A switch flipped in his head. The world, once a normal landscape painting, transformed into a grotesque, surrealist expressionist piece. The soft breeze pricked his skin like barbed wire, and the chirping of birds stabbed his ears like sharp needles.
“Get me the hell out of here!”
Louis clutched his head at the sound of Baek Kyung’s voice echoing from the deep pit. It was as if someone had pressed a megaphone to his skull—Baek Kyung’s voice reverberated through his brain, pounding him with a migraine.
“...Ngh, ...haa.”
With trembling fingers like a junkie going through withdrawal, Louis fished a ziplock bag out of his backpack. It was filled to the brim with Bebe’s belongings—things he’d secretly packed while staying at Bebe’s place. A T-shirt still saturated with pheromones, some underwear, a towel.
He opened the bag, buried his face in it, and inhaled deeply, over and over. Like someone hyperventilating into a paper bag to stabilize their CO₂ levels, he was trying to recalibrate his shattered senses from sensory overload.
Nothing changed at first. But as the faint trace of Bebe’s pheromones began to seep in, blending with the smell of fabric softener, all the painful stimuli dulling his nerves slowly faded, and time itself began to slow down.
As always, once the hypersensitivity began to ease, Louis felt drained. He lay sprawled out on the ground, atop a bed of damp, fallen leaves, utterly relaxed, no matter how much Baek Kyung screamed from the pit. It was like being stoned on marijuana.
“...Ahahaha.”
“What the hell are you laughing at?! Get me out right now!”
Baek Kyung’s voice boomed out of the pit like a cannon. Louis groaned and got to his feet. He looked down at Baek Kyung, who was trapped in a pit over six meters deep.
They had come into the Sombras Mountain forest searching for Isaac Bazelli’s hideout, and Baek Kyung had fallen into a cleverly camouflaged trap. The pit itself was a natural formation between rocks, a depression where water drained after rainfall.
Louis wanted nothing more than to leave him there. But until they found Yoon Siron, they couldn’t split up. After trailing Bebe with Baek Kyung for so long, Louis had realized a few things.
Baek Kyung claimed he couldn’t smell pheromones due to rhinitis—but that was a lie. He couldn’t detect Bebe’s pheromones at all. The only reason he’d brought Louis on this search for Yoon Siron was because Louis had potential—as a bloodhound.
Baek Kyung was hiding too much. He hoarded information to maintain control. Louis wanted to ditch him and go on alone, but Baek Kyung undeniably knew more about Yoon Siron’s whereabouts. Louis still needed him. Besides, even though it would take time, it looked like Baek Kyung could probably escape the pit on his own if he tried.
In the end, Louis used everything he had to fashion a makeshift rope and hauled him out.
“What the hell is Bazelli doing? Why are there booby traps all over the damn mountain?”
Louis’s question clearly grated on Baek Kyung’s nerves.
“Guess he’s such a reclusive freak he couldn’t stand strangers.”
Baek Kyung poured the muddy water out of his soaked shoes, snapping irritably. He tossed out a vague reply and took off ahead.
In one hand he held a GPS tracker; slung over the opposite shoulder was the strap of a semi-automatic rifle. Louis was similarly armed. Baek Kyung had insisted they gear up if they were going to confront Isaac Bazelli, and they had bought the rifles at a gun shop.
Louis knew almost nothing about Isaac Bazelli. That he was an alpha. That he had kidnapped Yoon Siron. That he posed as a urologist but was actually a mercenary. That someone with power—someone capable of mobilizing official forces—was pursuing him. The more Louis learned about Bazelli, the more he seemed like something out of a movie—villain or protagonist, he wasn’t sure. But either way, not a normal person.
The path to Bazelli’s hideout was brutal. The mountain was littered with traps, some already sprung on dead wildlife. On top of that, the hideout had already been bombed by enemies who arrived by helicopter. Whoever those enemies were, they had no qualms about deploying military force.
“...You think Bebe is still alive?”
Baek Kyung, walking in front, stopped in his tracks. His shoulders heaved as he let out a long sigh, then he turned back with a cold, hardened expression.
“One more word of that crap and I’ll kill you.”
Louis didn’t take the bait. They were both exhausted. Both despairing. Ever since they’d witnessed the destruction of Bazelli’s hideout, dread had seeped into their minds like thick, black tar.
After two hours of hiking, they finally reached the mid-slope. What greeted them was a one-story building, half-buried by a landslide from the rear slope, scorched and twisted by bombfire. The structure, once naturally blended into the forest, was now a ruin charred black like it had been swallowed by a vortex of flame. All around it, boot prints and splattered bloodstains painted a chaotic portrait of destruction and slaughter.
By some stroke of luck, the building wasn’t completely destroyed. The two men entered the ruined hideout, now precariously held up by fallen logs.
The first thing Louis noticed was the faintly bitter stench of lingering gas that clung to the air. He instinctively covered his nose, but he couldn’t block out the pheromones clinging to the subdermal scent glands. Amid the [N O V E L I G H T] tangled mess of odors—like rotting food waste—he detected Bebe’s pheromones, which jolted his senses clear like a slap.
“Yoon Siron!”
Behind him, Baek Kyung shouted Siron’s name, but there was no answer. Louis stepped over sticky puddles of blood as he searched the building.
“Looks like he mainly lived down here.”
Shining his phone’s flashlight into the basement, Louis muttered. Baek Kyung peered into the faint light, then descended the ladder. He took a deep breath and swore.
“Fuck, the place is pickled in pheromones.”
The basement reeked with Isaac’s pheromones—far more densely than anywhere else. Even though three days had passed since the bombing, the air was still thick with it, like some kind of high-viscosity fluid. Siron must have been steeped in it like syrup the entire time.
Even amid Isaac’s nauseating stench, Louis could still pick up traces of Bebe’s pheromones. But once again, only the scent remained. He was gone.
The two men sat on the collapsed support beam of the storage room, staring blankly at the building on the brink of collapse. Not even a corpse remained in Bazelli’s hideout. Either Yoon Siron and Isaac had been abducted by unknown forces, or they had somehow escaped again. After all the time spent tracking Yoon Siron, to be left with only this emptiness—it was hard to believe.
“We’ve come this far. Stop hiding shit. Who the hell is Isaac Bazelli really?”
Baek Kyung raised one brow and stared up at the ceiling. After a long pause, he spoke.
“I should be the one asking you. Why are you so obsessed with Yoon Siron? You only saw him once. And he wasn’t even in his right mind.”
Louis blinked slowly through the heavy silence.
Why, indeed? He suddenly realized he’d never really thought about it.
Siron’s pheromones didn’t just stir desire—they overrode everything in Louis’s brain like a compulsive illness. He didn’t know why, but he believed, with absolute certainty, that there was a thread of fate connecting him to Bebe. He was obsessed—myopically so—with no regard for anything else. He poured all his energy into Siron.
But so what? Why should he care about anything else?
“I just want to see him again.”
“...What?”
“That’s all I know. That’s all I can think about. If I can’t think about anything else, do I need a reason?”
Baek Kyung studied him from head to toe like he was testing the truth. As if Louis’s obsession with Siron would determine whether he was worthy of hearing Isaac Bazelli’s secret.
“Fine. Poor bastard. Guess it’s time you knew.”
As if he’d passed some strict test, Baek Kyung shrugged.
“There’s one thing you need to know first.”
“What?”
“Every alpha’s internal timer is set to 35.”
The sudden shift in tone made Louis frown.
“...Timer? What are you talking about?”
“When the timer goes off, the brain switch flips—and they die.”
Louis stared at him, stunned, then asked suspiciously,
“...You’re saying alphas die at thirty-five?”
“Yeah.”
“No way. That’s the first I’ve heard of it.”
Baek Kyung squinted at him with disgust.
“That’s not all. Alphas and betas can’t reproduce.”
“...You mean pregnancy’s impossible?”
“Exactly.”
“I—I never got any kind of warning like that.”
“I don’t know where the hell you came from, but that’s the truth I know.”
Baek Kyung went on to explain the overexpression of certain molecules that regulated gene expression, how it led to a fatal condition known as Aphorion Syndrome, and the genetic incompatibility between alphas and betas. It all sounded completely insane, and Louis reflexively wanted to argue every point—but at the same time, he couldn’t think of a reason Baek Kyung would lie about something like an alpha’s lifespan.
“...Has no alpha ever been cured?”
“There’s been one.”
Baek Kyung crossed his legs, resting his chin on one hand as if weighed down by thought.
“...But he’s locked up in prison.”
“If he’s in prison, we could request a visit. Maybe he’d share the cure under the right conditions.”
“It’s not that simple. And from what I heard, he didn’t know the cure. His partner was the one who saved him.”
“Then that makes it even easier. Just find the partner and ask.”
“...He was murdered.”
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