Global Descent: I Alone Can See Hidden Evolution Paths

Sang-woo tugged at the handle.

The metal plates wouldn’t budge past the three-foot gap.

"Get this thing down!" he shouted, his voice cracking as he kicked the base of the frame. He turned on the two hired vanguards, who were backing away toward the outer tunnel tracks. "What are you standing there for? Use the secondary brackets! Block it manually!"

The two hires didn’t move. They stared right past Sang-woo’s shoulder.

Jun-ho walked through the gap. He wasn’t rushing. His movements were casual, like a man stepping out of a convenience store after buying groceries. The right sleeve of his shirt hung in tatters, completely shredded from the bicep down, exposing a forearm that hummed with a strange, violent vibration. The dirt on his skin shifted in tiny, rapid geometric patterns from the resonance of the stored energy.

"Jun-ho," Min-ah said. She took a step back, her boots splashing into a puddle of oily tunnel water. The sweet mask she had worn for seven years was gone, replaced by a gray, twitching panic. "Jun-hoya, wait. Listen to me for a second. It wasn’t... we didn’t mean to leave you. The gate mechanism broke. Sang-woo said the ceiling was falling."

Sang-woo didn’t wait for her to finish. His face twisted into a desperate snarl as he pointed his thumb ring directly at Jun-ho’s face. The blue mana crystal in the setting flared with an erratic light. "Get out of the way! I’ll blast you back inside myself!"

A lance of blue energy shot from his hand. It was a high-tier spell, meant to pierce straight through a vanguard’s defenses.

Jun-ho didn’t even raise his arm. He just took the hit flush against his chest.

The spell exploded against his collarbone, but it didn’t pierce his skin. It didn’t even make him blink. The vast, hidden reservoir of seven hundred mana points behind his body absorbed the impact effortlessly, turning the magical strike into a mild, warm breeze that merely fluttered the torn fabric of his jacket.

[Tyrant’s Retaliation triggered.]

[Absorbed 150 points of magical damage.]

[Total kinetic force stored: 1,170 points.]

The vibration in his right hand grew so loud it sounded like a swarm of angry hornets trapped in a jar.

Jun-ho took one long step forward. Before Sang-woo could prime another spell, Jun-ho’s hand shot out, grabbing the mage by the throat. The grip was tight, his fingers squeezing until Sang-woo’s heels left the ground.

"You like using people as shields, right?" Jun-ho said, his voice quiet, almost conversational.

"Wait—" Sang-woo choked out, his fingers clawing at Jun-ho’s wrist.

Jun-ho didn’t punch him. He simply channeled a fraction of the stored energy through his fingers and threw Sang-woo straight down the corridor.

The mage flew ten meters, smashing hard into the stone wall before tumbling into the dirt. The impact was loud enough to shake loose dust from the ceiling. His expensive silk cloak tore to pieces, and the silver mana ring on his thumb shattered with a sharp pop, scattering tiny blue shards across the tracks. He lay there in the mud, groaning, his nose bleeding as he curled into a tight ball.

Min-ah dropped to her knees right there in the puddle. She grabbed the hem of Jun-ho’s jeans, her fingers shaking as she looked up at him. Tears were streaming down her face now, real ones, driven by pure terror.

"Jun-ho, please," she sobbed, her voice thick and trembling. "I was scared. Sang-woo forced me to do it. He said if I didn’t help him get the core, his family would ruin my chances with the Sun God Guild. You know how much I wanted to escape these tunnels. Everything I did... I did it because I wanted us to have a real life outside this dump. Forgive me. Please, Jun-hoya. Remember the time we spent together?"

Jun-ho looked down at her fingers clutching his jeans. He didn’t feel angry anymore. The burning rage that had sustained him when he woke up on Friday morning had turned into a dull, flat boredom.

"I remember the seven years," Jun-ho said, slowly bending down until his face was inches from hers. He reached out and gently unpicked her fingers from his fabric, one by one. "I spent seven years working double shifts so you could buy expensive text books and calfskin vests. And you spent five minutes calculating exactly how many seconds my death would buy you to run away."

"I was wrong!" she screamed, reaching for him again. "I’ll change! I’ll leave the guild, we can go back to the apartment—"

"The apartment has a water stain on the ceiling that looks like a boot," Jun-ho said, standing back up to his full height. "I hate that stain. And I’m done living in the basement."

Ten feet away, near the utility cart, a sharp noise broke the silence.

Eun-bi walked out from behind the pillar, sliding her trauma shears back into the leather loop on her belt. She looked at Sang-woo moaning in the dirt, then at Min-ah crying in the puddle, and finally at Jun-ho’s shredded sleeve.

"Well," Eun-bi said, pulling her clipboard out from under her arm and tapping it with her pen. "The emergency gate is officially logged as a mechanical failure due to poor public maintenance. The two hired vanguards are going to sign the incident report as witnesses if they want to keep their licenses. Right, boys?"

The two hires nodded rapidly, their faces pale under their helmets. They didn’t want any part of whatever Jun-ho had become.

Eun-bi turned her sharp eyes to Jun-ho, a tiny, dry smirk pulling at the corner of her lips. "Your blood sugar is probably low again after throwing that trust-fund brat. Get over here and help me push this cart out to the turnstiles. I’m off the clock in twenty minutes."

Jun-ho let out a short, clean laugh—the first real one since his regression. He turned his back on Min-ah and walked toward the medical cart.

"Let’s go," he said.

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