Gathering Darkness
“R-red air raid alert?!”
“Th-they want us to go outside?”
“We have to get out of Seoul… This place… this isn’t a place for people to live anymore…”
The moment the disaster safety texts arrived, people plunged into chaos, unsure how to act.
By everything they had drilled, the correct response was to wait inside a shelter until the incident was over. Yet the official guidelines also said that evacuating under government direction was equally valid.
“Maybe they’ve got some kind of plan?”
“Th-they wouldn’t tell us to leave Seoul unless they had a way to stop those monsters, right?”
In the end, a handful of those who had scrambled into the shelter earliest armed themselves with pipes and whatever else they could find, determined to break out of the city. A few others still inside tried to stop them, only to be met with furious curses.
“How long do you plan to stay here?! Even the shelters aren’t safe anymore! We have to get out of Seoul!”
“But still… it’s safer than being on the surface, and the government said to wait for rescue in the shelters if things go wrong…”
Voices rose. Tempers flared. Eventually the shelter split into two camps: those who would remain, and those who would flee the city.
“Are you… really going?”
“Yes. We’re not fools enough to believe it’s safe out there, but if staying here isn’t safe either, we at least have to try.”
“…May fortune favor you.”
Only moments earlier they had been shouting at one another over the disagreement; now they simply wished each other luck. The ones armed with blunt weapons hauled open the shelter’s steel doors and stepped outside.
Hundreds poured onto the road at once. What met their eyes was a Seoul that looked almost ordinary.
“What the… nothing’s happening?”
They had pictured a ruined city under a red air-raid alert, yet aside from a few shattered windows the buildings stood largely intact. No monsters of any note were in sight nearby.
“We move now. There are too many of us—those things could catch our scent any second.”
“Agreed.”
They finished their preparations and started to leave. That was when a claw erupted from the earth, seized the man at the very front, and swallowed him whole. Chaos exploded.
“Aaaagh—!”
“Kyaaah…!”
“Th-there are monsters…!”
Creatures that looked like a grotesque fusion of mole and lizard tore up through the ground, closing the distance in an instant. Some had clearly been lying in wait beneath the surface; they lunged and tore into people they had already marked.
“Back to the shelter! Hurry!”
“D-don’t push!”
Unlike their orderly exit, the crowd now stampeded back inside in half-panic. But the doors had been thrown wide open, and monsters were already forcing their way through the gap.
“G-gahhh—!”
“Help me! The d-door—!”
Thousands of people filled the shelter. Against a mere few hundred monsters the numbers should have been overwhelming—yet raw strength and sheer bulk could not be overcome by numbers alone. At this rate every last person inside would be slaughtered.
Then, in a single breath, damp fog flooded every zone around the shelter.
Saaaah—!
The mist that filled the interior was bitterly cold. Even though it was winter and most people wore thick coats, the chill stabbed straight through fabric and froze their blood.
A new monster? If so, they already knew their lives were as good as over. Terror seized them.
But the dense gray fog did not attack the people. It clung instead to the monsters.
Krrrukh—!
Kerrrukh—!
A thin rime of frost spread across the creatures’ bodies, locking their muscles tight. In the blink of an eye their movements slowed until every twitch was visible. They swung their heads wildly, searching for the source of the fog—yet their necks fell faster than they could look.
Seogeok—!
Invisible blades flashed out of the mist and severed heads. A few beasts, lucky enough to avoid vital points, kept thrashing even after being stabbed. For those the blades had not finished, a far worse torment waited.
Water molecules hanging in the air condensed into ice sharper than any edge. Grains too fine for the naked eye to see slipped into eyes, mouths, and every scale-less gap, opening wounds large and small.
Kieeeek—!
The monsters screamed in agony. Blood seeping from between their carapaces was swallowed by the thick fog, painting the air with a nightmare haze.
Not long after—
Chwaak—!
The last remaining beast collapsed under its own bleeding, and the battle ended.
“Wh-who…?”
“This fog… Unsa?”
A gray robe fluttered. A hwan-do rested in a bamboo scabbard. One of the core executives of the Dangun Guild that represented Korea—Unsa, master of the mist—had come to defend Seoul.
“U-Unsa-nim? Is that really you?”
“Oh? It’s been a while. I recall you held an executive post at the Association…”
“Well… I was on temporary assignment and got caught up in this mess on the way back. But weren’t you with Usa-nim? Where has Usa gone, and why are you here alone…?”
“That fellow is, well… as you know, a bit of a walker. The situation was urgent, so I came ahead.”
“Ah…”
Who in the world would dare call one of Korea’s only two S-class heroes a mere walker? The man standing here, apparently.
“Anyway, why are you here…?”
At the Association executive’s words, Unsa turned the question around.
“Hm? Didn’t the Association send me? My terminal displayed the route I was to take, so I assumed it came straight from them.”
The moment he had reached Seoul, the terminal every hero carried had fed him real-time data on monster sightings. This shelter was the fifth place he had stopped after rescuing people trying to leave.
“Th-that is… we’ve been trying to raise them on comms for a while now, but there’s no response from their end…”
“Hmm… base stations failing, perhaps? Though the terminals use satellite links, so that shouldn’t be it.”
“Yet the disaster texts have been going out just fine, as far as I know…”
Unsa and the Association executive sank into thought, but the truth of the matter remained beyond their reach. They would learn it only after this incident was over.
Unsa is doing his part.
Using the seismic detectors, I had already confirmed that the monsters were operating from underground bases. By tracing their projected paths I had obtained the locations of every shelter in danger ahead of time.
While I bypassed the hijacked base stations to warn the public that the towers had been seized and the disaster texts forged, I simultaneously fed the shelter coordinates to every hero active in Seoul. Calculating the shortest routes, combat capabilities, and selecting only those strong enough to extract the civilians safely had been no simple task—but if it meant saving lives, it had to be done.
First objective complete.
I had successfully informed every citizen in Seoul that the disaster texts were faked. Unsa and the other A-class heroes were already hard at work clearing monsters and rescuing people; a few had even begun moving toward the monsters’ origin point.
Honestly, wasn’t this already more than most A-class heroes could claim?
At this rate we’ll weather the crisis without much trouble.
Three months of recovery work would still be needed, but considering Seoul itself had nearly been destroyed, the damage was almost nothing. A magnitude-6.3 quake had rolled through from the monsters’ underground movement, yet unlike my previous life, this Korea’s seismic design standards were excellent. That alone had carried us through. Most buildings were engineered to withstand even magnitude-7 shocks; the government’s commitment to earthquake-proofing was clear. A handful of structures had still collapsed thanks to shoddy construction firms, but that was the extent of it.
In a month everyone will be back to their ordinary lives.
The sky still blanketed in demonic energy left me uneasy, yet it would probably end without further incident.
Probably.
“Hm?”
“Seo-hyun?”
Yulia, who until moments ago had been curled in a corner praying for the catastrophe to pass, saw me and hurried over.
“What have you been staring at this whole time?”
Ordinarily I would have answered with something. Right now my mind was racing too fast even to form words.
“Why the hell…”
The phone screen filled with the monsters’ movements, and my body locked solid. Creatures that had been scattered across the entire city were now converging on a single point they had never shown the slightest interest in before.
The demonic energy blanketing Seoul followed them, pouring into that narrow patch of ground and whipping up a storm. I watched the flow of that energy with trembling eyes and muttered,
“Why… why are they coming here…?”
“What?”
Kwa-kwang—!
Something enormous slammed into the mansion. Reinforced concrete thick enough that ordinary monsters could never breach it crumpled, sending a massive shockwave through the structure.
“Ugh…!”
Jijijijijijij—
I stared at the counter as the numbers spiked. Demonic energy dense enough to shatter every measurable limit washed over me as a thick, nauseating pressure.
“This can’t be…!”
Kudeudeuk—!
The steel plating that sheathed the shelter’s exterior buckled. A colossal mole-like hand punched through the wall. From the dense darkness beyond, a pair of crimson eyes fixed on us.