Shhhhh...Bong.
The train doors slid open at Dobong Station.
Kang Ji-Won stepped out onto the platform.
The station was completely different from Yeouido. It was an open-air platform, and the cold air was much sharper here. There were no shiny marble walls, just cold concrete and peeling, pale-blue paint.
And most of all: it was silent.
The silence in Yeouido was the silence of empty offices. The silence here was the silence of sleeping suburbs. It was deeper, more isolated.
Ji-Won was the only person who had gotten off.
He stood for a moment, listening. Nothing but the faint hum of a power transformer somewhere in the distance.
Where... where the hell is the old Lotte Mart?
"Behind the building," Baek had said.
He exited the station. The main street was empty. Dull orange streetlights cast long shadows. There were no luxury shops here, just closed Kimbap restaurants, cell phone stores, and Noraebangs that had turned off their lights.
He pulled out his phone.
[Battery: 1%].
Damn it. Damn it!
He opened the map application. Loading... Loading...
Come on, you damn thing...
[Map Loaded.]
A small blue dot appeared. "Lotte Mart Dobong" was three blocks to the west.
Then, the screen went black.
Beep.
The phone died.
"Ah," Ji-Won sighed. The darkness had just swallowed his last tether to the real world.
1%. I should have known.
Now, there was no going back. No calls. No maps. Nothing.
Just him, his ridiculous helmet, his rusty crowbar, and the dark.
Three blocks west.
He looked up at the sky. No moon. Just the sick, orange glow of Seoul's light-polluted sky.
He started walking.
The sound of his oversized combat boots was the only sound. Clomp... Clomp... Clomp. It was a ridiculously loud sound on the silent street. Every step felt like it was screaming, "Look! I'm here! A clown walking to his doom!"
Stop it. Focus.
One block. Two blocks.
He saw it.
"Lotte Mart." It wasn't the main building, but an old branch, the kind built in the 90s. Its big red sign was faded, some of the letters unlit. The building was dark, its massive parking lot as empty as a graveyard.
"Behind the building."
Ji-Won walked along the side of the building. Here, the streetlights disappeared. This was the shipping and receiving side. Huge dumpsters, wet cardboard boxes, and the foul smell of something rotten.
A perfect place for a gate to hell.
At the end of the back alley, there was a fenced-off area. A high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, and a large red sign on it:
[DANGER ZONE - WALKER ASSOCIATION FACILITY]
[UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY MEANS INSTANT DEATH]
Instant death. Good. At least they're honest.
There was a small gate in the fence, like a cage door. And just as Baek had said, there was a small card reader next to it.
Ji-Won stood in front of the gate. This is it. The dividing line.
He felt his heart start to pound. Thump. Thump. Thump. A muffled sound in his chest.
What if the chip doesn't work? What if this is all a trick?
Stop. You don't have time for doubt.
He pulled the white data-chip from his vest pocket. His hands were shaking—not from fear (he told himself), but from the cold.
Damn it. He couldn't hold the chip steady in the dark.
Remember. The helmet.
Click. Nothing. Click. A flicker. Click.
The weak, sickly yellow beam shot from his head. It lit up his hands, and the gate in front of him.
Just enough light to see me die, at least.
He held the chip up to the reader.
There was no slot. It was a wireless scanner.
Beep-beep!
The sharp electronic sound cut the night's silence. The small light on the reader turned green.
Click.
The magnetic lock on the gate buzzed open.
"..."
For a moment, Ji-Won didn't move. He was waiting. What? An alarm? Guards?
Nothing. Just the hum.
He hadn't noticed it before, but now he heard it clearly. A low-frequency electric hum, coming from behind the fence. Like a hundred refrigerators all running at once.
He pushed the gate. It swung open with a painful metal shriek.
Screeeeeeeeeech.
Great. Announce my arrival to all the hidden monsters.
He stepped inside.
It was a small back lot, surrounded by concrete. And in the middle... was "the thing."
It wasn't a shining portal like in the movies. It wasn't a magical swirl.
It was... "a tear."
It looked as if someone had grabbed reality itself and ripped it. It was a vertical slit in the air, ten feet tall, floating an inch off the ground. It wasn't completely black. It was a deep, dark blue, shimmering at the edges, slowly rippling like silk fabric underwater.
This is it. An F-Rank Gate. "The Goblin's Nest."
Thump. Thump. Thump.
His heart was now hammering in his throat.
Go in. Drag the bodies. Get out.
20%... minus 20,000 won.
For Hyun-Soo.
He gripped the crowbar with both hands, his grasp so tight his knuckles turned white.
He stepped toward the rippling tear.
Come on.
He pushed his right foot through the edge.
There was no pain. Just... a sudden cold, and a strange, pressurized feeling, like plunging into freezing water.
Then he took his second step, and his whole body went through.
Shhh-VWOOMP.
Kang Ji-Won vanished from the back alley in Dobong-gu.
The transition was not smooth.
It was violent.
For a split second, Kang Ji-Won lost all sense of direction. He felt as if his stomach had been left behind in Seoul, while the rest of his body was yanked through a narrow, icy tube. An intense cold surrounded him, pressing against his skin, stealing the air from his lungs.
Aaaargh...
He tried to scream, but no sound came out.
Then, just as quickly as it began, it ended.
Vwoomp.
It was like stepping out of the other side of a wet curtain. He stumbled, falling forward onto his hands and knees.
CLANG!
His rusty crowbar hit the ground in front of him, the metallic sound echoing in the silence.
"Hah... hah... hah..."
He was gasping. Gulping in air, trying to fill his lungs. The ground beneath his hands wasn't concrete. It was... soft. And damp.
Where...?
He stayed perfectly still for a full minute, not daring to move. He could hear only the sound of his own ragged breathing and his heart pounding against his ribs like a trapped bird.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
He forced his eyes open. He had squeezed them shut during the transition.
Shit...
Darkness.
But it wasn't the darkness of the alley. It was... a different darkness. A living darkness.
He slowly raised his head.
"Damn it..." he whispered again, this time audibly. The word died instantly in the heavy air.
There were no neon lights. No orange city-sky glow.
Above him, the sky was a deep, bruised purple. And there were two moons.
One was large, silver, and shattered, with a ring of debris spinning slowly around it.
The other was small, blood-red, and pulsed with a faint, sick throb.
I... I'm not in Seoul.
The simple thought, the fact he had known intellectually, now hit him with physical force. He felt fear, yes, but something else crawled underneath it... pure awe.
I'm in another world.
Then the smell hit him.
It was powerful. Not the smell of mildew and sewage from his apartment. This was the smell of life. The smell of damp moss, wet earth, and a sweet, cloying rot... like fruit decaying in the sun. And under it all, another scent, something pungent and musky, like a wet animal.
The smell... of goblins?
Then the sound.
No cars. No horns.
Instead, there was a rustling. The whisper of wind through foliage that looked nothing like any foliage he had ever seen. And... chit... chit... chit...
A faint, rhythmic clicking sound, coming from somewhere in the dark. Insects?
"The light." He remembered. I'm an idiot sitting in the dark.
He raised a trembling hand to his plastic helmet.
Click. Nothing. Click. A flicker. Click.
The weak, yellow beam of light shot out, cutting the darkness in front of him.
Oh my god.
He was in a forest.
But it wasn't an Earthly forest. The trees were massive, twisted, their bark as white as bone. There were no leaves, but huge, glowing fungi, pulsing with a ghostly blue and green light, hung from the branches like sick lanterns.
The ground he was kneeling on wasn't dirt, but a thick, springy carpet of glowing blue moss.
His helmet beam cut straight ahead, revealing a narrow path...
...and the entrance to a cave.
It was twenty meters in front of him. A black gash in the side of a rocky hill.
"The Goblin's Nest." That's what Baek said.
Three bodies. Drag them. Get out.
He looked behind him.
The Gate was there. The dark blue, rippling tear was floating silently in the air, illuminating the blue moss around it.
That's my escape route. Don't move away from it. Don't take your eyes off it.
Ji-Won pushed himself to his feet. His oversized combat boots sank into the wet moss. Squelch.
He froze.
...Chit... chit...
The sound stopped.
Shit. It heard me.
He gripped the crowbar with both hands, raising it. No. Don't be an idiot. You're here for the bodies. You're not here to fight.
Where are they?
He aimed his weak headlamp toward the cave entrance.
There it was.
Just outside the entrance, there was a body.
No.
It wasn't one of the three goblin bodies.
This was a new body.