Chapter 324

No one had ordered them to stop, yet everyone’s movement froze. Baekgyeong, drained to a sickly pallor, asked in a dull, cracked voice.

“Explain. What is this right now.”

“I set up a detonator so the river would flow in. Starting from the Psychological Health Center’s middle Entry Route, the Nathan River is going to pour in.”

It took a moment for everyone to process Isaac’s words. The silence, like time itself had stalled, shattered under Baekgyeong’s hoarse roar.

“Not torrential rain—river water? You actually carried out that insane plan?”

“The torrential rain was only a backup. The forecast can change any time.”

Baekgyeong sucked in a deep breath, glared at Isaac with naked contempt, then yanked Siron toward him in urgency.

“Yoon Siron, get on my back. Now!”

“Hey! W-wait!”

Baekgyeong forced the struggling Siron onto his back and shot forward at a dead run. But the three left behind couldn’t move, as if their feet had been nailed to the floor. It was because Lewis was holding on to Isaac and wouldn’t let go.

“What do you even want? Were you trying to kill all of us?”

Lewis demanded it fiercely, his face as pale as lead. At the word “us,” Isaac’s brow tightened by the slightest degree, and his gaze dropped to Lewis’s hand gripping him. Lewis’s hard fingers were pressing down with force on the neat bullet wound that had punched clean through Isaac’s shoulder.

“Yes.”

“Hah!”

At Lewis’s sharp, hollow laugh, Isaac lifted his eyes and stared at his face without a word.

“It’s not that surprising. You were lives that should’ve been dead in the first place.”

“Do you know this? A traitor is not a wolf—only prey.”

“...That’s from . Sounds like it made an impression.”

“There are hundreds still in there. They’ll die without even knowing why.”

“Worthless lives.”

“Oh, for God’s sake. They’re Alphas too. They’re people, same as us!”

Lewis gasped and spat it out like a scream. Isaac answered with a cold smile.

“Then go save them.”

Isaac shook off Lewis’s hand and moved without a hint of hesitation.

Watching Isaac’s back recede, Lewis’s breathing broke into ragged, uneven snatches. Fury made his blood boil from head to toe, and a shriek-like ringing screamed in his ears. With a trembling hand, Lewis raised his gun toward Isaac. He looked at Anna rushing in to stop him, and laughed in pain.

“I can’t take it anymore. This can’t be allowed. Anna.”

In his boyhood, Sinclair would sometimes see prophetic visions. Afterimages of the future overlapped reality, and illusions would appear without warning—like dreams in broad daylight. He had no way of knowing why those revelations came. At first, all he could do was explain it as a bizarre phenomenon: the tumor in his head stimulating some part of his brain.

It was inevitable that once he became an Alpha and regained his health, he lost that foresight. He no longer saw daylight visions. The only illusions left to him were dreams that came when he slept—common, ordinary dreams made from images his unconscious dragged up at random.

Even so, within those muddied, chaotic images, there were very rare moments when he felt something violently intense. A dream that remained carved into him, sharp and unmistakable even after he woke.

He had that dream around the time the political landscape lurched under the Beljoras military junta’s coup, compounded by Isaac Bazelli and Marta Monto’s interference, as he was in the midst of winding down the human-trafficking business. It was a dream about Noah’s Ark. In the dream, Noah—under the pretense of building a new paradise—drove the end of the corrupt old world forward with ruthless force. The Ark, with both females and males paired and boarded, was a gene vault prepared for what would come after the end.

No one human, except Noah’s family, was allowed to board the Ark. As desperate pleas and curses rose without end from outside, and their voices hammered inside his skull like tinnitus, Sinclair woke. For a long time he couldn’t move, only replaying the dream again and again.

It wasn’t one of his usual chaotic dreams. It was a message someone—someone unknowable, who had once shown him the future in childhood—had deliberately shown him, after he had lost his revelations.

Sinclair realized he was no different from Noah. He, too, was the one to announce the old world’s end—and to select the breed that would live on in the new world’s paradise.

“A call is coming in from Mr. Hurt Hitchins. Will you take it?”

Buried in thought, Sinclair lifted his eyes at the voice that speared into his mind like an ambush. A young flight attendant was looking at him with a polite smile. He was in the air, flying overhead. He had boarded a private jet bound for New York at almost the exact time Isaac attacked Hybris’s base in Baggers City.

Sinclair stared at the attendant with tired eyes. Perhaps that detached gaze stirred fear, because the attendant’s smile stiffened into something rigid. Sinclair looked away and accepted the phone without comment.

“How is it going.”

At Sinclair’s question, the man on the other end let out a deep sigh. Hurt Hitchins, one of Hybris’s administrators, spoke in an androgynous, metallic voice that grated unpleasantly.

-Jackson’s status and the Omega’s status still haven’t been confirmed. And restoring power inside the underground tunnel isn’t possible at this point.

A sudden surge of anger boiled up in Sinclair. Because of the cryptocurrency theft, he had departed for New York and couldn’t respond immediately to Isaac Bazelli’s intrusion. Instead of being on-site, he was trapped on the aircraft, forced to judge the situation from fragments delivered over the phone.

-The other side is equipped at the level of heavy weaponry. Should we bring in anti-tank weapons?

Sinclair fell into thought. The place where the Alphas and Isaac were facing off was a narrow corridor. A narrow passage inevitably created a bottleneck, restricting simultaneous attacks even with a clear disparity in numbers. Unless they disabled him through overwhelming firepower or struck from behind, it was hard to say their side truly held the advantage. Even so, Sinclair couldn’t allow it.

“No. Securing the Omega comes first.”

Listening to the other side’s subdued silence, Sinclair continued.

“Assume an escape attempt. Have search teams stand by around the Storm Drain and the Entry Route.”

After ending the call with the administrator, Sinclair reached New York in barely twenty minutes. He went straight to a mansion he’d acquired near the airport. Dylan Brown was waiting there, having arrived ahead of him to assess the situation.

In the media room of the mansion—spare, cold, and unused enough to feel bleak—Dylan played the footage he had prepared. It was CCTV Footage filmed two hours earlier, recording what happened after Isaac Bazelli entered the Deep Drainage Tunnel.

A low-resolution image filled the TV screen. It had been recording even before Isaac Bazelli appeared. A recon team sprinted down the corridor, took up a guard posture, and moved into a Cell. Wisps of pale gunsmoke drifted out into the dim corridor, and before long, Isaac Bazelli emerged from the Cell. Bazelli killed the recon team that rushed him in one clean sweep, then—like a man claiming to be a savior—got the Hostages out.

After guiding the Hostages to the escape route connected to the Storm Drain, he shot the entry door’s reader and destroyed the lock. It seemed intended to keep anyone from pursuing the Hostages who fled. Right after that, Bazelli leveled his gun at the CCTV camera, and the footage cut to black.

“What happened to the people who escaped?”

“We have two detained.”

“And the rest?”

“The remaining nineteen are unaccounted for. We tried to secure nearby road CCTV south of the Nathan River, but the hurricane damage still hasn’t been fully restored, so we couldn’t obtain the footage. There were no police reports, either.”

Dylan stared at Sinclair, his face uncharacteristically roiling with emotion. The look on him was one of desperation, as if the plea—use your foresight to break this deadlock right now—was lodged in his throat.

Sinclair wanted to tell him he didn’t have the power to foresee everything. No—wanted to tell him that power had vanished long ago.

The Langford Bridge collapse, the cryptocurrency value spike, the prophecy that he himself set into motion until the number of Alphas and Omegas finally reached balance—those and the other things he had pushed forward with certainty all originated in the revelations he received as a boy.

After that, he didn’t know the future. The future remained unknown territory to him, but it didn’t matter. He had become an absolute being who could overtake the visions he once saw and create a new future.

Aiming like he was sighting down a rifle, Sinclair stared at the black CCTV screen and spoke.

“Nineteen people didn’t just evaporate. Bazelli had a collaborator waiting outside the exit. They must have used a large vehicle or a transport boat, so tell the Baggers City Police Commissioner to deploy helicopters and pursue immediately.”

“Yes, sir.”

A faint smile surfaced on Dylan’s face. A smile of certainty that the Designer had a way to break this situation open. Before the young man who worshiped him left the room, Sinclair pointed at the TV screen, which displayed “No Signal,” and asked,

“Is there a live CCTV feed screen?”

“There is.”

Dylan changed the channel and played the CCTV feed. A familiar place from an unfamiliar angle filled the screen. It was the mid-zone of the Entry Route connecting the Psychological Health Center to the Deep Drainage Tunnel. It wasn’t tied into the underground power grid; it drew electricity from the Psychological Health Center’s power system, so the CCTV hadn’t shut off.

On-screen, young Alphas in full gear were entering the Entry Route. Grimly, there was no on-site commander among them to lead the fight. The three seasoned Executors with relatively deep military experience were roaming different parts of New York at that very moment.

Manhattan, the Greenwich Village post office box service, Post Office Box 14821. The address Jackson Cliff had used to send the laptop filled with DeepCoin.