Chapter 2
Seo Won gritted his teeth. There was no time. If they kept running like this, they would all be crushed to death. The speed at which the three of them were running could never overcome the velocity of an object falling from the sky.
At least they needed to get out of the shadow to have a chance of survival, but for that to happen…
“……”
Seo Won let out a hollow laugh inside at the thought that suddenly came to mind. It seemed he was destined to be remembered by his friends as a foolish guy. To think this was the first thing that came to mind.
Seo Won, who had been running with all his might, looked back at the two people he was holding onto.
The women, presumably students, were covered in tears and staring above their heads, sensing death approaching. Their eyes were becoming vacant as if they had given up on life – why did that look so heartbreaking?
Seo Won took a deep breath and gritted his teeth. Then he pulled both arms forward with all his strength. He threw the two people being dragged along straight out of the shadow and let go of their hands. The moment his body was pushed backward by the recoil, his eyes met with the two people filled with shock.
He could see their mouths gaping, whether they were trying to scream or say something, but it was only for an instant.
His body, which had fallen backward, was soon thrown to the ground, and a massive object was approaching right before his eyes.
[Hey! Yoon Seo Won! Seo Won!]
His friend’s urgent voice coming through the earphones was fading away like an echo.
Then at some point, he couldn’t hear anything. He couldn’t see anything. He didn’t know if time was passing or had stopped, and he couldn’t tell if he was breathing.
He was just surrounded by pitch-black darkness.
Being sucked into the void.
***
Blink, blink.
“……”
As soon as his consciousness, which had been hiding in a very deep place, surfaced, his eyes opened. It felt like he had dreamed something strange, but he couldn’t remember it – only an inexplicable sense of emptiness remained.
‘What is this…?’
It felt like he had lost something important, or like he had seen something he shouldn’t have. Subtle emotions that couldn’t be described were rippling in his chest.
Wondering why he felt this way, he rubbed his chest, when the surrounding scenery finally caught his eye.
Seo Won first looked at the sky visible straight ahead.
Quietly drifting apricot-colored clouds and crimson sunset captured his gaze. The sky was bizarrely red – too red to say it was heading toward night. It looked as if blood had covered the sky.
After staring at that strange sky, he turned his gaze and something caught in his vision.
The edge of a ceiling that had completely collapsed, leaving only its shape precariously intact, gaunt pillars that looked like they would crumble at any moment, and the hollow, gaping interior of the building.
Thinking he might have seen wrong, he rubbed his eyes, but nothing changed.
“What the hell is this?”
Seo Won got up and first checked his physical condition. What he clearly remembered last was…
‘…?’
What did he remember?
Something was trying to surface hazily, but suddenly his head throbbed. The feeling of sharp needles piercing his brain was vivid. There had been no warning signs to expect such pain, so he had no idea what was happening.
The problem wasn’t just the pain, but rather that he felt awful.
His stomach seemed to churn for no reason, and everything became hateful. Unpleasant emotions kept trying to burst out without him having time to think, causing his face to unconsciously contort.
“Hah…”
But it didn’t seem to be pain that would last long – as he waited while rubbing his temples, it gradually began to subside. A sigh of relief escaped.
Only then did Seo Won come to his senses and take a deep breath. Instantly, a fishy, stinging smell hit him.
“Ugh, what is this smell?”
He quickly covered his nose at the unbearable stench.
It wasn’t like breathing in air, but like gulping down rotten water – disgusting. It felt like his insides had been pickled in black filth. Was there rotting meat somewhere?
“Where on earth is this…?”
Where was this?
Seo Won, who had gotten up, looked outside the collapsed building. He thought the source of this smell might be somewhere nearby.
After looking around like that, he was speechless for a moment.
The smell wasn’t the problem. This place itself was the problem. The streets were lined with buildings so broken that their shapes were unrecognizable, and debris and machine parts that had fallen from who knows where were scattered about. The rebar and machinery poking out here and there were covered in rust, but he couldn’t see any rotten fish or decaying matter anywhere.
No, rather, it was a desolate space where microorganisms seemed unlikely to exist.
The air was bone dry with no moisture felt, and no living creatures like plants or animals were visible.
“Are there no people?”
He looked around for a while just in case, but unfortunately, no people were visible.
Seo Won scanned the dreary surroundings a few more times and slowly went out to the street. Perhaps because there wasn’t even wind, it was all the more quiet.
He started walking with the thought of looking around.
As he walked along the road examining the collapsed buildings and debris, Seo Won tilted his head in puzzlement. It looked like an abandoned city.
Not a single intact building remained. The asphalt, presumably a road, was cracked and pitted, and the sidewalk where people used to walk was completely overturned and unrecognizable.
The problem was that this city somehow looked very familiar.
It would have been nice if he had found a sign, but all that remained were dangling electrical wires. They looked as if someone had forcibly torn them down.
Moreover, that wasn’t the only puzzling thing. The rusted rebar and the dry sand that crumbled every time he passed by were reminiscent of ancient ruins.
Like a place where a war had occurred long ago and time had passed while it remained abandoned.
“This is strange…”
Looking at the ruins before him, he felt like he was missing something important. It seemed like he could solve the puzzle if only he knew what it was, but nothing came to mind.
Well, what was there to know here anyway?
Seo Won shook his head and started walking again.
How long had he walked like that? He eventually came to where the road ended. But what was waiting there was a completely unexpected sight.
Seo Won covered his mouth and stared at the scene spread out before him.
“What… is this?”
His voice trembled from being so shocked.
On the other side of the broken road, the ground had completely collapsed as if there had been an earthquake. And the scene that spread widely beyond that was…
“……”
It was too tragic to put into words.
Huge rocks were embedded here and there throughout the entire city, and most buildings had collapsed. What was piled gently on top was white dust made of sand and dirt.
As he looked again in bewilderment, he suddenly felt a strange sense of déjà vu. Those buildings visible in the distance, half-collapsed, looked familiar.
The representative buildings that served as landmarks and the forest of buildings he had seen every day.
No matter how collapsed they were, there was no way he wouldn’t recognize them.
Absurdly, this place was Seoul.
“Seoul? You’re saying this is Seoul?”
He couldn’t believe it at all. How could this possibly be Seoul? Clearly… until just now, there was no problem?
Seoul was a city where the streets were bright like daytime even late at night and bustling with people. It wasn’t a place like this ruin under a blood-red sky with not a single person visible, where buildings barely maintained their form.
Wasn’t this like… a city that had met its end?
“Ugh!”
Then another headache struck. As he squeezed his eyes shut from the throbbing pain, some images flashed through his mind like a panorama.
Brilliant night streets, a phone call with a friend, people’s screams, and…
The massive shadow that had covered a certain radius.
“Hah.”
Only then did Seo Won remember what had happened to him.
An object of unknown origin had fallen from the sky, and while running to survive, he had sent two people outside. With their shocked gazes as the last thing he saw, he had faced darkness. Yes, he had experienced such a strange event.
Could the object that had been falling from the sky have been those rocks?
Could it be… meteorites?
After recovering his forgotten memories, he felt the headache gradually subsiding. Seo Won rubbed his temples and belatedly faced reality.
‘But wait, can meteorites fall so suddenly like that?’
Could so many meteorites penetrate the atmosphere without anyone knowing?
It was absurd. Humans possessed the technology to detect the existence of meteorites. There was no way they would be hit like this without any preparation. Then where on earth had those rocks fallen from?
Seo Won looked up at the red sky and thought of various hypotheses, but nothing was realistically possible. They were all preposterous.
As he swept his face with the suffocating frustration in his chest and let out a long sigh, he suddenly felt something was off.
‘Come to think of it.’
After examining both arms and hands, he looked over his entire body with a serious expression. Not only the clothes he was wearing, but his body was also perfectly fine without a single wound.
“Why… am I alive?”
He had been crushed by that huge object but survived? How? Wasn’t it impossible to escape from there? Does this… make sense?
Nothing was normal. Everything was so surreal that he wondered if he was dreaming.
That he was alive, that Seoul had become a faded city, the huge rocks, the fishy air and blood-red sunset, and even the absence of any human presence. Everything, all of it.
Seo Won took in the scene once more – so devastatingly collapsed that he wanted to look away.
This place, filled with things he couldn’t understand with his common sense, was like…
Another world.
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
