Chapter 66 - Miracle Morning

The sunlight felt unusually bright that morning.

Compared with the past week of roaming through musty rubble and ruins, everything felt wonderfully dry and fresh. On an ordinary day, I would have strolled beneath the roadside trees in the warm sunshine, needlessly turning up my smartphone’s brightness.

But now, beneath that risen sun, we felt terror.

Just before we left the alley for the main road, ground-pounding tremors made us stagger. Not a breath of wind blew through the alley, yet our guts shook and the hems of our ponchos fluttered of their own accord.

We moved fast.

Before anyone could say a word, we scrambled through a broken window and hid behind the counters.

Me, Shin Na-in, Lee Se-jun, the pastor, Hamza.

Crouched behind counters or broken doors, we listened to the monster horde advance. None of us dared even consider lifting our heads for a peek.

All the monsters that had been suppressed by the fog began pouring out of their habitats to greet the sunlight.

Within mere tens of seconds, all manner of bizarre moans and footsteps overlapped in the alley where we had just been standing. The screams and groans that had once echoed through the city were crossing its desolate streets.

The critical-threshold breach.

The grief of those who had faced the flood of monsters as a city of ten million suffocated beneath dense clouds of fog was filling the empty alleys and roads once more.

Months later, we felt anew the reality of that moment when most of the citizens had been reduced to monsters.

"Aaaagh! Soldier, please help me! Run! Take me with you..."

The fluorescent lights and wires dangling from the ceiling swayed wildly.

Dust trickled from the pale layers coating medicine shelves that someone had already swept clean.

A place where monsters’ footsteps drowned out shelling and bombing. Where the sound of flight plunged earthward to the accompaniment of autocannon fire. Where flesh tore and human screams spewed from monsters’ vocal cords.

Everyone stayed utterly silent.

Only Shin Na-in lifted his gas mask and turned his deathly pale face aside. Apparently he had become a professional puker: instead of immediately spitting out whatever rose in his throat, he let it dribble out.

That was when Hamza silently pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket and handed it over.

Na-in finished retching, tipped his canteen to rinse his mouth, and spat before accepting it without a word. It was a stiff, glossy pamphlet picked up from the church, but apparently even that was a godsend.

With a reverent air, as though kissing it, he rubbed the pamphlet over his mouth to wipe away the vomit, then laid it neatly inside a medicine cabinet.

At that, I experienced a strange feeling I couldn’t quite put into words.

Behind the pharmacy’s counters and shelves, with broken windows between us and the outside, we enjoyed an odd silence.

Human and monster were divided by a space without even a single proper wall.

Humans huddled in the dusty shadows of ruined buildings.

Meanwhile, monsters rushed into clear sunlight, willingly running toward the shells.

While I was thinking this, the vibrations churning my stomach eased a little.

Everyone’s eyes naturally turned to Hamza and Na-in.

Hamza clenched his rifle’s barrel, while Na-in lowered his gas mask again, puffing out breaths. They spoke.

"Now."

"We have to break through."

We Supreme Mages rose again.

We stepped over broken glass to venture beneath a sky without a trace of fog. Beneath our crunching footsteps, vibrations from shelling and moving monsters continued to mingle and reach us.

My guts no longer shook.

My heartbeat merely quickened a little in time with that relentless rhythm.

HUFF, HUFF, HUFF, HUFF.

Our breathing grew ragged inside our gas masks.

I forced down the urge to sprint and concentrated solely on walking fast. My heart kept shouting at me to run with everything I had, while my head busied itself coldly spelling out reality.

If I started running already, I would exhaust myself. Exhaustion here meant the end.

We couldn’t waste any of it: the 760 rounds we had allocated entirely to the pastor, Hamza, and Na-in; the pain that was both magic’s price and backlash; even the handful of stamina we needed to make our way through this hell.

We were heading into the most dangerous place of all.

We Supreme Mages were heading into the center of a city that could be called hell without the slightest shame.

"Waaah, waaaah..."

At the far right edge of my vision, beyond the roadside trees in a small park, I glimpsed child-shaped monsters spilling writhing intestines from split bellies.

Nearby, lung trees growing along the bare branches of roadside trees that had died for lack of sunlight swelled and shrank to the rhythm of the crying.

The Tadpole Bellies’ guts gaped slowly like earthworms, sucking in even the scant handfuls of fog that remained. Lungs hanging from the trees spread open, displaying clusters of plump, ripe alveoli like fruit.

I saw the pastor hesitate, but only for a moment.

We ignored them.

We couldn’t save them.

More importantly, not a single building suitable for shelter remained nearby.

Around the apartment complex on our right, Tadpole Bellies wailed in every little park. To our left, some huge buildings stood in what looked like an empty expanse, flaunting glasslike outer walls with a blue-green tint.

A sign we happened across told us what those enormous buildings were.

Apparently still troubled by having to leave the Tadpole Bellies behind, the pastor briefly stopped walking.

"Those buildings on the left are a hospital."

"Amen."

Only after Na-in’s response did the pastor start moving again.

I didn’t bother asking whether that had been Na-in’s own brief expression of mourning or an attempt to pull the pastor out of his feelings.

We Supreme Mages proceeded along the sidewalk, crossing back and forth over the edge of the road, moving as fast as we could at a pace that still felt painfully slow. Between the tramp of combat boots and the clink of metal, all we heard was breathing inside gas masks.

I treated the countless screams and groans ringing throughout the city, and the dull vibrations still pounding through our soles, as background music.

CRUNCH, CRUNCH.

With every step, the cries of those confronting eternity erupted all around us.

CLINK.

Whenever the canteen on my belt knocked against something, the water inside swirled.

Then I realized.

Some of the footsteps among the monsters that should have been heading toward Seoul’s outskirts sounded different.

A presence stealing closer, setting its heels down gently, as though wary of stepping on even one rotten twig.

An air like a mischievous child creeping up to startle someone, unable to suppress laughter at the thought of their reaction.

I could feel it.

I tightened my grip on the bayonet and was just wondering whether to turn around when—

"Four heads."

Na-in’s voice was succinct.

"They’re following us."

After that, we broke from a walk into a half run.

Our ponchos, which had only stirred at the hems, began to flap.

And the farther we went, the more steps we took, the louder they fluttered.

We ran along a road tangled with burst tires and abandoned vehicles.

We stepped on sunken hoods, hurled ourselves forward, and rolled, running without regard for our mounting breathlessness.

BANG!

One loud crash of a hood crumpling joined the noise.

BANG, BANG!

By the time we squeezed between vehicles, scuttling low like crabs, there were two.

BANG, BANG, BANG!

Our ponchos were now flapping like capes. My breaths filled the rubber interior of my gas mask until my eyes began to sting.

The pungent smell of rubber stabbed beneath my eyelids at eyes already dazzled by the sunlight.

It was sheer luck that the pastor’s shout reached my ears.

"Je-min! We have to hold them off!"

Still gripping the knife, I turned. My lips parted of their own accord, and I sucked in a breath.

Amalgams.

Those things that had been nothing more than trash mobs were charging toward us in the sunlight, staring our way with melted, tangled faces. Despite flailing dozens of limbs, they somehow kept their balance, and even when they lost it and flopped down, they sprang back up like springs.

They bounced and ran, bounding between the vehicles toward us.

Their sagging faces had become tangled with dozens of arms and legs, leaving eyes, noses, and mouths embedded all over their victims’ bodies. My threshold had risen too far for the sight to strike me as horrible or grotesque anymore.

I had gasped for another reason.

There was no space between the eyes.

The main body made entirely of heads no longer existed.

Faces had melted down and stuck across their entire bodies and limbs.

Against that monster, I had to advance with nothing but magic and a single bayonet coated in [Blood of the Right Hand] to rely on.

And I rolled my tongue inside my mouth as I always did.

Target, kill, monster, five minutes, route, me.

Normally, it would have ended with something like mouth ulcers: my tongue’s taste buds splitting and blood bursting out.

But beneath that brilliant, clear sunlight, in the middle of a main road stripped of fog, it was different.

A tingling numbness.

Nothing ordinary. The illusion of standing on a crosswalk with a car’s headlights right in front of me as it ran the light—my body’s warning—raked through my entire mind.

The root of my tongue tingled.

Sour, salty saliva gushed out.

At the same time, a dreadful discomfort coursed through my body, as though an eyelid existed in the deepest part of my mind, parched and stiff, rubbing among the soft brain cells.

This was more than a scratchy sensation.

It felt as if every eyelash on that lid were pricking and digging through every part of my soft, squishy brain.

Behind that discomfort, the colors in my vision blurred together.

The sky, which should have been blue or at worst a gloomy gray, turned vivid purple and lavender.

Then came the pain of a knife slicing through my tongue and eyes at once.

Sharp, cold metal burrowing into tender flesh and scraping wildly. Agonizing pain that made me falter whenever I tried to act came with a sickening metallic taste.

Only then did I truly register the pain I had been ignoring because it had become chronic.

My left hand was hot.

The aftereffects of shooting it to use Eye, Stage Two—the burning sensation lingering in the nerves—climbed through my entire left forearm.

Against that burning, neither the pain of metal slicing and shaving flesh nor the discomfort of eyelashes stabbing and rubbing inside my head mattered.

I was burning alive.

Everything was meaningless before that pain.

The pain of burning to death—that illusion alone was enough.

Pain brought me to a halt and tore my mind apart; pain set me moving again and stitched my mind into one.

Before the agony of burning to death, both fear and logic grew faint.

That was why I could take a step.

That was why I charged to confront the monster with only a bayonet to rely on.

My mouth screamed, my mind was hacked apart by pain, and amid agony that wrung tears from my eyes, my reason whispered coldly, as if observing someone else.

'Don’t let it grab you.'

With that one thought, I swung my right hand.

SLASH!

The blade cut. A face stuck to a girl’s arm flapped its torn mouth before falling away.

But dozens of pairs of limbs writhed. They swayed toward me.

There was no fog to kindly show me every route.

Realizing the faint red footprints marked my path, I swung my right hand without pause.

The sounds of slicing came again and again.

My right foot, stretched far back to keep my balance, had already retreated three steps. I spread my left foot as far sideways as I could to widen my stance, but my legs were trembling.

Limbs dangled from severed tendons, and hands lay chopped clean off.

Beyond them, compound eyes tangled into one with the stuck-on faces crinkled in smiles.

It had noticed I was tired.

My trembling left foot fled backward of its own accord. As my balance wavered, my right foot wavered too.

The Amalgam didn’t miss its chance.

It seized me.

Dozens of pairs of limbs grabbed hold of me.

Features that had melted loose and wandered freely looked at me with sympathy and pity, then welcomed me with mockery. The vocal cords of what had once been people greeted me with their final cries.

"What’s wrong?"

I struggled.

"You’ve been acting strange lately."

I swung my knife wildly.

"Did you hear the rumor? Well..."

And before the tip could reach them, countless grasping hands reached me first.

A heavy, repulsive mass crashed over me.

Every time I struggled to shake it off, another arm extended to grab me. It was so thorough it wouldn’t even permit the flailing legs of an overturned cockroach.

Unable to withstand it, I fell.

CRASH!

Pale, plump baby arms settled over my poncho’s hood.

Their short length posed no problem. Stuck-on faces served as glue, joining the baby arms into long pincers.

Compound eyes that rolled in the tiny forearms, set in them like clusters of holes, looked at me.

A pair of long pincers made from baby forearms, and the compound eyes sprouting from them, occupied the edge of my vision beyond the scratched gas-mask lenses.

With my arms and legs held fast, crushed beneath grips more tenacious than spiderwebs, I had no choice but to watch the Amalgam’s approaching face.

More precisely, its compound and single eyes.

Those gazes were the only distinct things left on its crushed, tangled faces.

Pupils clouded milky white by cataracts. Innocent gazes looking this way and that. Eyes trembling as if about to cry, unable to close because they had no eyelids. Terrified stares, piled and tangled together like yolks from cracked eggs...

Slowly, all those eyes looked at me.

Seeing my eyes hidden behind the gas-mask lenses, they let out laughter through torn mouths woven into one. It was crying mingled with crying.

Then they began to pour.

The tangled, melted faces—that dough of compound and single eyes—began flowing over my gas mask.

My shoulders and neck went rigid.

I was still straining my arms and legs, but nothing changed.

Held by dozens of pairs of hands, the blade in my right hand only stirred empty air. My hand shook so badly that simply not dropping the hilt was all I could manage.

Finally, the faces spilled over my gas mask.

SPLAT.

My gaze met the eyeballs spilling over the left lens.

SPLAT, SPLAT.

I could feel sticky weight settling onto the mask’s rubber. The full weight spilling over it pressed down on my cheeks.

The faces kept pouring.

SPLAT, SPLAT, SPLAT!

I saw compound eyes staring at me as they toppled, mixed, and piled over the gas-mask lenses.

Only then could I hear another sound.

A heavy emotion that even the burning pain coursing through my left hand couldn’t overcome made my lungs boil.

Something sticky, heavy, dark, and hot surged up from my belly.

Who said despair was cold?

"Haaaah..."

Right now, I was hotter than anyone.

"Aaaagh!"

Shedding tears hot enough to cook flesh.

Spitting dried, foamy saliva through parched, cracking lips, I screamed.

"Aagh, agh! Aaaaaaaaaaagh!!!"

That was when the weight crushing me grew lighter.

The grips holding my limbs weakened. The instant I realized it, I swung my bayonet wildly without hesitation and hauled myself upright.

I stood on my own two feet again.

Only then did I gasp for breath.

But the faces clinging stubbornly to the gas-mask lenses remained.

I bowed my head and bent my right arm inward.

So the knife’s tip could stab those disgusting eyeballs stuck to my mask.

STAB!

I saw the tip leave another scratch on the gas-mask lens, but clearer still was the sight of the staring eyes being ripped apart by metal.

Those gazes.

Were they envious? Resentful?

Or were they the lament of a monster that had failed to reproduce?

I scraped the eyeballs stuck to the gas-mask lenses away with my knife’s tip.

SCRAPE, SCRAAAPE.

[Blood of the Right Hand] was quite useful even in sunlight. Its killing power might have diminished, but it had no trouble scraping off remains.

Each time the tip scraped, the monster’s remains lost their strength, hardened, then crumbled and scattered.

Once I had scraped both lenses clean, the remains dispersed into fog, leaving only gas-mask lenses ruined by knife scratches.

That was when Lee Se-jun patted my shoulder.

"I beat the one that jumped you with my blood fist, Je-min."

"Yeah. Thanks."

Lee Se-jun, you fucking bastard. I forgive you for all your usual bullshit.

Hamza was the one who reported the situation.

For a coward who kept a step back from fights, he apparently hadn’t stopped watching this one and had managed to grasp what was happening.

"We killed them all. But they’re hard to kill. Even if you shoot the heads..."

"Yeah. They’re fucking strong."

Having fought one at point-blank range, I knew without Hamza telling me.

An Amalgam in fog and an Amalgam in sunlight were in entirely different leagues when it came to close combat.

In fog, they had merely writhed and rubbed against you with their heads. In sunlight, they controlled dozens of pairs of writhing limbs almost freely. Nor was it ordinary how they had confined their reproductive instinct—the splitting of faces to increase their numbers—to their own bodies, using it like glue to reshape themselves.

As the adrenaline ebbed a little, I became even more aware of my shaking hands.

Five minutes.

No matter how long it had been, it couldn’t have exceeded five minutes.

The still-purple sky and the city stained red were proof.

Even as I stood blankly watching the spectacle of desolate, empty buildings swept by explosions and rising flames...

I had nearly died in less than five minutes.

"Pastor, how much ammo did we use?"

"Na-in and I used two magazines each."

Two thirty-round magazines apiece meant we had burned through 120 of our 760 rounds here.

In less than five minutes.

We Supreme Mages knew exactly what that meant.

"No engagements."

We mustn’t fight.

We couldn’t fight.

We couldn’t afford the expenditure.

"Let’s fucking run."

When I turned around, every one of the Supreme Mages was pale.

It was too late to go back.

Gunshots had already rung out without pause.

Advancing cautiously was no longer a viable tactic.

We ran with all our strength, adjusting our spacing simply to avoid stopping.

The rules of engagement came to mind unbidden.

The rule that said never to fire carelessly unless you absolutely had to.

At first, I’d thought it was obvious. Now, alive and breathing here, I understood.

HUFF, HUFF, HUFF.

Hamza’s breathing was growing ragged inside his gas mask.

Na-in ran hard with his rifle raised, maintaining a rhythm with short huffs to steady his breathing. Even so, he couldn’t hide the faint tremor at the end of each breath.

A few monsters had turned their attention toward the gunfire.

That fact kept us running.

Se-jun ran practically carrying the pastor on his back. Hamza held on to his backpack despite gasping for air. Na-in, apparently tired of holding his rifle, slung it over his shoulder. I moved my bayonet to my left hand and wiped my gas-mask lenses with my bleeding right.

SQUEAK, SQUEEEAK.

The blood on my right hand seeped little by little into the knife scratches on the gas-mask lenses.

Then, as I took my hand away and gripped the bayonet again, we crossed a barricade of abandoned vehicles, and a sign caught my eye.

[Olympic Bridge]

Beneath the dazzling sunshine, the true face of the city that had lain under clouds of fog slowly emerged along with the Han River.

All of us Supreme Mages gradually slowed our hard run as we looked up at the sky.

A huge, magnificent bridge spanning the Han River.

A heavy shadow lay over that bridge, littered with abandoned vehicles and roadblocks. That pale shade wasn’t the faint outline of water vapor, but the trace of something more organic.

Sunshine doesn’t guarantee cloudless weather.

But today, we stood beneath a clear sky without a single cloud.

What obscured it wasn’t clouds, but tens—hundreds—of thousands of Skin-jellyfish.

Like an infestation at a beach, they stained the transparent sky the color of human flesh, filling it densely with long, undulating tentacles.

Above them, I saw an entirely different monster.

At a glance, it looked like a centipede.

But the moment I realized that centipede-like monster was falling with itself wrapped tightly around something, the moment my eyes made out the details, my asshole clenched.

Hundreds of thousands of people were tangled together.

Where the centipede’s legs should have been, long membranes resembling bat wings sprouted, flaunting vivid veins. Every wing base was human.

The centipede’s body had been crushed or melted beyond recognition. In the long mouth slit down its center, huge keratin fingernails interlocked crudely in place of teeth.

The flying centipede was coiling tightly around a lump of metal—a fighter jet—like a leech or earthworm moving through peristalsis.

It was falling with the jet, nibbling at its canopy with the fingernails serving as teeth along the long slit of its central mouth. Hundreds of pairs of membranes it must have used for flight, along with its own body, enfolded the aircraft.

That monster was responsible for the sound of something falling, muffled by flesh.

The sky-centipede monster was willingly shoving its own body into the fighter’s engine, feeding it flesh.

Whether the engine ground that flesh up, shells tore it apart, or fire burned it, the monster didn’t care. As though demonstrating boundless maternal love, it clung to the jet as one, plummeting toward the Han River with it.

It took only seconds for a fighter that had raced through that vast sky to become debris in the Han River.

KABOOOOM!

It was practically an explosion.

Though we were far away, I almost imagined droplets might splash onto my gas mask. Watching the towering spray, none of us could readily speak.

Not long afterward, the war unfolding in Seoul came into view.

A fierce aerial battle was raging over our heads.

As fighters crossed the sky, pouring out autocannon fire and launching missiles, sky-centipede monsters curled up and shot themselves forward, lunging to snatch the aircraft.

The hundreds of thousands of Skin-jellyfish took the bombardment on their own bodies and pattered to the ground to the sound of bursting flesh.

The heavy shelling pouring in from Seoul’s outskirts shook the bridge full of abandoned vehicles, however slightly.

Hearing gunshots was impossible.

There was far too much firepower being poured into the monster hordes on the ground and in the sky. A place where monsters’ blood, flesh, and filthy bodily fluids fell instead of rain, together with oil and shell casings from fighter jets.

Only the fog near Lotte Tower, around Gangnam and Jamsil, remained thick.

I glanced involuntarily toward the gaze monster, where the fog lay dense, then stepped forward again.

All the physical force humanity boasted of was being poured out, again and again, to thin the monsters’ numbers.

But I could see that even those cutting-edge fighters and weapons couldn’t deal with every monster.

Across the Han River, amid the monsters in the sky, something translucent was endlessly spewing flesh-colored vomit.

It looked harmless, like one missile would burst it apart, yet no fighter, missile, or even artillery fire was targeting it.

Even the pastor squinted, clearly saw the monster floating across the river like a translucent lump of fat, and sighed.

"Can’t they see that thing?"

"Yes, probably not."

This wasn’t the time to worry about fighter pilots or spotters observing from afar being unable to see a monster.

Listening to Na-in’s answer, we moved between the abandoned vehicles.

Then we began running with all our strength.

It was a struggle to make the thud of our combat-boot soles on asphalt ring out amid this pandemonium, to keep from forgetting the sound of our own footsteps.

HUFF, HUFF.

My breath swirled inside my gas mask along with the smell of rubber.

Then a familiar sound came from behind us.

"Hun. Gry."

Monsters were faster than humans. If all we did was run, we would be caught.

Even so, I—we—didn’t stop.

Beneath dazzling sunlight, amid flesh bursting and spilling from a clear, bright sky and the ruins left by a city of ten million, we were confronting a single truth.

The sun treats all things equally.

And so it would not save humanity.

People therefore had to save themselves.

If Cruncher’s distinctive cry brought only despair and fear to mind, you were an amateur.

Beyond the hot, heavy, dark despair, the reason of archmage Baek Je-min spun its turbines like mad.

"Everyone, hah, haaah."

I steadied my breathing and conveyed my idea.

"This is an opportunity. Let’s match Cruncher’s pace and keep our distance while we run."

"Baek Je-min! Have you lost your mind?!"

"That fucker eats monsters."

I heard sharp intakes of breath behind me.

They had forgotten.

This was an alien ecosystem and a hunting ground.

The flimsy alliances between monsters naturally broke down when prey wasn’t plentiful.

We couldn’t run while dealing with all the abandoned vehicles on this long main road and the countless monsters lurking beyond them.

Humans were slower than monsters.

"Cruncher, time to eat!"

But faster than a monster coming after them one spoonful at a time.

For the first time, I liked this alien ecosystem.

This beautiful world of the strong devouring the weak, where different monsters ate each other!