“Fucking idiots.”
Standing on top of a pile of shredded and mangled corpses, the boy sneered, utterly fed up.
“Nothing ever changes.”
Bang!
Blood burst from the wings of a monster that had abruptly altered course upon spotting fresh prey. Across from the boy, positioned in the spectator stands, was another child—a boy who looked barely old enough to be in elementary school—handling an enormous anti-materiel sniper rifle aimed squarely at the creature.
The boy atop the corpses shouted encouragement.
“Yang Eunho! Keep firing! You’ve got this!”
The rifle’s trembling muzzle steadied instantly. Bang! Bang! The bullets found their mark repeatedly, tearing through the beast’s wings with precision.
The monster roared in fury and surged upward. Just as it dove aggressively toward the stands, the child wielding the rifle suddenly vanished, replaced immediately by a tall girl who appeared in his place.
Clang!
A deafening crash echoed as the girl’s riot shield met the monster’s claws head-on. Reinforced by some sort of magical enhancement, the shield didn’t break, enabling the girl to withstand the charge of the beast, which easily outweighed her by several times.
Another shot rang out from the opposite side. Blood sprayed from the creature’s wing again. It attempted to fly toward the source of the shots, driven mad by pain, but the girl refused to let it go.
“Hey, I bet I’m way tastier than that skinny runt!”
The monster screeched in rage as an axe struck its foot. While the girl kept it distracted, a blond-haired boy grabbed the sniper child and swiftly repositioned them. Each time they moved, the sniper fired again, relentlessly crippling the monster’s wings. With a final shot, its flight capability was utterly destroyed.
“Kyaaaak!”
Yet, grounded or not, the monster’s beak and claws remained lethal. Blinded by agony and fury, it turned its wrath fully on the girl. The shield cracked under the relentless assault, finally shattering as she was flung backward.
At that critical moment, a boy clad entirely in black—who had somehow scaled to the stadium roof unnoticed—leaped dramatically into the stands. Darkness rippled outward from his feet, stabbing through the monster’s massive body.
The beast convulsed wildly, desperate to throw off the boy clinging fiercely to its back. It smashed itself violently against walls, dragging its body roughly across surfaces to dislodge him, but he held fast, his hands bloody from gripping its razor-sharp feathers.
Eventually, the boy crawled all the way up to the monster’s head. Darkness coalesced in his hand, forming a spear-like shape. When it plunged directly through the creature’s eye, scrambling its brains, the man watching from afar finally understood that the nightmare of Dongdaemun Stadium had ended.
But his personal nightmare continued. Monsters he’d never dared confront—too frightened to even try hunting them, hiding uselessly in the shelter—had just been slain by teenagers. Why had these kids shown up only now?
Overflowing with bitterness and resentment, he lashed out at the wounded, black-clad boy stumbling away from the monster’s corpse. The boy ignored him completely, but the blond kid burst out angrily in response.
“Do you have any idea what Tae Woon went through to get that rifle? Or how much Hangyeol suffered to master the reinforcement spell?”
“Don’t bother wasting your energy on him. He’ll never change. If words alone could fix someone like that, he would’ve evacuated when I warned him.”
The boy was right.
Even after the refugees who had gathered around that boy rebuilt a semblance of a normal life, even after escaping from Seoul, even after people adjusted to the new era and the nation stabilized—this man remained forever trapped in the horror of Dongdaemun Stadium.
He never engraved his parents’ names on the memorial in Gwacheon. Losing his arm, the death of his parents, the massacre at the stadium—all of it, every single tragedy, was blamed on the boy who had arrived too late. It was blamed on the Hunters who knew about the shelter’s tyranny but refused to help. It was destiny’s fault for giving him such a worthless Trait. And it was the government’s fault for abandoning Seoul.
Approaching the 21st anniversary of his parents’ deaths, the man resolved to inflict his despair upon everyone else. Times had changed, and acquiring powerful magical explosives was now disturbingly simple.
And then—
“If you’re going to die anyway, why not die productively?”
The boy in black appeared before him once again, looking exactly the same as he had twenty-one years ago.
Laughter burst from the man, uncontrollable and frenzied. Had he finally gone insane? Was this just a hallucination, or was a monster twisting his mind?
Whatever it was, he didn’t care. As long as he could spread his despair and hatred further, he gladly accepted the boy’s proposal—a proposal from something surely not human, something he had ignored twenty-one years ago.
A translucent screen promptly appeared in the air before him.
[Quest 01]
[On the designated date, become the host of the Eid Portal at the Management Center.]
***
The Portal Keeper was a swarm of countless monsters, replaying the massacre from twenty-one years ago in twisted, exaggerated detail. They endlessly slaughtered and devoured one another, locked in a ceaseless, grotesque cycle of violence.
A monster with severed limbs writhed like a worm, biting viciously into another’s ankle. The bitten beast collapsed, plunging a blade deep into a third creature’s back. In response, the impaled monster gaped its massive jaws wide and swallowed the head of yet another attacker whole.
This nightmare of constant murder and cannibalism resembled nothing short of a scene from hell. They behaved as if escape from this nightmare depended on killing and devouring every single one of their kind, forming mountains of corpses beneath their feet.
“Ugh.”
The stench of blood, powerful enough to numb one’s senses, was mild compared to the horrific scene itself. Kim Sibaek glanced grimly at the scattered chunks of flesh and viscera splattered at his feet and quietly asked,
“…It wasn’t actually this bad, was it?”
“At least, there wasn’t any cannibalism back then,” Tae Woon replied evenly. “It shows how deeply traumatized the host of the Eid Portal is about that day.”
“So the core’s somewhere in there…”
Tae Woon lightly tapped Kim Sibaek’s shoulder.
“Hyung, could you drop me off at a higher spot? Back then, there was also a flying-type monster with quite an impressive entrance. Unless the host fainted, he definitely saw it.”
Given the host’s exaggerated perception, any flying monster he witnessed would appear several times stronger than reality.
“Are you sure you’ll be okay alone?”
“It’ll be tough, but I’ll manage. After making such a flashy entrance, I can’t just push everything onto you and hide, right?”
“You’ve really grown, Woonie.”
Kim Sibaek felt a pang of heartache for the child who had witnessed these horrors but was immensely proud of Tae Woon’s unwavering bravery. He raised his gaze, assessing the surroundings carefully.
“Where should I put you down?”
“Twenty-one years ago, I jumped off the stadium roof onto the monster’s back…”
“Well, that roof isn’t usable now.”
Not just the roof, but even the stadium’s outer walls—which had once shielded survivors from the monsters—were mostly destroyed. Still, not all routes were lost. On the stadium’s outskirts stood various buildings, collapsed or merged together. Among them were prominent structures—apartments and shops—that likely held personal significance to the host.
“That building over there looks perfect,” Tae Woon pointed out.
“Which one?”
Following Tae Woon’s finger, Kim Sibaek spotted a cluster of buildings—a university structure with a steep slope, smaller commercial buildings, and two apartment blocks.
“Uh… that apartment at the far end.”
“Which apartment? There are two.”
“The one with the mural.”
“They both have murals… Ah, you mean the one with the yellow and green balloons painted on it? That one’s taller.”
“Yes, that’s the one.”
Kim Sibaek adjusted Tae Woon on his back and carefully checked his route. It seemed manageable enough.
He lightly sprinted forward, leaping onto a nearby car, then propelled himself diagonally onto a partially crumbled wall. Gracefully navigating upward—balcony to wall, wall to ledge—he reached the tilted rooftop in a matter of moments.
Tae Woon slipped off Kim Sibaek’s back and gently brushed the dust from his clothes. Once again, Kim Sibaek marveled at how small and fragile Tae Woon had appeared twenty-one years ago—hardly believable that such a tiny child had endured the nightmare unfolding below.
“…You really did great, Woonie.”
Expressing heartfelt pride and encouragement, Kim Sibaek gently pulled Tae Woon into a hug. Tae Woon smiled sweetly, his eyes curving into playful crescents.
“No butt pats this time, Hyung?”
“Hey—do you actually like that?”
Kim Sibaek’s hand, instinctively reaching to pat Tae Woon’s bottom, froze mid-air. Rational thought briefly overrode instinct. Wait, what had this brat said about butt pats earlier?
Seeing Kim Sibaek hesitate, Tae Woon openly showed his disappointment—an expression far too mature for a fourteen-year-old. Despite the maturity, it was undeniably charming.
“I guess my cute act has finally stopped working.”
“…Let’s continue this conversation later.”
Thinking about the discussion they’d have afterward nearly sent his consciousness spinning, so Kim Sibaek quickly shut down the thought. Instead of patting Tae Woon’s bottom, he ruffled his hair roughly and leaped from the rooftop, Biendeoé’s wings fluttering closely behind.
Left alone on the rooftop, Tae Woon narrowed his eyes slightly, silently watching Kim Sibaek’s receding figure. Watching the older man walk resolutely toward the past Tae Woon himself had lived through stirred complex, indescribable emotions. A familiar bitter taste lingered on his tongue.
If only he could have clearly watched Kim Sibaek’s back until the very last moment, clearly etched and unblurred, all the way into the distant past.
