Chapter 107: Our Time

[Translator – Aren]

Me, Shin Nain, and the pastor.

The three of us decided to wind our way through narrow alleyways rather than move along the main road. There wasn’t any special reason. We could hear an announcement coming from loudspeakers over by the road.

They must have heard the fighting just now.

A voice steeped in paranoid vigilance boomed through the loudspeakers.

The contents made the weight of being at the very front of the blockade line hit home all at once.

[All civilians and separated soldiers, do not approach military forces. Remain calm and wait to be searched by a patrol unit. This is a warning. Any civilians or separated soldiers who approach military forces without first undergoing inspection by a patrol will be shot. That is all!]

I turned my head slightly toward Shin Nain, and he nodded.

"That’s definitely surviving military personnel.”

The fog in Seongnam was so thin it looked like a shallow layer of pale dust settled over the road.

Breathing in the raw-rubber smell inside our gas masks, the three of us decided to start by examining the traces left behind by the enemy ambushers. We couldn’t afford to waste Shin Nain’s information-gathering abilities with Ears-branch, Stage 3, [Hearing the Dying Words of the Dead], and Eyes-branch, Stage 1, [Past Vision].

Even a moron like me knew that people who fought without information were damn idiots.

The reason we Supreme Archmages were still alive and able to fight was that even when we got dragged into battles we never wanted, we never stopped collecting clues and observing.

The three of us kicked and swirled the fog mixed with shattered glass and concrete dust as we made our way toward where the bodies lay.

The alley where we had been ambushed was about as wide as a two-lane road without a center line. Shops occupied the ground floors on both sides with small apartment buildings above them. We had entered after passing the abandoned armored vehicles on the road, and every so often there was an armored vehicle or Humvee sitting right in the middle of the alley.

As we searched through the apartment buildings like this, Shin Nain used Eyes-branch Stage 1, [Cognitive Expansion], specifically [Past Vision], to check for any possible booby traps.

I had stepped back to strategically share the suffering since I was staggering around from the aftereffects of using Eyes-branch, Stage 2, [Cognitive Distortion] at 100%.

Shin Nain quietly dropped to one knee and let out a tense, drawn-out breath through the filter of his gas mask as he looked around.

Using his rifle like a cane, he wrapped the sling around his right hand several times and planted the buttstock against the ground while sweeping aside the pale dust and fog on the pavement with his left hand.

A little while later, Shin Nain stood and readjusted his grip on his rifle.

"No problems. Let’s go.”

"Weird bastards. They set up an ambush but didn’t bother with booby traps.”

I was glad there weren’t any, but it was strange as hell.

I kept remembering stories I’d picked up about tying grenades to tripwires so that one careless step made the whole thing explode.

The pastor took a short breath before speaking.

"They might be saving their explosives. Or maybe they never imagined the ambush would fail. Either way, I think we’ll find something once we keep moving.”

That made sense.

In a world with magic, it wasn’t like failing to use a few booby traps was going to kill them.

The first enemy corpse we found was near the concrete railing of an exterior staircase on one of the apartment buildings. Blood had already leaked out, trickling down the stairs before beginning to congeal in sticky streaks.

The corpse was caught over the railing and hanging forward like laundry, so we couldn’t identify who it was.

And I didn’t particularly want to touch it either.

Maybe if it were a wizard’s remains, but people naturally don't like touching other people’s corpses.

At that point, the pastor and I naturally crouched lower while keeping watch on our surroundings.

This was a completely different battlefield from inside Seoul, where thick fog blanketed everything. If the other side had anything resembling a sniper, we could suddenly start dropping dead without even knowing what hit us. We couldn’t keep using the same methods after the environment had changed.

While we kept watch, Shin Nain crouched down on the steps and slowly closed his eyes.

The pastor and I sat side by side, leaning against the concrete railing of the apartment building’s exterior staircase as we kept watch.

Shin Nain sat on the steps with his eyes closed, remaining beside the blood trickling from the corpse.

A strange silence settled over us for a moment.

Then Shin Nain broke the silence and opened his eyes.

"He’s an ordinary person.”

"What?"

I grabbed the corpse by the legs and pulled it down onto the steps.

Maybe I was handling him a little roughly, but I think being sweet and gentle even to a guy who had sprayed bullets at me without mercy would qualify as mental illness.

Still, there was such a thing as having limits, so I carefully supported the corpse’s head to keep it from smashing against the stairs.

Then I quickly looked over the body.

Name tag removed, white bandage wrapped around the left arm instead of an armband, 55 written on the white bandage in blood, gas mask on.

We had been told the identifying characteristic of the 55 Unit by the American generals a few days ago, so it was hard to believe Shin Nain when he said this guy was an ordinary person. The 55 Unit used white bandages with "55" written on them in blood instead of armbands as identification markers.

That was definitely what we’d been told.

The pastor asked exactly the question that was on my mind.

"Shin Nain, what’s going on?”

Pastor Park Yohan absentmindedly fiddled with the chin strap of his gas mask, while Shin Nain stared at the corpse I was holding for a moment before slowly shaking his head.

"They’re soldiers who defected. They’re mixing ordinary personnel into their forces to protect the Holy Alteration Battle Arts practitioners who make up their actual combat strength.”

"!”

At that moment, something I should’ve noticed earlier flashed through my mind.

The 55 Unit was supposedly made up entirely of Stage 1 Alteration-type wizards, with Ears-branch wizards making up most of each squad.

Shin Nain had even interpreted the tactics they used back when they fought the special forces.

The Ears-branch wizards served as both radio operators and riflemen, allowing the unit to move in close coordination.

If that was the case, there would have been no need to loudly broadcast a firing command through external speakers. As long as even one Ears-branch wizard could stay in contact with Yellow-Bandage Straggler, their commander, the signal could have been passed to everyone telepathically, and they could all have acted on it together.

That would have made the ambush much more reliable…

I should have realized they had non-wizard personnel the moment Yellow-Bandage Straggler gave the firing command out loud.

Which meant…

"So this bastard doesn’t have any remains to drop?”

"Baek Jemin, you little shit, there you go talking like human garbage again. Put the body down before you say that.”

-Splosh!

That was the sound of the back of the corpse’s head sinking into the pool of blood.

Even though he had defected and even shot at me, even though the bastard didn’t have any remains to drop, I gently lowered him onto the steps instead of tossing him over the side, considering that he had probably spent at least some time getting worked to the bone on the blockade line.

That was as far as my love for humanity went.

“Let’s go check the next corpse.”

"Yes. It looks like there’s a lot we need to find out.”

"You guys, you need to learn to love your enemies too. They may have been brothers and sisters who believed in the Lord.”

And so, we spent roughly an hour examining the alley and tending to the bodies. Though by ‘tending to them,’ all we really did was lay them down and fold their hands together over their chests.

The ones torn apart by suicide drones, however, had left barely any trace to recover.

In the end, we recovered 5 bodies in total.

Three of them were non-wizards.

Only one of them turned out to be a wizard. The guy who had been about to fire the machine gun was revealed to be a Heart-branch wizard.

The same guy I’d shot first because he had set up a bipod on the window frame and was about to open fire with the machine gun.

The room where the machine-gun Heart-branch wizard had been holed up was a rented villa unit furnished with a powerless refrigerator and furniture left scattered around in disarray. Judging by the energy-bar wrappers lying near the balcony, there were signs that he had held out there for quite a while.

It looked ridiculous for me to be the one tending to the corpse of the guy I’d shot dead, but the pastor had thrown a fit that I didn’t have much choice.

“Baek Jemin, once someone dies, that’s the end of it. The moment they die, judgment passes into the Lord’s hands. The living should at least show them the bare minimum of respect, no matter what sins they committed while alive. Got it?”

"I am showing them the bare minimum of respect.”

Considering I wasn’t stomping the corpses of guys who had tried to put bullets in me into paste, I figured that alone put me somewhere in the top 10% of humanity, but the pastor’s standards for basic decency were way too high.

Of course, yes-man Shin Nain reacted differently.

"As expected of you, Pastor. Hearing you preach the mindset that anyone who truly believes in the faith should naturally possess has reminded me of it anew.”

"That’s our Nain for you. You truly are spiritually awakened.”

"Kill them all. God will know His own. Amen.”

"That’s something those heretics over there who worship the Pope and Mary say!!!”

The fanatic zealot duo’s rift was met with the intervention of a wise mediator.

"Hold your trial. Just don’t tell me the verdict.”

"Do you perhaps possess some special insight, Jemin-ssi?”

A heavy metallic sound carried more weight than a hundred words.

-Click.

The moment I showed signs of slipping my finger into the trigger guard and resting it lightly on the trigger, we Supreme Archmages recovered our original unity.

Shin Nain immediately began extracting information through Ears-branch, Stage 3, [Hearing the Dying Words of the Dead], while the pastor and I thoroughly searched the surroundings and kept watch.

I looked over the closed doors and readjusted my grip on the AR-15.

Keep the rifle pulled into my body and ready to fire immediately. Stay constantly prepared to bite my tongue and activate Eyes-branch, Stage 2, [Cognitive Distortion]. Blink a few times to check the condition of my eyes.

All three checked out fine.

My eyes still felt slightly dry and gritty, but maybe because my stage had risen, the penalty had definitely diminished a lot compared to before, when tears had been streaming down my face.

This much was plenty in a place with almost no fog.

Leaving Shin Nain alone while he was busy talking to the corpse, I gestured toward the pastor.

"My eyes are mostly back to normal, so let’s check the other rooms and the lockers farther inside. I'll check for danger. Pastor, stay behind me and act as my totem.”

"What do you mean by 'totem'? Sounds like idolatry. Just call me a cross.”

"Haah~.”

Fuck it. I’ll give him this one.

"Cross-nim, follow me.”

"Okay."

No red footprints appeared in the [Future 10 Seconds Ahead] produced through Eyes-branch, Stage 1, [Cognitive Expansion].

Shin Nain hadn’t mentioned there being any monsters either, but after running into that insane Human-skin Tapeworm back in Anyang, letting our guard down was out of the question. We weren’t up against monsters or some non-wizard army but wizards just like me.

I had no intention of doing something as stupid as letting my guard down against another wizard.

I moved extremely carefully around the tightly shut door.

-Slap!

First, instead of standing in front of the door, I pressed my back against the wall beside it.

Instructor Song Smith had drilled it into me over and over that standing directly in front of a door was incredibly insane.

From there, my painstaking precautions continued.

Before touching the doorknob, I inspected it carefully, tapped it with the buttstock in case something would trigger on contact, knocked on the door, and even politely asked after whoever might be inside.

"Anybody home?”

"Baek Jemin, what are you doing?”

"Shh!”

I could see the pastor’s face changing color by the second, but people’s lives were at stake.

I thought it would be wrong to approach something carelessly when we were trying to save lives.

Especially when one of those lives was mine. That meant I should be even more careful.

These days, if you got yourself killed doing something recklessly stupid, you’d end up reduced to a 30-second laughing stock on YouTube Shorts.

But the pastor clicked his tongue at all this caution and abruptly grabbed the doorknob.

"That’s enough. Move. I can’t stand looking at this anymore, you coward.”

"Oh, you really don’t have to.”

Despite my vigorous attempts to stop him, the pastor turned the knob and yanked the door open.

It was an old bedroom that felt like a tiny one-room rental, the kind of place that probably reeked of mold and stale dust. Apparently it hadn’t been properly ventilated, because the dampness had turned into patches of mold across the wallpaper.

A crumpled blanket lay sprawled across the floor, and a desk occupied one corner of the tiny room, with pens, pencils, and notebooks scattered messily across it.

I checked the wallpaper in case there were bloodstains, but I wasn’t skilled enough to tell anything from wallpaper already soaked through with mold. I probably could have managed it by using Eyes-branch, Stage 1 enhanced with Tongue-branch, Stage 1, but I didn’t want to waste my precious pain on something like that.

Information was important, sure, but even information had tiers.

It wasn’t urgently important, so instead I decided to search through the scraps of paper scattered across the desk to see if there were any useful records. Thanks to the pastor opening the door for me, searching the room itself was much easier.

"Why does this little shit, Baek Jemin, do fine and then turn into an idiot in the weirdest places?”

"Pastor, I can hear you.”

"I’m saying it so you can hear me. I don’t talk behind people’s backs.”

"Then only say nice things.”

Of course not talking behind someone’s back was normal.

That wasn’t a reason for the pastor to act so shameless about it.

I let the pastor’s voice demanding to know whether I was some goddamn ungrateful bastard go in one ear and out the other while I cleared away dried-up ballpoint pens and pencils with broken tips. Seeing such old-fashioned writing tools in the era of smartphones gave me a rough idea of what circumstances the survivor who had stayed here must have been in.

They probably hadn’t been in a position where they could afford to use a phone.

Gangnam Thousand-Miles Eyes had only begun trying to break through the blockade line a few days ago, but Seongnam had already been on the front line long before that.

If they were willing to shoot all 10 million people in Seoul, evacuating the residents of Seongnam had probably been pushed back again and again.

I figured the owner of this place had probably been a Gyeonggi resident stranded in northern Seongnam.

The notebook, probably a remnant of someone’s past studies, had yellowed with age and was filled with nothing but complicated questions and English vocabulary. Maybe they would have mattered in peacetime, but in a situation like this, they had been reduced to truly useless knowledge.

Good thing I learned magic when I did.

The times were marching toward the Republic of Korea becoming a magical Superpower.

Just as I was thinking that, I found a notebook whose ink looked comparatively fresher.

When I picked it up, Pastor Park Yohan stopped cursing at me and sidled over to peek at it from over my shoulder.

"Find something?”

"Let’s have a look."

*t*t*

April 23rd.

The blockade line finally broke.

They say they managed to drive the monsters back again, but you’d have to be a fucking idiot to believe that.

They’ve already been putting off our evacuation for months.

Nobody even waits for the military to tell us anymore. Everyone shuts their doors on their own, obeys curfew, and doesn’t meet anyone.

I’m lonely.

But I don’t want to become a monster.

This is worse than COVID.

I want to go out and have fun.

April 26th.

There was a note under my front door, and what it said was so shocking and classified that I decided to write it down separately.

I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I want to vent to someone. There’s nobody to vent to, so I’m writing it down instead.

They knew.

They knew those damn monsters were going to come out, and all the National Assembly members ran away. And apparently the president who went to Incheon is a body double, so nobody even knows where the real one went.

What kind of fucking country is this?

People with no power, people like me, get eaten trying to stop monsters while all the big shots run away?

And after all that, if I refuse to join the army, I’m the criminal.

May 1st.

The military police knocked on my door.

They left for now, but shit, I’m so fucking scared.

Dammit.

I’ve seen what those damn monsters are like. Who in their right mind would join the military?

Who’s supposed to fight? I’ve seen people fighting while doped to shit after all the higher-ups ran away, so who the hell is supposed to keep fighting?

The guys defending the blockade line?

So what?

That doesn’t mean I have to do it too, fuck…

My 2nd.

Somebody reported me

Fuckfuckfuck…

I want to live too

Mom

*t*t*

Tsk.

The pastor, who had been peeking over my shoulder, was the first to click his tongue.

"You’ve got to fulfill your duty of national defense. A young man, with the country in crisis, running away and hiding like this…When you see things like this, Lee Sejun isn’t actually a bad person at heart. He’s got a solid core!”

"You're usually the harshest on him.”

"I taught Lee Sejun how to strip away the weakness in his heart, and he refuses to listen. He doesn’t even want to come to church, so at that point he’s just possessed by Satan and his demons.”

I carefully picked up the record, straightened it out, and decided to tuck it into one of my cargo pockets.

The pastor was angry at the cowardice of a young man who had refused the mobilization order, but I had noticed something completely different. Something seriously troubling. The most important detail, the kind you could easily miss if you skimmed past it, had caught my eye.

"Pastor. I think the Gangnam Thousand-Miles Eyes’ people might have been the ones spreading this rumor.”

"Rumor?"

"The part about the president who went to Incheon being a body double.”

Whether it was true or not, it made me even more confused about what exactly the Gangnam Thousand-Miles Eyes wanted and what the group under him wanted.

Gangnam Thousand-Miles Eyes could kill people according to his level of recognition of them.

If he wanted the real president dead, he could’ve killed him ages ago.

If the president who went to Incheon was a fake, then Gangnam Thousand-Miles Eyes had killed the real president himself and was pretending not to know where he was. And if the president really had gone to Incheon, then Gangnam Thousand-Miles Eyes was deliberately leaving him alive.

Was there something besides revenge?

Come to think of it, Gangnam Thousand-Miles Eyes could kill the decision makers himself. Why the hell was he demanding that they be handed over to him?

Was he genuinely insane?

Just as one thought started leading to another, the pastor smacked me on the shoulder a couple of times.

"Baek Jemin. Hmm? Why are you sitting there thinking? We all heard Gangnam Thousand-Miles Eyes’ voice. Shin Nain did too.”

"Ah."

"Just ask Nain. What are you agonizing over it for? This is a clue, right? If you’ve got it, let’s go ask Nain. He’ll be waiting for us.”

We had the Super Information Collector, Shin Nain.

Shin Nain.

He couldn’t sling around flashy killing spells like Fireball or Chain Lightning, but when it came to utility and convenience, he was damn incredible. Setting aside all his irritating qualities and defective personality, he was so versatile and useful that we couldn’t get rid of him, a lunatic who held us hostage with his sheer performance.

The pastor and I searched the draft dodger’s hideout one more time in case there were any other clues, but there was nothing else left to find.

If there were another clue, it would be in the Heart-branch wizard’s memories.

When we headed back toward the balcony, Shin Nain had already finished using [Hearing the Dying Words of the Dead].

He was sitting astride the Heart wizard’s body with his headset on, bobbing his head while humming a hymn through the gap around his gas mask filter. Once he noticed us approaching, he lowered the headset around his neck and revealed what he had learned.

"I found out how Yellow-Bandage Straggler’s tactics work.”

According to what Shin Nain had uncovered, the 55 Unit wasn’t using walkie-talkies and communication equipment simply because it now included non-wizard personnel.

The key was Yellow-Bandage Straggler himself, an Inverted Ears-branch wizard at Stage 3.

"That demon Yellow-Bandage deliberately pretends to leak information so the enemy will listen, then uses it to steer their actions. I suspect that’s why they don’t bother setting booby traps and actively make use of non-wizard forces as well. If you can manipulate your opponent's movements according to your own intentions, the advantage would be overwhelming.”

"Steer them how?”

"Plant suggestions like, ‘If I’m ambushed, I should take cover over there.’ ‘If bullets start flying, I should throw myself to the right.’ ‘There won’t be an ambush here.’ Things like that. They seem to retain friend-or-foe recognition itself, but this Heart-branch Holy Alteration Battle Arts practitioner also had the suggestion ‘If bullets start flying, throw yourself to the right’ deeply embedded in him.”

"Aha."

Unfortunately for the Heart-branch wizard, before he could throw himself to the right, he got shot and died inside my slowed-down time.

As expected, every plan is perfect until you get punched in the face.

-Tap, tap.

Shin Nain tapped the hood-covered side of his head with his index finger and smiled with the corners of his eyes behind the lenses of his gas mask.

"However, Upright Ears-branch Holy Alteration Battle Arts practitioners can detect a person’s true intentions even through communications devices. That’s why Yellow-Bandage used vehicles containing Human Slimes to create a kind of jamming effect. But conversely, that also means the locations where he can launch surprise attacks and ambushes are limited. And now that Jemin-ssi has shown that his 100% [Cognitive Distortion] can break through the demon’s tricks, he’ll probably refrain from attempting another careless ambush.”

The instant he heard that, the pastor narrowed his brow in displeasure.

"Then are you saying that me hiding behind that armored vehicle was something this Yellow-Bandage bastard guided me into doing too?”

"I can't say for certain. But considering that Dogma-type practitioners aren’t bound by stages even if he did guide you there, I suspect your Dogma-type magic may have turned it back to your advantage.”

As expected, Shin Nain had learned a lot.

If it had been Lee Sejun, he’d have been yawning his head off. Go Ryeoha would’ve been whining, and Hamza would’ve done nothing but tremble. This lunatic, on the other hand, was sitting on a corpse, humming songs, and rattling off useful information nonstop.

I finally couldn’t take it anymore and pointed at Shin Nain.

"Hey. I got it, so get off the corpse now.”

"If you, Jemin-ssi, have finally awakened spiritually and wish to show even these people respect…”

"You’ll damage the remains.”

How dare he smear the flesh wrapping my precious remains with his ass?

If so much as a single hair got onto the magic symbol that should have been engraved over his heart, I'd kill Shin Nain and steal his Ears-branch magic. But then I realized what kind of work would be involved in actually taking the heart out, and my whole face twisted into a grimace.

"My life sure took a weird turn. I’ve never even wrung a chicken’s neck before.”

The pastor looked back and forth between me and the Heart-branch wizard’s corpse with an uncomfortable expression, then frowned hard.

"Jemin. Those remains are lower-stage than you anyway. Do you really have to take them out?”

"We should at least test it once.”

"Then just stab it!”

"What if all I do is leave a scratch?”

I recalled the rules regarding wizard remains once again.

If I destroy the remains of a wizard at a higher stage than me, I can plunder that stage.

When an Ears-branch wizard destroys another wizard’s remains, they can glimpse that wizard’s memories.

And in all cases, destroying a wizard’s remains allows you to plunder the other person’s knowledge.

However, I need to possess enough of a foundation to understand that knowledge before I can steal it.

Then what would happen if I destroyed the remains of a wizard at a lower stage than me? To test that, I stripped the Heart-branch wizard’s clothes off and exposed his upper body, then drew my combat knife and aimed the tip at him. I left his gas mask on because I couldn’t bring myself to look at his face.

I offered a few kind words to the Heart-branch wizard who had probably already crossed the River Styx.

"Since you tried to rip me to shreds with a machine gun, think of this as divine punishment after death, and let’s crack that chest wide open.”

"You lunatic.”

At this point, I would almost feel empty without the pastor chiming in.

A little while later, accompanied by an entire ASMR collection of bones scraping, flesh grinding, and muscles snapping, a blood-soaked heart popped free. Sure enough, the Heart-branch magic symbol was engraved across it, giving off an eerie light.

Pastor Park Yohan and Shin Nain had already turned their heads away.

"If you’re going to do it, hurry up and get rid of it.”

"Jemin-ssi, I still haven’t awakened the Heart-branch, so looking at it makes me dizzy.”

"I know, I know. What can you do when I’m the only Great Archmage with all 5 branches?"

Thanks to the fanatic zealot duo happily yielding the heart to me, the atmosphere turned downright heartwarming.

This was why I hadn’t brought Lee Sejun or Go Ryeoha.

The Heart-branch wizards among our Supreme Archmages were already strong enough.

What if those two bastards smashed a low-level wizard's Heart and somehow leveled up from it?

Then I, the Great Archmage, Baek Jemin consumed by jealousy, might end up clutching the corpse of a fallen comrade, bawling my eyes out while destroying their remains.

To prevent such a tragedy, I needed to gobble up the experience points and knowledge myself.

Me!

"Please, Heart-branch Stage 2!”

-Crunch!

When I stomped it underfoot, the heart dispersed into fog, and the mist flowed straight into my body.

I thought I might level up, but…

There was none of the Alteration-type magic’s trademark cram-school injection that simply hammered knowledge straight into my head.

Instead, because I was an Ears-branch wizard, the memories of this 55 Unit wizard unfolded before my eyes.

A damp, clammy underground passage.

A barricade formed by Amalgam and Predator Spine corpses fused together with Human Slime.

Inside the subway passage protected by that grotesque wall, a strange and solemn ritual was underway.

Under the dim fluorescent lights, soldiers knelt on one knee with their firearms placed before them, heads bowed as they listened reverently. Every one of them held a combat knife in their left hand while raising their right hand, ready to slice their own flesh against the blade.

Standing before them was someone familiar.

Someone I had encountered once before at Konkuk University through magic.

Father Kang Peter.

The priest with the gentle expression and sorrowful eyes walked among the dozens of kneeling soldiers, laying hands on each of them one by one as he spoke.

[66 for 7. 55 for 66. Humanity for 55.]

It was the 66 Society’s password.

The soldiers who received Father Kang Peter’s laying on of hands bowed their heads even more deeply and recited in formal voices.

[5 above 4. We who believe in 5 are human.]

After laying hands on them once in order, he changed direction and began again in reverse.

It was around then that the priest’s hand came to rest atop the Heart-branch wizard’s head.

[What is the one thing you absolutely never wish to lose?]

Father Kang Peter’s voice settled over him, and the Heart-branch wizard heard the pounding of his own heart.

Perception, intellect, adaptation, fate, life…

[What do you desire most?]

Eyes, Hand, Tongue, Ears, Heart.

The Heart-branch wizard chose the Heart.

At that, Father Kang Peter answered in a voice tinged with a smile.

[July 23rd.]

-Nod.

In the memory, the Heart-branch wizard bowed his head solemnly and reverently.

I could sense, however faintly, the countless emotions swirling through the Heart-branch wizard’s mind.

Anger, despair, resignation, sorrow, hope, exhilaration.

Emotions that seemed perfectly natural were directed somewhere completely unexpected.

The Heart-branch wizard of the 55 Unit despised Father Kang Peter, hated him, and feared him.

That damn monster.

Only then did I start noticing the other soldiers too.

Most followed as though entranced, but a few obeyed with reluctant expressions.

Yet, however unwilling he was, however much he resented the man before him, the Heart-branch wizard did not refuse Father Kang.

—But.

The Heart-branch wizard slowly lowered his gaze again and closed his eyes.

—Still better than being trapped for eternity inside a monster’s body. Yeah. Fuck…

The memory ended.

Did it show me that because it had been his most intense memory? Or because it contained the information I most wanted to know?

But once I returned to reality, the sweaty dampness soaking the inside of my gas mask was driving me insane. Unable to stand it, I started clawing at the chin strap to loosen it, then gave up and breathed out instead.

-Huuff, huff.

"Baek Jemin?”

I raised a hand and put the pastor’s worries to rest.

Good thing he hadn’t said anything yet. Shin Nain, who had heard the thoughts in my head, was staring at me with a rigid gaze as well.

For a moment I wondered whether I should tell the pastor but quickly changed my mind.

We were in the middle of an infiltration, so I better keep quiet for now.

It would be dangerous to make him focus on something irrelevant.

"It’s nothing. I’m just motion sick.”

"You’re getting helicopter sickness an hour after getting off the helicopter?”

"Pastor, have you ever had motion sickness? Mine works like this.”

"Oh, quit the nonsense. If there’s nothing important, let’s go. Doesn’t look like you gained a new stage either.”

The pastor clicked his tongue and turned away.

Good.

I pulled my gas mask up slightly and gulped down air.

-Haah, haah.

Then, as if making up my mind, I put the gas mask back on.

We were in combat. Right now, I needed to kill the Yellow-Bandage Straggler, so I pushed the matter aside.

Still, it was significant that I had now gotten official confirmation from knowledge originating from the 66 Society itself of what kind of people made up the 55 Unit.

Shin Nain and I silently readjusted our grips on our rifles and left the Heart-branch wizard’s corpse behind.

An eternity.

If a monster eats you, you suffer for eternity.