FLIA 147

However, at the next moment Kim Hyunwoo opened his eyes again. He was covered in cold sweat, and he screamed in confusion. His team members were also drenched in sweat, and they were in a panic. In front of them, Ju Hoyoung glanced at his watch. And he grinned.

“From now I’ll give you three minutes. Try to run away as much as you can. Then, start!”

“Aaahhh!”

Kim Hyunwoo ran while he screamed in fear. What is this? Why is the same situation repeating again? Did I regress?

However, he had no time to think deeply. He ran again desperately. This time also Ju Hoyoung appeared, and he reached out his cold hand. Instead of breaking his neck, he snapped his ankle one after another. He laughed at his limping, and he caught him crawling on the ground in the end and broke his neck.

After that repeated three times, Kim Hyunwoo changed direction.

Whenever he tried to go toward the city center, the feeling of Ju Hoyoung appearing like a ghost and breaking his neck was vivid. Naturally, their steps turned in the opposite direction. A team member who had been hyperventilating screamed.

“T, team leader! If we keep going this way it’s the rift zone!”

“Shut up, you bastard! Is there any other way to run from those monsters except this?” Kim Hyunwoo rubbed his neck that still held the feeling of breaking painfully, and he shouted with spit flying. He thought he was going to die of fear. The monsters of the rift zone were much better than the Taeyang Team. He planned to somehow shake them off first and try to hide. Fortunately, this time Ju Hoyoung didn’t appear to break his neck.

They entered the rift zone safely. After running for a long time and hiding inside the darkest and most gloomy building, Ju Hoyoung soon appeared. When he looked around, Kim Hyunwoo didn’t even breathe. Ju Hoyoung, who was nearby, disappeared elsewhere.

‘I survived.’

Relief barely came to him. The team members also sighed in relief and sprawled on the floor one by one. They were too scared to go out, and they waited inside the building all day before they could barely come out.

“Shit, what do we do about the body cam footage…”

Kim Hyunwoo spat curses. The body cam footage they had gathered was like a lifeline.

It was the footage they had gathered so they wouldn’t be discarded after being forced to do the dirty and messy cleanup by those people? Now that it was gone, they could be destroyed as evidence anytime.

The mood of the team became gloomy. Even though it was one thing that they had entered the rift zone without any preparation, the thought of encountering the Taeyang Team again after getting out was extremely terrifying. They put their heads together and thought, and they came up with the option of foreign asylum.

“For now, let’s run abroad. If we run, that’s it. This zone is adjacent to the port anyway. Let’s grab some ship no matter what and stow away. And if we live quietly like dead rats for a few years, those guys will forget too.”

This fairly plausible plan won everyone’s agreement. The experience earlier had been too terrifying. So they moved to the port while hungry and thirsty with no food. After walking for a long time, a team member asked carefully.

“Team leader, are we going the right way?”

“Fuck, yes! I’ve been here so many times! If we keep going this way, a tall building will appear. Look. Machun Building!”

When Kim Hyunwoo spoke with confidence, the team members followed again without a word. However, all of them thought it was strange. The destination should have appeared a long time ago, but it still didn’t appear. At that time, Kim Hyunwoo muttered with a flustered voice.

“What is this? Why does that building keep appearing?”

The Machun Building he saw earlier appeared again. Even though he was going the right way, when he came to his senses, he was again in front of the Machun Building.

“Team leader, are you corrupted, and your head is going back and forth?”

“Look at my body! I’m fine!”

Kim Hyunwoo bared his upper body and shouted furiously, but all the team members sent doubtful looks, and he had no choice but to hand over the guide role. However, no matter how they changed the guide and walked on a different path, the Machun Building kept appearing again. Only then did they realize they were trapped inside the rift zone, but it was already too late.

Lee Chanha and Yoon Seungryong watched from the rooftop of the Machun Building as Kim Hyunwoo and the other team members circled the same street like bugs caught in a trap. Because they were caught in a powerful hallucination and couldn’t see the right path, they couldn’t escape.

Lee Chanha’s hallucination ability was very powerful, but it required constant attention. When he mixed it with Yoon Seungryong’s poison and used it, the effect was so great that even the users themselves were surprised.

These mercenaries wouldn’t be able to pass through every path where Yoon Seungryong’s poison lay thick, and they would return to the same place and keep circling. Beg for their lives? From the beginning, of course, there was no plan to let them live. They were people who knew very well that death was mercy compared to this.

“Shall we go now?”

After Yoon Seungryong confirmed that from every exit of the Youngjin Building the poison that induced hallucinations leaked endlessly from the living burrows he had dug, he tapped Lee Chanha. That poison would block going out, and it would block approaching from outside too. After scattering food here and there so they wouldn’t die, Lee Chanha laid the hallucination once more. Seo Yakrin and Ju Hoyoung had already lost interest, and they had long since returned to the guild.

“Wait a moment.”

Lee Chanha, who had been jumping swiftly from building to building with the screaming mercenaries behind him, stopped. Yoon Seungryong, who had gone ahead and come back, also looked in the direction Lee Chanha was looking, but there was only a collapsed and dark interior of a building there. And when he heard Lee Chanha’s next words, his face stiffened.

“….I feel traces of the Flood here.”

<10>

Ominous

“Traces of the Flood?”

Lee Chanha’s words after he returned from dealing with the mercenaries, made them flinch. Seo Yakrin crumpled the book she had been reading, and Ju Hoyoung put down his game console. Yoon Seungryong also put down the potato chip bag he had been eating from, maybe because even recalling it again ruined his appetite. No, when he looked, it was already empty anyway…

“It’s certain. I can’t forget that disgusting stench.” Lee Chanha revealed his hostility. Once, because it was too agonizing, he had brainwashed himself that he loved the Flood, but now he hated the Flood as much as that maddened frenzy. Yohan, worried, scattered light and asked.

“Shall I go purify it?”

Lee Chanha smiled as he approached Yohan and the shining light with courtesy

“No, Yohan-gun. For now I intend to leave it as it is. If we follow the filthy traces it excreted, we’ll find out what it tried to do here. I think it’s probably related to those who attacked the ceremony.” Yohan nodded. Suddenly he remembered the nightmare he had dreamed on the first night he returned home. In the dream, something dreadful leaked out of a corrupted city and tried to devour everything. Maybe, just like in the Abyss, he had also felt the approach of the Flood here. He started to feel anxious, but that feeling soon disappeared.

‘I faced even the core of the Abyss, so here I can face something like the Flood easily.’ Yohan strengthened his heart bravely. Above all, there were now multiple purifiers here. And more purifiers were going to keep appearing in the future. Lee Hyunmook pulled a laptop in front of Yohan and said.

“Then let’s leave that matter to Chanha, and now let’s check the footage.” He inserted the memory device confiscated from the team leader into the laptop. As the list of videos appeared, Yohan murmured.

“What if it’s damaged?”

The revenge Yohan wanted included Park Seungmin’s social downfall. For that, clear evidence was necessary.

As expected, when he skimmed through the dates of the body cam footage the team leader had, the record from the day Yohan went missing wasn’t there. In this case, achieving revenge on Park Seungmin in the direction he wanted would take some time, so Yohan felt disappointed. Yoon Seungryong consoled him.

“In your case, there was no reason to keep it, so Kim Hyunwoo must have damaged it. But one of the team members might have kept something they recorded separately.”

“That’s correct, Yohan-gun. Let’s check another team member’s footage.” While saying that, Lee Chanha took out another memory device that he had obtained from the team members using hallucination. This team was so harmonious that each of them secretly had their own recordings.

Fortunately, this time there was also footage from the day Yohan had gone missing. The beginning of the video was ordinary. As they pulled the play bar backward to check, at one moment the gaping mouth leading to the Abyss appeared.

“Ah, here it is!”

When they played it at normal speed, noisy sounds came from the laptop speakers. Park Seungmin’s voice was especially clear.

–Just throw one person in! At this rate, we’ll all die! What if the expansion suddenly speeds up!

The scene of Park Seungmin shoving Yohan appeared. Soon after, the mercenaries seized him without hesitation and bound him. As Yohan was sucked into the Abyss, he shouted his friend’s name. Park Seungmin! You, I’ll…! The rest faded into distance. After that, the survivors chuckled among themselves.

”Just throwing in one person makes it disappear like that? That bastard is crazy efficient.”

”Hey, did you see that bastard grin after throwing his friend in? Isn’t he a total psychopath?”

“Me, a psychopath? If you had seen how annoying that bastard acted normally, you would’ve done the same as me.”

”Haha, Park Seungmin, this guy is really funny. Hey, when we go back, let’s eat something nice together.”

Yohan worried that he might experience something like trauma symptoms, but except when he saw the scene of himself being sucked into the Abyss, he was fine. After watching the footage to the end, Yohan rejoiced.