"Uh, penalty one?"

"Didn’t the first penalty already happen?" Jisoo said, voice flat, eyes still tracking the spot in the sky where the letters had dissolved.

"Yeah, first loop..." Si Hon answered automatically before stopping midway. Both of them looked at each other as the same realization struck simultaneously.

For several seconds neither spoke.

The rain continued falling around them while distant thunder rolled through the ruined city.

Then Jisoo slowly blinked.

"Wait."

Jisoo expression stiffened.

"Does regressing reset... everything?" Si Hon asked. "Like actually everything?" Neither of them had time to think further.

A roar erupted across the city.

The sound exploded from somewhere beyond the distant buildings and rolled through the streets like a living avalanche.

Then another followed. Then another. Then another.

The ground itself seemed to tremble beneath their feet as echoes bounced between skyscrapers. Si Hon instinctively turned toward the noise. At first he couldn’t understand what he was seeing. The rain obscured everything, transforming the distant streets into a gray blur. But as his eyes adjusted, shapes began emerging from the storm.

Hundreds of them.

His entire body froze.

Figures moved between buildings. Some stood on rooftops. Some crawled across walls. Some hung upside down from shattered windows. There were hundreds. Maybe thousands. Tall silhouettes with unnatural proportions. Horn like structures protruded from elongated skulls.

Limbs bent the wrong way. Bodies stretched impossibly thin. Some moved on all fours while others dragged themselves forward despite possessing legs far too long to belong to anything human.

Even from this distance something about them felt deeply wrong. Like reality itself had made a mistake. One of them suddenly stopped moving. Its head slowly turned toward their direction. The distance should have made it impossible to see them. Yet Si Hon immediately felt it. It was looking directly at him.

Beside him Jisoo visibly shivered.

"Ah..." Her voice cracked. "Ah, fuck..." Her face rapidly lost color as she stared at the approaching figures. "What the fuck..."

She took several steps backward. Her eyes widened further and further as if she were witnessing something impossible. "These things..." Her breathing became uneven. "These things aren’t supposed to appear yet."

For the first time since Si Hon had met her, genuine fear appeared in her eyes. Not frustration. Not exhaustion. Fear. Raw fear. The kind that comes from seeing something that should never exist.

Without warning she spun around and began desperately searching the ground.

Si Hon frowned. "What are you doing?"

Jisoo ignored him. Her movements became frantic. Desperate. Like someone racing against an invisible timer. Then suddenly she found it. A jagged piece of broken concrete with a razor sharp edge.

Before Si Hon could react she snatched it from the ground and immediately raised it toward her neck.

Si Hon’s eyes widened.

"Jisoo!"

"We can’t win this!" she shouted back. Rainwater dripped down her face while her hands trembled uncontrollably. "There isn’t enough time! There was never enough time! We just regress and try agai—"

"DUMBASS!"

Si Hon launched forward without hesitation. He slammed into her before she could finish speaking. The sharp fragment flew from her hand and disappeared into the rain.

Jisoo stumbled backward while Si Hon immediately grabbed her arm. "We haven’t even tried yet!" he shouted.

Another roar echoed across the city far ahead. Much closer this time. The approaching figures had already reached the outer streets surrounding the school.

Si Hon didn’t wait another second. He threw Jisoo over his shoulder despite her protests and immediately started sprinting toward the school entrance.

The school entrance was maybe sixty meters away and everyone was still clustered near the front— Aeloria’s team sitting on broken steps, Mihu and Seong talking about something, Han standing with Suha’s hand in his while Suha pointed at a piece of collapsed wall with what appeared to be genuine academic interest. Completely unaware. All of them.

"FUCK! EVERYONE GET INSIDE!"

His voice echoed through the rain.

Si Hon’s lungs started burning around the thirty meter mark.

"JUST FUCKING GET INSIDE—"

The people gathered near the school entrance immediately turned toward the source of the scream.

Most looked annoyed.

Some looked confused.

A few looked concerned.

None of them understood why Eun wo(Si Hon) was suddenly sprinting through the rain carrying Jisoo over his shoulder like a man fleeing the apocalypse itself.

Then they looked behind him.

And saw the city.

For a moment nobody reacted.

Their brains simply failed to process what they were seeing.

Hundreds of dark figures moved through the rain soaked streets. More appeared atop distant buildings. More crawled down walls. More emerged from shattered windows. The sheer number alone was enough to make someone’s stomach drop.

Then one of the creatures suddenly leaped.

It crossed an entire intersection in a single movement.

The crowd exploded.

"INSIDE!"

"RUN!"

"HOLY SHIT!"

"What the fuck is THAT?!"

The entrance instantly descended into chaos. People shoved each other. Some fell. Some abandoned their belongings entirely.

Aeloria was still confused, then she looked past him toward the gate, and whatever she saw there made her move fast, already calling to her teammates, already ushering people through the entrance.

Seong did the same and immediately grabbed Suha without waiting for an explanation. Han looked back once, twice, three times, feet moving automatically while his eyes stayed on the figures at the gate. Mihu said something sharp and ran.

After a few seconds, Si Hon hit the doorway and kept going, still carrying Jisoo, rain chasing them in through the opening before the sound of the things outside swallowed the rest.

"WAIT—" He skidded to a stop just inside, turning his head. "Where the hell is the old man?!"

Nobody answered. Somebody shouted something from deeper in the corridor. He waited exactly one second.

Then he dismissed it and ran.

He made it maybe fifteen more steps.

He tried to shake off the panic and keep moving, just focusing on putting one foot in front of the other. Then, something grabbed his ankle.

It wasn’t a hand— it felt like a jagged piece of bone or metal digging right through his tendom. Hard. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

He went down. Jisoo hit the pavement hard, flat on her back, and Si Hon slammed his chin into the concrete so hard his teeth cracked together.

He scrambled to look back, and then he looked back. And his whole body just froze.

It was standing there. It wasn’t really a creature, just a black thing in the shape of a person. It was so pitch black, darker than the night, but floating in the middle of that darkness were two pinprick pupils, darting around frantically.

And the mouth— it was a vertical tear that just kept going, like a rip in fabric that wouldn’t stop. It had arms and legs, but they were long, spindly, and jointed at impossible angles, clicking and twitching like a spider.

The thing lunged.

Jisoo was right beside him. She couldn’t even stand up in time. The creature swiped down, its arm slicing through her torso like it was nothing more than a wet paper.

There was a sickening pop as her spine snapped. Her head lolled to the side, hanging by a string of muscle and skin, her eyes still blinking at him.

Before Si Hon could even understand the spray of hot, metallic blood hitting his face, the thing slammed its face forward. There was a wet, crunching sound— like some boots stepping on a melon— and then the world went black.

Si Hon’s eyes snapped open.

He gasped, air rushing into his lungs, but instead of the classroom, the first thing he felt was cold. Rain.

He was standing at the school gate. Water was pouring down, soaking his uniform, making his hair stick to his forehead. He wiped his mouth, expecting to feel blood, but there was nothing there. Just rainwater.

He looked to his side. Jisoo was standing there, clutching her uniform her knuckles were white. She looked like she’d seen a ghost. Her breathing was uneven, shallow, and she wouldn’t even meet his eyes.

She looked scared.

Not cautious. Not tense.

Scared.

Her hands were shaking.

Jisoo Park, the woman who had survived four thousand eight hundred twenty five loops, was staring at the rain soaked school gate like she’d just discovered something worse than death.

And somehow...

That terrified Si Hon more than the monsters did.

"Si Hon," she whispered, her voice barely audible over the rain. She didn’t look confused about where they were, she looked terrified that they were here again.

"We’re so fucked..."