I PICKED UP A CHILD IN A DUMPSTER

Chapter 197: A probably Familiar store.

Abit of silence followed.

Nothing moved in the grass. She exhaled shakily and dropped her hand. "I don’t— I don’t know what’s happening." Her voice was quieter now but the tremor was still in it, real and unsteady in a way he had genuinely never heard from her before. "I-i just feel.. I feel scared, S-Si Hon. I feel really scared and I don’t know why and something is wrong with me—"

"Hey, nice acting, genuinely, very convincing—"

A window then suddenly appeared between them.

Jisoo went quiet. Si Hon went quiet. As they both read it.

「Due to the penalty, you both will receive a debuff.

Kim Si Hon: Cannot focus unless alone.

Park Jisoo: All memory of dying has been removed.」

The window held. Then dissolved.

Silence.

Si Hon looked at the empty air where the text had been. Then he looked at Jisoo, still pressed against his side, still trembling, and something in his expression shifted— the last trace of the laugh completely gone now, replaced by something slower and more serious.

He looked at her face.

The wide eyes. The way she was breathing. The way she was holding onto him like the ground had become unreliable.

Four thousand eight hundred and ninety eight loops. Seventy three deaths today alone. A girl who had pressed a piece of sharp thing to her own throat without blinking, who had watched herself bleed out and woken up and done it again, who had treated death like punctuation and reset like a commute.

Who had looked at the most terrifying thing in that corridor and gone still and calculated.

That was gone now.

Not her knowledge. Not her strategies, her timing, her four thousand loops of memorized patterns and survival instincts and carefully mapped contingency plans.

All of that was still in there— he could tell from the way her eyes were still moving even now, still tracking the street, still working. But the part of her that had made death routine, the part that had died enough times that it stopped as something to fear, the system had reached in and taken it out cleanly, like pulling a single thread from a woven thing and watching the tension in everything else change.

She remembered everything she’d learned.

She just didn’t remember why she wasn’t supposed to be scared of dying anymore.

Jisoo Park, the regressor with nearly five thousand loops under her belt, the girl who slit her own throat like a some crazy woman, was standing in an overgrown apocalypse city holding onto his jacket with both hands and shaking.

Si Hon stopped trying to push her away.

"Okay," he said, much quieter than before. He didn’t move. Just let her hold on. "Okay. Just— breathe for a second."

She didn’t respond immediately. The trembling didn’t stop, but it slowed slightly, the sharp edge of it evening out into something lower. Her grip stayed where it was.

Outside, the city sat around them, tall grass and broken windows and the distant sound of something moving several blocks away through the overgrowth.

And Si Hon stood in the middle of an overgrown street holding up a girl who had survived everything imaginable and was now, for the first time in a very long time, is genuinely afraid.

He looked up at the grey sky above the canopy of vines and leaves and thought, (This is going to be different.)

Then, because there was nothing else to do—

"Alright," he said. "We move slow. We move together. And you tell me if it gets worse."

A pause. Then, very quietly, muffled against his uniform— "Okay."

Tadadadun.

They walked without direction for a while, which was a strange thing to do in a trial that presumably had an endpoint somewhere, but the city gave them nothing to work with— no markers, no arrows, no helpful system window floating above a specific alleyway saying the Core is this way or the way out is ts way.

Just overgrown streets and dark windows and the occasional sound from somewhere in the grass that they both decided not to investigate.

Walking was also, genuinely, becoming a structural problem.

Jisoo had migrated from holding his sleeve to holding his actual side at some point during the first ten minutes, and somewhere in the last five she had tightened her grip to a degree that was meaningfully affecting his walking style...

Though, she matched his pace exactly, pressed close enough that he had to adjust every other step to avoid bumping into her, her eyes moving constantly across every shadow and doorway they passed with the alert, unhappy energy of someone whose body had decided that threat assessment was now a full time occupation.

Si Hon bore this without comment.

Then they came around a corner and found a CU store sitting between two overgrown buildings like it had simply refused to participate in the apocalypse.

The sign was still up. Not just the light.

The sliding glass doors at the front were intact. Vines had started climbing the lower half of the exterior wall and a small tree had taken root in the crack between the store and the building beside it, but compared to everything else on this street it looked almost reasonable.

Si Hon looked at it. "Want to check inside? Might be something useful."

"No," Jisoo said immediately, tightening her grip by another increment. "It’s risky. We don’t know what’s in there. It’s too enclosed. If something’s already inside we’d have no exit room and—"

Si Hon scooped her up.

One arm under her knees, one arm across her back, clean and unhesitating.

Jisoo made a noise that didn’t resolve into any particular word— something muffled and confused and slightly indignant, her hands grabbing his uniform automatically as her train of thought derailed completely. He was already walking toward the store.

(What is this,) he thought, glancing down at her expression— the wide eyes, the faint flush of embarrassment cutting through the fear, the way she looked genuinely baffled by her own situation. (I did not expect a Jisoo with this kind of personality. This is kind of C— actually, nevermind.)

He set her down in front of the sliding doors, gently enough, and she stood there looking at him with an expression she hadn’t fully assembled yet.

He pushed the door open before she could finish reassembling it.

The inside was exactly what a convenience store looked like after the world forgot about it for a while— shelves still standing but coated in a thin layer of grime, leaves tracked in from outside and scattered across the floor in dry brittle patches, packaging knocked over and faded, the overhead lights long dead and the whole interior lit only by what came through the front glass.

A smell of dust and something faintly sweet going stale. One of the refrigerator units at the back had its door hanging open, long empty, the interior dark.

Si Hon looked at a shelf near the middle.

Lighters. Three of them, different colors. A folded emergency blanket still in its packaging. Two more blankets on the shelf below that, the cheap fleece kind.

He picked up a lighter, clicked it once— flame, good... and ofcourse pocketed it. (Why does a convenience store have emergency blankets,) he thought. (Who decided that was a product category. Well, Win for me.)

He moved along the shelf.

Snacks further down— sealed bags, a few of them, the kind with enough preservatives to survive a decade. He checked the packaging on one. Technically still within some definition of edible. He started collecting.

Jisoo had stayed close enough that her shoulder was practically against his arm the whole time, tracking every shadow at the back of the store, every dark corner between shelves. She didn’t say anything. He didn’t push her to.

After a minute of quiet looting Si Hon paused, holding a bag of something that was probably once a chip. He looked down the dark aisle toward the back of the store. Then he said, mostly to himself, "Isn’t it weirdly quiet in here. That’s kind of scary actually."

Jisoo’s hand found his sleeve immediately. Then she made a small pained sound and sat down right there on the floor between the shelves, pulling her knees up, pressing both hands over her ears. "Don’t say things like that," she said, voice tight. "Why would you say that out loud—"

A growl rolled through the store.

Low. Close. Coming from somewhere in the dark at the back.

Si Hon stopped moving entirely. Jisoo, on the floor, went absolutely rigid.

The emergency blanket crinkled once in his grip.

Neither of them breathed.

"Fuck... why do I keep jinxing it."