It was Gong Gyeong-min’s suggestion to use his hideout as a forward base.

His bunker—minus the unnecessary gaming-grade cooling rigs—was a command-post-level military shelter that nullified virtually any attack; once the blast door closed, you weren’t getting through it with any ordinary tools.

There were, however, a few problems we had to solve to use his bunker as-is.

The biggest obstacle wasn’t monsters or raiders.

It was dealing with the corpses rotting inside the rooms.

Part of me wanted to just set a fire, but if we did that the entire bunker could turn into a raccoon burrow, so we had no choice but to carry the half-rotted bodies out by hand, one by one, together with Gong.

Hauling these putrefying bodies wasn’t just about the slime that clung to your clothes, the stench, or the horrific sight.

Bzzzz—

It was spring, after all.

Even that cold, planetary-scale butcher called the Crack apparently couldn’t do anything about flies.

Countless flies swarmed us, making everything miserable.

There was, at least, one small comfort.

While we carried the bodies, Gong never stopped telling me stories of the past.

Despite having been bedridden on the brink of death for so long, he adapted to his emaciated body with the ease you’d expect from a born first-rate Hunter, and he hauled corpses about as efficiently as I did.

Of course, part of his constant talking was probably to help heal the mental damage.

Better to spit something out than let a lump of feeling fester inside.

Thanks to that, I got a lot of high-quality intel I couldn’t have gotten anywhere else.

“This is something even Min-hee probably doesn’t know. Na Hye-in won’t either. It’s about Kang Han-min. Whenever he used his Authority once, he’d vanish for days. People thought he was resting up to recover from using a power no one else had, but the truth’s different. Kang Han-min—that guy—doesn’t feel fatigue. He could use his Authority 365 days a year and not get tired.”

“Really?”

“When it comes to the Crack, Kang Han-min has no weakness. He doesn’t feel fatigue or fear. After serving at his side, my conclusion was that God sent Kang Han-min down to protect us humans.”

“A Savior, literally.”

Thud—

We dropped a rotting corpse into a pit.

The pit was already packed with flies and maggots, and with guests that had arrived before us.

Gong looked at the body and traced the sign of the cross, Catholic-style.

It wasn’t because he was a believer.

When a teammate died, he paid respects according to whatever faith that teammate held.

Even so, I never saw him bow.

Sure, bowing is a Confucian custom, but how many people in Korea actually claim to “believe” in Confucianism?

Unless you throw on a gat and a scholar’s robe or something.

“But that guy acted like the Crack.”

“Like the Crack?”

“Yeah. Vaguely—he crafted a secretive corner of himself no one could ever see into, and let it show, subtly. At first I wondered why he was like that, but as time went on it became clear: he enjoyed watching people bicker over his secrets.”

Thud—

We set down another body.

Contrary to my expectation, Gong bowed to this one.

“Religion?”

“Muslim. He was from Indonesia.”

“Don’t they only bow to God, over there?”

“I’m not sure. Anyway, he was a good man.”

It seemed the relationship between the deceased and Gong was nothing more or less than coworkers.

Truthfully, Gong is a genial, sociable guy, but he’s hard to get past the “friend” threshold with.

He’s a man who shook hands with death and survived the front lines.

He was bound to have one or two sharp edges in his heart.

“He kept using the internet even after becoming the Savior?”

At my question, Gong nodded.

“You saw it in China. The man was addicted to the community.”

He really was sunk so deep into the community that “community addict” fit.

It wasn’t like he was networking, and unlike me he wasn’t trying to become a Named.

He was that breed of human that lives for community activity itself.

“If you suddenly become Awakened, you can’t just suddenly stop what you’ve always done, right?”

“That makes sense.”

“Well, back then it was still fine.”

Thud—

We tossed the last body into the pit.

It was a woman’s.

Gong bowed his head in Christian silence.

“She was pretty and kind. Died a shameful death.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I can’t say I bear no responsibility.”

Once we’d removed every body, we started cleaning.

We grabbed meals in between.

Maybe because he’d once held the top post over all Hunters, Gong’s bunker had a serious stockpile.

The crown jewel among them was a nuclear warhead.

“Did you get this «N.o.v.e.l.i.g.h.t» from the Chinese army?”

I figured not.

The lettering on the warhead was in Korean.

A blocky, warlike font you rarely see in the South.

“We brought it from North Korea.”

“Yeah?”

“Going to the North with Kang Han-min was to pull these out.”

News I’d never heard.

As I’d expected, Gong knew much more than Woo Min-hee, with whom he got along poorly, or Na Hye-in, who’d been forced into partnership with him and hated him one-sidedly.

“What went off in China was nuclear, too.”

“So we set them off as well.”

“Of course. You pay back what you’re hit with. Bringing down the Three Gorges Dam, and blowing up that nobles-only secret city in Xinjiang—all thanks to North Korean nukes. The launchers were domestic, though.”

The story went back to the past again.

As Savior, Kang Han-min was appropriately amazed and appropriately burdened, and he gradually adapted to his changed life.

What Gong called his “secretive” style seems to have started as nothing more than a personal hobby.

“Know what Kang Han-min liked best?”

“What?”

“Sitting there eating snacks and drinking soda while watching the internet run wild with speculation and debates over some secret breadcrumb he dropped.”

“...Specifically?”

“Mm. Let’s see. What was there... Ah. There was a bracelet he wore without thinking. Back when Beijing fell and the fight went on from Chongqing, he’d cluelessly bought it from a woman practically forcing it on refugees in the packed night streets.”

“What did it look like?”

“Silver, like a chain. And—what’s it called—the thing doctors use. The ornament with two snakes twined around fat, was it.”

“The Staff of Asclepius, I think.”

“Whatever. He bought it under pressure and wore it with zero thought, but the internet gave it meaning. Since Kang Han-min didn’t wear accessories, was him wearing a doctor’s symbol a signal to the world that China lacked medical support? Someone else even said Kang had formed a secret society of the Awakened and that the emblem marked its leader. A famous North American Awakened wore the same thing he did.”

“Interpretation beats the dream.”

“Anyway, Kang watched that very happily—enjoyed it. After that he did more and more things, on purpose, that could be read in multiple ways.”

“...”

For a brief moment I felt that long-held bitter taste.

Call it inferiority. I can admit that now.

I became a mythic Named and did work fit for a mythic Named, and my name was in everyone’s mouths—but the “game” Kang Han-min played during his Savior days was a kind of sport even a mythic Named like me couldn’t have imagined.

So you could play like this, too.

It felt like opening my eyes to a new dimension.

As expected from a senior in internet life who once toyed with Skeleton himself using nothing but bait posts.

“The problem is what came after.”

Unfortunately, the story didn’t continue.

Other work remained.

Cleaning.

Cleaning wasn’t just tidying filthy, reeking rooms.

Eight more people besides Gong had lived here.

Sorting their belongings was also part of cleaning.

The genders of the putrid, suppurating bodies—turned into something like fermented fish—were hard to tell apart, but what the dead had owned in life held distinct personal flavors.

Especially striking was the contrast between those who had arranged everything neatly in advance, with a will enclosed, and those who’d left things as if they’d be back any time to open a cabinet and use them.

They all went into the same coffins with entirely different states of mind.

Looking at one neatly organized cabinet with a will tucked in, Gong said evenly,

“Plenty of us went in ready to die.”

We split the keepsakes into what we could use and what we couldn’t.

It’s true we shared the common goal of removing Kang Han-min, but both Gong and I are realistic people.

We know how impossible killing the entity called Kang Han-min is.

Us crawling into the Crack to kill him is effectively impossible.

A colossal being like Kang can only be targeted if he gives you the chance himself.

“For now, let’s split things into what we can sell and what we can’t. Never know when we’ll need to trade.”

Gong’s bunker had abundant supplies, but not everything.

Food, especially, was short.

There were fancy ingredients in the fridge to cover a few meals, but at best a month’s worth.

That relatively small amount of food dovetailed with the intent behind how Gong built the bunker and with his flat reaction to his comrades’ deaths.

“I wasn’t planning to live long. Call it a slow suicide. I figured if I held out a year, maybe I’d finally let go of life. That was the mindset I went in with. A spoiler got in the way and screwed things up midway, but if you hadn’t shown up, my fate wouldn’t have changed much in the big picture.”

The food is in my bunker.

Even adding up Gong and me, Mark Two, and Jonnaenon III, we could theoretically last over three years without issue.

Whether chewing on brick-hard ration bars that long would actually be survivable, we’d have to see.

But I doubt we’ll need that much food.

A full-scale monster offensive is coming.

Back then I used the word “eruption,” but I can say it clearly now.

An offensive.

I told Gong that a massive concentration of monsters had gathered near the Paju Crack and the offensive was imminent.

“Really?”

He looked dubious.

“Even with the population this low, numbers like you’d see in China’s heartland are converging? That’s not very Crack-like. You know the Crack can’t be analyzed, but at least on the surface it’s chillingly, mechanically consistent.”

“We’ll have to analyze the reason as we go.”

Gong nodded.

He brought up Kang Han-min again as we were nearly done cleaning.

One familiar item among the keepsakes caught our eyes in particular.

[ Savior Kang Han-min ]

A framed, Photoshopped photo of Kang Han-min with his handwritten autograph.

It was dusty, but despite its age the signs of careful upkeep were obvious.

“...Honestly, spending time with Kang right after he became the Savior wasn’t so bad. I had my prejudices, but unlike back in school, the guy must’ve grown up a bit—he had basic social sense and a measure of maturity. Not saying hurtful things or doing hurtful things is a big plus for the people around you.”

Gong admitted that the time he’d been on a team with Kang had been, frankly, good days.

“I’m nothing special, but the reason I climbed that high owed a lot to Kang’s share. Yeah. I feasted on the crumbs. I made decent money and lived as well as anyone. Moving that game company wholesale to Jeju happened because of the clout I’d built then.”

As he reminisced about the good days, Gong’s expression suddenly went cold.

“But once I realized he hadn’t changed from school at all—if anything, he’d gotten worse—everything changed.”

It was when all Korean Hunters were pulling out of China.

The Savior’s return to Korea shook the whole country—loud enough that even I, who had cut myself off from his news, knew.

A lavish welcome was prepared, Gwanghwamun and the boulevard before it reserved for him.

With hundreds of thousands gathered, Kang rode in the same vehicle as Na Hye-in, doing a car parade and soaking up the brightest spotlight of his life.

After the fairy-tale ball of a banquet ended, Gong went to the waiting room first to await a call from the driver.

That was when Kang came in. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

He was wiping off his makeup with a handkerchief; even at a glance, he looked exhausted.

Having grown somewhat used to Kang’s personality, Gong lobbed the kind of light, carefully filtered joke that wouldn’t offend.

“Harder than killing monsters, right? Events?”

Kang gave a faint smile and nodded.

Relieved his joke landed, Gong stood up.

“Then I’ll head out first.”

Normally, Kang would’ve just let him go.

Just as Gong didn’t think of Kang as a friend and kept a set distance, Kang kept a similar distance from Gong.

Same alma mater, bound by necessity.

That’s the neatest summary of their relationship.

Kang went a step further.

“Wasn’t there a disgusting number of people?”

He asked for an opinion—unusual for him.

“Yeah. It was a lot.”

Kang nodded and murmured in a low voice.

“If the population went down, would the world get better?”

It was a radical thought, but Gong took it as a Kang-style stray notion and answered reluctantly.

“Maybe. The Crack’s intensity is proportional to headcount.”

“What if we left, say, a hundred?”

Gong found himself looking into Kang’s eyes without meaning to.

“A hundred?”

“A hundred—or ten. Wouldn’t that be fine? Hm? Maybe the Crack’s feelers would lose interest in humans.”

“Isn’t that too few? That’s basically human extinction.”

Kang smiled pale.

“I’ll include you.”

The emotion shining in those fierce eyes was unmistakably sincere.

When the war broke out, Gong remembered Kang’s face with perfect clarity.

“That’s when I learned he could smile with that much pure joy.”

Gong sighed and glared at me.

“That bastard doesn’t have a human heart.”

I nodded.

Agreed.

Kang Han-min had already crossed the line.

“But even he reacted to you.”

“To me?”

Gong nodded.

“That day—the day we took down the Nemesis-type—Kang got a radio call. Yeah. That was the first time I ever saw him that excited. And I thought then.”

I waited quietly for my classmate to go on.

After a long stretch of silence, Gong spoke with a bitter smile.

“...That maybe even that monster could become human if he met you.”

Gong stood.

“I’ll go get dinner started.”

One thing is certain.

In a sense, Gong finished his own sorting.

There was no trace of regret or expectation in the lean but steady steps that took him out into the corridor.

He would do his work.

What he still hadn’t finished.

I sat for a while, lost in thought.

I asked myself.

Have I finished my sorting?

I couldn’t say yes.

But I don’t think that’s wholly bad or lacking.

Even the keepsakes we sorted were all different, weren’t they?

That’s how it is.