Chapter 2
It felt like drowning in pitch-black water, unable to see even an inch ahead. The darkness stretching out in every direction was like the comforting shroud of night, and the silence, undisturbed by even the faintest whisper of a bubble, brought a peace he hadn’t felt in ages. Sinking endlessly into the inescapable depths, he found himself thinking it wouldn’t be so bad to just close his eyes and stay here forever.
And to think he’d fought so desperately to survive.
BEEEEEP—
He caught something faint, like the chirp of a small bird. The long, thin sound of breathing came slowly, but it sharpened with each passing second. And as it did, another color bloomed in his pitch-black field of vision.
At first, it was just a red dot. As time passed, the tiny dot branched outward in every direction, unraveling countless threads. To the sides. Up. Down. Curving around in a wide arc to the back.
Spreading out in such fine detail, they wove themselves at last into a human-shaped skein of thread. Without any light, no color should have been discernible, yet somehow this alone burned magically vivid.
The human-shaped skein was no skein at all but a young man bound tight in red threads, and he sat curled up, utterly motionless, as if he were dead.
BEEP, BEEP—
The high-pitched tone tapping through the darkness began to break at regular intervals, right around the moment the man wrapped in red threads appeared. At the same time, it sharpened into a grating shriek, sounding less like birdsong now and more like a screaming alarm.
Just then.
The man, still as death, slowly lifted his head. Only then did he realize the man wasn’t bound by red threads at all. He was covered in what looked like red veins.
As though someone had dragged them out from beneath his skin, the vividly, starkly exposed red channels coiled ruthlessly around his slender body. His heart pounded. An urge rose in him—to seize that body and devour it, like a vampire starved for blood.
He wanted to trace the tip of his tongue along every coiling vein, teasing, before setting his teeth against skin and biting down. That was how fiercely the man’s body, wrapped in those red veins, kindled his hunger.
BEEP, BEEP, BEEP—
The noise came swarming in from all sides and lunged at him, as if to smother the desire swelling up so shamelessly within him. And with it, his body, still sinking deep into the water, was suddenly seized by something. What followed was a terrible, crushing heaviness and a throbbing pain that radiated outward.
Wait!
He cried out in a panic, feeling himself hauled forcibly upward by some unseen force. But his cry was a soundless scream. The only thing that rang out clear and real in this space was that shrill, relentless alarm.
BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP—
He was dragged higher, and higher still, chasing the alarm that pulsed at its steady intervals. The man, curled quietly far below like someone abandoned alone at the bottom of an abyss, grew smaller and smaller, slipping ever farther out of reach.
If only he’d had his two hands in this darkness, he would have reached out for the man with everything he had. He would have thrashed and clawed to grab hold of him, never even noticing if his shoulders wrenched loose or his arms tore away.
That was how badly he wanted to hold him. A staggering sense of crisis, that he might truly die if he couldn’t catch him, set a mass of raw, extreme fear ablaze.
Stop!
As if in answer to his desperation, the man looked up. Their eyes met, though the man was already so far away that he seemed smaller than a palm. And those eyes were red. Red, and every bit as vivid as the veins wrapped around him.
* * *
When he came to, ample light was already filtering through his closed lids. He forced up his unusually heavy eyelids, and the bright overhead lights swam dizzyingly across his vision.
It took a moment for everything to sharpen into focus. By then, his body’s senses were flickering awake, one by one.
BEEP, BEEP—
The sound bleeding out of the electrocardiogram prodded steadily at his hazy mind.
“Are you awake?”
He’d been staring blankly up at the white ceiling; now he turned his head. A middle-aged man in a white coat stood there wearing a warm smile, and behind him, five others in matching attire bowed politely.
“Do you recognize me?” the man asked, carefully.
At the question, he worked his slightly parched lips. A faint fog of breath gathered inside the oxygen mask pressing snugly over his nose and mouth.
“…Director Shin.”
At that one simple answer, every face in the medical team—the middle-aged man included—lit up.
“The surgery was a complete success. Your recovery rate is excellent, and the ESP wavelengths integrated perfectly, no rejection whatsoever.” There was something more than relief in his voice, an unmistakable note of excitement.
Yet the patient, the very person living out the surgery’s success, remained silent, lips pressed shut. The faces of the medical staff slowly clouded with anxiety and unease.
“Is anything bothering you—”
“No.”
He answered the cautious question briefly, then lifted his right hand and laid it over the left side of his chest. More than the sting of the IV needle in the back of his hand, it was the clear, steady thud beneath his palm that satisfied him.
“…It feels perfect.”
The newly settled heart pulsed smoothly beneath his hand, as though it had always been his.
* * *
On a quiet street, the news played from an outdoor wall-mounted TV outside a fairly well-appointed electronics store. Against a backdrop of a massive explosion—the kind you’d expect from a blockbuster—a fearless reporter was delivering an impassioned live broadcast.
“—The esper that went on a rampage this time is an A-rank elemental user, an offensive type capable of generating fire and triggering explosions—!”
The reporter’s voice, broadcasting live from the scene, was swallowed whole by another explosion. The rest of the sentence was lost, but one thing was clear enough: this rampaging esper had a seriously dangerous ability.
Cha Hangyeom stood alone on the deserted street, watching the live feed. Judging by the location in the captions, there was some distance between them—but it was unmistakably still Seoul.
Amid the yellow-and-red pillars of flame and the enormous blasts, a black shadow moved. No—it wasn’t a shadow. Twice the height of a grown man, with straining, muscular black skin, a hideously warped face where no features could be made out, and two great horns curving up from its forehead like a wild goat’s.
A giant black monster—the kind of thing that only existed in fantasy novels and movies.
“GRAAAAH!”
At first, it sounded like a piercing roar of nothing but rage. But to Hangyeom, the screech sounded more like sorrowful, helpless weeping—a creature that had no idea what to do with itself.
“—The ability users dispatched to suppress the rampage have just arrived!”
The reporter’s voice cracked with urgency, and the camera swung away from the blast site. It caught three people climbing out of a vehicle with heavily tinted windows. Every one of them wore an immaculate black suit, small black-patterned badges pinned to their lapels marking them as espers of the Association.
No guide, then?
With that shot of them preparing for battle, no other ability users showed up at the scene. Confirming there was no guide, Hangyeom reached out with a bitter expression. His fingertip pressed the touch-button—placed there so any passing pedestrian could easily flip the channel.
He didn’t need to watch. What happened to a rampaging esper at a suppression site with no guide was as clear as day. He’d be saved by no one—torn apart by his fellow humans and breathe his last. As nothing more than a “monster.”
And afterward, the reporter who’d been narrating it all in that giddy voice, and every person watching from the scene, would burst into cheers. All to exalt the “heroes” the Association had manufactured. He had little patience for that kind of staged theater.
But the point of the other channels wasn’t much different from the first.
“—Meanwhile, the Ability User Association has continued to extend a helping hand, offering ongoing donations to those harmed by unregistered ability users and rampaging espers. Once again, they’ve donated $100,000 to the Ja-ae Orphanage—”
The rampages of unregistered espers that flared up the moment people started to forget. The Association officials who, going back years, made a point of personally visiting and donating—always to “orphanages,” above all else.
To Hangyeom, who knew the “true face” they kept hidden in the dark, that neatly staged image was nothing but nauseating. He stared quietly at the screen, so busy singing the Association’s praises, until his interest drained away and he flipped the channel again.
With the ongoing rampage, it was a time slot crammed with Association coverage—so he figured the next channel would be more of the same.
“—…the Urban Crystal Battery, developed on this foundation, is finally on the verge of full-scale commercialization. Prism Biobattery’s CEO, Seo Won, has fulfilled the company’s long-cherished dream just five years into his tenure, and the achievement is drawing considerable attention overseas.”
Against his expectations, what came up on the next channel was some story about secondary batteries. Secondary battery development was one of the flagship ventures led by the nation’s formidable Gangsan Group, and the CEO on screen, Seo Won, was the man standing at the dead center of that flagship business.
It was a subject he didn’t really understand and cared nothing about. Still, the man basking in the spotlight had a certain familiarity to him, as you’d expect from someone that famous.