and the debris of a collapsed building.

Se-jun surveyed the area before speaking briefly.

"Looks like they tried to escape when the critical threshold was breached and failed. The collapsed building was probably... the army's doing."

It was only six or seven stories tall at most, but if a building snapped clean off at its base and fell across a road, that was a typhoon-scale disaster.

I felt strange looking at the ruins, every window shattered and even the frame crushed by the tremendous impact. The sight of an entire building toppled across the road gave me some idea of the hell Seoul must have been on January 6.

The pastor surveyed the vehicles and building debris blocking the road, murmured a short prayer, then turned toward the park on the right.

"We'll have to be careful entering buildings along the roads for a while. There may be explosives planted to block roads like this that never went off. Going into the alleys on the thick-fog side now wouldn't be ideal. Let's detour to the right and scout the park while we're at it."

His intentions were plain as day. He wanted to take this opportunity to investigate the park and the source of the children's laughter, then rescue any real children he found. It was a flimsy, transparent pretext, but...

"Let's do that."

I, Baek Je-min, was the first to nod.

"Let's do as the pastor says."

Next, Na-in fiddled with his headset and looked up.

"We have to be careful. It's dangerous."

Hamza looked around with a slightly pale face and warned us.

"It's wide open, so we need to keep a careful watch in every direction. Let's adjust our formation. I'll cover the right flank, Je-min the front, and Na-in the rear. The exposed positions will probably be the most dangerous."

Se-jun proposed the change with a serious look. For a guy who normally babbled about wanting to become a cute girl through a sex change, it was surprisingly sensible, so everyone agreed.

And so our detour began. Instead of taking the road completely clogged with abandoned vehicles and collapsed-building debris, we entered Olympic Park.

The moment our boot soles stepped onto the moisture-softened, rotten grass, cheerful children's laughter echoed inside our heads.

"Ahahahaha..."

Everyone seemed to hear it together. Their eyes took on all kinds of expressions.

One felt guilt, another hatred, another disgust, another fear. I, Baek Je-min, couldn't hide my unpleasant curiosity as we passed the park's trees.

We only needed a slight detour, not to go this deep, but we deliberately kept heading farther in. That was our Supreme Mages for you.

We wouldn't go out of our way to save lives, but if we found someone while gathering information, we'd gladly hand them over to other survivors. Such warmhearted people.

Then a sight greeted us that should have been impossible in Seoul, buried beneath a fog bank hundreds of meters thick.

A grassy field almost free of fog.

The trees were withered, but droplets rolled over their leaves as they swayed in the wind. The grass was flattened, but its blades were poised to rise again. In a patch of faint sunlight, children faced one another and played happily, pretending to be scarecrows.

They basked in the sun as though treasuring the sunlight they hadn't seen in so long.

"Hehehehe..."

Anyone who knew nothing and saw a child bouncing with both arms spread, letting out that drawn-out laughter—anyone who saw this little sunlit field—would have no choice but to call it a miracle.

They would see it as the rightful miracle that ought to arrive in the face of an irrational catastrophe.

But we were mages.

We knew that what opposed the irrational wasn't ordinary cause and effect, but more of the same irrationality. Under heaven, the only one looking out for me was myself. Rather than hope for miracles or luck, I chose to face the reality before my eyes.

Alteration-Type Eye, Stage One. Ten seconds of foresight.

My eyes seemed to grow bloodshot, then a scratchy, plastic sensation spread over my entire eyeballs. An unpleasant feeling arose inside my head, as though eyelids were blinking there, scraping against my other brain cells.

In exchange, I could see red footprints. They remained fixed, unmoving, as though nailed to the spots where the children laughed and chattered.

'They're monsters.'

The instant I recognized that fact, my human vision and magical vision split apart.

Ordinary human eyes found nothing wrong. The children hopping in place felt slightly off, but that was all. This was a sunlit place, practically a sacred sanctuary in Seoul.

But my magical vision was different.

The trees were dead. Swollen human lungs had replaced their leaves. But could you call something a lung when it had emerged from a human body and breathed independently, inflating and deflating over and over?

Pieces of human lungs hung thickly from the dead trees in place of leaves.

When the lungs inhaled and swelled taut, fog seeped into them. Blunt, hard tentacles that appeared to have once been bronchi fastened them to the dead trees.

Like parasitic plants infesting trees, the bronchi and tiny capillaries had taken root throughout the dead trunks, securing the lung leaves to their branches.

And the children. The children...

"Waaah..."

Have you ever seen children suffering from starvation in third-world countries? Skin and bones, but with bellies sticking out like tadpoles? That was what these children looked like. Their arms and legs had melted away, and they lay strewn across the grass, connected by blood vessels to the lung leaves in the trees.

Their skin had shriveled so badly that it was impossible even to tell their sex. Their eyes had shrunken as though about to collapse. Between their jutting cheekbones and lips, only their crying voices retained the suggestion of plump baby fat.

Their tadpole bellies weren't normal, either. A huge mouth occupied the center of each abdomen, its teeth meshing like a zipper. Through those mouths, writhing internal organs protruded and breathed.

Quite literally, they were riddled with countless breathing holes like sea sponges, flapping in the air as they breathed. Each time the intestinal tentacles growing from the children's bellies undulated in the wind instead of seawater and drew breath, fog was sucked in and forced down into their abdomens.

The children's bellies swelled as though they might burst at any moment, but strangely, they didn't.

But my intuition told me the most horrifying part was something else.

"Sob... sob."

"Aaugh. Ugh."

The voices couldn't even call for Mommy or Daddy. They were too busy letting out agonized groans and sobs.

What stood here now was one hundred percent monster.

Yet my intuition told me those voices weren't monstrous—that they weren't a monster's imitation, but sounds made by real people. That uselessly accurate intuition, which some might call a spiritual sense.

I heard retching behind me. The pastor muttered something in a voice seething with emotion, Hamza gagged, and Se-jun struggled for breath.

Then someone raised a gun.

CLACK

I looked toward the heavy metallic sound. Na-in stood there.

With cold but resolute eyes, he aimed his muzzle at the children and pulled the trigger without hesitation. I couldn't say how many times.

While the other Supreme Mages were still in shock, Na-in alone aimed at the heads of the tadpole-bellied children sprouting intestinal tentacles. For a long time, spent casings fell with wet thuds into the sodden grass.

With every deafening gunshot and flash of the muzzle, another child's crying stopped.

That wasn't enough for him. He poured bullets into the bellies of the children already transformed into monsters, even changing magazines once. None of the Supreme Mages intervened as he carried on alone.

BANG, BA-BANG. BANG...

By the time only acrid gunsmoke rose into the air, it was all over.

Fog erupted from the tadpole bellies torn open by bullets. Watching it thicken in an instant, we realized what these monsters were for.

Fog collection.

The lung leaves tried futilely to inflate, then burst one after another. All that lay before us were the corpses of child monsters leaking fog.

While everyone remained silent, Na-in alone checked his weapon, adjusted his stance, and turned toward us.

"May those children knock upon the gates of heaven. Amen!"

While the others couldn't say a word, I alone walked over and patted his shoulder.

"You did a hard job. Let's go."

* * *

April 18, 2028, 12:23 a.m.

We Supreme Mages encountered an unidentified species in Olympic Park, provisionally designated Tadpole Belly.

We judged it to be a parasitic monster intended to collect fog, either taking the form of a young child or arising from a mutated child so that mages and other humans would hesitate to shoot it.

We chose not to decide whether the children's crying belonged to monsters or people.

The pastor, who had remained silent for a long time, offered our assessment of the Tadpole Bellies.

"This place is fucked up."

Not all the fog had returned. Olympic Park still had thin fog with visibility between a hundred and two hundred meters. Fog had risen only where we'd passed, and even that was being torn to shreds and drifting away somewhere.

We chose not to figure out what that meant.

There was no way the army didn't know about those monsters. Had they scouted them out and left them alone because they thought the creatures were getting rid of the troublesome fog for them?

And what we'd thought was sunlight...

"The bright yellow gaze."

Na-in looked toward me and whispered.

"Those without holy-war arts would have mistaken the gaze for sunlight and been lured in. Those children must have been, too."

"... Let's share that information later. Right now, let's get even one step closer to the Han River."

"Yes."

Na-in was dependable in the most pointless situations.

We decided to put off discussing our theories until everyone had recovered from the shock and we'd reached the Han River as quickly as possible.

But my mouth was starting to feel a little dry.

Perhaps, without even knowing it, we were heading toward an even more horrifying doom.