Memory (2)
Memory (2)
Even in a world that trumpeted the arrival of peace after the Great Cataclysm and the Chaos Period, public safety varied wildly depending on the region and the circumstances.
The district where Ilbo Orphanage stood had decent security.
It was on the Korean Peninsula, where the Three Great Families had planted their roots. Although it lay on the outskirts far from their main estates, it wasn't a place where children worried about being dragged off by monsters in their sleep.
So she had let her guard down.
She had never imagined that the superhumans and soldiers would fail to clear a Grade 4 Dungeon and that it would begin to rampage.
And walking home from school around the foot of the very mountain where that dungeon was located, she certainly hadn't expected to lock eyes with an 8th-Rank Monster that came charging out.
Thankfully, she had survived.
The other children had fled in a panic, and Lee Ha-sol, the monster's target, had managed to shake it off.
This was because Ha-sol was naturally quick, and the monster had been limping on an injured leg.
'What do I do.'
Now, the problem was that she hadn't managed to escape to the city and had instead been driven into the forest. And because this was the mountain next to the one where the dungeon had run wild, other monsters had crawled in.
- Grrrr...
Lee Ha-sol, body concealed within the underbrush, held her breath.
Casting a glance outward, she saw the orange sky stubbornly darkening.
'Once it's night, it'll be dangerous...'
But she couldn't just walk out of the bushes now. Lee Ha-sol wasn't confident she could outrun a monster with fully functioning legs.
Of course, this situation would be suppressed shortly.
It was, at best, a Grade 4 Dungeon. A rampage that hadn't even generated a Spatial Isolation. The monsters were only at the 8th Rank, so the superhumans and soldiers would sweep them all away soon.
Even so, staying put was dangerous.
The monster Lee Ha-sol had encountered was a four-legged beast with yellow fur and vicious, protruding fangs.
Considering that beast-type monsters generally have an excellent sense of smell, she wasn't safe even now.
She had rolled around in the dirt, but she couldn't be certain she had fooled the monster's nose.
'Ah, seriously... why does this shit keep happening to me...'
With all her senses on high alert, Lee Ha-sol's eyes went wide for a moment.
As a sliver of breathing room appeared, the misery of her situation hit her hard.
What exactly had she done wrong to end up here? It was a selfish thought, but of all the children, why had she been the one singled out?
While swallowing her sorrow, Lee Ha-sol suddenly recalled something from a few months ago.
It was a particularly sleepless late night. As she had stared up at the night sky, imagining an exhausting future and fighting back tears just as she was now...
Lee Ha-yul had held out a handkerchief to her.
It was so unexpected that it stopped her tears cold, and the comfort of the gesture had left her startled.
'...Ha-yul should be fine there.'
Right now, that was an impossible wish.
There was quite a distance between here and the orphanage. Most importantly, Lee Ha-yul couldn't just wander around outside the orphanage.
'Right, Ha-yul is waiting for me...'
She couldn't die here for such a stupid reason. A new resolve settled in Lee Ha-sol's eyes.
- Tap
"...Gk, mmmph...!?"
Just as she thought that, Lee Ha-sol's eyes flew open at the sudden sensation of something wrapping around her ankle.
It was too sudden even to scream.
Clapping both hands over her mouth, Lee Ha-sol shuddered as if she'd been electrocuted.
When she turned with difficulty, she met the eyes of Lee Ha-yul, who had crawled painfully into the bushes. His hand was gripping her ankle.
"......"
Lee Ha-sol's face went blank.
Was this a dream? Was she so delirious she was seeing things? But the touch on her ankle was too vivid...
"Ha-yul...?"
- Nod
"No, really..."
At her hushed whisper, Lee Ha-yul nodded promptly. Only then did a sense of reality snap back into Lee Ha-sol, and her face drained of color.
Her gaze swept rapidly over Lee Ha-yul.
His clothes and hair were in complete disarray, his body soaked in sweat.
Beneath loosened bandages, a glimpse of the terrible burn scars on his arm was visible. There were many scratches on his delicate skin, as if from branches.
A spark of fire lit in Lee Ha-sol's eyes.
"How on earth...! How could you... why are you here...?"
For a moment, Lee Ha-sol almost shrieked but swallowed the sound. If she yelled here, monsters might swarm them.
"......"
Lee Ha-yul didn't answer.
His throat was too sore to answer in the first place, and with a dazed look, blinking, he just stared at Lee Ha-sol as though he himself wasn't sure why he'd come.
Lee Ha-sol bit down hard on her lip.
Why in the world was Lee Ha-yul here, in a place crawling with monsters, without a shred of fear...?
'Wait, but how did he even get here in the first place?'
Lee Ha-yul, who could barely see and had such a frail body, had climbed a mountain? And managed to avoid all the monsters?
Moreover, she hadn't sensed him approaching at all. There should have at least been the sound of rustling bushes...
- Rustle...!
"...!?"
There came the sound of undergrowth. Some distance away from them. Lee Ha-sol held her breath, and Ha-yul didn't make a sound either.
- Sniff, sniff, sniff...
A presence was drawing closer. She could picture the monster, its nose pressed to the ground, tracking their scent.
- Grrrr...!
Soon, a chilling breath of air brushed the heated nape of her neck.
They'd been found.
"Ha-yul...!"
Lee Ha-sol shot up, grabbed Lee Ha-yul's hand, and bolted in the opposite direction of the noise, running as if her life depended on it.
The dark forest made it hard to see. Even with her eyes adjusted to the dark, it was worse than daytime, and the rough, uneven mountain path was difficult just to walk on.
- Kraaaugh!
"Kgh...!"
But the monster, unhindered by such conditions, suddenly narrowed the distance.
At this rate, they would be overtaken. Facing a steeply declining slope, Lee Ha-sol clicked her tongue and ground to a halt.
Without even a moment to catch her breath, she spun around and saw menacing eyes gleaming in the darkness.
- Grrrr...!
It was that same monster. Yellow fur and hideous snaggleteeth. A Yellow Beast, a standard 8th-Rank Monster.
Unfortunately, this was not the one with the injured leg.
'What do I do.'
Lee Ha-sol swallowed hard.
An 8th-Rank Monster could be easily dispatched with a firearm, and a single superhuman could slaughter dozens of them.
But Lee Ha-sol was not a superhuman. She wasn't even old enough for middle school yet. To her, a monster was literally a monster.
The murderous gaze made her limbs tremble. Her vision shook, and her already ragged breaths felt like they would stop completely.
- Squeeze...
The tremor subsided for an instant at the warmth of the hand she held. Her wavering gaze steadied. Following instinct, Lee Ha-sol hid Lee Ha-yul behind her.
'...What do I do?'
But even then, no solution came. What could she do against this monster drooling voraciously? Lee Ha-sol clenched her teeth.
'I have to at least protect Ha-yul.'
If it had come to this, there was no other choice. She would have to throw herself at it with everything she had and buy time for Lee Ha-yul to escape.
"Ha-yul, listen carefully...?"
She didn't get to finish her sentence.
Lee Ha-sol's eyes went wide with shock. The hand she was holding pulled her backward, then abruptly shoved her down the steep slope.
As she toppled backward, she saw Lee Ha-yul, the one who had pushed her.
"Ha-yul─!?"
Thud-thump! Lee Ha-sol tumbled down the incline and screamed. The drooling monster's attention also turned to the foot of the slope.
Lee Ha-yul blinked.
The monster reflected in his blurry vision didn't seem to notice him.
Lee Ha-yul wished it wouldn't find him.
"...Grruk?"
Only then did the monster notice him, flinching with wariness. But soon, sensing no particularly threatening presence, its drool began to drip again.
There was no reason to hold back.
"Kraagh!"
Its huge, gaping mouth lunged for his throat. Lee Ha-yul's vision was hazy, but his sharp survival instinct clearly sensed the danger.
However, his body was not agile enough to dodge the attack. Instead, he barely managed to twist his body, offering the less vital right arm.
- Crunch!
Fangs sank into the bandaged right arm. A spray of blood burst out. That blood also splattered down onto the slope below.
"Ah, aaaah...!"
Lee Ha-sol's scream battered his eardrums. The sensation of fangs penetrating skin and grinding into bone. The fetid warmth of the monster's breath clinging to his body.
Processing every sound, Lee Ha-yul repeated a thought process without a single ounce of hesitation.
He had offered his arm instead of his throat. It hurt. He was going to die like this. His survival instinct screamed that he had to flee.
But he couldn't run with his arm in its jaws. And even if he could, Ha-sol was still down there.
'Get rid of it?'
Impossible. Lee Ha-yul was not what people called a superhuman. He didn't have the strength to kill this monster. He didn't even have the strength to run.
'Didn't have it?'
In an instant, he rejected that judgment.
It wasn't a rational conclusion. It was a whisper of instinct.
Lee Ha-yul clenched his left fist. Though it was an empty void, his instinct whispered that there was something there.
- Grasp...
The empty space was truly caught in his grip. Obeying the murmuring instinct, he grasped and pulled it forth.
Fwoosh! A light blazed between his fingers.
"Huh?"
A warm light, bright as the sun, illuminated the darkness.
The monster that was about to chew and swallow Lee Ha-yul's arm, and Lee Ha-sol, who had been desperately scrambling up the steep slope, both opened their eyes wide.
Lee Ha-yul also blinked.
The radiance he had grasped flowed up his hand and permeated his body.
Strength surged into his body, which had been on the verge of collapse. His legs stood firm as though they could never give way. An arm that shouldn't have been able to move, moved.
He was even struck by the illusion that, so long as he held this light, he could withstand anything without falling.
Soon, the radiance in his left hand elongated.
He didn't know what it was, but he realized he could use it as a weapon.
Judgment and action became one. He lifted the radiance up and rammed it straight into the monster's eye.
- Thunk!
The All-Rounder he had possessed since birth guided its trajectory. Where his strength was lacking, the radiance more than supplemented it.
The radiance pierced through the eyeball, penetrated the skull, and lodged in its brain.
There was no ordinary scream or final death throes. The blazing radiance had destroyed the monster's brain.
The monster's jaw went slack.
As the fangs firmly buried in his arm were ripped out, the decerebrated monster sagged and collapsed onto Lee Ha-yul.
"Ha-yul! Ha-yul!? Ha-yul...!?"
Around that time.
Lee Ha-sol finally managed to climb back up the slope.
Lee Ha-yul was pinned under the monster, struggling. Hurling herself forward, Lee Ha-sol put all her strength into shoving the monster aside.
"Nngh...!"
After struggling to push the limp monster away, Lee Ha-sol checked on the Lee Ha-yul beneath it.
"...Ah."
A sigh of despair leaked from her slightly parted lips.
The bandages wrapped around his right arm were shredded to ribbons. The flesh and bone beneath could not possibly be intact.
The dark forest floor was sticky and red. That pool of blood was gradually growing. Lee Ha-sol's eyes trembled.
Even without any knowledge of human anatomy or medicine, anyone knew that losing this much blood meant death.
"Ah, ah, no... no..."
Lee Ha-sol reached out with both hands but froze in mid-air.
There was nothing a child ignorant of medicine could do. It wasn't even a wound that simple first aid could treat.
'Why...'
With Lee Ha-yul collapsed like this, because he had tried to save her and ended up like this, why couldn't she do anything?
'...Why...'
She had been too slow to act.
She should have pushed him first. Because of her hesitation, Lee Ha-yul had tried to save her first, and this was the result.
That fact stabbed deep into Lee Ha-sol's young heart and mind.
- Squeeze...
"......"
Amid her ragged breathing, choked with a nauseating self-loathing, Lee Ha-sol's vision sharpened.
Using his relatively unharmed left hand, Lee Ha-yul had reached out and grasped her shaking hand.
Both were a mess of blood. One from being splattered. The other from getting scraped up and bloodied while scrambling up the slope.
Though he must be in far more pain, he held her injured hand as if worried about it.
"Ha, yul...?"
- Boom!
It was the moment Lee Ha-sol's lips parted. Suddenly, a tremendous resonance erupted from Lee Ha-yul.
The branches and leaves shook violently. Startled, Lee Ha-sol flinched and looked around before dropping her gaze back down.
"...Huh?"
Then, as if unable to believe her eyes, Lee Ha-sol's eyes flew open in astonishment.
- Sssss...
A hiss of steam rose from the arm that had been torn ragged by thick fangs, and gradually, new flesh rose in its place.
It was a sight as though time itself were rewinding.
It was over quickly.
The arm, maimed to the brink of being torn off, was completely restored, and even the old burn scars were wiped clean away.
* * *