Chapter 308

Siron’s hands, mid-tear on the plastic pouch containing the pill, stopped.

“...What?”

Doubting his own ears, Siron asked the Designer again.

“What did you just say?”

“You have an irritating habit of making people repeat themselves.”

He clicked his tongue lightly and continued.

“If you insist on hearing it one more time, I’ll answer. When you smell an Alpha’s Pheromones, does your asshole twitch?”

Lowering his intonation, the Designer reproached Siron in a calm, measured manner. But inside it was a naked, unmistakable malice—pleasure savoring Siron’s flustered reaction.

Siron didn’t hesitate. He pried open the mouth of the pouch. The instant he was about to pour the pills into his mouth, the Designer snatched Siron’s wrist.

“What are you doing?”

“Let go!”

Keeping a hard grip on Siron’s struggling arm, the Designer took the pouch from Siron’s palm as if hooking it away.

“Strange. I didn’t receive any report that medication was prescribed.”

Siron didn’t answer. In the dim gray light, the Designer held the pouch up to the sliver of light leaking through the peephole and examined it. As he studied the thumbnail-sized capsule, the man’s profile felt oddly familiar.

“What is it?”

While Siron stalled, still trying to pin down the source of that familiarity, the Designer turned his body toward the toilet and sink. Siron realized he meant to throw the pouch into the toilet as punishment for refusing to answer, and he shouted in panic.

“A suppressant! H-Heat-cycle Suppressant!”

The Designer froze. Siron wedged himself between the toilet and the man.

“Jackson gave it to me. Jackson Cliff gave it to me!”

Clinging to the Designer, Siron strained to force his fingers open and said,

“They said my Heat Cycle is in a few days. If my Heat Cycle hits in here, it’ll just turn into a situation that exhausts both of us! So give it back—give it to me, right now!”

Siron shouted, flooded with the filthy, throbbing discomfort of lust pulsing through his lower body. From the wounded Alpha, Pheromones poured out obscenely. Watching Siron pant, the Designer broke into laughter.

“Heat-cycle Suppressant? You’re the only Omega in the world—how would we even make a suppressant?”

“What?”

He snickered. It was a laugh that seemed to hide some complicated reality Siron didn’t know.

“Now I’m curious what it really is. Let’s check.”

Letting out a dry laugh, the Designer turned and walked to the man collapsed on the floor. He bent over the man, who was still writhing in pain, and said,

“It’s a painkiller to ease your suffering. Chew it. The effect will come faster.”

Half-delirious with pain, the man fumbled for the Designer’s hand and snatched the pill away. Maybe because he chewed and swallowed it, it didn’t take long for the effect to show.

“Ghh—!”

The man suddenly convulsed, like a machine that had lost control and gone into runaway mode. He spat out a violent scream from deep in his lungs and clawed madly at the floor. His whole body bucked, and in less than five minutes from the start of the seizure, his movements dwindled. Then he sprawled there, face down on the floor, and showed no reaction at all.

Through the sharp stench of urine mixed into the blood reek, Siron realized the man had thrashed and died in his own piss. If it hadn’t been this man, it might have happened to Siron instead.

Shock hit Siron like a blunt force. What Jackson Cliff had given him was not a Heat-cycle Suppressant. Inside the capsule had been poison—so lethal it could snatch even an Alpha’s life in a single blow. Jackson Cliff had tried to kill Siron.

And someone in front of him was taking that fact just as seriously as Siron was.

The Designer stared down at the dead man, rigid as a statue. Across the shadowed plane of his profile, the light leaking from the peephole drew pale, slanted lines.

A horrifying Pheromones spilled from the Designer. Invisible violence lashed into Siron’s skin and lungs like a knife’s edge. The Designer turned away. Without leaving Siron a single word, he opened the door and went out, abandoning the corpse. Bang—the door slammed, and only a blood-stinking silence remained with Siron.

Baekgyeong entered the password into the phone his mother, Chairwoman Choi Baekhee, had left as an inheritance to her bastard son. In English keystrokes it was “wkfahtgoTdj”—an eleven-character password that, typed in Korean, meant “I was wrong.”

After a brief buffer, the phone’s default app screen appeared. Flipping through pages, Baekgyeong opened a file and carefully read her final words.

#The genetic difference between Alpha and Homo sapiens: 0.6 percent. With that gap, Alpha became a being that reached the extreme end of the physical spectrum. Even though they carry a fatal flaw, Alpha still possess a new sensory system called Pheromones, and physical regeneration at an unbelievable level.

I want to call them Homo Supernus. Homo Supernus. It means humanity with divinity and transcendence.

His mother had held on to the hope that if science could tame the fatal flaw of the Alpha trait, then through Alpha, humanity would ultimately walk the path of evolution.

She believed Baekgyeong, remade as an Alpha, would become a more mature being than before, and she meant to push him to the front as the first Alpha known to the world, preserving him in history like an insect pinned in a display case.

If she could see the reality of the present from beyond the grave, she would probably weep tears of bitter, broken regret. Baekgyeong was still foolish, and the new humanity called Alpha was nothing more than a savage existence that mercilessly amplified the flaws of the XY chromosome.

Baekgyeong thought of the inheritance his mother had left him like a gift: the Rut Suppressant. Her gift was precariously stored, without so much as a backup file, on a phone not even half the size of his palm. If this phone vanished, the method to control an Alpha’s destructive libido would never become known to the world, and would be lost forever to the depths.

Baekgyeong couldn’t promise he would keep the phone safe indefinitely. No—before that, he didn’t even know if he could come out of the Deep Drainage Tunnel alive.

With his resolve hardening on his face, Baekgyeong stood. He searched Anna McCarthy’s house, found a data-transfer cable, and connected the phone to a laptop. Then he copied the Rut Suppressant manufacturing protocol onto the laptop and logged into the private mail server he and Daniel used when they exchanged messages.

Dozens of unread emails were piled in the inbox. He and Daniel mostly communicated by email, and sometimes used an old prepaid 2G phone. But lately he hadn’t had the presence of mind to access the inbox, nor the leeway to charge the old phone—so he had half-deliberately ignored Daniel’s attempts to reach him.

This time, too, instead of checking the unread emails filling page after page, Baekgyeong clicked the compose menu to say only what he had to say.

Long time. I’m not dead yet.

You probably heard the rough outline from Anna McCarthy, but I’m that amazing Alpha.

You’ve probably heard about Rut, the Alpha heat cycle, so I won’t explain it separately.

I attached a file to this email. It’s the manufacturing instructions for a drug that suppresses Rut.

Daniel. I’ve got a favor to ask.

If you don’t hear from me by midnight on the 20th, upload the attached file to every site you can access. Title it ＜Rut Suppressant Manufacturing Protocol＞. Most people will think it’s bullshit, but for someone who desperately needs a Rut Suppressant, it’ll be useful.

I’m counting on you. I’ll contact you soon.

After sending the email, Baekgyeong shut down the laptop without hesitation and unplugged the cable from the phone. Then he tapped the memo file—Choi Baekhee’s last inheritance, stored on the phone.

Inside the file was a set of coordinates that felt completely out of nowhere. In case the phone fell into someone else’s hands, he had altered the coordinates, but the original had been 36°59′41″N, 128°49′20″E.

He opened an online map and searched the coordinates. The location that came up was mountainous terrain near Sangju, Gyeongsangbuk-do, South Korea. There was a narrow shoulder beside a winding two-lane road, and that shoulder connected to some kind of facility whose nature was impossible to identify. Even zooming in on satellite view, he couldn’t make out what it was. The surrounding trees were so dense that only a pale brown roof barely showed through.

Baekgyeong wondered if the day would ever come when he could confirm it with his own eyes.

The thought that he might not survive the drainage tunnel kept creeping back in. When he escaped Somora, the fear he’d felt down in that underground passage had imprinted itself deep into his bones. Just like in the pitch-black night sea back then, dread surged up that he would lose his direction inside the storm drain and wander until the end.

And that wasn’t all. He worried whether he—untrained—could push through absolute darkness on the limited view of a thermal camera and still manage to rescue Siron.

If he died pointlessly in the underground tunnel, what would become of Siron’s fate? And the unidentified building in the satellite photo would remain untouched by any human footsteps, forgotten by the world forever.

Baekgyeong briefly considered whether he should pass the coordinates to his older brother, Baeksang, and his father in preparation for the worst. But he discarded the thought almost immediately. If they still hadn’t come close to the truth behind his mother’s death and his own disappearance, he didn’t want to drag them toward unnecessary truth and entangle them with Hybris.

He told himself to stop thinking like an idiot, like he was about to write a will.

Shaking off the persistent bad thoughts, Baekgyeong steeled himself.

“I’ll live, and I’ll see it with my own eyes.”

“What are you trying to see?”

Anna suddenly appeared behind him and asked in a sleep-thick voice. Woken from a short nap of about two hours, she approached holding a mug of hot coffee in both hands and asked,

“Aren’t you sleeping?”

At her words, Baekgyeong tried to remember the last time he’d actually closed his eyes. Three days? Or four? Since losing Siron, Baekgyeong had barely slept.

“Sleep is a luxury. I can’t lie down and take it easy like someone else.”

Yawning long, Anna set the mug of strong coffee down in front of Baekgyeong.

“Must be nice being an Alpha. I’m a normal human—I need at least five hours to get through a day. I only got two hours, and I feel like I’m dying.”

Sipping her coffee, Anna looked down at the monitor from behind Baekgyeong.

“A map? ...Where is this?”

“You don’t need to know.”

Before Anna could study the screen more closely, Baekgyeong closed the browser. Anna jutted her lips and asked bluntly,

“Did you do the research Isaac Bazelli told you to do?”

Baekgyeong stared at the laptop screen with a subtle expression, then clicked a saved web page he had added to a folder on the desktop.

“There were two more missing scientists. A forty-seven-year-old Black British biologist abducted half a year ago, and a thirty-nine-year-old white reproductive medicine researcher abducted just ten days ago. Both male, both biotech researchers. It also looks like it’s connected to the fields Hybris cared about—artificial fertilization and implantation.”

“Yeah? Then why do you look like that?”

Anna pointed at Baekgyeong’s furrowed face and asked.

“Because it feels off. I did it because I was told to, but it doesn’t feel like material we really need to rescue Yoon Siron.”