Chapter 319

As soon as Baekgyeong and Anna stepped out of the Electrical Room, they saw a flashlight coming straight toward them. The beam had started about a hundred meters ahead and was swelling larger as it approached.

"Fuck. Not easy from the start."

"Please shut up and find somewhere to hide."

Muttering under their breath, they yanked open every door around the Electrical Room at random. Luckily, right before the light reached them, they managed to slip into a room with an unlocked door. They held their breath and pressed up against the door, listening hard for movement outside.

Several people swept past the door in quick succession. They were obviously going to check the damaged electrical equipment. About ten minutes later, they hurried back the way they’d come, sending radio chatter to someone. Baekgyeong couldn’t make out the words, but he could clearly feel their confusion as they confirmed there was no way to restore the electrical system.

"They’re gone."

Baekgyeong peeled his face away from the door and turned to the side. But Anna wasn’t where she should have been. A faint light brushed his back. Anna was sweeping the inside of the room with a flashlight, searching every corner.

"Are you insane?"

When Baekgyeong moved to snatch the flashlight, Anna quickly hit the power and killed the beam. Without a hint of remorse, she said,

"Looks like a sleeping quarters. Even a monk wouldn’t live like this."

Inside the cramped room, which looked like it had housed six people, there was nothing but three sets of bunk beds and personal lockers. Keeping his attention tuned to the sounds outside, Baekgyeong said tensely,

"Don’t tell me you’re planning to check every room one by one."

"We have to. How else would we know where Lewis is?"

"Haah, fuck."

Baekgyeong rubbed at his throbbing head, irritably. Lack of sleep, stress, and brutal labor had pushed his body to its limit; even his pheromone control wasn’t coming easily, unlike him. In a situation where it wouldn’t have been strange for him to collapse and die on the spot, he couldn’t afford to waste time looking for someone like Lewis.

"I’m going up."

At Baekgyeong’s declaration, Anna spoke in a stiff voice.

"You’re going up alone? Not checking together, step by step?"

"You can hear the gunfire upstairs. Siron’s probably on the same level as Isaac."

Leaving Anna—usually decent, despite her filthy mouth—in the middle of a wolf den sat wrong with him, but Baekgyeong said firmly,

"I’m going."

Before opening the door, Baekgyeong turned back again and whispered,

"Let’s meet again alive."

He eased the door open and stepped out. Relying on the thermal imaging camera’s flat, depthless view, Baekgyeong moved one careful step at a time. Against the dull backdrop of cold concrete, steel doors—colder still—showed themselves as pitch-black outlines. Even with the power out, the ceiling lights still held residual heat, lined up in a long row as bright dots and bars.

Baekgyeong flinched and stopped at the sound of footsteps behind him. Anna came up close and fell into step beside him.

"Trying not to die?"

"If Siron’s there, Lewis will be there too. And I can’t even smell Lewis’s pheromones."

It was a fair point. Baekgyeong nodded. They started moving again—toward Basement Level 1, where Siron and Isaac, and maybe Lewis as well, might be.

People said the time spent in the Capsule was time °• N 𝑜 v 𝑒 l i g h t •° for repentance. Inside a press Capsule—one hundred centimeters wide and two hundred fifty centimeters long—when oxygen cleared the muddied head, nitrogen would flood the cramped space again. The peace he’d felt while breathing rich oxygen vanished, and the dull stupor dragged on until it finally ended in blackout.

Throughout the entire process, the speaker by his head never stopped pouring out a recorded voice. The Designer’s sermon, repeating like a loop. With sharply clipped enunciation and an aggressive low midrange that pressed down on the listener, he ceaselessly preached the “truth” an Alpha ought to follow. Propaganda and doctrine of superiority, the logic of eugenics—everything was fused into the crackpot book called . It denied everything Lewis had learned at school, at home, in society.

Half a day, trapped in the Capsule while being swallowed by a forced Rut, listening to the Designer’s words—his soul shattered into fragments and was reassembled into something else.

But the moment he reunited with Siron in the Cell, everything changed. From that day on, the repentance time in the Capsule no longer transformed him the way it used to. Lewis came to regard the Designer’s sermon as nothing more than noise he had to endure. He’d realized many things through the doctrine and still loved Hybris, but he also wanted to smash the speaker spitting out nothing but radical bullshit and clamp the Designer’s mouth shut with that stinking bastard’s toes.

Lewis squeezed his tear-wet eyes shut as the volume kept rising. The time when oxygen dwindled and nitrogen rose, and his consciousness blurred. Lewis saw hallucinations. In the haze, his imagination shot off in directions he couldn’t rein in.

Siron—the one Lewis had betrayed—stared at him with depressed eyes. The ruined landscape around Siron was filled with Alpha bones and skin, genitals and semen. Lewis, who had lost his voice, couldn’t speak words of atonement to Siron, who had lost his safe place. The world went dark as if someone had smeared it with lead, and his lungs creaked like a rusted pump. His soul leaked out through the cracks between shards of a broken heart. Without a trace.

"Fucking Lewis McCarthy."

What Lewis saw when he opened his eyes in a rut-fever daze was a blinding light. A brightness so intense he couldn’t keep his eyes open was shining on him from point-blank range. Only after a long moment did Lewis realize it was a flashlight aimed at him—and that the voice waking him was familiar.

"Ted Stone?"

"You stupid bastard. In the middle of all this, you’re sleeping like you’ve got it made."

As if he’d just woken from deep sleep, the words didn’t input into his head right away.

"In the middle of what?"

"Isaac Bazelli barged in and smashed the Zone 2 gate. He’s acting like some serial killer picking people off at a mall exit—shooting everyone trying to escape."

In Lewis’s sluggishly turning mind, Isaac Bazelli’s face surfaced faintly, then disappeared. Then he understood why Isaac had come into the underground tunnel. He’d come to take Siron back. Lewis reflexively tried to sit up. But his waist wouldn’t budge. His limbs were restrained.

Lewis dragged up his last memory before blacking out. Red warning lights had flashed in front of him, and the siren and the Designer’s sermon had drifted through his head like mixed gases. But now he couldn’t hear anything. The surroundings were unnaturally silent, and it felt like only Ted Stone and Lewis himself had been left behind in the pitch-black stillness of space.

"Bazelli barged in, and what are you doing in here?"

"I’m going. I just came here first because there’s something I need to take care of!"

Stone snapped as if his shame had been prodded, then suddenly burst into laughter. Listening to that endlessly grating, frivolous laugh, Lewis understood.

Stone was trying to kill him.

Ted Stone had kidnapped Siron after their escape from Somora Prison, when Siron had nearly drowned at sea. And Lewis had restrained Stone when he tried to rape Siron—twisting his arms behind his back until they dislocated, then hanging him from the ceiling. Stone had been left like that for a long time until Hybris found them; his shoulder would have been wrecked at a serious level before barely recovering.

"Looks like you’ve still got plenty of room to breathe. Not grasping the situation?"

Through Ted’s pheromones, Lewis read the thick, murderous aggression rolling off him.

"You’re going to kill me or something?"

"Yeah. I never liked you in the first place."

Standing over him, Ted groped through the pitch-black dark until he found Lewis’s neck and clamped both hands around it. He threw his weight in and started strangling him with full force. But unfortunately for him, while Lewis had thrashed inside the Capsule, the belt had loosened—leaving Lewis’s right hand free.

Blood vessels burst in Lewis’s eyes, pressure surging into his head. Instead of wasting strength flailing to shake Ted off, Lewis swelled his chest to draw even a fraction of air, and with his free right hand he seized Ted by the hair.

"Ah—ugh—let go, fuck! Let go!"

Even as he felt the oxygen reaching his brain dwindling by the second, Lewis yanked Ted’s head down in front of his face. Then he opened his mouth and tore into Ted’s nose with all his strength. A scream like an animal being slaughtered and hot breath poured disgustingly over Lewis’s face. The moment Ted finally couldn’t hold out and released Lewis’s throat, Lewis hurriedly undid the belt restraining his upper body and spat cartilage and flesh from his mouth.

As Ted lunged at him in a rage, Lewis threw punch after punch. He must have struck the exact center of Ted’s ruined face, because a skin-crawling scream rang out long and hard through the silence.

Lewis struggled to undo the belt restraining his lower body, then twisted free and slipped out of the Capsule. Ted’s body, sprawled on the floor and writhing, almost made Lewis trip and fall—but Lewis didn’t show mercy. He kicked him hard. The man who’d lost an ear to Isaac on the island—and now had lost his nose too—clung to Lewis’s leg and sobbed like a child.

"My nose! Give it back, you bastard! Aaagh!"

For a moment, Lewis couldn’t stand the fact that Ted was the same kind of Alpha as him. Ted was a mass of filth that disgraced the very name of Alpha.

After kicking the thrashing Ted over and over, Lewis threw his weight forward on top of him and grabbed his throat. A slave to lust, raping people, living miserably with that grotesque face—wouldn’t it be better for everyone, including Ted himself, if he just died here and vanished?

Lewis, about to choke Ted Stone to death, jolted at his own thought and loosened his grip. The images of the two men he’d recently beaten into pulp and killed sprang up in his vision like a jack-in-the-box, dyeing his sight red.

Staggering, Lewis stepped out through the doorway. What met him was the same pitch-black darkness—and stagnant air. Within the layered mix of countless pheromones, Lewis caught a familiar lingering trace.

Baekgyeong’s pheromones. And Isaac’s.

"Isaac Bazelli barged in and smashed the Zone 2 gate. He’s acting like some serial killer picking people off at a mall exit—shooting everyone trying to escape."

A foul metallic taste filled Lewis’s mouth. He spat on the floor and glared into the dark.

"How unsurprising."

His teeth trembled with rage at the nauseating obsession and possessiveness Alphas had toward an Omega. Pathetically, he wanted the Omega too. He wanted Siron just as badly. Even if it wasn’t a deep drainage tunnel underground, but a pit of ruin you could only reach by opening the gates of hell and stepping through, he would have jumped in.

He couldn’t refuse this pull.