January 1, 2020, 12:00 p.m. Seoul, South Korea.
“More than ten hours have passed since the event social media is calling ‘The Return.’ Most of the missing who reappeared early this morning have been taken in for tests to check on their health.”
The news on the TV in an electronics store window was fighting the thunder, without much success.
“For those who don’t remember, or weren’t born yet, exactly twenty years ago about one million people disappeared at the same time. Among them were athletes from martial arts, traditional sports and esports.”
Outside, the rain ran down my windbreaker while I watched with the attention of someone coming back to his hometown after a whole life away. Twenty years of changes to catch up on, and no desire at all to hurry.
I was one of the missing, but I doubt anyone noticed. I wasn’t famous, I had no parents or siblings, and “friends” was far too generous a word for anyone who had passed through my life.
The only thing that set me apart was being absurdly good at a strategy game called PlanetCraft. My hands weren’t even the fastest; I saw the whole match at once: how much the other guy was spending, where he was going to expand, what he’d try three minutes from now. I made my living climbing other people’s rankings: they paid me, I played on their account and handed it back at the top. A booster doesn’t get to pick his army. He takes the account he was paid for, with someone else’s bad habits, and wins with what he’s got. I was number 1, and I never wanted anyone to know. Back then, boosting paid better than going pro, and nobody asks for the autograph of a name that doesn’t show up anywhere. I thought that was great, honestly. Fewer people to disappoint.
In the wet glass, my reflection took shape between the drops, and I almost didn’t recognize the face. That face hadn’t existed for twenty years. Amber eyes, wavy black hair falling to my shoulders, months without scissors. I touched my skin: smooth, without the marks that time and the desperation of surviving in Erebus had left.
Eighteen again. Great. Now all I have to do is learn to climb a flight of stairs without losing my breath.
I took a book out of my pocket. On the outside it was an ordinary object: hardcover, brown, worn, with a title nobody would stop to read.
“The Book of Ezekiel,” I said to myself. “If I saw this on a shelf, I wouldn’t even look. And yet it’s what gave me my memories back. Well, part of them. I’m still on the index.”
It had shown up in my pocket at the start of the day, its pages blank. Hours later it glowed with an orange light, and when I opened it, the contents flew into my head like a file transfer too big for the connection. I blacked out on the sidewalk for a few hours. No one stopped to see if I was alive, which, honestly, matched my life up to that point.
My “self” from the other world had split everything into chapters that would only open at the right moment. I understood the logic. If the index alone had knocked me out, the whole book at once would probably kill me. It was care, at least. I’d have done the same.
On the last line of the index, in handwriting that was mine and at the same time wasn’t, there was a sentence underlined twice: “Don’t tell them. Not until they’re strong enough to choose.”
Tell what? To whom? I closed the book.
You don’t make it easy, do you, pal.
“The most surprising part is the condition the missing came back in. That’s why we’ve invited Dr. Phillip Waist to explain a little more.”
“Thank you very much, Joe,” said the doctor beside the anchor. “What’s most striking is that these people haven’t aged a single day. And not only that: none of them remembers disappearing!”
And they won’t. The bastards of Erebus did a clean job. I looked at my palm, and flashes blinked behind my eyes: light, a scream, something hot in my chest. I had almost failed. Without the divine fragment, I would never have had the power to bring the book with me. The question was still there, unanswered: where did the Erebians get so much power?
“How is that possible, Doctor? It’s been twenty years!”
“I wish I had that answer.” The doctor shrugged. “Unfortunately, I don’t.”
“We’ve also learned that not everyone came back. Is there any pattern to why fewer than half returned?”
“They haven’t found any pattern. Unknowns came back, and famous people came back.”
The others are dead. Erebus doesn’t choose between the known and the nameless; it tries to swallow everyone the same way. Some chose to live in quiet towns, far from the wars. Others died fighting. Maybe, if they’d known they would come back, they’d have chosen peace. Not that they’d have managed to keep it for long.
“I don’t want to alarm anyone,” said the doctor. “But my guess is that this is far from over.”
Good guess, Doctor. You just got the timing wrong. It’s tonight.
I started walking again in the rain, without running. I still had to get ready for the night, and showing up tired wasn’t going to help anything. Only I knew what was coming: the transmigration of the other world into this one.
The trip to Erebus had been a test, one long exam to find out whether this world was fit to receive the other. A greater force controlled time, and the twenty years there worked as a rehearsal. At the end of the two decades, time rewound for everyone and the terraforming of the new world began. Nobody remembered anything, and the cycle started over and devoured one universe after another.
Nobody remembered. Only me.
I bought an egg bread at a little stall that didn’t know it would be gone in twelve hours and ate it on the way. End of the world or not, I was hungry.
*
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January 1, 2020, 11:32 p.m.
Twenty years earlier, when we were summoned to Erebus, most people fell into despair. Celebrities lost fortunes; fathers and mothers lost families, and some never got the chance to start one. In exchange, they got the chance to become almost gods.
Wishes humanity had only ever had in dreams: strength to split mountains, to fly, to teleport, to control minds, to call up elements and creatures out of nothing, to be king or queen of a territory. For centuries, breaking the laws of physics like that was the stuff of madmen. In Erebus, it was Tuesday. Even so, almost nobody thought the trade was fair. Some weren’t interested. Others were afraid.
Not me.
I didn’t lose anything. To begin with, I never had anything to lose.
So I ran. I took a common class, Thief, the one everybody skips on the selection screen, and evolved it step by slow step into Memory Thief and, at last, into the Calamity of Oblivion.
In Erebus, they called me the Black Radiance, leader of the second-largest faction among the summoned of Earth. My territory stretched past the horizon, and my servants numbered in the tens of thousands.
Second. Never first. However much the index talked about my territory, nowhere did it say I had won.
For someone who had spent his life as number 1, second place hurt more than it should have.
There was something else the index didn’t say: what that man was like. I knew his titles, his conquests, the size of his territory. I didn’t know if he laughed. Reading those lines, I had the impression he didn’t.
“But here…” I looked at a puddle, and the reflection looked back. I pulled down my hood and let the rain run down my face. “Here I’m just Kai Sehun. A nobody.”
And, to be honest, this nobody was pretty much fine with that.
“No way! HAHAHA!” A man’s voice rang out in front of me. “Sehun! You haven’t changed a bit!”
I knew that voice. My stomach knew it before I did.
“It can’t be. You disappeared too? Even losers were among the chosen? I swore it was people with special qualities, like me. But look at you, exactly the same.”
I raised my face, and the name came before the image.
“What’s with that face, Sehun? Don’t tell me you don’t remember me? It’s me, Baekyung, your best friend!”
Friend. That’s a good one.
Baekyung, son of the owner of the Jyunkok conglomerate, and the reason I had dropped out of school. Baek was an under-18 baseball prodigy who was always complaining that training every day while also being a millionaire heir was too stressful. So he used me to relieve the stress. Punches, cuts, cigarette burns, always in places my baggy clothes hid.
I took it in silence. I was slow to react, afraid of the backlash. When I finally reported him, the fear came true: the school preferred to expel me and bury the case. It wasn’t easy to prove anything in the 2000s, even less against a family name that big.
“Hey, Sehun, I’m really stressed out, you know?” said Baekyung. “I lost my inheritance and twenty years! How about we go for another round, like the good old days?”
“Baek, it’s been twenty years. Do you really need this?” said an older man beside him. I recognized that face too: one of Baekyung’s school friends, now with a receding hairline and an office belly.
“For me it’s been a lot less than that. And I bet he doesn’t even care!” Baekyung stepped forward and punched me in the pit of the stomach.
GASP
My weak body couldn’t take even the first blow. I fell and threw up the only thing in my stomach onto the sidewalk: the egg bread.
What a waste. An eighteen-year-old body, zero conditioning, one punch and I’m done. Excellent start, Kai.
“I knew it! HAAA, nothing cheers me up like that groan of yours!” Baekyung started kicking my ribs, with me still on the ground. The pain came sharp, bone against lung, and my eyes rolled back.
“Hey, Baekyung, take it easy,” another man said.
“Fuck off! You have any idea how pissed I am? It’s an honor for this pig to help me blow off steam. He should be thanking me.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw short red hair. Dyed hair had been forbidden at school, and Baekyung was never punished for it, or for anything. The pain, though, was the most familiar thing I had felt since getting part of my memories back. Familiar not because of school, but because of what came after.
The two of us had grown up in different ways. Was that the problem? If I’d had the same advantages from the start, would I have turned into that arrogant jerk?
I doubt it. I’m too lazy to be cruel. Cruelty takes work.
“What are you looking at? I don’t like that look!” Baekyung shouted and kicked again.
January 1, 2020, 11:59 p.m.
Then something changed inside me.
Anger I knew: it was hot, disorganized. This was cold, patient, and it spoke with a voice that sounded like mine after giving orders to a lot of people.
Maybe it’s his parents’ fault, for not raising their son right. Maybe, if he’d taken a good beating, been beaten until he couldn’t feel the cold of the wet ground anymore, he’d have straightened out.
“Baekyung! Stop, you’re going to kill him!” One of the men tried to hold him back, without success.
What would it be like if it were you screaming in pain?
“BAEKYUNG!”
What it would be like.
January 2, 2020, 12:00 a.m.
Maybe I should show you.
WHOOSH RUMBLE RUMBLE RUMBLE
“What is that?” one of the men asked. “An earthquake?”
“And the sky? It’s midnight, how is it so bright?”
The sky lit up in flashes while the earth shook. Sirens started wailing in every neighborhood, and the cold voice inside me went quiet all at once, a door closing in another room.
It had begun.
Half a dozen messages appeared on a floating screen before my eyes.
[Congratulations, you have been summoned]
[Welcome, Kai Sehun]
[Class: Thief]
[Tier 1: Pickpocket]
[Type: Normal]
The same messages as twenty years before. Even the font was the same. Not a single comma had changed.
[Error]
[Error]
“Huh?”
The blue screen turned red.
[Profession does not match the summoned’s skills, memories, experience and potential]
[Reevaluation required]
[Reevaluating]
“Reevaluation?” I mumbled, still on the ground.
That hadn’t happened last time.
“Hey, wasn’t there a building there? What is that? A castle?!”
“Damn it, my phone won’t turn on! What kind of crap is this, right now of all times?”
“You guys aren’t seeing these messages?” asked Baekyung.
“What messages?”
“Like a screen floating there, I don’t know.”
Of course. Baekyung had been summoned too. The universe had a sense of humor, and it was a terrible one.
[Reevaluation complete]
[Class chosen: ???]
[Tier 1: Umbra Initiate]
[Type: Mythic]
I stared at the word, the taste of acid still in my mouth.
Mythic.
Well, Baek. Looks like something did change after all.