Gaemun
Spirit force coiled at the tip of the scale was already surging through the open fissure.
The Knight-class's ponderous weapon hung at a slant overhead. Beneath it, the collapsed entrance overlapped in his vision. If that blow landed, even the remaining gap would be buried.
His Movement Arts clung to the still-unclosed crack between armor plate and flesh — before the fibrous tissue could drag the seam shut again.
One instant was all he needed.
He struck.
His body launched toward the fissure.
In that same breath, the flesh inside the crack ballooned all at once.
Boom.
The hold where he had wedged himself was crushed flat. The stalled current of power surged madly again, and a reversed pulse flung the scale-tip free.
The head that had been driving in to pierce hung, wavering, in empty air.
Above it, the weapon was already falling.
Danger!
Chukji
The next instant, he was behind the Knight-class's flank. The falling weapon smashed down across the loading-bay entrance instead.
Krrrumble.
What structure remained came down in a single mass. The gap that had been just wide enough for a person to squeeze through shrank to a hole the size of a palm.
"Shit — the entrance just dropped further!"
Noise shouted.
Geomeunburi was already snapping his fingers.
Snap.
Two wolf-types scattered left and right. The Knight-class's attention dragged after them, and the motion of lifting its weapon again lagged for a beat.
In that opening, Noise raised his carbine.
Tat-tang!
The rounds struck the inner joint of the wrist holding the weapon.
Even so, the Knight-class did not stop. The moment it righted its stance, the weapon's trajectory locked over the collapsed entrance once more.
"We can't hold much longer!"
Geomeunburi answered with nothing but another snap of his fingers.
One wolf-type scraped the ground at the edge of range; the other peeled off the opposite way, opening distance again. They did not bite head-on. Even beasts knew that locking jaws meant death.
Between those feints, the Knight-class's body hitched by fractions of a second.
When those fractions ran out, the next downward strike would bury even the remaining gap.
Freezing its movement for a moment with his technique would do no good either.
Piercing alone would not work.
Gaemun
It was a spell that opened only when one touched one's true domain — something he had never fully refined even in a Taoist's body. With this frail frame, it was more reckless still.
He lacked the strength.
The serpent turning inside the golden eyes spun a circuit faster. Heat rose deep behind his gaze, and the power beneath the scales drew into a single point. Everything he had absorbed from Infected and Variants piled onto it.
Even gathering every scrap of force, he could not unfold a domain in full.
He would open only a door.
He would draw out only one fragment of the mind's image.
"Sool."
"Hae."
"Gae."
⟨ Gaemun ⟩
The scattering power stood still inside the golden eyes.
The serpent biting its own tail uncoiled its pattern.
The darkness before him split.
Something hot ran down along the rim of his eyes.
Bloody tears.
Wait — stop!
Ocular overload is way too high. That power — your body can't take it. Keep going and you'll collapse from the inside out.
The rotation under the scales slipped out of true. The Ouroboros pattern failed to complete even a single turn and skidded.
A spell that should have turned with the original domain was reversing into his body for want of capacity and a place to land.
No! The current's twisted. Circulation's falling apart!
Leave the knotted flow to me for now.
I'll back you up. I won't touch what you're trying to do — I'll just hold the tangled parts.
He hesitated.
He had never entrusted a spell to anything else. Was that even allowed?
The warped circulation slipped further out of alignment, and a sensation of something snapping rose from beneath the scales.
There was no room left even to choose a thought.
No choice.
Do it.
AI drove in at once.
He felt a different rotation turning inside his head. It never touched the spell itself. Only the misalignment of the twisted circulation — the places where power fell out and the places where it rushed in — began to line up in a single direction.
The rotation righted itself again.
The Ouroboros pattern completed its turn.
The gate opened.
No domain unfurled. Only the place beyond that door forced its way, for a moment, into the middle of the loading bay.
Through the stench of scorched blood and molten metal came the smell of rain about to fall. Golden ripples spread across the blood and oil pooled on the floor, and a vast shadow of scales brushed over the collapsed iron plating.
Above it, a heavy shade settled down.
It felt as though the underside of a rain-swollen thundercloud hung directly over their heads.
The Knight-class's movement stopped.
The weapon it had been lifting again wavered in empty air. Geomeunburi's fingers stilled. The muzzle of Noise's carbine froze. Both wolf-types dropped low at the same time — as if a beast's instinct had recognized it first.
Scales rose out of the gold.
Too heavy to be illusion. Too blurred to be solid flesh.
There was no body. No claws. No tail.
Only a dragon's head occupied that space.
In its proper form, the whole of it would have revealed itself inside a domain. Now only one shard of that shape leaked through the crack of the door.
Even so, above a small body — a head that small body could never possibly contain — rose into being.
Horns curved out of the dark; gold flowed between the scales. The jaws opened slowly.
In that deep place, a thunderbolt was gathering.
Not lightning falling from the sky. Thunder on the verge of being vomited from beyond the opened gate.
The remaining crack across the Knight-class's front locked into the golden eyes.
The dragon loosed its bolt.
KRA-KOOM—CRACKLE!
The golden lightning did not skim the surface. It drove straight into the still-unclosed fissure.
The Knight-class never even screamed.
Light bled out between the armor plates, and the flesh boiled and turned inside out. The fibrous tissue that had been trying to seal the crack again was sucked inward all at once.
The weapon hit the floor.
Thud.
The Knight-class's knees buckled. From the crack in its front, the flesh burned inward. The pale blue-white light leaking through the seams of the head armor flickered once more and went out.
The aftershock of the bolt spread in every direction.
Variants flanking the Knight-class convulsed as one. The black-plated one dropped to its knees with its head twisted sideways; the long-armed one lost the joint at its elbow and collapsed over a cargo crate. Variants still dropping from above lost their posture in midair and smashed into the wreckage.
The dragon's head slowly blurred.
The jaws closed. The gold between the scales sank away. The shade lifted, and the smell of rain about to fall vanished with it.
The gate shut.
The instant it closed, something twisted once more inside his body. A mark left by forcing the spell without a domain scored itself beneath the scales.
The bloody tears that had run along his eyes had already dried hard on the scales.
It did not take long for the Knight-class to fall.
A body burned out from within listed to one side. Viscous fluid sprayed from between the armor plates, and the flesh within was already losing shape.
Kuuung.
The Knight-class's body collapsed onto the floor before the loading bay.
The Variants still dropping from the wall froze for a moment. Noise swallowed hard. Geomeunburi did not move. The two wolf-types stayed locked in their low crouch.
The Knight-class's remains did not last long.
Armor fragments cooled, and the flesh between them scattered like a shed skin. The dispersed residue did not fall to the floor.
It flowed toward him.
The residue did not pass through a throat. It seeped in between the scales and deep into the eyes, clinging to places that had not been filled until now. As it did, the wreckage vanished.
Beneath the scales, the Ouroboros pattern turned a smooth circuit.
This time it did not slip.
The power that had come in over the rotation settled into place as if it belonged there.
Before the bloody tears could fully dry, the searing heat deep in his eyes subsided. The mark scored beneath the scales filled in from inside the body itself.
The circulation that had been about to snap and skid only moments ago was turning again as if the strain had never happened. Even the pain at the scale-tip — flung free by the pressure of flesh trying to seal a crack — had already faded.
It was strangely fast.
Even in the days of a Taoist's body, it had never been quite like this.
The Ouroboros pattern turned another circuit.
Hey, snake.
That just now was seriously pushing it. Your eyes would've been done for if we'd kept going.
Good thing I caught all the knotted flow, huh? Right?
I was helpful, yeah?
He gave the suddenly cocky AI a straightforward admission.
It had been useful.
Wow. You really say "thanks" like that all the way to the end, huh?
"Don't just stand there staring."
Geomeunburi recovered first. Noise shifted his grip on the carbine and pressed in toward the collapsed entrance.
There was no entrance left to see.
Even the palm-sized hole that had remained moments before had been buried under the debris the Knight-class shoved out as it fell, and under the structure that had come down with it.
"Tch. Entrance's completely sealed."
Geomeunburi answered with a short flick of his fingers.
The two wolf-types were on the wreckage at once. One drove its forepaws into a concrete seam; the other shoved its muzzle under a warped metal plate.
Metal scraped.
Broken concrete shoved aside.
Noise hauled on a fallen support beam. Geomeunburi kicked a bent iron plate free beside him, and dust burst out through the slanted gap that lifted.
"This is it."
"Lower purification filter. There's space underneath, luckily. We just need to clear the debris on top."
Geomeunburi jerked his chin.
The wolf-types dug deeper. The sound of claws raking metal stretched long across the loading bay. Noise pulled on the support; Geomeunburi shoved the lifted plate clear.
Screee.
The packed wreckage slowly forced open.
Dust leaked out first.
Then the smell of stagnant water and rusted metal rose together.
At last, darkness showed through.
On the sealed roadway above, the investigation team's vehicles came to a halt.
The lead vehicle's external display shuddered. Ahead on the road, Infected swayed in a packed mass, and sections of the barrier walls on both sides had already collapsed.
Farther off on one corner of the feed, the lower face of District 30's defensive wall flared gold for an instant.
Between pollution smoke and fallen structure, light burst and died. It was too brief. Ordinary cameras held only residual glare; image correction lagged and shook after the fact.
"Outer approach to District 30."
The control officer reported.
"Multiple Infected on the road ahead. Partial collapse of both barrier walls. Unassisted passage not viable."
Rin did not take her eyes off the wall-side display.
Behind the gold that had flared and gone, the shape of the remaining energy felt somehow familiar.
"Karin."
Karin's wrist-mounted sensory assist device reacted first.
A thin light flared once and subsided. Standing by the vehicle window, Karin pointed her fingertips toward the wall.
"Just now."
Karin clenched her teeth.
"Yeah. That's the reaction."
Rin's eyes narrowed.
"The Core?"
"That part's still being masked by something."
Rin pulled up her terminal.
A faint waveform rose inside the vehicle — the trace Karin's assist device had caught. Rin overlaid it on the previous appearance data.
The two traces nearly stacked.
Rin's fingers stopped.
Rin put the designation up on the terminal.
"Matches previous appearance records."
In the seat beside her, Dam So-hye's fingertips stiffened by the smallest degree.
The place where Yeon Mu-jin had died.
The Core that had vanished near there.
And the Unclassified Immortal-Class Entity reported at the same point.
Incidents that had each stood alone were now pointing in the same direction.
Dam So-hye did not interrupt. She only slowly folded the hands resting on her knees.
Rin did not ask.
Ezekiel turned his head toward the communications officer.
"Open the line."
The officer opened the channel at once.
A hazy form rose into the air on one side of the vehicle. A corporate crest wavered faintly over a suit.
Ezekiel did not answer.
Rin put the coordinates of the sealed roadway's forward stretch up on the terminal.
"Outer approach to District 30."
The coordinates passed over the channel.
"Clear only the Infected on the road. Do not touch the outer wall or facilities."
The other side paused a moment.
Ezekiel spoke.
"Immediately."
The channel did not cut. It sank into a dark standby state.
Then Karin's wrist device trembled again.
The light did not swell. It thinned — almost dying out.
Karin swore under her breath.
"It cut."
Rin's head turned.
"Completely?"
"No. The Core side is still there. But it's faint."
Karin pressed the device once more. The light did not return.
Rin's face set cold.
The lead they had caught was vanishing.
In that moment, Ezekiel's gaze moved.
He was not looking at Karin. Nor at the place where the golden flash had died.
Those red eyes were fixed on the dark of the outer pollution zone beyond the wall.
His fingertip came down on the map.
A new marker stamped itself there.
It was not the Unclassified Immortal-Class Entity reaction Karin had just confirmed.
Nor was it the Core's tracking coordinates.
Rin checked her terminal.
"Chief Executor."
"Hold it."
Rin saved the coordinates at once. But her fingertips stopped on the spot.
The new coordinates lay outside the wall.
No alarm rose on the vehicle's internal displays. Heat signatures, waveforms, pollution density — all buried inside ordinary outer-zone values.
But Ezekiel kept looking at that place.
Rin zoomed the terminal screen.
Only then did the strangeness show.
Infected were moving while avoiding only the area around those coordinates. The horde blanketing the roadway ran wild at will, yet not one of them could approach that point beyond the wall.
As if they dared not touch it.
Even the fog was slowly parting around that place as its center.
Rin swung the display back toward the reaction that had just gone faint.
The trace of the golden flash was nearly gone.
"Chief Executor."
Rin's voice was even.
"The lead we just acquired on the Unclassified Immortal-Class Entity has a high probability of connecting to the Core. It also overlaps with prior appearance records."
"If we delay here, we may lose it again."
Ezekiel did not answer at once.
His red eyes remained fixed on the dark beyond the wall.
"Hold."
Rin's fingers stopped over the terminal.
Low static bled from the standby channel.
Rin did not answer.
Ezekiel spoke.
"Stand by."
The form beyond the channel went rigid.
"Do not fire until ordered."
The standby channel remained dark.
Rin asked nothing further.
The lead was scattering on the inside of the wall.
The coordinates Ezekiel had marked remained outside it.
The two were not on the same line.
And yet what had stopped their movement now was something beyond the wall.
"…Chief Executor."
Only then did Ezekiel's red eyes turn toward the interior of the vehicle.
Karin sucked in a breath.
Dam So-hye's fingertips loosened on her knees.
The communications officer and the control officer could say nothing at all.
Over the dark on the far side of the wall, pollution smoke lay in a long sheet.
Around the coordinates that nothing had been able to approach until moments ago, Infected were drawing back in a wider ring.
Only the darkness at the center did not move.
Something that had not yet shown itself was holding everything around it at bay — as if looking down on the city.