Death was a strong word. Especially for someone like Jisung, who’d already brushed past it more times than he could count on both hands.
Staring down the Harrier as it closed the distance, his mind ripped open and flooded with memory, his whole life replaying itself in the space of one heartbeat.
Pressure clamped down behind his eyes, and then he saw it. It wasn’t physical, but he felt it too. Somehow, like he had experienced it before.
The creature’s shoulder slamming into him and his body leaving the ground. One brief, absurd moment of defying gravity before the ice rushed up to meet his skull. The sound it made when it did was horrifying enough that Jisung felt his insides quake. He saw the rest of him laying there afterwards. Completely lifeless.
This all played out like a footage projected straight onto the inside of his skull. His body went cold.
"I’ll... die?" The words came out barely above a whisper, his knees threatening to lose balance, right until the Harrier’s shriek dragged him back into the present.
’...huh?’ He gasped.
The strike almost caught him. ’Almost.’ His body moved before his brain finished processing the threat, and dodged last minute on pure instinct.
When he landed, he blinked, and slapped his own forehead.
’Idiot.’ He nearly laughed at himself. ’After everything I’ve survived to get here?’
He threw himself into a backflip, dodging the second strike, landing hard and unsteady as a fresh crack spidered out beneath his boots. "Never. I’m not dying here. I refuse, even if it’s on the table. I won’t fucking die."
He fixed his eyes on the Harrier, tracking every twitch beneath its feathers.
The ice under them both was already splintering further with every hit. Long white veins spread across the surface, and that, Jisung realized, was exactly the weapon he needed.
He let his breath out slow as it committed to its next charge.
[Massive Adaptability To Any Situation Lv.0 (Muscle Memory): Activated]
"Hey, pabo!" he shouted, sprinting straight at it. "I can hold my breath underwater for a long time!"
He slid low at the last second, let the attack scream past overhead, came up behind it, and dropped to one knee, breathing hard, a grin spreading across his face as he tilted his head at it.
"Can you?"
The Harrier turned, confused, standing dead center on the widest crack in the entire field.
"Hehe." His grin widened and winked. "Gotcha."
He drove his fist into the ice with everything he had. The fracture ripped outward in a heartbeat, and before the Harrier could react, the floor gave way beneath it, swallowing it into the black water below with a violent, splitting crash.
Silence.
One minute passed. And then a second.
When it seemed like nothing was going to happen, he dropped flat onto his back and let out a loud sigh of relief that cracked into laughter.
For a second there, he’d thought he was going to die. "Finally," he heard himself say out loud. "...the enemy has been neutralised."
He let his eyes fall shut. "I won."
[Massive Adaptability To Any Situation Lv.0 (Muscle Memory): Deactivated]
Laying there in the sound of nothing but wind, he let his mind silently wander around but it drifted towards one particular thought that had built a fortress in his mind.
’Middle school.’
It was a punishment assembly. Half of the class were being dragged up for a string of failed tests at the end of exam week. Jisung had been one of the few exempt.
But he’d hated that more than anything, because he already knew what it meant walking out of that classroom. What he didn’t know was that today would be worse than usual.
Daniel and his gang had been waiting on his route home, same as always. But what followed on that special day never left his mind.
It started as a slow, methodical unmaking, hit after hit, mockery after mockery, torture after torture until his legs gave out. He had thought that was the end of it, as always. But they didn’t stop there.
He was dragged, half-conscious, to the pool in the PE building.
"Get in," Daniel had said, sounding almost bored by then. "And don’t come out till I say so."
Jisung looked at the pool and felt his whole life flashing before his eyes. With the little strength he had left, he begged, even promising to do Daniel’s homework for the rest of his life if only he’d just let him go, just this once.
Daniel hadn’t cared. He looked disgusted at the sound of Jisung’s pleas and kicked him into the pool mid-sentence, and that had been the end of the conversation.
Jisung remembered the water closing over his head and the strange, floating calm that came after the panic burned itself out. He remembered deciding, with a child’s blunt logic, that if he was going to die anyway, he’d at least not give Daniel the satisfaction of seeing it happen.
So he’d held his breath. Longer than he thought a person could. Long enough that by the time he dragged himself out, alone and dripping, the sun had already started going down, and Daniel had gotten bored of a game he’d never bothered sticking around to finish.
A teacher found him an hour later, blue-lipped and shaking on the pool deck. The cameras did the rest. His foster parents had him transferred within the month.
As cold air kissed his cheeks now as he lay calmly on the ice floor, he smiled, finally understanding something.
’So that’s what Muscle Memory actually is huh?’
It wasn’t just combat instinct. The power lived in the memory itself. Every pattern he’d ever noticed, every close call he’d survived, it was feeding back into him now. He believed now that even his worst memories were going to pull their weight now and help him in future to plot, adapt and survive.
He laughed under his breath. ’A person’s whole life really can flip overnight.’
"Well." He opened his eyes. "It’s been over a minute already. A message should be coming in three, two, —"
Krcck!
The sound yanked him upright.
He froze.
The fracture was spreading again. And this time, straight toward him.
"Oh, come on."
He scrambled up as fast as he could, boots sliding uselessly against the ice, but he ran anyway.
’Stupid... Karma.’ he thought as he ran.
A few meters forward and he slipped and fell down hard on his face.
"Ow!" He cried but he didn’t stop moving, even flat on the ground. "Fuckin— karma!"
He crawled, arms pinwheeling for balance, dragging himself forward however he could. It still wasn’t enough.
The crack outran him, and for one suspended second he actually thought he might make it, right before the ice ahead of him exploded and the ground vanished out from under him entirely.
He was falling. "I hate karrrmaaa!"
Splash!
The water swallowed him whole.
The cold was immediate. He felt as if he was going to freeze to death. As quickly as he could, he spun in the dark water, completely disoriented, eyes open and seeing nothing but black beneath him and the fractured ceiling of ice somewhere above him.
He kicked as hard as he could, found a direction and swam toward the ceiling of ice up above him with everything he had. His head broke the surface and he gasped so hard.
"Oh my g-god! C-C-Cold!"
He floated there, arms moving just enough to keep him up. His chest heaving and the cold gnawing into every part of him. The broken ice which he fell through was a meter away. Beyond it, the surface looked solid but he had no idea how to reach it without putting his weight straight through it again. His boots were already dragging at his ankles and his soaked jacket doubling in weight with every second he stayed in.
’Okay.’ He blinked water out of his eyes, floating there in silence as cold air brushed past his ears.
’What do I do now?’
It was about time and yet no message had come and that was the part nagging at him now that the adrenaline had room to loosen its grip.
He’d beaten the creature hadn’t he? So he couldn’t understand.
Ding!
[Yu Jisung Celebrates Too Early]
"What?"
He wanted to say something when something crawled up his legs and closed around his ankle and yanked.
The surface vanished above him instantly and the sky of ice swapped for churning black waters. He twisted and kicked, fighting with everything he had, but the grip only tightened, dragging him down and sideways at once, spinning him until pressure built behind his ears in a way that made his skull feel ready to crack open from the inside.
He screamed. Bubbles tore free before he clamped his mouth shut, too late to stop the cold water from flooding his nose instead.
Panic ran through his body as he began to lose air. He clenched his jaw as he forced the panic down. There wasn’t enough time to get rid of it, only to ignore it.
Using his free leg, he aimed at whatever had him. He kicked. Once. Twice. And the grip loosened.
He kicked again, harder, driving his heel in with everything his body had left to give, and the grip broke entirely. He was tumbling free in the dark with no sense of up, no sense of anything except the growing fire in his lungs.
He picked a direction and swam. The closer he got to the ice ceiling, the more fire lit up in his lungs.
’Almost there.’
Finally he got it to and he stretched out his hands. They hit ice.
’Damnit.’ It was the wrong section.
His lungs were screaming now and his vision was starting to blur at the edges the way it had at the bottom of a pool a decade ago.
He moved along the underside of the ice, palms flat, searching for any seam of light, any sign of the hole he’d come through.
His chest convulsed once, a warning his body was done negotiating.
’Almost.’
He balled his fist and punched the ceiling above him. It cracked. He hit it again, a bigger crack this time and once more with everything that remained, and the ice gave way all at once, his fist punching clean through into open air. He grabbed the broken edge and hauled, pulled, dragged himself up until his head broke the surface and he was breathing again, in enormous, ragged, undignified gasps.
"Oh my god." He wheezed, both arms locked around the edge of the ice like it might try to leave him. "Oh my god. That was a close one."
He hung there catching his breath for close to a minute when he felt something moving in the water around him.
He flinched, wondering what it could be. As he stared down, into the water, he immediately wished he hadn’t done that.
The Split-Fang Harrier was still recognizably the same creature. But it had grown about five times bigger, maybe even more, filling the water around him. It moved in a slow circle around him, and in the water it was horrifyingly graceful. Its whole body undulating like a ribbon caught in current, generating speed without any visible effort.
Jisung hung on the edge of the ice and watched it circle.
"How do I fight that thing."
He thought quietly to himself. He took a breath and dove back into the water to get a closer look when a message rang out.
Ding!
[AWAKENING TRIAL - SUB #2]
[PARTICIPANT 34 YU JISUNG
MISSION: Defeat a B-Class Split-Fang Harrier in one-on-one combat before the time limit ends.
TIME LIMIT: 1 Hour 10 Minutes
DIFFICULTY: A
PENALTY: Death
REWARD: 20,000 Coins]
[TIME REMAINING: 00:36:06]
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Author’s Note: If you’re enjoying the novel, don’t forget to add it to your library and show some support. It really helps!
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