Chapter 322

Isaac stared at the smear of light beyond the lens with an unbelieving look. Siron—whom he’d thought was dead—had appeared right in front of him.

“You’re Isaac, right? It sounded like your voice, but...”

Not fully certain he’d stepped in front of Isaac at all, Siron’s expression was taut as he fumbled at empty air in the dark. Isaac answered Siron’s question in a choked voice.

“Yes.”

“Hah, thank God.”

Siron braced his exhausted body with both hands on his knees and let out a thin laugh, then, as if the more he thought about it the more wronged he felt, he snapped with a voice full of resentment.

“You should’ve come right away. Do you know how long I waited?”

Hearing the sorrow and deep relief mixed into Siron’s scolding, Isaac felt strangely unsettled. He’d killed the wrong person. He’d impulsively taken the life of Jackson Cliff, the man who knew the most about the Designer and Hybris. And yet he didn’t regret it, and it didn’t even feel foolish.

Another barrage poured in. The two of them were each concealed in Cells facing one another across the corridor. For a while, indiscriminate automatic fire raked the opposite side, then a brief lull arrived. Seizing the gap, Siron shouted over the noise.

“Where’s Baekgyeong?!”

“He’s on the surface.”

Isaac lied without blinking.

“This place is fucking horrible! Let’s get out, now!”

Siron laughed through the pain, his pheromones thickening. Isaac, eyes locked on Siron, let out a helpless, breathy chuckle without realizing it.

Even shoved to the edge of a cliff, Siron clearly carried one bright shard of cheer somewhere inside him—something that would never wear down to nothing.

If the enemy hadn’t regrouped and resumed their offensive, Isaac would have been unable to tear his eyes from Siron’s silhouette of light in the lens. He found himself dimly wanting to live, and the moment that thought surfaced, an incomprehensible urge to kill himself surged up instead.

But at the very least, he didn’t want to die like a dog down here.

“Step back a few paces.”

After spraying continuous fire downrange, Isaac immediately ducked back inside behind the steel door. While he fed a belt into the feed tray, attacks from across the way hammered the steel like blows from a sledge. Bullet impacts multiplied across the door, drilling line after line of small holes, and wind and dust leaked in through the gaps.

Isaac measured what he had left. He had fewer than five grenades remaining—the ones with real killing power—and his rifle rounds were steadily running dry. It was a fight he couldn’t win. Worse, Siron’s pheromones were unusually strong. Air saturated with Alpha pheromones at a level that strained even Isaac had clearly affected Siron in full.

“Let’s move to the rear. There’s an escape route there.”

As Isaac started toward Siron, something unexpected happened. The airflow changed abruptly. Hot wind swept over Isaac’s sweat-soaked face, scorching as it passed.

The heat waves from gunfire and explosions were being sucked toward the gate on the right. A beat later, relatively cooler, fresher air poured inward as if being pulled in. Stagnant air mixed in convection, and the pheromones that had filled the air with taut pressure scattered wide.

Isaac worried what Siron’s pheromones would do to them. He hurriedly grabbed Siron, who was standing in the doorway, and yanked him back.

“Wear it on your back.”

“W-What? Wear what?”

To Siron, who might as well have been blind, Isaac made him put on a backpack to serve as makeshift body armor. Before Siron could ask what was happening, Isaac hoisted him onto his back. As if time were tightening a noose, he ran—breathing hard as he kicked off down the corridor.

Pheromones were an unnecessary communication tool for a rational human being. Pheromones that sharpened anger and desire into a knife-edge clearly degraded humans into something more primitive.

“This is bad. This is really fucking bad.”

Baekgyeong was consumed by rage as he felt the massive, muddled rush of pheromones mixed into the humid air like a great current. Alpha pheromones spiked aggression, and Siron’s pheromones—clear within it—prodded at his desire.

It wasn’t the kind of thought anyone should have in a corridor stacked with corpses like a mountain, but Baekgyeong wanted to suck Siron’s hole and roll with him on top of the bodies. There was no way he was the only one feeling it. Every Alpha in this corridor would be dragged by the same hunger. The more sharply death pressed in, the clearer instinct became.

“Move!”

Lewis suddenly burst out behind him, slamming Baekgyeong hard into the wall and sprinting forward.

“Fuck, you bastard!”

Baekgyeong crashed into the middle of the warm, bleeding pile and cracked his head against the wall, his eyes blazing through blood. Fury surged up to the crown of his head and he almost sprayed bullets into Lewis’s back—then he caught sight of Anna and barely hauled himself back to his senses.

Hauling up his body that felt as heavy as a thousand pounds, Baekgyeong chased after him and realized something important. Siron wouldn’t have released pheromones by choice in a space crawling with Alphas. Omegas, like Alphas, went through a cycle at regular intervals. Siron—who’d gone through his Heat Cycle around the same time as Baekgyeong—would also be nearing his next Heat Cycle.

Siron rubbed his forehead against the back of Isaac’s head. As if he were wearing goggles, a taut band wrapped around the back of his head, and above it thick, wavy hair puffed up. Rubbing his sweat-soaked forehead into that soft-feeling hair, Siron let himself breathe. Separate from hating Isaac, the moment he’d reunited with him, a belief took hold that he could survive and get out of here.

The pheromones around Siron felt like they were slicing him apart, but Isaac’s sweat and the faint pheromones threading through it seemed to steady him. Fleeing the nose-stinging stench of blood and the foul stink of excrement, and the Alphas’ overpowering pheromones that thickened by the second, Siron fixed on Isaac’s dim scent as if it were a rope. The pheromones of the man who had made him an Omega and thrown him into a living hell he’d never wanted.

Siron had always believed he was special, but he’d never wanted to be special enough to become the world’s only Omega—something not even Homo sapiens.

Since his life had already barreled into the gutter anyway, he wanted to believe there had to be a reason misfortune was this relentless. Thinking even this ordeal was part of some grand story of his, he found himself, in a way, not wanting to miss this dramatic suffering.

“I think I’m really losing it.”

A drama king, or a psychopath, or running away from reality—he felt like he had to be one of the three.

“Haah. This is fucking irritating.”

Even as anger flared toward Isaac for ruining his life, the moment he saw him again, joy and bitterness surged up together. Wanting to whine for comfort from the relief of reuniting with the man he ought to tear bald strand by strand. Stung by the unfairness of it, Siron let out a sniffling, irritated sound—and sank his teeth hard into the nape of Isaac’s neck.

Isaac’s body jerked rigid. Only then did Siron realize he’d done something weird without thinking.

“What are you doing.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

Siron lied shamelessly, then snapped at Isaac instead.

“What are you doing? Run faster!”

They reached Zone 2 in no time. Thankfully, no one was approaching from the right. The body heat of three corpses propped against the wall had cooled to lukewarm, glowing pale blue and green. Isaac set Siron down in the adjacent room to the confinement room with the escape route, then pulled a small bomb from the backpack Siron had been carrying. It was designed to direct the blast toward the side it was mounted on.

From the left, Alphas in formation were closing in on them. But something about it was different from before. The movement was individual, scattered—like how a pack of intelligent zombies might move if they advanced. Siron’s pheromones had clearly stirred them into agitation.

“Can’t you hide your pheromones?”

“...It’s not really working.”

“Is it your Heat Cycle?”

“Well... it could be.”

Siron dodged the question. Isaac recalled Siron’s Heat Cycle back in Belzoras, and realized enough time had passed that Siron’s second Heat Cycle could have started—and then some.

It was the worst possible outcome. In a situation like this, he couldn’t handle Siron’s Heat Cycle on top of everything else.

Just then, the Alpha at the front accelerated toward them. Isaac, fearlessly switching on his flashlight, aimed his rifle at the man rapidly advancing while using the open doorway as cover.

Roughly three hundred meters to the target. Without optical sights, Isaac judged the range with the naked eye and fired. It was a distance that bordered on impossible, but it hit. The man’s shoulder blew apart, and the flashlight flew with it. Isaac fired without hesitation at enemies lit by the spinning beam, and three of his five shots landed—three more men dropping.

While the enemy hesitated, Isaac pulled out a metal cable tie and wrapped it around the bomb along with the doorknob. But the moment he yanked the cable tight, a faint sound hooked into his ear. A magazine seating into a handgun, and a slide racking back, then returning forward. To his right—within twenty meters.

Isaac reflexively kicked off the wall and threw himself sideways, yanking his handgun from his back pocket. As his back slammed into the floor, a bullet fired into the spot he’d been standing a heartbeat earlier, carving a heated trajectory through the air.

Isaac released the safety and raised his gun. With lightning-fast movement, he fired at the man radiating red heat. His body was tilted, unable to maintain a stable firing posture, so even at close range it was hard to expect a hit. His instincts were right. The bullet skimmed past a hand’s breadth from the Alpha’s head and buried itself in the ceiling.

Isaac sprang up and charged him. Giving him no chance to defend, Isaac twisted the man’s arm, knocked the gun to the ground, then drove a fist up from below, slamming into him as if to smash his solar plexus. The blow landed cleanly, and the man doubled over and staggered backward.

“Lewis!”

It was a woman’s scream.

“Bazelli! Don’t shoot! Please, no!”

Anna McCarthy. Isaac’s eyes flicked fast—Anna McCarthy raising her weapon, Lewis resetting his stance. Isaac decided he should shoot Anna McCarthy first, and it was the moment he lifted his muzzle—

“Anna? Lewis?”

Siron’s voice rang out. Siron had already slipped out the door and was running toward where Anna’s voice had come from.

“You all came to save me! Don’t shoot each other!”

The three people who’d been facing off froze mid-motion.

“If you love me, that’s enough of a reason to stick together! Be nice to each other!”

Somewhere, a curse and a heavy sigh sounded at the same time.

“You all heard him, right? For now, be nice. Once we’re out of the underground tunnels, then you can kill each other.”

At Baekgyeong’s vicious remark, Anna growled.

“Shut up! Lewis, are you okay?”

“G-Gyeong... is that you? Ah—no. Lewis, why—are you hurt?”

“Yeah. I’m going into Rut soon, so it came to mind and I stopped by.”

“The first thing you say after coming to save me is that... are you out of your mind?”

“Lewis, answer me. Are you badly hurt?”

“Yoon Siron, don’t piss me off. Control your pheromones.”

While each of them said whatever they felt like saying, Lewis spat blood-mixed saliva onto the floor, rubbed his chest, and answered in a harsh, cracked voice.

“I’m not hurt. I’m fine. So... let’s just get out first.”

The instant Lewis finished, a hail of attacks poured in from the front. Isaac grabbed Siron’s arm and barely hauled him behind cover. Somehow, the enemy had already closed to point-blank range. From less than a hundred meters, merciless fire slammed into them.