Ting.
The pure, crystalline sound echoed inside his skull.
And the words... the words burned into his retinas, blazing with a clean blue light.
[Skill Acquired: Shadow Step (Rank F)]
"...What?"
Kang Ji-Won whispered. His voice came out like the rustle of dry paper.
...Shadow Step? Void... Echo?
I... I'm hallucinating.
That was the only explanation. He had lost too much blood. His brain, in its final desperate moments, was concocting a strange, detailed dream. A dream where he wasn't a "failure." A dream where he had an "Echo."
What a cruel joke.
But the blue screen didn't fade.
It remained fixed, clear, and sharp. It floated a foot from his face, steady, even as his peripheral vision swam and drowned in darkness.
It was the only real thing left in the world.
"Echoless..." He remembered the employee's voice at the Harmony Tower. The look of pity.
"Scrap Class..." Baek's raspy voice.
Rage.
A cold, pure, burning rage suddenly flooded his veins, stronger than the adrenaline, hotter than the pain.
They lied.
They all lied to me. The damned System... it was wrong.
"AAAAAH!"
He tried to rise, to scream at the purple twin-mooned sky, to scream at this "System" that had betrayed him.
WHOOSH!
A wave of pure white pain exploded from his left leg, as if someone had poured liquid nitrogen over it and then set it on fire.
"GhgAAAAH!"
He collapsed back onto the wet moss, the scream turning into a muffled moan.
The blue screen... he forgot it.
The pain. The bleeding.
It's not stopping.
He pressed both hands against the open wound on his thigh. It was like trying to stop a flood with bare hands. The hot, sticky blood welled up between his fingers, unstoppable.
I'm going to die. What's the use of an "Echo" if I die before I can use it?
He looked up at the blue window again, eyes desperate.
System! He screamed in his head. System! Do something! You said 'Emergency Protocol'! Stop the bleeding! Help me!
The blue window just floated there. Silent. Cold. Indifferent.
The only words on it were: [Skill Acquired: Shadow Step (Rank F)]
"Shadow Step?" Ji-Won spat the words in his mind. What am I going to do with this? Step into my grave? You useless bastard!
He realized the cold truth.
The "System" hadn't saved him. The "System" didn't care.
It had classified the threat ("Shadow Goblin"). It had analyzed the threat when it died. It had given him "Loot" (Skill). That was it.
The bleeding? That was his problem. The "System" was just... a catalog.
No. No. I won't die like this.
The cold. The cold was crawling up him now. The true cold of death, starting at his fingertips.
Stop it.
Pressure. I need pressure. A tourniquet.
He looked around frantically in the dim blue-green light. His gear? The vest was on him. His pants... shredded.
He had nothing.
Except...
His eyes, now adapted to the gloom, settled on the corpse he had used as a shield.
The other man. The other "Scrap."
He was lying a few feet away. His chest was crushed, but... his shirt... his jacket... they were still relatively intact.
No. I can't...
Do you have another choice?
[72 Hours.]
[Hyun-Soo.]
Ji-Won let out an animalistic cry of pain and rage.
Ignoring the blue screen that still hovered before him like a mocking ghost, he began to crawl.
Dragging his dead left leg behind him, leaving a dark, glistening trail on the glowing blue moss... heading toward the corpse.