The Missing XIII
Go Yuri is dead.
"Hey, mister? Why are you spacing out all of a sudden?"
Go Yuri is dead.
Perhaps this was the ending I had spent a thousand turns of regression praying for. In run after run, I wandered, hunting for some way to handle the "pink entity." And yet... Seeing Go Yuri's severed head dangling vacantly from Seo-rin's hand sent my heart thumping at an ominous tempo.
"Your Excellency? Your complexion..."
Maybe that was inevitable. All this punny regressor had managed so far was to keep Ji-won glued to Go Yuri, and even that only shooed her away. If you asked whether we ever truly stopped her, a question mark was all we could offer.
And now, Go Yuri was dead.
Killed by Dang Seo-rin, as casually as breathing.
Splat. Crack.
Fresh blood dotted the mirror-bright lunar surface.
Seo-rin opened her hand, and in an unhurried arc, slow enough to mistake for a drifting balloon, Go Yuri's head fell. Her face was just as serene.
「Hmm... Looks like you've got a lot of company over there too.」
Lilac eyes, bored to the point of drowsiness, swept across the Void. She wasn't staring at me but staring past me—at my comrades, glancing back with worried faces.
「It's hard to talk in peace with them hanging around, right?」
Her lips whispered.
「Shall I clear them out?」
"Everyone! Scatter!" I instantly shouted, flinging Aura and the transmission of sound alike.
A rookie might have blinked in confusion, but my party—the last elites of this world, who had even accepted Corruption—were different. Of course, even among raiders, there were differences in reflexes.
Yu Ji-won was the fastest. "I'll handle it."
Then with no forewarning, Seo-rin flicked her hand, and the vast emptiness of the Void itself was cleaved in violet. It was a ridiculous fissure, a slash big enough to bisect the whole team. We could have been annihilated in one blow.
Ji-won charged straight at it without a heartbeat's hesitation, a spectrum of auroras slamming into the attack.
Screeeech...
Sound shouldn't carry in the middle of space, yet a warped static howled like a monster's scream—an ugly shriek stabbing our eardrums.
Impact.
The authority of Hecate collided with Leviathan, and the slash never reached us.
But not without a price.
"Hmm."
Half of Ji-won's body was gone.
The silver-haired girl glanced down and murmured, "So that's why she chose the moon, an environment where she can cast any spell at any time."
Even with half her body missing, Ji-won stayed calm.
"But how strange. The Great Witch's specialty is the Cursed Song Incantation. Melodies layered in advance should be the core of her magic. How can she fire off a grand spell this large on the spot without chanting...?"
"Heal."
Petals sprouted and scattered over Ji-won's wounds, as Ah-ryeon was already beside me, praying without expression. Where the petals passed, Ji-won's body—and even her clothing—were restored.
"Dok-seo!" I shouted. "Hold the rear with Ah-ryeon! If a spell that we absolutely can't stop comes, that's when you pop Absolute Defense!"
"R-right, mister!"
"Ha-yul, take center! Watch ahead and behind, and adjust on your own!"
[Okay.]
"Ji-won! Yo-hwa! You're with me!"
No reply was needed.
The moment her treatment concluded, Ji-won rode her Aura and shot toward the moon.
Fighting in the air—well, in space—put us at a disadvantage. On a battlefield without ground beneath our feet, Seo-rin held the upper hand. She always flew on her broom and so commanded the field. All of our experience, by contrast, was earned on solid earth.
「Hmm-hmm.」
Humming as if amused, she swept her arm through space again. This time I didn't need to shout; the whole raid was already tracking her every twitch.
"I'll block this one, Teacher!"
The same casual blow that had torn off Ji-won's limbs sliced silently between us again—
Between us.
She had aimed for Ji-won and Yo-hwa's throats, but the moment Yo-hwa snapped her fingers, the slashes corkscrewed away. By rewriting the target's perceived data, Infinite Void had made their strikes veer off as though ensnared by illusion.
Yo-hwa laughed. "Ahaha! What an idiot! Has eyes but doesn't know what you use them for!"
Kuuuu-oom!
With her razor-edged laughter, we slammed into the moon.
The boom and tremor were seismic. Any NASA tech would have fainted. Yet that mirror-smooth surface showed not a single crater or scratch.
Astronomers and physicists alike would be out of work.
"Ji-won."
Ji-won knelt the instant she landed and pressed her palms together. "Yes. I know, Mr. Matiz."
Her whole body flashed with aurora. The light ran down her legs—down, ever down. Within moments, a full-spectrum light swallowed the moon. Terraforming— No, Auraforming was the word. Ji-won's Aura rolled across a moon already twisted into Dang Seo-rin's divine realm, making a battlefield perfectly suited for us.
Gwooooo...
Behind the praying Ji-won, a sea dragon of water reared up.
Dok-seo yelped, "Eek!" and slipped. With gravity now Earth-normal, she splashed on her backside.
"Dang Seo-rin." I stepped forward. Splash—water fanned beneath my shoe. "I'm here to return your question."
Splash. Slosh.
The raiders followed at my back—Ji-won on my left, Yo-hwa on my right, Ha-yul behind, Dok-seo and Ah-ryeon at the rear—forming a triangular wedge aimed straight at Seo-rin.
「Ah. At last...」
「You'll stay with me, right—forever?」
She smiled wide, yet it seemed I alone understood her. My comrades only tilted their heads.
Yo-hwa frowned. "What'd she say just now?"
[It sounded like someone dragging a crowbar across a car hood. Weird.]
"M-me too, sir. Like a TV full of static."
Only I'd caught her words.
Odd. Ji-won could lip-read, yet even she was puzzled.
Something was fundamentally off. In this universe, somehow only she and I...
I swallowed my questions and spoke what had to be said. "Yes... I'll stay with you."
Her smile brightened.
「Wise decision! If you're by my side, everything will be fine.」
She leaned against her broom.
「Saving the world is foolish. Think back to the world before it died. Was it worth saving?」
Behind her, the planets spun—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn all circling a flattened Earth, not a shrunken Sun.
「You can't remember the worlds before cycle four, Undertaker, so you cling to a fantasy of "the world" you must save.」
Uranus and Neptune no longer existed here. Only the ancient sky of magic remained, the planets' shadows sliding over the mirror-moon.
「No one takes responsibility. They think they suffer, yet dump their pain on others without a thought.
Rather than that filthy surface, the utopia we'll build will be far more beautiful. Without fail.」
Light and shadow striped the ground beneath her like a shifting crosswalk.
At the crossroads of the cosmos, she stood.
「And if you stay with me now, you'll never have to suffer hundreds more times.」
I remained silent.
「You fear a time paradox? But why treat time's order as sacred? I can re-assemble space this beautifully, so with you, I can rebuild time as well. That is an Outer God. A miracle granted to humanity! A god truly watching over us has given us a chance to redesign the flawed human race!」
She rejoiced like a child.
「Let's rebuild humans. Let's redesign the world. Again and again, until every being is happy—even if it takes eternity! That is why you exist. You and I share a single destiny—we exist for this!」
Her words painted a vivid vision. One witch and one swordsman, forever piecing together the perfect human. We would tweak intellect, compassion, memory. Lament each failure yet never despair. Because together, even hardship became play.
But every playtime ends.
「Once the world we want is complete, we'll slip away quietly. There'll be no need for a god to meddle with a perfected world. This is better—definitely.」
Indeed. The world she dreamed of echoed the Saintess's wish and Ji-won's hope.
And yet...
"I have a question, Dang Seo-rin."
「Hmm? Ask anything.」
"The children you tried to kill, the people around me. What do they look like to you now?"
She blinked. Memories flashed.
"I love humanity!"
"I hate people. They tick me off."
"The day we first defeated the Meteor Shower, wrapped in endless sunset..."
"Humans are amazing!"
A thread of that tune still flowed in my heart.
The witch who looked just like you swept her eyes over my comrades and said lightly,
「Yeah. They're noisy, aren't they? Honestly, they've been grating on me—so noisy, noisy, noisy. Can't we talk after I wipe them away? Don't worry. I'll remake them later, and they'll be much prettier.」
...I see.
I listened to my heartbeat, then opened my eyes.
"They each have their reasons, but they chose to come here and fight. They're a suicide squad."
「...?」
"Dang Seo-rin would never call such people ugly. What you see and hear right now aren't through her eyes or ears."
「...」
"My witch... No."
I drew my cane-sword. When the walking stick's sheath fell away, Do-hwa gleamed.
Faced with that bright tip, Dang Seo-rin's smile froze.
"I have come to reclaim my princess, Outer God Hecate."
-x-X-x-
The Missing XIV
Dang Seo-rin's—
No.
Hecate's violet eyes faded to ash.
「So that's how it is.」
「The "Dang Seo-rin" you picture and the "me" in front of you are separate beings. Someone I can't even recall is lodged in your heart like a splinter.」
「Come to think of it, you've never really looked at me—only at the shadow of somebody else.」
The kaleidoscopic eyes that once gleamed like amethyst lost the line between pupil and iris as the planets soundlessly lined up behind Hecate stopped dead in their orbits.
"Uwaaahhh!"
But to everyone except me, the scene was different.
Dok-seo clutched her ears and writhed. "S-so loud! It's disgusting! What is this noise?! Where's it coming from?!"
Even now Hecate's voice reached me, and only me, clearly. There was no time to ponder why.
Hecate raised her broom and—crack—drove it into the mirror-smooth lunar surface.
「Then I'll kill them for you.」
「Everything stuck in your heart like thorns.」
「The ragged pieces of "Dang Seo-rin" that never made it this far. They're useless, anyway.」
In that instant, innumerable magic circles blossomed in the dark void of space. Tens of thousands of gaping holes were etched at once without so much as a chant.
"Eek—"
Dok-seo's squawk of panic lasted only a moment. From millions of holes, pitch-black hands shot out and lunged at the raiding party like writhing tentacles.
Ji-won and I moved at exactly the same time. I swung Do-hwa left while Ji-won drew her hand-axe right. Parry, cleave—within heartbeats, dozens of slashes severed the black hands.
"Ah."
There were simply too many.
Clomp! One hand Ji-won missed clamped around her wrist, and the stench of rotting flesh stung our noses. Decay raced outward from the punctured skin.
"Mmph!"
"I-I'll fix it!"
Ah-ryeon was already in position. She flung healing forth in a panic, and purple globe-amaranths and pure white lilies blossomed where flesh had rotted away. However, the spot the black hand had touched kept rotting all the same.
Before Ah-ryeon could even gasp, Ji-won swung her axe with a blank face, and with a splut, a heavy chunk of flesh went flying away—Ji-won's forearm.
"It's a curse," she said evenly. Red and white petals burst from the stump, regrowing the arm at once. "I don't yet know how it bypasses Ah-ryeon's healing. President."
Cheon Yo-hwa snapped her leg out in a kick as she shouted, "Leave it to me!"
She went about cleaning up the attacks Ji-won and I had missed while deliberately left an opening for a black hand to grab her ankle. The skin there rotted in a heartbeat. As calmly as Ji-won had, Yo-hwa severed her own foot, then snatched up the decomposed left foot.
"It isn't a simple curse, Teacher! These black hands are perfect clones built from our own biological data!" Her red eyes, able to read the fabric of creation, flashed as she explained, "The trait is Infection! Because each hand shares our exact body, when Ah-ryeon heals us the hands get healed at the same time!"
"I see."
Every comrade here had once been registered as a citizen of Utopia before escaping Hecate's realm through Corruption. Naturally, Hecate had stockpiled their data.
"Th-then guard your heads, everyone!" Ah-ryeon cried out. "Arms and legs are fine, but regrowing a neck is a pain—!"
"Gyaaa! T-too many! Way too many!"
Dok-seo swung her bat like mad, fouling off the hands coming for her.
"There've gotta be millions! Mister! I-I'm using it, okay?! Absolute Defense—I can pop it, right?!"
I tried to answer no. Hecate was throwing numbers at us precisely to burn Dok-seo's Absolute Defense early.
[No need.]
But someone beat my warning.
Ha-yul.
[Ready.]
Her voice came not from her throat but from the puppet strings. Threads as thin as piano wire, already webbed across the lunar surface, vibrated and carried Ha-yul's words.
[Ji-won unnie. Now, please.]
"Of course."
Now similar in build to Corrupted Ha-yul, Ji-won reached out. A few strands of string looped around her palm. Light welled from the spot as the Aura flooding the moon clung to the threads until hundreds of thousands of strands unfurled like an aurora. From every angle around us came a slicing sound as Ha-yul's web, charged with Ji-won's Aura, harvested millions upon millions of black hands in a single flash.
Ha-yul flicked her hand, staying expressionless.
[Easy.]
Perfect native pronunciation. As expected of a scion of that infamous collaborator clan.
[I advise nobody move carelessly.]
[Heads removed are not my fault. Probably.]
"Hah! Behold the 'Collaborator Princess's Killing Field'!"
[Whoever coined that line can be the first to lose their head.]
A gap opened. I had no intention of wasting it.
I downed the "blood" that the elder twin insisted I drink, ditched the thermos, and sprang forward with a splash. Ha-yul warned me not to act rashly, but I trusted her and pounded the ground.
One step. Two. The water of Leviathan underfoot gave my soles a gentle push. Looking closer, I was only skimming the surface—my ankles never got wet.
Water-Lily Step.
Hecate's face, so far away, rushed toward me.
Flick! Flick-flick!
Ha-yul's wires blanked out wherever I charged, instead swarming toward Hecate's position.
The moon goddess clicked her tongue.
「Cheap grappling tricks.」
She waved her hand, and slash-marks scored the void. The very slash that had taken half of Ji-won at the start sheared through Ha-yul's careful web in an instant. Freed to maneuver, Hecate tried to stop my rush by casting another circle, but...
"Pardon me."
At some point, Ji-won had already positioned herself behind her.
For the first time, dismay colored Hecate's eyes.
Seeing my head-long dash, she assumed "the Undertaker is fastest," but it was actually a feint. While she focused on me and the wires, Ji-won dove under the surface and swam the opposite way. Ha-yul's converging strings had both assaulted Hecate and hidden Ji-won's movement.
It was flawless teamwork.
"My apologies, Director."
Craaaack!
From behind, Ji-won wrestled Dang Seo-rin tight—arms, legs, and Aura binding her like perfect pro-wrestling holds.
「You—」
"Obviously this side has better odds. Blame your win-rate, not my betrayal."
Hecate fought back too late; I was already on top of her.
「Ah.」
Without warning I swung Do-hwa in a single arc.
First Flash.
The blade forged by a prosthetic-knight-turned-smith who died screaming in this universe cleaved both Hecate and Ji-won without discrimination.
「――――!」
God-Slayer.
The title once belonged to a certain pistol, yet the artifact that came closest in my books was none other than my famed sword, Do-hwa. With every loop of the world, "Infinite Void" revived, and so early in each run, I slew it at Baekhwa High with this very blade. In other words, except in vacation runs, the more my returns piled up, the more layers of "killed an Outer God" painted themselves onto Do-hwa.
Hundreds of divine deaths lacquered onto one edge.
That cursed steel pierced the Goddess of Night.
She did not escape unscathed. By holding Hecate to the bitter end, she paid with her own body, carved to pieces.
She coughed, spitting blood—blue, not red. Taking a God-Slayer hit head-on put even her near erasure, and yet...
"H-heal."
We had Ah-ryeon.
Though everything below Ji-won's waist was gone, lilies flowered to life in boundless blossoms, and her lower half regrew whole. It was a suicidal tactic, possible only because a Saintess of the North bloomed among us and because the team's trust was absolute.
"Teacher!"
Cheon Yo-hwa dashed over with Ah-ryeon and Dok-seo carried piggy-back, then set them down—Splash! Blagh! Ack! Ow!—and pressed close to me.
"Did we win?!"
"H-hey! You idiot!"
Dok-seo jerked up from where she'd landed face-down in a puddle. Even her trademark cap slid off her soaked head.
She knew Yo-hwa bears grudges forever, yet she hadn't even faked formal speech. She must have really panicked.
Wilting under Yo-hwa's glare, Dok-seo stammered, "N-no, that's a flag! Say that and the boss never dies... sir!"
I approached Hecate with a splashing step. While the two ran their comedy skit, I'd kept my eyes on her.
'It doesn't matter if she dies now or revives whole—both are bad. We need her in suspended animation.'
Only then can we dive into her subconscious and pry the human Seo-rin free.
My collar tightened as someone came up beside me and grabbed my shirt—Ah-ryeon.
"Sh-should I heal her, Guild Leader?"
"Just keep her breathing. Let's watch a bit longer."
Hecate floated in the puddle, half of her body missing. However, relaxing would be fatal.
'She's the one who beat Go Yuri.'
For some reason, every voice but mine reached her as raw static. The same went for Go Yuri, no doubt. Her supreme brain-washing could charm anyone, anywhere, but to Hecate, it might have sounded like sheer noise. She herself had admitted she tossed Yuri's head aside because it "irritated" her.
'All living things on Earth felt filthy to her, so paradoxically enough, Go Yuri's hypnosis was sealed.'
Thus, Go Yuri's strongest weapon—Distortion—had been nullified.
'Even so, Hecate's magic feels bizarre. There was no trace of her Cursed Song Incantation lead-in, yet she fires off grand spells chantless... How?'
I stared down at her half-dead face. Then in a blink, a memory flashed before my eyes like lightning.
"Actually..."
Not that long ago...
"I heard a song."
It was back in the 999th run. Given that this is the epilogue extending from the 999th, you could call it the 1000th run.
"A song?"
"Yeah. A song, or maybe a sound. Usually it's just noise. But whenever I approach certain people or places... I hear a particular 'sound' they have."
At the intersection before the fallen-flower park, Dang Seo-rin had confessed.
"Look at the sunset overhead. You see red, right? But I don't just see red. I hear the sunset's distinct sound in my ears. It's kinda like the sound of waves."
The confession puzzled me. I knew she wove magic through song, but only in the 1000th cycle did she reveal that the entire world dissolved into "sounds" for her. The idea that she'd hidden it till then made no sense. She had no reason to.
"I can hear a song from you too. It's very sad, but also very clear. Really faint... but really strong."
A hypothesis crystallized.
'What if when Seo-rin was fully devoured by the Outer God, those "sounds" warped?'
Then it hit me. Humans couldn't perceive infra- or ultrasonic. Our hearing range was narrow. So what would happen if this universe held sounds only Seo-rin—only Hecate—could hear? To her, they'd be unbearably "loud," "irritating," and "grating" noise for any human ear.
'The premise that no sound exists here is wrong. It's the opposite—we just can't hear it. This Void is already crammed with silent choruses she laid down in advance.'
A chill down my spine. Time seemed to drift slowly before my eyes—evidence my mind was racing.
'Hecate isn't spamming grand spells chantless! She's triggering songs she prerecorded all over space! Songs we can't hear!'
So even now her cursed chorus was singing with the volume turned to zero.
"Everyone!" The party looked over at me as I shouted, "Hecate is not defeated! Her magic is still active! Full defensive formation!"
With no questions or complaints, they snapped into place behind me. Our lines of sight combined to scan in every direction.
Ha-yul's strings webbed anew. Ji-won's Leviathan curled around us like a sea dragon. Ah-ryeon's petals scattered over the water.
The moon lay in utter silence.
'Think, Undertaker. A hint must be in my memories. My ears hear no song, and neither do the others. Yet somewhere a chorus is playing. Where? Where did Seo-rin—did Hecate—hide her song?'
The now-flat Earth below was nothing but clamorous static to her, my allies—her old allies—included. Everyone but me must have become "unbearable noise." And so she fled to the moon, away from the din.
'In other words...'
For Seo-rin, this Void was safe from that hellish racket. As if a gentle lullaby filled that empty space.
I sucked in a breath as another flashback washed over me. The scene coloring my mind now was, in one sense, older than the 1000th cycle yet in another, painfully present.
"Mr. Undertaker."
Same setting.
"This world is hell."
The moon.
"The world is hell, yet no one takes responsibility for it. They take no effort to change it, or say it's too slow."
Each time I slew Infinite Void at Baekhwa High, Infinite Void planted hallucinations in me: dreams of rail-travel with Seo-rin alone, of tea-time with the Saintess. And in those dreams, the setting was a silver, gleaming moon like this one.
"Just one layer."
"Just one layer below the surface of that planet... it's all hell."
The Pythagoreans said the cosmos were made of ten bodies, and those ten bodies sang a "music unheard by men."
'In short...'
The Saintess on the moon, whom Infinite Void showed me, might have been speaking to me inside the universe Hecate had already warped.
If every clue had been foretold since then...
'The Pythagoreans were more mystics than mathematicians. They believed the ten celestial bodies make sound as they orbit.'
Like heartbeats, like harmonies.
'Thus, the universe is forever filled with that cosmic music, or so those ancient heretic magi believed.'
Ten bodies, a symphony in ten layers.
'We humans grow so used to the song that we no longer notice it.'
I looked around.
'Uranus and Neptune... They're missing.'
First layer, Earth.
Second, the moon.
Third, Mercury.
Fourth, Venus.
Fifth, Sun.
Sixth, Mars.
Seventh, Jupiter.
Eighth, Saturn.
Unsure where the missing two layers lay, I still shouted to my comrades, "It's the celestial bodies!"
Dok-seo blinked. "Huh?"
"The planets are singing! Each celestial body in this Void is taking part in a chorus we can't hear! Until we destroy every last one, the magic won't stop—Sun, Mercury, all of them! Every planet is an empty shell polluted by the Goddess of Night!"
The moment my words rang out, countless boulders blinked into being from the planets' shadows. Meteoroids packed the Void.
Blink.
Each rock bore an eye.
Blink, blink.
Millions of eyes opened and fixed on us.
One comrade managed a gasp. "Everyone, look out!"
Archmagic—the aspiration of all magicians. The ultimate sorcery.
"A meteor shower!"
A meteor descended.
-x-X-x-
The Missing XV
The meteors did not drift down at a relaxed tempo. Though honestly, given the giant eyes staring down from each of them, it was hard to say they should be called "meteors" at all.
Shrrrraaaaa!
The sky, already cramped by the millions of streaks making up the Meteor Shower, grew even more crowded as tentacles began to sprout from the surface of each meteor.
"Eeeek! M-m-monsters!" Dok-seo shrieked.
I couldn't blame her. First, there were huge, bloodshot eyeballs glaring right at us, and now, several layers of thrashing tentacles had joined the show—hardly a pleasing sight.
Swaaaaah!
The meteors flared their tentacles like wings and dove in sync. Neighboring stones tangled together, weaving whole swarms in mid-air.
Ha-yul cast out her Puppet Strings. [I'll block them. Wait, no— Abort—]
She had taken one stylish step forward, only to retreat again two seconds later and announce her surrender. The chunk she had sliced away from one meteor re-formed into "baby meteors," each with freshly opened eyes and wings.
"Teacher! They're not just rocks!" Yo-hwa shouted as the Meteor Shower closed in on us as if by divine punishment. "They're more like clumps of magic! I'm seeing every buff and debuff you can name: Sever, Pierce, Replicate, Repeat, Brainwash, Sleep—"
"Ji-won, conserve your Aura." I gave the order at once, causing Ji-won's emotionless eyes to flick toward me. "If they share the traits of the Meteor Shower we know, they'll try to knock us out or meddle with our heads. Aura has to serve as our last-ditch mental shield until the very end."
"Understood."
I turned back to the rest of the team. "All units, gather up around Dok-seo! Dok-seo, you're on!"
Tears brimming, Dok-seo flung her arms wide and let out a keening cry. Three... two... one second before the grand-spell Meteor made of millions of boulders washed over us—
"Absolute Defence!"
Well, she could have activated the power without screaming its name, but Dok-seo would sooner die than betray her own aesthetics.
Maybe that stubbornness paid off. The subsequent effect was phenomenal.
Wham! Thud! KWA-RA-RA-RA-RUMBLE!
The meteors shattered, ricocheted, and splintered against the barrier the Miko of the Infinite Metagame had raised until dust swallowed everything in sight.
Not a single strand of hair on us had been touched.
[Wow,] Ha-yul blurted out in awe. Even if they didn't speak up, Ji-won, Cheon Yo-hwa, and the others were all clearly impressed as well. To them, Dok-seo was merely a "mercenary we hired not long ago" and "hardly reliable."
Only I knew her true worth.
"Dok-seo, how long can you hold?" I asked.
"N-no idea. Ugh. It's eating a lot of stamina, but Ah-ryeon keeps spamming heals, so I guess I'm fine... Uh, at least ten minutes! Fifteen if we're lucky!"
I narrowed my eyes.
'In the original tutorial dungeon, Absolute Defence barely lasted a minute. She's managing this because she's fully Awakened as the Miko of the Outer Gods.'
Rumble! Boom!
Meteors kept raining on the translucent shield without pause. I watched as some stones didn't shatter but instead stuck to the barrier.
'The others might be relieved, but this is bad. We just traded away one of our joker cards.'
After a closer look, every tentacle from the meteors was a mass of fingers. Those fingers crawled forward and etched their nails into the shield.
"Kyaaaaa!"
[Too noisy,] Ha-yul scolded both the tentacles and Dok-seo.
"N-noisy?" the latter stammered. "This barrier is basically an extension of my own skin! It feels freaky as hell. I'm gonna hurl..."
"Ji-won, support her."
"Okay." Ji-won spread Aura over the barrier at my command, and color rushed back into Dok-seo's face.
"Huh? Oh, that's better."
"Mr. Matiz's prediction was right—it's psychic interference. If I'd burned Aura first, we'd have been battling at a huge loss now."
Ji-won launched into her usual praise of me, but I had no room to reply. The scratching—what Ha-yul and Dok-seo called "noise"—was, to me, both nails on glass and a warped lullaby:
Twinkle, twinkle, little star.
How I wonder what you are.
It wasn't only noise. It was music only I could hear.
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.
Nails scraped the shield in a clumsy yet recognizable rhythm and pitch, mimicking the famous lullaby.
I turned away to ask, "Yo-hwa, do you hear any singing?"
"Huh? Singing? No, nothing at all, Teacher."
The others were the same. It seemed I alone could catch the "song."
'Come to think of it, I was the only one who heard Dang Seo-rin's voice too. I'm the only person who can understand this Meteor Shower's hymn.'
Old habit drove my mind to analyze the phenomenon, even in the middle of battle.
'Every country has its own verse for that lullaby.'
The fourth verse in English describes the star as "never shutting its eye." In Japanese, the star "blinks and blinks" like an eyelid. Chinese lyrics compare it to "countless tiny eyes." Combine all that, and blinking eyes falling from the sky didn't seem odd at all.
'And what does a mother or teacher do while singing a lullaby? She strokes the child to sleep.'
So fingers sprouting wasn't strange either.
'If I expand this line of thought a little more, I might figure out how to break this meteor strike—'
"Teacher!"
Yo-hwa's call snapped me out of it. Barely seven seconds had passed, yet on a battlefield, seven seconds was an eternity.
My disciple stared at me, worried. "The number of meteors isn't dropping. If we just cower here and defend while she keeps summoning showers, we'll lose eventually."
I nodded. "Right. To break this grand spell, we have to destroy the celestial bodies that are singing out there."
"Do we... have a way to do that?" Yo-hwa glanced outside as the Meteor Shower assaulted the shield even harder than before in screeching wails. "W-we'd have to step outside first..."
That was the problem.
'The clock is ticking.'
Could we really obliterate all those orbiting planets in ten minutes? Borrowing Leviathan's power might help, but the psychic assault from millions of stones would crush anyone who spent too much Aura.
'Dok-seo can move the barrier, but not fast enough. If I dash out alone, I'll have to deal with every trap Hecate laid out there.'
One false step and we'd—
Knock, knock.
A cheery, entirely unfitting knock sounded nearby. I turned on pure instinct—and froze.
"Hiya, sunbae."
There stood the elder twin, Cheon Yo-hwa.
There she was outside the shield, standing in her black sailor uniform right in the middle of the lunar surface, smiling like nothing was wrong as meteors stabbed down all around her.
"I'm late, but I came to help. This thing's in my way, though. Could you open up for just a—"
Before I could react, one of my comrades swung a kick and blew her head clean off.
Her sister Yo-hwa had done the deed.
"Phew. That scared me half to death!"
Everyone—except Ji-won—stared at Yo-hwa in horror. The one in question sighed lightly and frowned as if wondering why we were glaring. "Huh? What? My sister's Corrupted. That makes her an enemy."
"B-but she's still your sister..." Dok-seo protested meekly, earning her a snort in response.
"She got here on foot with no Aura and while dodging meteors. Does that sound human? Obviously she's a Hecate puppet."
"I mean, usually you'd hesitate or cry, 'Sis! Let her in!' or something..."
"Eh?" Yo-hwa tilted her head. "My sister's smart. Once she decided not to Fall, she must've accepted death. Why hesitate now? If anything, she'd prefer that I finished her myself."
Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha...
The headless elder twin's shoulders shook with laughter. Her body flipped onto its back and scuttled away like a spider, giggling madly as it vanished.
Silence filled the shield while meteors continued to crash and shatter above us.
[Dad. What now?] Ha-yul plucked her Puppet Strings like cello wires to say, [Hecate's penned us in with the shower and dumped every Anomaly she can outside. Can we really smash the planets?]
I bit my lip.
'If only I could hear the planets' song. Maybe then, I could cancel it with counter-frequencies...'
I'd realized it too late. Had I recognized the silent chorus the moment we entered space, the tides of this battle would have swayed much more in our favor. With even the ground-side Cheon Yo-hwa turning coat, rushing out there would likely get me killed in seconds—
I blinked. "Wait. Where's the Saintess?"
Right beside me, Ah-ryeon cocked her head. "H-huh?"
"The Saintess. Yo-hwa's sister is down for the count, so why would the Saintess be untouched?"
Unlike the strategist sister, the Saintess had terrifying powers. Time Stop went without saying, of course, and her Telepathy alone could torment us endlessly. Had she joined Hecate, we wouldn't be standing here, getting this chance to recuperate.
Enlightenment settled in quietly as I slowly parted my lips. "Ji-won."
"Yes, Mr. Matiz."
"New order. When I count one, two, three—remove all Aura restrictions."
Ji-won studied me. "Confirming: Currently, Aura usage is locked to our strike team only. You want that lock completely released?"
"Exactly."
"Hecate may hijack Aura. Her core, Dang Seo-rin, is a mage but hardly ignorant of its existence."
"I know."
Ji-won nodded, trusting me so deeply she'd follow even if I switched sides right now. "Understood. When should I free it?"
"Now. One, two... Three."
In that instant, a miracle greater than magic unfolded.
"Eh?"
Someone gasped. Actually, all of us did, myself included.
The Meteor Shower shattered. The stones that had never once paused fell apart at once, without preamble, until shards of glass-like debris were left to drift through space. The miracle didn't end there either. Far away, across the Void that had seemed impossible to reach—
Saturn cracked.
Jupiter split.
Mars broke.
The sun fractured.
Venus, Mercury, Earth—
A slash scored the universe.
Every celestial body arrayed in this sky collapsed in a single heartbeat, save for the pale surface beneath our feet: the moon.
Ji-won collapsed beside me, without a hint of warning.
"Wh-whoa?"
Yo-hwa hurried to catch her, but Ji-won's eyes stayed shut. She was out cold.
Our strike team was just starting to panic when—
"Don't worry about Ji-won."
A calm voice and measured footfalls echoed out.
"I drained too much Aura, so she merely fainted."
The speaker turned to me. Behind her swirled millions of shattered meteors and seven ruined planets.
The corpse of the universe cast its shadow squarely across her face.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Undertaker, " she said. "You asked me not to Fall, but this raid needed my power. I'll take responsibility later. For now, let us save Dang Seo-rin together."
Awakener: Saintess
Corrupted Alias: The Executioner
Strongest member of the Regressor's Alliance.
Has joined the party.
-x-X-x-
The Missing XVI
Let me digress for a bit.
Once, on SG Net, someone posted a complaint that went something like this:
- Anonymous: Damn. I finally ascended into the Awakener rank of my dreams, and life is still absolute trash...
- Anonymous: Some folks Awaken to be heroes of the battlefield for clicking "heal" once while others only get to have their fingers treated like cheap cigarette lighters...
This is the so-called Awakened Spoon Theory, based on the caste system that once ravaged the Korean Peninsula. The system had simply changed its skin and updated itself, and now, even Awakeners are divided into gold-, silver-, bronze-, and dirt-spoon tiers—or so the theory claimed.
The Spoon-Theory OP fired that shot, and a fair number of comments nodded along.
- Anonymous: Being an Awakener doesn't automatically make you OP. If anything, Awakeners look down on weak Awakeners way more than normies do. Being a dirt-spoon makes me so miserable I could die...
└dolLHoUse: lighter bro hey o/
└Anonymous: Fact: Even a "human lighter" like that still sits in the top 0.01 % of humanity if you count normies.
└[Oriental Star]TheKindOne: Uh, sorry, but that "heal clicker" isn't our northern Saintess, right??
└LiteraryGirl: Spoons exist for those who cannot live unless they cling to spoons.
└Anonymous: Ma'am, how about finishing your serial instead of philosophizing?
└OldManGoryeo: Healers stand at the back with their arms folded yet get pampered. If that bugs you, smash that like button lolol
Hmm.
I watched the back-and-forth like an angler watching his float, then typed a casual reply.
- ZERO_SUGAR: Mr. Seo-Gyu.
- ZERO_SUGAR: Please don't play anonymous here.
Seconds later, the thread disappeared.
Anyway, even though the post was nuked, that didn't change reality—the Awakeners just had some tact when admitting to it. The gap between ordinary humans and Awakeners is nothing compared to the gulf between low-grade and high-grade Awakeners. True, the members of the Regressor's Alliance that I recruited mostly boasted gold-spoon shine or better, but...
[Wow.]
Above any gold-spoon there is always a diamond-spoon, and ours was the Saintess. And I'm not talking about the knock-off with the "Made in North Korea" label, but the original masterpiece. Before her brand-name splendor, every other Awakener's spoon looked one grade cheaper.
[What in the world is even happening up there?] Ha-yul muttered.
It wasn't just her either. Every strike-team member stared upward, struck utterly dumb. Up there raged an air battle... No, a war in space. Planets that had once been split in two writhed like living amoebas, trying to fuse back together. The millions of "holes" that had turned the universe into a trypophobic nightmare were still intact. The trembling fissures were summoning Meteors again.
And every single attempt was massacred before it could sprout.
"We can't keep this up forever."
Such was the Saintess's grand feat. Whenever Hecate's night-sky spell—or the night sky itself—thrashed, the Saintess stomped it flat with Time Stop. One second, one more, and then another. With each passing instant, shards of planets and countless meteors were pulverized.
A witch who governs space versus a saintess who overpowers time. In that very moment, the cosmos was no more than a Go board where black and white stones collided.
"Even as we speak, the burden on Ji-won keeps increasing," the Saintess noted. "Leviathan's Aura isn't infinite."
"How long can she hold?" I questioned.
"Twenty-three thou... Sorry. One more hour."
I gritted my teeth. Sorrow sang through me for making the Saintess relive her purgatory within a frozen world, but ultimately, it just meant that I had absolutely no time to hesitate. The only way to fix it was to shave whatever seconds I could off her season in that wasteland.
The Saintess looked at me. "Mr. Undertaker, are you truly sure that Hecate and Dang Seo-rin can be separated?"
I paused, then said, "Yes. I'll be the one to do it."
"I believed you would." Her crystalline eyes seemed to stand alone in the universe. "The method?"
A storm of thoughts flashed through me. Some were plans drawn up before the fight. Others were insights struck during the battle. Yet even then, one knot remained untied in this operation: Cheon Yo-hwa. The elder of the twin sisters, and the architect of Project Collapse. And yet absurdly, when her turn finally came, she dropped herself from the candidate list.
'Yo-hwa may be playful, but she's not shameless enough to bail on an op. If anything, she's the sort who gets addicted to risk and goes all-in. And yet... she stepped out. The only thing she left behind was that bizarre request for me to drink her blood, then she walked away from the gambling table.'
The realization was quick to hit home.
'Impossible.'
The conclusion came even faster.
'If she sees a shortcake, that girl saves the strawberry for last—always.'
So why fold her hand now?
'Because only by folding can she eat the final strawberry at peak sweetness.'
And when would that final moment come?
'Right now.'
Even with Dok-seo and the Saintess deployed, we were basically stalling. The chorus from all four cosmic walls was drawing ever closer. This lethal tension was precisely the stage that that dopamine-junkie tactician had lusted for.
'There's only one question remaining.'
Could I trust Cheon Yo-hwa?
Doubt painted the edge of my mind for the briefest instant, but no more.
"Find the elder Yo-hwa."
I made my decision. I would trust myself, and I chose to trust that mischievous, orange-haired gambler.
"Even a corpse is fine. Bring her here—"
"Okay."
The next instant the elder Yo-hwa's body was lying there between the Saintess and me, still headless.
"Here she is." When I stared down at the body without a word, the Saintess continued, "Oddly enough, I sense none of the Mastermind's power. Aside from Void Poison, she's practically ordinary—just bewitched by Hecate."
I nodded and turned to Sim Ah-ryeon. The fight was a race against time now.
"Ah-ryeon."
"Yeeep?"
"Check on how Yo-hwa is doing."
"Ah... Just a sec. Mmm." Ah-ryeon floated a four-leaf clover over her nail and studied it. "N-not dead, at least."
"And?"
"Hard to say she's alive either. Part human, part Anomaly, see? Kind of a suspended-animation state... Literally just entranced."
"Like she's dreaming?"
"Eh? Oh, yeah. And the missing head isn't a big deal. I could regrow it anytime..."
"Then regenerate it, but don't heal her fully awake."
"'Kay."
Ah-ryeon knelt before the half-corpse as I looked across to the almost-corpse's sole relative. The younger twin was gazing down at her sister's remains with an unreadable face.
"Yo-hwa."
She was slow to respond. "Yes, Teacher?"
"The Tutorial fairy. Can you summon one here?"
"Y-yeah. I can!" she exclaimed, blinking in surprise. "But the fairies draw from my resource pool, so combat power won't really go up—might even drop, since they're all criminals..."
"That's fine. Call one."
"Hm-hm, okay! I'll bring the one closest to you, Teacher."
Pyonk!
With a comically cheap sound effect, a baku popped out of thin air: the Tutorial Fairy No. 264, red armband and all.
"Hoeeeek! At last, freedom! Freedom! What is a lord, a master? We march from the colony of scorn and oppression to the bright dawn of liberation—"
A meteor whooshed past.
The fairy spun around to find the titanic space duel of Witch and Saintess still in full swing.
"A-ahem. Truly, I was perfectly content under His Imperial Majesty's benevolent rule. Upon reflection, living my life as a high-school security guard sounds lovely, so I'll just head back—"
"Shut it."
"Eeep! S-save the children from bullying!"
One curt phrase from the student council president reduced the fairy to tears.
I grabbed No. 264's hand.
"Hoek? Comrade Secretary-General?"
"The situation is urgent. Nazi dogs press on Moscow's doorstep. You've got questions—I've got no time. Obey orders without a word."
The fairy's eyes went round. "Hoeeek! The Great Patriotic War! For the eternal liberation of the working class, I'll gladly lay this duckweed life beneath the red flag!"
"See this corpse?"
"Yes, sir! Turns out she's the final-final boss—the elder sister of the student council president!"
"We're entering her dream. You lead."
"At your command!"
"Seriously..." Yo-hwa muttered. "Did they all inhale something? Why are they RPing like that?"
"They're beings swayed by dreams—humanity's harshest scarlet sever, you could say. Yo-hwa, assist us in entering your sister's dream."
"Ahh. Of course, Teacher."
The fairy took my left hand, and Yo-hwa gripped my right. The three-link circuit enclosed the half-corpse.
I cast one last glance around, then looked at the Saintess.
"We'll be back."
She simply stared at me, quiet for a moment, before she mused, "You've thought of a method."
"Yes. Whether it's even possible is a gamble, though."
"That's nothing new for us." A faint smile touched her lips. "Go ahead, Mr. Undertaker. I'll guard the Mr. Undertaker who enters the dream."
"...I'm off."
We ended our brief farewell with a nod. The dream-demon master and minion nodded back.
This time we needed no lullaby to enter the unconscious realm.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star.
See how beautifully you shine.
Shards of endless, crumbling meteors clawed at the universe's curtain with delicate fingers, singing the nursery rhyme for us.
Yo-hwa parted her lips. "One."
The fairy chirped. "Twoooo."
"Three."
In that moment, a veil darker than the night sky and deeper than the universe fell across my awareness. It was a single curtain at first, then an instant later, it layered twofold, fourfold, eightfold—
I sank.
Plunged. Fell.
Collapsed.
Just as the sea is made of uncountable waves, I fell into a dream composed of uncountable times.
A crossroads of black and white stretching on forever.
·
·
·
·
·
·
Step.
The footsteps reached me first before my eyes even opened, while the world was still wrapped in darkness.
"It was a gamble—I won't deny it."
The tread carried a faint hum and a clear thrill.
"If you're right, sunbae, then I, Cheon Yo-hwa, can't determine on my own whether I'm Anomalous or human. Hahaha! Schrödinger's cat? More like Schrödinger's Anomaly."
Step.
"So, gamble one: Will sunbae, a dead-serious hater of Anomalies, trust someone who may be nothing but an Anomaly?"
Step.
"Gamble two: Will Hecate, who is devolving into an estranged god, actually absorb me? Considering Dang Seo-rin always saw me as a thorn, the odds existed—but that's no guarantee."
Step.
"If that one pays off, my mind and body become a 'passage' leading straight into the estranged god Hecate. Naturally, I myself degrade into part of her."
Step.
"Gamble three, the final of them: How deeply does sunbae understand me?"
...
"Will he brand me irresponsible for proposing the plan, then backing out? Or will he guess that I'm a conscious offender with my own agenda?"
...
"Will he acknowledge that not only am I human, not only am I his comrade and student, but that I—Cheon Yo-hwa, the human—am highly competent?"
Step.
"A fifty-fifty shot. If Sim Ah-ryeon drops early, or Saintess unnie can't pull the trigger, or the younger twin fails—then the pathway into my dream gets blocked."
Step.
"I laid every stone I could, but in the end, the only move left was 'to put my trust in someone.'"
...
"That was the method you taught me, sunbae. Thanks for trusting me."
Something covered my face.
Five ridges. Fingers. A palm.
Cheon Yo-hwa gently cupped her hand over my eyes.
"Mmm. To be fair, it's not just you. The other comrades performed splendidly, each in their role."
...
"So now, it's my turn."
I opened my eyes. Even then, my vision was still partly blocked by those black lines—her fingers.
The world I saw came in broken crosswalk stripes.
"One."
Beneath the little finger, a night sky.
Meteors shattered by the thousands. While I slept, the Saintess kept dueling the Goddess of Night.
"Two."
Beneath the ring finger, a frozen world.
Oh Dok-seo with Absolute Defence. Sim Ah-ryeon kneeling quietly beside me. Lee Ha-yul casting Puppet Strings. Yu Ji-won lying unconscious. Cheon Yo-hwa intercepting. Everyone motionless—except for the Saintess striding across the field of debris.
"Three."
Beneath the middle finger, Noh Do-hwa's corpse.
The tombstone drifted among earthly fragments splintered by the war of the Great Witch and the Saintess. If even one person who makes me "me" was lost, this would be the fate we were all destined to meet.
"Four."
Beneath the index finger, static.
No form, no color—just the hiss of signals beyond human recognition. The Void always lives between our eyelids.
And under the thumb... lips.
"It might feel a bit stifling."
At the closest crossroads in this universe, those lips whispered softly.
"But could you leave my hand where it is, sunbae?"
A tiny giggle.
"Kind of embarrassing, but to me, this place is sacred ground—the last four seasons."
...
"After losing all black, only this curtain remains, draped solely for you. My long curtain call."
Yo-hwa smiled.
"Well then. Shall we go, sunbae? Let's lift the curtain and see whether only oblivion still waits there."
Awakener: Cheon Yo-hwa (天寥化)
Corrupted Alias: Shadow Schemer
Strategist of the Regressor's Alliance.
Has joined the party.
-x-X-x-
The Missing XVII
Allow me a moment to pose you a question.
Let's say you thought the story was galloping toward a happy ending. But then out of nowhere, somebody channels a shaman and proclaims, "Guys, we're doomed! Even if we hammer away at this trash game a couple hundred more times, we'll never clear it! Anyway, have fun!" Cue them dumping spoilers all over the place.
So, how do you react?
Naturally, the answer will vary from person to person. Some will despair at having to grind that already-rage-inducing game hundreds of times more. On the other hand, if you're the depraved type—names withheld to protect the guilty—you might actually grin at the fragrant stench of a forever-broken game and truthfully claim to love it.
As for the student council president's elder sister, AKA the reigning champ of the Regressor Alliance's yearly poll for "Most Sinister Personality" and the person famous for the face that screams "betrayal incoming", Miss Cheon Yo-hwa...
'I come from the 999th cycle, and from a certain angle, you could even call it the 1000th.'
To her, a spoiler from a returner merely marked the level's difficulty.
Yes, that's right. Difficulty.
It was something altogether different from embarrassment, which carried with it the necessity of emotion. Yo-hwa felt no frustration, irritation, anger, despair, sadness, hurt, or puzzlement. Her reaction was not embarrassment but acknowledgement of a conundrum. Like a gamer facing a puzzle that must be solved, she sensed only the raw difficulty level.
"Those innate blank spots you have, sunbae. The amnesia cut-off at the 4th cycle. We'll paint causality on that empty canvas in ways that favor us. I love it—it's very me. Smells of tricky and deviousness, which is right up my alley. But it's a razor-thin line," said Yo-hwa.
Was it because her five fingers blocked my sight? It went beyond her face. Even her voice rang out from different places, from and through the tiny worlds cut by those fingers, all at once.
With one hand still covering my eyes—how, I cannot guess—she was guiding me somewhere step by step.
"As you said, this is both the 173rd and the 1000th cycle. The others may be able to bear the consequences, but I walk the razor's edge. As a human, I—Cheon Yo-hwa, your beloved student—must exist in the 173rd cycle. Conversely, in the 1000th cycle, I cannot exist."
Exactly. Her fate is to swallow the Mastermind and be hit with a Time Seal. So by the 1000th cycle, the human Cheon Yo-hwa can no longer appear.
"Yet as an estranged god fused with the Mastermind, my position flips. In the 1000th cycle, it's fine for me to meet you. However small the space, I'll be in that divine realm sealed by Time Seal. But in the 173rd cycle, I mustn't appear."
That was the dilemma Cheon Yo-hwa faced. Human or Fallen Outer God, one side of herself must commit a temporal contradiction.
Ah-ha, Yo-hwa laughed. "Of course I could just say, 'Screw the time paradox,' but I feel it too."
Finally, I asked back, "Feel what?"
"Your gut telling you that we mustn't casually commit a Time Paradox. If we toy with the cosmic order called 'time,' the debts we defer will someday crash down at once. I feel that too."
Hence the conundrum.
The first thought she had upon hearing the Regressor's confession was simply that this would be hard. Yet from birth, she has solved every problem, no matter how hard—love's puzzle aside.
"I brooded a bit and saw the answer."
This time was no different.
"'Oh? So I just have to die, right?'"
The solution was simple.
"As a human, I exist fully in the 173rd cycle. I'm a weak Awakener, yes, but I am also a non-romantic who lives by brain and strategy. And as the Mastermind—"
I need only exist in a dream.
"Specifically, your dream, sunbae." Her lips curved. "Right? The original Time Seal is no different from a dream only you can experience."
After a long pause, I said, "I see... So you waited until I entered the dream via a Dream Demon."
"Yep!" she exclaimed, her smile deepening. "And sorry, but I evicted my sister and the fairy. If they perceive the current me, it'll be trouble."
So that was why the two who'd dived with me were gone. She'd hidden this from them.
Truly, she commits the outrageous with a straight face.
"Well, someone had to serve as the corridor to Hecate. Now, sunbae, please trample my corpse and go!"
I chose not to grace that with a response.
"Aw, don't make that face. By the way, how did I die? My memory ends with the night sky falling on Utopia."
"Your sister kicked your head off."
"Eh? Ah-ha? Ahahaha!" Her palm shook the planes of my vision as she remarked, "Wow. I did tell her, you know. 'If sis goes bad, kill her.' Still, to die by her foot! Born earlier, die earlier, I guess."
"Did you egg on the Saintess too?"
"Yep. Told her, 'Fall if you must.'" She noticed my silence then. "I know the frozen world of Time Stop is hell to you. Sorry. But your feelings don't matter much." That faint smile stayed put, its edge dipping into shadow as she concluded, "Mine don't matter either."
"You..."
"I'm weak, unlike our gifted comrades. So all I know is how to pay with my life." I tried to scold her, but her next words stopped me. "Same as you. That's what a regressor is."
I had no response to that.
"Ah. We're close. Brace yourself."
A solemn footstep sounded out.
My limited view made judging distance hard—each gap between her fingers showed a different scene.
Focusing under her thumb, I inferred that we were descending stairs.
"Where are we headed?"
"The Void. The Abyss."
Step. Step. Step.
Down into darkness we sank.
"A dream deeper than dream. The realm you named Dream-within-Dream, the Unconscious World. Heh heh. Each flight down wears me out a bit... but I'll try my best."
"You okay?"
"I'm fine. But may I ask one favor?"
Step. Step. Step. Step.
Footfalls clicked in varying pitches within the fragmented view.
"Please don't move my hand until the very end."
Many sounds overlapped the steps—her breathing, a small grunt, a giggle.
"Sunbae."
The sounds echoed.
Downward, further, still deeper.
The deeper we went, the thinner Yo-hwa's breaths became.
"When I died, what face did my sister make?"
Step. Step. Step. Step.
"Aha. Figures. She would think that we weren't parting forever. What'd be the point of feeling sad? She's always been like that... She believes our twin souls are linked. Too much of a romantic, honestly."
Step. Step. Step. Step.
"I wonder. When I have the Mastermind in my grasp and vanish, what face will she make? She likely won't be able to even conceive of the reality of it, yet she'll still believe our souls connect. That girl..."
Step. Step. Step. Step.
"I'll confess only to you, sunbae. When the Void first dawned... I almost went mad when I heard my sister was trapped at school. But after you saved her, I was glad."
Step. Step. Step.
"See, I'm always bored. It's dull. Successor to a cult—an exotic title, perhaps, but one that's dull to me. Too many sights too young. My dopamine system's fried. Maybe it's just childish bravado."
Step. Step.
"Would you close your eyes for a moment? Yes, just like that. Just a moment... There."
Step.
"Sunbae... Sunbae. I trust you."
"Yo-hwa?"
Silence.
"Cheon Yo-hwa?"
I opened my eyes.
The darkness was gone.
The fingers that had gently shielded my sight, the Final Curtain rather than the Mastermind, were gone.
Yo-hwa was nowhere.
Silently, I looked down. In my palm lay a lone black hair tie.
She said she trusted me. In that last instant, what exactly did she trust? Even disappearing, how did my disciple conclude it was pure faith, not resignation?
"Been a while since I came here," I muttered.
The Unconscious World. A place you reach only after dreaming within dreams, when time melted away like candle wax. The drain. The Void all humanity shares—the very first Void.
The guide who led me safely here was gone.
"Don't worry." I squeezed the black hair tie she left me. Whether driven by instinct or impulse, I didn't know, but I deliberately spoke to keep my own continuity. "I fully grasp why you brought me here."
And so, I took a step.
In the Void of Dreams-within-Dreams, space and time lack coherence. Chaos was the Void's nature, and this realm jumbled even loops. Next to Haeundae's beach unfurled a snowy field—the Nenet tundra, an impossible sight in the 173rd cycle. Under rubble lay the shadows of Old Man Scho and Adele flickered, visions unseen even by the me of the 1000th cycle. In a desert, Ha-yul played with a doll of me while Ah-ryeon sprouted from a fruit and melted like slime.
"Not now."
They were residues of time, echoes eroded from piled-up residues. Phantoms no longer real.
"Now's not the time to think about them."
White sand crunched underfoot. Not sand ground by the Water of Life but sand vomited by the Void, called White Night. In it, many things were half-buried.
A broken pole. A traffic light frozen forever on red. Petals. Glass shards. Big Ben's hands.
Beyond them lay the Beginning: the Busan Station concourse, nicknamed "the starting village" by Dok-seo.
If the world truly blooms and withers with each loop, that joke can't be laughed off.
One step I went into the half-ruined shell. I walked into the wreckage where the shapes of loops I recalled and loops I forgot overlapped. The concourse roof gaped open like Rome's Pantheon as light and shadow mosaicked the space through broken beams.
And beneath them sat Go Yuri.
"Welcome, Guild Leader."
She wasn't looking at me. Her eyes were closed, her face tilted to trace the contours of shattered sky and shadow.
She spoke.
"Sit beside me? It's a bit cramped..."
I sat.
"The sunlight here feels wonderful. You can zone out, empty your thoughts... I've loved this spot for ages."
White dust motes drifted in the ruins, buoyed by the silence. So it was between us. Specks that could never become seeds glimmered in the sun then vanished into the shadows.
"It took exactly one year," Go Yuri said.
"One year?"
"Yes. Three hundred sixty-five days."
"...Doesn't feel like a small time."
"From your viewpoint, Guild Leader."
Her eyes were still closed.
"You know well how time's sensibility varies from person to person... Imagine erasing every scrap of time in a life that leaves no trace in memory."
Her voice sounded somehow light.
"The breath you took yesterday. The Tuesday you played with a friend whose name and face you've lost. Erase it all—and fill time only with scenes truly remembered."
"..."
"Then, looking back at death's door, how much of eighty years remains?"
"...It's hard to fill up even one full day's worth of time."
"Yes. That's normal for humans."
She raised the back of her hand. A mote brushed her nail.
"To live a lifetime yet collect only a single moment, clutching mayfly-length memories, and still lose even that blink."
"..."
"I filled all three hundred sixty-five days."
A breeze blew.
The mote vanished beyond shadow as Go Yori turned toward me.
Our eyes met.
"So for me, this moment is number three hundred sixty-five, Guild Leader."
-x-X-x-
The Missing XVIII
Go Yuri had always been an unfathomable riddle to me. Her demure way of speaking, her whisper-soft voice, the scent of freshly rinsed apples, even the faint smile that lingered on her face—all of it.
"...So, what is it you'd like to talk about?"
"Oh my, were you really listening to me that attentively just now?"
As I watched her—pink hair framing a masked chuckle behind her hand—I felt it.
Something was different. Indescribably so.
"I'm sorry, Guild Leader. I was just teasing you a little."
"Teasing...? You, teasing me?"
"Yes."
The difference became clear in an instant.
'There's no impulse.'
Whenever that crisp apple scent hit my nose, a tingling electric shock would normally race from the frail edges of my brain all the way to its most vulgar core. The smell was not sliding down my throat, soaking my stomach in fruit stench. No invisible jam was being slathered along the inside of my skull with a butter knife. The ground was not falling away, the sky was not reeling, and Go Yuri's body-heat was not closing in on me with suffocating intimacy. The sudden urge to hug her, to stroke her hair, to comfort her—every impulse was sinking quietly beneath the surface.
'It's calm.'
Everything was serene. Go Yuri's profile, bathed in sunlight pouring through the ceiling, was serene. The half-shadowed throb of my own heart was serene.
All of it.
How long had it been since I'd felt such peace in Go Yuri's presence?
"The thing in your hand," she said. "Is that Cheon Yo-hwa's hair tie?"
"...It is."
"Wow. Looking closely, it's the very ribbon she wore the first day she met you, isn't it? Do you remember?"
I had no idea how Go Yuri could know a memory I myself could not recall. Whether she was spinning a plausible lie was impossible to judge.
She smiled brightly. "It's a treasure. A gui-mul. You would call it a ghostly relic, but take that same word and put it in a different context, and you get a precious object. I think this gui-mul is the latter."
"This hair tie?"
"Yes. Something left behind by someone who kept believing in herself until the absolute end. How truly strong of will. Even in this place where every object is slipping into chaos... it stands out so clearly." When I didn't respond, she continued, "People devote an entire lifetime to coloring in an hour's worth of memories, yet to some, that single hour can be as beautiful as a piece of music."
Maybe so.
I couldn't explain the logic behind it, but this thing Cheon Yo-hwa had prepared was somehow letting me keep this mirror-calm, even in front of Go Yuri. In exchange, Yo-hwa had vanished.
True to her word, she only knew how to pay with her life.
"To be honest, I don't dislike Cheon-hwa at all."
The confession came out of nowhere. "Cheon-hwa?" I asked reflexively.
"Yes. The elder sister is Cheon-hwa, the younger is Yo-hwa. That's how I distinguish them." I had never heard anyone separate their names like that, but Go Yuri carried on as if it were obvious. "If I had to judge, the comrade who resembles me most is Cheon-hwa."
"Sometimes, you say the most absurd things."
"Oh, I'm not talking about personality. Our personalities couldn't be more different. I mean our way of thinking has similar twists and turns." Then a short little laugh tinkled out of her. "Dang Seo-rin killed the 'me' outside. Thanks to her, even if only for a short while, I can act a little more freely."
Go Yuri rose to her feet. Hands folded neatly before her, she slowly turned toward me.
"Will you come with me?"
I kept silent, simply looking up at her, when she suddenly struck an awkward pose. "Rawr!" she mock-growled—a childish tiger noise.
"And that is supposed to be...?" I questioned warily.
"Ahh. You were staring as if I might swallow you whole. Don't worry, Guild Leader, I won't eat you. Mmm... Although, that sort of unexpected event could be fun. But asking me to loop another 365 days just for entertainment would be far too cruel a future for me."
I had no idea what she meant. The unnatural impulses had vanished, but Go Yuri's unpredictable behavior remained. Still, I stood up to follow.
"By the way," she began, "you have to step where I step and nowhere else, all right? If you don't, even Cheon Yo-hwa won't be able to protect you."
"You should've led with that. Are you stupid?"
"Ahaha!" Go Yuri smiled softly. Being called stupid by me seemed to put her in the highest spirits.
"Fine," I grumbled. "I don't mind following. This place is practically your own divine realm, anyway. But at least tell me where we're going."
"To Dang Seo-rin's house."
I froze, caught mid-crouch just as I was about to stand. My eyes found Go Yuri's, creased into twin crescent moons.
"Have you ever been there?"
I hesitated for a long moment before admitting, "Seo-rin's house was a flower shop in Busan. It closed after her family was massacred."
"Yes. Have you been inside?"
"When I regressed, it was already destroyed. Seo-rin never considered those ruins a home."
"Yes." Go Yuri's gaze narrowed, and she insisted, "Have you been there?"
I had not. "Of course not... Anyway, it's impossible now. The place no longer exists."
"Dang Seo-rin was born at home."
"What?"
She began to walk ahead of me, leaving me behind. I almost stopped her but immediately remembered her warning.
Follow my footsteps.
I placed my feet exactly where hers had tred.
One step. Two steps.
She never looked back, certain I would keep pace—or perhaps signaling that if I slipped even once, that would be the end of that.
"You're telling me she was born at home... not at a hospital?" I mused. "That's rare nowadays. Was that what her parents wanted?"
"Who knows? You should know, all of her younger siblings were born in hospitals."
With each stride she took, the scenery shifted. If I'd had any mischief left in me, I would have joked that her footwork was some advanced technique.
"If Seo-rin was born at home, and if the 'home' you speak of is not merely a physical location but a space imbued with ritual meaning, then it too must be part of Hecate's divine realm," I realized.
"A sound deduction."
"Even if this is a dream-within-dream and even if you're irregular beyond all comprehension, can you really trespass on another Outer God's territory at will? The mirror in Ji-won's room can at least—"
"No need for that," came her matter-of-fact answer over her shoulder. "That Magic Mirror is nothing more than a degraded copy of the moon."
"What?"
"You thought Hecate descended on the moon's surface and decided it looked like a mirror, didn't you? It's the other way around: The moon resembles the mirror. Ancient people believed another world existed up there in one way or another. The world in a mirror seems to exist yet not exist. A place that is nowhere. All of them, every one of them: utopias."
Her explanation was easy to follow. Perhaps because, voice and tone aside, the logic she used to discuss Anomalies was almost identical to mine.
As though she were mimicking me.
As though she had learned from me.
Talking to her felt like standing before a mirror.
"I understand your logic," I granted after a pause. "But then why has the Magic Mirror always appeared near Ji-won instead of Seo-rin? Ji-won has nothing to do with it."
"Ahaha. Mmm... Guild Leader, you're usually brilliant, yet sometimes you overlook the simplest points. How troublesome."
"I don't follow."
"Yu Ji-won is beautiful."
I almost replied, As beautiful as you, and would have if not for Cheon Yo-hwa's hair tie. While I kept my mouth shut, her voice flowed on.
"Guild Leader. To a breathtaking, moonlit beauty like her, it is only natural to bestow a replica of the moon."
"What? No, uh..."
"You really should look more honestly at the faces around you. I know you feel as if you've lived for tens of thousands of years, but if you let basic human senses dull, things get complicated."
That almost sounded like she was scolding me.
"Did you know? Whenever your other comrades have to wedge themselves between you and Princess Kaguya, they get incredibly tense. Yu Ji-won won't consider feelings like those, so you have to be the one to step up, Guild Leader."
Yep. Whatever the reason, it sure seemed like I was being lectured by Go Yuri.
– Undertaker.
I jolted, startled to find Dang Seo-rin standing just beyond Go Yuri's shoulder.
– Do not be fooled by that thing.
It was unmistakably Dang Seo-rin. Black cloak laundered clean, witch's hat perched—the Great Witch of Samcheon World was staring straight at me.
– If you follow it, you're finished. You know this, right? Cheon Yo-hwa is an Anomaly and so is that thing. The very fact it brought you here is the trap.
"Please don't listen, Guild Leader," said my pink-haired guide, cutting off my silence at Seo-rin's whisper. "Ahh. Well, actually, you can listen if you like... Hmm, no, actually it does matter. But even that's part of your choice... Will you listen?"
– Don't be deceived.
Buildings of sand-laced concrete. Rust-stained signs pointing to a traditional market. Traffic lights flickering red.
Everything behind Seo-rin was collapsing.
– You're misunderstanding something. You think no temptation is reaching you? That this version of it is different? Since when did you trust your own senses so completely in front of this thing?
"Time is short. I'll go ahead, Guild Leader."
Ignoring it all, Go Yuri's heels stepped over the street ruins. Her back receded one pace at a time.
Seo-rin looked at me.
– Even that act is part of the play.
– It's pretending it doesn't care whether you follow, because that indifference works on you.
I...
– Trust me, Undertaker.
– Do not follow it.
I followed Go Yuri's footprints.
– ...Why?
– Why? Why? Why?
Every time I stepped, Seo-rin appeared—by a moss-covered wall, beside a bent storm drain, under a rusted sign.
– Liar.
– You said you liked me. You told me you'd stay with me. Liar, liar, liar, liar—
Her voice became a blood-slick blade carving into my heart.
I could have answered in many ways. This Seo-rin wasn't the real one. If she saw the pink entity, it would mirror my face, so how could she tell us apart? If she used the presence or absence of static as a clue, then all creation still sounded like noise to her—that was Hecate's mark.
– Don't go.
– Please don't, Undertaker.
Seo-rin sank to her knees.
– No. No. Don't go. No...
Yet Go Yuri kept walking and so did I. She glanced back, eyebrow twitching in surprise that I was indeed following. Then a smile touched her lips and she faced forward again, treading across the ruined city.
"A sanctuary—no, a divine realm—always has an outer ring and an inner core," she exposited. "Picture an onion made of countless growth rings. The lower an Anomaly's rank, the thinner its layers. The higher, the thicker. There's a Kafka short story called 'An Imperial Message.' Have you read it?"
"I have."
"Read it again. It helps with the imagery. Like the emperor's palace, an Anomaly's realm is itself a nine-fold palace. To cross a wall, you either march through the gate or clamber over by brute force."
Something was off. I'd said I'd read it, yet she'd spoken as if I hadn't, reciting her lecture calmly—as though addressing not only me but another unseen listener.
"In the past, Guild Leader, you slipped into Hecate's realm through what you might call a dog-hole."
"A... dog-hole?"
"But shortcuts seal quickly. That's why you never reached Hecate's realm again."
She must have been referring to the 267th cycle, when that cycle's Saintess sacrificed herself to seal Hecate's domain.
"You've realized patchwork fixes can't sink the world. A direct assault is the answer. Hecate is the goddess on the far side of mirrors, the Mistress of Utopias. To approach her essence, we must keep stepping onto one nowhereafter another."
We exited the market into an intersection that opened before us. There was a potato stew joint, a café, an auto-repair shop. Ruined yet recognizable buildings dotted the street.
I now knew exactly where we were. It was the town where Dang Seo-rin once lived.
"Hecate's perfect city in Busan—first step."
– Undertaker.
"This stage that you agreed to forget entirely once it's over—second step."
– Don't go there.
"The moon itself, remade from Earth's satellite into a planet-sized mirror—third step."
– Why are you choosing to be fooled?
"The dream of a corpse whose personality has flown away—fourth step."
Go Yuri crossed a crosswalk littered with scrapped cars. I followed.
Ahead stood a flower shop.
– Please.
The shop was strangely intact. That was both bizarre and natural at once. Bizarre because when I visited this town with Seo-rin, the greenhouse had already been cinders. Natural because in a dream-within-dream, anything could happen.
"It's no coincidence."
She read my mind with a voice colder than any since our reunion.
"This is the product of chance that isn't chance. Cheon-hwa overlaid a simulation of this universe onto the dream-within-dream using the Mastermind's power."
"...Yo-hwa."
"The Mastermind can run simulations beyond time. The dream-within-dream only supplied the material. This greenhouse isn't an accident—it's Cheon Yo-hwa's inevitability."
"..."
"Listen carefully. Remember it. Don't miss a single piece.
Without Yu Ji-won, we lack combat strength.
Without Sim Ah-ryeon, we can't replenish that strength.
Without Lee Ha-yul, Ji-won's power drains too early.
Without Oh Dok-seo, Undertaker has no time to think.
If Undertaker can't think, the Saintess can't stand.
Without Yo-hwa, there's no passage into dreams.
Without Cheon-hwa, the dream-within-dream loses its shape."
"..."
"Do you understand? You have one chance only. If even one shard—just one—is lost, we can't reach this place."
She looked at me, or perhaps through me to someone else.
Under that multilayered gaze, I asked without thinking, "And you?"
For the first time, she paused. "Pardon?"
"If countless inevitabilities are required to come here, you must be one step yourself. What role are you playing?"
She blinked, entirely unprepared to hear that from me. "Oh dear. Am I, perhaps, counted among your comrades, Guild Leader?"
She giggled, and for some reason I couldn't answer. After studying me, she parted her lips.
"The dream-within-dream, the so-called unconscious world. Its Void that exists yet scoffs at reality is the fifth step."
– No no no no no
"And me." She touched her chest. "As you know, I'm the sixth step, Guild Leader."
My heart pounded with no cause.
"I'm the nonexistent human, the ideal form strolling among you, utopia stuffed and mounted while still alive."
She turned her back to me to gaze at the sign that read Dang Sect Flower Garden. Seo-rin once complained that her father's obsessed with wuxia had led to said name.
"Only the last step remains."
She reached out, fingers closing on the greenhouse's steel latch.
Once the door opened, that would be the end.
Go Yuri drew a long breath. "Ahaha. Sorry, I'm a little nervous too... Truth is, climbing to the seventh step is a first for me. It was a massive gamble, and honestly? Even now, I can't guarantee the door will—"
Her eyes widened, taking in the sight of my hand covering the back of hers.
"Let's open it together. I've guessed who you've been talking to all this time. Oh Dok-seo, right?"
Her gaze lingered on me. She breathed, smiled, and spoke. "It has to be the 366th."
Each word, crystal clear.
"365 days make one year—sun and moon and night sky ruled by Hecate's symbols. But 365 isn't enough."
Not to my present self nor my future self, but straight toward the slowest prophet who would one day spy on this moment. Epimetheus.
"A leap year."
Go Yuri said:
"The surplus day calendars can't capture, the empty day, the gateway Hecate's magic must leave ajar... This door opens only in that instant."
A strange déjà vu seized me. When I'd declared I would fight Hecate, these words had slipped from my mouth:
"My witch... No. I have come to reclaim my princess, Outer God Hecate."
Never once had I thought of Dang Seo-rin as a princess, yet in that moment, the title came as naturally as breath. Why?
'The leap year. The character 윤(閏) meaning intercalary.'[1]
A king (王) behind the door (門). In other words...
'Open this door and the princess awaits.'
I was certain I'd stood here once before, though no memory contained it.
"Well then, Guild Leader. Shall we see if we've succeeded?"
Who had been beside me then?
"One. Two... Three."
With her palm under mine, we pushed the greenhouse door. Perhaps because no one had come for ages, the flimsy vinyl door refused to budge. As the hinge squealed, Seo-rin's silhouette screamed within the plastic.
– Aaaaaaaaaaaaah!
– No, don't, no, Undertaker, stop, don't look, don't, die, die— No! Undertaker, ah, no...
My hand faltered, but Go Yuri's other hand covered it. Palm over palm.
We exchanged a silent glance, nodded once, and together pressed on the thinnest vinyl door.
For a heartbeat, the hinge's groan and Seo-rin's shriek ceased. Then—
The door opened.
Footnotes:
[1] Intercalary: (of a day or a month) inserted in the calendar to harmonize it with the solar year, e.g., February 29 in leap years.