"No!!!"
Sea-ah let out a wrenching scream and scrambled desperately toward the railing where her parents had fallen.
But all that was there was a black column of water and the crawling monsters — not a trace of them anywhere.
"Mommy! Daddy!!"
As Sea-ah screamed, arms flung out into empty air, someone yanked her back hard.
"Sea-ah! Snap out of it!!!"
When she came back to herself, she'd been dragged back inside the shield with her siblings.
"You can't pass out here!"
It was the teacher.
How much time had passed —
—Kyaaaaaaak!!!
Once again a bone-scraping shriek tore through the air.
And, as if on cue, the lizards ripping at them broke off, one and all, and began crawling back down the outer walls into the deep blue water.
Just six of them left alive now.
Gold Toad and his son, the preschool teacher, and Sea-ah and her two siblings.
"Waaaah—!! Mommyyy— Daddyyy—!"
"Noona… scared… noonaaa…!"
Her siblings clung to Sea-ah's clothes and screamed themselves breathless, but Sea-ah didn't so much as stir.
More precisely — she couldn't move at all.
The always-cool-headed, precocious mind of the seven-year-old had shut off in front of that horror like someone had flipped a switch.
The unheralded Gate breach, the horrific slaughter, her parents' senseless death.
A pile-on of hellish tragedies, one after the other — a despair too enormous and too heavy for a seven-year-old to carry.
'……ah.'
Sea-ah's pupils had gone slack, both eyes fixed on the point in the air where her parents had fallen.
The tears running down her cheeks, her siblings' shredding sobs — none of it reached her.
Every sense, every awareness, had been cut off completely, as if she were sinking into the deep sea.
Sunk into that perfect vacuum, breathing but corpse-still, she was staring blankly at empty air — and that was the moment.
A hand reached in out of nowhere and clamped down hard on her shoulder.
"…artifact……."
"We'll… take it… instead… to keep them safe."
Sea-ah, eyes unfocused, only stared blankly at the teacher's moving lips.
A moment later a cool sensation grazed her — something being taken from her clothes — but the child was as powerless as a broken doll.
Having gathered every last one of the three jade talismans from the children, the teacher walked over to Gold Toad and his son and spoke.
"Good thing you listened to me and kept the kids alive, right?"
He stroked the talismans and continued.
"I'd had my eye on them for a while. Kids dressed like they came out of District Two or Three, wearing artifacts even, tucked away in a backwater like this — it never added up. Turns out they weren't ordinary kids after all."
"Heh, heh, heh — an educated man really does have a head on him, doesn't he."
Gold Toad cackled with glee and snatched two of the talismans, stuffing one into his own coat and one into his son's.
The son, face pale with guilt, only looked away — and never once lifted a hand to stop it.
"Now that I've watched them a while, those beast bastards seem to be dragging people off alive to stockpile as food, instead of killing them on the spot."
He jerked his chin at Sea-ah and her dazed siblings and added, cruel.
"Since we've got everything we need, next time let's just toss those brats out as bait."
And the horrific moment those bastards had been hoping for came cruelly, mercilessly quickly.
—Kyaaaaaaak!!!
A hellish shriek battered the rooftop, and at last the fourth assault began.
"Here! Your meal! Take it!"
Gold Toad and the preschool teacher walked up, seized the two children clinging to Sea-ah by the scruff of the neck, and hauled them up like sacks of luggage.
"Aah! Unnie! Unnieee!!"
"Please save us! Waaah!"
The merciless hands of the adults threw the two children out of the shield, into the killing ground, without a shred of mercy.
'Huh? Why are they throwing my siblings out?'
It was like a horrible nightmare in slow, underwater motion.
Reality had drained away completely — she was mired in a swamp.
"Unnieeeee!!!"
Se-eun's shredding, desperate scream slammed into Sea-ah's mind.
"……!!!"
In that instant, the severed rope of reason snapped back into place — pop — as though struck by lightning.
"No!!"
Without a second to think, Sea-ah threw herself out of the shield and pulled her tumbled siblings into a fierce embrace.
—Kyaaaak!!
As the slime-drooling monsters rushed in, Sea-ah shielded her siblings with her own body and backed away — step by step — until the rooftop railing was at her back.
Breath ragged, she lifted her head — her eyes landed on the adults inside the shield.
The Warding Jade Talismans, glowing faintly, in Gold Toad's coat, his son's, and the preschool teacher's.
Only then did Sea-ah's frozen brain begin to spin, terrifyingly fast.
'…I was tricked.'
Those devils had stolen her parents' keepsakes and thrown her siblings out as monster bait.
That perfect, complete realization, if anything, snapped Sea-ah's mind awake — cold and clear as ice.
"How could you? Stealing our parents' keepsakes!"
At the blood-choked scream, Gold Toad snorted, incredulous, and sneered.
"Played the little zombie this whole time and now you want to glare? Kid — who stole anything?"
"!"
"We kept you alive this long — you ought to be grateful! Call it a fee for our trouble. And the price of your lives."
At the shameless, malicious sophistry, her breath jammed in her throat.
Even the teacher she had trusted only looked down at her, without blinking.
But there was no time left for arguments.
Monsters in front, a bottomless drop of water behind.
Watching her terror-choked siblings sobbing as though they couldn't breathe, Sea-ah's mind spun fast.
'If the monsters catch us, we die. A hundred percent.'
"Se-min, Se-eun. You trust me, right?"
Sea-ah crushed her siblings into a hug so tight she might have broken them.
With bloodshot eyes she burned the faces of the adults inside the shield into her memory — and, without an instant's hesitation, threw herself over the railing, into the abyss.
Splash—!!
Water cold as ice swallowed all three of them whole in a heartbeat.
Sea-ah held her siblings and tried desperately to swim, but underwater the monsters were staggeringly faster — nothing like on land.
Whoosh—!
A hideous jaw, tearing through the spray, closed in like a shot — right on the edge of chewing Se-eun's small body up in one bite —
'If I had power…!'
Through the bubbles Sea-ah's eyes shook wildly with despair and rage.
'If I had the power to protect my siblings — power enough that no one would dare touch even a hair on us…!!'
The moment that anguished longing shattered the tightly bolted door in the deepest place of Sea-ah's soul —
Fwoosh—!!
From near Sea-ah's navel, heat like lava rocketed up as if detonated.
Along with hideous pain like her organs being burned alive, an unknown energy began to expand as if it would rip her veins apart.
Toong—!!
At the same time, from Sea-ah's small frame, a brilliant, destructive golden flash exploded outward.
Kwaaaaaaang—!!!
Enormous mana whipped violently and shoved tens of thousands of tons of water pressure aside like a sheet of paper.
The monster on the verge of swallowing the children was swept up in that overwhelming shockwave and flung out of the water without even a scream.
At the center of a brilliance so intense she couldn't have kept her eyes open in it, deep in the blue-black abyss —
A dazzling, massive golden barrier — on a completely different scale from Gold Toad's son's — lit up the depths.
It was an energy she'd never once felt in her life, and yet Sea-ah instinctively knew how to wield it.
Without hesitation she gathered her siblings up and rocketed toward the surface.
"Pwaaah—!"
The moment she gulped air, ragged, above the water, Sea-ah spread her mana into a spherical shape and wrapped it snugly around all three of them.
Kwang! Kwaang!
The monsters, furious to lose their catch, bit at the barrier and slammed their massive bodies against it.
But Sea-ah's barrier didn't so much as budge.
In the end — along with an irritable —Kyaaaaaak!! — the lizards vanished into the water like an ebbing tide.
"Wow… noona! What is dis?"
"Unnie! It's so pwetty!"
With the fear of death gone, Se-min and Se-eun, faces smeared with tears, stroked the shimmering wall of light in wonder.
Sea-ah hid her shaking hands and forced out a casual answer.
"It's an artifact Mom and Dad left for us."
Maybe because the monsters hadn't managed to carry anyone off in the previous round, the enraged fifth assault came down on them very quickly.
But even through the huge tsunami and the monsters' slaughter, Sea-ah's barrier drifted along the surface, calm and unscratched.
That was when.
"Aaaagh—!!"
Along with the scream, three figures pitched off the rooftop, flailing, and slammed down onto the blue water below.
Splash—!
Thrashing through the current, the ones who surfaced were none other than Gold Toad, his son, and the preschool teacher.
They spotted the siblings breathing safely inside the barrier, and their eyes bulged in shock.
"You… you, how…! Y-you were Awakened?!"
Gold Toad let out a spiteful scream.
But the shock was fleeting.
The swarm of monsters that surged in seized them by the scruff and dragged them deep underwater before they could even scream.
Worried her siblings might see, Sea-ah quickly covered their eyes.
After the adults met their brutal end, silence returned — but Sea-ah couldn't let herself relax.
Because with every passing moment she could feel, on instinct, that the mana in her body was running out.
That was the moment.
Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh—
From the bottom of the pitch-black water, an ominous vibration rippled up — and a massive shadow, as if to swallow the whole apartment complex, swelled up, terrible.
—Kwaaaaaang!!
What burst up, tearing through tens of thousands of tons of spray, was on a completely different scale from the lizards — disaster itself.
A body massive enough to wind around the outer walls of the apartment with plenty of length to spare.
Between plates of pitch-black armor that looked harder than steel, hundreds of hideous legs writhed, grinding out grotesque friction sounds.
Vile slime poured like a waterfall through gleaming venom-fangs, and dozens of eyes glittered with pure murder — all locked on living prey.
—Kyeeeeeeeeek—!!!
An eardrum-shredding, horrific roar.
The same spine-crawling cry that had marshaled every one of the lizard swarms through each attack so far.
At the overwhelming size and ferocity, Sea-ah knew on instinct.
That this centipede was the boss monster of this place.
The massive centipede coiled around Sea-ah's golden barrier and began squeezing with a horrifying grip.
Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-tak—!
Hundreds of sharp centipede legs scraped and dug at the outer wall of the barrier, filling the inside of the sphere with a spine-crawling sound.
"Kyaaak! Unnie!"
"N-noonaaa!"
Along with her siblings' shredding screams, a grinding sound like bone against bone rang out.
Sea-ah threw everything she had into holding the barrier against the crushing pressure.
When the barrier wouldn't break easily, the centipede clamped the sphere tight and began slamming it against the outer wall of the apartment, mercilessly.
Kwang! Kwang! Kwang! Kwang!
Under the enormous impacts that shattered the concrete wall, the steadfast barrier rocked wildly.
Unable to bear the recoil, Sea-ah's body was hurled around inside without mercy, and the thread of concentration she'd barely held on to at last snapped.
Ksshk—!
Finally, along with an ominous cracking sound, a massive fissure split across the barrier that had seemed unbreakable.
The centipede took the moment, wound the barrier up tight, and dragged it deep down into the blue-black water.
Under the pressure of the depths the crack in the barrier split wider, and water poured in through the gap.
"cough! N-noonaaa…!"
"Unnieeee…!"
The water flooding in surged up to their chins in a heartbeat.
Thrashing in the ice-cold water, her siblings' faces were already blue as if dead.
'Please, no…!'
Sea-ah swallowed tears of blood at the sight of them, but her own consciousness — breath cut off — was scattering fast under the terrible water pressure.
'…someone… anyone… please… save…'
Just as her last consciousness was sinking helplessly into the pitch-black abyss —
—Whooosh!!!
A huge sword came flying in from somewhere and skewered the centipede's head clean through in one stroke.
—Krrreeeee!!!
Along with a grotesque death cry, the centipede sank into the abyss — and, on that last note, Sea-ah's consciousness, past its limit, cut out completely.
Drifting through it all like a ghost, I could only watch the whole catastrophe, helpless.
Just as with Sihyeok before, I was face-to-face with the tragic moment of Sea-ah's Awakening, and there was nothing — nothing — I could do.
My outstretched hand only sliced uselessly through the air; all I could do was hover beside the dying, blue-faced children and pour out bitter tears.
The hunters arrived just in time, and Sea-ah was pulled out, barely — but her two siblings never opened their eyes again.
Just as I sank down in front of those tiny bodies, sobs pouring out of me — that was the moment.
— To break your mind… this much is probably still a bit weak, isn't it?
A grotesque, and grotesquely familiar, voice raked coldly down my spine.
The Fox.
Along with that mocking whisper, the sound of water and the reek of blood evaporated as if they'd never been, and a nausea — like my whole body was being wrenched into a whirlpool — crashed over me.
"Ugh…!"
When I opened my tightly squeezed eyes, the deep blue sea of water and the blood-drenched rooftop had both vanished like a lie.
In front of me, the apartment that only moments before had been brutally shattered stood tall — peaceful, whole, as if none of it had ever happened.
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