It Was a Disappearance (1)
“It looks like the special zone has… stopped functioning.”
Stopped functioning?
It was an expression I'd never heard before.
Kwon Mu-seop apparently hadn't either, because he stood there blankly for a moment. Then, as if squeezing the words out of himself, he spoke.
“Effective immediately, all of Ant Hill is designated a Level 8 Quarantine Zone. Team 6 will withdraw support from the Meditation Center That Reverses Time and deploy to Ant Hill.”
-Understood. Dispatching them now.
As Yoon Woo-jeong answered swiftly, Kwon Mu-seop straightened up from where he'd been leaning over my smartwatch.
Then he seized both my shoulders with a firm grip.
“Well done. Thank you. Truly.”
Kwon Mu-seop was generous with praise by nature.
Even so, what he was saying now carried a weight entirely different from usual.
His eyes as he looked at me were fluctuating wildly, as if he'd just been handed the whole world.
I hadn't fully grasped the situation yet, but I nodded anyway at the sheer earnestness of it.
“Section Chief, what do we do with the core now—”
At that moment, Kwon Mu-seop released my shoulders and spun around with startling speed.
I swung the searchlight toward whatever had him on guard.
Damn it.
I gritted my teeth, sick to death of it all.
Alpha was watching us from the far end of the passage.
The distance was roughly thirty meters.
A few seconds of sprinting, and it would reach us.
I backed up a step, a visceral revulsion crawling up my spine.
My pistol was nowhere to be seen.
Kwon Mu-seop still had his rifle slung over his shoulder, but in practice it was as good as empty.
After all, the magazine was out of it.
Our only weapon was Kwon Mu-seop's knife. What were we supposed to do?
If that thing charged again—
Thud!
Kwon Mu-seop took a step forward.
Whether he intended to face Alpha down, he planted himself squarely in front of it.
A suffocating silence settled over the passage.
After the wordless standoff, Alpha slowly retreated.
It backed away.
And then it simply vanished into the darkness.
Do you know the joy of crashing into sleep?
Holding out until your brain overloads, then dropping off like you've fainted, every last worry left behind you.
Considering what it does to your lifespan, it's a forbidden pleasure you're far better off never knowing.
Ah, I slept so well.
Where I woke up after sleeping like the dead was the Bureau's medical center.
That's right. I was back in a hospital bed again.
Nothing was seriously wrong with me.
It was just that I'd been doused in the Ant's mucus and handled the core directly, so they'd decided to keep me under observation for half a day.
I was wolfing down my first meal—breakfast and lunch in one—and luxuriating in the drowsy afterglow when it happened.
Knock, knock.
With a light knock, someone came to visit.
“Hello, Otter.”
It was Baek Sa-ra.
“The Deputy Head sent me to give you an update on your condition.”
Cha Si-eon and Gwak Jae-gyeom were still on assignment at the Island Where Blood Rains.
Baek Sa-ra, on the other hand, had been pulled from this Intensive Suppression Week due to the injuries she'd sustained at the National Theater.
So she'd come to conduct the post-operation debrief in their place, apparently.
“You really went through a lot. I'm so glad you weren't hurt badly.”
“That's all thanks to Section Chief Kwon Mu-seop. How is he doing, by the way?”
“He has stab wounds on both arms and his legs—he went into surgery. Eight stitches in total, but he seems fine.”
Stabbed eight times and surgically repaired, yet he seems fine?
Which of them did that speak better of—Baek Sa-ra, or Kwon Mu-seop?
A stupid question. Both of them, obviously. Yes.
“You did something truly enormous this time, Otter.”
Something enormous?
I looked at Baek Sa-ra without understanding what she meant.
She was smiling with what looked, somehow, like elation.
“They say it's the first time since zones were first observed that a special zone has stopped functioning. Whether it's truly stopped will take more observation, but still.”
Right.
Baek Sa-ra, like Kwon Mu-seop, was buzzing over this unprecedented development.
“Securing a special zone's core is also a first. So as soon as the Suppression Week ends, the Research Department is going into Ant Hill to investigate.”
“I see.”
Team 6 was deployed in Ant Hill right now, keeping it under quarantine watch.
The core I'd secured had been placed back where it originally sat.
I'd considered separating it from the space entirely, but carrying something like that out recklessly only to have it vanish would have been a disaster, so I'd left it in place for now.
“The Research Department seems more interested in the core we secured than in the zone stopping, honestly. Word is they're bombarding the Deputy Head with texts demanding to be let into Ant Hill immediately.”
Baek Sa-ra said it with laughter in her voice.
A special zone's core evaporates the instant artificial contact is made with it.
Researchers had always interpreted this phenomenon as a kind of self-destruct.
Even people, when cornered after doing something wrong, will blow up their phones and computers first to destroy the evidence.
The Bureau had long suspected that special zones concealed information in exactly the same way.
And yet that core had been secured intact.
Any researcher would be itching to tear it apart as fast as possible.
…Maybe I shouldn't mention that I smacked that core against a wall.
It turned out fine in the end, so no need, right?
I winced at my own misconduct, then remembered the thing I had successfully destroyed.
“By the way, the ring you gave me broke.”
“I heard. I'm really glad I gave that ring to you, Otter.”
Baek Sa-ra's smile grew even brighter.
“They're still not certain whether this happened because of you or because of that ring. But right now, the strongest hypothesis is that the ring did something.”
“Surely it was the ring?”
When I'd grabbed the core, there had been two rings on my fingers.
Of those, the silver ring had survived intact while only the black one had shattered and vanished.
And the black one was made of far tougher material than the silver.
“In any case, now that the phenomenon has been confirmed, we should be able to pin down the exact conditions going forward.”
“We'd need that ring back for that, though.”
“That's why Team 1 got a new mission added. That ring is a fragment of Big Cat, the hazard entity of the Island Where Blood Rains.”
“Really?”
I'd only heard it described as a 'body part of a named hazard entity,' so I'd had no idea.
Big Cat—you mean the thing Team 1 is fighting right now?
“Yes. Two years ago, during the all-out war, they went in and carved it out. So this time they passed the same order down to Team 1: secure more of Big Cat.”
That worked out well.
If they made a few more rings out of that, we could run all kinds of experiments.
I nodded and added, “It'd be worth checking whether it only works with Big Cat's body, or whether parts of other hazard entities produce the same effect too.”
“Exactly. Though I suspect Big Cat might be the only special one. The other Type 1 entities fear nothing but Big Cat's fragments, and every so often that thing gives the impression of commanding the others.”
“Commanding them?”
“Yes. The mercenary entities have a habit of converging on the Island Where Blood Rains whenever it comes under attack, and there have been observed instances of them sacrificing themselves for Big Cat.”
In that case, Big Cat really might be something special.
Say, the boss of the Type 1 zones, for instance.
“That's why everyone's so worked up over you right now. The Suppression Week isn't even over yet, but they'll make the official announcement once every field agent has returned.”
Baek Sa-ra herself was more buoyant than usual as she said it.
She was normally so composed that I sometimes forgot she was younger than she seemed, but without that calculating calm, her smile made her look her age—bright and young.
Bathed in that radiant smile, I gradually started to feel the reality of it myself.
The heat in Kwon Mu-seop's eyes.
The tremor in Yoon Woo-jeong's voice.
Until now, special zones could only be abandoned, smashed, or re-explored from scratch when they regenerated.
An endless maze of that same loop, repeated without end.
But now, for the first time, an option called ending it existed.
A new phase had opened for a Bureau slowly withering away in a stalemate it was sick to death of.
“I'd started to wonder if there'd ever be an end. It feels like a miracle happened.”
Baek Sa-ra whispered it softly.
So I dropped my gaze for a moment.
Because I doubted it really was a miracle.
Because it felt closer to someone's intention—or design.
The suspicion climbed all the way up my throat, but I didn't want to spoil Baek Sa-ra's joy, so I held my tongue.
Then, belatedly, I dug up something to echo her with.
“Things did go our way, like a miracle. Especially at the end—if Alpha hadn't backed off, it would've been dangerous.”
Honestly, it was a genuine question.
Why had Alpha simply turned away at the end?
It could have killed us and retrieved the core.
But Baek Sa-ra tilted her head and asked back.
“Dangerous for which side?”
“Sorry?”
“Which side are you saying was in danger?”
“Us, obviously. Me and the Section Chief.”
At my answer, Baek Sa-ra burst into a light laugh.
“No, Otter. In that situation, the one in danger was Alpha. It didn't just back off—it fled, running for its own life.”
Now it was my turn to be dumbfounded.
That Alpha—fled?
We'd been unarmed and worn down to rags.
There wasn't a single reason for that monster to run.
When I remained half-doubtful, Baek Sa-ra said playfully, “I think you're underestimating it a little too much?”
“Ah, of course I know Section Chief Kwon Mu-seop is incredible. But he was already badly injured by then, so—”
“No, Otter. I mean you.”
“Sorry?”
“You're the one who subdued Alpha when the Section Chief couldn't see, remember?”
Well, that was true.
“But I had the gun then. I wouldn't bet on winning a bare-handed fight.”
“Of course not. Who wins that one-on-one, right?”
Baek Sa-ra shook her head with the weary air of someone with firsthand experience. “But the Section Chief was there this time too. If those two had ended up fighting, what would you have done?”
“If the Chief took the front, I suppose I'd have gone for its lower body from the flank.”
“See? Exactly that.”
Ah. So this is how frightening rote training really is.
At my reflexive answer, Baek Sa-ra nodded as if her teaching had paid off.
Come to think of it, she was right.
We'd been the ones with the advantage.
But I hadn't even realized it until Baek Sa-ra pointed it out.
When I belatedly looked impressed, Baek Sa-ra let out a laugh and said, “Most of the staff are scared of Alpha on principle. It's not just anyone it's copying—it's Team Leader Cha. Honestly, I think people fear it more because of the original.”
“Fair enough. The original is terrifying enough on his own.”
Come to think of it, Delta—another Fake Human—had never put this kind of pressure on me.
Neither had the Moving Gun or the Ant, both genuine hazard entities.
Alpha hadn't even attacked me directly. Not yet, anyway.
I'd merely watched from the side when Baek Sa-ra and Kwon Mu-seop were thrown against it.
And yet the fact that I felt this much oppression from it—no small part of that had to come from the original, Cha Si-eon.
“That's right. And knowing him makes it scarier. Team Leader Cha's presence is anything but ordinary.”
I nodded, conceding her point.
But then Baek Sa-ra smiled an odd sort of smile and added, “All the same, I don't think you ever need to be afraid of Team Leader Cha or Alpha, Otter.”
“Me?”
“No. Team Leader Cha is unusually prickly with you, isn't he?”
“…I thought that was just my imagination?”
“It's not. Have you ever once seen Team Leader Cha nitpick someone else's words or pick a fight with them?”
I hadn't.
Apart from giving orders, I don't think I'd ever seen him open his mouth at all.
“That, Otter, is Team Leader Cha keeping you in check.”