Survive to the Very End
'Now that's a character,' several journalists in the audience thought.
A wounded man boards the helicopter knowing full well he's being used — for one purpose alone: revenge. On top of that, there was the munchkin-like spectacle of him single-handedly taking on monsters that took a squad to bring down, paired with a delicately layered performance of a man slowly losing his mind the closer he drew to the heart of Antarctica.
For Yoon Jay, too, everything about this film was a novel experience. Film shoots certainly allowed more time than dramas, but which scenes got filmed still shifted with the location schedule.
Shin Ji-won, director of Intermission, had brought in a storyboard specialist before production even began, mapping the entire flow from start to finish and shooting with meticulous efficiency.
Lee Han-lim, director of Permafrost, on the other hand, simply shot whatever came to mind.
Not a single line of dialogue was filmed only once from one angle — he shot every scene two or three times over, shifting locations and camera positions each time.
And Yoon Jay had heard the ending wasn't locked to a single version either. There were several candidates: one where everyone was wiped out, one where they all made it home alive, and more.
'So it really can change this much.'
skillfully weaving all of it together was a director's gift in itself. It made Yoon Jay feel, viscerally, that film was the art of editing.
'Wait — did I actually shoot that much?'
Going strictly by the original screenplay, Captain Jin Young-do should have been a character who dazzled with flashy action and then vanished quickly. Yet in the finished cut, he appeared far more than expected.
'Well, it turned out great. That's what matters.'
What the increasingly desperate establishment was waiting for was the vaccine to be made from the data the Antarctic team had brought back.
Once they secured the vaccine or the cure, they planned to use it to shut the mouths of everyone protesting against them.
"So? How much longer?"
"Still a long way off."
"We didn't sink this much money into sending you people just so you could stall for time."
"Hey, do any of you even understand biotechnology?!"
Professor Bae shouted down the men in black suits.
At first, when the government was the only organization capable of mounting an Antarctic expedition, he had groveled before them. He didn't need to anymore.
"You think medicine just pops out the moment we hand over data?! Stop getting in our way and get out!"
Professor Bae shooed them out like an unwelcome guest and locked the lab door.
Then he let out an awkward smile. Playing the bully like that wasn't really in his nature.
"They'll be back after that, won't they?"
"They will."
Chae Seol-hwan carefully prodded a needle into a lab rat gone feral from infection. Professor Bae sat down beside him.
"When do you plan to go public with it?"
"Hard to say..."
Chae Seol-hwan gazed at the hard drive holding the data from Antarctica, then projected an augmented-reality display into the empty air.
The densely glowing golden structure sparkled like a constellation. And beneath it, written in full: SYNTHESIS COMPLETE.
The lab rat, injected with the cure, gradually shed its coat of writhing purple membrane and returned to its original white.
[And... there's something I never told you either.]
That was what Chae Seol-hwan had started to tell Jung Yu-na, then swallowed. He had already developed both the vaccine and the cure — all the way back at the Antarctic base.
But he had told no one. In the beginning, he had been a researcher drunk on the romance and the dream of forging peace with his own two hands.
But after nearly being assassinated in Antarctica, and after watching the members of the expedition sell themselves out to different factions one by one, he came to believe that chasing lofty ideals alone would change nothing.
He was, in the end, just one researcher.
"...Until it reaches people who can actually put this to proper use."
Chae Seol-hwan was waiting for the right moment. The moment when good people could wield this medicine effectively.
But that moment never came. As he stepped out of the lab for a while and headed home, someone began tailing him.
"Chae Seol-hwan?"
"Yes?"
The assailant drove in close. Chae Seol-hwan dropped his umbrella, and then came the sickening, wet sound of a blade plunging into his belly, again and again.
He crumpled to the ground in a deserted alley. The rain soaking the pavement slowly turned red.
"So K.I Research Institute still hasn't cracked it either."
"Hardly surprising. The data is enormously complex."
"How far along are you?"
"I'm no genius."
Jung Yu-na bristled at Assemblyman Park Chul-moon, who kept pushing her to hurry.
Park Chul-moon flashed his benevolent smile. So that side was dragging its feet too — good. She was a child he had personally sponsored; she wouldn't betray him.
"Impatient as I am — well, take a breather now and then."
Since when does that man care about me? After sending Park Chul-moon home, Jung Yu-na picked up her phone.
"Yes, hello?"
And then she stormed out of the laboratory.
Where Jung Yu-na ran was a funeral hall. On the portrait, Chae Seol-hwan smiled his shy smile.
"Why..."
She sat before the casket for a full day, staring blankly into space. She had cried so hard her eyes swelled shut, and dark circles settled beneath them almost overnight.
Chae Seol-hwan's family had all been wiped out in a monster attack. Professor Bae — a colleague of his father and his mentor in the same field — and Jung Yu-na attended the sealing of the casket.
"Could you two give us a moment, please?"
"Of course."
Once the funeral director stepped outside, Jung Yu-na broke down all over again at the sight of Chae Seol-hwan — looking for all the world as if he were merely asleep.
When she touched his forehead, there was none of the warmth she remembered from those final moments in Antarctica, when he had gripped her hand tightly as they escaped.
"Professor... what do we do now?"
"Yu-na."
"What are we supposed to do now...?"
The "we" Jung Yu-na spoke of meant humanity. She knew as well as anyone that without Chae Seol-hwan, the vaccine and the cure could never be completed.
Professor Bae patted her back and wept alongside her. Then he drew something from inside his coat.
"Seol-hwan left this behind before he died."
"How did he leave it behind?"
"...I suppose he saw this coming."
As if he had known he was going to die.
What Professor Bae handed over was everything Chae Seol-hwan had ever created. There was no way Jung Yu-na couldn't recognize it — she had agonized over whether to destroy the very same thing back in Antarctica.
"This is..."
"He said if anything happened to him, I was to put it in your hands, no matter what. Said you'd know how to use it..."
"No. You need to keep this, Professor."
"Too many eyes are on me."
He had waited until they were alone. That was why he'd brought her to the sealing ceremony under the lie that she was Chae Seol-hwan's fiancée.
Jung Yu-na stared dazedly at her dead friend's legacy. Her hands felt leaden. She wanted to set it down and walk away that very instant.
"Do you know what choices I might make? And you're just handing this to me?"
"You look after your own rice bowl just fine, but your heart has always been weak."
"I'm not that good a person. What if I monopolize this and use it only for my own gain?"
"If that's what you choose to do, then so be it."
"...Why?"
Professor Bae smiled his gentle smile. The corners of his eyes were still red. I was too busy crying to notice — he must have wept so much too.
"Because Seol-hwan believed in you."
"..."
"And because I believe in you too."
"You do realize how selfish you're being, Professor?"
Professor Bae removed his glasses and pressed his eyes hard with his fingers. Tears ran down his cheeks.
"I'm truly sorry — to you, and to Seol-hwan. For being such a powerless teacher..."
Jung Yu-na walked outside as if nothing had happened and sat in the funeral hall lobby, watching the mourners drift past.
[Don't forget that I was the one who sponsored you.]
[Because you're a good person.]
[Once you've made up your mind — don't waver.]
Don't waver? You're the man who shakes me even from beyond the grave.
Jung Yu-na scrubbed roughly at her eyes with her sleeve and rose to her feet, her face like stone.
Having decided something, she strode out of the funeral hall at a rapid pace.
Back when she was fleeing the monsters in the Antarctic base, Jung Yu-na had kept glancing over her shoulder — because of the people who had sacrificed themselves for her.
But the Jung Yu-na of this moment never once looked back.
Carrying Chae Seol-hwan's legacy, she went to the company, and emerged having prepared something.
As she set off somewhere, someone fell in behind her.
Jung Yu-na deliberately wound through alley after alley, trying to shake the tail.
'Who is it? Don't tell me...'
The moment the shadow of a knife-wielding assailant lunged at her, she spun and crossed her arms to block.
Fortunately, no blow landed. Behind the collapsed attacker, Yoo Hyun was waving his hand cheerfully.
"Hiya! I'm not late, am I?"
"Hah..."
Jung Yu-na let out a long breath of relief.
[Survive to the very end.]
The words Jin Young-do had spoken as he tucked that contact card into her front pocket — the number she'd received from Yoo Hyun in the film's opening act.
Jung Yu-na raised her phone and dialed Park Chul-moon.
"Uncle. Please gather everyone for me."
Then the setting changed. In a conference room sat every figure the audience had decided was one of the "bad guys" — the Prime Minister, the Minister of National Defense, Assemblyman Park Chul-moon, and the rest of them.
Before their eyes, Jung Yu-na administered the cure to a lab rat transformed into a monster.
At once, the rat regained its original color and grew docile.
"Ooooh...!"
"Good heavens."
The room erupted in astonishment. Park Chul-moon turned around, his face glowing with pride.
"I knew you could do it."
"Yes."
Jung Yu-na quietly accepted the hand patting her shoulder. And at the same time, she remembered Chae Seol-hwan — nearly assassinated from the very first day he set foot in Antarctica.
"With this, there's no bad blood between us. Agreed?"
"Of course, of course."
As if they hadn't been at each other's throats in that bunker, they laughed themselves silly, fawning and wagging their tails for Park Chul-moon.
Jung Yu-na watched them with eyes gone cold.
The vaccine wasn't even finished, and already they came scrambling, desperate to be first in line for the injection. It was pathetic.
"It's an intramuscular injection, so just push the needle straight into your arm."
The crowd fumbled the syringes into their forearms in a scrambling rush. For Park Chul-moon, Jung Yu-na administered the shot herself.
The moment she confirmed that everyone had been injected, she told them the truth.
"Actually, the vaccine you've just received is a vaccine engineered for one purpose — to mutate you into monsters more efficiently. And..."
"...What did you say?"
"It's straight from the Antarctic source. No ordinary cure will touch it."
"What the hell are you saying?!"
If Chae Seol-hwan had synthesized the vaccine and cure on the spot and carried them back, what Jung Yu-na had brought along, just in case, was the Antarctic virus itself.
The original strain that created the monsters. It would still be a long while before Chae Seol-hwan's cure could ever be distributed to the public.
These people would probably be dead — cut down by the Capital Defense Command — before a real cure ever reached their veins. Jung Yu-na's lips curled into a cold sneer.
"Jung Yu-na! You! What have you done?!"
"I'm repaying the debt of everything you raised me for."
Jung Yu-na looked at Park Chul-moon with a face utterly at peace. In it, one could see the serenity of a person who had made peace with death — the same serenity Jin Young-do had worn.
"What kind of bullshit is that?!"
"Die as a monster. It suits you, after all."
"You little...! Ugh—!"
Park Chul-moon lunged to grab her and collapsed instead. His skin was slowly turning purple.
Jung Yu-na's gaze swept over the crowd as their bodies twisted into ever more grotesque shapes.
[Survive to the very end.]
"...Survive to the very end, you said?"
Then, at last, a laugh spilled out of her — the laugh of someone who had lost her mind.
Five years ago, Jin Young-do had returned alive from Antarctica, only to be framed and branded a scapegoat, driven again and again to attempt suicide by his own guilt.
Survive to the end — and live like that? Like him?
Build a company on the cure Chae Seol-hwan had created, act with ruthless selfishness, climb onto a mountain of money — could she really live in comfort until the day she died?
Repeating, over and over, the pattern of people dying for her sake — all while carrying the guilt of failing to carry on Chae Seol-hwan's legacy? Me?
"I won't live like that. Squalid and groveling, like you."
A single tear fell from Jung Yu-na's wide-open eyes. Then she drew a pistol from her waistband. The one Jin Young-do had given her in Antarctica.
Jin Young-do had died there — and yet his influence had reached all the way to this final moment.
The screen pulls far back from the conference room. Behind its frosted glass wall, the shadows of people slowly turning into monsters grow visible.
The crowd's screams boil and curdle into the shrieks of monsters, merging with the laughter of Jung Yu-na — who has surrendered to everything.
And then, the shadow of Jung Yu-na presses the muzzle of the gun to her own temple.
Bang!