Anomalous Event
"Hrm."
Han Mir frowned as he took in the corridor. The air had turned cold without warning, the kind of hush that settled over a place that no longer belonged to the ordinary world.
"Hey, where's the chicken? Which bastard just ding-dong ditched me?"
"What are you doing right n— huh!?"
Lee Si-a's face went bloodless the instant she caught up. She yanked a frequency scanner from her coat and swept it frantically up and down the hallway. Han Mir watched her work and gave a lazy shrug.
"What's with you?"
"One hundred H!? Th-that's impossible! H-how did an Anomalous Event just trigger with no warning at all?"
One hundred H. A reading that high was already flirting with C-rank Anomalous Event territory. Lee Si-a chewed her thumbnail raw and dragged out her phone.
No signal, just as she'd feared. Texts wouldn't send. Calls wouldn't connect. Cold sweat slicked her palms as she tore through her pockets with shaking hands. Snack wrappers, a recorder pen, a spy camera, a pistol — junk of every description spilled onto the floor, but the one thing she needed was not among it. The portable containment unit was gone.
"Damn it! I rushed out so fast I didn't grab the proper gear!"
Anyone caught inside an Anomalous Event was supposed to have a portable containment unit on them. It was a specialized emergency device manufactured by the Management Bureau, and from inside one, radio contact with headquarters was still possible. Her superiors, though, had ordered her to bring Han Mir in immediately, and she had deployed in such a scramble that the right equipment had never made it into her bag.
She kicked the floor hard, unable to swallow the bitterness of it.
"Haaah. Of all the things that could happen, it had to be an Anomalous Event."
An Anomalous Event. What exactly was that? In the simplest terms, a phenomenon science could not explain. A supermarket's aisles twisting overnight into a vast, living labyrinth. A crowded downtown street emptying in a single breath, every last person vanishing as though they had never existed, leaving you alone in a dead city. Those were the textbook cases — events that defied all reason.
And this place was no different.
The H-index was still climbing. If this had been an ordinary Anomaly, they could have put it down themselves or radioed headquarters for backup and been done with it. An Anomalous Event was a different animal. Unless you satisfied some hidden condition or found an exit, leaving was impossible. No one was coming to help. They would have to solve this themselves.
"Why the song and dance? You gotta take a dump or something? If you need the bathroom, just say so. Oh — and just so you know, there's no bidet, so ten squares of toilet paper is the limit."
"What kind of nonsense is that!? That is not what's happening! And what do you mean, wipe with ten squares!?"
"Huh? It's not?" Han Mir asked, mining his nostril with a pinky. "Then why are you bouncing around like a dog that needs to go?"
The sheer nonchalance of it finally snapped something in Lee Si-a.
"You have no idea how serious this is! This is an Anomalous Event! Space-time is tangled in on itself, and we have no way of knowing when — or even if — we get out!"
"Ah. Got it."
"Aaargh!!"
She clawed at her hair and glared at the man who looked as though none of this had anything to do with him.
"Let me put this simply. A man is grocery shopping when an Anomalous Event swallows the store. The supermarket turns into a maze. By the time he finds the exit, fifty years have passed for him. In the real world, it has been a single day."
"Oh. Sounds a lot like a sealing spell."
Lee Si-a slapped her own forehead.
"Sealing spell, binding charm, I don't care — we are in that exact no-win situation right now! We have no idea how many years it will take to get out! And if we can still feel hunger in here, we could starve to death!"
"Man, you really do not shut up. I'm going back inside, so—"
SLAM!
The wide-open front door crashed shut with a report like a gunshot.
"Huh? What the hell?"
Click.
No matter how hard Han Mir twisted the knob, the door refused to give.
"Eek! You've got to be kidding me! All the food is in there!!!"
Lee Si-a grabbed the back of her neck as her blood pressure spiked. The one safe space where they could have secured food and water had just sealed itself, and the world in front of her seemed to go dark. If they couldn't find supplies anywhere else, they would be dead in three to five days. Drinking their own urine might stretch that to five or seven — and escaping in that window was close to a fantasy. Even the fastest recorded escape from an Anomalous Event had taken a full month.
She could only pray that, inside this place, they would not feel hunger or thirst at all.
Click. Click. Click. Click!
Han Mir kept working the locked door. Lee Si-a let out a long breath and sank into a crouch.
"Once it locks, it won't open again. Looks like the rule here is that anything you open and close stays shut for—"
CRACK! CRUNCH!
Lee Si-a's jaw fell open. Han Mir had torn the entire door off its frame. The steel slab dangled from his grip as though it had been cut from styrofoam.
"What is this."
He stared, blank, at the thick wall standing where his front hall should have been. It was as if the apartment had never existed. The corridor wall sat there, solid and smug, as though it had always been the only thing in that spot.
Lee Si-a clicked her tongue.
"Tsk. I told you it wouldn't work."
"Tch."
Han Mir smacked his lips, put on the face of a man who had been personally inconvenienced by the universe, shoved his hands in his pockets, and started walking. Lee Si-a startled and scrambled after him.
"W-wait! Where do you think you're going!?"
"Where else? The house vanished, so I'll walk. Something's bound to turn up."
"We should search the area first and make a plan! If you just charge off like this, you could make everything worse!"
"Then you search. I'm going to find the ding-dong ditcher."
"The ding-dong ditcher? The ding-dong ditcher…"
Lee Si-a trailed off, muttering to herself as the pieces started to turn over. Han Mir had gone out because he heard the bell. There had been no one outside. Instead, an Anomalous Event had unfolded. A doorbell. An Anomalous Event. She pressed her lips into a thin line and kept thinking.
Han Mir gazed down the corridor with a look of utter disinterest — a hallway that ran on into an abyss with no end in sight. Only a thin wash of light cut the dark, marking the path they would have to take. An ordinary person would have frozen, every step strangled by the fear of what might come lunging out of the shadows. He strode forward without a care in the world.
I'm sure I smelled chicken.
In his years as a hero, people had tried to assassinate him with poisoned food more than five hundred times. The first few attempts had left him vomiting blood, his whole body locking up as death crept in. After the five hundredth, poison no longer touched him — and his sense of smell had sharpened until he could tell, from a single breath, whether a dish was clean. He could pick out the scent of someone brewing toxin a full kilometer away.
That nose still worked. Which meant that when the bell had rung, the chicken had been real.
Ding-dong.
A doorbell, faint and far. Lee Si-a's eyes flashed as her head snapped up.
At the distant end of the corridor, something stood — little more than a speck. She pulled a pair of glasses from her coat, slid them on, and tapped the frame. The lenses leapt forward, pulling the far-off figure into focus.
"A delivery driver?"
It wore a courier's uniform. A motorcycle helmet. A bag of food in one hand. And she knew, with a certainty that lived in her bones, that it was not a person.
That was an Anomaly.
Years in the Bureau had honed an instinct that did not lie, and every nerve she had was screaming that the thing down the hall was not human.
Ding-dong.
The bell again, thin as a thread. The Anomaly in the delivery uniform was working its way down the corridor, ringing every doorbell it passed.
Lee Si-a's eyes trembled. The figure in her lenses suddenly looked much farther away. The device itself was fine.
A delivery driver. A doorbell. An Anomalous Event.
Don't tell me the space expands every time the Anomaly rings a bell!?
She ripped her pistol free and broke into a run.
"Mir! Listen to me! Right now— wait, what?"
Her sprint bled off without her meaning it to. Her legs slowed, then stopped altogether. She scrubbed at her eyes with the heel of her hand and looked again, certain her vision had gone wrong.
Han Mir was standing beside the delivery driver — a figure that had been at least ten kilometers away.
He was grinning, wide and bright, and patting the thing on the shoulder.
"!?!?"
The delivery Anomaly jerked around. In the dark curve of the motorcycle helmet, Han Mir's smile gleamed back at it, sharp enough to cut.
"Ah, I knew you'd be here. That's chicken, right? I'm the one who ordered it, so…"
Ding-dong! Ding-dong! Ding-dong! Ding-dong!
The Anomaly mashed doorbells in a frantic blur. The figure that had been standing at the end of Han Mir's nose receded in a heartbeat, shrinking back to a distant speck. Han Mir watched it go and ran his tongue along his lower lip.
"Well. Would you look at that."
He rolled his shoulders, joints popping like wet wood.
Ding-dong.
The ringing slowed. Thinking that ought to be enough, the Anomaly glanced back over its shoulder.
Han Mir was already there, leaning in so close their faces nearly touched, the words sliding out of him in a voice that did not belong in any human throat.