(If your gonna read this… please read it while listening to "THE GREAT GIG IN THE SKY." THANK YOU — Damn... Nice one last year me, found a goated song cry cry — try FOREVER, and THOSE YEARS ARE OVER.)
"Wait… a tent...? What the FUCK—" I lowered my head and looked at the beast already about to eat the pavement below me, and reality snapped back into place hard, my foot moving without waiting for permission.
My feet slammed into cracked asphalt again as I bolted down the parking lot, lungs burning instantly, every breath too small for my chest to actually use.
Behind me the beast's footsteps were loud, obscenely loud, each one shattering pavement like it was made of glass instead of concrete. I didn't look back— didn't dare— and right as I hit my stride the System burned into my vision uninvited.
「[System Notice]
[SUB-OBJECTIVE]
Survive for 10 seconds — you're almost there 92%」
"What the fuck… you've got to be kidding me…"
[1 second. /]
The air shook behind me, pressure building against my back like a wall closing in.
[Two. ]
A chunk of concrete exploded somewhere off to my left, close enough to sting my cheek with grit.
[3.] My legs screamed at me to stop and I ignored every word of it.
[4.] The ground dropped without warning and I stumbled, barely catching myself before I went down.
[5.] I could feel the beast's hot breath crawling up my spine.
[Six.] Its shadow swallowed me whole.
[Seven.] The air pressure shifted— the warning right before death, the kind you only recognize once you've already felt it.
[Eight.] I twisted sideways, desperate, too slow.
Something massive slammed into my ribs. Not a claw. A paw. The impact erased everything— made the world slow down again, this time from pain instead of System nonsense— and my body flew sideways like I'd been hit by a truck, bouncing across the pavement, rolling hard, slamming into a broken light pole that folded under the impact.
Pain shot through my entire right side in one long, blinding wave, and I couldn't breathe, couldn't do anything but lie there while the count kept climbing.
[Nine.] I tried to stand. Failed. Tried again. Failed again. Tried a third time and failed that too.
Then a shadow fell over me, blotting out what little gray light the sky had left.
[Ten.] The beast's paw came down again, but this time it didn't smash. It closed.
Metal bent somewhere beneath me. Concrete shattered outward in a ring. And I was lifted straight into the air like I weighed nothing at all, its massive paw wrapped around my torso, my ribs crushing inward, my arms pinned uselessly to my sides while my feet kicked at nothing but open air.
For one split second the world tilted just right, and through the shattered glass of the CU store's front window, I saw her.
Ivy.
She was screaming— not words at first, just raw sound tearing out of her chest over and over, like if she said it enough times reality would finally listen. "Dad! Dad! DAD!!!"
Lila had both arms locked around her from behind, feet braced hard against the tile floor, dragging a kid who fought like something feral, and Ivy's hands scratched at the air toward me, fingers stretched out and shaking, reaching for someone already too far gone to reach.
"Let me go!!! My Ahj— M-MY DAD! Needs me! Please!!!" she sobbed, and Lila was crying too, I could see it even from here, her jaw clenched so hard it trembled as she hauled Ivy backward inch by inch, away from the entrance, away from me, away from the thing currently holding me like a broken toy.
"I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm SORRY!!!" Lila kept shouting, not even sure anymore who she was apologizing to.
Our eyes met. Ivy's eyes. And for half a second everything else just disappeared— the monster, the portal, the pain in my ribs— nothing left but her looking at me like she was watching her entire world get torn apart right in front of her.
My chest tightened worse than the broken ribs ever could, tight enough that it looped all the way around into feeling like nothing at all.
"Ivy," I tried to say. No sound came out. The beast's grip only tightened, and I found myself locking eyes with it instead— every one of its too-many eyes staring back at me, not angry, just curious, like it was still deciding whether the broken toy in its paw was worth tearing apart or keeping.
Then the portal above the CU jerked, hard, so hard the glowing ring in the sky twisted violently like something had grabbed it from the inside and yanked.
The falling light debris reversed course, getting sucked back upward instead of drifting down, and the air pressure changed all at once, sharp enough to pop in my ears.
The beast snarled in confusion as everything around us started pulling— not toward the ground, toward the sky.
Cars lifted off the asphalt. Debris ripped free from every direction. The beast dug its claws into the pavement in a losing fight against gravity itself, its grip on me tightening on reflex as the portal dragged both of us upward together.
For half a second I caught the whole parking lot from above— Vesper screaming my name, Ivy still reaching, Lila frozen mid-horror— and then the world folded in on itself.
No light. No sound. Just pressure.
And then me and the beast both got sucked straight into the portal.
***
Cold. My body slammed into something that was soft and crushing all at once— snow, I realized, as I skidded across frozen ground and rolled to a stop face-down, lungs burning, ice stabbing through what was left of my very expensive, very torn clothes. "Haha… I forgot this outfit cost like a million," I muttered into the snow, because apparently that was the thought my brain decided was worth having.
The silence was wrong. No monster. No alarms. No screaming. Just wind, low and constant, brushing across an endless white field.
I lifted my head slowly and found nothing but snowy mountains stretching out under a flat gray sky in every direction. I was alive. Barely.
And the beast— gone, flung somewhere else entirely when the portal spat us both out, since I'd caught a glimpse of it tumbling away from me right before we landed.
「
System Notice.
Sub-Objective: Complete.
Reward: ???
[Good luck, Si Hon.]」
I stared at it for a long second. "Haha. What the fuck, why is it always a question mark." I let my head fall back into the snow, cold soaking instantly into the back of my skull, sharp and biting, and I didn't flinch, didn't move, didn't try.
My body felt heavy— not weak, just heavy, like every muscle I owned had already spent everything it had and clocked out early.
"Or maybe I'm just lazy as hell," I chuckled, then winced. "Kidding. Everything actually hurts."
Snowflakes drifted down onto my face, sliding into my eyes, my lips, the raw edges of a dozen small cuts, and I stopped bothering to blink them away. Let them fall. Let them bury me a little. I honestly didn't have the energy left to care.
The sky above stretched gray and endless, like someone had started painting the world and given up halfway through. No sun. No visible light source at all, just a dull brightness bleeding through thick clouds that never seemed to move.
My breath came out in tight little clouds of white fog— in, out, each one hurting slightly less than the last, which scared me more than the pain ever could.
I stayed like that for a while, maybe longer than I realized, because time itself felt warped here, thick and slow in a way that had nothing to do with anything.
Then something felt wrong. Not danger. Not sound. Scale. I lifted my head and followed the slope of the ground downward, and that's when I saw it— a tower. Not a building, not some crumbling ruin.
A tower, rising straight out of the frozen land beneath where I'd landed, so massive that my brain flatly refused to process it at first glance.
The base alone stretched wider than several city blocks. Its surface wasn't stone and it wasn't metal either— it looked like layered black steel fused with something disturbingly organic, ridged with enormous vertical grooves spiraling endlessly upward into the clouds. No matter how far back I tilted my head, I couldn't find the top.
It just vanished into the gray like it had stabbed straight through the sky itself.
At its base, the snow didn't gather.
It melted— not from heat, no steam rising, no warmth radiating outward, the ground simply refused to freeze near it, revealing cracked black earth threaded with faint glowing lines that pulsed slowly, steadily, like a heartbeat.
The world finally felt real again.
And deeply, thoroughly wrong.
This wasn't Korea. This wasn't anywhere close to Korea.
"Haha… yeah, I forgot I got sucked into a portal," I muttered to the empty sky, and somewhere under the joke I understood, clearly and completely, that this place had been made. Built. Designed. For something specific.
A low vibration hummed through the air, too faint to hear but strong enough to feel deep in my chest, buried somewhere behind my cracked ribs.
The tower wasn't dormant. It was active. Waiting. Every single instinct left in my battered body screamed the same message on repeat— this tower was not optional.
Whatever world I'd been dragged into, this was the center of it, the beating black heart of the whole place, and I was lying at its feet like some half-dead offering nobody had asked for.
I forced myself upright anyway, dragging my body forward meter by meter until I was close enough that the thing blotted out half the sky, and that's exactly when my legs finally gave out for good.
I hit the snow again, flat on my back, staring straight up at that endless gray, watching the flakes drift down one after another like the sky itself was trying to bury the evidence.
"You know…" I breathed out, voice barely more than fog. "I'm so tired…"