Chapter 277

Isaac felt the merciless waves crash over his face. They slapped him again and again like an open hand, and he forced his eyelids apart, struggling to meet the sky. But there was nothing—only a depthless darkness. If he dove into that black abyss above, his entire world would dissolve and disappear into it.

He could sense death lurking very near. There were still things he had to do, things that mattered to his purpose. Yet tonight he would die here, unable to escape the black sea. God did not exist—and even if such a thing did, it would have no interest in his wishes. His fight would end unfinished.

That the final sight of his life would be this dreadful darkness—how fitting. He chose instead to look inward, toward the barren landscape of his own mind. He closed his eyes. Not a single fragment of a happy memory came to him. It was a relief. At least there was no warmth burning in his chest, no affection, no lingering attachment to life.

A sudden agony ripped through his side. He coughed blood and clutched at the tube attached to his wrist. Someone grabbed his arm and yanked hard. In an instant, his body slid upward, dragged onto the slick deck of a boat.

“Jesus Christ! Were you trying to drown again? Hold the damn chair!”

But Isaac was already unconscious. Sleep came down on him like a narcotic. The roar of waves, the thumping of helicopter rotors, and the engines of the boats pressed against the dim edges of his hearing. He covered his ears, trying to block it all. The sounds followed him sluggishly, then receded—fading with the smell and touch of the sea until nothing remained.

When he opened his eyes, he was no longer in the black water. He was standing in a strange hotel room.

He immediately surveyed its size and layout. The wallpaper pattern, the furniture—it was the typical design of a mid-2000s hotel. Three tall windows stretched from thigh height to the ceiling, and through the heavy blackout curtains came the faint noise of car horns. All he wanted was to collapse onto the bed and sleep forever.

But before he could catch his breath, the door burst open and men stormed in. Isaac dropped his stance and sharpened his senses. It was like nodding off while driving 180 kilometers an hour, only to wake with a jolt of lightning. His body sensed danger and snapped into focus.

As the first man came through the door, Isaac—without even knowing when the gun had appeared in his hand—pulled the trigger. The intruder fired at the same moment.

The man’s mistake was fatal. He carried a Desert Eagle loaded with .50 Action Express rounds and fitted with an extended magazine—more short rifle than handgun. Firing the three-kilogram metal beast one-handed, he instinctively flinched and shut his eyes against the recoil.

The result was predictable. His shot didn’t even graze Isaac’s shadow. Isaac’s two bullets, however, pierced the first man’s brow and the second man’s neck.

He watched them drop, dead before they hit the carpet, and felt déjà vu. He had lived this before—no, he had lived it a hundred times.

In each hand he held a long-barreled pistol fitted with a suppressor. With multiple enemies in a confined space, a frontal assault was the only option. He tore off the suppressors to lighten the weapons and, before the first body hit the floor, snatched up the Desert Eagle.

He used the collapsing corpse as a shield and fired again—one bullet through a third man’s right eye, another through the fourth man’s forehead. The heads burst like firecrackers, spraying blood and gray matter across the walls.

The blast power of the .50 AE rounds froze the attackers at the doorway. Those outside in the corridor scattered like sand fleas in a swamp. Isaac held the room’s only exit, a perfect choke point. The others had to flank him to complete their task, but that meant exposing themselves. They could hide behind bodies or rush in and die one by one—either way, they were hopelessly disadvantaged.

He could hear them murmuring beyond the hallway, quick low voices whispering plans. The sound reminded him of locusts rubbing their wings. Alone, locusts were timid. But when gathered, serotonin surged, and they became violent. The men in the corridor were waiting for their swarm. When reinforcements arrived, they would devour everything and leave a wasteland behind.

Time was running out. He had someone to protect—someone waiting in the hotel’s banquet hall. Isaac had to make sure that person was alive. He fired a rapid burst into the four corners and center of the window. The glass spider-webbed, shattered into glittering fragments, and rained down. As the last shards fell, he slipped through the empty frame, watching the doorway.

One of the “locusts” leaned into the room, spotting his escape. Isaac’s shot blew the man’s head apart, scattering red and gray across the walls. The others hesitated, and Isaac jumped out fully, catching the decorative trim of the outer wall as he dropped from the second floor.

He landed on both feet just as bullets poured down from above. Firing back in short bursts, he sprinted toward a service entrance.

And there, inside the crawling noise of the insects’ world, he met a boy. The kid looked terrified, about to bolt outside. His crumpled face was still soft, no older than fifteen, though tall enough that his forehead reached Isaac’s nose.

For a fleeting instant, Isaac felt something like sadness. The boy’s face—Ezra’s face, or perhaps his own reflected back—blurred between dream and reality. He hesitated to raise his gun. Then he heard the clatter of the swarm descending the emergency stairs.

He turned to run past the boy—and was struck by searing pain. A blow like a hammer slammed into his left back, then another into his flank, white pain blinding him.

Instinct took over. He spun and shot the boy through the forehead. Sticky fluid burst out like a firework, just as Ezra’s head had once shattered into the air.

Dragging his torn body, Isaac moved in a state of over-arousal born of extreme stress, putting bullets one after another into the faces emerging from the stairwell. Their stink and noise flooded his mind until it seemed the whole world was filled with the shriek of insects.

He realized then that he would never reach the man waiting for him in the banquet hall. Like sand draining through a broken hourglass, his blood—and the last of his time—was slipping away fast.

He had always believed he would feel nothing about dying. He’d thought himself detached from death.

No baggage, no home—he’d left the ruins of the amusement park, crossed the border of boyhood into the adult world, determined to wander unloved like a stray dog until the clothes on his back rotted away. That childhood vow, he had mostly kept.

He hadn’t clung to the same rags all his life, but he had honored the promise not to care for himself. In a life where survival came first, love remained an untranslatable word in a foreign language.

Love.

To think that completing an Imprint required something as hateful as love—it almost made him laugh.

He thought of Ezra, headless and gone. For half his life, Isaac had suspected he should have died the same miserable death that day.

Most of his first Rut—the massacre—was a blank in his memory, and he had filled that void with the cruelest version imaginable.

Soon he would follow his brother. His life, tough as steel, now flickered like a candle ready to go out in a passing breeze.

“Wake up, you son of a bitch! Yoon Siron’s been kidnapped! You’re not dying yet!”

Something struck his face like lightning. Isaac opened his eyes with effort, pain muffled and distant. In the pitch darkness, Baekgyeong’s furious voice thundered. They were on a boat, pitching in violent waves, seconds from capsizing, and Isaac could do nothing—too weak even to lift a hand.

A death without a single happy memory to take with him. The smell of gunpowder and blood—foul, ugly—perfectly suited his life.

His consciousness was fading again. Baekgyeong was cursing him from far away, but the voice grew dim, drifting like smoke.

Isaac tried not to think of the man whose face had once, faintly, made him smile. He imagined pouring black ink over that face, erasing it. But it was too late—the mischievous grin came back anyway.

All the memories of that man—who believed, without hesitation, that the world revolved around him—collided and twisted together.

And then Isaac’s world went completely dark.