I shot up to my feet.

My head spun, but I did not collapse. Covering the dangling communicator at my ear with my palm, I stared blankly ahead.

Where am I right now? How did I end up in this situation?

The last thing I remembered was falling together with a creature.

And then...

Right. I hit the surface of the water.

Below the canyon a wide river had stretched out. My last memory was of violently colliding with it. I must have lost my memory from hitting the surface wrong.

I sat there blankly, slowly lowering my gaze to my body.

A combat uniform soaked in water. A sharp, nose-stinging smell of blood. But it did not seem to be my blood.

It must be the blood the creature I stabbed with my sword had spurted out. I could still feel that I had stabbed its body precisely.

With both hands vividly...

Huh?

My sword.

My sword. Where is my sword.

I groped my body frantically. The sword I had driven into the creature’s body.

Why is it gone?

[Hilde!]

While I was fumbling around in a daze, a sharp voice pierced my ear.

[Get a grip!]

“Yes?”

My reason returned.

My senses opened. Sight and hearing poured in at once. A scene I felt I had never seen in my life engraved itself on my eyes.

The surroundings were quiet. The river flowing right beside me. A bleak clearing spread beyond the river.

Although the sun seemed not to have gone down yet, the area was dark. The trees were not very dense, there were hardly any traces of a city, and what little remained was covered by faded grass.

And a long corpse lying in the ash-colored clearing.

It was the creature that had climbed up the canyon.

I straightened my back.

“Aide-de-Camp.”

[Report your situation.]

There was an unmistakable tension mixed into Ska’s voice.

[Stay completely alert.]

This man had always been composed. I used to think he was the most composed person I had met among the Badgers. If Yun was listless and Yehyeon had veteran’s gravitas, then Ska had composure.

But not now.

I pressed the communicator, barely hanging on my ear, firmly with my palm.

“I think I lost consciousness after hitting the river. I’m now on a plain below the canyon, and the creature that fell with me is dead across the river.”

[Any other creatures?]

“I do not see any...”

I swept my gaze around.

But there was no sign of anything—no hint of movement, not even the chirp of insects. It was a place so quiet it grated on my nerves.

And why is it so dark? The grass too had faded into gray, and the few trees had no life or color.

Rails overgrown with plants, and an old train lying beside the tracks—only those showed that humans had once lived here.

Keeping my nerves taut, I answered slowly.

“There is nothing around.”

[Hilde.]

Ska’s voice coming back was heavy.

[Under your feet.]

Under my feet?

“Under my feet?”

[Nothing under your feet?]

I lowered my eyes.

What could there be under my feet...?

And then I realized why the surroundings were so dark.

I also realized why Ska’s voice was so full of tension. Stiff, I looked down at the ground under my body. Confronting something I had never expected, I momentarily forgot how to speak.

A place where, with no humans dwelling there, nature had seized the initiative.

The ground was covered with black mold.

“No, is it a fungus?”

[A fungus is mold.]

Ska gently corrected my mutter.

I reflexively marveled at how gentle his correction was. His voice showed none of the contempt for another’s ignorance. If it had been Yun, his tone would have carried the thought, “It’s hard talking to someone dumber than a chimpanzee.”

Though that was not what mattered now.

[More precisely, it’s not so much a fungus as a mycelial body. A creature’s mycelial body.]

Ska spoke.

[The fruiting body of that creature that covered A Zone is about to rise up through the ground to consume the dead creature and you. Do you see it moving?]

“Yes.”

The giant black mold was stealthily extending its body.

I slowly rose to my feet, my gaze fixed on the ground. I could see the black mold, like a net, approaching densely under my feet.

This is insane.

Its appearance covering the vast ground was grotesque, but is it really that threatening?

As I was quietly lifting my right foot off the ground, the aide’s explanation continued.

[The main body is deep underground and won’t die even if you cut off the fruiting bodies. The mycelial body is monstrously large. The moment the fruiting body shoots up above ground, run. We still haven’t found a way to kill it.]

Are you serious?

[The creature that was dragging off your unconscious body probably drifted here and got eaten by that thing.]

I lifted my head.

My gaze shifted to the corpse across the river. Only after looking again did I realize it was covered in black mold.

Damn it. Ska was right.

Besides, a locator was implanted beneath my finger. Headquarters had implanted it to protect me from the unknown figure “Jaeyeon.” They could have confirmed my location with it. They might not have been able to tell the seniors dispatched outside the Core, but they would have checked my position as soon as they got the report.

The signal must have flowed down with the river and stopped somewhere around here.

[It must have left you alone because it was digesting that creature.]

No sooner had he finished speaking than the ground under my feet began to writhe.

I stared, aghast, at the shrinking creature corpse.

“The ground under my feet is moving.”

[It’ll shoot up in thirty seconds.]

Ska advised flatly.

[Run like you’re going to die. If you’ve got any last words, say them now.]

“Yes. Like I’m going to die... Yes? Last words?”

[Headquarters doesn’t issue detailed orders to Badgers who go outside the Core unless it’s a territorial reclamation war.]

Now the net under my feet was packed with no gaps.

As I tensed my calves, Ska’s heavy voice struck ◆ Nоvеlіgһt ◆ (Only on Nоvеlіgһt) my ear.

[Except when a Badger’s life is hanging by a thread.]

Sluuurp!

Sluuurp! Shluk! The fruiting bodies shot up. My vision filled in an instant with tentacle-like things. Black stalks sprouted from the ground.

I bolted in terror.

The mold spearing through my legs, trying to cover my body.

What the hell is this!

I did not want to die to mold. Least of all to mold creeping over the ground like nerves.

“Uwaaaah!”

I ran.

I ran like mad. I nearly tripped. A fruiting body erupting from the ground had hit my heel.

No good. I’ll have to head for the river.

Feeling the ground rise wherever my foot landed, I ran desperately.

If I could just reach the flowing water, it would be safe...

[Don’t go to the river!]

At the sharp warning I barely stopped at the river’s edge.

[Jumping into the water will only slow you down! You think that thing isn’t under the river?!]

Shaaah!

A black fruiting body pierced the water’s surface.

Water spraying everywhere, the mold bulging behind me as I twisted my body to dash off. Shit! Is this really mold? Gritting my teeth, I ran wherever my feet landed. Even if you cut it, it survives, it moves at terrifying speed, its main body is underground, and it’s monstrously huge.

How did such a grotesque life-form appear?

How did something like this take root on Earth? There was no one to answer the questions bursting out. I had no energy to think. I just ran mindlessly wherever my feet struck. I knew if I misstepped even once or fell, those tentacles would pierce my body, cover me, and digest me.

It didn’t seem to resent me in particular.

It simply tried to devour everything living indiscriminately. Ska barked in my ear to hold on until I got out of the ground it covered. He said it didn’t matter which way I ran.

A small mercy. I had no time to think about direction. If I had lingered even one second longer on the ground, my insteps would have been pierced.

I plunged into the runner’s high of running.

An ecstasy where only the sound of wind came. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

But it wouldn’t last long. My breath was already up to my throat.

My legs were turning to stone. More than once, when I slowed a bit, my foot had nearly been pierced.

Just how far does this thing stretch. Tears welled up from the wind—tears from the wind, or tears from sensing a futile death was chasing me, I didn’t know.

Ska shouted something but I couldn’t hear.

Wow.

This is really the limit...

“Hey!”

A sharp shout yanked me out of runner’s high.

I opened my eyes wide.

The owner of the voice was sticking his head out of a subway entrance several meters away.

“Run this way!”

Into the subway?

Angela had told me never to go down into the subway.

But this was no time to say that. I had to do something to escape from the creature covering the ground.

Besides, that subway entrance building was covered in black mold, but inside the entrance looked clean.

I had no other option anyway.

First, survive!

I dashed toward the human sticking his head out.

“Hurry inside!”

He grabbed my arm as I reached the subway entrance.

“Before those things get in!”

The man threw me down the stairs and thrust a device forward.

The device generated a strange barrier. My legs gave out as I stared, aghast, at the black fruiting bodies plastering themselves against the transparent barrier.

Fortunately, it ended quickly. The mold blocked by the translucent shield. The solid cement floor. The man who had blocked the subway entrance lifted me, unable to move, carried me down the stairs, raised the iron door, and stepped into the subway.

Then he lowered the iron door again, shutting out the sunlight above.

A gray space unfolded before my eyes.

Once again, I had survived.

***

The communicator didn’t work.

They had said the communicator normally didn’t work well inside subways. As static suddenly mixed into the communicator, I frowned, and the other person approached me. He plucked the communicator out of my ear where I sat slumped.

“Give it here.”

Speaking offhandedly, the man who took the communicator from me looked it over this way and that and clicked his tongue.

He shoved the communicator into his own pocket.

“Completely dead.”

Then, looking at me still gasping for breath, he crooked his finger.

“If you’ve caught your breath, follow me. You can’t sit here forever.”

The man did not remove his black mask while speaking.

“You’re not planning to sprawl out and sleep here, are you?”

And so ten minutes after I started following the unknown man.

An empty subway. Footsteps echoing in the eerie space. Trudging, I stared at the back of the man ahead.

A strangely powered subway corridor with electricity still on. The man walking beside a stopped escalator. Since we started walking, he had not spoken and had not turned his head to look at me.

He had not asked my name.

Nor given his own.

“Um.”

My low voice echoed off the empty subway walls.

“Who are you?”

“Your sky-like senior.”

The man answered without turning back.

Clean, orderly footsteps. I trudged after him, my voice weary.

“Are you human?”

“Can’t you tell by looking?”

“A Badger?”

“That’s right.”

“But you can’t be a formal Badger.”

At my mutter, the man walking ahead stopped.

I also stopped following him. And I took in the unmoving man, his back turned.

A gray space. A place so clean it was hard to believe it was outside the Core.

Standing in a place like a city subway at two a.m., I looked at the unmoving human.

“If you were a formal Badger, Aide-de-Camp Ska would surely have told me someone was coming to rescue me...”

“Looks like they didn’t know I was here.”

“You don’t have a communicator either...”

“I told you, communication doesn’t work well here.”

“My communicator broke?”

“You were the one who said there was noise mixed in, weren’t you?”

“That thing on your waist.”

The man’s body twitched slightly.

“That’s my sword, isn’t it?”

“...Yeah. I kept it for you.”

“The one on your left is a communication-jamming device.”

He slowly turned his head.

I didn’t move. I didn’t yet have the strength to move, and I didn’t see the point. So, exhausted, I only watched him.

The man slowly turned his body. I gazed quietly at his sharp eyes.

He had green eyes. Far clearer than Ricardo’s.

Truly human eyes.

“I’ve seen you in Yun’s laboratory.”

“Ah. That bastard’s still alive?”

The man asked back casually, then gave a faint laugh.

He slowly tugged off his mask. As the mask came off, his features gradually emerged.

Hair long enough to flop down over his shoulders. A beard clearly left unshaved for a long time.

A face typical of those cut off from civilization for a long time.

The man tossed the mask to the floor.

“When that rookie Ska gave an order, I figured maybe Yehyeon had died. Looks like everyone’s still alive? No. Who knows. If Yun died, Yehyeon might have died too. But just because Yehyeon died doesn’t mean Yun would die.”

“A deserter?”

I whispered in a tired voice.

“You ran away outside the Core?”

Like I had fled from Jaeyeon.

Outside the Core. Outside civilization. Outside the organization. Fleeing everything that bound you.

A place crawling with creatures, but where there might be freedom—maybe only freedom.

“You’ve been living alone outside the Core, a missing person? I didn’t think there was such a Badger.”

“Smart junior.”

He quietly stepped up and pressed a knife to my neck.

“Follow me quietly.”