Chapter 316

Isaac seated three corpses with shattered heads in a neat row, their backs propped against the corridor wall. The tidy alignment looked like a serial killer’s obsessive and cruel bad taste, but the effort hadn’t been made for pleasure.

Inside the cell door facing the bodies, there was a passage leading out of the underground tunnel. It was a storm drain connected to a shabby strip of shops south of the Nathan River. Both ends had been sealed with concrete and it was an area that was always flooded, but the explosion had exposed the passage.

Of the several storm drains Isaac had opened, this was the only one that would become an escape route. The other storm drains were too steep to climb without equipment.

His current position was Basement Level 1. It was the level where the kidnapped people, including an Omega, were being held. The Omega was confined in Zone 1 with heavier security, and the test subjects were confined in Zone 2. And every Alpha except the recon team was living on Basement Level 2.

The entry route that led to and from the surface connected to Basement Level 2. To go up to the surface from where he was, he had to pass through Basement Level 2. That, however, was only true before Isaac had drilled through the storm drain and created a passage.

Isaac looked down at the floor beneath his boots with cold eyes. One level below, Alphas heated with loyalty to Hybris would be swarming like eggs in a hive. Based on the blueprints and the testimony of the Alpha he had tortured, Basement Level 2 was much larger.

Basement Level 1 was still using the drainage tunnel’s original structure almost as-is. Level 2, in contrast, was divided into zones on the premise that Alphas would live there. A dining hall and assembly space—built around the drainage facility’s broad retention basin—sat at the center, with sleeping quarters and sanitation facilities packed tightly around it. And inside it, the Alphas waited to be used up like bullets in a magazine. What Isaac couldn’t understand was their obedient attitude.

It was as if they were people whose thinking had been remodeled. They followed the sophistry-ridden as though they had a sacred duty that could only be fulfilled by offering up body and mind.

Based on several truths he had learned through the Alpha who had been watching the Water Level Monitoring Station on the Nathan River, Isaac had come to vaguely understand how the Designer had brainwashed the Alphas. Under forced Rut and under certain specific conditions, the Alpha imprinted the Designer’s teachings as an absolute requirement for survival. The Designer kept the Alphas confined through the entire Rut, preventing them from relieving their sexual drive, exposed their vulnerabilities through periodic Counseling, and isolated the Alpha community from the outside world.

According to the Designer’s teachings, the only people in [N O V E L I G H T] the world who had value were those who obeyed what was “good” for the Alpha collective. Alphas were a more evolved existence than Homo sapiens, and humanity that had stopped evolving was worthless—no better than livestock. Believing that the collective could decide whether such worthless others lived or died, the Alphas committed murders the Designer ordered without any guilt, in order to achieve a sacred purpose.

So Hybris was a cult that ran on a small number of people. The irony was that it was a cult led by Jackson Cliff, a Beta.

The cults Isaac had identified so far were built to promise belonging and meaning, then steal both away in the cruelest way. The desire to be loved was the cause of every tragedy. People fastened cheap shackles on themselves just to obtain something as paltry as love. Like Yuri Berek, who had loved Gezar and discarded himself, humans destroyed themselves under the pretext of love.

A siren suddenly blared, and Isaac snapped out of his short chain of thought. The entire tunnel was swallowed by the huge siren. A sharp resonance, like it was echoing inside a giant’s intestines, rose and fell in pitch as it wailed.

There were entrances at the far left and far right ends of the long corridor where Alphas from Basement Level 2 could come up to Level 1. Isaac was currently close to the Security Gate on the right.

He aimed his rifle and shot out the Security Key reader and the manual release device along the edge of the door, destroying them. A sharp warning tone burst out, and the unlocking mechanism was cut off. For a while, the Alphas wouldn’t be able to cross into this side. At the very least, he could buy a little time.

Isaac pressed the Security Key to the steel doors of the cells that lined both sides. Most were empty, but occasionally there was a kidnapped person inside. Most were young women—weak, and pale like corpses from never seeing light.

“Escape to the surface. There’s an escape passage across from the wall where three corpses are seated in a row.”

Isaac spoke as he tossed a glow stick at their feet. Terrified by the ear-splitting siren and the sudden appearance of an unfamiliar Alpha, the people took a beat to understand him—then hurriedly burst out of their rooms and ran toward the escape route. But not everyone reacted the same way. Some, as if choosing to be left behind, stayed sunk in lethargy and showed no response at all.

“I’ll take care of them.”

A stranger in a lab coat abruptly appeared in front of Isaac and spoke with a face taut with tension. Isaac recognized him as Dexter Baker, a researcher who had gone missing years ago, but he didn’t acknowledge it. He snapped a glow stick and handed it over with indifference. It was the only means to light the way out of the tunnel, which would soon be flooded like a sinking ship, and up to the surface.

“I believed someone with a conscience would escape with us.”

“With us?”

“...Aren’t you Hybris?”

The researcher seemed to have mistaken Isaac for an insider of Hybris, judging by the recon-team uniform Isaac had taken and put on. Instead of correcting him, Isaac kept watch and asked,

“How many kidnapped people are left?”

“There are twenty-one people in Zone 2.”

“Including you?”

“What? ...Yes.”

“And Zone 1?”

“Only one is being held—”

But the researcher couldn’t continue. The central gate was opening with an electronic sound. Using the steel door that stood wide open to the corridor as cover, Isaac shoved his muzzle through the viewing window.

The first man to emerge through the widening gap was absurdly inflated by adrenaline venting like madness. In his stupidity, he had his rifle’s muzzle tilted toward the floor. The man belatedly spotted Isaac and started to raise his muzzle, but Isaac had already fired a grenade.

The wide-kill-radius grenade punched through the man’s body and burst like a grenade, shredding the gate and the bodies of the men at the front into pieces. Immediately after, dozens of men who couldn’t even form a minimum battle line surged in all at once, as if pouring out. There was no tactics, no cover. It was as if they were being shoved toward an execution platform by the fear that if they retreated they would become traitors, and if they stopped they would be discarded. Isaac calmly pulled the trigger.

When the pale haze that had veiled his vision like fog scattered, the revealed devastation looked like a painting of hell. The pheromones the men had spewed in frenzy stung as if they would tear his entire body apart. Isaac inhaled deeply the stench of death mixed into the acrid smoke. The sensation of pheromones stabbing into his lungs became a stimulant, calling back the long-forgotten sense of slaughter.

Isaac quietly clenched and unclenched his fist, then turned around. The researcher was fleeing in a panic with a kidnapped person on his back who couldn’t move. After confirming the man made it safely into the room with the escape passage, Isaac followed him. He closed the door and shot the entry door reader in one burst, destroying the lock.

Now there was no way to escape this underground tunnel. There was still the entry route connected to the Psychological Health Center, but once the blasting device installed in the Nathan River was triggered, the current would surge in along that path and swallow everything.

He hurriedly shot the CCTV monitoring the corridor, shattering it, and left only a minimum of the ceiling-embedded lights. When it dimmed until the surroundings were barely distinguishable, the corpses lined along the corridor looked like a black mountain range made by darkness.

Isaac stepped over the mountain of bodies and crossed into Zone 1. The Omega was being held in Zone 1 on Basement Level 1, and the researcher had confirmed there was only one kidnapped person in that zone.

A face he could never forget rose into Isaac’s mind—Yoon Siron’s. For an instant his guard loosened and a laugh that didn’t fit the situation leaked out. He had hardened his resolve to kill him, and he was smiling as he thought of him.

The smile lingering at Isaac’s mouth slowly vanished. He erased each emotion, and with a face that finally became numb, he watched both sides with sharp caution. He checked Zone 1 cell by cell, pressing the Security Key to each door, until he came to open the door to the laboratory.

The laboratory, packed with all kinds of experimental equipment, still bore traces of animal testing. Under small metal cages, sawdust and droppings had caked on, and above it lab rats scurried busily, gnawing at the wire mesh.

And beside them was a large metal cage. It was big enough to easily fit a person. It was obvious experiments had been conducted not only on lab rats but on medium-to-large mammals. The thought flickered that Siron might have been among the test subjects, but Isaac had no room to examine the evidence in detail.

He threw a grenade with the pin pulled deeper into the laboratory. The instant he heard metal bounce and roll along the floor, he drew back and used the wall as a shield. The next moment, a violent blast erupted, and heated air shoved dust and debris out into the corridor.

Right after that, gunfire rang out from the opposite end of the corridor. In the opening before the fragments and dust had settled, two men charged at the same time. Isaac dropped low on reflex and returned fire.

A bullet buried into the first man’s clavicle and blood sprayed like a fountain, and the second man fumbled as he searched for cover, slamming into the wall. Isaac didn’t miss the chance and fired. The bullet punched through the man’s thigh and temple. Clean, exact burst fire without waste.

Isaac didn’t stop. Guarding the front, he rapidly checked the doors on both sides of the corridor. And then, at last, he ran into someone he had longed to face—yet had not expected to meet right now.

It was Jackson Cliff.

His mind went numb at the unexpected discovery. There was only one person confined in Zone 1. It had to be Yoon Siron.

At that moment, a bullet grazed past Isaac’s head by a hair. Isaac hurled himself into the cell as if throwing his body, slammed the door shut, and before someone outside could wrench it open, he shot the entry door lock and destroyed it. Indiscriminate gunfire hammered the door from outside. Isaac ignored it and shoved Jackson’s body up against the door to block the viewing window.

“Don’t shoot! It’s me! It’s me!”

Whether they heard Jackson’s scream or not, the attack outside stopped immediately. Jackson, pale with fear, tried to pull away from the door, but at Isaac’s warning shot into the floor at his feet, he reluctantly stayed in place.

Isaac shifted to an angle outside the viewing window’s field of view and leveled his Beretta at Jackson’s face.

On the other side, with Jackson’s back blocking the viewing window so they couldn’t see inside, they fell into a standoff where they could neither spray the door with bullets nor attempt entry. The siren was so loud that Isaac couldn’t catch their movements, but from the explosively increasing pheromones he could tell the number of Alphas outside the door was rapidly growing.

Isaac asked,

“Why are you locked up in here?”