Chapter 54
Seo Won weakly nodded and awkwardly raised his arms. Baek Rak embraced his waist and lightly swung his sword. A short whooshing sound was heard, then the rotten smell of creature corpses spread.
Just as Baek Rak was about to leap from that spot.
A small metallic scraping sound, kiiiek, could be heard. Baek Rak and Seo Won quickly turned their heads toward where the sound came from. And they made eye contact with a man who was looking at them with only his face sticking out from the building floor.
“Huh?”
There was… a person?
Just as the surprised Seo Won was about to speak, Baek Rak covered his mouth and ran toward where the man was. Only then did he realize that a turncoat was approaching them.
Seo Won gestured to the man to quickly close the door. But the man just stared blankly. But something was strange. The man’s face was exactly like…
“…?”
Wasn’t it exactly the same as his? Seo Won held his breath. No way, no way.
Baek Rak seemed to notice too as he looked back and forth between Seo Won and the man. The man hiding in the underground bunker definitely resembled Yoon Seo Won.
When the panicked Seo Won reached out his arms, Baek Rak frowned and jumped into where the man was hiding. The startled man fell on his buttocks and let out a short scream. Baek Rak closed the bunker door before that sound could escape outside.
Then immediately, the sound of the ground vibrating could be heard. And it was from a very close distance. Since it wasn’t banging on the bunker entrance, fortunately it seemed they weren’t discovered.
Seo Won belatedly came to his senses and covered the startled man’s mouth with his palm. Then he gestured for him to stay quiet. The man seemed to understand as he nodded vigorously.
Only then did Seo Won remove his hand and stare intently at the man.
‘Red-tinged skin and bleached hair with black roots growing out.’
It was an appearance that could never be seen in this place. The people here had no reason to bleach their hair, and bleaching agents themselves didn’t exist. There was no need to have things that weren’t necessary for survival.
Most decisively, the man’s appearance was too familiar. The ordinary appearance that Koreans living in the original world would naturally have.
Seo Won dragged his hand down his face and tried to calm his frantically pounding heart.
Perhaps, hadn’t the man also been brought over by some unknown force like himself?
Just that assumption alone made him want to talk to the man so badly he could go crazy. When he looked back at Baek Rak, he firmly shook his head saying it wasn’t time yet.
‘This is so frustrating!’
At that moment, a growling sound could be heard from the man’s stomach. Come to think of it, the man looked extremely haggard, as if he hadn’t been able to eat for a while.
Seo Won hurriedly took out water and food from the bag attached to his belt and gave it to the man. The man bowed his head and began eating urgently.
What on earth was this about?
He never imagined he would meet someone exactly like himself here. Well, if he had come over, there was no law saying other people couldn’t come over too.
Thanks to that, his heart seemed to swell up. Should he say that just the man’s existence made him feel somehow comforted? Though it was unfair to the man, he felt relieved that he wasn’t alone.
By the way, how had he survived? It couldn’t have been easy.
Perhaps it was possible precisely because he had been this careful.
As he couldn’t take his eyes off the man earnestly filling his stomach, Baek Rak had approached at some point and tapped his shoulder. When he turned around, the guy whispered in a small voice.
“The bunker walls are thicker than expected, so we can talk if we just keep our voices down.”
“This much?”
Baek Rak nodded.
Finally shaking off his frustration, Seo Won approached the man closely and said,
“He says it’s okay to talk if we speak quietly.”
“…Who are you?”
“I’m Yoon Seo Won. What’s your name?”
The man finished the small amount of food and carefully rolled his eyes. Then, seeing Seo Won waiting patiently for him and Baek Rak watching from a step away, he slowly opened his mouth.
“Choi Gi Beom.”
Seo Won’s eyes sparkled brightly.
Since he didn’t find the formal speech strange and went along with it, he could be even more certain. That Choi Gi Beom was someone from the same world as himself.
“Gi Beom-ssi, do you remember anything? How did you come here?”
“I’m not sure…”
“Then, were you there when the meteorite fell?”
Choi Gi Beom looked at the slightly excited Seo Won for a while, then nodded slightly.
“How long have you been here?”
“About five days… Um, but where is this place?”
The man seemed to have grasped the situation as he began asking questions actively, breaking away from his passive attitude. Seo Won nodded, thinking it was fortunate, and answered.
“You won’t believe it, but this isn’t the world we used to live in. You saw those strange monsters wandering around outside, right? Fortunately, you hid well.”
“Not the world we used to live in…”
Choi Gi Beom looked confused and clasped his trembling hands together. Understanding what the man might be feeling, Seo Won patted his shoulder and said,
“First, calm down. Calm down, and when those things outside disappear, I’ll take you to a safe place. Rest there for a bit.”
At that moment, Baek Rak approached and grabbed Seo Won’s arm.
“Yoon Seo Won.”
‘Huh?’ In that instant, he was pulled back by Baek Rak. When he turned around asking what he was doing, Baek Rak’s expression had hardened stiffly.
“What’s wrong?”
“You’re going to take him as you please?”
“Of course I have to take him. You’re not planning to leave him here?”
“…I don’t have a good feeling about this.”
“What’s not good about it?”
Baek Rak checked on Choi Gi Beom who was staring intently at them, then moved closer to Seo Won and whispered in his ear.
“The day he arrived here is strange. Five days ago was the day the shelter was attacked.”
“But that was at night. He could have come over during the day.”
“Even so, it doesn’t make sense that he’s still alive.”
“…Why?”
“He doesn’t know what creatures are or what habits they have, yet he avoided them and hid here?”
“What if he was lucky? He spotted creatures from far away and just happened to find an underground bunker. When I first saw creatures too, I instinctively thought I had to run away. Almost instinctively.”
Baek Rak sighed unusually, seeming frustrated.
“…You, think about when you first came here.”
“First time?”
“When you didn’t know what creatures were, what did you do? Didn’t you wander around?”
“…”
“Then you would have entered the city center. Looking around for where this was, whether there were other people.”
“…”
“And in the process, you met creatures and ran away, right? If you had accidentally spotted creatures from far away and hidden, wouldn’t you come out once they disappeared?”
Seo Won couldn’t help but acknowledge Baek Rak’s words. If he had hidden without being caught by creatures then, he would have moved to another place the moment they disappeared.
But there was no guarantee that everyone would do that.
There would be people who moved like him, and people who didn’t move like Choi Gi Beom. The magnitude of fear couldn’t be the same for everyone.
“I would have done that, but he seems to have been more cautious.”
“…”
“Even you can see that Choi Gi Beom resembles me. The background of how we came over is the same too. And look at that hair. Do you know how yellow hair is made? It wouldn’t exist here, but it was common in the world I lived in.”
“…Yoon Seo Won.”
“You said you sometimes rescue and bring people from outside too. Isn’t it too much to say he can’t come just because you don’t have a good feeling? Someone from the same world as me survived luckily, how can I just leave him?”
“…”
“Let’s take him, Baek Rak. Okay?”
Seo Won was pleading in a way he had never shown before. Whether Choi Gi Beom was a strange person or not, perhaps just his existence was enough to provide reassurance for now.
Anyway, it was obvious that if he told the soft-hearted Yoon Seo Won, who would jump in to save unknown people, to leave the man behind, there would be chaos.
He didn’t know what kind of person he was, but to calm Yoon Seo Won for now, it was better to take him to the shelter. If he told Han Seong Hyeon to monitor him well, they could prepare to some extent for whatever might happen.
Baek Rak considered the situation and nodded.
Only then did Seo Won smile brightly. He had been nervous thinking he might say no, but fortunately. He was so grateful that he grabbed Baek Rak’s hand and shook it vigorously. By the time Baek Rak was looking at him strangely, he quickly let go and ran back to Choi Gi Beom. Excessive expressions might cause aversion, so he had to control them appropriately.
After all, it was ‘that’ Baek Rak.
When he glanced back, Baek Rak was looking down at the hand that had been grabbed by him. He was doing that with an expression where you couldn’t tell what he was thinking at all, making him feel strange somehow.
Anyway, right now his curiosity about the man came first.
“But where were you before coming to this place?”
Seo Won turned his head to look at the man and asked. Then he thought for a moment and slowly continued speaking.
“Yeongdeungpo Market. I had just come out of the station, and people were screaming and making a fuss, so I wondered what was happening… then a rock fell from the sky.”
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
