The Plaza Incident
The three of them emerged from the plaza incident into the hallway. Heat from the seminar room still seeped through the crack beneath the door. Students scattered while chattering about the presentations. One boasted about receiving a business card, another brought up internships, and yet another grew excited imagining the scale of Garam Bio’s laboratories. Just then, Ha Yul’s phone vibrated. She checked the screen.
Sender: Seo Yujin
Message: Additional discovery in the Jongro Redevelopment Area. Can you come now.
Only the essentials, no unnecessary details. A very Yu-jin-like message.
‘The story we discussed in the lab and what we heard at the seminar seem to line up.’
Mutants implanted with blood crystals moving through underground passages under someone’s orders—and now another discovery in Jongro. The coincidence felt too perfect.
Su-min caught on immediately. “Jongro again?”
Without taking her eyes off the screen, Ha Yul answered briefly. “They found something else.”
“Is it the same kind of rampaging mutant as last time in the Jongro Redevelopment Area?” Chae-won asked. Ha Yul shook her head. “I don’t know yet.”
At that moment, a commotion rose from not far away. At first it sounded like nothing special—just the murmur at the end of the hallway growing louder. Campuses were crowded places by nature; small disturbances happened all the time. But Ha Yul reacted sharply to the noise. Startling at something ordinary was different from startling at danger. She had already turned her head.
Beyond the wide window overlooking the central plaza, several students hurriedly backed away. One nearly tripped, another pulled out a phone. Ha Yul spotted a figure cutting through the crowd. At first glance, it looked like a drunk. Staggering steps, irregular gait, shoulders twitching unnaturally. Yet it moved far too quickly. Its center of gravity seemed broken, yet it threaded through empty spaces with uncanny precision.
The moment sunlight struck the back of its neck, something dark red glinted. A blood crystal was embedded there.
“Blood crystal,” Ha Yul said quietly.
Su-min and Chae-won stopped at the same time. Both had been looking out the window, but the instant the words left her mouth, their understanding of the situation shifted. The pattern they had seen in the lab. The behavioral adjustment through external stimuli mentioned in the seminar. And now the blood-crystal entity right in front of them.
Ha Yul was already moving. She wove through the crowd and sprinted toward the plaza. The mutant had not yet gone berserk. A typical rampaging mutant would have lunged at the nearest prey, yet this one did not. It nearly collided with students twice, only to veer away each time. It was not without aggression, but its priorities were different.
“It’s running away,” Su-min said, slightly out of breath as she caught up. “Why?”
Ha Yul kept her eyes on the mutant. “It has a destination.”
The moment the words left her mouth, the mutant suddenly lowered its body. In the next instant it sprang forward explosively, turning toward the stairs at the edge of the plaza. The screams around them grew louder. Without hesitation, Ha Yul threw herself forward. Her black coat flared dramatically behind her; to the students, the movement looked unreal. Even in a world where martial artists could be seen on the street, the movements of a true master still froze people in place.
The first collision was brief. Ha Yul struck from the side instead of head-on and brought the mutant down. It slid across the ground as if scraping the floor, then twisted grotesquely before rising again. Students screamed and fled farther away. Some continued filming with trembling hands. The face revealed under the sunlight still retained many human traces. Its lips were cracked, its eyes unfocused and trembling, yet the red crystal at the back of its neck reflected the sunlight with perfect clarity. Veins beneath the skin were abnormally swollen, and a liquid—sweat or something else—ran down its temples and neck.
The mutant moved again. This time it tried to break past her side rather than toward her. It really was trying to escape. Ha Yul clicked her tongue inwardly and moved her hand. To the onlookers, it looked as though something had flashed. The karambit severed the ankle and the back of the knee, toppling the mutant and driving it face-first into the ground so that the back of its neck was exposed. The mutant screamed as it fell—a half-human, half-beastly roar.
Campus security personnel were running from a distance. Students had backed farther away, but the filming did not stop. Ha Yul did not hesitate. Before the mutant could crawl up again, she pinned it down. For a moment it thrashed like a beast, yet even its struggles differed from those of ordinary rampaging mutants. Instead of trying to bite her, it kept lifting its head to look in a certain direction—as though obeying an order to head there.
Ha Yul followed its gaze. Beyond the plaza, toward the road. The exit leading out of campus. Had someone been sent to retrieve it? Or had that been its original next route? She did not think any longer. The instant the mutant twisted to rise again, she pressed down on the cervical spine and used the karambit to tear the flesh at the back of its neck, exposing the embedded blood crystal. Blood and viscous fluid splattered. Even under daylight, the color looked murky. The mutant convulsed once, then moved no more.
Behind them came the students’ screams and murmurs, and notification sounds from phones ringing everywhere. Su-min and Chae-won approached as well. Neither was as accustomed to scenes like this as Ha Yul, yet they did not look away.
Just then, the crowd parted once more—not from fear this time, but because of someone’s presence. People in suits who had just descended from the seminar room appeared, and at their center stood Lee Garam. She seemed to have noticed the commotion after finishing her post-seminar tasks and leaving the building. Her steps were quick but not frantic. Even when her bodyguards tried to move first, she stepped to the front without hesitation.
She stopped before the fallen mutant. Her gaze immediately went to the back of its neck. The time it took to confirm the crystal was very short. Lee Garam’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly. It was less an expression of surprise than one of confirmation.
“How interesting,” she said.
Ha Yul looked up. Their eyes met again. This time they were not far apart as they had been in the seminar room. Up close, Lee Garam seemed even sharper than she had on the podium. There was a distinct sense that this woman was accustomed to standing in a position where she looked down on and evaluated others.
After a brief silence, Lee Garam added in a smooth tone, “I didn’t expect the case I mentioned in today’s seminar to appear so quickly.”
On the surface the words sounded like admiration for coincidence, but to Ha Yul they felt different. The timing of the incident was too swift and too precise. After hearing Chae-won and Su-min’s hypothesis in the lab, after learning about the possibility of external stimulus adjustment during the seminar, a blood-crystal entity had appeared right in the middle of the same campus. How could anyone call this coincidence?
Lee Garam looked down at the mutant on the ground once more. “This is no ordinary rampaging mutant,” she stated. Her tone was decisive. Her judgment was fast—or else she already knew of similar cases.
Chae-won and Su-min had drawn closer but did not intervene. They could feel the atmosphere had changed. The incident in the plaza was no longer a simple campus safety accident.
At that moment, the siren of a Moorim Agency vehicle sounded briefly from the road outside the plaza. People turned again. A black-and-white official vehicle came to a sharp stop. The door opened and the Special Response Team disembarked first. Then Yu-jin appeared.
The moment her feet touched the scene, she assessed the situation. The mutant on the ground, the blood crystal at the back of its neck, the murmuring students, Ha Yul, and Lee Garam standing beside her. Yu-jin’s expression hardened. It was not merely because another incident had occurred. The team leader of the Moorim Agency’s Special Response Team and the CEO of a top Moorim Agency-affiliated corporation now stood at the same scene with a blood-crystal entity between them. The composition itself was already unfavorable. Too fast, too public, too many watching eyes.
Ha Yul did not step back. Lee Garam did not close her mouth. Yu-jin, freshly arrived, looked between the two of them. An invisible line between the three women drew taut. And at the center of it, on the concrete floor, lay the mutant still pinned down with a red blood crystal embedded in the back of its neck.
What had begun in the night of the Jongro Redevelopment Area had now risen into the middle of a university campus in broad daylight. The experiments once hidden in damp basements were no longer confined underground. Campus plaza, in front of students’ eyes, right after a corporate seminar, at the exact timing of a Moorim Agency summons. It was as though someone had known this timing—or deliberately made it overlap.
And just as that thought began to take shape, Seo Yujin’s and Lee Garam’s gazes collided head-on in the middle of the plaza.