[Translator – Aren]
Without thinking, I pulled out my phone to check the time.
It was 12:36 AM.
I turned my gaze back toward the road illuminated by the streetlights. Fog was beginning to spread low across the asphalt like dry ice.
At some point, I must’ve started staring too hard without realizing it because they felt strained.
Meanwhile, Han Myungwoon, the smooth-faced, easygoing squad member sharing watch duty with me, remained completely focused on the kissing couple.
Apparently deciding the sight was the most entertaining thing to happen during this tedious night watch, he’d even put away his phone so he could watch properly.
However, before long, both Han Myungwoon, who’d initially treated it as harmless entertainment, and I, who’d only been staring at the fog, gradually found our expressions hardening.
"Mmmgh…Ngh…Hm…”
Something about the man and woman was off. What initially looked like an intense make-out session between a middle-aged office worker and a fit young woman had started becoming disturbingly unnatural.-Thud! Thud!
The middle-aged man was pounding on the woman’s back.
He wasn’t embracing her. Anyone could tell from the force behind it that he was practically punching hard enough to leave bruises. His footing even started slipping backward.
Meanwhile, the woman clung tightly around the man’s head and refused to let go.
As the middle-aged man staggered backward and nearly lost balance, she supported him against the wall before seemingly kissing him even more intensely.
And with every passing moment, the man started to react more and more violently.
At some point he’d started digging his fingernails into the back of the woman’s neck, clawing and tearing at her flesh hard enough to draw blood.
Even from where I stood, I could see blood running down where the nails had gouged into her skin.
"Hnngh...Mmph..."
Han Myungwoon’s face stiffened into a rigid mask. Gripping his rifle tighter, he immediately started walking toward them.
Apparently this guy possessed a far stronger sense of justice than his relaxed appearance suggested.
The moment he moved, the guideline we’d received back in the auditorium flashed through my mind. That was no coincidence.
I called out to stop him.
"Han Myungwoon-ssi. The fog’s here.”
"Huh?"
"Survival and Engagement Guidelines Within Restricted Zones. Rule 6. Rescue operations are prohibited.”
Han Myungwoon blinked several times at my words. Then he looked back at me with outright disgust, like he was staring at garbage.
-Tsk.
Clicking his tongue loudly enough for me to hear, Han Myungwoon adjusted his helmet and continued toward the couple.
"What a pathetic bastard..."
His muttering was loud enough to be obviously intentional.
Objectively speaking, Han Myungwoon was the one in the right here. Unlike me, who was standing frozen behind sandbags and vehicle barriers, he looked like some heroic knight rushing off to save an injured woman.
His tall build and natural charisma only amplified the image.
At the very least, he wasn’t shameless enough to hide behind the excuse that there was fog and justify himself by quoting Rule 6 like I was.
And yet, even while feeling like a coward, I had absolutely no intention of following him.
Because beneath the streetlights, the fog covering the road looked like it was steadily rising higher with every passing second.
If you’ve ever listened blankly to a scary story only to suddenly realize afterward which part was actually terrifying, sending chills crawling down your spine, then you’d understand exactly how I felt.
At first, you could dismiss it as ordinary fog drifting in during the early morning hours. But once even the streetlights started blurring and smearing beneath the thick, damp haze, a cold stream of sweat ran down my back.
And in that instant, Lieutenant Shin Hangi’s words resurfaced in my mind.
[These symbols were discovered inside the restricted zone.]
I pulled out the Magic Crash Course booklet from my pocket.
Only after seeing the hand gripping it did I realize my fingers were trembling violently.
And only after noting the trembling did I realize I was experiencing chills worse than any from any stomach flu I’d ever suffered through.
In a panic, I opened the page containing the bizarre symbol I’d nicknamed squangle.
The symbol fixed firmly against the page beneath my deathly pale fingernails. The countless interpretations densely packed beside it.
The realization that had nearly come to me earlier while isolated in the storage room was returning once again.
It was instinct.
Like our ancient ancestors staring into the eyes of a tiger shifting beneath the darkness of a moonless night.
Beyond the rising fog, beneath the wrapped glow of the streetlights, I could see the strange symbol, the bizarre mark, slowly returning to its original form.
You could call it an optical illusion.
The natural explanation would be that my brain was generating hallucinations under psychological stress.
And yet, as the fog gradually rose high enough to reach my left hand gripping the booklet, as it swallowed the page itself, my eyes saw the symbol I’d assumed was merely overlapping triangles and squares begin to squirm and align like something alive.
"..."
-Gulp.
Even swallowing saliva felt difficult.
Should I trust proven science? Or trust my uncertain instincts?
Should I convince myself my eyes were deceiving me? Or should I understand what the moving symbol truly meant?
For the first time, I understood a bit how our ancestors must have felt when they looked into a tiger’s eyes. There was only one thought occupying my mind. I was going to be eaten.
From this point onward, common sense would collapse. Every prejudice and assumption I’d built throughout my life would twist and melt apart like stretched taffy.
Anything beyond this point was curiosity toward the unknown. Recklessness that invited death. Madness that placed me into great danger.
Then suddenly, I noticed sweat dripping from my hands onto the page.
Only then could I finally see what the fully aligned symbol truly was.
The overlapping triangle and square. A distorted square forcibly crammed inside a long, stretched triangle.
This wasn’t a letter.
It was an eye.
An eye forcing humans, creatures meant to see only three dimensions, to perceive something beyond them…
......Magic.
"Bleeeeaargh…”
The moment realization struck me, I vomited instantly.
My legs gave out beneath me. My entire body collapsed forward onto the stacked sandbags.
Even throwing up felt exhausting enough to leave me gasping for breath. I hadn’t eaten anything while confined in the storage room, yet thick clumps of something still spilled out alongside stomach acid before splattering into the fog that now completely blanketed the road.
But my eyes… My eyes, which had now awakened to magic, burned as if they were on fire.
The veins in my forehead and scalp bulged violently. Every pulse pounded against my skull like boiling blood cooking my brain alive. The nausea became unbearable. Eventually, even after vomiting up everything inside me, I kept dry-heaving until nothing but choking gasps remained.
And yet, in stark contrast to my burning head and scorching eyes, an icy chill seeped down my spine.
The violent shivering spreading through my entire body forced me back onto my feet.
Without even wiping the vomit from my mouth, I instinctively loaded live ammunition into my rifle.
-Click, clack.
The fog had already risen to chest level. Beyond it, it had grown so thick that one could barely make anything out at all.
Every time the crosswalk signal blinked weakly through the haze, damp shadows writhed beneath the smeared light.
The man and woman standing near the alleyway entrance had become three people now.
At some point, Han Myungwoon’s back had replaced the limp middle-aged man, thrashing desperately in his place.
Actually, ‘thrashing’ sounded a bit too gentle to describe his actions.
Han Myungwoon looked like someone being strangled to death. Like a man hanging from a noose while kicking desperately for the ground.
I raised the M16 to my shoulder and aimed.
The barrel trembled greatly. I hadn’t even properly zeroed the sights, and the target barely aligned inside the iron sights at all, but I kept aiming anyway.
I didn’t dare to even breathe.
Then, within the grotesque cluster of three, Han Myungwoon finally succeeded in resisting.
-Riiiiip!
Have you ever played with clay as a child? Or chewed gum until the flavor disappeared, spit it out, mixed it with another piece, and chewed them together again?
Once things mixed together, separating them became nearly impossible. After tangling together, they effectively became one entity.
So even after Han Myungwoon barely managed to pull his face free, chunks of his melted cheek still remained fused to the back of the woman’s head.
Flesh and flesh had become one. Even from a distance, I could see blue veins beneath the skin intertwining like tangled threads.
And the most horrifying change of all, the middle-aged man’s face was melting and merging into Han Myungwoon’s.
"Uwaah…Uwah…”
Han Myungwoon’s mouth was no exception.
He desperately tried turning his head away, but his lips had long since fused together with the middle-aged man’s splitting mouth.
THe older man's face melted apart and mixed directly into Han Myungwoon’s.
Han Myungwoon’s left eye had already merged with the older man's right eye socket. Their eye sockets had become one. Their eyeballs overlapped together into a twisted compound eye.
Only Han Myungwoon’s remaining right eye still looked toward me. Tears poured from it uncontrollably.
Fear, pleading, and sheer desperation filled that eye.
Twisting the part of his tongue that hadn’t completely merged yet, Han Myungwoon desperately screamed.
"Dooon coooome…un awaaaay!!”
I never moved. I simply kept aiming my rifle while watching the horrors my eyes were showing me.
Even through the thick fog, I could clearly make out the silhouette of the three melted people.
One head connected the three bodies.
"Uwaaaaaaaargh!!!!”
Han Myungwoon’s face was already completely gone.
No, the three who had become one now tangled their faces together like some grotesque conjoined abomination, crushing their three mouths into a single fused mass.
Han Myungwoon’s desperately protruding tongue was forcibly wrapped together with the others’ tongue before melting into one.
"Aaagh…Agh…”
Even his vocal cords no longer belonged to him.
At this point, the only thing left of Han Myungwoon was his right eye. Tears streamed endlessly from it, yet instinctively, I knew even those tears no longer belonged to Han Myungwoon either.
The rasping sound clawing out from his throat wasn’t even a scream anymore. That pitiful groan was all that remained of him.
Then the fused head of the three, now fused into one, turned toward me.
Its limbs dangled loosely, swaying limply, yet somehow the thing still maintained an unnatural, upright gait as it stood there.
At last, I understood why a single symbol could produce completely different interpretations depending on the viewer.
It was a force that made humans perceive things they were never meant to see.
I was seeing time. Specifically, I was seeing the future of how the monster would move.
The points where the thick fog covering the road trembled became the future itself. The monster’s approaching footsteps.
As I moved the rifle barrel along those invisible footsteps, the creature simply watched me silently.
Then it moved again.
This time, Han Myungwoon’s arm twitched.
It was a feint. The woman’s leg would move instead. The middle-aged man’s limbs remained wedged between them like structural supports holding the entire thing together.
The moment I shifted my rifle toward the woman’s side, the three-bodied creature stopped provoking me.
Instead, it simply stood there silently beyond the fog, staring back at me.
Cold sweat poured down my body.
With my eyes burning and my brain feeling like it was being boiled alive, I couldn’t even begin imagining how long I could endure this.
And yet, even with eyes that felt ready to burst, even with sweat soaking my trembling hands, I never lowered the rifle.
I couldn’t even tell whether I was still breathing.
I didn’t know whether the dampness covering me came from the fog or my own sweat.
Then finally, after a long standoff, the three-bodied creature slowly overlapped its faces together until only the backs of their heads remained visible before dragging its limbs away into the fog.
There were no more screams. No more groans.
Even so, I continued aiming my rifle at the road for minutes, perhaps tens of minutes, without moving a single inch.
Then eventually, the fog began to recede.
By the time the blinking crosswalk signal became visible clearly again, I was the only one left standing at the intersection.
Even then, my body remained stiff as stone while I continued aiming across the road.
At least until someone placed a hand on my shoulder.
"Baek Jemin-ssi, Baek Jemin-ssi!”
"..."
It was Kang Daniel.
Behind him, squad members climbed down from a truck carrying searchlights.
Kang Daniel looked around before studying my expression, seemingly sensing the bizarre atmosphere surrounding the scene.
"Where’s the other guard?”
"Where did Han Myungwoon go?”
I tried to answer, but my lips wouldn’t move.
No. my entire body had locked up completely, still frozen in the exact firing stance I’d held before.
Meanwhile, residents from nearby villas slowly opened their doors and peeked outside after hearing the commotion.
But only one thought remained in my mind.
I had to escape Seoul.
No, I needed to leave this country entirely.