The Black Sea
That resonance had barely faded when Noise’s receiver began to boil with static.
Crackle-crackle-sizzle.
“Feed Seventeen’s down! Get it back up! Now!”
“Lower battery signal’s gone!”
“Gone my ass! Row Three’s still firing, you bastard! Who the hell reported a cut?”
“Screen under Seventeen just blew! Correction’s not—”
Reports that were half-screams tangled with curses and poured through the channel.
“Have they broken through?”
“Not yet.”
Noise’s fingers slid across the terminal; numbers and waveforms leapt in a chaotic scatter.
“They’re holding, but the problem’s the observation feeds crossing and the battery links going unstable. The field channels are pure chaos.”
“Upper surveillance net?”
“We’re catching about half of it.”
“Connect it.”
“Sir? Opening it now.”
Noise yanked a cable from his belt and jammed it into the old panel on the maintenance bay wall.
Crackle. Click. Clack-clack.
What had looked like solid wall slid inward, opening a dark sloping passage. It was an abandoned cargo inspection route patched over with steel plate and reinforcement beams.
Black Beak stepped in first.
Two wolf-types followed low to the floor, bodies flattened as if the path were long familiar.
Noise pressed his receiver.
“Opening the upper net. Boss is checking it himself.”
Crackle-sizzle.
“The upper net? That leaves bypass-channel logs. Whether it’s the Red Pine Society or the district grid, they’ll start tracing immediately.”
Noise looked at Black Beak.
“Turn it on.”
“The logs—”
“Later.”
Silence held for a beat on the other end of the receiver.
“……Opening it.”
As they climbed the slope, the outside sounds drew steadily closer.
Shrill sirens, shutters slamming against concrete, metal shrieks of vehicles forcing their way through narrow streets, and people screaming curses all mixed into one raw noise.
“Run! The gate’s closing!”
“Kids first! Fuck, get the kids up!”
“We don’t have filters! Just use cloth, damn it!”
Noise watched the scene with open contempt.
“These are the same bastards who swaggered around selling until C-2 hit. Now look at them losing their minds.”
“Even scum know when to cut and run.”
The upper exit was hidden behind a shattered billboard. The lock clunked open; Black Beak shoved the steel plate aside as if ripping it free, and outside air rushed in.
Above the maintenance bay lay an old observation deck linked to the waste compaction yard. Illegal transmitters, severed cables, and broken antennas lay tangled across it.
Beyond that, the full sprawl of District 30 opened out.
Below was pure pandemonium.
Among the jumble of plank levels, rusted girders, waste rails, and cramped alleys, people no longer walked—they shoved and trampled one another.
“Filters! Still got filters! Triple price!”
“Triple my ass, you son of a bitch!”
“Don’t like it, fuck off—or stop breathing!”
“You little—”
The chaos outside made the inner district look almost calm by comparison.
Past the crushed lower structures, part of the district core rose like a blade.
Skyscrapers, armored glass, corporate logos stamped across high towers.
Around them stood a solid inner perimeter of checkpoint towers, armored gates, and auto-turrets.
The outer defensive wall that held the outside world at bay, and the smaller wall that protected the inner core.
Everything between those two walls was District 30 as it stood now.
Black Beak turned his head straight toward the outer wall.
It was too far. Stacked elevated rails and illegally extended buildings blocked the view.
Worse, the scale was so vast that the wall barely registered as a shape—only a black darkness driven into the horizon.
Boom.
A low resonance rolled in from the distance.
The dull vibration traveled late through the ground; the deck’s steel plates trembled faintly and cables knocked together.
Noise jacked his terminal into the observation gear.
“Bringing up the image.”
The old observation panel lit, then immediately tore. Black spots and horizontal lines bled across the screen; a fragment of the wall locked on for a second before communication failure shattered it.
An endless metal face.
Batteries packed tight across it, blue trajectories flickering and dying.
And below that, at first, only a dense dark stain.
Noise’s fingers moved.
Zoom. Correct. Zoom again.
When he saw the black stain writhe, his hand stopped.
The ouroboros pattern inside the golden eye turned slowly.
Eastern Art.
He narrowed the width of the divine sight.
Human heat, communication signals, jamming waves, and the murky breath of pollution were tangled like garbage; if he opened the field too wide the sheer volume of information would drown him.
He focused only on the lowest, darkest stretch beyond the wall.
The inside of the eye burned; vision wavered once. Through the noise that split like a snake’s tongue he finally caught a single outline.
A black wave.
The low horizon beyond the wall was heaving darkly. At first he thought it was a black tide, but the tighter he focused the more it became a tsunami.
A black tidal wave made of beasts, insects, and things shaped like people, all knotted and fused together, was crashing toward the wall.
“Wa……”
Noise’s lips trembled.
“Wave.”
Black Beak did not move, still facing the wall.
“Impossible. Something that size is moving and the outer ecosystem stays quiet? Blood scent, cries—anything—the small fry should already be going crazy.”
“There was nothing like that.”
“That’s exactly why it doesn’t make sense.”
A heavy guidance tone rolled through the sirens.
> Erosion Grade C-4 maintained.
> Outer Wall Sector 17 defense line reorganizing.
> Non-combat personnel, move to designated shielded sectors.
Noise let out a hollow laugh.
“Reorganizing in this? My ass.”
A frantic voice burst from the receiver.
Crackle-sizzle.
“Lower batteries on Seventeen are all gone! Repeat, full battery silence!”
“Left flank’s getting pushed! The association bastards can’t hold anymore!”
“Don’t get pushed, fuck! You can’t fall back! I said don’t get pushed!”
“Official net still says C-4.”
“It’ll change soon enough.”
Before Black Beak finished speaking, the city-wide siren dropped into a grinding, bone-deep low tone, as if the sound itself were being dragged up from the bottom of the world.
The entire observation deck shook; the bones inside them resonated.
District 30 Outer Wall Erosion Grade C-5.
Screams erupted from the alleys below.
Repeating. Erosion Grade C-5.
All Wall Association personnel, assemble. Awaiting higher-response authorization.
Noise gripped his terminal and twisted his lips into an ugly smile.
“Authorization pending…… Even in this mess the suit bastards are still looking for a rubber stamp.”
Then a series of harsh scraping sounds rose from below—steel plate being clawed open. Inside the maintenance bay. Noise snatched the receiver on pure reflex.
“What’s happening.”
Crackle-sizzle.
“The ones inside the wire mesh are going berserk! Ah fuck, it’s gonna tear!”
Behind the static came the sound of something chewing through metal.
“The winged ones are ripping the rings—stop them! Hey, watch that rat bastard, the rat!”
“Eyes rolled back, get out!! Graaaah!”
“Don’t unhook the rings! Fall back! I said fall back!”
Black Beak’s fingers moved.
Snap.
The two wolf-types at his feet flinched and let out low cries from the backs of their throats.
Their spines rose; the light inside the metal collars at their napes flickered once and died.
Black Beak flicked his fingers again.
Snap.
This time one wolf-type refused to drop and slammed a forepaw into the floor.
Screee.
Black Beak’s fingers stopped in midair.
“Down.”
They understood the order, but their bodies would not obey.
Clouded eyes and the boiling sensation rising from their throats reached even here.
As the Wave approached from beyond the wall, it was already violently stimulating the instincts of the Pollution Beasts on this side.
My own insides shook as well.
Demonic power tried to surge outward. Instinct recognized that black tide as kin and drove hard through the blood, urging me to join it.
Dangerous. If I got swept up I would lose control.
I twisted the rising direction of the Tao force; the trajectory of the Taegeuk spun once at high speed.
The cycle rewound and locked back into place—yet a thin breath of power still leaked past the scales.
I had not meant to release it.
Shhhiiiisss.
The escaped energy struck the wolf-types across the napes of their necks; both pairs of ears flattened to the floor at once. The collars that had gone dark flickered back to life and settled into a steady glow.
Before Black Beak could even give the next command, they dropped flat on their bellies.
The tearing sounds from the mesh below gradually quieted, then cut off completely.
“Wh-what. It stopped.”
“What the hell was that just now?”
Black Beak turned his head slowly.
“You.”
“That was your doing just now.”
The playfulness vanished from Black Beak’s face.
Hey.
You got hit by it too just now, right? My sensors shook all the way over here. Your body just reacted toward the wall.
A Wave is a zone-annihilation-class disaster. More than half the records are lost. The only surviving logs are the ones they managed to keep by sacrificing entire districts.
I looked toward the wall again.
A living black sea was pouring toward the city.
Noise, still gripping the receiver, asked,
“Boss. What do we do?”
Black Beak looked from the wall to the alleys below, then to me in turn.
“Get the nest first. Move them to the lower concealment zone. Now!”
“You heard him? Drag every nest kid downstairs. If any of them have rolled eyes, break a joint if you have to and put them down. Stuff them in and drop the bulkheads the second the last one is inside. Just keep them breathing.”
“Yes.”
After giving the order, Black Beak looked back at me.
“Can you do what you just did again?”
When I simply stayed silent, Black Beak nodded.
“You’re not denying it, so that means you can.”
“I’ll give you a place to hide. I’ll answer what I can, within what I know.”
He pointed at the wall with his chin.
“In return, if the nest goes crazy again, stop them like you just did.”
It was a deal.
There was no reason to refuse. I ran the situation through my head at high speed. Facing a disaster of that scale, what I needed right now was a place to hide and information.
Conditions.
The identity of the pursuer.
Information on the disaster outside.
Black Beak spoke first.
“Fine. We’ll go down and I’ll answer what I know.”
Then light erupted in the distance.
A white flash swelled beyond the darkness above the wall. A beat later a dull, heavy impact slammed through the ground.
Kuuuung.
The observation deck lurched hard; thick black smoke billowed up from the wall. What began as a thin plume spread in an instant and swallowed a section of the fortification.
The black tide did not stop. It heaved even larger beneath the smoke.
Something burst upward from it. At first he thought they were fragments torn from the wall, but the shapes began to change direction on their own in midair.
The first few forms split and multiplied in moments—dozens, then too many to count.
The wall had not fallen yet.
But the tide had already begun to climb over it.
Noise muttered,
“Fuck.”