Vrooooooom----

Defender says he likes sports cars because the beastlike engine note makes your heart thump.

Then why doesn’t he like tanks?

A tank’s engine note has a depth and resonance that leaves sports cars in the dust.

Not a beast—more like a dinosaur.

Thunk.

It’s true Gong Gyeong-min’s face had been stripped of all laughter until he looked like a person with only the shell left, but he hadn’t entirely lost his old touch.

He brought something amusing.

It was an SD-style plushie of what looked like a female character from some game or anime.

For some reason it was in a prone, flattened pose, and Gong Gyeong-min set it right in front of the tank commander’s position, at the spot where it would be looking at him from the side.

“What is that.”

I asked because there wasn’t much else to say, but I know people like this enjoy being asked about their hobbies.

“Huh? This? It’s a thing called a Nesoberi. Had a big boom once. Well, it was already on the way out before the war.”

“Nice.”

For a second I imagined it.

If even now Kang Han-min came to his senses, remembered his true assignment, closed the Rift, peace returned to the world, and I launched SkeletonNet successfully and went down in human history as a great figure—then wouldn’t it be good to make and sell a Skeleton plushie too?

The Skeleton Nesoberi Gong Gyeong-min just mentioned sounded pretty good.

Personally, the full-body Skeleton mascot suit is more my taste, though.

It was a thought I had after seeing the stacks of various merch Gong Gyeong-min had collected in the separate personal room set aside for him inside his bunker.

People die but names remain, and relics last even longer than names—wasn’t that how the saying went?

Even in Egypt, structures nearly ten thousand years old still survive, testifying that there was once a great civilization on the lower Nile.

Bzzzt—

The radio crackled.

There’s a contact.

A woman, short but solidly built.

With agile movement she hopped straight up onto the tank.

Not on Kim Daram’s level, but clearly with considerable physical ability.

“You’re the Professor, right?”

After a brief exchange, we rolled out.

Before long we reached the destination.

I could see smoke from fires.

Smoke rising out of the gaps all over the Tower.

Even through the gray-white fog, that thick smoke was visible.

The guide Yeom Dda-wan assigned us was a woman not yet twenty.

Young, but her hard features, muscular arms, and a scar running across the corner of her eye said she hadn’t lived an easy life.

Above all, her pupils were dilated to an almost excessive degree and kept sweeping in all directions—signs she was living under extreme survival stress.

“She’s Chinese.”

After a few words traded, Gong Gyeong-min had no trouble realizing she was Chinese.

“I hear a Cantonese lilt in her speech.”

“Not Korean Chinese?”

“Korean Chinese learn with a basic intonation scaffold from their parents. Whether they later pick up Seoul speech or a Gyeongsang accent, you can’t ignore the pre-set frame. A Han Chinese, on the other hand, has to till the soil of language from scratch on bare ground. There’s a dissonance you can feel from that.”

Like other one-off connections, she didn’t give her real name, but she did give a handle: Jade.

Back when she operated inside the Rift, her call sign was Jade plus a 3—Jade3.

Tacking on numbers is a custom we didn’t have in our day.

“Uncles.”

A bit unfair, but that’s what she called us.

Given her age, it wasn’t at all strange for her to call us that, so I didn’t bother correcting her.

“It’s over there. Park the tank there and fire or don’t—do as you like.”

Obviously, having once run with Jeon Si-hoon’s crew, she’s an Awakened.

A low-level Awakened, and fitting a guide, she’s a sensor-type.

By her own account, her senses aren’t as sharp as other people’s, so she often gets the boundary between human and non-human wrong, but her detection range is wide.

Accuracy’s poor, but if she concentrates, she says she can detect a human even a kilometer out.

“Looks like you were in a squad.”

Watching the clearly trained, military movement, Gong Gyeong-min tossed out a line.

“Squad?”

“Among low-level Awakened, they formed separate combat squads. Mostly picked kids whose abilities were lacking and whose deaths «N.o.v.e.l.i.g.h.t» wouldn’t matter much.”

She seemed to be the same category as the boy who fought to the death when I was in Jeju.

It’s a strange thing.

If fate had skewed just a bit, that day we might have aimed guns at each other, but now we’re moving toward a common objective somewhere else.

The spot Jade led us to showed the kind of position selection you’d expect from someone with real military training.

Between tall buildings you had line of sight to the Tower, while the surroundings were open ground without a single piece of cover.

Without proper anti-armor, it’s practically invulnerable.

By temperament, it’s impossible for us Hunters to fight with humans as the primary enemy, but circumstances are what they are, and there were times we launched ops assuming the main threat would be human.

Especially before I left China, the skill level and armament of the fanatics and anti-government forces had risen to rival regular troops.

Operating in territory held by hostile civilians meant you had to assume near-military-grade, anti-personnel action.

In that sense, this mission feels good.

First, we have an informant.

A friend fighting under the same flag and for the same purpose is guiding our way.

“Huh? Why are you suddenly asking that?”

Jade snapped, chewing her gum with a wet smack.

“Know-the-enemy-know-yourself and you won’t be imperiled in a hundred battles. Wasn’t that said by your ancestor?”

“What’s that?”

“You don’t know Sun Tzu?”

“You have a grandson?”

When Gong Gyeong-min said something in Chinese, Jade finally nodded, muttered in Chinese, and then at last answered my question.

“What do you want to know?”

What I asked Jade about was the weapons and tactics used by Awakened like her.

I can guess, roughly.

Most will use small arms, and no one will be carrying heavy weapons.

Anti-personnel strategy for the Awakened is fundamentally counterpunching.

They carry only basic antipersonnel firearms like rifles—or sometimes pistols—enter hostile zones trusting their instantaneous reflective field, induce enemy attacks, and shove them away with the reflective field. That’s their strategy.

Sometimes I hear they use kill methods based on their powers, but unlike human weapons, monster attack powers are a bit slow for killing humans and easier to anticipate.

The fanatic I fought before gave an impressive performance using powers, but in hindsight, he wasn’t such a threatening enemy.

Their biggest weapon is the reflective field.

Just as with monsters, the reflective field is by itself a peerless performer; most fights can be ended with the reflective field alone.

With such a powerful weapon, they don’t need others.

They’ll carry small arms to provoke, to cause confusion, or for hunting—something like that.

I don’t see them receiving anti-armor tactics training like a professional soldier such as Nam Ban-jang.

They wouldn’t have such weapons anyway.

If there’s any possibility, it’s Hunter weapons.

Hunter weapons came in dizzying variety—enough to recall the invention boom of the early 20th century—but the ones that became mainstream were anti-tank rocket-base types.

If it were Monster Punch, the cheapest Hunter weapon, maybe not—but the standard Hunter weapon built on an anti-tank rocket base might penetrate the armor of our dumb tank—not from the front, maybe, but from the side or rear.

That was my only worry, and Jade’s testimony wiped it clean.

“Over level-5 Awakened don’t carry broom-looking things. Brooms are for... mangdasae? The ones who work underneath. The big shots don’t carry that stuff.”

She’d clearly mistaken “madangsoe” for something else.

Anyway, just as I expected, over level-5 Awakened neither carry Hunter weapons nor know how to use them.

That implies one fact.

Anyone who has something like a Hunter weapon—no, anti-armor-type gear—doesn’t have to care about a reflective field.

Anyway, with all that in mind, we set up.

Time frame: deep night.

Something slinks beyond the fog-shrouded streets.

Gong Gyeong-min stuck his head out the hull and asked,

“Isn’t that a person?”

“No need to worry. That’s someone whose soul has left.”

Jade is definitely Chinese.

For people who’d stayed long in an erosion zone and lost their minds, the Chinese called them “people who’ve lost their souls.”

Meaning they wear a human shape, but you can no longer consider them human—that’s the implication.

That’s why the Chinese government didn’t hesitate to “clean up” civilians in erosion zones at scale.

Thinking back now, even that term feels like something the Party pushed.

When Yeom Dda-wan and I came near the Tower before, we saw countless people around it, living off supplies thrown down from the Tower.

There were dwellings under the Tower’s oppressive bulk, and smoke rose from many of them.

Even in a hell like this, people live on.

“Why are they still staying in a place like this?”

When Gong Gyeong-min asked in a baffled tone, Jade gave a bitter snort, muttered something in Chinese, then said in Korean again,

“They don’t want to go somewhere they don’t know. If they stay, stuff gets thrown to them, and as the number of people goes down, their share goes up. That’s why they stay.”

She sighed and added,

“Even though they know it ruins them.”

We waited for morning.

Most of us said nothing, and we spent the time in silence.

Gong Gyeong-min mostly had his phone on, staring at the screen.

I glanced once, curious what he was looking at, and soon sank into a sober mood.

Old photos.

The commemorative shots we routinely took back when we were in China.

I don’t have those photos.

I didn’t save pictures of comrades.

I thought that was right.

We’re all just consumables, myself included—bound to die and vanish—so making keepsakes among consumables felt contradictory.

Gong Gyeong-min is different from me.

On the verge of fierce combat, he looked back on his past comrades—friends who can never return now—as he scrolled.

When the atmosphere grew too heavy, Gong Gyeong-min threw a joke in his own way.

“Do you know why I got obsessed with dating sims?”

“What’s a dating sim?”

Jade didn’t like me much, but she showed a liking for Gong Gyeong-min.

Apparently his reputation had been good during the Jeju days.

At the very least, they said he treated the fighters well.

Well, he was spinning up mobile games and even set up and ran a pseudo-community, so the boys and girls going into the Rift would rate him highly.

Gong Gyeong-min was as lenient toward Chinese as I was.

Not holding hostility toward China is, surprisingly, a fairly rare trait.

Gong Gyeong-min chuckled and answered.

“A pretty-girl romance simulation.”

He showed the screen to Jade.

As befit someone young, she wore a look that said she couldn’t comprehend past amusements at all.

“Isn’t that the kind of game old folks play?”

“It’s a relic, sure. But the reason I fell into games like this—you see, there’s a return value.”

“Return value?”

This time I threw the question.

“Yeah. When you invest, you’re guaranteed a payoff. Unlike with real women.”

I think I see why things don’t work out for Gong Gyeong-min.

It’s logical, but the process that gets to his conclusion is a bit ridiculous.

With a wry smile, listening to Gong Gyeong-min’s nonsense for the first time in a while, a sudden chill slid down my spine.

“Monsters.”

Jade muttered something in Chinese.

Her pupils, which had finally shrunk back to normal for once, dilated again.

“A pack.”

A pack indeed.

Beyond the buildings, multiple combat types were filing along.

“Where are they going?”

Gong Gyeong-min gauged their bearing.

“Heading west, maybe.”

Jade chewed her gum again and spoke.

“There are a lot of packs these days. You see them a lot. They don’t seem to come near the Tower, but they pass by often. They prowled near our side several times too.”

Nothing off in their exchange.

It matches the situation, the sort of thing anyone might say.

But they’re missing something important.

“The composition of that pack.”

Squinting, I stared hard at the hazy silhouettes draped in a double veil of gray-white fog and darkness, and continued.

“Two Troopers, a Centurion, one unidentified type that looks large-class, two Panzers, a Hedgehog, and three Pikemen.”

Those names are the registered monster morphs—types—in the international Hunter organization.

Jade looked like she didn’t understand me, but Gong Gyeong-min was different.

He straightened up, showed some interest, and fixed me with eyes that still had some sharpness left.

“It’s the same composition as the ones we saw earlier. Down to...”

After carefully confirming the silhouettes slipping through the forest of buildings several times, I continued.

“...the order of their formation.”

Gong Gyeong-min shot a question right away.

“You’re saying it matches that pack we saw a while ago?”

“There can be hundreds, thousands of packs, but combat types are peculiarly numerous compared to other morphs. We knew over thirty morphs before the war. Yet creatures with that kind of diversity are moving in the same numbers, same morphs, same order.”

I nodded, speaking with conviction.

“It appears to match, with a very high probability, the pack we saw earlier.”

Jade, who’d been listening quietly, asked curtly,

“Is that a problem?”

Gong Gyeong-min and I answered at the same time.

“Yeah.”

“It’s a problem.”

Gong Gyeong-min yielded the explanation to me.

After a small bow, I passed on what we knew to the young one.

“Once a pack is ejected from a Rift, it doesn’t change direction. Like a ball we throw that traces a trajectory according to the force and direction imparted at the throw, a pack that emerges from a Rift moves toward the same bearing. Unless they meet a natural barrier like a river or sea, they go one way.”

I looked around.

“The only natural barrier here is the Han River, and we’re south of it. And it hasn’t even been twenty-four hours since we saw that pack. Before a day passes, the ones we saw have reversed one-hundred-eighty degrees and are moving. That’s outside the norm.”

It’s not the pressing issue right now.

But in a sense, it touches our fate.

The large-scale outpouring connected to that Tower we’re staring at won’t turn into an immediate threat, but if something like a Nemesis-type appears again, that would herald the end for the humans left in Sejong—no, on the Korean Peninsula.

Dawn bled into the gloom.

The sun was rising.

The enemy hadn’t found us, and the tank, soaked in the chill of early morning, awaited the fight.

“See there?”

Jade said,

“They’ve clocked in since dawn.”

Black dots moved below the Tower.

Kang Han-min’s guard detail, most likely.

There were a lot of them.

Looked like more than twenty.

If the number of visible guards is about that, it’s safe to say there are even more inside.

Gong Gyeong-min stared right at me.

When I met his eyes, he said,

“Makes me think I shouldn’t have floated a meaningless hypothesis.”

I shook my head and stared at our enemies.

“Proof always comes with difficulty.”

Call it a rebuttal.