Chapter 54: The Ticking Doomsday Clock

[Translator – Aren]

The Supreme Archmages had already experienced psychic attacks before.

Thanks to the Teratoma, those grotesque masses of flesh that mimicked crying babies, we reacted quickly this time. And besides, these weren't the cries of newborns. They sounded like the cheerful laughter of children old enough to run around and play. That made it much easier to steel our hearts.

Some people might smile warmly at the sound of children laughing, but I, Baek Jemin, had spent years living in a downstairs apartment. I’d endured kids stomping around upstairs until 2 in the morning, laughing and screaming the whole time.

Hearing children play wasn’t something that filled me with warmth. I was a man whose heart had been forged in the fires of upstairs neighbors.

Still, unlike me, Shin Nain, and Lee Sejun, who had already dealt with the Teratoma, the pastor and Hamza couldn’t help but waver. There were some things that no amount of self-reassurance can overcome.

Even so, the pastor brushed the dew collecting on his gas mask with one hand and said,

"Satan always slips into the weakest part of a person's heart. He tempts us to abandon the mission the Lord has entrusted to us. Baek Jemin, don’t worry. I can tell the difference between a demon’s tricks and someone genuinely crying out for help.”

"It’s dangerous. We can’t go near it.”

Hamza waved his right hand emphatically in warning, yet his eyes remained fixed on Olympic Park, where the fog had begun to thin.

4 months without proper sunlight had left the trees withered and skeletal. The grass was soaked through with moisture. Between them lay a small plaza paved with stone tiles.

We all understood the reality.

There was no way children could still be happily playing in the ruins of Seoul.

That much was obvious.

Which only made it more unsettling. To our left the road vanished into dense fog with visibility of less than 10 meters. To our right, the park lay beneath much thinner fog, where visibility stretched close to 100 meters, and children’s laughter echoed through the dead trees.

The problem was that tiny, almost impossible possibility.

What if there really were children?

Seeing the pastor and Hamza wrestling with that thought, I snapped my fingers to get their attention. Half-baked humanitarianism only got people killed. It sounded noble, but in a world where death might not even be the end, it was the kind of stupidity that would wipe all of us out.

You had to know the difference between what you could do and what you couldn’t.

The Supreme Archmages were excellent at killing monsters. Saving people, not so much.

"We’re not a rescue team. Let’s keep moving. We’re not getting across the Han River while dragging a kid with us.”

"If there really is a kid over there, we could just make a detour and go back.”

"To where?”

"Seongnam.”

That single answer revealed everything the pastor was thinking. He couldn’t bear the thought of leaving even one lost lamb behind.

We’d fought our way all the way here through hell. If we turned back, broke through the monster hordes massed near the front, identified ourselves to the Korean military while they were indiscriminately mowing everything down, and returned home, only to report that we’d abandoned our mission to rescue one mysterious child, what a spectacular rescue operation that would be.

We still hadn’t uncovered the truth about magic. We still didn’t know what the fog really was or why it existed. We still hadn’t learned where the monsters had come from.

We hadn’t even managed to make contact with Go Ryeoha, the friendly survivor group we’d come all this way to find.

Of course, I still glanced around, worried that some soft-hearted members of Aphorism would harp on about saving lives, but thankfully, everyone else seems to be thinking the same thing I was. They all looked at the pastor with flat, unimpressed expressions.

That’s the Supreme Archmages for you.

More importantly, even the fanatic, Shin Nain, was on my side.

"Pastor. It’s true these children have been given an opportunity to repent. But fundamentally, there’s a high chance they’re children of unbelievers. If they were churchgoers, that would be one thing. But we, as warriors of the Lord, cannot risk ourselves for children whose faith is uncertain.”

"Hmm…that’s a fair point. Haah. Still, children are the ones most likely to accept the Gospel…"

Shin Nain’s reasoning was complete nonsense, but since it led to the outcome I wanted, maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.

Lee Sejun seemed to recall his own encounter with the Teratoma. As a member of the Alteration-type trio who understood the dangers of psychic attacks better than anyone, he simply breathed sharply inside his gas mask. He didn't even have the composure to speak.

The pastor glanced around at the other Supreme Archmages, perhaps hoping someone would support him, but no one did.

We were prepared to march into hell itself, but none of us intended to turn back just to save a single pitiful life.

Even so, the pastor stubbornly refused to give up. Eventually, he offered a compromise.

"We won’t go out of our way to rescue anyone, but if we can save them, we do. At the very least, we can hand them over to another survivor group. That’s acceptable, isn’t it?”

"Haah~."

I let out a long, resigned sigh. The pastor raised an eyebrow behind his gas mask.

"Listen here. No matter how difficult the times, you must never lose your faith. Anyway, that’s what we’ll do. Let’s move.”

And so, our strange journey continued.

Olympic Park was much larger than we'd imagined. Walking for 10 minutes wasn’t nearly enough to reach the end of it. The wide road we were following formed such a distinct border that the whole place felt even more surreal.

The rows of trees planted along the center road, as if serving as a divider, had suffocated long ago beneath 4 months of fog.

To the left of the road, where the fog thickened abruptly, stood apartment complexes and buildings swallowed by white. 

To the right, where the thinner fog allowed us to see farther, lay the park itself. The trees were soaked, mold-covered, and rotting. The grass had long since withered.

Every so often we caught faint glimpses of decorative pillars or sculptures standing within the park. Whenever we did, we instinctively stopped to look.

Some of those sculptures and columns were so bizarre that they were completely beyond my artistic sensibilities. I guess people in Seoul really did have a thing for weird stuff.

Maybe they’d unexpectedly even enjoy being monsters or something.

Just as that ridiculous thought crossed my mind, a surprisingly solid obstacle blocked our path. Abandoned vehicles were piled together in a dense mass right where the thick fog from the left drifted lazily into the thinner fog on the right.

Streetlights and collapsed chunks of buildings had become tangled together.

Lee Sejun slowly surveyed the scene before speaking.

"They probably tried to escape when the threshold breakthrough happened. And the collapsed buildings…The Korean military probably brought those down.”

Even a 6 or 7-story building would basically turn into a natural disaster on the level of a typhoon if it snapped at the base and fell across a road.

Looking at the shattered windows and the mangled skeleton of the building, I couldn't help feeling strange. An entire building had toppled across the street. It painted a vivid picture of the utter chaos Seoul must have descended into back on January 6th.

The pastor quietly offered a brief prayer while surveying the blocked roadway. Then he turned toward the park on our right.

"For the time being we’ll have to be careful whenever we enter buildings along the road. They may have planted explosives to block these roads and simply failed to detonate them. At this point, heading back into the dense fog and cutting through the alleys isn’t a great option. Let’s circle around to the right and scout the park while we’re at it.”

The pastor’s true intentions were completely obvious.

He wanted to use this opportunity to investigate the source of the children’s laughter, and if there really were children, he intended to rescue them. It was an obvious and rather flimsy excuse, but…

"Let’s do that."

I, Baek Jemin, was the first to nod.

"We’ll go with the pastor’s plan."

Next, Shin Nain adjusted his headset and narrowed his eyes as he looked up.

"We need to be careful. It’s dangerous."

Hamza looked around with a pale face as he warned us.

"Since we’re moving into an open area, we need to maintain a sharp lookout. We should adjust our formation slightly. I’ll cover the right flank. Jemin-ssi, you take point. Nain-ssi, watch the rear. The most exposed positions are the most dangerous.”

Lee Sejun proposed the change with a serious look in his eyes.

Coming from the guy who was always rambling about wanting to become a TS anime girl, it was surprisingly sensible. Everyone agreed.

And so our detour began. 

Instead of forcing our way through the road clogged with abandoned cars and collapsed buildings, we entered Olympic Park itself.

The moment my combat boots stepped onto the damp, rotting grass, the cheerful laughter of children echoed inside my head.

-Ahahahahahaha......

Apparently, everyone heard it.

The expressions in our eyes all changed in various ways.

One carried guilt. Another, hatred. And yet another, disgust. Some held fear. As for me, Baek Jemin, I couldn’t hide my morbid curiosity as we passed beneath the park’s rows of trees.

We didn’t need to go this far in. A slight detour around the edge would’ve been enough, yet we deliberately kept walking deeper.

That’s the Supreme Archmages for you.

We wouldn’t go out of our way to rescue people, but if we discovered someone while gathering information, we were more than willing to hand them over to another survivor group. Warm-hearted people, every last one of us.

Then, we were greeted by a sight that simply shouldn’t have existed beneath the hundreds of meters of fog blanketing Seoul.

A patch of grass, almost completely free of fog.

The trees were withered, yet dew rolled across their leaves as they swayed gently in the breeze. The grass had long since lost its vitality, yet it still stood upright as though preparing to grow again. Bathed in faint sunlight, children played together, facing one another with their arms outstretched like scarecrows.

As though cherishing the sunlight they’d been reunited with, they basked in its warmth.

-Hehehehehe...

If you saw a child happily bouncing around with both arms spread wide, if you saw this little sunlit meadow, you’d believe it was a miracle.

In the middle of such an absurd catastrophe, it looked exactly like the kind of miracle that was supposed to appear.

But we were wizards.

We understood that opposing absurdity wasn’t some natural law of cause and effect. It was merely another absurdity. In the end, the only person beneath the heavens who truly looked out for you was yourself. I wasn’t going to rely on miracles or wishful thinking. I’d face the reality before my eyes.

Alteration-type, Eyes-branch, Stage 1. 10-second foresight.

My eyes become bloodshot. Then a rough sensation spread across my eyeballs, like coarse plastic scraping against them. It felt as though my eyelids were blinking directly against my brain, making an unpleasant feeling spread throughout my mind.

In exchange for that price, I saw red footprints. They weren’t moving, remaining fixed in place.

It was as if they were nailed directly beneath the laughing children.

—They were monsters.

The instant I realized that, my normal vision and my magical sight split apart.

An ordinary human eye couldn’t find anything wrong about this scene. The children hopping in place felt slightly unnatural, but that was all.

This was a palace touched by sunlight, a sanctuary, in the heart of Seoul.

My magical sight showed something entirely different.

The trees were dead. The leaves had been replaced by swollen human lungs. Though, could you still call them human lungs when they had burst free from the human body and were independently inflating and deflating on their own?

Pieces of human lungs hung from the dead branches where leaves should have been.

Every time the lungs inhaled, they swelled like balloons, drawing the surrounding fog into themselves. The things anchoring those lungs to the dead trees appeared to be thick, blunt tendrils that had once been tracheas.

Like parasitic vines, those tracheas and tiny capillaries had rooted themselves throughout the dead trees, holding the lung-leaves firmly to every branch. 

And the children…the children were…

"Uwaagh…”

Have you ever seen children in famine-stricken countries?

So emaciated their bones seemed ready to tear through their skin, yet their stomachs bulge grotesquely outward. Those children looked like that. Their arms and legs had melted away, their bodies connected by blood vessels to the lung leaves rooted in the trees as they writhed across the grass helplessly.

Their skin had shriveled so badly that you couldn’t even tell whether they were boys or girls. Their eyes had sunken deep into their sockets. Their cheekbones jutted sharply beneath taut skin. And yet, the voices coming from between those cracked lips still carried the soft innocence of little kids.

Those swollen bellies weren’t normal either.

Running down the center of each abdomen was a gigantic mouth, its rows of teeth interlocking like a zipper. Between those teeth, their organs writhed outside their bodies, breathing.

Quire literally. Like sea sponges riddled with countless pores, those masses or organs fluttered in the open air, inhaling. Every time the tendrils of viscera growing from the children’s stomachs breathed, they swayed in the wind instead of seawater, drawing the surrounding fog into themselves, forcing it deeper and deeper into the children’s bodies.

Their stomachs swelled as though they might burst at any moment, yet somehow, they never did.

But the most horrifying part was what my instincts were telling me.

"Sob, sob.”

"Ugh. Agh.”

They weren’t even crying for their mothers or fathers. They were too busy choking out agonized sobs and broken whimpers.

Every being here was unquestionably 100% a monster.

And yet those voices weren’t. My instincts screamed that they weren’t fake. That this wasn’t some monster mimicking children. Those cries were genuinely human. Call it spiritual intuition if you wanted. Whatever it was, it was unnervingly accurate.

The sound of someone retching came from behind me.

The pastor was muttering something, his voice trembling with emotion. Hamza was coughing violently. Lee Sejun struggled just to catch his breath.

Then someone raised their rifle.

-Click.

I turned toward the metallic sound. It was Shin Nain.

His eyes were cold but unwavering. He leveled his rifle at the children and pulled the trigger without hesitation. Again and again. I lost count of how many shots he fired.

While the rest of the Supreme Archmages still stood frozen in shock, only Shin Nain aimed squarely at the heads of those tadpole-bellied children with the organ tendrils growing from them. Spent shell casings landed in the soaked grass with wet splats.

Each burst of gunfire, each flash from the muzzle, made another child’s crying fall silent.

Even then, he wasn't finished. He turned his rifle on the grotesquely swollen stomachs of the children who had already become monsters pouring round after round into them. He even changed magazines. Not a single one of the Supreme Archmages tried to stop him.

-Bang, babang. Bang…

At last only the acrid smell of gunpowder remained.

As the swollen bellies burst apart under the bullets, fog began pouring back out of them. Watching the mist rapidly thicken around us, we finally understood this creature’s purpose.

Fog collection.

The lung-leaves twitched uselessly, trying to inflate one last time before bursting apart. All that remained before us were the corpses of child monsters leaking fog into the air.

Silence fell over everyone. Only Shin Nain calmly inspected his rifle, adjusted his stance, and turned back toward us.

"May those children be able to knock upon Heaven’s gate. Amen!”

No one could find the words to respond. I was the only one who walked over to him and patted him on the shoulder.

"You did good. Let’s go.”

*t*t*

April 18th, 208, 12:23 PM.

Our Supreme Archmages encountered an unidentified species in Olympic Park tentatively dubbed ‘Tadpole Belly.'

We concluded it was a parasitic-type monster whose purpose was to collect fog and that it had either taken on the appearance of young children or had been born from children who had mutated so that wizards and other humans would hesitate to kill it.

We decided not to determine whether the crying belonged to the monster or the children.

It was the pastor, after a long silence, who finally summed up our assessment.

"What a goddamned nightmare of a place.”

Not all of the fog had returned.

Olympic Park still lay beneath a thin mist, with visibility stretching between 100 and 200 meters. Only the area we had passed through had filled with fog again.

Even that fog was being torn apart and carried away somewhere else.

We chose not to dwell on what that meant.

There was no way the Korean Army didn’t know about those monsters. If they’d already discovered them during reconnaissance and still left them alone, perhaps it was because the creatures conveniently got rid of that troublesome fog for them.

And what we’d mistaken for sunlight…

"The pale yellow gaze."

Shin Nain whispered the words toward us.

"Anyone without Holy Alteration Battle Arts would mistake that gaze for sunlight and be lured to it. Those children probably did too.”

"...We’ll share information later. From now, let’s aim to even get one step closer to the Han River.”

"Yes."

Shin Nain had a knack for becoming reliable at the strangest times.

We decided to postpone discussing our theories until everyone had recovered from the shock and until we’d gotten as close to the Han River as possible.

Even so, my mouth had begun to feel dry.

Without even realizing it, we might have been walking toward an even more horrifying end.