The Great Monster (4)
“Gueeeek, kek, kek.”
The red liquid spilling from my mouth pattered onto the floor in heavy drops.
The auntie who had handed me the drink jumped back in alarm.
“A-are you okay?!”
“What the hell… is this even made of…?”
“It’s extracted from candy worms…”
“Why would you serve something used only for treating hypoglycemic shock in the field as a juice…”
“Why? They say if you drink it before fighting anomalies, it helps preserve your mental strength.”
Ugh, fucking pseudoscience.
Ever since the anomaly floods began, the food industry had taken pseudoscience to its absolute peak.
It was all thanks to the extreme placebo effect born from humanity’s desperate survival instincts.
People spouted all kinds of nonsense: eating monster meat makes anomalies think you’re one of them and avoid you, Koreans have high anomaly resistance because they eat so much garlic, and so on.
It was all baseless rumors.
‘Biological-type anomalies get trapped in spatial-type ones and torn limb from limb all the time, so how does eating monster meat make you safe from anomalies…?’
Not wanting to argue with the auntie, I told her to take care and quickly retreated.
You couldn’t convince people about stuff like this.
It would only stress everyone out.
“Ugh, I was going to wait while sipping something cool…”
The bitter taste wouldn’t leave my mouth, so I hurried to find an open café, but given the current situation, it looked like everyone had already evacuated.
Not a single café was open for business!
“Uuuu… the sunlight is so hoooot…”
Slumped over, I stared at the massive, translucent dome shimmering in the distance.
It was a Sephirah-derived translucent barrier wall that surrounded Window Da-112—the core area for today’s operation.
I think the Anomaly Management Bureau’s Measurement and Analysis Division had created it.
When I reached out and touched it lightly, the translucent wall let out a sharp wing sound and roughly repelled my right hand, just like before.
That was because I was an anomaly.
I briefly considered forcing my way through, but I didn’t want to cause any misunderstandings, so I gave up on the idea.
The last thing I needed was to create trouble and bother Woo Chun-yeob from the Wall-Facing Division. No way.
“…Is it about to start?”
In the center of the dome, a middle-aged woman holding a long staff topped with a skull was delivering a passionate speech.
It was Kim Rok-hee, the representative of the Loki Office, which worshipped fantasy and magic.
I replayed my conversation with God as I began walking in a wide circle along the edge of the dome.
“Tsk.”
Based on what God had told me and the gallery posts I’d read, Kim Rok-hee was guaranteed to make a mistake.
But those mistakes always created dramatic moments, and that was exactly why she was so popular.
The key point here was that she would make a mistake.
“The kind of mistake I’m worried about is the bugs leaking out… but the dome is supposed to be completely sealing off the area.”
There were two possibilities.
One was that the bugs would tear through the dome and escape outside.
The other was that Kim Rok-hee, the owner of the Sephirah maintaining the dome, would be taken down.
“But you said Auntie has never actually been taken down. She only ever gets into dangerous situations.”
That naturally made the first option the most likely.
After all, anomalies couldn’t be easily defined just by what humans had witnessed—that was what made them anomalies.
‘What if the bugs are actually highly intelligent?’
They looked like some grotesque fusion of grasshoppers and cockroaches, but that could be a deliberate fake-out, exploiting how humans tend to underestimate insects.
They might be using diversion tactics or focused breakthroughs.
“If I want to see the whole picture, I’ll have to get to the top of the dome, huh?”
To scan the entire area, which was about half the size of a soccer field, I’d need to reach the center of the dome’s ceiling.
Flying there felt like it would draw too much attention, so I decided to ask the gallery first.
Yeah, of course it turned out like this.
Everyone’s thinking along pretty much the same lines…
‘Maybe I should’ve just accepted Chun-yeob-hyung’s offer… No matter how you look at it, a fixer flying would draw less suspicion than an anomaly flying alone.’
But then I remembered how insanely complicated and difficult the anomaly registration process for fixers was.
To just pretend that process never existed and make me a fixer or an office representative?
Woo Chun-yeob would throw a fit over that.
Just preparing the paperwork alone took a whole month, apparently.
From what the owner of that dog café—who had actually made an anomaly her representative—said, it nearly made her shut down her business.
“Ugh……”
Damn it.
The sunlight was making my brain even slower.
For now, I’d just run along the ground in a wide circle around the dome.
“Ueee.”
I decided the direction by dropping saliva on the floor and heading toward the side where the stain spread bigger.
Counterclockwise, then.
“…Once you’ve decided, don’t hesitate!”
I kicked off the ground with force.
The problem occurred exactly as I had predicted.
It happened after I had run about halfway around the dome.
Thud—!
Not long after a swarm of black bugs filled the upper part of the dome like smoke from a fire, massive-headed bugs began flying in one after another and slamming into the translucent wall.
Thud thud thud thud. Thud thud thud thud thud…
The fixers were rushing in to smash the bugs, and since the dome easily bounced back their charges, there didn’t seem to be much damage…
But every now and then, I spotted suspicious ones.
Some were spraying red secretions mixed with small clumps.
“Sniff, sniff sniff.”
And the scent coming from those secretions soon reached my nose.
My body twitched in reaction.
It was the smell of blood. Human blood, at that.
Why would it smell like that?
The barrier didn’t just block anomaly wavelengths—it also functioned as a physical wall.
There was no way any smell should be leaking out.
A hole had been punched through.
“…No way. For real?”
The Management Bureau’s barrier at the isolation facility only allowed ‘humans’ to pass through.
But it also treated ‘things that used to be human’ or ‘parts of humans’ as human.
Otherwise there would be problems transporting the injured or the dead.
In other words, what had made the hole in the wall wasn’t the bugs’ secretions—it was human.
The bugs were disguising themselves with the corpses of the fixers they had killed inside the dome and breaking through that way.
They were using human corpses to open holes in the barrier, then physically wedging their bodies into those holes to keep them from closing, forcibly holding the space open.
“These guys are seriously dangerous.”
Those insane bastards from the Cheong Clan Alliance.
Why the hell did they take on a Window they couldn’t even close?
You people raised these bugs!
They were already starting to slip outside the barrier little by little, so there was no time to hesitate.
I hurled a droplet at the bug that was struggling to squeeze through the hole.
And then—splat!
I instantly expanded the fluid inside its body and burst it apart.
Chitin fragments scattered everywhere.
The problem was that these weren’t the only ones.
Holes smeared with red secretions were slowly multiplying all across the dome.
Hadn’t the fixers noticed yet?
Ah, they were all too busy dealing with the bugs to pay attention.
…But shouldn’t they be noticing by now?
That a swarm of cockroach-grasshoppers was about to spread across Seoul?
“Damn it. If only it weren’t for the ramen shop…!”
I gathered the human blood that had created the holes in the barrier and flung it back inside the wall.
The head of a bug that had been charging forward to keep the gap open exploded with a bang!
I immediately ran toward the next hole.
I burst the bugs trying to break through.
I removed the human blood from the wall to close the holes.
Closed them, closed them, and closed them again.
After sealing about five holes like that, I became certain.
“…Trying to plug these one by one is fucking impossible.”
For every five holes I closed, ten new ones opened.
They were multiplying at a physically impossible speed.
“Damn it, should I release the seal?”
If I pulled out the Silver Crosses embedded in my body, the power I had sealed away would be released in proportion to how many I removed.
With that power, resolving this situation wouldn’t be difficult at all.
But Woo Chun-yeob was definitely monitoring me.
The abilities I was about to use would look far too threatening from a human perspective.
If I wasn’t careful, I might be judged as a dangerous Qlipha and marked for disposal.
‘But if I don’t release it, my ramen shop…!’
Release it? Or not? What should I do?
The dilemma continued as I ran, burst bugs, and sealed holes, but it ended in a surprisingly hollow way.
“…What the.”
A person floating in the air, impaled on a bug’s sharp foreleg.
It was a situation that could easily happen during a major anomaly operation.
But the problem was that it was Cheong Ha-rin.
Why was my meal buddy over there?
Dark red blood flowing from her mouth.
A body wracked with convulsions.
Eyes slowly rolling upward.
She wasn’t dead yet, but she was on the verge.
I felt no emotional disturbance, but the me that came right after was probably the most agile I had been since I started my isolation life.
I threw a droplet at the bug drilling a hole beside Cheong Ha-rin.
While bursting it, I launched another droplet and exploded the joint of the arm that had stabbed her.
With the recoil, Cheong Ha-rin’s body crossed the barrier and fell into my arms.
The enraged bugs charged toward me, but with heavy thuds and cracks, they only ended up smashing their own heads against the now-closed barrier.
“That’s why I told you to answer your calls… If you had, none of this would’ve happened.”
Right after pulling out the bug leg that had pierced her stomach, I hardened the spilled blood to seal off the severed blood vessels so that no more would leak from the wound.
As soon as I stopped the bleeding, I returned every drop of blood she had shed back into her body.
Since the blood spilled inside the barrier had only come out during the process of her falling through, the actual amount of blood she had lost wasn’t that great.
The real problem was the damaged organs.
I carefully adjusted the direction and flow of her bloodstream so that no tissue would rupture or necrotize from the severed vessels. That was the limit of the emergency treatment I could provide…
“This won’t do.”
The situation inside the dome was already a complete mess, so I couldn’t entrust her to anyone there.
And taking her to a hospital wasn’t an option while the number of holes the bugs were making kept increasing.
The blood scent that let me count the holes in the wall had already exceeded fifty.
It was too dangerous to leave the area, so if I wanted to save Cheong Ha-rin, I had no choice but to clean up this disaster first.
I had been a mosquito once too, after all.
…At least I never harmed humans, you guys.
Blame the Cheong Clan Alliance for raising you like this.
“And I will never forgive anyone who tries to destroy my precious ramen shop, burger shop, bossam shop, kimbap shop, and everything else!”
I reached inside my body and pulled out one of the embedded Silver Crosses.
After shaking off my blood-soaked right hand once, I gripped the pulled-out cross.
The synesthesia that had been limited to my immediate surroundings expanded widely.
I could feel the real-time positions of every living creature.
Inside the wall, the exact number of bugs—everything.
I threw a droplet at the bug drilling another hole.
I burst it apart.
I scattered the hundreds of split droplets in every direction.
Avoiding the fixers, embedding droplets into any bug they touched.
Bursting them, spreading them, farther, more, wider.
‘There are a disgusting number of them.’
Roughly ten thousand in total.
If I released more crosses, I could do this without any incantation.
But there were too many risks in releasing more.
For now, I’d handle it with the spell.
I took a deep breath.
“Expand ().”
Burst.
