My House Collapsed! (2)

I crawled into the first unmanned motel I could find and passed out cold. When I came to, the light outside was still that murky, half-formed gray of early dawn.

I reached for my phone on instinct — and stopped. The last few hours crashed back into place.

Right. I turned it off yesterday.

I'd powered it down in case the police tried to track me. I don't usually leave GPS on, but you never know.

Fortunately, the motel room had a big wall-mounted TV. It wouldn't be as good as searching on my phone, but I could at least catch the news.

So, first piece of bad news: footage of me wrecking my own house was already circulating across the internet and every social media platform that existed.

Second piece of bad news: the police were looking for my human form.

Still, it wasn't all terrible. The CCTV had caught me, sure, but I'd had the hood pulled down tight — face and hair didn't seem to have made it onto the tape. And I was pretty sure I wasn't the only person who'd gone through something impossible this morning.

Okay. That's actually a relief.

This was unambiguously good news. Even common sense has a baseline. Me turning into a dragon while everyone else stayed normal would have been blatantly, irredeemably absurd. A single dragon showing up in a world already crawling with superpowers, though? That was at least a little less absurd. If I ever did get found out, maybe the odds of being branded a monster and shot on sight had gone down a notch.

Anyway. That was all well and good.

...So what the hell do I do now?

I picked up the ballpoint pen and notepad the motel had left on the desk. Time to sort the urgent problems from the merely awful ones.

The police were hunting me. That meant I couldn't use a card, which meant I had no money. The clothes I was wearing were far too conspicuous, which meant I had no clothes. And I had no identity. Technically I did, but proving it was going to be a nightmare — which amounted to the same thing.

What does this bastard even have going for her?

I drew a fat circle around no identity. That was the real problem, in the end.

Being wanted by the police wouldn't, under ordinary circumstances, have been that big a deal. It wasn't like I'd stolen anything. I hadn't killed anyone. All I'd done was turn into a dragon in my sleep and knock a building over. Sure, the other residents wouldn't be able to use the bathroom for a while, or the gas, and they couldn't go home because of the risk of secondary collapse, and they might have to rebuild the whole thing from scratch, but—

And that's my fault why?

Was I supposed to know this would happen? Was I supposed to start sleeping outside just in case? So no, what I'd actually done wasn't the crisis. The crisis was that if the police caught me, they'd restrict my movement.

Proving who I was would be a long, grinding process — that much was obvious. It'd be nice if fingerprints, iris scans, DNA, any of that still matched the old Yoo Siwol. But look at me. A white-haired little girl. Where, exactly, on this body was there a trace of the person I used to be?

Which meant that until I could prove my identity, I was as good as a legal nonentity. A perfect pretext for the police or the government to detain me in the name of "protection."

On top of that, I was an orphan. No parents to vouch for me. No one to show up and say, yes, that's my kid.

A girl who'd fled the exact location where a dragon had appeared. Who happened to have the same white hair and pale purple eyes as the dragon in the footage. Who was now, as far as anyone could tell, an unaccompanied minor.

Yeah. I'm so fucked.

Like most people in this country, I harbored a very modest distrust of the integrity and soundness of state power. Entrusting my person to that power, under these circumstances, was not a great idea.

So then...

Maybe it was the sharp teeth. The end of the pen I'd been chewing was already a mangled wreck. I pulled out a fresh one and scribbled at the bottom of the notepad.

"Hmm..."

The goals were clear. Which meant I could at least estimate what needed to be done.

Okay. Analysis complete.

"...How the hell do I actually do any of this."

As far as I could tell, this wasn't a problem that girl Yoo Siwol — thirty bucks in her wallet — could solve. Hell, even the orphanage director of twenty-three-year-old male Yoo Siwol, Korea University AI major, wouldn't be able to crack this one.

And then, uninvited, the thought arrived that maybe all of this was pointless. Was I hanging on too hard to the identity thing? If I actually thought about it, weren't there plenty of other ways out?

I mean, if Dragon-Yoo-Siwol planted herself in the middle of Gwanghwamun with a sign that read I Love You, Republic of Korea. PSY-Parasite-SonHeungmin-Faker-BTS-KoreanDragon let's go and just took selfies with Instagram celebrities, I'd probably build a cult following overnight. The government wouldn't be able to touch me after that.

Failing that, I could always run. Hide. I'd never actually flown, but the wings that had been attached to my shoulder blades yesterday probably weren't decorative. I could bounce from mountain to mountain — Taebaeksan yesterday, Jirisan today, Seoraksan tomorrow — pull a full Ma Su and just live up there. How would they even catch me? They couldn't scramble fighter jets every single day. There'd be a limit.

"Hah."

None of those options sat right with me, though. It felt like a luxurious complaint given how urgent things were, but this actually mattered more than it seemed. I had no idea whether I could ever get back the body of the twenty-four-year-old man I'd been. The choice I made right now could be the turning point of my entire life.

I didn't want to live as a sideshow freak, treated like a monster. I also didn't want to lurk around in the mountains for a few decades only to end up on some World's Most Bizarre Stories special. I just wanted to make a decent living, own my own place, and exist as a comfortably well-off member of the middle class.

And more than anything else — I still had a connection worth using.

Moon Sangjun was twenty-eight, a young human rights lawyer, and his ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠two greatest worries in life were stress-induced hair loss and a face that looked older than it had any right to. That was about to change.

In the middle of his usual morning workout, a casual jab exploded the punching bag.

"...?"

He stood there with his mouth hanging open, taking in the wreckage of his floor.

"Was that a dream?"

The fist visible beneath the burst hand wrap was completely fine. His wrist didn't even ache. No bruise, nothing.

"...Yeah, I'm done for today."

He hung the towel from around his neck on the wall and walked ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠out of the training room without a backward glance. Then he sank deep into the living room sofa, reached for his phone out of habit, and looked at the screen.

"The hell is this."

Sangjun rubbed his eyes and opened a news portal.

The trending searches ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠were a complete mess.

...Is the world running a hidden-camera prank on me right now?

Sangjun frowned and tapped the breaking news tab. And there it was: something that was either a white dragon or a western-style wyrm, standing tall on the roof of a collapsed villa.

"What the hell is this???"

A composite? Didn't look like it. The comments were wall-to-wall eyewitness accounts, and other articles were running the same footage shot from different angles. It wasn't AI, either. KBC wasn't insane enough for that. No matter how much AI slop was floating around these days, KBC was not about to air a generated video as a special news report.

"So this is real?"

He spent a long time bouncing between news tabs. Superpowers. Dragons. A UFC fighter shattering a concrete wall with a knee kick. A Human Torch and a human air conditioner.

"You've got to be kidding me."

The world had apparently lost its mind. And yet... it wasn't as if he had grounds to refuse to believe it. He was living proof, sitting right here. The comments had been throwing around words like Awakener, and given that he seemed to be one himself, he could hardly deny what had already happened.

Sangjun pressed his fingers to a throbbing temple and looked down at his phone again. Then he backtracked through a disaster alert he'd scrolled past without really reading it.

This morning, the third floor of a villa in the Guui-dong area of Gwangjin-gu...

A familiar neighborhood. He opened the news portal again. In the footage he'd actually paid attention to this time, a villa he recognized filled the frame.

"...No way."

Yes way. The only lunatic who'd ever dragged him all the way out to look at a house he was about to buy, just to have him check the real estate contract, was Yoo Siwol. He remembered that villa very, very well.

The half-smile evaporated from Sangjun's face.

"Ah, for fuck's sake."

Yoo Siwol wasn't picking up. The guy was five years younger than him, and the whole friendship had started over a game, but they'd been tight for over ten years now — the kind of friends who told each other everything. These days Sangjun thought of him as practically a little brother.

This bastard didn't get crushed under the building, did he?

If a condolence text came in, he was going to be extremely, comprehensively pissed off. The anxiety was climbing up his throat when—

The phone buzzed in his hand.

An unfamiliar number. Sangjun answered as if he'd been put under a spell.

"Yes, this is Attorney Moon Sangjun of Law Firm Saram."

He'd had a feeling, but the voice that came through was not Yoo Siwol's distinctive low rasp. Sangjun answered, disappointed.

"...I think you have the wrong number."

"No, hyung. I know this is going to be hard to believe, but it's me. Yoo Siwol."

Sangjun's brow furrowed hard. He was already having a day, and now some crazy girl was making prank calls.

"If this is a prank, I'm hanging up. I'm very busy right now."

"No, I really am Yoo Siwol. Ah, shit. Okay, what have I got. My resident registration number? The name of my old orphanage director? That time in elementary school I got hauled into the police station for throwing stuff? I can tell you all of it."

"I'm hanging up. You sound young. Don't pull this kind of prank. Who do you take me for—"

"Wait wait wait! Don't hang up! Hyung! The thing! You're getting married next year!"

"...?"

"...???"