The gaze drilling into him from behind felt vivid enough to be physical contact. It was possible he was only imagining it on his end.
An inexplicable awkwardness welled up, and he opened and closed his hand several times in a row. The same hand that had been held by him just moments before.
With each step forward, Hae-il checked the wavelength flowing through his body, gathering his ability and building it up steadily.
The sensation of the wavelength moving through the inside of his hand was sharp and clear. His condition was better than it had any right to be, thanks to the guiding. Good enough that he could feel confident he could manage whatever the Gate wall’s thickness turned out to be.
Reaching the wall, Hae-il took a short deep breath and turned around. The moment he turned his head, he met Moon Woo-shin’s eyes directly.
“…….”
He was much closer than expected. It felt like the words he’d been about to say lodged in his throat all at once.
Hae-il quietly avoided his gaze and held his silence for a moment — and Moon Woo-shin tilted his head slightly to the side, voicing his question without words.
After opening and closing his mouth a few times, Hae-il finally managed to speak.
“……Stay behind me.”
“Alright.”
Hae-il straightened his posture and let the wall fill his field of vision naturally.
He ran his hands over themselves again, took another deep breath to steady himself — and only then pulled his ability toward him without hesitation.
Condensing water at high density and launching it at speed could generate considerable force. With enough technique, it could be used far more sharply and powerfully than any weapon.
And Hae-il was quite good at it.
He raised a shield in front of his body first, in preparation for anything unexpected, then concentrated his ability beyond it.
From defense to offense took less than a full second.
A thick column of water materialized in the air and slammed into the wall with a ferocious sound. Against an ordinary wall, it would have torn straight through to the other side in one hit.
He’d expected not to break through in a single attempt, of course. But.
What is this?
The moment his ability made contact with the edge of the Gate, something felt off. The wall he’d expected to be solid had a softer, more yielding texture than anticipated.
Regardless of the material, Hae-il’s ability still delivered its full force. Within seconds, cracks began to split across the previously smooth wall.
He poured more aggressive attacks into the gaps. The water that bounced back off the wall was cleanly absorbed by the shield he had raised in front.
Just as he thought he’d torn about halfway through the thick wall —
“Hold on.”
Moon Woo-shin, standing behind him, placed a hand on Hae-il’s shoulder. Hae-il stopped his attack immediately, lowering the shield to clear his line of sight.
It wasn’t because of Moon Woo-shin. He had felt and noticed the same thing himself.
The ground beneath their feet was vibrating as if an earthquake had struck.
The wall was shaking too. And from the cracks he’d forced open, a purple liquid was seeping down. The way it mixed with water and slid across the floor felt strangely familiar.
“That looks… like blood, doesn’t it?”
The sound of it dripping and pooling on the ground. The unusually thick, viscous consistency. And the purple color.
The hallmarks of a monster’s blood.
“I think so too.”
The hand Moon Woo-shin had on his shoulder tightened its grip.
Hae-il immediately raised the shield again. He extended it far back to cover Moon Woo-shin as well, then layered it over their heads and beneath their feet.
Only after sealing every direction carefully did he turn around to meet the grave expression facing him.
“Were the monsters hiding inside that wall? Is there anything you can sense?”
“If they’d been hiding this close, I would have known before you broke through the wall.”
“Then — does that mean the monsters in this Gate aren’t sentient?”
“You know as well as I do that monsters with zero intelligence don’t exist. Not even plant-types.”
“It’s a special Gate, so you never know.”
Moon Woo-shin shook his head, started to speak, then looked past Hae-il toward the wall behind him. Hae-il turned quickly. The change in the wall was immediately visible.
The purple liquid that had been flowing down through the cracks he’d torn had already thickened and hardened, clinging messily to the surrounding surface. And the splits he had worked so hard to force open… were slowly sealing back together. Slowly, but fast enough to register the moment he looked.
The sight triggered a sense of déjà vu. It was a scene he’d seen countless times while clearing Gates.
“I thought I was imagining it.”
Moon Woo-shin spoke quietly from behind him. Hae-il turned to face him again with a dumbfounded look.
“There’s been one individual I’ve been sensing faintly, this whole time. When something comes through this faintly from outside my ability range, it’s usually just my imagination, so I didn’t say anything.”
“…Are you still sensing it now?”
“Yes.”
Hearing that, a small detail he’d brushed off came back to him.
“Last night, when I was anchoring the shield — I drove it into the ground too. Right before the waves hit. The ground shook then too. I thought it was just the waves, but that was also….”
“That was probably the ground reacting too.”
“So this is….”
A wall that wasn’t entirely solid. It reacted and moved when attacked. It bled purple when cut. It healed at a speed visibly fast enough to confirm with the naked eye. The liquid inside swept away everything that came from outside. And there was exactly one living entity Moon Woo-shin could detect.
If you just slightly inverted the common assumption that there were monsters inside a Gate, there was one thing that could be inferred from every lead they’d gathered so far.
“Are we inside a monster’s body right now?”
“Most likely.”
The Gate itself was a single enormous monster.
“Even for a special Gate, what kind of Gate is this even….”
Come to think of it, the fall after being pulled into the Gate in the first place had been far too long to be normal. And that had been getting swallowed by a monster. No wonder it was pitch black both during the fall and after landing.
The biggest thing that came crashing in after the realization wasn’t relief, or revulsion, or shock — it was the sheer bleakness of figuring out what to do next.
“What do we do now?”
“We get out. By killing the monster.”
“How do you kill it from inside its body? Do we just tear our way out?”
“If we can manage that, it would certainly be the fastest.”
Depending on the type of monster, there were those whose outer hide was too dense to penetrate. Though cutting from the inside outward might make a difference.
And it was possible that simply cutting through wouldn’t be enough to exit the Gate. Since the clearing condition for most Gates was the death of all monsters inside, there was a high chance that with this Gate too, they’d need to kill the monster completely — not just tear through its body.
To instantly kill a monster by splitting its abdomen or back rather than its head, they’d have to cut deep and wide. Definitively.
Having never encountered even a remotely similar situation, it was difficult to be confident about anything.
While Hae-il was combing through his memories of every monster he’d faced up until now, Moon Woo-shin grabbed his arm to get his attention.
“What’s certain is, whatever we do, we need to do it fast.”
“Why?”
“If our assumption is right, those waves of liquid are the monster’s immune system and digestive fluid working in tandem. They’ll come again soon. We attacked hard enough to draw blood from something inside its body — it’ll want to clean that up.”
He genuinely did not want to build that shield again and wait inside it for hours until the liquid had all passed.
Setting aside having to wait for hours more — he wasn’t confident he could calmly endure the guiding that would inevitably continue the entire time they were trapped like that.
“Can you control this monster?”
“Its head is too far away. I can’t.”
“Then I’ll just keep breaking through for now.”
