Our destination was a low mountain on the border between Chungcheong-do and Gyeonggi-do, about two hours away.

On the land register, it was probably listed as something like “Mountain lot number so-and-so.”

To the naked eye, it looked like a mountain.

Even when sending a drone to check, same thing.

Nothing stood out.

But anyone with a sharp eye would notice the unpaved road cutting between the hills.

“Han Ji-hyo.”

The one who knew about this hidden spot was none other than Defender.

“One of the Jeju Committee members. She never put herself in the spotlight, never showed much ambition for position, so she stayed in the background—but when it came to greed, she could go toe-to-toe with Kim So-uk. She siphoned off more supplies than anyone.”

A vehicle waited in the rear.

Rebecca and her daughter, plus Sue’s boyfriend and his friends.

I had told them they didn’t have to come, but Rebecca insisted on tagging along, and Sue ended up coming too.

Once Sue came, her boyfriend followed, and once the boyfriend came, his buddies came tagging along in a row.

Technically they were still teenagers, but they all knew how to handle guns, and some could even speak Korean, so they could be of use in an emergency—though honestly, they were just baggage.

Rebecca and Sue already felt like baggage; the others even more so.

“Wait here for a bit.”

I left Rebecca’s group in a safe spot and turned toward the mountain.

It was covered in white snow, but here and there I could see it.

The cancer-like protrusions of erosion energy.

“You don’t know what Han Ji-hyo looks like, right?”

Defender showed me a picture of the woman on his phone.

Late twenties, a gloomy face behind glasses, her head and shoulders hunched.

The picture screamed a woman lacking confidence, but you can’t judge people by appearances alone.

“She had one hell of a temper. Yeah. Even I was surprised. I never thought she’d go this far.”

Han Ji-hyo had proudly placed herself in the upper ranks of the hit list that Jeon Si-hoon had provided.

Before launching his coup, Defender had gone on a hunt for Jeju Committee members who had fled the island.

Han Ji-hyo, who’d escaped to Chungcheong-do, was easy prey.

One of her subordinates revealed the location of her hideout—and that it contained a significant stockpile of supplies.

What began as a semi-religious fanatic group had, at some point, turned into a den of vicious wolves. The Skull Brigade licked their chops and raided Han Ji-hyo’s lair.

Han Ji-hyo had family and a few mercenaries she’d bought with promises of money and profit, but they were no match for the Skull Brigade.

Under a cruel but methodical assault, her soldiers fell one by one, and even her relatives took casualties. That’s when Han Ji-hyo played her trump card.

Capsules.

“She’d been stockpiling dozens of capsules. The moment I saw them, I went ‘Ah.’”

Defender smirked bitterly.

“She’d known it would come to this.”

They say Han Ji-hyo burst into maniacal laughter and blew herself up among the capsules.

The rest was obvious.

The Skull Brigade turned tail and never came near here again.

When a death trap is packed full of small-class monsters, no amount of treasure inside matters.

Life comes before money.

It’s something people tend to forget, but you have to be alive to enjoy all the conveniences of civilization—money, goods, whatever.

And yet, here I was.

Defender had told me that even for him, this was impossible, but he didn’t know my secret.

“Well, let’s go then.”

What I worried about was today’s workload.

I’d have to roll at least twenty 20kg propane tanks.

It was going to wear me out.

Just as I was about to take the bike toward the hidden storage, an unexpected companion appeared.

Sue’s boyfriend.

He glanced at me, almost challengingly, and said:

“You Skeleton?”

Awkward Korean.

I nodded.

I could guess why he’d come.

“I go too.”

I smirked and nodded.

Everyone goes through that phase.

The phase where you want to look like the coolest, most impressive man in front of your girlfriend.

I’d never had such a phase myself, and never would, but ⊛ Nоvеlιght ⊛ (Read the full story) I wasn’t going to stop him.

He’d be back soon enough.

“Oooh...”

Just beyond the huge open door in the mountains, I could already see four monsters.

They weren’t moving, as if dead, but the underlings scurrying beneath them told me they’d already noticed human presence.

I looked at Michael’s face, pale as death, and said calmly:

“Treat Sue well.”

Whether he understood me or not, I couldn’t tell.

“Thanks! Thanks!”

He shouted something completely out of context and bolted.

A wise choice.

If he’d dug his heels in here, it would’ve come to blows.

Sue might scold him, but in the face of obvious death, there’s no clever alternative to a good beating.

Once Michael was gone, the restless underlings quieted down.

“...”

They couldn’t see me.

Within the dark shroud gifted by another victim of Kang Han-min’s making, I walked forward slowly, silently.

“Hoo...”

I normally keep my mouth shut during a fight, but even I had to admit—this was unusual.

Thirty small-class monsters?

It was like a monster boarding house.

I remembered Han Ji-hyo as just a minor figure who’d briefly appeared in a Jeju Committee comic Filkrum had drawn, but she must’ve been a real piece of work.

What on earth was she thinking, hoarding that many capsules, and then blowing herself up right in the middle of them?

I personally hate “explosion endings,” but for sheer dramatic effect, hers was top-tier.

And there’d been a personal reason for it.

I learned that only after passing through the monster boarding house and into the living quarters, separated by a partition wall.

Bodies lay neatly arranged.

They hadn’t died in battle, or in the blast.

These deaths had come much later, after Han Ji-hyo turned the area into a monster field.

A young boy, an elderly couple, and two men about her age.

Most showed no injuries except for the mummification from time, but the last, lying facedown alone, had a bullet wound to the temple.

The people Han Ji-hyo had wanted to protect.

For all she’d slaughtered others and their families like a rabid beast, her own family had been precious to her.

No one at the Jeju Committee’s high-class table would’ve guessed that her family’s fate was a joint suicide.

The storage was beyond her dead family.

“...”

Nature wins again.

The storage had been looted.

More precisely, the food section had been looted.

There was a gap in the concrete, with traces of wild animals passing through.

Whether mutated or not, I couldn’t tell, but most of Han Ji-hyo’s hoarded food had been stolen or left to rot.

Fortunately, some ammunition and today’s prize—the propane gas—were still there in decent quantity.

LPG.

I’d already talked before about the pros and cons of LPG, but the biggest danger is its explosiveness.

In her position, Han Ji-hyo could have easily obtained widely distributed synthetic fuel, but that has a short storage life, so she’d opted to stockpile LPG.

Ironically, Defender had found her hideout in the process of investigating a report of a large LPG shipment.

Creak—

I rolled one of the tanks.

It was full.

I felt a pang of disappointment, then brushed it aside and kept rolling.

*

Back-breaking repetitive labor, sneaking between monsters on tiptoe, a hapless underling crushed under a gas tank, a confused comrade, and one unlucky monster hunted at the end to fill my stomach.

The interlude ended, unexpectedly, with a small explosion.

“Skeleton!”

“Skeleton, you okay?”

Rebecca and Sue greeted me.

Much about them had changed over time, but the way they sincerely worried about me and showed emotion—that hadn’t changed.

They might have changed, but they hadn’t.

It was just our way of seeing this world, our thoughts, that had changed.

“Here. Now you can go home.”

I smiled and told my first neighbor.

Rebecca and Sue looked at me in silence.

Countless emotions flickered in their eyes, but it wasn’t only their emotions mixing—mine were too.

Was it right to part with them?

Was it right to send them to the deadly U.S.?

It wasn’t my decision.

It was theirs.

As I’d expected, the propane gas—the LPG—had just been an excuse for the minority who wanted to stay in Korea.

Even after receiving the gas, they decided to keep using their synthetic-fuel-powered engines.

Whatever debates the U.S. military had internally, whatever clashes between the return faction and those wanting to remain, none of that was my concern.

What mattered was that the gas I’d brought tipped the scales completely toward the return faction, and the U.S. troops remaining in Korea had decided their fate: they would return to America.

Unfortunately, their “emergency flight” wouldn’t happen right away.

Moving 300 people takes time.

They had to load supplies onto a half-assembled airship, and most of all, wait for the wind.

The wind that would carry them from the Far East, Korea, to their distant North American home.

“Skeleton.”

Before I left Rebecca’s house, Sue called to me.

She had something to say.

She’d grown a lot, but in my eyes, she was still the admirable girl who had braved the dark to reach my bunker for her sick mother.

“We’re going to America now.”

“I know.”

I smiled.

Sue suddenly made a determined face and looked up at me.

“Skeleton, can’t you come too?”

“Me?” 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

“You don’t have a wife or family, right? Why not come with us?”

“Well, that’s...”

“Dad’s... probably dead. Honestly, he’s been dead a long time, but Mom just wouldn’t give up. Now... now she has.”

That was something I’d never discussed with Rebecca.

I hadn’t thought there was any need.

It was one of those topics everyone knew but left unspoken.

“When you get old, I’ll hunt and take care of you.”

Looking at Sue’s earnest but absurd offer, I felt both urgency and another emotion.

Unease.

I lightly patted her head.

It might be improper to pat the head of a young woman who’d grown into a proper lady, but some things are universal.

She allowed it quietly.

When I withdrew my hand, I said:

“The world might get worse from here. Where you’re going could be worse than here. But that doesn’t mean you have to fear everything.”

I thought back to Rebecca when we first met.

Why had she been so quick to shoot at everything?

“Everyone lives with fear. Me too.”

“Even you, Skeleton?”

“Yeah. Who could be more scared than me?”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Even someone as juicy as you?”

So to her, I’d been a “juicy” person.

I smiled faintly.

“Everyone feels fear. Maybe even monsters.”

“Monsters too?”

“Sure. It depends on the species, but yeah. And yet, everyone keeps living.”

Then I saw it—a winged creature flying far away.

A magpie? Or something I didn’t know.

“Every bird leaves the nest. Every bird that flies has overcome its fear.”

“In what sense?”

“Because the first time they leave the nest, they flap their wings despite the fear of falling to the dangerous ground.”

“Hm. I get it.”

“Not exactly a juicy story, but it’s the kind of story everyone goes through.”

Sue nodded.

“Are you comparing it to our journey?”

“Maybe. The important thing is—”

I watched the nameless bird disappear into the distance, choosing my words.

I don’t have a creed, but thinking about it, there’s one philosophy I live by daily.

I said softly to the girl who’d grown and would soon fly away:

“To treasure each day.”

It was advice for myself, too.

I’d practiced it faithfully.

Especially on the forum.

That’s how I became a legendary name—but that’s another story.

One family now prepared for flight.

The girl about to take wing looked at the same twilight sky I did.

“...Okay. I’ll try to live well.”

“Just... no explosion endings.”

“?”

“Kidding.”

I started walking.

“Come on. Your mom and boyfriend are waiting.”

Sue pouted when she saw her boyfriend.

“Lately... he’s just... meh.”

Something soft and cool wrapped around my hand.

Sue’s hand.

She looked at me.

“I think I still like you better.”

I chuckled.

“Treat your boyfriend well. He seems like a good guy.”

Sue’s eyes went wide.

“You think so?”

“Yeah.”

Is this what it feels like to be a dad?

A bit proud, a bit annoyed.

“Skeleton, I’ll message you sometimes!”

Sue went back to her family.

Naturally, within minutes, she and her boyfriend were raising their voices in a light quarrel.

Watching their usual pro wrestling match with a smile, I waved to Rebecca.

Vroooom—

The U.S. military truck pulled out.

Rebecca cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted:

“I’ll send regards!”

I gave her a thumbs-up and turned.

Defender was waiting.

With twilight on his profile, he was staring at the darkening sky.

As I approached, he turned his head.

“How was it?”

“What was?”

“Do you feel relieved?”

“Bittersweet.”

He tilted his head slightly.

“Ah, yeah.”

I nodded.

“Maybe they’re not the only ones preparing to fly.”

Defender smirked.

“Everyone has their own sky.”

I nodded and we mounted our scooters.

The sun was setting.

Time to hurry.

*

A little further in the future—

All 300 soldiers and family members of the U.S. 8th Army, 2nd Infantry Division’s Korea Residual Task Force boarded the airship and made it safely over North America’s California airspace, through all sorts of turbulence and foul weather.

Despite the high risk of an explosion ending, not a single casualty or blast occurred.

It was a miracle—a ray of sunlight in a dying world—that would be talked about on the forum for a long time to come.