The Age of Chaos
- When the alarm bell goes off, the evacuation route will be relayed only to those in our clan. Until then, Sung-hwan, you guard the electrical equipment room.
He recalled Choi Hyun-seok’s words.
Yoo Sung-hwan looked around while wearing the Omega Suit.
The clan members who knew nothing about the killer group’s raid were acting exactly as they always did.
Guards stood watch, protecting each corridor and facility.
Some people were grinning over a joke, while others showed off their gear.
Peaceful. The kind of atmosphere that would probably remain even after Dark Cover.
A place where my brother, Jeyca noona, and I can rest easy.
There had been many sacrifices.
Everyone had bled and sweated to retake this place, and in the end, they had seized it from the enemy.
It hadn’t been the work of an individual. It had been the achievement of a group.
Maybe that was why guarding this place felt so special.
"Good evening!"
"Hello!"
A shout rang out as he passed through the intersection.
He turned his head and saw two clan members approaching him, their eyes shining brightly.
The looks he had once thought were reserved only for his brother.
By now, they were a familiar kind of gaze directed at Yoo Sung-hwan as well.
Probably because I’ve gotten more of that than I can handle at the shooting range.
Judging by their gear, the two coming toward him seemed to be sniper-position members.
Whether he’d seen them at the shooting range before was another matter.
I don’t know. I never got a proper look at their faces.
So he stayed quiet, and they came up first to introduce themselves.
"I’m Kim Hoon. It’s an honor to meet you face-to-face!"
"Idiot. What do you mean, face-to-face, if I’m here too? I’m Min Yuri."
"Do you know who I am?"
Kim Hoon and Min Yuri. Yoo Sung-hwan memorized their faces and names before asking in a low voice.
The two of them smiled brightly and pointed at his suit.
"That suit. The one with the deep green flow—only the veteran sniper has that, right?"
"Right. We don’t have anyone in the clan with senses specialized that far. Not even the clan leader is like that, you know?"
"So you must be Meteor’s partner."
They kept calling him the veteran sniper.
Yoo Sung-hwan didn’t like that.
It’s too long. Maybe I should come up with another name to go by...
It wasn’t like he’d never thought about it.
He had already decided on the username he’d wanted to use once, a long time ago.
If he told these two, they’d probably spread it around for him.
Yoo Sung-hwan cleared his throat and said, "It’s Vasilon."
"...Pardon?"
"My username. Vasilon."
"Ah... so you’re Lord Vasilon."
It was a Spanish word meaning someone who boasted or liked to joke around.
He had never dreamed he’d end up saying it in real life, but still.
He had chosen Vasilon as his username because he liked the meaning.
"So this is the first time we’re learning your name, right? Lord Vasilon."
"Yeah."
"Wow... Is today some kind of special day? I’m insanely lucky. Haa, I want to talk more, but I’m on guard duty... Still! If we meet again later, could you take a look at my shooting?"
"Oh, could you look at mine too then? I came by for work before, so I couldn’t get any feedback."
The two of them spoke with expressions full of regret.
He could feel how hard they were trying to sharpen their skills.
Yoo Sung-hwan nodded gladly.
"Sure. Whenever you have time."
"Haha! Then I’ll take you at your word. Lord Vasilon!"
It had been a short meeting, but he could tell they were good people.
They recognized him. Respected him. That was what it meant, probably.
And he doubted they were the only ones.
The people in this place felt secure because of Yoo Sung-hwan and his brother’s strength.
They trusted and relied on them, glad to be with people like them.
An age in which sheer strength was acknowledged.
Yoo Sung-hwan didn’t think that was a bad thing.
Once your skill was recognized, you could use it to help and support those who lacked it.
This is our second home.
He reached the equipment room with a satisfied smile.
There were guards stationed nearby, but among the people standing watch up close, Yoo Sung-hwan was the only one.
Hm?
His gaze shifted.
Flies, mosquitoes—he wasn’t sure what they were exactly. In any case, all kinds of winged insects were swarming through the ceiling and corridors.
There were a lot of bugs today.
Anyone else would have frowned and waved them away as they walked past.
But Yoo Sung-hwan was different.
His heightened senses and Trajectory Eye made the insects’ paths appear in a maddening tangle, irritating him to no end.
What a pain.
It was just like when he’d first shown off his shooting skills.
The little pests had kept bothering him while he was trying to review things in his head.
So he picked up a metal scrap lying nearby.
He gathered a handful, placed them on his thumb, and flicked them off one by one.
He’d done it before, so he already had the feel of it.
Crack!
A metal fragment shot out and burst an insect in midair.
Yoo Sung-hwan repeated the process without blinking.
Every flick sent another bug bursting apart, tumbling down as fragments.
That’s a little cleaner now.
When he focused on hitting things like this, his senses sharpened into a razor edge.
Maybe that was why.
Hm?
A strange sensation brushed past Yoo Sung-hwan’s body.
It was the sound of tiny footsteps.
What reason would there be to run on such a still night?
But they were small. It was movement that seemed deliberately muted.
He tilted his head and moved toward the direction he’d sensed.
And even now, why were there still so many bugs?
He muttered under his breath as he eliminated them one after another.
"Damn it. Every time I see bugs, it reminds me of that day, and it just puts me in a rotten mood."
He rounded the corner—and the sight before him made reality feel distant for a moment.
Two corpses, their heads severed, lay sprawled on the floor.
As one of the heads rolled lazily across the ground, his eyes met its stare.
The expression on it seemed to ask how it had even died.
And those faces were familiar.
The two who had been smiling with delight just moments ago after meeting him.
Kim Hoon and Min Yuri.
Reality slammed back into place.
He stared at the figure standing before the dead pair.
"Who the hell are you?"
Instead of answering, the man lunged.
Yoo Sung-hwan instinctively threw the rifle from his back into his hands.
Now he understood why Choi Hyun-seok had asked him to do this.
The killer group wasn’t arriving in two weeks.
They were here right now.
Got you.
He drew up his senses and used Trajectory Eye. His pupils contracted as he gauged the target.
The distance between them was roughly seventy meters.
With his body already reinforced, three seconds was more than enough to close it.
The man twisted and moved, trying to survive those three seconds while shortening the gap.
He was trying to create his own distance.
But Yoo Sung-hwan was faster to pull the trigger.
I can see it all.
Victor had already sensed that Yoo Sung-hwan was in firing stance.
The insects he had linked to in the restaurant district relayed every detail from multiple angles.
They told him he had made an exact aim, and that he was about to shoot now.
If I know the angle of the muzzle and the cue before the shot, this isn’t hard.
Victor was a killer seasoned by countless sniper assassinations.
His body moved sideways like flowing water.
At the same time, he swept out his hand and fired a silver thread.
It wasn’t aimed at Yoo Sung-hwan.
It struck the emergency button behind him, the one that opened and closed each corridor entrance.
Crash!
He smashed through the glass covering the button and slammed it without hesitation.
The instant it was pressed, a steel door came crashing down.
Front, back, left, and right—the entrances were sealed shut in an instant.
And then—
BANG!
A delayed gunshot rang out inside the sealed space.
This bastard...
Yoo Sung-hwan understood his intention.
He had dodged the shot, and on top of that, he’d blocked the sound from leaking outside.
He had even narrowed the distance, so the bastard probably thought he’d already won the spacing battle.
"Hey."
Yoo Sung-hwan called out to him and turned his head.
He could see the trajectory now. He could also see exactly where he needed to strike to scatter the force.
The nearly transparent silver thread grazed the visor by the thinnest margin.
Beyond the scattered nano-particles of the visor, the curve of Yoo Sung-hwan’s mouth was faintly visible as it twisted.
A cold, honed fury burst out of him.
"Did you really think you’d win just because you got close?"
He let go of the sniper rifle.
His hand dropped to the pocket at his waist.
The pocket, which had seemed like nothing more than a place to store magazines or medical supplies, changed shape before his eyes.
Camouflage. For the first time, Level 2 of the Omega Suit revealed what it could do.
Clack!
Now holding two handguns in the transformed pocket—no, in the transformed form of the pocket—Yoo Sung-hwan pulled the trigger without hesitation.
Just because it was an island didn’t mean there were no Infectors.
Infectors constantly lusted after life, constantly evolved. That was what they did.
So island-dwelling Infectors generally fell into three categories.
The first were those that had adapted to the sea, evolved individually, and come ashore.
The second were people who had originally lived on the island and mutated after being infected by the D-Virus.
That was the most common case.
The last was a little more special: flying species that had settled there.
Usually, organisms classified as flying species preferred to wander the world and accumulate nutrients rather than settle anywhere.
For a flying species to choose to settle on an island...
That meant a tempting ecosystem had been built there—one rich enough to attract them.
Such places always had native species, and any outsider trying to settle there had to prove its strength.
After all, if it wasn’t powerful enough to defeat the original owner, it couldn’t claim the territory.
Right now, on an island roughly twenty-five kilometers in a straight line from Gimpo Airport, a battle was raging to prove who had the right to seize this place.
Krk! Rrkkk!
Fuming at the sight of its territory being burned away, the Level 4 Infector Kawadella snorted hot air through its nostrils.
Its face and body resembled a rhinoceros. In its uniquely human-like pillar-shaped arms, it gripped an H-beam that had rusted heavily with age.
Dozens of similar creatures stood on two legs around it.
As the leader of the group, Kawadella let out a vicious roar.
KWAOOO!
They were the true owners of this island.
Until some red dragon-looking bastard had shown up, they had lived here in their own tribal society, with their own order.
They had been happily hunting marine Infectors trying to come ashore.
And then that bastard had ruined everything.
A being that occasionally gave off such deliciously tempting scent it made them lose their minds, only to swallow up their own kind in return.
Kwao! Kwaaawk!
Today was the day of desperate resistance.
Because it was the dark of night, a surprise attack should have been easy.
Its kin raised their weapons.
The crude, massive remnants of civilization became clubs and spears.
With those in front, Kawadella’s group charged.
Their target was the cliff cave the monster had carved out.
But only five minutes after the charge began, the ambush turned into a last, futile struggle.
Krraaaaark!
It hadn’t been sleeping.
It had simply been waiting for the right moment to annihilate them.
The thing spread its enormous wings wide.
The red scales packed across its body flashed ominously in the all-consuming flames that burned in every direction.
But Kawadella’s group wasn’t afraid of that oppressive presence.
Its eyes—that black iris that looked as though it could swallow them whole—stared down at them, split cleanly into vertical slits.
The murderous intent shining in those eyes, the unprecedented force that seemed to draw them in.
Their feeble reason kept scattering.
They wanted to surrender to instinct and covet that body.
They should have held back, but they couldn’t hold back anymore.
Kwaaaak!
So they even threw down their weapons and rushed forward.
It had been a fearless charge, a mighty roar wasted on the fact that what met Kawadella wasn’t an attack from the dragon’s massive body.
Whoosh!
Crimson flame swallowed them all.
The superheated blast spewed from the dragon’s gaping maw incinerated everything that rushed toward it.
The air itself burned as it was drawn in.
The heat surged forward, scorching lungs from the briefest inhale.
With that one exhalation, silence fell over the island.
Crackle. Tatter... crackle...
They had been roasted alive, plain and simple.
Kawadella, blackened to charcoal, tilted over in the exact posture of its charge.
It collapsed like a perfectly cooked slab of meat.
Thud.
The dragon, now fully the island’s master, snorted and lowered its mouth to the prey.
Its sharply honed teeth tore away flesh with ease and crunched it into pieces.
Grrr...
With a body that large, it took hardly any time to devour everything.
The red dragon—this flying species—let out a satisfied burp and prepared to return to its now-safe nest.
But then something mouthwatering stirred its instincts.
Rrrk?
If it flew from here, the distance wasn’t all that far.
It could feel a presence born from thousands of weak individuals stirring together.
The dragon knew the terrain around here well.
Which meant that if it went there, it would find that.
Gimpo Airport, where a stronger being had already taken root.
It had never even dared to approach before, too afraid.
Rrrk...
But now. If it could take just a little of the weak creatures before they caught its eye, wouldn’t it become stronger?
The huge dragon decided to indulge its greed just once.
The vertical slit of its iris transformed into a round, eager shape as it fixed on its destination.
Its eyes sparkled with anticipation as it let out a bold cry.
Kkyung! Kkyung!