“Is my hyung really alive?”
“Those things aren’t evil.”
“You said he was alive. You said he had a long life ahead of him.”
“A god has descended. A god… God has come.”
Whenever Lee Geonwoo tried to storm out of the house, unable to bear it any longer, his grandmother’s fierce grip would seize him and hold him back. You must live, you must survive. Her inarticulate voice repeating the same words over and over made his blood boil with frustration.
She’d always muttered incomprehensible things, but she’d never acted like this before—as if possessed by something. He couldn’t tell if this was also the effect of her awakened ability, or if she’d lost her mind after seeing the ruined world.
But whether it was his grandmother’s problem or the issue of his parents not coming home, neither mattered much to Lee Geonwoo.
‘I have to find hyung.’
He had to go see his hyung. Even if he hadn’t survived, even if he could just see the corpse, he felt like only then could he put his mind at ease.
So he shook off his grandmother’s hand blocking his way. He grabbed a golf club as a makeshift weapon and tried to leave the house, but there was movement ahead of him.
“I should go out.”
“…What?”
“You stay here quietly. In a safe place, safely, alive, you must live….”
Before he could ask anything more, his grandmother opened the front door and stepped out. Lee Geonwoo, snapping to his senses too late, tried to follow and grabbed the door handle, but the knob only rattled—for some reason, it wouldn’t open.
Something heavy and solid seemed to be blocking it from the other side of the door. When he panicked and pounded on the front door, a monster’s cry echoed low from the hallway beyond the wall.
Lee Geonwoo gritted his teeth and turned around to find another way.
It took another day to figure out a way to cross over to the neighboring apartment through the balcony, and it took several more days to escape the apartment building and make his way, hiding and skulking, to the high school his hyung attended.
During that process, he never encountered his grandmother who had left the house first. But once he reached the high school building, anything unrelated to his hyung had long since fallen outside his concern.
However, that non-existent god never sided with Lee Geonwoo, so the timing of his arrival at the high school was inopportune.
The main building he entered was an utter mess. The first floor was eerily quiet, but from the second floor up, it wasn’t. For some reason, he vaguely heard that even the monsters prowling the schoolyard were all rushing to the upper floors.
In that chaos, no one properly answered him even when he called out the name ‘Lee Gojun’ alone. With a body not skilled in combat, he couldn’t charge into a space swarming with monsters in every direction. So he judged that sorting out this situation first was the priority, and hoping to be of some help, he revealed his ability.
Then a male student who appeared to be the leader among the school’s survivors approached and asked him one thing.
“Then can you lock a door with your ability?”
What door?
“The fire door leading to the third floor. We’ll drive all the monsters remaining on the second floor up to the third floor, so you lock it at the right timing.”
There’ll be other survivors on the upper floor too, won’t there? What if hyung is among them? What if hyung, who had been alive and well, gets caught up in that brutal battlefield where the monsters are being pushed to and dies?
“You said you came to find your hyung, right? Shouldn’t you move even a little faster? If you keep hesitating like this, both your hyung and you will just end up crushed to death by monsters.”
The anxiety in one corner of his heart that he’d been desperately suppressing all the way here bubbled up unpleasantly. Like a tightly locked faucet valve opening against his will, what he’d buried deep inside overflowed in an instant and paralyzed his reason.
This can’t happen. Hyung can’t die.
Only that sentence seemed to echo loudly in his head, tearing through it. Obsessive compulsions crushed all other hopes and possibilities, and even his grandmother’s words that Lee Gojun’s life would be long, leaving only itself behind.
When he finally came to his senses belatedly, Lee Geonwoo had already used his locking ability on the fire door with his own hands. The only contingency plan he’d squeezed out of whatever reason remained was that he’d set the condition for unlocking the door to ‘Lee Gojun.’
‘…Where’s hyung? Where is he?’
I have to find hyung. If hyung isn’t here.
After running back and forth between the first and second floors alone, he went to find that leader, the student council president, again.
“Lee Gojun? Well. I don’t think there’s anyone with that name among our survivors.”
The anxiety didn’t subside. An even greater fear soaked through Lee Geonwoo as if it would devour his entire body.
“You said you came all the way here to find your hyung, right? That’s unfortunate.”
“……”
“Is your hyung that precious to you? If your hyung dies, are you going to follow him in death too?”
Lee Geonwoo’s head snapped up and he stared at the person standing before him with a slight smile. The person, quietly meeting Lee Geonwoo’s eyes, continued slowly.
“Ah, maybe he’s not that precious after all.”
No. Hyung was definitely an incomparably precious and important existence to Lee Geonwoo. So if hyung died, he himself would no longer…
He didn’t want to face anyone anymore. If he continued to be exposed to stimulation from others like this, it felt like the emotions already raging out of control would run even more rampant and destroy him.
He fled from the student council room. Pushing away various gazes and hands that seemed worried about him, passing by those looking at him in bewilderment, he moved to find a narrow space where there were no people.
That’s how he locked himself in the studio inside the broadcasting room. People kept coming to give him bread and water, annoying him with such things, so he even used his ability to lock the door.
‘…If hyung isn’t here.’
If hyung isn’t here, then I too.
Inside the studio, there were no windows, no clock. He couldn’t tell whether hours or days had passed. In the dim space, he slept when he felt like it, and when drowsiness faded, he just blinked blankly, killing time. Nothing came to mind in his dazed head, and his senses grew so dim he couldn’t tell if his body was really dying—he didn’t even feel physiological thirst.
So when the door miraculously opened and his desperately wished-for hyung appeared, he couldn’t react immediately. He just stared with his mouth open, and his hyung, whom he was seeing after such a long time, swallowed his tears and approached to pull him into an embrace.
Only then did it feel like something went click and released.
‘…What on earth have I been doing?’
Had he really tried to die? Of course, a world without hyung would be no different from hell, but to give up and resign himself without even attempting to find hyung just because one path to the third floor was blocked?
However, that bitter question faded, pushed aside by the relief and upset at meeting his hyung alive with all his limbs intact, and by the bizarre cult-like thing his hyung had fallen into.
Church of Hayoung. Hyung spouted the absurd claim that he would newly establish a religious order with even that cult-like name. He was even desperately eager to serve and uphold not some real god or a figure from legends, but Kim Hayoung, a person right there close by.
Since hyung had believed and followed their grandmother’s words like gospel since childhood, he’d worried with some resignation that something like this might happen someday. But he never expected hyung would step forward to create a cult religion himself.
Doubt became anger, and that anger soon became disgust.
‘You’re going to suck out his valuable ability without even properly providing hyung with food?’
Right now, even the healers who had established their power in the school auditorium were receiving overflowing treatment. They would accept any fellow healers, so if hyung went there, he could greatly increase his chances of survival, but Lee Gojun even followed those who were being driven out of the main building.
They were people who would just suck hyung dry and cast him aside anytime. Especially that Kim Hayoung bastard, who didn’t hide his annoyance at hyung’s words and actions and let it show plainly, was even more so.
‘Crafty bastard.’
A cunning person who stood there alone with a face pretending to know nothing, with eyes claiming he desired nothing, stepping back.
So when hyung said he should briefly check the auditorium while Kim Hayoung went to the main building, he thought it was an opportunity. He thought it wouldn’t be bad for hyung to belong to the healers’ faction this time. Although that student council president bastard was unpleasant, the healers in the auditorium were surviving as clearly separate affiliations from them.
He followed hyung, intending to persuade and push through somehow. And then the incident broke out.
What had started as just complaints and resentment toward the healers asserting their turf swelled into violent protests. Then a survivor who couldn’t bear it anymore indiscriminately threw whatever object he could grab, and that object shattering the huge glass window in the auditorium wall became the trigger that drove things toward a climax.
Attention was drawn and monsters began gathering toward the auditorium, and the terrified survivors cried out in chaos, drawing even more of the monsters’ attention. A vicious cycle repeating.
Even in his shock, he forcibly dragged hyung who said he had to go to Kim Hayoung and looked for an escape. Then he discovered a small door at the back of the auditorium where several survivors were slipping out and hurriedly headed there.
He pushed hyung into the hallway first and crossed that threshold. But because of another survivor who roughly shoved him aside and ran away, Lee Geonwoo staggered greatly and fell forward onto the cold floor.
The accident didn’t end there. Whether he’d bumped into it wrong while falling, plastic boxes stacked by the door toppled down onto Lee Geonwoo with a clatter. The sensation of those unrefined sharp corners tearing through his lower leg’s pant leg and slicing his skin was devastatingly vivid.
“Geonwoo-ya!”
Lee Gojun, startled, fumbled to push away the plastic boxes. Then with gathered strength, he lifted Lee Geonwoo and supported him.
‘We don’t have time for this.’
Behind them and ahead of them were swarms of monsters. Before drawing even more attention, they had to go farther, to a safer place and hide.
But after taking a few steps leaning on his hyung, Lee Geonwoo could only collapse exhausted.
