Story 0 — Mistake
The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was the merciless swirl of snowflakes.
I had barely registered the drop in temperature before the icy sting against my cheeks sent my soul right out of my body.
Snow?
It was real snow. White, cold, vanishing the instant it touched skin….
Na Hwiyeon blinked. It was a sluggish, gritty movement, one that reflected none of his own will at all.
Looking down from where he stood, he saw snow piled all the way up to his thighs.
"Ha—"
Hot breath burst from his throat and scattered into the air.
But Na Hwiyeon immediately shut his mouth.
It wasn't a mistake…. No, it wasn't a mistake.
This body, now coming to its senses, was not his own.
The blinking eyes, the mouth exhaling hot air, the two legs half-buried in the snowdrift — none of it.
Beneath a vision blurred by the swirling snow, he could see two hands.
Large fists, clenched tight.
Until just moments ago, these were the hands I fidgeted with a memo pad in.
Kwon Haeseong.
These were Kwon Haeseong's hands.
At that single flashing realization, his frozen brain finally began to turn over.
NEW! STORY 0. Mistake
He had pressed it without knowing a thing — the status window.
Barely a few seconds had passed since then, and now he had woken up in a different place, in a different person's body.
What on earth is going on?
The moment the question surfaced, an answer seemed to arrive with it — fragmented information began forcing its way into his head. Na Hwiyeon, unable to resist even once, absorbed all of it.
A BOND field team, dispatched on an urgent government request in the dead of night.
It was to be a deployment into a relatively low-grade E-rank dungeon, but given the nature of the request, the entire team was ordered in.
The request read as follows:
Eight children on their way home from kindergarten, along with two adults presumed to be their teachers, had been caught up in a dungeon that had spontaneously appeared and gone missing.
Naturally, the final objective of the mission was to rescue them all, safe and sound.
They would have to navigate using nothing but a special item that detected human biometric signals as their compass — a tedious, grueling, patience-testing job if ever there was one.
"Seems like we could just find the boss and kill it…."
Kwon Haeseong muttered, rubbing his large hands together.
"There you go again with that. Though honestly, I agree. Let's do it the flashy way."
Beside him, a senior teammate readjusted his goggles and spoke, holding out an open palm.
Figured he'd agree.
What that meant was this — rather than hunting down the missing people one by one across this endlessly sprawling snowy mountain dungeon, it would be faster to locate the dungeon boss and eliminate it.
Besides, this was an E-rank dungeon.
If they could just find the boss, clearing the dungeon would be a piece of cake.
After some time had passed, the blizzard that seemed ready to swallow the whole party vanished without a trace.
Kwon Haeseong took a brief sweep of the clear sky and the vast snowfields stretching out beneath it, then spoke without hesitation.
"Let's just clear the dungeon…."
Try as he might to think otherwise, searching for the missing with nothing but a single item to rely on was hopelessly inefficient.
At those words, the team leader's brow furrowed.
"Haeseong, you big bear idiot. You think we don't know that? And how exactly are we supposed to find this boss, huh?"
"……Then how are we supposed to find the missing people, exactly?"
The boss — and the missing.
Neither of their locations was known, so weren't they in exactly the same boat?
If they killed the boss alone, the gate would close, and every human inside would be forcibly expelled from the dungeon in one go.
On pure efficiency, it was only natural that his heart leaned that way.
"I'll abstain. It's not like my situation changes no matter which option we pick."
One abstention.
"Then I'm throwing my vote in with the bear. How long do you think it'd take to haul ten civilians out of here?"
One vote for clearing the dungeon.
And with that, the team leader and Kwon Haeseong stood opposed at one-to-two.
At last, the field team leader opened his mouth with a heavy sigh.
"Ugh, fine, fine. But in exchange — me and the rookie search for the missing, and you two take the boss."
Only then did Kwon Haeseong give a light nod.
It was the conclusion he wanted. He was certain this way was better for the missing — and better for them, too.
"Keep a close eye on your watches."
With the team leader's parting warning, the four split from two into pairs at the fork in the path and moved out.
Footsteps as silent and swift as the eye of a storm.
Reckless. Fearless.
Meanwhile, Na Hwiyeon lamented inwardly. He'd spent hours already trying everything he could, but the result was always the same.
I can't move.
The only thing within his power was rolling his eyes.
But perhaps as a trade-off, he could feel everything of Kwon Haeseong's.
Smell, touch, taste, pain.
Even his emotions.
Even now, this very second, anxiety and unease churned together in a queasy knot in his stomach.
It would have been far more bearable if he didn't know the cause of this foul feeling….
But with the information and memories crammed so violently into his skull, there was no way he couldn't know.
Makes sense. That much time has already passed.
A full fourteen hours — and Kwon Haeseong still hadn't found the dungeon boss.
Right up until he'd boldly proposed clearing the dungeon, he'd radiated total confidence, even a trace of boredom.
Finding the boss was taking far longer than expected.
And the problem was, that wasn't the end of it.
Contact with the team leader had been cut three hours ago.
The leader, who had been reporting their status at one-hour intervals, had abruptly gone silent.
But rather than going to look for their missing teammates, Kwon Haeseong and his senior had chosen to press on with the dungeon clear.
They judged that continuing forward in search of the boss would be faster than backtracking to find the leader and the missing.
It was, by any measure, not a wrong choice.
But….
Was it really the right one?
Na Hwiyeon's unease materialized into reality before long.
Fourteen hours of hunting for the boss, and then three more on top of that.
At last, the two of them came face to face with the dungeon boss.
Wiping the blood smeared across his cheek with the back of his hand, Kwon Haeseong stared silently at the monsters before him.
Roughly twenty wolf-type monsters.
Ice shards embedded in their white fur scraped at his skin every time they hurled themselves at him in attack.
But aside from that nuisance, the fight hadn't been particularly difficult.
Case in point: only one of them was left.
He looked down at the final wolf sprawled on the ground, breathing hard.
The moment this thing breathed its last, we head home.
"Ugh! Thought I was a goner. Still, thank god. Any later and we'd have been in real trouble."
His senior flopped down flat onto the ground as he spoke. Monster corpses littered the area, but he didn't seem to care one bit.
Na Hwiyeon could understand why. The exhaustion was considerable. Seventeen hours of searching, followed back-to-back by a fight against twenty monsters — none of it had allowed for rest.
Kwon Haeseong let out a long breath.
When the field team had entered the dungeon, seven hours had already passed since the kindergarten group went missing.
Seventeen more hours had elapsed since then… so a rescue in twenty-four, then?
Roughly a full day burned through.
At that point, odds were decent that every one of the missing would be rescued alive.
Just as he was letting out a hollow laugh at the absurdity of being conscripted into an entire unplanned day of work, his senior's voice beside him drilled into his ear.
"Hey…. what's with this time."
At the sight of his senior staring down at his watch with a grave face, Kwon Haeseong checked his own.
"……!"
December 25th, 20XX.
Christmas Day itself.
The moment Kwon Haeseong's eyes met his senior's, he felt it — something had gone very, very wrong.
The date he'd checked right before entering the E-rank dungeon was December 11th. With Christmas a full two weeks out, he remembered it precisely.
No — it would be strange if he didn't remember.
Only a single day was supposed to have passed.
And yet somehow, there was a two-week gap between that memory and the date now glowing on the watch.
……The two of them fell silent.
Scenarios and worst-case assumptions crowded their minds, but neither opened his mouth rashly.
As if saying it aloud would make it all true.
But time, indifferent, kept flowing, and they couldn't simply stand there forever.
"This is bad. Really bad. No wonder it felt off — collapsing like this after just one day's work made no sense."
His senior sprang to his feet, yanked off his goggles and tossed them aside, muttering under his breath.
"The time we experience and the time that actually passes are different…. If that's the case, then rescuing the civilians—"
Two weeks. No — factoring in the seven hours they'd already been missing before the team even deployed, three or four more days had passed in the outside world.
Would they still… be alive?
He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them. His own face was reflected in the goggles his senior had discarded.
He looked gaunt beyond belief for someone who supposedly hadn't been in there more than a day.
If Kwon Haeseong could have had his way, he would never have looked at the scene unfolding before him now.
But he couldn't bring himself to turn his head away. He needed to see, plainly and completely, the consequences of what he had done.
Ten bodies carried away under white blankets.
Eight of them were children, not yet six years old.
A heavy, dead silence settled over the field team as they stood staring.
It was long moments later that the team leader, face drained ghost-white, finally forced the words out.
"……By the time we found them, they'd already all lost consciousness. They'd hidden themselves in a cave in the snowfields, so they'd held their body heat — the problem was they'd had no nutrition at all…."
Nourishment.
The most fundamental line between life and death that any human being must cross.
When he heard the cause of death, it felt as though Kwon Haeseong had been struck across the head.
Because the fear of death he'd brushed against every single day had never once been this.
The fear of one's life under threat — that meant a monster's ambush, an attack by another awakener, or a trap sprung mid-mission. Things like that.
But in this moment, the hollow, almost absurdly primitive cause of death — insufficient nourishment — was more terrifying than any of them.
Which meant that what the team leader was really saying was… that they had starved to death?
When the team and I split up, we divided the rations in two.
"Quit whining about being hungry, bear, and pack extra."
At that remark, Kwon Haeseong had grabbed extra food without thinking twice. Would things have turned out differently if he hadn't?
The memory of his senior sweeping up the rations with that guileless grin made his stomach heave.
"You all must have felt it too — inside that dungeon, the time you experience and the time that actually passes don't match."
By the time the team leader found the missing, two full weeks had already elapsed on the watches.
He said the survivors they'd scraped out of the snow were clinging to life by a thread, doing nothing but breathing.
"There was nothing we could do. Whether it was distance, I couldn't reach you two, and we judged it impossible for just me and the rookie to carry all ten unconscious people to the exit."
They had tried to bring them anyway, he said.
Carrying them on their backs, hauling them, holding them in their arms — even if it meant dragging them across the snow by sheer force of will.
"I honestly thought I was losing my mind…! Even the ten minutes we stopped to think — hours had passed in the real world…."
The rookie, voice choking as he forced the words out, finally broke into tears.
"It was my mistake."
With those words, the team leader left to handle the aftermath, and his senior stalked off cursing himself under his breath.
Kwon Haeseong turned his gaze away from the rookie, who was still crying.
The gate, slowly closing.
The dungeon he himself had cleared.
The team leader had called it his own error, but to Kwon Haeseong, every word of it sounded like his fault.
If they had set out to find the missing first, as the request demanded, from the very beginning.
If he hadn't pushed a dungeon clear on nothing but baseless conviction.
If, at the very least, he had gone searching for the others the moment contact was lost….
None of this worst-case horror would have come to pass.
……No tears came.
No — he thought shedding tears would be an obscenity.
In the end, it was the team leader and the rookie who carried the bodies out of the dungeon in their arms the moment it closed.
All he himself had done was throw ignorant fists at monsters.
Kwon Haeseong looked up at the sky. White snow was falling.
Na Hwiyeon stared blankly at the city street where white snow was falling in thick, silent sheets.
By this point, there was no mistaking it.
What he was watching now was Kwon Haeseong's past.
The problem was that this was 5D screen-sharing — sensations and emotions included.
If he was feeling it all himself, too — the guilt crushing his whole body, the regret that flooded in with every single breath — then yes, that was a problem.
Across the street, bright, cheerful Christmas carols played on and on.
Right around this time, I saw it on the news too.
The story of the daycare dungeon disaster.
Trying not to think about his gritty, unblinking eyes, Na Hwiyeon looked around.
Only a few hours ago in this memory, eight children and two adults had been swallowed by a dungeon and died a horrific death… and yet the world hadn't changed in the slightest.
The music still played, the streets still overflowed with people, and warm holiday chatter still passed from mouth to mouth, festive as Christmas demanded.
He accepted that strange yet utterly ordinary sight without difficulty.
The same misfortune is felt differently by every person who encounters it.
Some would treat it like just another item on the evening news, scrolling past.
Some would grieve, feel sorry, and somehow manage to carry on.
And others still might crumble entirely, their lives ending in despair and pain.
And Kwon Haeseong….
He would have chosen to blame himself, endlessly, and to put himself on trial forever.
Na Hwiyeon thought back to his own school days — now a lifetime ago, impossibly distant.
More precisely, to the memory of the day the building where his parents worked collapsed in a single instant.
Life's turning points arrive in ways no one could ever predict.
The way he, orphaned overnight, had lost both parents in the space of a heartbeat.
For Kwon Haeseong, this incident might be exactly that kind of event — the one that turns a life upside down.
Come to think of it, maybe the reason he came to the kindergarten is tied to this, too.
Na Hwiyeon fell silent.
He'd had no idea he would end up seeing something this heavy — a colleague's darkest past — completely by accident.
But the shifting situation was moving faster than his discomfort could keep up.
Because that now-familiar sensation was beginning to curl through his mind.
Ah. So I'm waking up now.