The Villainous Director Is Raising a Child!

Crunch!

Enormous claws tore into my back and drove down deep.

The horrible sound of bones being ground to pieces went straight into my ears.

"Hkk—!"

I couldn't breathe.

As if a red-hot iron skewer had been shoved into my lungs, a burning agony spread through my whole body.

I crumpled limply to the floor.

Through my rapidly clouding vision, I saw a bone-pale Sihyeok staggering toward me.

His pupils were shaking violently, as if an earthquake had struck behind them.

"N... no... again, again because of me..."

The whisper, stained with guilt, was the trigger that broke his mind.

Wooooong—.

The space itself began to hum low.

The shadow lying under Sihyeok's feet started spreading out like spilled black ink, wet and clinging.

"Uuuh... uwaaaah..."

And finally—

"AAAAAAAAAHHHHH—!!!!"

A scream that couldn't possibly have come from a human being tore out of him, and at the same instant, the child's shadow surged upward.

Like a starving demon yawning its jaws open, it ballooned in size in an instant.

The training room floor, the walls, the ceiling — it started chewing them up and swallowing them greedily.

Pop! Krkzzt! Bang!

The artificial lights caught in his overload shrieked and threw off sparks.

Where the light disappeared, absolute darkness rushed in to fill the gap.

The world was sinking helplessly into an abyss like ink.

"Grwoah!"

Even the raging, roaring Grizzly seemed to feel an instinctive terror and backed away.

But the darkness that had started at the child's feet didn't hesitate to swallow that huge monster.

The shadow coiled around its ankles like a living tidal wave and dragged its whole massive body down into the dark.

Crunch, snap, pop!

From inside the darkness, the horrible sounds of its data crumpling and bursting like paper reached me.

But soon enough, even those sounds were completely swallowed into the pitch-black.

A perfect zone of nothing — swallowing light, erasing sound, obliterating existence.

Panicked, I shouted the child's name.

"Sihyeok! Snap out of it! Kim Sihyeok!"

But my voice didn't reach him.

Somewhere along the way, the black waves — writhing to swallow me too — had risen to my feet.

There was no time to dodge the darkness gaping its jaws open at me.

The pitch-black void slammed down over my consciousness just like that.

The control room outside the training area was outright pandemonium.

"O-overload! It's an overload! B-rank Awakened Kim Sihyeok is out of control! He's blown past the measurement limits!"

"E-every screen's dark! We can't observe what's happening inside!"

"The Director too — we believe he's been lost inside the shadow!"

The bone-white screams of researchers scattered chaotically over the control consoles.

Right up to the moment the Grizzly attacked the Director, every data point had been within range.

But the second the Director had thrown himself over Kim Sihyeok and gone down, Kim Sihyeok had gone into an overload state and swallowed everything.

At the center of all that chaos, Park Wonjin looked at the main screen — now gone black — and inwardly cheered.

I was going to have him killed by the monster, but this turned out even better...! The tragic Director, killed by his own overloaded test subject!

Could there be a more perfect setup than this?

But on the outside, he put on a face pale enough to look ready to collapse any second and ran to Chae Ganghyeon.

"B-Bureau Chief! W-we have to deploy security immediately and rescue the Director—!"

But his urgent shout lost all its force in the face of Chae Ganghyeon's strange silence.

Park Wonjin raised his head to look at the Bureau Chief's face.

And felt the blood in his whole body freeze.

The corners of Chae Ganghyeon's mouth were curled up almost to his ears, wide enough to split.

Chae Ganghyeon... was smiling.

Eyes fixed on the screen, he said in a voice full of ecstasy:

"Don't interfere."

"...!"

"This is where the real experiment begins."

"Ungh..."

When I came to, the first thing that greeted me was a darkness with nothing in it.

Right, I was trying to save Sihyeok from the black shadow...

That was as far as I got before I understood what had happened.

Sihyeok... went into an overload state.

Knowledge from the original novel about overload flashed through my head.

A perilous state where awakening energy exploded past the body's limit, letting the Awakened manifest power beyond their own rank.

Without quick intervention, in the worst case the core could be destroyed and take the person's life with it.

I have to find Sihyeok, fast.

I whipped my head around, urgent.

But there was nothing to see.

Perfect darkness, without a single speck of light.

Where in the world is this?

I remembered the pitch-black waves of shadow that had swallowed me just before I lost consciousness.

Could this... be inside Sihyeok's shadow?

That was when—

Into a field of vision that had been nothing but black, a tiny orange dot appeared.

It drifted softly, as if dancing, and fluttered gently.

Looking closer, I saw it wasn't a dot at all — it was a single small flower.

...That's a marigold?

The flowers I'd once planted in the kindergarten garden with the Sunshine Class kids.

Why on earth was this flower here now?

The little orange bloom circled around me once, then began to flit off toward somewhere in the darkness, like a butterfly.

As if telling me to follow.

Half-entranced, I stepped after that small light.

I don't know how long I walked.

Finally, the petal came to a stop at the edge of a black lake, smooth as a mirror.

A lake?

Puzzled, I stepped close to the water and looked down into it.

But instead of my own face, the surface reflected only empty darkness.

Right then, the little orange flower that had been circling around me came down softly and landed on my back.

Tap.

For a second, along with the feeling of a huge invisible hand pushing me forward, my body pitched sharply ahead.

"Argh!"

With a short cry, I was sucked into the lake.

When I came to, what wrapped around me wasn't the feel of cold water.

The rusty tang of iron in my nose, and the smell of damp earth.

"...Where—."

What stretched out in front of me was an enormous junkyard, piles of scrap metal heaped up like mountains.

Wrecked-car mounds that looked ready to collapse any second were blotting out the sky and casting weird, twisted shadows.

And beneath those shadows, a group of kids was standing in a ring around something.

The biggest of them spat ptooey! at whatever was in the middle.

"Hey, garbage. I told you not to let me catch you. Came all the way out here to scrounge for scraps?"

At that, the other kids around him joined in, cackling.

"Ugh, he stinks! I bet he actually sleeps in the trash!"

"Beggar brat with no mom or dad!"

At that ugly line, I felt my brow furrow before I could stop it.

Where the hell are they learning to talk like—

Just as I was stepping forward to give the kids a piece of my mind—

"Cut it out!"

A sharp shout came from behind me.

I turned my head, and there stood a girl with her orange hair tied back tight, holding an iron pipe.

She looked maybe around Sea-ah's age?

She closed the distance in a flash and swung the pipe down hard against the biggest kid's leg.

Thwack!

Along with a heavy, meaty sound, a scream tore out of him.

"Aaargh! My leg!"

"I-insane! Sh-she actually hit him!"

The kid whose leg she'd hit yelled through his sobs.

"Just you wait! I'm telling my dad on you! I'll get you for this!"

With that as their parting shot, the kids scattered like a tide going out, screaming as they went.

The girl shouted at their retreating backs.

"You lot better think twice about coming back! Next time I'm smashing your skulls in!"

Then, making a point of it, she slung the iron pipe over her shoulder and walked over to the kid still curled up on the ground.

The curled-up kid cautiously lifted his head.

Sihyeok?!

There he was — a Sihyeok so much livelier, so much younger, than the one I knew.

"Kim Sihyeok! I told you — the second those punks show up, you just run!"

"But... they were gonna step on it..."

The child scooted his curled body slightly aside and showed her what he'd been protecting.

There, punching through the bleak heap of scrap metal, a single orange marigold had bloomed — a miracle.

Seeing the flower, the girl's eyes went wide.

"A flower? How's a flower blooming in a place like this?"

"Right?! It's the same color as your hair, noona! So I pwotected it!"

At that, a huge grin bloomed across the girl's face.

"Well, if that's the reason, then good job."

She ruffled Sihyeok's hair.

"But those guys might come back, so from now on, you stick with me at all times. Got it?"

"Yeah!"

The girl looked around for a moment, then picked up a rusted-out tin can rolling around nearby.

Then, with her small hands, she scooped up the soil and carefully transplanted the marigold, roots and all, into the can.

Handed the tin-can planter, Sihyeok beamed brighter than if he'd been given the whole world.

Watching them, I reached a hand out toward the kids before I even realized I was doing it.

Just to give that small head a pat, once.

But my hand passed straight through Sihyeok's little shoulder, as though cutting through empty air.

Only then did I get it.

That this place was Sihyeok's past, one I couldn't intervene in.

From that day on, I drifted around the two of them like a ghost.

Over those days of watching, I came to understand.

That this filthy, dangerous junkyard really was these children's home.

They dug through mounds of food scraps thrown out by other people to fill their stomachs.

And come nightfall, they curled up inside an old rusted wreck of a car, leaning on each other's warmth, and fell asleep.

Occasionally adults came in to salvage scrap metal, but somehow the two of them managed to stay out of their line of sight.

That day was the same.

The girl was out scavenging for something to eat, and beside her spot, Sihyeok was playing with the marigold pot.

"Found her!" — at the sharp shout, the neighborhood kids the girl had scared off not long ago reappeared, with rough-faced adults out in front as their shield.

Among them, the kid whose leg had been hit last time was hiding behind a man who looked like his dad, jabbing a finger at the girl and howling.

"Dad! Her! I wasn't doing anything and she just hit me out of nowhere!"

At that brazen lie, the girl shot to her feet and, refusing to back down, shouted right back:

"Don't lie! You're the one who started it — you were bullying Sihyeok! Sihyeok got hurt because of you too!"

But the adults had no intention of hearing her out.

The largest of the men strode over to the girl.

"How dare an orphan with no parents put her hands on my precious kid!"

His enormous palm cut through the air.

Slap—!!!

Along with an eardrum-splitting crack, the girl's small body reeled hard to the side.

Blood ran red from her split lip and down her chin.

The girl, for a moment, just stared blankly to one side, as if she didn't even know what had just happened to her.

But only for a moment.

"...What did I do wrong!"

She scrubbed the blood at her mouth away roughly with her sleeve and snapped back at him.

But I saw it.

The way her small shoulders — squared with such deliberate defiance — were trembling, ever so slightly.

The way that little fist that had wiped the blood away was shaking uncontrollably.

She'd shouted him down, but she was still just a ten-year-old.

At the girl's brazen attitude, the man who had slapped her flew into another rage.

"Little brat with no manners! This is what happens with kids raised with no mother or father—! Fine, I'll teach you some proper manners myself today!"

And with that, curses and merciless violence rained down on the child's small body.

While she was taking it, defenseless, one of the people standing by shifted his eyes to Sihyeok, quaking behind her back.

"That one's with her. Needs a taste of it too."

The man reached his rough hand out toward Sihyeok.

That was the exact moment.

The girl, who hadn't so much as let out one scream while she herself was being beaten, let out a tearing scream for the first time.

She threw her own body forward and completely blocked Sihyeok off from him.

"Don't touch my little brother!"

Her desperate resistance only poured fuel on the adult's rage.

"Won't quit, will you!"

The man grabbed a handful of the girl's small head of hair. Then he flung her down like an animal, into the dirt.

But even in the moment she went down, the girl didn't let go of Sihyeok in her arms.

If anything, she wrapped herself completely around Sihyeok with her whole body and silently endured every bit of the violence coming down on her.

A long while later, spent and sated, the adults spat, "Bah, ptooey! — filthy little beggars," at the ground and disappeared.

After the violence ended and the adults were gone, the junkyard went quiet.

The two children, leaning on each other, barely managed to make it back to their home — the old, wrecked car.

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