Chapter 288

Dylan’s words continued, and the tears in 3543’s eyes dried as a sharp, cold blue anger rose in their place.

Dylan had been aware for a while of the faint fragrance lingering in the room. A scent that made the heart pound and sent a dull, tense ache through the lower body, nothing like the artificial pheromones of an Eta.

The Designer had been right. An omega’s pheromones could overstimulate an alpha’s instinct to dominate, provoking conflicts that were nearly impossible to control.

He glanced up at the ceiling ventilation fan humming overhead. They were sixty meters below the Nathan River that cut Baggers City east to west. More precisely, they stood in a section of the Deep Drainage Tunnel that regulated the river’s water level—an underground ark modified to support as many as a thousand people for up to a month.

Because it was a subterranean facility, ventilation was essential. Three ventilation shafts extended up to the surface, disguised as various urban structures, and every space inside the ark was connected to them, circulating the air endlessly.

Dylan imagined the day a ventilation unit failed and the stale air inside the ark no longer refreshed—when heat, carbon dioxide, and layers of alpha pheromones accumulated without dispersal. And then, on top of that tar-like thickness, the sweet icing of an omega’s pheromones. LanguageResources

The alphas would tear the omega’s body apart piece by piece, tasting it in a delirium. Love and desire could transform into collective madness and violence at any moment. Humans were contradictory beings: the more they loved, the more they wanted to dominate and destroy. He could feel 3543’s faint pheromones slowly thinning, and he unknowingly wet his lips.

“But what do you mean by that?”

3543, holding Lewis’s right hand between both of his, asked anxiously.

“You said there was something interesting inside my body?”

“Oh, that.”

Dylan recalled the implant chip he had briefly forgotten. He picked up the capsule-sized chip from the tray and held it up in front of 3543’s eyes.

“It came from you. It was embedded in your back.”

3543 peered at the chip through narrowed eyes.

“In my body? ...What is it?”

“A biochip.”

An expression of confusion spread across his face, as if seeing something entirely unfamiliar. But curiosity quickly shifted to suspicion, and then his face turned pale as near-horrified disbelief overtook him.

“...666.”

He covered his mouth with his palm, his voice choked.

“Unbelievable. The conspiracy was real.”

Even while trembling as if facing some terrible truth, 3543 did not take his eyes off the chip.

He was likely recalling the “New World Order” conspiracy theory that emerged in the late 20th century and drew countless believers. The theory claimed that a secret elite group, the Illuminati, planned to implant every person with a biochip marked with the number ‘666,’ the mark of the beast, in order to establish a unified world government.

“So Hybris is the Aluminuty?”

Dylan’s brow twitched at the unexpected reaction. He couldn’t quite tell whether the man lacked a sense of crisis even now or if he genuinely had no idea—but given 3543’s certainty, the latter seemed more likely.

“It’s Illuminati, not Aluminuty.”

“Right. That. I just mispronounced it.”

3543 still refused to acknowledge his own ignorance.

Dylan couldn’t help glancing toward Baker. The man, who always stared at the ground with the expression of someone waiting for death, was now biting his lip to suppress laughter. Dylan raised one eyebrow and let out a quiet sigh.

“Think whatever you want.”

“Hey—no, what kind of vague answer is that supposed to be?”

Ignoring him, Dylan wrapped the implant chip carefully in plastic and handed it to Baker. Wiping every trace of amusement from his face, Baker stored the chip in his bag. Seeing that, 3543 suddenly reached out in protest.

“H-hey, that’s mine! I want to see it! Let me see it too!”

Dylan ignored him and looked down at Lewis lying on the floor, his face lifeless as stone. With a low sigh, he grabbed the ankle of the man who stood well over 195 centimeters and began to drag him. 3543 lunged at once and pulled Lewis by the arm, trying to stop him.

“Don’t touch Lewis! And give the chip back! Let me see it!”

“If you keep being a nuisance, I’ll tie you up.”

Dylan pointed at the ring fixed into the wall. It was a mooring hook meant for securing a medium-sized ship. Here, it was used to restrain alphas who went into sudden Rut inside the ark. Dylan gestured with his eyes to the belt slung loosely over his arm.

“If you want even your freedom of movement taken away, go ahead and resist.”

3543 looked between Lewis and the belt, conflicted, then reluctantly released his grip. Dylan hauled Lewis like a heavy sack over his back and left the room. Fortunately, 3543 seemed to understand his situation; he did nothing, even as the frail Baker closed the door behind them.

Dylan paused for a moment outside, listening for movement. Hearing none, he resumed walking down the long corridor. After a while, he suddenly burst out laughing, remembering the man’s nonsense.

666 and Aluminuty. The thought process exceeded ordinary logic. Dylan chuckled for a long moment, the dry laughter echoing softly, then abruptly fell silent.

He thought he understood what the chip was. Isaac Bazelli, the one who turned 3543 into an omega, must have embedded it in him. And a chip inserted for collecting merely biological data was unlikely. It was almost certainly a GPS-based tracking chip.

Which meant that the entrance to the underground ark was exposed to Isaac.

Dylan looked up at the stark white ceiling. As if Isaac and Baekgyeong were gazing down at him from far above. His thin violet lips curved into a cool smile.

After the governor of Helso’s press conference, executions proceeded without pause. It was as if the administration intended to empty the prisons entirely before the remaining three months of his term expired.

Baekgyeong unfolded a local newspaper he had bought from a kiosk near the bus stop. On the front page was a political cartoon comparing death row inmates to cattle being herded into a slaughterhouse. The national section listed the names of those executed—and among them was the alias Gezar Bazelli had used while incarcerated: Colby James. On the morning of October 16, just yesterday, he had finally been put to death.

An indistinguishable, disposable name buried among countless others on death row—an unremarkable death no one in the world would remember. The traces left behind by the first new human remained only in Spencer’s USB files.

Baekgyeong folded the newspaper with a hardened expression and tossed it into the passenger seat before looking back. The second and third rows of the van had been removed, leaving a wide open space where Isaac lay on a thin mattress. His breathing was so faint he seemed neither alive nor dead.

After finishing Isaac’s transfusion, Baekgyeong had placed the brown-haired man’s corpse and Isaac into the boat and left Kamti Island. He returned to the isolated cliffside house he had rented for a month and buried the man in the backyard. Without time to even fully process the guilt of killing yet another person for Isaac’s sake, he drove the used Ford van he’d bought in Texas into Baggers City.

The face of the brown-haired man Baekgyeong had killed overlapped faintly over Isaac’s blank face. Baekgyeong might have to live his entire life under the weight of the dead, shadows clinging to him—but Isaac still had not regained consciousness.

“This is so fucking miserable.”

Baekgyeong shook his head as if to dispel the dead man’s image.

It was possible Isaac was in a persistent vegetative state, brain function responsible for consciousness and cognition damaged, his life sustained only by autonomous respiration. If he truly could never recover, Baekgyeong’s entire plan would collapse.

“If you’re gonna die, then die later. Just open your eyes now.”

But Baekgyeong’s desperate plea dissolved into nothing.

It had already been four days since Siron was taken. Baekgyeong had even considered the extreme option of deliberately being captured by Hybris. But unlike on the island, he had no guarantee he would be taken to the same location as Siron, so he remained hidden in the van, tracking any trace of him. By day he watched the Hybris Baggers City branch on the outskirts; by night he observed the area around the governor’s residence in Sun Haven.

The Hybris branch sat on the outskirts in Technovalley, a failed state development project. Half the district was barren. Dust-covered cars lined the road, yet for three days not a single parking enforcement vehicle appeared. It felt like a lawless zone where public authority did not reach.

Thanks to that, Baekgyeong could park without concern and watch the building through binoculars, observing the vehicles and people coming and going. But even as he kept vigil like stone, he knew deep down Siron was not there. The reason was simple. They would never put a precious omega on display like an Eta. They would hide Siron somewhere far more concealed and unremarkable.

He had not spent these days merely enduring anxiety. Baekgyeong analyzed every byte of Spencer’s 117GB of files. Eventually, he sorted them into three main groups.

The first: “Hybris and the Missing.”

The second: “Interviews with Gezar Bazelli.”

And the last: data that belonged to no category at all, whose meaning remained unclear.