Chapter 54

The Ticking Clock of Ruin

This wasn't the first time us Supreme Mages had been subjected to a mental attack.

Thanks to the Teratoma—the malformed cancer-mass monster that mimicked babies—we had all received a sort of vaccination against such things. Our reactions were swift.

Besides, these weren't the cries of newborn infants. They sounded like older children running around and playing. That made it even easier to stay rational.

Some people might hear children laughing and feel warmth spreading through their hearts.

But I, Baek Jemin, was a downstairs neighbor.

I'd suffered through children stomping around above me until two in the morning.

I was a passionate man for whom the sound of children running around would never inspire cozy feelings.

Still, unlike Shin Nain, Lee Sejun, and me—who had already experienced the Teratoma—the Pastor and Hamza couldn't entirely suppress their agitation.

There were some things no amount of self-persuasion could overcome.

Even so, the Pastor wiped the dew from his gas mask and spoke.

"Satan and his demons always worm their way into a person's weakest point. They tempt us to abandon the mission given by the Lord. Baek Jemin, don't worry. I can distinguish a genuine cry for help."

"It's dangerous. We shouldn't approach."

Hamza waved his right hand dismissively in warning.

Yet his gaze remained fixed on Olympic Park, where the fog was thinner.

At the withered trees, starved of sunlight for four months.

At the grass soaked through with moisture.

At the small plaza paved with neat stone tiles between them.

Everyone understood the truth intellectually.

There was no way children were running around in ruined Seoul.

The situation was creepy as hell.

On the left side of the road, visibility was less than ten meters due to dense fog.

On the right side, visibility stretched nearly a hundred meters through thinner fog covering the skeletal remains of the park—while children's laughter echoed through it.

It all came down to one infinitesimal possibility.

What if there really were children there?

Seeing the Pastor and Hamza quietly wrestling with that thought, I snapped my fingers to get their attention.

Half-baked humanitarianism got everyone killed.

It had a certain romantic appeal, sure.

But in a world where death might not even be the end, it was the height of stupidity.

You had to know the difference between what you could do and what you couldn't.

We Supreme Mages were good at killing monsters.

Saving people?

Frankly, we sucked at it.

"We're not a rescue team. Let's keep moving. We can't cross the Han River while dragging kids along."

"If there are kids, we could escort them back afterward."

"Back where?"

"Seongnam."

That one answer revealed the Pastor's true feelings.

He couldn't bear the thought of abandoning even a single lost lamb.

We'd fought our way through hell to get here.

If we somehow broke back through the monster hordes at the front lines, identified ourselves to soldiers who were indiscriminately shooting anything that moved, and returned home...

...only to report that we'd done it all for one unidentified child?

What an impressive rescue operation that would be.

We still hadn't answered our questions about magic.

We still didn't know the true nature of the fog.

We still didn't know where the monsters came from.

We hadn't even made contact with Goryeoha, the friendly survivor group we were searching for.

I had absolutely no desire to discuss retreat.

Of course, I still glanced around, worried that some weak-hearted aphorism might sway the others.

Fortunately, everyone seemed to share my opinion.

They all stared at the Pastor with similarly unimpressed expressions.

As expected of Supreme Mages.

Most importantly, even the lunatic zealot Shin Nain agreed.

"Pastor. It's true that the children have been given an opportunity to repent. However, they're likely heathens by default. If they attended church, that would be different. But we cannot risk the lives of the Lord's warriors to save children whose faith is uncertain."

"Hmm... That's not entirely unreasonable. Still, children are highly receptive to the Gospel..."

Shin Nain's logic was completely insane.

But the result was useful, so maybe that was fine.

Lee Sejun also seemed to remember his encounter with the Teratoma.

He made a short clicking sound inside his gas mask and silently tensed.

As one of the Alteration Trio, he understood the dangers of mental attacks better than anyone and apparently didn't even have the spare attention to speak.

The Pastor looked around hopefully at the other Supreme Mages.

Everyone gave the same answer.

We were prepared to walk into hell.

But none of us intended to turn back for the sake of a single pitiful life.

Even so, the Pastor stubbornly refused to give up and finally proposed a compromise.

"We won't go out of our way to save anyone. But if we can save them, we do. Handing them off to another survivor group would be acceptable, right?"

"Sigh..."

I let out a long sigh.

The Pastor raised an eyebrow behind his gas mask.

"Kid. Even in difficult times, a person can't lose their faith. Anyway, that's what we'll do. Let's move."

And so the strange scenery continued.

Olympic Park was much larger than we'd imagined.

Ten minutes of walking wasn't enough to reach the end.

The sensation was even stranger because the broad road we followed formed such a clear boundary.

The rows of trees planted along the center divider had long since died, suffocated by four months of settling fog.

To the left:

Apartment complexes and buildings swallowed by thickening fog.

To the right:

The vast park, where the thinner fog allowed us to see damp trees rotting under mold and fields of dead grass.

Whenever decorative columns or statues emerged faintly from the mist, we'd stop briefly to inspect them.

I saw pillars and sculptures so bizarre they were beyond my aesthetic comprehension.

It made me think:

People in Seoul really do like weird things more than country folk.

Maybe they'd even embraced monsterhood with enthusiasm.

As I entertained such thoughts, a surprisingly solid obstacle blocked our path.

Abandoned vehicles were packed tightly across the road.

Streetlights, wrecked cars, and chunks of collapsed buildings were tangled together in a massive barrier.

Lee Sejun scanned the area before speaking.

"They must've tried to escape when the Critical Point Breakthrough happened and failed. As for the collapsed buildings... the military probably did that."

The buildings weren't especially tall.

Six or seven stories at most.

But when the entire base of a structure sheared off and crashed onto a roadway, it was equivalent to a natural disaster.

Looking at the ruins—windows shattered, frames crushed by unimaginable impacts—I felt strangely uneasy.

An entire building lying across the road painted a vivid picture of the nightmare Seoul must have become on January 6th.

The Pastor looked over the wrecked vehicles and collapsed debris.

After offering a brief prayer, he turned toward the park.

"We should be careful when entering buildings along the roadside from now on. They might've planted explosives to block roads like this and failed to detonate them."

Then he added,

"Let's head into the park for a bit."

His intentions were completely transparent.

He wanted to investigate the source of the children's laughter.

And if there really were children...

He wanted to save them.

It was a flimsy, obvious motive.

But—

"Let's do it."

I, Baek Jemin, was the first to nod.

"We'll follow the Pastor's suggestion."

Next, Shin Nain fiddled with her headset and raised her eyes.

"We need to be careful. This is dangerous."

Hamza looked around with a slightly pale face as he issued his warning.

"Visibility is wide open here, so we need strict all-around security. Let's adjust the formation slightly. I'll take the right flank, Mr. Jemin takes point, and Nain covers the rear. Exposed areas are always the most dangerous."

Lee Sejun proposed the repositioning with a serious expression.

Despite normally talking about wanting to become a TS anime girl, he actually made a reasonable point, so everyone accepted it.

And so the detour began.

We left the road clogged with abandoned vehicles and collapsed building debris and entered Olympic Park.

The moment my combat boots stepped onto the moisture-rotted grass, the cheerful laughter of children echoed through my head.

Ahahaha...

Everyone seemed to hear it.

The looks in their eyes all changed differently.

Guilt.

Hatred.

Disgust.

Fear.

And me, Baek Jemin?

I couldn't hide my unpleasant curiosity.

There was no need to go this deep into the park. A slight detour would've sufficed.

Yet we deliberately kept moving inward.

Truly, we were Supreme Mages.

We wouldn't intentionally go out of our way to save lives, but if we discovered survivors while gathering information, we'd gladly hand them over to someone capable of helping them.

Warm-hearted people, every last one of us.

Then we saw something impossible.

Something that shouldn't have existed beneath the hundreds-of-meters-thick blanket of fog covering Seoul.

A grassy field almost entirely free of fog.

The roadside trees were withered, but their leaves swayed in the breeze, rolling droplets of dew.

The grass was dying, yet seemed ready to stand upright again at any moment.

Children stood in a small patch of weak sunlight, pretending to be scarecrows while facing one another and laughing happily.

As though savoring the precious sunlight they hadn't seen in months.

Hehehehehe...

If you saw those children hopping around with their arms spread wide...

If you saw this little sunlit meadow...

Anyone ignorant of the truth would call it a miracle.

The sort of miracle that should naturally appear when an absurd catastrophe descended upon the world.

But we were mages.

We knew that opposing absurdity wasn't some natural law.

It was another absurdity entirely.

Under heaven, the only being that truly worked for your benefit was yourself.

I didn't believe in miracles.

I didn't believe in lucky breaks.

I chose to face reality.

Alteration Eyes Stage 1 — Ten-Second Precognition.

My eyes became bloodshot.

A rough sensation, like plastic scraping against my eyeballs, spread across my vision.

It felt as though my eyelids were blinking inside my skull, rubbing unpleasantly against other parts of my brain.

In exchange, I saw red footprints.

They weren't moving.

They were fixed in place.

Pinned directly beneath the laughing children.

—Monsters.

The instant I realized that, my ordinary vision and magical vision split apart.

My human eyes saw nothing unusual.

The children seemed slightly strange for hopping in place without moving, but that was all.

This place resembled a sanctuary in ruined Seoul.

A patch of sunlight amidst the darkness.

But magical sight told a different story.

The trees were dead.

What I had mistaken for leaves were swollen human lungs.

Though could they still be called lungs?

They had burst from human bodies and now breathed independently, inflating and deflating on their own.

Fragments of human lungs hung from dead trees like grotesque fruit.

Whenever they inhaled and expanded, fog flowed into them.

Thick tentacles that appeared to have once been bronchi anchored them in place.

Like parasitic plants infesting a tree, bronchi and tiny capillaries had rooted themselves throughout the dead trunks, fastening lung-leaves to the branches.

And the children...

The children were—

"Uwaaaah..."

Have you ever seen starving children in famine-stricken countries?

Emaciated limbs.

Sunken bodies.

Bellies swollen grotesquely outward.

The children looked like that.

Their arms and legs had melted away.

Their bodies were connected to the lung-leaves and pools of blood surrounding the trees.

They writhed helplessly across the grass.

Their skin had dried and shriveled so badly that their gender was impossible to identify.

Their eyes were sunken.

Their cheekbones protruded sharply.

Yet somehow their voices still retained the softness of childhood.

Even those swollen bellies were abnormal.

A gigantic mouth occupied the center of each abdomen.

Rows of teeth interlocked like a zipper.

Between those teeth, organs protruded outward.

The organs were breathing.

Actually breathing.

Like sea sponges riddled with countless pores, intestinal tendrils fluttered in open air.

Every time they inhaled, fog flowed into them.

The fog was dragged relentlessly into the children's bodies.

Their bellies bulged as though they were about to burst.

Yet somehow they never ruptured.

But the most horrifying part was something my instincts whispered.

"Ugh... ugh..."

"Aaaah... ah..."

The voices weren't calling for their mothers.

Or their fathers.

They were too busy crying and groaning in agony.

Everything here was unquestionably a monster.

Yet my instincts insisted that those voices weren't fake.

They weren't monster imitations.

They were real.

A uselessly accurate intuition—something one might call a spiritual sense—told me that genuine human voices were trapped within those monsters.

Someone vomited behind me.

The Pastor muttered something in a trembling voice.

Hamza retched violently.

Lee Sejun struggled just to breathe.

Then someone raised a rifle.

Click.

I turned toward the metallic sound.

It was Shin Nain.

Her eyes were cold.

Resolute.

She aimed at the children and pulled the trigger without hesitation.

Again.

And again.

And again.

While the other Supreme Mages remained frozen in shock, only Shin Nain aimed directly at the heads of those tadpole-bellied children whose stomachs had sprouted intestinal tentacles.

Spent casings splashed into the rotting grass.

The sound continued for a long time.

Every flash of the muzzle.

Every thunderous gunshot.

The crying gradually ceased.

Even that wasn't enough for her.

She redirected her fire into the children's grotesquely swollen abdomens.

She even changed magazines and kept shooting.

No one interfered.

Bang. Bang-bang. Bang...

Eventually only the smell of burnt gunpowder remained.

And it was over.

As the bloated bellies burst apart, fog poured from the corpses.

Watching the rapidly thickening mist, we finally understood the creature's purpose.

Fog collection.

The lung-leaves attempted to inflate one final time before bursting uselessly.

All that remained were the corpses of child-monsters leaking fog.

Silence fell over everyone.

Only Shin Nain calmly inspected her rifle, adjusted her stance, and turned back toward us.

"May those children be allowed to knock upon Heaven's gate. Amen."

Nobody could find words.

I was the only one who walked over and patted her shoulder.

"You did good. Let's go."

April 18, 2028 — 12:23 PM

In Olympic Park, we Supreme Mages encountered an unidentified species.

Tentatively designated:

Tadpole Belly.

Its apparent purpose was collecting fog.

It seemed to be a parasitic monster that either assumed the appearance of children or was born from children transformed into monsters, specifically to make mages and humans hesitate before killing it.

We chose not to determine whether the crying belonged to the monster or the human victim.

After remaining silent for a long time, the Pastor finally summarized our assessment.

"What a goddamn awful place."

The fog hadn't fully returned.

Olympic Park still maintained relatively thin fog with visibility between one hundred and two hundred meters.

Only the area we'd passed through had become obscured again.

Even that fog was being torn apart and carried away somewhere.

We decided not to think about what that meant.

There was no way the military didn't know about these creatures.

If they had discovered them during reconnaissance and still left them alone, perhaps it was because the monsters conveniently removed the troublesome fog.

And what we'd mistaken for sunlight...

"Bright Yellow Gaze."

Shin Nain whispered.

"Those without Sacred Formula techniques would mistake its gaze for sunlight. Those children probably did too."

"...We'll share information later. Right now, every step toward the Han River matters."

"Yes."

Shin Nain was strangely dependable at times like these.

We postponed all discussion of our theories until everyone had recovered from the shock and until we'd gotten as close to the Han River as possible.

Still, my mouth was beginning to feel dry.

Perhaps, without even realizing it, we were already walking toward a far greater catastrophe.

A doom even more terrible than anything we'd imagined.