Chapter 318

“You should be grateful to me.”

Jackson spoke arrogantly in a voice sunk and dull.

Hearing him, Isaac recalled the brief exchange he had just had with the researcher who had been helping people escape. The researcher said there was only one person confined in Zone 1. Then the only person in Zone 1 should have been Yoon Siron. But outside Isaac’s expectations, Jackson Cliff had taken that place.

Isaac slowly lowered the muzzle that had been aimed at Jackson’s face. He moved to stand directly in front of him and asked,

“Did you kill the Omega?”

Jackson quickly confirmed the muzzle was no longer trained on him and raised his gaze. Conflict flickered across his face as he hesitated. Then, with a resolute air, he stared straight into Isaac’s eyes.

“Yes.”

Like striking a match over dry kindling, shock and a strange heat passed over Isaac’s rough, parched face. Jackson burst into a refreshed laugh, like he had landed a clean hit.

“How did you kill him?”

“I gave him a capsule filled with potassium cyanide. I told him it was a Heat-cycle Suppressant, and he took it without suspicion.”

“Did he swallow it?”

“Yes. He swallowed it without much suspicion. I saved you the trouble.”

Jackson exhaled as if relieved, a long breath of satisfaction. All at once he shifted into an eager, almost pleading friendliness, smiling as he reached a hand toward Isaac.

“Now you understand, don’t you? We have the same goal. So hurry up and get us out of here and together we can take down the Designer—”

Jackson couldn’t finish. Before he could even register it, fire flared from the muzzle aimed at him. The bullet punched through the dead center of Jackson’s forehead, tore through the brain’s gray matter, burst out through his skull, and slammed into the steel door. Immediately, bright red blood ran down from his eyes and nose. Jackson died with a smile on his face, without even realizing he was dying.

The moment Isaac fired, he realized he had done something foolish. Even if he had disrupted his plan to seize the Designer by using Siron as leverage, Jackson might have become a useful partner. Jackson had merely hastened the death Isaac himself had intended to carry out on Siron. Hypocritically, the emotion Isaac felt the instant he recognized that was grief. Emptiness spread inside his chest.

But the situation shifted too fast for him to savor grief. Jackson’s body collapsed to the floor, revealing the viewing window it had been blocking. A rifle muzzle shoved in from the corridor was aimed at Isaac through the glass.

The first shot was aimed precisely at Isaac’s heart, the second at his solar plexus. It was a lethal attack—he would have died instantly if he hadn’t been wearing body armor. Feeling pain like his chest and stomach were being smashed apart, Isaac rolled across the floor toward the door in a flash.

With his back pressed to the door and one knee up, Isaac stretched his arm upward, grabbed the muzzle that had missed its mark, and yanked it down. Outside the door, the Alpha fought like mad to keep his weapon, firing wildly. The room was shredded by the spray of bullets; fragments flew off the walls and furniture, and dust spiked up like fireworks.

In that time, Isaac flipped aside the securing band on the side of his body armor and pulled out a grenade. Holding the lever down, he pulled the pin and tossed it through the gap of the viewing window. The man who had been desperately yanking on the rifle seemed to recognize the grenade immediately as it fell, bounced, and rolled along the floor. The gunfire stopped. In the instant a cold silence dropped, the explosion detonated.

Hot air blasted through the viewing window like lava, and men screamed. Having bought only a sliver of time, Isaac threw another grenade out through the viewing window. The thick steel door buckled inward, and hot wind and dust surged through the gaps in a suffocating wave.

Isaac hurriedly loaded a grenade and kicked open the door, bursting into the corridor. Gunfire resumed from the front immediately. Using the ragged steel door as cover, he fired a grenade downrange. Tough bodies shattered apart and a path opened—but only for a moment. Like slicing the surface of water with a knife, no matter how many he killed and killed again, the corridor kept crawling with Alphas pouring in without end.

The siren consumed his concentration by the second, and the Alphas’ pheromones—packed with malice and madness—wore his patience down. It felt like being trapped inside a dream. A nightmare that could only be escaped by fleeing into death.

Fucking hell—he had to choose. Push forward and confirm whether Yoon Siron was alive or dead, fall back and smash the door he had destroyed to chase the Designer through the escape passage, or simply accept the kind death that had come right up to his nose.

A bullet grazed his shoulder. A violent pain flashed through him like lightning. Feeling blood from his shoulder run down inside his body armor, Isaac fired a grenade into the side wall ahead. An explosion tore through the corridor’s center, and bone and flesh scattered into the smoke. But it still wasn’t over.

From behind the fallen steel door that had slammed down across the corridor’s middle, men holding automatic rifles took firing positions. It was a weapon that could spit out at least six hundred rounds per minute, emptying a magazine in three seconds in a spray.

The chamber of Isaac’s rifle was already empty. But he had no time to swap magazines or reload grenades. Just before their muzzles could erupt, he threw his body into an open doorway. As he rolled across the floor, the entire corridor suddenly drowned in dense darkness. The lights and the siren cut out at once, and a chilling silence swallowed everything, as if the world had sunk into black water. There was no way something this impossible could happen by accident at such perfect timing. Someone had intervened. One name surfaced in Isaac’s mind.

Baekgyeong.

[Restricted Access Area]

At the door, Anna checked the blueprints and their current location, then turned back and met Baekgyeong’s eyes. Certainty sat in her gaze—they had found the right place. She picked the locked door with a pin, and as they stepped inside, the air changed. Instead of the underground’s damp stench, a smell of metal and dust mixed with diesel oil stabbed at their noses.

Inside the Electrical Room, along the concrete wall, switchboards, control panels, and communication racks were lined up in dense, orderly rows.

And in one section, there was a diesel generator. It looked like an emergency generator run on petroleum, meant for when the power went out.

Baekgyeong first opened the metal cap of the emergency generator’s side fuel inlet. Into the hole reeking of petroleum, he poured every last bottle of drinking water he had taken from the bag—without hesitation.

“Did you hear that? ...That explosion was pretty loud, wasn’t it?”

Anna, who had been pulling a toy water gun out of Baekgyeong’s bag, snapped her head up.

From far away, a dull boom reached them. It came faintly through the sirens blaring from every direction, but it was unmistakably the resonance of an explosion.

Baekgyeong glared at empty air with bloodshot eyes, then ground out a curse like he was chewing it up as he grabbed the toy water gun. Rage surged as he thought of the time wasted because of Isaac. And that wasn’t all. The [N O V E L I G H T] thought that Isaac might kill Yoon Siron—no, the possibility that he might have already killed him—hurt as if his insides were being torn apart.

After pouring the drinking water into the toy water gun’s fill port, they moved back outside the entrance. The toy water gun was, in its own way, a method they had found with safety in mind—to avoid electrocution accidents. Exchanging a look of grim resolve, they fired the water gun at the electrical devices.

At first, nothing happened. But as water seeped along contact points and into gaps between components, blue sparks jumped along the metal frames. The ceiling lights flashed once—bright—then flickered, and went out completely.

Then, even at a distance, lights and speakers began shutting down one after another in a chain reaction. Soon silence and darkness came over the entire tunnel. It was total blackout, so complete they couldn’t even see a palm held right in front of their faces.

The two of them quickly pulled out the thermal imaging camera they had been wearing around their necks. They pressed the monocular’s viewfinder to the right eye, adjusted the band, and fixed it to the face. When they powered it on, the screen lit and the world changed into different colors. Cold walls appeared as bluish ash-gray, while electrical facilities on the wall heated by power and sparks showed up as stark white stains.

“Ready?”

Anna asked in a tense voice. Looking at Anna’s face—features barely distinguishable even in the dimness—Baekgyeong nodded.

“Yeah. Let’s go.”