FLIA 173

<Epilogue>

Kim Hyunwoo gasped for breath and wandered through the streets. No matter which direction he walked, east or west or north or south, the scenery was the same. Even so, he continued walking and searching through buildings because there was a reason. If he kept doing this, sometimes he found food or something to drink. And if he searched a place again that he had already searched, sometimes something turned up, so he had to keep searching the same scenery endlessly until his mind went numb.

“Haa…!”

He was lucky today. He had found a piece of bread after three days. It smelled a bit spoiled, but he was still grateful for it. Just as he hurried to tear into it, a kick sent it flying. It was Go Jaewon.

“You filthy bastard, I knew it. You’re eating everything by yourself again!”

“Ahhh! No! No! I didn’t eat it! I, I’ll share! I’m hungry too!”

No matter how much Kim Hyunwoo protested, Go Jaewon devoured the spoiled bread like a beast. He smelled worse than the bread. His eyes were glassy, and his mind was gone. Ears, a nose, and lips had grown on the back of his head and all over his body. Kim Hyunwoo cried and begged for just one bite, but Go Jaewon cursed him and stomped him until his bones cracked.

Kim Hyunwoo cursed reality. Where had this demonic monster come from? Life had been better when Go Jaewon hadn’t been there. Back then, at least he could eat everything himself. The rest of the team was useless fools who couldn’t help at all. Shouldn’t they have fought against Go Jaewon in a situation like this? But now they had lost both speech and reason, crawling like insects and gnawing on monsters, so his complaint meant nothing.

Go Jaewon finished the bread greedily and widened his eyes. He had sensed eyes watching them from the rooftop. Someone was there again, chuckling as they watched. The people who came to watch changed every time, but today it was Ju Hoyoung and Yoon Seungryong. They laughed as they watched the two of them behave pathetically.

“Ahhhhh! Please! Please get me out of here! I was wrong! I was wrong!”

Kim Hyunwoo ran toward them and screamed, but no matter how much he ran, the building never got any closer. Ju Hoyoung frowned.

“Ugh, why is he naked? My eyes are burning.”

Only then did Kim Hyunwoo realize he was naked. His muddled mind barely recalled that he had taken off his clothes because he had been too hot. But whether that was true or not, he didn’t care. He only cried and begged.

“I, I want to go to prison. I did wrong! Please, please, send me to prison!”

Lately, the heat had grown into a burning agony that tortured him constantly. Since he couldn’t sleep properly, the pain had grown worse. And knowing that his body was twisting from corruption was pain and fear itself. Even then, Go Jaewon still glared at Ju Hoyoung with bloodshot eyes. Then he suddenly dropped to his knees. Without hesitation, he slammed his forehead against the ground over and over as he begged.

“H-Hoyoung! Seungryong! I’m begging you. Please. Forgive me for the old days. I’ll do anything. You can use me as a slave for life.”

“Would you look at that, they still know how to talk?”

Go Jaewon lifted his head. Seo Yakrin stood there now, arms crossed and looking down at them with disapproval. Kim Hyunwoo quickly fell on all fours and barked. Go Jaewon followed and made animal sounds too. They didn’t even think about pride or dignity. They just wanted to escape the fate of insects trapped in a cage. Sometimes, if the observers acted generous, they received a reward. Otherwise, they wished they would just be killed. They didn’t want to live anymore.

There was another burning gaze on them. It was Lee Chanha’s. But Go Jaewon couldn’t even raise his head in that direction. He knew very well that if he displeased him even slightly, this place would twist into something even more hellish under Lee Chanha’s will.

For example, it went like this. A useful item they had struggled to find would suddenly rot away. Normal food would fill with maggots. Or they would think they were fighting a monster, but when they came to their senses, they were punching a wall. Or insults that tore apart their sanity would echo all day long.

Those were the mild cases. The worst was when they barely escaped and made it home, only to open the front door and see the same nightmare again. In those moments, they wanted to die on the spot. But they couldn’t die as they wished. No matter how many times they killed themselves, they woke up again the next day. And each time they tried to die, something even worse followed.

“Hey… hey…”

A small voice came from the corner. It was Park Seungmin, who appeared in a miserable state. He gasped for air, too dehydrated to swallow even a drop of water. His body was covered in bite marks, and pieces of flesh were missing. He was a purifier, a low-level one, and the only person who hadn’t been corrupted. He was also the one who got exploited by Go Jaewon and Kim Hyunwoo every single day.

“I, I need to talk to Yohan. Call Yohan for me. I really need to tell him something. It’s important. I still haven’t…paid back…all the money.”

Desperate, Park Seungmin begged again and again. But the answer he got was cold. Lee Hyunmook appeared out of nowhere and spoke.

“That’s not possible. Yohan said he never wants to see you again.”

There were others who had fallen into this hell too. Hwang Yeongcheol and Kim Jongseok. They wandered through the streets as well, unable to die. Because they were civilians, their corruption progressed so quickly that their faces could no longer be recognized.

“Ahhh! Please! I’m begging you! I want to die! Kill me! Just kill me!”

Park Seungmin screamed in despair. Every time he fell asleep, he dreamed of his happiest moment. In the dream, he awakened as a high-level purifier and lived a proud life, admired by all. It wasn’t just a fantasy, because he had once really experienced it, which made the dream even more vivid. And every time he woke from that short, sweet dream, he felt the deepest despair. Reality was too miserable compared to that dream.

Before all of them, each consumed by a different kind of horror, Lee Hyunmook pulled something out. It was a bag filled with syringes. The wailing of those less than beasts immediately stopped.

“When I first got these, I hoped we’d never need to use them. But maybe Yohan brought them knowing we’d end up needing them at a time like this. Do you know what these are?”

Lee Hyunmook’s tone was soft, and he looked more human than before. But none of that mattered to them. As everyone’s eyes fixed on him, Lee Hyunmook smiled and gave the answer.

“It’s morphine.”

Morphine. The name of the powerful narcotic painkiller filled their filthy, mottled faces with greed. It was the only thing that could make them forget the pain, even for a little while. Lee Hyunmook threw the syringes in front of them.

“Ah! It’s mine! It’s mine!”

“Bastards! Get lost, you scum!”

They fought and bit and clawed like wild animals. The victor was Go Jaewon.

“Ah… ahh…”

He quickly stabbed the syringe into his arm and injected it. His body went limp. He melted into a rare moment of peace. Even as Kim Hyunwoo screamed and hit him for stealing the dose, he didn’t care.

“Do you want more of this?”

Before the eyes that had gone blood-red, more syringes fell one by one. But this time, they didn’t land nearby. They scattered far away, beyond sight. The people screamed and ran toward where the syringes had fallen.

“Ha!”

For the first time, Lee Hyunmook laughed like he enjoyed taking revenge. The truth was, only the first one had contained real morphine. The rest were all filled with water.

And did they even realize it? That right now was the least hellish moment they would ever have.

Until the day the Abyss swallowed them, they would remain trapped in this rift forever. Once that happened, they would never return here again. Even Yohan, who was a high-level purifier, had struggled with this place, so Park Seungmin, a low-rank purifier, could never endure it alone.

Even Lee Hyunmook, who had held such unshakable resolve, and the comrades who once shared deep bonds of trust, had fought each other here. Could these ones really endure to the end?

“Let’s go. Our youngest is waiting.”

Seo Yakrin lost interest in the traitors who had turned into worms and muttered irritably. Lee Hyunmook agreed that his lover must be waiting and didn’t look back. Even though he had spread his shadow through the area, he didn’t want to leave Yohan alone.

Yohan waited quietly inside the van parked nearby, polishing his weapon. The eternal stone that Seo Yakrin had personally retrieved and refined glimmered at the tip of his spear. Lee Hyunmook was a little disappointed that it wasn’t a black-and-white stone, but he held back his greed because he knew splitting his own eternal stone last time had helped cause that mess.

“Did everyone come back safely?”

Even though he knew they had gone out to take cruel revenge, Yohan didn’t mention it. He only greeted them with a bright smile. Each of them patted his head once before sitting down. Yohan, now used to this, put his weapon down calmly after.

“Let’s go eat pork belly today!”

“Don’t you ever get sick of that pork belly?”

Seo Yakrin, sitting in the driver’s seat, scolded Yoon Seungryong for the suggestion. Though her temper often flared, she was careful behind the wheel. Yohan quietly sided with Yoon Seungryong.

“I like pork belly.”

“If Yohan likes it, then I’m fine with it too.”

“I don’t care what we eat~.”

Ju Hoyoung, who didn’t seem to get motion sickness, agreed as he focused on his game console. But in the end, they didn’t get to eat pork belly. A high-grade monster alert had gone off. The van turned immediately away from the city center.

The monster’s location was in the northern part of Seoul. After Yohan’s help had allowed them to reclaim the north, the Taeyang Team had become busier than ever. Unlike when the Han River had been the boundary, monsters now kept pouring down from the north. As they headed toward the helicopter zone, Seo Yakrin clicked her tongue.

“Why don’t we just go in and wipe everything out?”

“It’s almost fallen apart, but it hasn’t completely collapsed yet, so we can’t,” Lee Chanha replied flatly. Many nations had crumbled after the first Great Rift. North Korea was one of them, its rulers fleeing overseas.

Even so, when Korea announced plans to subdue the northern territory because of the monsters coming down from there, those same exiled rulers had fiercely opposed it. The negotiations were taking too long. The land was already ruined, but the government still wanted to avoid noise and conflict, which only made things more troublesome for the Taeyang Team.

The van soon arrived where the special unit’s helicopter waited. Yohan boarded and, no longer afraid, looked out the window. He gazed at the peaceful southern Seoul landscape and recalled what had happened recently.

That day, the chaos caused by Lee Hyunmook had somehow been resolved. It had been an enormous incident that was hard to believe one person had caused. The government’s drones had all crashed at the time, so no one knew the full truth. To the public, the Taeyang Team had been credited with stopping an unusual form of great rift.

But those higher up seemed to know more. According to Lee Chanha, all the covert operations targeting the Taeyang Team had completely vanished after that.

It made sense, since Lee Hyunmook’s shadow had expanded and covered Yeouido. The people who had been pulled into that shadow from the shelters and facilities near the Rift Management Bureau must have seen and heard things that no one else did. The team never told Yohan what they had witnessed or what measures the guild had taken afterward, and Yohan didn’t care to ask.

Anyway, since then, everyone had gone out of their way to please them, and Lee Hyunmook had joked, “We should’ve done this from the start.”

Yohan had thought, “No… that’s not something I’d ever want to experience again.”

After that, everything went smoothly. Many videos had surfaced, including the one Park Seungmin had desperately begged them not to release. Public outrage spread, the government faced backlash, and several officials resigned or went to prison. Go Jaewon, Park Seungmin, and the rest disappeared. Only the Taeyang Team knew where they had “escaped” to.

There was another good thing. Captain Jeong Siyoung got promoted. She refused the position of minister, but she accepted the director role at the Rift Management Bureau, making their work much easier. As more purifiers awakened, people began to fear rifts less. The awakeners were no longer oppressed, and the restoration of lost territory began in earnest. Life grew a little better.

The Awakener Association also began operating in full. Things were peaceful now because the Rift Management Bureau and the Department of National Rift Safety had been completely reshuffled, but it wouldn’t last forever. The old corruption couldn’t be allowed to return, and the awakeners couldn’t be allowed to act unchecked either. The Association would serve as a mediator to maintain balance.

While Yohan pondered that, the helicopter reached its target.

“There it is!”

Seo Yakrin shouted excitedly, she looked back for permission, and jump as soon as Lee Hyunmook nodded. A massive golden net spread out and ensnared the long monster climbing up a skyscraper. The others landed on the rooftop one by one with heavy sounds.

“I don’t think all of us needed to come,” Yoon Seungryong muttered lazily while yawning, even as the building groaned and cracked beneath them. In the meantime, Ju Hoyoung burst the rooftop water tank. The water poured out in a torrent and froze solid, supporting the collapsing structure. Below, Lee Chanha protected the civilians who had been hiding in fear.

The monster clinging to the building couldn’t move and only twitched its disgusting filaments. It spurted thick poison, touching it meant instant death.

Before the situation could worsen, lightning struck from Lee Hyunmook’s hand. The first bolt made the creature seize up, and the second charred it completely. A deafening crash followed as its huge body fell. Toxic energy filled the air, and now it was Yohan’s turn.

Radiant light surged from Yohan’s body. It fell down like a waterfall from the rooftop and devoured the poison in the air. The foul stench and dark fluid disappeared, leaving the surroundings pure. The light swept over the place where the monster had been, and something grotesque still remained. Maybe it had once been a caterpillar.

As Yohan trembled at the sight, unable to hide his disgust toward insects even after purification, a gentle hand pulled him close. A warm voice praised him.

“You did well, Yohan.”

When he lifted his head, his lover, Lee Hyunmook, was smiling softly. Feeling proud, Yohan looked down again. The place that had once been a rift zone looked clean. The rift zone and the corrupted were slowly becoming purified.

It would take time, but one day the Abyss would disappear completely. That thought alone gave great comfort and strength to those who had barely survived that living hell. Knowing that the Abyss was starving and fading little by little made Yohan feel joy every time he purified it.

“I’ve been thinking,” Lee Hyunmook murmured as he watched his radiant lover.

“What were you thinking?” Yohan tilted his head.

Lee Hyunmook’s gaze deepened. Shadows covered part of his face, but it wasn’t enough to hide his features. His eyes were calm, bright, and beautiful.

“I think following you was the best choice I ever made.”

In the Abysd, and in the dream that felt like an illusion, Yohan had always shone like a lighthouse, guiding Lee Hyunmook and saving him every single time. That precious light that had appeared before him in the depths.

“My Yangyang.”

“…What?”

“You’re my Yangyang.”

Yohan blinked in surprise at the sudden use of an affectionate nickname, but before he could answer, Lee Hyunmook kissed him. Then he smiled.

He was happy, just like a human being. 

<END>