The Thing at the Top of the Building
Forty days had passed since Yoo Jinchae entered the dungeon.
Roughly a month and a week, give or take. Na Hwiyeon, whose vision was linked to hers, had felt every one of those forty days flow by in full.
Her mental exhaustion had reached its absolute limit. In the month since she'd been trapped in this dungeon, Yoo Jinchae had not once had a proper hour of rest.
Thirty minutes. A minimal catnap, taken only to keep her body from shutting down — that was the greatest reprieve she had ever allowed herself.
Even for an Awakener, that was superhuman. Mental fortitude and stamina beyond anything ordinary.
Is she going to collapse like this?
Na Hwiyeon swallowed down the urge to drop flat onto the ground that very second. His throat burned with thirst, and the sun hammering down on the crown of his head made it feel as though his brain were melting and running out of him like water.
The asphalt road shimmered, roasting under the midday sun, heat haze rising off its surface.
Sadly, forty days of Yoo Jinchae's grueling effort had borne no fruit.
She had not found her teammates.
Not a single one.
Exactly one month after being sealed inside the dungeon, sick to death of everything, she had done nothing but search for the gate's exit.
Get myself out first. Then request backup and come back. Those two sentences alone circled her mind on repeat.
But even that had failed.
There was no trace of an exit anywhere. Not a hint of anything leading outside.
Her lips had cracked and dried to flakes. Her hair had gone brittle, the color draining out of her face. On the morning of the fortieth day exactly, Yoo Jinchae woke from her catnap and walked toward the nearest mirror she could find.
And she screamed like a madwoman — remembering how, when the team had first entered this place, she had spoken with a teammate through a mirror inside a department store.
But that miracle never happened again. And Na Hwiyeon had no choice but to watch it all, unfiltered, exactly as it was.
Fear, grief, desperation, confusion, guilt — he felt it all churning together, every bit of it.
This is going to drive me insane.
It felt like he was losing his mind right alongside her. Any plan, any strategy — he wanted to throw it all away and just get out of this place. That was all that existed in his head.
Feeling fear and sorrow that weren't his own was, truly... a different dimension of suffering altogether.
Only after her throat had been worn completely raw did Yoo Jinchae stagger back from the mirror.
Then, when the sun stood at its highest, she came dragging her worn-out combat boots back to the place where she had first opened her eyes.
The spot where the gate had originally been.
It's gone now, but...
In its place, a tall building loomed on the opposite side.
"There."
A voice like rusted iron, cracked through and through, slipped out of Yoo Jinchae's mouth as she stared at the building. In this moment — sharing her body as if it were his own — Na Hwiyeon could feel it too.
It was a conviction close to instinct, without a shred of evidence, but still.
The answer is over there.
It felt like fog lifting, the whole world snapping into clarity at once.
***
A towering building frozen mid-construction, its steel skeleton exposed to the sky.
As if bewitched, Yoo Jinchae walked inside.
Following instinct, she climbed the stairs one step at a time, ascending and ascending.
Was there even a place like this before? Will something come of going up there? What if there's nothing? Is there even a boss? Does the outside know we're trapped in here? Would it just be better to die? How much time has passed?
With every step, meaningless questions sprang up in her mind, only to wither and die, over and over.
Her hollow eyes swept past bags of cement powder piled in the corners. She never once paused, moving forward as though she had a destination, without a single stop.
And at last, on the very top floor of the building, her hurried footsteps finally came to a halt.
"...You!"
A cry burst out of her. For the first time, something had caught in her field of vision. A jolt of electric exhilaration and overwhelming relief struck her frozen brain awake.
She had found the teammate she'd been searching for all this time.
One of the two who remained — the one she had never managed to contact even once.
The youngest of the team. K.
K was leaning against a crude imitation of a railing, gazing down at the ground far below, her black hair tied up high and snapping in the wind like a flag.
What? Why isn't she answering?
Yoo Jinchae hurried toward her, reaching out a hand.
At that moment, K turned to look at her — a gaunt, wrecked face that looked like it could stop breathing at any moment.
"No, are you okay—"
But that didn't matter. None of it did.
"...?"
K walked straight past her, as if Yoo Jinchae weren't there at all.
Or no — should she call it walking through her?
Her eyes followed helplessly after the back of the youngest's head as she slipped right through her.
As she stood staring blankly at the ponytail drifting away, something... caught her eye from the corner across the way.
Someone walking toward K, waving a hand in greeting.
That someone was her.
Another Yoo Jinchae.
"What the... what the hell is this now."
It was like looking into a mirror.
From head to toe... identical. It had even faithfully reproduced the look of someone who'd been through hell, down to the smallest detail. A disturbing attention to realism.
Years of hunter experience let Yoo Jinchae land on the answer without much trouble.
The original target of our raid.
That thing has to be the boss of this dungeon.
K smiled brightly and gave the approaching thing a friendly pat on the shoulder. She looked utterly worn down, yet like someone who'd just glimpsed hope, her face seemed lighter than it had in days.
"When do you think we can get out of here?"
"Ah... soon. Soon. We'll take all the kids home with us."
"Ugh, I seriously thought I was gonna die. Team Leader~"
The thing handled K's whining clinginess with practiced ease, gently steering her along.
Toward the end of the railing of the building, hollow all the way down.
A vertiginous spot so high up you could almost believe you'd touch the sky.
The two of them stood there and looked down.
Meanwhile, Yoo Jinchae pressed her lips tight and crept toward them, careful as a held breath.
A monster? What kind?
Does it have the same Shapeshifting skill as me? Even if so, what is this insane situation?
...Don't tell me. An illusion?
She closed in without a sound, waiting for the right moment. Then she swung her arm at the back of its head.
But her arm sliced through empty air.
Her fist whipped through nothing and returned to her side, and the futility of it stung. She kept her fists and legs moving without pause, but nothing connected.
As if they and she existed in entirely different worlds.
"Please!!"
Yoo Jinchae broke down, begging as she stared at K. Sadly, whatever calm she might have mustered had long since scraped bottom — her strength and her mind both running on fumes.
"When are the others getting here? Think they'll come if we wait?"
I'm already here! I'm right here!
"Oh, oh — my Watch is getting signal now? They said they're heading this way."
"Oh, thank god. We'll be less scared together. When we get out of here, I want a hot bath, right away."
That's not me! Please!
K and the thing's conversation came through crisp and clear.
...Huh?
The thing standing behind K, who was peering down over the railing, began to move, slow and furtive.
And before anyone could stop it, it drew something from its coat and drove it into the small of K's back.
With an expression of utter, indifferent blankness.
"Huh?"
No no no no.
K staggered for a moment, then clutched the railing. Between her cracked lips, a surge of red spilled out.
Eyes wide with bewilderment, K turned to look at the thing wearing Yoo Jinchae's face — then reached straight for it.
Between her pale, slender fingers, threads of red wriggled to life and snared the thing's limbs.
"Y-you, what are you? You're... not the Team Leader?"
"Ahh, right. Not her. Or am I? Maybe I am?"
"What?"
"Don't I seem like the Team Leader right now? Same as that woman. Ah — is it the way I talk?"
"..."
"Damn it, no signal again! Where the hell are these bastards slacking off? Are they kidding me? The second we're out of here, they're dead. Absolutely dead."
Yoo Jinchae's speech and expressions were being printed in real time, copy-pasted one after another.
Watching it, K wiped away cold sweat, her face draining white. Her trembling hands clenched into fists and pulled the red threads taut.
"Every human who came here was like you, at first. All full of energy, talking nonstop. But over time, everyone goes quiet. Their strength drains. And in the end... they can't even think anymore. Can't react. Things they could normally do — gone."
The thing's voice sank lower and lower, like an echo in a cave, until only its throat creaked as the head turned.
Its gaze was fixed not on K, but on an empty concrete wall where no one stood. And yet Yoo Jinchae knew.
She knew that it was looking directly at her.
Her breath caught in her throat. Because in that thing's cadence, in the little hum it tacked onto the end of every sentence, she had recognized someone familiar.
The Team Leader of Team Ma, who had died half a year ago in an A-rank Chaos Dungeon.
It was exactly like that man.
...Then does that mean this isn't a C-rank dungeon at all — that this is the A-rank Chaos Dungeon where all of Team Ma vanished and died, half a year ago?
The moment the truth took shape, a terror beyond anything she'd felt in her ignorance came crashing over her like a wave.
The entire squad lost. Every member dead.
It was such an unprecedented catastrophe that not just BOND but every hunter corporation in South Korea had spent a long while in mourning.
...But wasn't that dungeon erased by S-rank foreign mercenary hunters?
Come to think of it, she'd never actually seen an article saying it had been fully cleared.
She had only read that S-rank foreign mercenaries had been deployed. That was all.
Her thoughts were spinning.
...What if that A-rank Chaos Dungeon was never cleared at all, and it's been sitting there, abandoned, this whole time?
And what if that's the dungeon we walked into?
Yoo Jinchae looked at her teammate. Blood-froth was rising on K's lips, and her body was tilting slowly forward.
What do I do.
What am I supposed to do here.
An illusion. If this really is the A-rank Chaos Dungeon, then that thing must be casting the illusion right now.
...Then breaking out of the illusion comes first.
But how do I break...
"...!"
The fastest way out of an illusion was a sudden, intense shock to the body.
Yoo Jinchae pulled the dagger strapped to her calf and drove it into her own thigh without a moment's hesitation.
Blood welled up instantly, and just as a wave of sharp, blinding pain began to tear through her—
the scene before her eyes began to ripple like a mirage. As if paint had been poured over the world, everything except K and the thing collapsed and ran away in rivers of color.
And so Yoo Jinchae glimpsed the reality that the illusion had been hiding.
This was not a building in the middle of a city.
It was a formless, empty space — nothing in it at all.
A round, white expanse like a blank sheet of paper, no bigger than a small studio apartment.
But the truly sickening part wasn't even that. All four of the sealed walls were sheathed in mirrors.
And in the center of that space, K and the thing stood facing each other.
The thing was a monster — a slime-shaped mass of jelly trailing tentacles.
The reality was cruel. For forty days, in a space barely ten square meters across, they had all been trapped in its illusion, circling in place like caged animals.
Yoo Jinchae swallowed a curse and swept her surroundings with a quick glance. In one corner, she could see two more of her teammates, foreheads pressed to the mirrors, pushing forward against them step by step.
She wanted nothing more than to collapse where she stood and give up. But instead, she pulled the dagger back out and forced herself to her feet.
Get it together.
Gripping the dagger straight-backed, Yoo Jinchae charged at the monster.
And then—
"Huh? T-Team Leader?"
Mid-charge, her eyes met K's. The blade in her back and the shattering of the illusion had clearly snapped K out of it at the same moment.
There was so much she wanted to say. Too much. But the moment she saw K's face, the words died in her throat.
"Haha...! You were alive!"
A blood-soaked twenty-year-old's face. The team's youngest was smiling at her, relieved beyond words.
For an instant, the hand gripping the dagger went slack.
It was truly the length of a blink.
Before her eyes could even finish closing and opening, K had wound the red threads around the monster's body and pressed her back against the railing.
And all the while, the illusion was creeping back. Behind K, the familiar skyline of ruined Seoul was already layering itself over the formless white space, faster and faster.
Her breath went ragged. Yoo Jinchae threw the dagger aside and reached out both hands.
But K didn't take them. Whether she wouldn't, or couldn't, Yoo Jinchae would never know.
K simply pressed herself tight against the monster, and threw them both over the railing together.
"No— don't—!"
K and the monster plummeted toward the concrete below, down through the illusion's forest of buildings.
Yoo Jinchae flung herself over the railing, arms flailing desperately outward — but she couldn't reach.
The dizzying drop yawned open directly beneath her. Her breath was swallowed whole by raw, primal terror.
...A moment later, tears were streaming down her cheeks. Tears born of pure physiological horror.
Her legs gave out and Yoo Jinchae sank to the floor. From there, she crawled to the railing and looked down beneath it.
Nothing. There was no one.
All she could see was the mangled sprawl of the city far, far below, seen from a height that made her head swim.
The next time Yoo Jinchae opened her eyes, she had already been flung out of the dungeon.
There was only one way to shatter an illusion completely: either kill the caster outright, or...
Be devoured by the illusion and vanish together with the one who cast it.
K had died with the illusion. Inside it.