Time seemed to freeze. Kim-Do, still trembling from the remnants of the real Kim-Do's agony, saw the gun barrel of the gun point at him. Lee Min-Ji uttered a muffled cry, instinctively curling up.
Their attackers were not students. They weren't even quite human. Their movements were perfectly synchronized, fluid and thrifty, like machines. Their black suits absorbed light, and their faceless helmets emitted a slight hum.
"Identification: Subject A-0. Confirmed Anomaly," said the same guard, his synthetic voice echoing strangely in the silent room.
Kim-Do didn't have time to think. The survival instinct - his instinct, forged in weeks of lies and fear - took over. He was not a fighter, but he was a survivor.
"Run!" he yelled at Min-Ji, giving her a violent push towards the classroom window, the only way out.
At the same time, he activated his "Emotional Camouflage" to the maximum, hoping that absolute coldness would give him the necessary detachment. Then he threw himself to the side, overturning a metal table in a deafening noise.
ZZZAP! A beam of bluish energy hit the spot where he stood a second earlier, leaving a black, smoking burn mark on the floor.
Resistance detected. Threat level reassessed," monontated another guard.
Min-Ji, despite his terror, was quick-witted. She did not attempt to open the window; she grabbed a chair and broke the window. "Kim-Do!" she shouted.
He rolled behind another table, his heart beating. He couldn't beat them. He knew it. But maybe he could save time.
"Who are you?" he shouted, hoping to distract them. "Omni-Corp?"
The head guard slowly turned his head towards him. "We are the Protocol. The Anomaly must be contained."
Content. Not killed. Not eliminated. Content. Like a virus. Like a sample.
Meanwhile, Min-Ji had managed to sneak through the broken window. She turned around, her eyes met Kim-Do's. There was fear, but also fierce determination. She didn't run away to abandon him. She was fleeing to act.
"I'm going to get help!" she yelled before disappearing into the outside hallway.
One of the guards took a step to pursue her, but the chief raised a hand. "Priority: Subject A-0. The secondary witness will be treated afterwards."
Treatise. The word was sinister.
Now alone against the three guards, Kim-Do felt fear overwhelm him. His camouflage cracked. He had nowhere to go. He was stuck.
Suddenly, a new system window appeared, but it was even more distorted than the previous ones, riddled with parasites.
"'
[ALERT: Host integrity compromised at 17%]
[BRECHE IN PRIMORDIAL DATA...]
[ACCES]... obtained.
[Rescue system: FORCED ACTIVATION.]
[Ultimate quest: IMMEDIATE SURVIVAL.]
[CHARGE]... Cheating... Loading...
"'
The system itself was breaking down because of the breach. And in his chaos, he was desperately trying to give her a chance.
The guards advanced, their weapons emitting a sharper hum. Kim-Do backed up, his back hitting the wall. It was over.
It was then that a silhouette appeared out of nowhere, moving with an impossible speed. A precise kick sent the first guard's weapon into the room. A movement of deviation threw the second against the wall with brute force.
Joon.
The regulator stood between Kim-Do and the guards, his usually enigmatic expression replaced by a murderous coldness.
"You are beyond your prerogatives," Joon scolded, his voice was no longer that of a teenager, but charged with ancient authority. "Subject A-0 is under my jurisdiction."
The chief guard raised his gun." - Joon Regulator. You interfere with the Contention Protocol.
"The Protocol was designed for standard failures, not for an anomaly of this level," Joon retorted. He glanced quickly at Kim-Do. "The system is cracking because of him. To destroy it is to lose irreplaceable data."
"Our order is to contain. By any means necessary."
"Then you're going to have to contain me too," said Joon with a dangerous smile.
It was chaos.
Joon went wild. It wasn't the small, fast fighter who had tested Kim-Do in the park. It was a force of nature. His movements were of deadly precision, each shot aimed at neutralizing, at disarticulateing. He fought as if every second mattered, with an emergency that Kim-Do had never seen him.
Kim-Do, stunned, watched the fight. It was beyond anything he could have imagined. The guards were strong, but Joon was... different. He seemed to anticipate their movements, exploiting the micro-flaws in their perfect coordination.
"A-0!" cried Joon, dodging an energy ray. "The breach! Use it!"
"Use what?" shouted Kim-Do, completely lost.
"Your memories! Mine! Anything that flees! The system is vulnerable! Hit him!"
Hit the system? How? He was just a spirit in a borrowed body.
Suddenly, another discharge of parasitic memories hit him, but this one was different. He wasn't the real Kim-Do. It was... Joon. Fragments. A laboratory. Infinite pain. Years spent in infinite white space. The feeling of being a tool, a software in an envelope of flesh. The eternal weariness of a regulator.
And with those memories came access. A backdoor into the code of the system itself. A flaw that Joon, after years of service, had secretly cultivated.
The chief guard, realizing that the situation was slipping away, pointed his gun not at Joon, but directly at Kim-Do.
The gun barrel lit up.
Kim-Do had no choice. He closed his eyes, and instead of resisting the flood of data, he plunged into it. He focused on the breach, on the fault that Joon had unwittingly shown him. He wasn't trying to understand, he was trying to control.
He visualized a simple, raw command, a primitive order pushed through the corrupted connection.
Stop.
The effect was immediate and catastrophic.
The light from the guard's gun went out. All the guards froze in place, like statues. The fluorescent lights in the classroom flashed frantically and then went out, plunging the room into a dark darkness disturbed only by the glow of the burn marks on the ground.
The hum of the guards' helmets turned into a sharp sizzle, and then stopped dead.
A dead silence reigned.
Joon, panting, stood in the middle of the guards immobilized. He looked at Kim-Do, and for the first time, his expression was one of sheer amazement.
"What did you do?" he whispered.
Kim-Do opened his eyes, wobbling. The mental effort had been titanic. He felt a net of blood flowing from his nose.
"I... I turned them off," he whispered, incredulously.
He had just given an order to the system. And the system obeyed.
But the victory was short-lived.
A deafening alarm, unlike anything he had heard before, sounded throughout the school. It wasn't the fire alarm. It was a strident, electronic tone that seemed to vibrate inside his skull.
From the broken window, Kim-Do saw black, unmarked vehicles converge towards the high-speed school.
Joon cursed between his teeth. "You raised the Omega alert. They're going to clean everything up. Erase everything."
He rushed to Kim-Do and grabbed her arm. His grip was iron.
"Listen to me," said Joon, his gaze burning with intensity. "You are not an anomaly. You're a mutation. The system can't control you, and it can't let you go free. They will do anything to capture you. Or destroy you."
"Who is that, "they?" asked Kim-Do, terror overwhelming him again.
"The Controllers. Those who created the system. Those for whom we are just data," Joon replied. "We must leave. Now."
"Where to go?"
"Far from here. In the interstices. Where the system has trouble seeing."
Joon pulled him towards the broken window. Kim-Do took one last look at the classroom, the paralyzed guards, the world he had just begun to tame and had just torn to pieces.
He wanted to survive. But surviving that now meant becoming a fugitive. A virus on the run in the machine.
As they jumped out of the window to land in the wet grass, Kim-Do knew one thing with absolute certainty.
Kim-Do's life was over. The Survivor's had just begun. And it would be much shorter and more dangerous than he had ever imagined.