Gripped by an ominous premonition, I flew straight down to the fifteenth floor.
There, Sea-ah and her siblings — who moments before had been dying blue-faced underwater — were shouting out their chant, bright and beaming.
"We are—!"
"The bestest siblings in the universe!"
"Won't be picky about food today—!"
"Won't fight wif fwiends today—!"
"No cwying!"
The moment I heard that innocent chant, my mind blanked out white.
I was back at the beginning.
'You teach them that no matter how hard they run for their lives, they're right back where they started.'
'Wait — is he really going to run this hellish tragedy from the top over and over? Then does Sea-ah know she's in this too?'
On the surface, it looked no different from the start of the first cycle.
But watching her closely, I soon caught a strange wrongness in how she was moving.
She didn't remember it clearly, but some unconscious déjà vu was making her flinch.
Herding her siblings under the dining table before the tsunami hit. Bristling faintly when the preschool teacher came near. Small things like that.
And yet, despite that unconscious struggle, fate flowed inexorably back into the same horrific tragedy as the first cycle.
'Is this not going to stop with one time — is it going to loop, over and over, until Sea-ah's mind breaks?'
A chill ran down my spine.
If that was the case, I had to do something. Anything.
Trying to grind out any variable I could, I was hovering desperately at Sea-ah's side — that was when.
Just like before, the preschool teacher reached a greedy hand toward the dazed Sea-ah's clothes to snatch the talismans.
Without thinking, wanting to protect her, I lashed out at his arm — that was the very moment.
Thump—!
My fingertips, which had always sliced uselessly through empty air, suddenly caught on something with a solid impact.
A faint tremor, and with it an unfamiliar physical sensation.
"……!"
Startled, I quickly swung my hand at him again.
But the impact from a moment ago was nowhere to be found — my hand only kept passing through the teacher's body like smoke.
I didn't give up, waving through the air dozens of times, but the result was a miserable failure.
While I flailed helplessly, Sea-ah — cornered by the monsters — was forced off the rooftop again.
Just like before, I threw myself desperately at any chance to protect her, but the tragic ending was unavoidable this time as well.
Soon the familiar nausea and dizziness came over me, and once more the loop began.
"We are! The bestest siblings in the universe!"
The bright chant again, ringing in my ears.
'…my hypothesis was right.'
Until Sea-ah's mind crumbled to dust completely, they meant to run her through this hellish tragedy tens, hundreds of times.
Bone-deep despair rose to my throat, but there was no time to sit stunned and mourn.
'Last cycle, I was able to interfere with the preschool teacher for a moment…!'
Pinning my hope on that one variable, I flew straight up to the rooftop and dove into the preschool teacher's body without hesitation.
And this time, a response came back — clear and forceful, on a completely different scale from before.
Whoosh—!
In an instant, along with the strange sensation of being sucked into someone else's body, my view flipped completely.
'Did I actually get in?'
Just as, with a nervous, thudding heart, I tried to move a finger in that new view —
Toong—!
Along with a violent repulsion — like magnets of the same pole slamming together — my soul was flung uselessly back out into the air.
"Wh-what? What was that? Something just went creepy for a second."
The preschool teacher, feeling that brief foreign sensation, clutched his own shoulder and looked around, bewildered.
His face said he had no idea what was even happening to him.
'I just have to keep trying until it works!'
Whoosh— Thump!
Whoosh— Thump!
Whoosh— Thooong!!
"Aa-aagh, what is this?! Why does my body keep twitching on its own?!"
'Come on! Just one arm!'
Every time I got flung back out of him, the teacher jumped out of his skin — but I didn't back off, throwing myself at the possession like a maniac.
In and out, dozens of times.
My ferocious possession attempts and his body's cold rejection ran back and forth on a second-by-second beat, and the teacher's body was in absolute chaos.
One second his right leg would kick out in the air on its own; the next, standing still, his whole body would start flapping wildly like a squid on a deck.
"Waaah! Mommy! That man's scary!!"
A terrified child yanked at his mother's clothes, crying.
The survivors, drawn by the shriek, backed away from the teacher in horror, one step at a time.
When Sea-ah finally made it up to the rooftop, it was the same for her.
On top of the unconscious wrongness she'd felt in the previous cycle, she was so put off by the teacher's convulsive twitching that she started avoiding him outright.
"I— i-it's not me! I'm not doing this! Something's wrong with my body! Please, somebody help me!"
The teacher thrashed and howled, fighting to get his own flailing limbs under control.
But at his grotesque contortions the people only shrank back further in horror — not a soul willing to come close.
'Full possession's a stretch for now, it seems… let me back out for the moment.'
I swallowed the disappointment and pulled out of the teacher's body.
The possession had failed, but instead of despair, a kind of elation was spreading through me.
'The more cycles pass, the stronger this power is getting.'
I still didn't know what kind of power it was, but there was no need to rush.
What mattered more was that I'd found a way to help Sea-ah.
'I need more information.'
Using the ghost's advantage of being able to pass through anything, I began scouting the state of things outside the apartment.
What I found across District Eight was more horrifying than I'd imagined.
People flailing in the surge of the tide; survivors torn and dragged off by monsters; families sobbing as they were separated for good — all of it.
I squeezed my eyes shut and flew toward the Gate the beasts had poured out of.
There, the lizard monsters were pitching the captured people through the Gate, one after another.
'So — there was a reason they weren't just killing people, they were carrying them off.'
Turning my search away from the horror and toward somewhere else, I soon caught sight of something in the chaos that stood out sharply.
A small lifeboat cutting through the rough current.
On it, a man and a woman in white lab coats.
'Sea-ah's parents!'
Without hesitation I cut across the air and dropped down right above their boat.
There, Sea-ah's father was gnawing on his fingernails, face half in panic.
"Honey, please, calm down! Panicking isn't going to get us to the kids a second faster!"
Sea-ah's mother gripped his shoulder hard and shouted, urgent.
"Pull yourself together and do what we're best at! Use your head! What kind of thing do you think the boss is?"
At the sharp reprimand, Dad at last lowered the hand from his teeth and began to answer.
"…The monsters that came pouring out were lizard-shaped. Factor in that the interior of the Gate is a submerged environment, and the boss has to be a predator higher up the chain than the lizards."
"A predator above lizards that lives on land and in water both… could be a giant aquatic spider. Or something with a lot of legs — a giant centipede, maybe."
"Right. And with either of those, there's one perfectly shared, fatal weakness."
Mom nodded at what Dad said.
"Right. They rely on their skin or thin mucous membranes to stay hydrated and breathe. Hit them with real heat or fire and they'll die on the spot."
Dad, face set, pulled a flamethrower artifact from his coat and gripped it tight.
"Please…… just let them hold on until we get there."
"…"
"The Mana Pistol I hid on top of the kitchen cupboard… I should've told Sea-ah about it beforehand. I only hid it because I thought it'd be dangerous…"
"She'll be fine. You know how smart our Sea-ah is — just look at the way she manages her test scores. She'll be keeping the little ones safe just fine."
Even beneath the brave, comforting tone Mom was forcing, deep anxiety showed through.
After a heavy silence, Dad opened his mouth, careful.
"Honey. Do you think we… might die today?"
"Don't say things like that!"
"But if we do… what happens to that child. The other researchers don't even care anymore… and it seems like the side effects are still lingering…."
"That busybody streak of yours is a sickness! Is now the time to worry about someone else's kid? Look after our own!"
At Mom's sharp rebuke, Dad flinched and shut his mouth.
Faces set, the two of them pressed on toward the apartment where their three children were.
I burned every word of their conversation into my head and hurried back to the apartment.
The first thing I did was fly to Sea-ah's place and confirm the location of the Mana Pistol hidden on top of the kitchen cupboard.
Putting the parents' conversation together, the massive centipede that had killed Sea-ah's siblings was clearly the boss monster.
'Its weakness is sudden temperature change. In other words, fire and heat…'
My mind spun fast, laying out a perfect setup to hunt that monster down.
Time to make full use of my ghost-state advantages.
The monsters' attack routes, how high the flooding would climb inside the building, the layout we'd need for escape — I mapped it all like a maniac.
Not only that — I combed through every unlocked apartment and crammed the locations of every item worth using for survival into my head, right now.
How long had I been running around like that.
"Ugh…!"
My vision distorted grotesquely, and once again the familiar nausea and dizziness swept over me.
The fourth loop was beginning.
"We are! The bestest siblings in the universe! Won't be picky about food today…!"
The moment that bright chant hit my ears, I didn't look back — I charged for the teacher on the rooftop at full speed.
'This time, let's change the approach.'
What if the reason I kept failing at possession was because the owner of the body was awake?
Then all I had to do was knock him out — cut off the consciousness entirely.
Instead of throwing myself at his whole body, I focused only on his right arm and attempted possession.
Whoosh—!
'Got it!'
The moment I felt the arm's control pass over to me, I snapped the right arm up and, without hesitation, drove a full swing right into his face.
Whack!
"Aaagh! Wh-what?! Why is this happening?!"
The teacher, having just smacked himself across the face out of nowhere, lost his mind and screamed.
He tried to grab the thrashing right arm with his left hand, but he couldn't match the desperate strength I was pouring into it.
I tightened the fist and hammered his jaw one shot after another.
Whack! Whack! Whaaack!
"S-somebody, hel— ungh!"
As I kept up the merciless self-beating — enough to roll his eyes back into his head — the teacher finally frothed at the mouth and dropped where he stood.
With the body's owner unconscious, the sticky repulsion that had been flinging me out vanished as if it had never been there.
I slipped, at my leisure, into every part of his body.
"God, that felt good! I'd been dying to lay one on you with my own hands!"
Feeling a long-standing knot inside me finally loosen, I dusted the possessed body off and pulled it up to its feet.
"…"
But the atmosphere around me had gone past chilly and into pure horror.
A perfectly ordinary man had beaten his own face to a bloody pulp like a lunatic, dropped unconscious, and then popped right back up — of course it had.
"Ahaha… nothing to worry about! Just trying to snap myself out of it!"
As I laughed shamelessly through a bloody-pulp face and brushed it off, the people looked at me the way you'd look at a madman.
But between everyone panicking over the disaster on top of them, they wrote it off as a bizarre incident and hurriedly looked away.
That's when the rooftop door flew open and Sea-ah and her siblings came up.
"Teacher!"
Not knowing anything, Se-min and Se-eun's faces brightened, and they started running toward me.
But at that instant Sea-ah snatched her siblings' wrists and stepped in front of them.
I stopped mid-step and met her eyes.
"!"
Sea-ah's eyes… were broken.
The bright, life-lit look from that very first cycle was nowhere to be found.
Not a shred of light was left in her unfocused pupils — they had died over, cold, like ash crumbled to nothing.
'Is her mind… falling apart a little more with every loop?'
Pressing down the sharp ache in my chest, I put on the gentlest smile I could and reached out to the children.
"Kids, come here."
But Sea-ah flinched and pulled her siblings tight behind her back.
Deep, hard wariness.
At this rate there was no saving her.
I made up my mind to tell her everything, and slowly opened my mouth.
"Sea-ah, this place is actually an illu—"
—Beeeeeeeep!!!
"Aagh—!"
Just as I moved to put the word out, a piercing tone — sharp enough to shred my eardrums — hammered through my head.
My vision swayed wildly and shook, violent, as if my soul were about to be flung right out of the body at any second.
It felt violent, brutal — as if the world itself were trying to spit out a foreign object.
I clamped my mouth shut and swallowed the word back, and only then did the swaying just barely stop.
"Hah…."
I barely dragged myself up off the floor, wiping the cold sweat off my face.
That kickback just now made it certain.
'I can't tell Sea-ah… the truth.'
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