In the extreme stress environment called the battlefield, everyone walks away with a trauma or two as if they were souvenirs.

In my case, the trauma manifested as drowsiness.

I consider that a pretty fatal manifestation.

Having your eyelids droop when death is about to happen isn’t much different from nodding off at over 120 km/h on a rainy highway.

Routine training, combat instincts, and luck kept me from sharing the same fate as my classmates.

If even I—once at the very top of the Hunter system—was dealing with a mental issue like that, you can imagine everyone else.

Trauma management was one of the key agenda items the leadership at the National Ability Agency took seriously and sought a solution for.

Various methods were proposed and discarded, but what we ultimately adopted was the so-called indirect management method.

In other words, instead of actively stepping in to “care” for someone else’s mental problem, we aimed to detect it in advance and avoid it as much as possible.

We had no choice.

Sending a trusted, invaluable Hunter teammate to the rear because of a mental issue that Jang Ki-young despised could shatter the entire team.

And given the nature of such mental illnesses, there was no guarantee they’d be cured just because you shipped them to the rear.

Chinese Hunters—who used the same name for “Hunter system” as we did but lived and died in conditions incomparable to ours, forced to sacrifice—depended on drugs they loathed and shuddered at. Our higher-ups seriously considered introducing those drugs.

If Jang Ki-young hadn’t opposed it, we might have ended up adopting the psychoactive substance the Chinese called “practice-pill” (練丹).

One of the few positive achievements my old mentor left behind.

At least until I retired, our response to a Hunter team’s mental issues was for the team leader to identify each member’s psychological risk factors and manage them by avoidance.

That included interviews, battlefield observation, and testimony from colleagues—but note this: we did not record every mental medical history in the official records.

We are people who fight with only a sheet of paper between us and death, in disciplines represented by things like Intimidating and Skelping.

The forms of mental pathology ranged from those that could ruin a person’s honor to those that manifested as war crimes.

I still remember one teammate—now dead on the battlefield—who normally carried out his duties faithfully but, when pushed beyond his limit, killed civilians.

There were two conditions.

If there were civilians along our route of travel, and if no teammates were around to witness him, he would—at high probability—kill with a suppressor-equipped gun.

A suppressor on a rifle doesn’t make it silent.

Every time we heard that unnatural “thup-thup” of air being shoved aside, we took it in stride, thinking, There he goes—another pointless massacre.

He died when a round glanced off a reflection field while he was looking at civilians during Intimidating fire and blew his head apart. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

It happened a week before our traditional “safety gear” for Hunters—reinforced helmets and low-powered ammunition, an application of the low-charge propellant from the so-called “dumb tank”—was issued.

Anyway, I saw more than enough of those kinds of people to have them stick in my mind, and I zipped more than a few of them into body bags to send back home.

My classmate and trustworthy teammate, Gong Gyeong-min, has trauma too.

His is young women.

On the battlefield, he accidentally killed a young woman.

You might wonder what the big deal is about killing a single person, but a trauma that stains the heart like a ground-in blot can make that one not-so-big, individual incident into something very special.

“It must’ve been my fourth mission. A Chinese officer told us hostile civilians were lying in small ambushes in the area and to be on guard. I was on assault that day. I carried a 32-gauge shotgun. You know it, right? At close range, if you hose a person down, it turns them into pancake batter. I was in awful condition that day. Chinese food really didn’t sit right with me, especially that day. Even so, I forced myself up a Korean-style apartment and checked the rooms one by one, and that’s when a woman in white suddenly screamed from my blind corner.”

He carried a fear of young women with long hair, dressed in white.

Being the strong type, he overcame the trauma on his own, but sometimes, if he inadvertently ran into a woman with a similar look on the battlefield, I’d see him flinch.

Whether he can overcome that trauma now is doubtful.

I stood on the roof of the vehicle, looking down over a city sunk in thick fog.

“Nice ride. I’ve seen it in movies. Where’d you even get something like that?”

A group of armed humans emerged from the ruins like ghosts.

Yeom Dda-wan and his friends.

I’d briefed them beforehand.

If you ask me whether Yeom Dda-wan is as trustworthy as Cheon Young-jae or Kim Daram, I’d say no, but we have to use everything we can use.

He, already showing impatience, perked up at the name Gong Gyeong-min.

The reason he even showed himself to us is because he was moved by my saying I was going to bring Gong Gyeong-min in.

“Now it’s foggy about six days a week. It’s practically Jeju level. Weird, right? There’s not even a Rift here.”

He and his group were lingering right at the boundary where the fog encircling Seoul and the metro area didn’t reach.

Aside from survival, most of what he does is watch the Tower where his friend is, and thanks to that he has a lot of information about phenomena occurring around Seoul lately.

“You can spot Extinction-types anywhere. If you’ve got a vehicle, they’re not that threatening, but if you’re short on weapons and moving on foot, you’re gambling your life. Personally, I still see them as less dangerous than zombies. The problem is: Extinction-types aren’t the only things in this fog.”

By now, the whole Seoul area had been completely eroded into ash-gray.

Which means monsters now roam the ground of Seoul with no restrictions.

“Over there. You see it?”

“Yeah. Clear as day.”

Moving at a moderate pace over about 10 km, we spotted at least three combat-type mediums.

They moved slowly across the ash-gray city with purposes we couldn’t fathom.

Because we saw them first from relatively long range, there was no chance of getting attacked.

As horrible as a place marred by Erosion this is, the perceived difficulty actually felt easier and safer than the past.

Because there aren’t many humans left in Seoul hiding in the ruins with guns, aiming at us.

Even if there were some friends trying an ambush, the fog conceals us, and Yeom Dda-wan’s sensor-type friend can detect them preemptively—or almost simultaneously.

Even with fog and Erosion, unless infiltrator-type monsters build a nest that blocks the road, the roads are still the roads.

Plenty of satellites are dead, but enough commercial satellites are still functioning to give us GPS-based navigation, and with that we made our way through the fog-shrouded city without much trouble.

We arrived at Gong Gyeong-min’s hideout.

In the distance, the old school building lifted a bleak silhouette above the milky fog.

“Are we going there? Where Chairman Gong Gyeong-min used to be?”

“Yeah. He’s there.”

“I hope he can help.”

Yeom Dda-wan and his crew started making ready to leave.

“Call me anytime you’re ready. Even now, inside the Tower, my old colleagues are asking for help.”

Given he pestered me every time I saw him, that was understandable, but on the other hand, it sparked suspicion.

So I asked, once.

“You can get into the Tower, right?”

Yeom Dda-wan nodded.

“Anytime.”

He hesitated for a moment.

That hesitation is probably Yeom Dda-wan’s real heart.

He’s not going to be able to play a proper role inside the Tower.

I was thinking that and was about to head into Gong Gyeong-min’s hideout when—

“Hey. Dda-wan.”

One of his buddies called out to him.

“What?”

“Over there. Look at that. That thing.”

“What thing?”

“That bastard. The one with the eyeball.”

Hearing that, Yeom Dda-wan seemed to remember something, and came over to me grinning ear to ear.

“Hunter Park.”

“?”

“Have you heard about the new strain that’s been showing up lately?”

There’s no way to know how many new strains are roaming the Earth right now.

It’s probably another new model to wipe out humanity, born of either the Rift or Kang Han-min.

That complacent thought vanished like a lie the moment I saw the monster reflected in the surveillance device Yeom Dda-wan’s buddy held out.

“......”

An ash-gray monster, simian enough to make you think “ape,” had its four arms fixed to the top of a building like a harness and was peering down at the ground beneath.

Judging by volume estimation, its class was between a medium and a small.

Probably closer to a medium.

But I didn’t see the hard points often observed in mediums, those distinctive external attack implements.

It just had four arms, short legs, a blunt trunk, and a spindle-shaped head whose underside faced forward.

If it ended there, I would’ve written it off as just another new strain and moved on.

But Yeom Dda-wan’s friend had said something.

He distinctly called it the one with the eyeball.

The instant I took in that enormous eye, it felt like all the blood in my body froze.

It’s looking at me.

No—more precisely, hanging way up there, it’s staring at us.

Clack—

When I reflexively adjusted my firearm, Yeom Dda-wan laughed and said,

“Don’t worry, Hunter Park.”

“?”

“That bastard. You see them a lot these days, and they don’t do anything.”

“They don’t do anything?”

A Hunter friend of his had taken down one of the same kind.

It had basic defensive measures like a reflection field, but otherwise it didn’t counterattack or act aggressively at all.

None of the lethal attacks using hard points you commonly see in combat types.

“Right. No attacks, no movement. It just hangs up somewhere high and watches people. That’s it.”

It was 2.5 km away.

Even with the thick fog, the spot it was perched on was an isolated high-rise, so its silhouette stood out better; and at high altitude the wind thins the fog, which made it easier to make out than other things.

So we could observe it in a bit more detail, but despite the clarity, it was impossible to determine its nature or its reason to exist.

“What do you think that monster is, Hunter? Does it have some special gimmick like the caterpillar–meatball type you were the first to defeat?”

Yeom Dda-wan asked, interested.

Fair enough.

Since my retirement, nobody’s emerged who could match me in first monster analysis, discovery, and the classification that followed.

But that monster—I don’t know.

I can’t find a reason for it to exist.

“That big black hole. Is there any chance we can consider it an eyeball?”

I tossed the question back.

By form, it’s something like an eye.

The spindle head, with most of its broad underside taken up by a large, pitch-black hole, fits the shape we instinctively consider an eyeball.

But I’m certain that mere black emptiness isn’t like a human or animal eye.

“It’s probably an eyeball.”

A man whose name I didn’t know, sleeves rolled to show his forearm muscles, answered.

“I once tried circling to the side, and its head slid along—like it was tracking me with its gaze.”

Whatever it is, we can’t tell.

If time allowed, I’d set up camp and watch, but this is an Erosion zone.

Fatigue was written all over Mark Two’s face.

Even a kid who loves outings this much can’t endure that peculiar Erosion-zone aura that drains human vigor.

After Yeom Dda-wan’s group disappeared, we went into the school.

Inside the chilled building, the silence was deathly.

Following my memory, I reached the entrance to the bunker Gong Gyeong-min had set up underground.

A 5-meter-tall, massive protective door—the kind you’d expect on a VIP-grade bunker—blocked the way.

I checked the «N.o.v.e.l.i.g.h.t» area around the entrance.

There was a comms unit.

I tried patching in.

Beep— beep— beep—

No answer.

I tried several times, but nothing.

This time I tried the radio.

Beep— beep— beep—

Same story.

Nothing.

“......”

It’s possible he was ignoring me.

He already said with his own mouth that he’d cut ties with me.

We fought side by side once after that, but our relationship didn’t recover—in fact, it got worse.

Even so, I don’t think he’s ignoring me.

I know him.

Sitting in that terrible darkness with that washed-out woman the Rift spawned—those would be unbearable hours for him.

He might even have been waiting for someone like me to come.

Gong Gyeong-min hadn’t noticed us.

That’s what I want to believe.

The problem is, unless he opens the door, there’s no way to get inside.

“Seems like he’s not opening up, huh?”

“Can you open it with your ability?”

“If it were the Director, maybe. Me? No.”

“Right.”

I asked Mark Two on the off chance, but it was too much.

After a brief rest, I took a look around.

We’d come all this way; no way I was turning back now.

I wanted to scout the perimeter.

I knew this bunker hadn’t been fully completed as a formal construction—it was halted mid-build, and then Gong Gyeong-min took it over and maintained it.

And I knew he’d gone a step further: to power the high-performance compute units he used for his pastime, he packed a large amount of generation equipment in here.

Such generation equipment inevitably produces a lot of heat, and you need matching cooling systems to dissipate it.

Every time I visited Gong Gyeong-min’s school, the interior was ice-cold—that’s because those cooling systems usually run.

But generation and cooling equipment like that necessarily demand large spaces.

Just as my generator takes up more room than a decent-sized bunker and needs a ventilation system laced like a spiderweb, his bunker would need the same auxiliary facilities.

Which means: even with that iron wall of a bunker, there might be unexpected gaps.

“Woof!”

Once destined for slaughter but spared after earning back some trust—thus avoiding butchering for a while—John_nenon the Third returned my trust.

He found a vent.

On a concrete wall finished in a different material than the heavy entrance, I found an opening where faint steam was leaking out.

It was large enough for a grown man to crawl through with room to spare.

Except—

Beep— beep-bip beep-beeep—

Radiation was a little high.

A hint as to what fuel powers Gong Gyeong-min’s refuge.

He’s probably using something like the nuclear battery John_nenon used.

I don’t want to get a single speck of radiation on me, but I feel differently right now.

If I can meet my classmate, I consider taking on a little radiation a decent investment.

Thunk!

I tore off the wire mesh and crawled into the dark mouth yawning wide.

“I’ll be back.”

What waits up ahead, I don’t know.

I’ll leave every possibility open.

Including the death of my classmate.

Luckily, the darkness wasn’t that long.

I saw first light, and an exit.

Thunk!

I tore off the vent cover and dropped down.

“......”

I peered into the dark.

Something was there.

A monster.

Shrrrk—

I drew the axe, then put it away.

It was the eyeball thing we’d seen earlier.

It wasn’t looking at me.

What it was watching was my classmate, Gong Gyeong-min.