The City (1)
The City (1) — Gohyeon High School, Guro-gu, Seoul
Straight lines and curves swam across the dark classroom wall.
The lines, each carrying its own color, connected and wove together into a single painting. The picture that took shape was as abstract as an ancient mural, yet its meaning was unmistakably clear to anyone who looked.
The record was showing me a war.
No—there were far too few people for it to be called a war.
The message of the mural was a bloodbath.
A sword-wielder and a spear-wielder were tangled together. A man spouting fire from his hands clashed against a man vomiting wind.
And at the very center of the blood-soaked corpses strewn across the ground, two men were locked in a standoff.
One man glaring upward with seething black energy, and another man gazing down at him from above.
An utterly familiar confrontation. A familiar composition.
"……Seo Joowon?"
Inside the mural, Seo Joowon and I went on facing each other as though we were still alive and breathing. It was only a painting, and yet the dagger in Seo Joowon's hand kept wavering in the black mana.
I cautiously reached out and stroked the cult-leader robes fluttering in the painted wind. Under my touch, the mural continued projecting its image without the slightest disturbance.
I took a step back from the painting, crossed my arms, and stroked my chin. I tried to pick apart the meaning embedded in it the way one might appreciate a work of art……
Honestly, I had no idea.
It wasn't a prophecy of the future, either. Seo Joowon had already died miserably at my hands.
I waited a little longer, hoping a next scene might appear, but the mural went on depicting the same moment, frozen in place.
A city chronicle?
The fighting awakened, Seo Joowon, and me?
Well, was it something like the city's diary, then?
But wouldn't that make it nothing more than a simple record of who fought whom?
Why was this a Hidden Piece reward? Especially since, unlike that mural full of awakened warriors, I'd only ever seen Seo Joowon.
One question tangled into the next, endless as a tail chasing its own head.
"All right. 'Record 1' alone doesn't get me anywhere."
With a light scratch of my head, I left Gohyeon High School behind, its halls crammed with corpses.
"Keeeeeeek―!"
Right on cue, the zombie horde went into a frenzy and broke through the front gate. They must have chased the noise I made until their legs gave out, but I had somewhere to be.
BOOM―!
I shot up into the air, both hands pinning down the gliding Frogs mid-flight.
Screeeeech―!
Watching the Frogs crash into the ground, Steroid let out a long, howling scream and began hurling zombies at me in a rage.
Dodging the zombies that flew at me like boulders from a catapult, I kept gliding onward.
"Keeeeeeeek―!"
The horde's roar at losing its prey shook the whole city.
BOOM―!
Before that vengeful howling could reach me, I accelerated my telekinesis and swept my head quickly across the skies above Seoul.
I needed the next Hidden Piece.
If 'Record 1' told me nothing, then all I had to do was find 'Record 2'.
CRASH―!
Steroid crumpled onto the penthouse floor.
Scritch―
The second Hidden Piece was located in a luxury apartment complex in eastern Guro-gu. And in the penthouse at its very top floor, a muscle-bound mass of flesh, curled up defensively around a red gem, was guarding it.
The hulk roared at the sight of me sailing in through the window on telekinetic flight. Any ordinary awakened person would have screamed and pissed themselves, but to me he was hardly a threat at all.
Awakened's Guro-gu Domination Rate: 64%
I swiftly absorbed the gem and turned my gaze calmly to the living room wall.
Fwaaash―!
With the familiar omen, light surged and painted the second mural.
City Chronicle 'Record 2' discovered.
This time there weren't many people in the mural.
A single human figure was all the painting depicted—one man reaching out his hand toward something. Before him lay gold and a doll.
"……This looks familiar too."
Is that me, clearing a special stronghold?
I frowned and focused on the painting. Then, as I stared at the man in the mural who wore an expression scrunched up exactly like my own, a strange feeling crept over me.
Hold on—this painting is way too small, isn't it?
Compared to the grandiose composition of the first, this one was far too sparse. I slowly took another step back and lifted my gaze higher.
"……"
The real painting was up here.
Above the man reaching for the gold and the doll spread a black membrane. The shape was familiar, but what the mural depicted was slightly different.
Countless eyeballs clinging to the black membrane. Their pupils writhed wildly, as if they were alive.
And every single one of those eyes—all of them, without exception—was fixed on one person.
"……Eyes. So, what, you're watching me or something?"
I tapped my temple and walked back out to the veranda I'd come in through. 'Record 2' wasn't enough either.
Awakened's Guro-gu Domination Rate: 66%
THWACK―! THUD―!
The Sound Stalkers clinging to the Guro Station platform like a swarm of bats kissed the floor. After inspecting the corpses piling up like white ants, I turned my attention to the train sitting on the platform.
Fwaaash―!
Just as I expected, light flared across the train's broad wall.
City Chronicle 'Record 3' discovered.
Only after obtaining the third chronicle did the mural finally show me something I didn't know.
Beneath the black membrane, a pillar of light was descending. A blood-drenched man fighting against the monsters pouring out of that pillar.
Even though it was a painting, I could almost hear the man's desperate roar, his mouth torn wide open, ringing in my ears.
And within that pillar, a single gem gleamed brilliantly. It was blue—utterly unlike the red of the special missions and the Hidden Pieces.
"……A Wave, is it?"
But if it were a Wave, the hordes had roamed around just fine even without a pillar-of-light performance. Well, did it mean something like 'the black membrane created the Wave'?
Shaking my head, I lifted my body into the air again. Sitting in one place agonizing over it wouldn't produce an answer.
Right now, I was a blind man standing before an elephant. Knowing the long trunk and the thick legs didn't mean knowing the elephant. I had to find the white tusks and the wide flapping ears too.
I needed more murals.
THUD―!
I landed on the ground in a body still radiating light and stretched out my right hand.
Awakened's Guro-gu Domination Rate: 68%
I absorbed the fourth Hidden Piece on the slide at Guro Children's Park.
"Whew―"
Staring at the corpses of the Shamblers sprawled across the ground, I drew in a deep breath.
Tonight had been the most mana-guzzling night since I'd entered Guro-gu. The war of attrition against Seo Joowon had cost me about forty percent of my mana, and that was exactly what I had left.
In other words, this was the first time since maxing out Mimic Holy Body that I'd burned through sixty percent—more than half—in a single day.
"And I was planning to raid all the special strongholds starting tomorrow morning, too."
Unease closed in on me.
The day after killing Seo Joowon, I'd thankfully recovered to full condition. The problem was that the Hidden Piece collection wasn't finished yet.
I still had mana left to spend—and whether I'd be back at a full tank tomorrow morning, no one could say. I hadn't yet figured out how fast mana recovered outside the Sanctuary. It was a problem born of the fact that no matter how recklessly I'd burned mana until now, I had always slept in the Sanctuary without fail.
City Chronicle 'Record 4' discovered.
When the message I'd been waiting for printed out, I gave my head a light shake and swept the worry aside.
Let's not rush things. Even if I wasn't at full condition, resting one more day and moving after that wasn't urgent.
Vanguard. Don't forget you're the vanguard.
"Whew―"
Taking a deep breath, I studied the next mural the light had projected.
This one was far too simple. I stepped back in case it might change when viewed from a distance like the second one, but it was no use.
The mural showed only a man lying on the ground, drenched in cold sweat, and a serpent coiled up before him. If anything was unusual, it was the gem floating above the serpent. Then again, gems had appeared in these murals so often by now that it barely registered.
No matter how I kept digging through the chronicles, no clear answer emerged. I was collecting murals to solve a riddle, and the more I collected, the deeper the riddle's mystery grew.
I looked over the mural once more with my eyes wide open, then lifted my body on telekinesis. I'd come this far, and my curiosity was still unsatisfied. As long as my mana allowed it, I wanted to keep searching.
Hah― hah―
"Ha… told you it'd come to this."
Panting hard, I stared at the fifth Hidden Piece.
Ever since the fourth, I had scoured the city from the air, and still no red glow appeared. When I circled back over the same ground again and again just in case I'd missed it, and it still didn't show, that meant one thing: this one was hidden somewhere deep.
Only after tearing apart the interiors of the larger buildings, then schools and hospitals one after another, did I finally spot the red light. The fifth Hidden Piece lay dormant on the underground platform of Sindorim Station, right on the border with Yeongdeungpo-gu.
"Haah― this is where I call it for today."
Bracing my back straight with both hands after my brief panting hunch, I raised my head.
The platform was packed with a greatest-hits collection of zombies. The watchmen of Sindorim Station's underground had assembled what felt like every mutant variant I'd ever encountered, all waiting for me.
Sound Stalkers above, Frogs and Steroids below. The ones that looked like ordinary zombies were all Shamblers through and through.
I'd given the mutants—unusually thick on the ground at this particular Hidden Piece—a telekinetic education, but this was where it ended. Even I had to ration my mana, now draining visibly toward its last reserves, and grind my way through a soul-crushing slog of a fight.
Hah― hah―
Sparing my mana as much as moving carefully, I walked slowly to the red gem and stretched out my right hand.
Awakened's Guro-gu Domination Rate: 70%
The moment I absorbed the fifth Hidden Piece, light blazed to life on the platform screen doors. Wiping the sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand, I stared at the screen.
City Chronicle 'Record 5' discovered.
This painting was, at a glance, enormous. It depicted something on a grander scale than any mural I'd seen so far.
Countless humans lay fallen upon the ground. They sprawled with their own weapons in hand, reaching upward, their faces twisted in anguish.
And their fallen bodies had piled and piled into a single mountain. At the summit of that mountain stood a man.
The man held something aloft and was grinning brightly.
"……Is that a heart?"
Where the outstretched hands of everyone screaming in desperate longing pointed, there was the man's own heart. The heart pulsing in the man's hand radiated light across the entire city. That light split into rainbow colors and reached the city's edge and the black membrane.
"That one's weirdly snide about it, isn't it."
I muttered to the empty air, loud enough to be heard.
One-Day Quick Draw? Whoever came up with that achievement name knew exactly how to piss me off.
Brushing the message aside, I turned back to the mural.
Well, judging by the special achievement, the records end at five.
Let's organize what we have, then.
The first mural: people locked in a bloodbath, and Seo Joowon and me. The second: a swarm of eyes watching a human reach for gold and a doll. The third: a man fighting the monsters pouring from a descending pillar of light. The fourth: a man lying on the ground beside a coiled serpent.
"And……"
I drew the words out long as I studied the final mural at length.
The heart of the man standing at the summit. And the light that heart gave off.
"……what exactly are you trying to tell me?"
For a long time, I gazed at the fifth mural.
At that heart, pounding so hard it seemed its beat might ring in my ears at any moment.