The Horned Water Deer (1)
By the time we left the city behind and rolled back into Dohwang-ri, the sun had already slipped behind the ridgeline.
The evening glow was staining the sky a deep violet, but I couldn't find it beautiful. The shimmer overhead, so much closer now than it had been in town, had stretched all the way across the distant mountain crests.
The moment I parked the truck in front of the village hall, Hana and Poppy hopped down as if they'd been waiting for the chance. They gave me a quick little wave, then scampered inside on hurried feet.
At once, the hush that had hung over the hall — quiet enough to hear from outside — shattered, and a cascade of laughter spilled through the doorway. Typical. The elders always lit up like their own granddaughters had come to visit whenever those two showed up.
I left that warmth behind and walked straight into the police substation next door, without a second's hesitation.
The air inside was nothing like it had been that morning. Officer Lee and every other cop in the building were standing by at their posts with grim faces, and even Inspector Park was at his desk without his trademark mix coffee, silently working over the communications gear.
Aside from there being more officers than usual, and the atmosphere running a shade more solemn, nothing else looked different. But the pistol holsters strapped tight at every waist made it clear that none of this was ordinary.
Inspector Park spotted me coming in and spoke first, pointing toward the gun locker.
"Left it unlocked. Grab what you need."
"Can't I run home and at least grab a vest?"
"No time for that. There's an old vest from back in the day — throw that on. Just peel the police patch off and hand it over."
I pulled the battered police vest down from where it hung in the cabinet and shrugged it on, then plucked the patch off the chest with practiced ease and set it on his desk. There weren't enough pouches for ammo or the rest of my gear, but it beat going in with nothing. Just the feeling that I'd prepared something eased a knot in my chest.
The television inside the substation was looping the same emergency bulletins and evacuation instructions on repeat. The other officers had a large map spread out and were tracing blockade zones and evacuation routes with their fingers, drilling the plan one more time.
I found myself wondering if this was what it looked like when a war broke out. But the enemy we were about to face was different. At least with humans you could talk to, you could hope for a scrap of mercy or a chance to negotiate. Monsters didn't have any such thing as mercy.
The officer running the briefing glanced at me, then tapped the village entrance on the map.
"Huntsman Jang, please take position at the village entrance. In an emergency, that's the road that feeds directly into the civilian evacuation route."
Handing the most important post to a civilian who hadn't even properly Awakened felt strange, but there wasn't much choice. I was still clearly stronger than the regular cops, so for them, this was the best they could do.
I stood there for a while, trying to follow the briefing as best I could. But it had been well over ten years since I'd been discharged, and the jargon-thick briefings weren't landing. All I really managed to take away was what I was supposed to do.
By the time they'd finished laying out their plan in all that impenetrable language, the wall clock in the substation read seven in the evening.
At the same moment, a shrill emergency broadcast erupted from the television. The officers rose as one, gathered their gear, and started filing out of the substation.
Hang on — my gun? If they all walked out like that, what was I supposed to do? If a cop didn't hand it to me personally, I could end up getting booked as a firearms thief for taking it myself.
There was only one way to handle this.
"Officer Lee, could you get my gun out for me?"
"Given the circumstances, wouldn't it be acceptable to just take it yourself?"
"And then I take the fall for it? Quit arguing and just bring it."
Officer Lee shook his head, but he went back to the gun locker without further protest. While he was gone, I opened the Firearm Checkout Ledger on Inspector Park's desk and filled it out. A moment later Officer Lee returned with my rifle and ammunition; I took them, ran through a practiced safety check, tucked the ammo box under my arm, and stepped outside.
The scene in front of the substation was anything but ordinary. Officers were checking their pistols or loading live rounds, bracing for the worst. The shimmer in the sky, so much closer than it had been in the city, had already swallowed the whole of Dohwang-ri and was wavering overhead in a way that set my teeth on edge.
The one comfort was that it didn't work like the movies or the games. It wouldn't suddenly turn people into monsters, and it wouldn't bring a lethal storm of radiation. The shimmer would simply fill the sky in that unpleasant way, then vanish as if it had never been there at all.
The real problem was that nobody knew what would happen in a place that shimmer had covered. A mudskipper might swell to the size of a house. A wild boar might go berserk. Something no one had ever seen before might burst up out of the ground. Which meant you couldn't afford to let your guard down.
I slung the rifle across my back and walked to my assigned post at the village entrance.
The road there was a mess of cars still trickling back into the village, civilians trying to evacuate somewhere safer just in case, and police cruisers blocking the way. A squad of heavily armed soldiers showing up as backup would have been a real comfort right about then, but of course that didn't happen. Out here in the sticks, it was always the cops holding the line with their own bodies — and if you had a Semi-Awakened like me around, you counted yourself lucky.
I let out a breath and started walking toward the village entrance, where the dark had already settled in.
Only after the noisy crush at the entrance had thinned did a siren begin to wail unpleasantly in the distance. A moment later, the streetlights that had come on automatically all went out at once, and the peaceful village was swallowed by pitch-black dark. The only things left to say that people were still here were a few police cruiser light bars blinking faintly far off.
By that flickering glow I opened the ammo box and fed the cold rounds into the chamber one by one. The metallic click rang out unnaturally loud in the dark.
Fortunately, time passed without anything going wrong.
Over the radios of the officers standing watch with me, the only traffic that came through was the occasional all-clear from another sector, or a report of wildlife in the area — the kind of news that let you breathe a little easier.
But I remembered something Inspector Park had said. The main radio inside the substation was linked all the way to the military and the neighboring cities, and not once had anything good come through that set. Which meant that somewhere outside Dohwang-ri, at this very moment, something terrible was happening.
To shake off the ugly thoughts, I spent a while staring blankly at the stars over the mountains, counting them. It wasn't until a voice came through the radio of the officer beside me that the tension seemed to ease.
"Entrance sector, we're here to relieve you."
I could see the incoming shift approaching from down the road. I tipped my head in a silent greeting as they came up, then headed not for the substation but toward where my beat-up truck was parked.
The second I climbed in, I used my phone screen as a light and opened the small trunk I'd hidden under the back seat. On ordinary days it was just the spot Poppy used as a footrest. Not tonight. Inside were a special barrel I'd stored separately, a few tools, and another box of ammunition — all of it stashed away for a day like this, just in case.
I pulled every round I'd just loaded, then used the tools with familiar hands to strip the old barrel and swap in the new one. I opened the fresh ammo box and fed the rounds into the chamber one by one.
The government was still waving around outdated laws telling people not to use this kind of ammunition, which was a joke. They wouldn't send a single soldier when you actually needed one, so there was no reason to sit around arguing over legal and illegal. My life was mine to defend.
I finished my preparations and climbed back out of the truck. One of the young officers from the shift that had just been relieved came over, glanced at the rifle in my hands, and asked,
"You swapped it out?"
"Yeah. Didn't sit right with me."
He chose his words carefully.
"Even so… please don't shoot anywhere you shouldn't. I know it's an emergency, but…"
"Here's hoping I won't have to."
He didn't say anything more. He just ducked his head in a bow and went back to his colleagues.
I slung the rifle across my back again and stepped into the substation to catch a breather. Inside, the older veterans like Inspector Park were busy sorting the situation or staying on the radio, while the officers who'd just come off the line with me were sitting in chairs, catching their breath.
Inspector Park was in the middle of a grim-faced call. He glanced up when I came in, set the receiver down for a moment, and asked with a sigh,
"Slugs, or the other stuff?"
"The former."
He didn't press. He just nodded once and went back to the radio.
I sat in an empty chair to rest. Every so often, something that sounded like distant gunfire came faintly through the comms. Thankfully, there were no screams, and no desperate calls for help.
I was starting to think we might ride this one out quietly too. But the voice that actually came through urgent belonged to our own radio.
Blue light spotted at the southern blockade.
Repeat — blue light spotted at the southern blockade.
At that hurried report, everyone in the substation froze mid-motion. More often than not, a blue light was the ominous tell of a Variant's Magic Stone starting to glow.
I was on my feet again without a second thought.
"Southern blockade — that's the fishing tackle shop, right?"
Inspector Park nodded urgently.
"Yeah, that's the one. Go take a look. We already talked to the owner, so you've got the rooftop. You'll have a clear field of view from up there. Be careful."
There was no time left to rest. I bolted out of the substation and ran through the darkened village streets, heading hard for the fishing tackle shop at the southern blockade.