Age of Chaos
Honestly, Choi Hyun-seok had thought his role in this operation would be smaller than Meteor’s or Jack Kalt’s.
And that guess had been exactly right.
Yoo Sung-jun hadn’t even needed help in the first place.
In fact, just standing near him felt like a nuisance.
If he’d been at Sung-jun’s side, there was no way Sung-jun would’ve been able to swing that greatsword freely.
Whoosh. Crack.
Another one of the fanatics had just died.
One of the pulses his Wave Detection talent had been continuously mapping, ready for any sudden variable, flickered out.
That kept happening again and again, with every blink of his eyes and every breath he took.
One person with each sword strike. Another with each shot.
They vanished. They collapsed to the floor and exhaled their last breath.
When the white robes they wore were stained red with their own blood, Choi Hyun-seok found himself murmuring before he knew it.
"He’s gotten... even stronger."
Meteor. No—Yoo Sung-jun. Was that man even capable of adapting like everyone else?
No matter how many points you had, if you couldn’t adapt to an enhanced body and suit, you couldn’t move on to the next level. That was the norm.
Even users who had surpassed the standard weren’t exempt from that.
And yet Yoo Sung-jun was different.
Enhancement? If he could do it, he did it. He’d adapt in no time anyway.
...Ah. Right. Now he understood.
Only then did Choi Hyun-seok realize what Yoo Sung-jun’s true value really was.
The ability to use Breathing, the overwhelming combat technique—those weren’t his real talent at all.
It was adaptability.
Only one word, but it contained a thousand things.
Massive power. A body moving faster than the signals in the brain could keep up with. A flood of sensory input. A suit that filled the wearer with a completely different, euphoric energy the moment it was donned.
And that wasn’t all. If you awakened a talent like Breathing, you still had to learn to harmonize with the additional power it gave you. Adaptation was simply indispensable for users.
But Yoo Sung-jun had skipped that process. No—calling it a leap would be more accurate.
Choi Hyun-seok couldn’t close his mouth.
In front of him, Yoo Sung-jun cutting down dozens of Evolve fanatics alone was, frankly, the living embodiment of adaptation.
If not, that combat power doesn’t make sense.
As long as the points held out, he would grow at a terrifying pace.
Once he reached the stage where the points required for equipment and physical enhancement rose exponentially, his growth would inevitably slow—but with power like his, even that would only be a matter of time.
I really ended up becoming friends with a truly monstrous existence...
What did it feel like, having him at your side in a world where brute force was everything?
Choi Hyun-seok swallowed the laughter trying to escape his lips and forced his racing heart back under control.
"Since it’s over, you can come in."
At Sung-jun’s call, after he’d finished off the last fanatic, everyone moved toward the cliff wall.
The only pulses Choi Hyun-seok could sense belonged to his companions.
Wait a second. I thought this was just a wall...
He stepped through the blood pooled on the ground and over scattered scraps of entrails.
Then he brushed a hand along the smooth wall and frowned.
"What, is there a problem?"
At Sung-jun’s question, Choi Hyun-seok shook his head.
"No. This wall—I thought it was just stone, but it isn’t."
Choi Hyun-seok’s Wave Detection was a talent based on touch.
It could accurately pick up even the tiniest pulse through his skin.
Right now, he was taking in those pulses through his entire body.
That made the details even clearer.
"From here to here. It’s all steel."
"Well, it’s an entrance. Maybe it was built that way. Is that really so surprising?"
"It is surprising... A machine structure that can bear massive loads, emit force, and handle even delicate assembly work. Have you ever heard of something like that?"
Seeing Yoo Sung-jun’s eyes widen, Choi Hyun-seok shook his head.
"I haven’t. That’s why I’m saying it doesn’t make sense."
As he gauged it through pulses and measured its size by eye, the reality of it struck him harder.
A steel mechanism that had to weigh tens of thousands of tons at the very least.
And inside that mechanism, gears so precisely fitted and turned that they filled the whole thing.
This was beyond anything humans could make.
Even if the gears had been designed by people, assembly was another matter entirely.
To lift hundreds of tons of gears dozens of meters into the air and assemble them without a single error?
Impossible for humans. Yes, humans...
That said, it was still hard to believe the Higher Being or the supporters had intervened.
They had been the only ones to come into this world with outside support.
Choi Hyun-seok stood before the gears he could feel and the buttons that held them in place.
He’d been focusing too hard on his talent, and now his whole body tingled while his head throbbed.
Still, he gritted his teeth and endured it.
He was the only one who could open this door.
If Sung-jun tried to smash it open and force it, he might end up making things worse.
Glad he’d trusted his talent, Choi Hyun-seok figured out the unlocking method and nodded.
"There are nine buttons hidden here. They look randomly placed, but each one is restraining a major gear."
"So. It’s not as simple as just pressing them."
"Right. If you just press them, it actually locks the door. You have to press them in a specific order, to a specific depth. Not more, not less—exactly right."
"And if you can’t press them that way?"
"It locks again."
It seemed Choi Hyun-seok really could open the door.
Yoo Sung-jun stepped back and watched what he did.
Some buttons had to be pressed shallowly, while others had to be driven in as deep as they would go.
"The steel pins built into the buttons have to mesh exactly with the gears. That’s how the opening mechanism gets activated."
He kept explaining as he pressed the last one.
Then, with a tremendous grinding boom, the wall slid back.
A dark but clean corridor appeared beyond it.
"Phew... Looks like it opened properly."
Choi Hyun-seok let out a breath of relief and stood in front of Yoo Sung-jun.
With a grave expression, he pointed into the passage.
"Now tell me. This facility couldn’t have been built with human technology and labor alone. Something else must have been involved... So what’s inside, besides the core?"
"I only heard this from Jack Kalt, so I don’t know the details, but apparently there’s an entity in there."
"An entity?"
Yoo Sung-jun answered plainly.
He’d planned to explain the objective and target before they went in anyway, so this worked out nicely.
"Something that ate an Infector core, or had one implanted in it, is sleeping in there. We need to eliminate it. That was Jack Kalt’s objective too."
An entity that wasn’t an Infector core, but something that had swallowed one.
Imagining what kind of creature it might be, Choi Hyun-seok stared at the massive entrance sliding aside.
"Finally...!"
At the voice of triumph drilling into her ears, Yoon Choi frowned.
Had she blacked out? As reality began to return, a sharp pain lanced down her back.
Ghk! Shit.
She bit down hard on her lip and pretended to be calm.
If she showed weakness, they might notice.
Relying on her sharpened senses from physical enhancement, Yoon Choi tried to assess herself and her surroundings.
Her eyes were closed, so vision was useless, but she could still learn quite a lot.
It’s a wide space. I can hear about ten people around me. The Omega Suit’s long gone—it burned through all its power to absorb the impact. And my injury... yelp!
The moment she focused on it, the pain became even more detailed.
A deep stab wound buried in her back.
She hadn’t even been able to react.
Was her name Amia, the assistant bishop?
The instant she appeared, the burst of acceleration and the two scythes she swung with both hands had subdued Yoon Choi in a single exchange.
Yoon Choi could tell that woman was several steps above her.
But unlike what she said, she didn’t kill me.
She couldn’t return.
If someone cleared the mission, maybe she could have returned—but even that was only possible when there were no Infectors nearby.
Jack said the bastards in Evolve are infected.
That meant her only remaining escape route had been blocked too.
Still, she couldn’t give up on hope yet.
A blocked path could always be forced open.
She couldn’t die here.
She was this close.
If she could just get through this mission safely, she’d be able to cure her father.
Dad endured this for me, too. I can’t die here.
Yoon Choi had so many things she wanted to do with her dad.
The world was ruined, so they couldn’t exactly run an amusement park, but they could travel, couldn’t they?
They could walk side by side, just the two of them, carrying the camping gear she’d bought in the Enter Room.
They’d talk about all kinds of things, imagine the future, figure out what they wanted to do next.
And if an Infector showed up, she’d brag about how their daughter had become so dependable.
Then she’d show off her cooking, too.
Even if she didn’t say it out loud, she’d explain it through each and every one of those actions.
Dad had kept going for her, so she’d kept going for him.
Thank you for holding on. From now on, I’ll make sure the man who suffered all this can finally rest easy.
For Yoon Choi, that had been the only sanctuary she could survive in in this damned world. It had been a sanctuary, but...
"Hihihik! Kik! You crying? Are you crying because you want to die? Or because you don’t want to die?"
Suddenly there was a voice.
That shrill, steel-on-nails voice and way of speaking could only belong to Amia.
Yoon Choi wanted to wipe away the thick tears streaming down her face, but she couldn’t.
Amia was gripping her by the hair and hoisting her up.
"Seeing your tears makes me want to kill you. I can’t stand the sound of you sniveling. I’m the one who’s sad, the one whose whole fucking world is garbage, so why are you crying? You think crying solves anything? You think some prince on a white horse is gonna come trotting in and save you?"
"...Fff."
"What?"
Amia leaned in at Yoon Choi’s mumble.
And there, without hesitation, Yoon Choi twisted her head.
Her mouth flew open, clamped down on something, and shut again.
Crack. With vicious force, a voice ground its way out from between her clenched teeth.
"Suck it."
Spitting out the ear she’d been chewing on, Yoon Choi jerked her chin.
"The other one, too. If you hate the sound that much, I’ll make sure you can’t hear at all."
"Ha, hahaha. Kyaaahaha!"
Apparently not feeling any pain, Amia staggered back a step and burst into loud laughter.
After laughing for quite a while, she pushed her hair aside.
The spot where the ear Yoon Choi had just bitten off had been.
"Wh-what was that? Hard to hear what a crazy bitch’s barking sounds like, y’know?"
Before long, a pale new ear had already grown back, twitching with every bit of force she put into it.
So she really was one of those enhanced D-Virus infected freaks.
Her regeneration is insane.
Yoon Choi’s brow furrowed hard.
And in front of her, a scythe fell at terrifying speed.
"Guess I really will kill you."
For a moment, it seemed like this was the end.
Then, suddenly, a rough hand shot in and caught Amia’s wrist.
It was Caron, the other assistant bishop, who had been standing at a distance until just a moment ago.
"Amia. Are you really going to damage the ‘vessel’ meant to carry Lord Evolve’s chalice? Be patient. You’ll get all the slaughter you want in the holy war."
"And how long is ‘a little while’?"
Amia glared at Caron with venom.
Instead of answering, Caron seized Yoon Choi by the wrist and dragged her forward.
Almost literally being pulled along, Yoon Choi followed Caron until she was thrown down in front of some kind of structure.
She was dizzy from pain and blood loss.
She didn’t even have the strength to keep thinking about what exactly this “vessel” he’d mentioned was supposed to mean.
"Lift your head. Fool."
Fool? Was he talking to her?
Yoon Choi staggered but forced her head up.
And in the haze before her eyes, the sight she saw made her suck in a breath.
The instant she saw it, her mind went razor-sharp.
Gooseflesh raced down her spine, and before she knew it, her teeth were chattering.
Dangerous. This was—this was really dangerous.
Yoon Choi lost the thread of hope she’d been clinging to and plunged into deep despair.
Her head was a racket of the Supporter’s variable-occurrence warning.
The mission window flickering faintly in her vision showed a difficulty rating of A.
It was a completely reasonable rating.
Because right in front of her stood an “entity” worthy of an A.
A giant...
No matter how far she tilted her head back, all she could see were its thighs.
That was how enormous the thing standing in the laboratory was.