Chapter 66: Miracle Morning¹

[Translator – Aren]

The morning sunlight felt unusually bright.

Compared to the past week, spent wandering through mold-reeking ruins and rubble, it almost felt refreshingly crisp. On any ordinary day, I would’ve strolled beneath the roadside trees in the warm sunshine and turned my phone’s brightness up just to see the screen.

But now we only felt fear beneath that same sun.

Just before leaving the alley for the main road, we felt the ground shake beneath our feet. The tremors pounded through the earth hard enough to make us stagger. In the endless alley our organs quivered, and the ends of our ponchos fluttered on their own.

We reacted instantly.

Without anyone saying a word, we vaulted through a shattered storefront window and hid behind a display counter.

Me, Shin Nain, Lee Sejun, the pastor, and Hamza.

Each of us crouched behind a counter or a broken door, listening as a horde of monsters advanced. Not one of us even considered raising our heads for a peek.

The moment sunlight reached them, every monster that had been suppressed beneath the fog came bursting out of its lair.

In less than half a minute, the alley where we’d been standing moments ago was flooded with grotesque moans and pounding footsteps. The screams and cries that had once echoed through the city rang across its desolate streets once again.

Threshold Breach.

The moment the city of 10 million had suffocated beneath the dense blanket of fog, the despair of the people who’d faced the endless tide of monsters returned to fill the empty roads and alleyways.

Months later, we were finally witnessing the moment when almost the entire population of this place had become monsters.

-Aaaaaagh, Mister Soldier, help me, run, take me with you…

The fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling and the loose electrical wires began to sway violently.

Dust that had settled over medicine shelves, already ransacked long ago, drifted quietly to the floor.

This was a place where artillery and airstrikes were drowned out by the thunder of monsters’ footsteps, where the roar of fighter jets plummeted alongside the instant autocannons opened fire. where flesh was torn apart and human screams poured from monstrous throats.

None of us spoke, remaining as quiet as graves.

Only Shin Nain pulled up his gas mask and turned away with a deathly pale face. He’d apparently become something of a professional at throwing up. Instead of retching violently, he simply let the vomit dribble quietly from his mouth.

It was then that Hamza silently reached into his pocket and handed him a sheet of paper.

After finishing, Shin Nain rinsed his mouth with water from his canteen, spat it out, and quietly accepted it. It was one of those glossy pamphlets we’d picked up from the church. Even that seemed precious now. 

Almost reverently, he wiped the vomit from around his mouth using the pamphlet almost as though he were kissing it before neatly placing it inside an empty medicine cabinet.

Watching him, I felt a strange, indescribable feeling well up inside of me.

Beyond the pharmacy shelves and display counter separated only by shattered glass, we shared a strange silence. Not even a proper wall stood between us. Only that thin divide separated humans from monsters.

Humans crouched within the dust-covered shadows of ruined buildings.

Meanwhile, the monsters eagerly raced into the bright sunlight, charging willingly toward the incoming artillery shells.

While that thought crossed my mind, the vibrations shaking my stomach finally began to subside.

Everyone’s eyes naturally turned toward Hamza and Shin Nain.

Hamza tightened his grip around his rifle. Shin Nain lowered his gas mask again, blew a few breaths into the filter, then spoke up.

"Now."

"We have to break through."

The Supreme Archmages rose once more.

Stepping across shattered glass, we advanced beneath a sky without a single trace of fog. Under every crunching footstep, the vibrations of artillery fire and countless monsters continued to mingle beneath our feet.

My insides no longer trembled.

Only my heartbeat quickened slightly, keeping time with that endless rhythm.

-Huuff, huuff, huuff, huuff.

The sound of breathing through gas masks grew harsher.

Every fiber of my body wanted to break into a sprint. Instead, I forced myself to focus on nothing more than walking quickly. My heart kept screaming at me to run, but my head coldly reminded me of reality.

If we started running now, we’d burn through our stamina. And if we ran out of stamina here, it was all over.

The 760 rounds we’d pooled for the pastor, Hamza, and Shin Nain, the pain that served as both the cost and backlash of our magic, even the tiny reserve of strength we needed just to cross through his hell…none of it could be wasted.

We were heading toward the most dangerous place imaginable.

We Supreme Archmages were walking straight toward the heart of a city that could be called Hell without a shadow of a doubt.

-Sobsob, waaah...

At the far edge of my vision, beyond the roadside trees, I caught the sight of child-shaped monsters in a small park. Their split-open bellies sluggishly spilled intestines onto the ground.

Nearby, dead roadside trees that had withered from the lack of sunlight had turned into Lung Trees, strange growths hanging from their skeletal branches. They expanded and contracted in rhythm with the children’s cries.

The Tadpole Bellies’ exposed intestines writhed like earthworms, slowly sucking up what little fog remained. The lungs hanging from the trees unfurled, displaying clusters of ripealveoli, like fruit.

I noticed the pastor hesitate, but it was only for a moment.

We just kept walking.

There was nothing we could do for them.

More importantly, there wasn’t a single building left nearby that could serve as shelter.

Near the apartment complex on our right, every tiny park echoed with the cries of the Tadpole Bellies. On our left, an open expanse was lined with massive buildings, their blue-green glass facades gleaming beneath the sun.

A road sign we happened to pass told us what those huge buildings were. 

The pastor, still unable to shake the thought of the creatures we’d left behind, slowed for just an instant.

"Those buildings…They’re hospitals.”

“Amen."

Only after Shin Nain answered did the pastor start walking again.

Whether that ‘Amen’ was Shin Nain’s own brief prayer for the dead or simply an attempt to pull the pastor out of his thoughts, I didn’t ask.

The Supreme Archmages continued onward, keeping mostly to the sidewalk, occasionally stepping into the road, moving as quickly as we dared, yet still feeling unbearably slow. Between the thudding of combat boots and the clinking of metal gear, the only sound we made was the breathing through our gas masks.

The countless screams and moans echoing across the city, along with the dull tremors still shaking the ground beneath our feet, had become nothing more than background music.

-Crunch, crunch.

With every step, the cries of those trapped in an eternal nightmare erupted from every direction.

-Clink.

Each time the canteen hanging from my belt bumped against my side, the water inside swirled around.

Then I realized something.

Among the countless footsteps of monsters heading toward Seoul’s outskirts, a few sounded out of place.

The careful approach of something placing each heel down first as though trying not to snap even a single rotten twig.

Like a mischievous child creeping closer to surprise someone, barely able to contain its excitement while imagining their reaction.

I could feel it.

Just as I tightened my grip around my combat knife…

"Four faces."

Shin Nain’s voice was brief.

"They’re following us.”

After those words, we stopped walking and broke into a jog.

The hems of our ponchos, which had only been swaying before, were now fluttering with every stride.

And the farther we went, the louder they flapped.

We ran along a road choked with abandoned cars and blown-out tires.

Stepping onto a caved-in hood, I threw myself forward and rolled, ignoring the way my breathing caught in my chest.

-Bang!

The hood crumpled beneath me with a deafening metallic crash.

-Bang, bang!

By the time we were squeezing between wrecked vehicles, scuttling sideways like crabs, I heard it twice.

-Bang, bang, bang!

Our ponchos had begun billowing behind us like capes. The sound of our breathing filled the inside of our gas masks until my eyes started to sting.

The overpowering smell of rubber burned beneath my eyelids, already aching from the brilliant sunlight.

The pastor’s shout reached my ears like a blessing.

"Jemin! We’ve got to hold them off!”

Still gripping the hilt of my combat knife, I turned around. My lips parted on their own as I sucked in a sharp breath.

Amalgams.

Those things that had once been nothing but trash mobs were charging straight at us beneath the sunlight, their melted, tangled faces fixed on us. Dozens of arms and legs flailed wildly, yet somehow they never lost their balance. Even when they stumbled and crashed into pavement, they sprang right back up like coiled springs. 

Bounding between abandoned cars, they kept coming.

The melted faces had fused with dozens of limbs, eyes, noses, and mouths embedded all across what had once been human bodies. I’d long since crossed the point where I could simply think things like ‘That’s horrifying’ or ‘That’s grotesque.’

I gasped for a different reason.

There was no glabella.

The central body made entirely of heads was gone.

Faces had melted and fused across every limb across every inch of the creature’s body.

Against that monster I had no choice but to trust my single combat knife coated in [Blood of the Right Hand] and my magic.

As always, I rolled my tongue inside my mouth.

Target, kill, monster, 5 minutes, path, me.

Normally, the taste buds on my tongue would split open, I’d bleed a little, and it’d end with something like a nasty mouth ulcer.

But here, beneath the dazzling sunlight, standing in the middle of a boulevard stripped of fog, it was different.

It was numb.

Not just ordinary numbness. It felt as though I’d stepped into a crosswalk, only to find the headlights of a speeding car barreling straight toward me after running the red light. Every instinct my body possessed was screaming warnings through my head.

The root of my tongue went numb.

Sour, salty saliva flooded my mouth.

At the same time, from somewhere deep inside my head, a revolting sensation spread through my entire body. It felt as though there were eyelids inside my brain, and those eyelids had become painfully dry, rubbing back and forth between my soft brain tissue.

It wasn’t just rough and scratchy.

It felt as though every single eyelash caught beneath those imaginary eyelids were poking, prodding, and scraping through the soft folds of my brain.

Behind the revolting sensation, the colors in my vision began to blur.

The sky, which should have been blue, or at the very least a gloomy gray, was stained a vivid violet and pale lavender.

Then the pain hit. It felt as though a cold, razor-sharp blade were carving through both my tongue and my eyes at the same time.

A hard piece of steel gouging into soft flesh, scraping it raw again and again. The agony was so horrifyingly overwhelming that every movement made me instinctively hesitate. The metallic taste only made it worse.

Only then did I truly realize the pain I’d been ignoring, simply because it had become constant.

My left hand was burning.

The aftermath of shooting it with a gun to cast Eyes-Stage 2. The scorching sensation that had remained in my nerves surged through my entire forearm.

Compared to that blazing pain, the feeling of being sliced apart by steel, or the revolting sensation of imaginary eyelashes scraping around inside my brain, meant nothing.

I was burning alive.

Before that pain everything else became meaningless.

The illusion alone, the feeling of burning to death, was enough.

The pain stopped me. It tore my mind to pieces. Then that same pain forced me to move again, binding those shattered pieces back together.

Faced with the agony of burning alive, fear and logic faded.

That was why I could still step forward.

And so, trusting nothing but my combat knife, I charged at the monster.

My mouth screamed as my mind was butchered by pain. And somewhere beneath the agony, sharp enough to wring tears from my eyes, my reason whispered to me as coldly as though it belonged to someone else.

Don’t let it grab you.

With that single thought, I swung my right hand.

-Slash!

I cut it. A face fused onto a young girl’s arm, its split mouth hanging open, was severed and fell away.

But dozens of arms and legs kept writhing. They swayed and kept advancing.

The fog, which had once kindly traced every path for me, was gone.

Realizing that the faint red footprints were now all I had to follow, I swung my right hand over and over.

Wet chopping sounds rang out repeatedly.

My right foot, which had stretched backward to keep my balance, had already retreated three full steps. My left foot desperately spread sideways to widen my stance, but my legs were already trembling.

Limbs hung together, their tendons severed. Hands lay hacked clean off.

Beyond them, the overlapping eyes, formed from faces melted together, smiled at me.

They knew I was exhausted.

My trembling left foot betrayed me first, retreating on its own. As my center of gravity shifted, my right foot wavered with it.

The Amalgam didn’t miss its chance.

-Grab!

Dozens of arms seized me at once.

Their melted features, eyes, noses, and mouths, now free to drift wherever they pleased, looked at me. They pitied me. They sympathized with me. Then they welcomed me with mocking smiles. The vocal cords of things that had once been human greeted me with their final dying words.

"What’s wrong?”

I struggled.

"You’ve been acting strange lately.”

I wildly hacked with my knife.

"Did you hear the rumor? Apparently…”

Before my blade could reach them, countless hands reached me first.

A heavy, revolting weight crashed over me.

Every time I struggled to throw them off, another arm reached out and grabbed hold. They were thorough, like they refused to allow even the desperate flailing of an overturned cockroach.

I couldn’t endure it, so I fell.

-Crash!

Soft, chubby baby arms settled atop the hood of my poncho.

Their short length didn’t matter. The melted faces acted like glue, linking them together into long, pincer-like limbs.

Clusters of compound eyes, rolling within tiny holes scattered across those arms, turned toward me.

A pair of long pincers fashioned from baby arms. Compound eyes sprouting from them. They settled at the edge of my vision, beyond the scratch lenses of my gas mask.

Pinned by countless limbs, crushed beneath a grip stickier than any spiderweb, I had no choice but to watch the Amalgam’s face approach.

Or rather, its single and compound eyes.

Nothing on that melted tangle of faces remained distinct except their gazes.

Clouded pupils turned milky white with cataracts. Innocent eyes, darting curiously from side to side. Eyes trembling, warning to cry, yet unable to close because they had no eyelids. Terrified gazes, their eyeballs fused together like broken egg yolks…

All of them slowly turned toward me.

They looked into my eyes, hidden behind the gas mask’s lenses, and let out a laugh through a gaping, fused mouth.

It was a laugh mixed with sobbing.

Then they began to pour down.

The tangled, melting faces, that dough of fused compound and single eyes, started flowing over my gas mask.

My shoulders and neck stiffened.

I kept pouring strength into my arms and legs yet accomplished nothing.

The blade in my right hand, held fast by dozens of hands, could do nothing but slash uselessly through empty air. My hand shook so violently that all I could manage was not letting go of the hilt.

Then the faces spilled over my mask.

-Splat.

The cluster of eyes that landed on the left lens met my gaze.

-Splat, splat.

I felt the sticky weight settling over the rubber of the mask. The burden pressing against it crushed directly into my cheek.

The faces kept coming.

-Splat, splat, splat!

Layering themselves over the lenses, mixing together, stacking atop one another, watching me with their countless eyes.

Only then did I hear something else.

A crushing emotion, one so heavy that even the blazing pain racing through my left arm couldn’t drown it out, set my lungs boiling.

Something sticky, heavy, and as black as tar, yet burning hot, surged upward from the pit of my stomach.

Whoever said despair was cold?

"Haaah..."

Right now, I felt hotter than anyone else.

"Aaaaaagh!”

Tears hot enough to cook flesh streamed from my eyes.

Foamy saliva, dry and cracked between my parched lips, flew from my mouth as I screamed.

"Aagh, Agh! AAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!”

The weight crushing my body finally lightened.

The instant I realized it, I wildly swung my combat knife and forced myself back to my feet.

I was standing on my own two legs again.

Only then did I finally gasp for air.

The faces, however, were still stuck fast to my gas mask’s lenses and wouldn’t come off. 

I lowered my head and bent my right arm inward.

So the tip of my blade could reach those revolting eyes plastered to my mask.

-Stab!

The tip carved another scratch into the gas mask’s lens, but what I saw even more clearly was the cluster of eyes being ripped apart by steel.

Those eyes.

Were they jealous? Or resentful?

Or perhaps were they filled with the lament of monsters that had failed to reproduce?

I scraped the eyeballs off my mask with the tip of my blade.

-Scrap, scrap.

[Blood of the Right Hand] was still incredibly useful, even beneath the sunlight. Its killing power might have diminished, but scraping away the remains posed no problem.

Every scrape of the blade left the monster’s flesh losing its strength, hardening before crumbling into dust.

When I had cleaned both lenses, the monster’s remains scattered away into mist, leaving behind only the gas mask, its lenses gouged to hell.

It was then that Lee Sejun slapped my shoulder.

"I beat the one that jumped you to death with my Bloody Fist.”

"Yeah. Thank you.”

Lee Sejun, you bastard, I forgive every bit of the bullshit you’ve ever said up to now.

Hamza was the one who filled us in.

Coward that he was, always hanging back from a fight, he apparently hadn’t stopped watching. He’d managed to figure out what happened.

"We killed all of them. But they don’t die easily. Even if you shoot them in the head…”

"Yeah. They’re tough as hell.”

I didn’t need Hamza to tell me. I’d fought one at point-blank range.

The Amalgams in the fog and the Amalgams under the sun were on completely different levels in close combat.

Inside the fog, they’d merely staggered toward you, rubbing you with little more than their heads. Out here beneath the sunlight, they wielded dozens of flailing limbs almost at will. Even the way they used their instinct to split their faces into more bodies, limiting it to their own flesh and using it like glue to reshape themselves, was anything but ordinary.

As the adrenaline finally ebbed, the trembling in my hands became impossible to ignore.

5 minutes.

No matter what, I couldn’t last more than 5 minutes.

The violet sky and the city stained crimson were proof enough.

Even as I stood there, blankly staring at the deserted buildings, at the spectacular pillars of flame rising beneath endless explosions, I’d almost died…

In less than 5 minutes I had nearly died.

"Pastor, how much ammo did we use?”

"Nain and I each burned through 2 magazines.”

So they had spent 120 out of 730 rounds in this fight.

In less than 5 minutes.

Every one of the Supreme Archmages understood exactly how heavy those numbers were.

"Engagement is impossible."

We couldn’t fight.

We mustn’t fight.

We couldn’t afford the cost.

"Let’s run like hell.”

When I turned around, every one of the Supreme Archmages had gone deathly pale.

It was too late to turn back.

The gunfire had already been echoing nonstop.

The tactic of advancing cautiously was no longer an option.

We ran with everything we had, adjusting our pace just enough to ensure we wouldn’t stop moving.

The rules of engagement drifted into my mind.

The ones that said you should never fire your weapon carelessly if you could help it.

At first I thought that it was just common sense, but now that I was actually fighting for my life here, I finally understood.

-Huff, huuff, huuff.

Hamza’s breathing inside his gas mask was growing ragged.

Shin Nain kept running with his rifle at the ready, breathing in short, controlled bursts to keep his rhythm. Even so, he couldn’t completely hide the tremor creeping into each exhale. 

Some of them had heard the gunshots. Some had turned their attention toward us.

That alone was enough to keep us running.

Lee Sejun practically carried the pastor as they ran. Hamza gasped for breath yet never let go of his backpack. Shin Nain, apparently exhausted from carrying his rifle at the ready, finally let it hang from its sling. I shifted my combat knife to my left hand and wiped my gas mask’s lenses with my bleeding right hand.

-Squeak, squeak.

The blood on my right hand slowly seeped into the scratches carved across the lenses.

When I pulled my hand away, gripping my combat knife again, and vaulted over a barricade made from abandoned vehicles, a road sign caught my eye.

[Olympic Bridge]

Beneath the dazzling sunlight, the city’s true form, hidden beneath the sea of fog, was finally revealing itself alongside the Han River.

Every one of us looked up. Our sprint gradually slowed.

A massive bridge majestically stretched across the Han River.

And over it, over the abandoned cars and makeshift roadblocks, hung an enormous shadow.

The pale haze above wasn’t the outline of mist. It was something organic.

Sunlight alone didn’t guarantee a cloudless sky.

But today the sky truly was completely clear.

What covered the heavens wasn’t clouds. It was a swarm of Human-skin Jellyfish. Tens of thousands, no, hundreds of thousands of them.

Like countless jellyfish overtaking a beach, they stained the transparent sky the color of human skin, their endless tentacles undulating until they completely filled the heavens.

And above them, I saw something else.

At first glance it looked like a centipede.

But the instant I realized that centipede-like creature was wrapped around something as it fell, the instant my eyes picked out the details, my asshole clenched on instinct.

Hundreds of thousands of people were fused into it.

Where a centipede’s legs should have been, long, bat-like wing membranes stretched outward, their thick veins bulging outward vividly. Every wing was made of human beings.

Its body had been crushed or melted until no recognizable shape remained. Running down the center of its torso was a long, split-open mouth. Instead of teeth, huge keratin fingernails meshed together haphazardly.

The flying centipede moved like a giant leech or earthworm. It had coiled itself completely around a lump of metal, a fighter jet.

Using those fingernails lining its slit-like mouth as teeth, it idly gnawed at the aircraft’s canopy while falling together with it. Hundreds of human wings and its own grotesque body were wrapped tightly around the jet.

So that was what had been dragging those aircraft out of the sky, buried beneath mountains of flesh.

The Sky Centipede was feeding itself to the fighter jet’s engines without the slightest hesitation.

It didn’t care whether the engines ground its flesh to pulp, whether artillery shells tore it apart or whether it burned. As though flaunting an endless, maternal love, it clung to the aircraft, the two of them falling together toward the Han River as one.

It took only a few seconds for a fighter jet that had ruled the vast sky to become nothing more than debris floating on the Han River.

-Craaaaash!

It almost sounded like a massive explosion.

Even from this far away, I almost imagined droplets splashing against my gas mask. Watching that towering column of water erupt, none of us could find the words to speak.

And then the war consuming Seoul came into view.

A brutal air battle raged directly above our heads.

As fighter jets streaked across the sky, spewing cannon fire and missiles, the Sky Centipedes curled their bodies and then launched themselves like springs, trying to snatch the aircraft from the air.

The hundreds of thousands of Human-skin Jellyfish absorbed the bombardment with their own bodies. Their flesh bursting apart before they rained down to the earth.

The heavy artillery barrage hammering Seoul’s outskirts was powerful enough to make even the bridge packed with abandoned vehicles tremble beneath our feet.

Hearing individual gunshots was impossible.

The firepower unleashed against the monsters filling both earth and sky was far too overwhelming. Monster blood, shredded flesh, filthy bodily fluids, jet fuel, spent shell casings…all of that was pouring from the heavens instead of rain.

Only one place remained cloaked in thick fog. The area near Lotte Tower, specifically around Gangnam and Jamsil.

Without thinking, I glanced toward the Yellow Gaze Monster that lurked beneath that dense blanket of mist before forcing my legs onward again. Every ounce of humanity’s military might was being poured into culling the monsters.

And yet even those state-of-the-art fighter jets, even those weapons, couldn’t engage every monster.

Across the Han River, something translucent floated among the creatures in the sky unceasingly vomiting flesh-colored sludge.

It looked utterly harmless. The sort of thing that would burst apart from a single missile. Yet no fighter, missile, or even artillery targeted it.

Even the pastor narrowed his eyes, clearly seeing the translucent creature drifting through the sky like a gigantic lump of fat before letting out a sigh.

"Can they not see that thing?”

"Yeah, probably not.”

Now wasn’t the time to worry about whether the fighter pilots or the spotters observing from afar couldn’t see certain monsters.

Listening to Shin Nain’s reply, we pressed onward through the maze of abandoned vehicles.

Then we broke into a full sprint.

We pound across the asphalt so that, amid this living hell, the sound of our footsteps and the proof of our existence wouldn’t disappear.

-Huff, huff.

My breath thundered inside my gas mask, mixed with the overpowering stench of rubber.

Then, behind us, a familiar voice drifted towards us.

-Hungry.

Monsters were faster than humans. If all we did was run, they would catch us.

Even so, none of us stopped.

Beneath the brilliant sunlight, under a perfectly clear blue sky, amid the exploding flesh, the melting corpses, and the ruins left behind by a city of 10 million, we came face-to-face with a single truth.

The sun is impartial to all things.

Which is precisely why it will never save humanity.

People must save themselves.

If hearing Odok’s mournful cry only filled you with despair and fear, you were an amateur.

Beyond that hot, heavy, pitch-black despair, the rational mind of this Great Archmage Baek Jemin, spun like a turbine.

"Everyone, huff, huuff.”

I steadied my breathing and spoke my conclusion.

"This is our chance. Let’s match Odok’s pace, keep our distance, and run with it.”

"Baek Jemin! Have you lost your damn mind?!”

"That thing eats other monsters."

I heard everyone behind me gasp.

We’d forgotten.

This place was an alien ecosystem and hunting ground.

The flimsy alliances between monsters lasted only as long as prey was plentiful. Once the food ran out they fell apart.

There was no way we could fight our way past every abandoned vehicle lining this endless boulevard and every monster lying in wait beyond them.

Humans were slower than monsters, but…

"Odok, time to eat!”

We were still faster than a monster stopping for another bite.

For the first time, I found myself liking this twisted ecosystem.

A beautiful world where different monsters devoured one another and only the strong survived!

_________________________________________________________________________

¹ A self-help book by Hal Elrod about how to spend your morning more effectively. The title is a nod to that. Jemin mentioned it in an earlier chapter as well.