In a city that had become so utterly devastated.
It wasn’t easy to find traces of the old Yeouido.
Still, as I kept moving along the Han River basin, I was barely able to arrive at the area that ‘used to be’ Yeouido.
‘......Judging by what’s left around here, this should be it.’
It was so ruined that it was hard to believe this was the place I’d seen not long ago.
I let out a sigh and moved farther in.
After avoiding the overflowing monsters as carefully as possible.
I arrived in front of the wreckage of a building.
As I somehow cleared away the debris.
I saw stairs leading underground.
Not only was the place collapsed in spots.
It was so dark that an ordinary person wouldn’t have been able to see anything at all.
But right now, nonhuman blood was flowing inside my body.
Darkness was the nobles’ domain.
I walked down into the underground drowned in deep darkness.
After I’d gone in for a while.
A thick-looking iron door appeared, but.......
[Supreme Dagger Mastery]
With a SCHICK sound.
An iron door designed to endure even a nuclear explosion shattered into pieces and scattered apart.
Inside was.
An underground shelter humans had built to evacuate in case of the worst.
I entered without a word.
The paths were complicated, but.
Because I had memories of coming here a few times, I could move by tracing those memories.
And.
The place I arrived at was.
“Here.”
A huge door.
When I’d come here before, multiple troops had been standing guard.
They’d even pulled what few awakened Seoul had left into that guard detail.
Creeeak.......
I opened the door and went in.
Inside was the same scenery I’d seen in ◆ Nоvеlіgһt ◆ (Only on Nоvеlіgһt) the past.
The ground was bare dirt that hadn’t even been properly finished.
And mold had bloomed in places from the moisture.
This was my guess, but.
This probably wasn’t a properly completed facility to begin with.
A place where they’d tried to do some additional construction, and then that construction stopped...... something like that.
‘It’s the same as back then.’
But.
When I’d come here in the past, I hadn’t found anything here.
No, to be exact.
‘It tastes like death.’
I’d felt an unbearably thick taste of death.
I just hadn’t been able to see anything there.
Back then, I hadn’t known the cause.
Now, I felt like I did.
“......Hello.”
The taste I’d caught back then.
Wasn’t a smell that came from that [Otherworld].
The [Matron]’s power manifests in the form of layering the [Otherworld] over reality.
But it’s only layering it.
It can’t change the essence.
And.
“Did you come.......”
A death-stench this thick.
Wasn’t something you could cover up with a light overlay.
“You’re...... a bit late.”
“I had some things to take care of.”
The place where I’d felt the thickest taste of death.
The deepest part of the cave.
In that very spot that had been subtly hollowed in.
“Mr. Jang Youngwoong.”
“Hah...... you still add the honorific.......”
Jang Youngwoong.
Was dying.
*****
When I saw that [Matron] exerting power on this land.
I thought a medium would be needed to exert that power.
And that it would be Jang Youngwoong.
And.
There was only one meaning to that.
Even if Seoul had been ruined this miserably.
‘It means Jang Youngwoong is alive, at least for now.’
No matter what.
You wouldn’t be able to exert that kind of power using a dead human as a medium.
And.
Once my thoughts reached the question of where he’d be if he was alive.
The place that came to mind was right here.
‘A place they tried to guard by mobilizing troops, even though there wasn’t anything here worth guarding at all.’
At first, I hadn’t understood why and had been confused.
Now, I felt like I knew.
Even Jang Youngwoong himself.
Didn’t know the cause of the power given to him.
‘The place where he had actually been.’
If this place was destroyed.
He might lose that power...... or in the worst case, he might die.
That must have been what he thought.
“Thanks for finding your way here.......”
And.
Looking down at him as he breathed with a faint rasp, I said.
“You don’t look like you’re doing well.”
“Hah...... yeah, that’s how it turned out.”
Then.
He spoke with a bitter smile.
“I look...... pretty pathetic, don’t I?”
“You do look a little lonely, but you’re not pathetic.”
“Thanks, even if it’s just words....... In truth, I wasn’t alone like this from the beginning.”
“You mean.”
As if trying to recall a faraway past.
Jang Youngwoong closed his eyes and muttered in a small voice.
“To me...... it feels like something from more than ten thousand years ago...... but in real time, it was probably about a month ago.......”
“When you say a month ago.”
“The day I lost my last comrades.”
“.......”
When I fell silent, words stuck in my throat.
Even though he looked like he could barely breathe, he continued, sweating as he spoke.
“That man who said he came from Daejeon...... Kang Sincheol, was it?”
“Yes.”
“The truth is.”
Daejeon and Seoul.
Places where a lot of people were gathered in a narrow land.
“After hearing his story...... I felt a lot of kinship.”
“.......”
“My situation was exactly like that.”
There would have been differences in degree.
But the flow of events would have been similar.
Just like Kang Sincheol.
Jang Youngwoong must have barely survived together with a small number of survivors as well.
“Up to a certain point...... we could somehow manage to survive. But...... there was an accident in the middle, and we lost our only healer.”
“I see.”
“Once we lost our means of recovery, we couldn’t endure the endless fighting in that city overflowing with monsters....... We headed for this bunker that even the monsters didn’t know about.”
At those words.
I looked around and said.
“It seems like a good base. Since you were an information-type awakened, I suppose you found it with that ability.”
“......No.”
“What?”
“I already knew where this bunker was.”
At that, I tilted my head and asked.
“How? It doesn’t look like it was hidden by ordinary means.”
“Do you know what my job was......?”
A job.
If it was as shown by [Ingredients Identification (Enhanced)], then.
“You’re an [Intelligence Agent].”
“What the hell...... you even know that?”
“I have my own know-how.”
“Heh...... then this will be easy to say.”
At what followed.
I could catch what he was trying to say.
“My wife thought I was an office worker until the day she died.”
If he was an agent who introduced himself as an office worker.
At least in our country, only one place came to mind.
‘The National Intelligence Service.’
If he had been an agent there.
Having information about a bunker like this wouldn’t be strange.
Becoming an awakened specialized in information gathering would be the same.
“The problem was after we entered this bunker....... Those monsters seemed to have spawned naturally even inside.”
At that.
I recalled the underground shelter where I’d first encountered Ariella.
This place was also a military facility.
There must have been monsters guarding it.
“You were injured fighting them?”
“We managed to take them down...... but that wasn’t the problem. For some reason, they wouldn’t leave this underground shelter. Yet they seemed to still have the desire to live. So maybe that’s why.......”
At that.
I realized what the problem he meant was.
“Food.”
“Hah. They didn’t leave a single scrap—cleaned it out.”
With a bitter smile.
He patted his own stomach.
“I’d already used up my points buying supplies needed to survive. In the end, we had to go outside and get food. But...... I was excluded from that search.”
“Why?”
“Because.”
He gave a bitter smile.
Moved the hand that had been holding himself, and showed me his waist.
“I couldn’t move around with a wound like this.”
“.......”
There.
Countless maggots were writhing.
“That was the last time. Heeseon and Mr. Baeman who went out to get food, and Professor Kang Ilhwan too...... after that, we lost contact.”
I didn’t need to hear what came after to know.
He couldn’t go outside and fight.
And he couldn’t find anything to eat in this barren underground shelter.
After losing even his last comrades.
He had no choice but to slowly die here.
In that state, the only thing he could do was.
“Other than chewing on regret...... there was nothing.”
“.......”
“The family I lost, the people who died, the comrades I never should have sent out...... the country I couldn’t protect. All of it.”
I’d heard that when the National Intelligence Service selects people, the most important thing is loyalty to the nation.
......In that [Otherworld] that embodied Jang Youngwoong’s dream.
I felt like I finally understood, a little, why the country’s 모습 had been reproduced so thoroughly.
“That [Matron], you know.”
“Yes.”
“When I first realized the truth, I hated them so much...... but once I calmed down, my thoughts changed.”
He let out a dry chuckle.
“Maybe...... that [Matron] really was trying to help me.”
On that point, I nodded as well.
The [Matron] truly wanted to resolve the regret of Jang Youngwoong, who carried deep regret.
To do that, they must have adjusted his sense of time as if he’d spent tens of thousands of years.
And even.
“Even trying to use me to take this land...... probably.”
“Yes.”
If the [Matron] became the ruler of this land.
The residents of that land...... the Matron’s children would reach an ideal world where all regrets were resolved.
Even if it was a land for those buried in the past.
A land that would be nothing but hell to me, since time wouldn’t flow forward.
‘For Jang Youngwoong, who was being consumed by regret and dying, it would’ve been a happy ending.’
Trying to dominate this land by exploiting Jang Youngwoong as a medium.
In the end, it was an act meant to fulfill Jang Youngwoong’s wish to overcome that regret.
“It’s just...... my wish was too absurd, that’s all.”
“.......”
Probably.
That wasn’t all the Matron did for him.
‘At the very end...... the Matron could have fought more, but they withdrew.’
At first, I thought.
They made that choice because fighting more would be meaningless.
But thinking again, it wasn’t that.
“Still, it feels refreshing. I thought I was fated to die miserably in this darkness...... but I was able to hold even an impossible hope.”
In the end, the Matron and Jang Youngwoong failed.
In the process, Jang Youngwoong was exploited as a medium to manifest the Matron’s power.
“Besides.”
If they’d fought to the very end.......
He would have met annihilation once he reached his limit.
But.
‘Because the Matron gave up early and left.......’
Now.
Like this.
“At the end, I got to tell my story to someone before I go, didn’t I.”
“.......”
“Something to be grateful for.......”
At the very end.
He got the chance to pass on his life to me.
‘A Matron who embraces the regretful.’
And.
Here, I realized one fact.
‘The names that refer to those external existences...... aren’t just names.’
Just as the Matron, true to that name, genuinely tried to help Jang Youngwoong.
Just as the shape of the world Mirinae showed me as an example changed to extremes according to that divine name.
Their names.
Pointed to that being’s identity itself.
*****
“My story ends here. Then...... may I ask why you came to find me.”
“If I say I wanted to stay with you at the end...... would you believe me?”
“Heh. You came all this way just to see a corpse? I’m not going to believe that.”
With an expression that looked a little envious.
Jang Youngwoong looked at my face.
“You’re not like me—you’re aiming forward.”
“.......”
“Even if I don’t know what your purpose is...... tell me. You listened to my last story...... if there’s something I can do, I’ll do it for you.”
At that.
I shrugged and answered.
“There’s something I want to ask.”
“......?”
“I want to hear in detail what you experienced in Seoul.”
I looked down at Jang Youngwoong.
A horrendous wound.
Even if he hadn’t been used as the [Matron]’s medium.
By the time we arrived, his body would already have been beyond saving.
Even if it was hard to tell now because he was injured this badly.
Still.
‘This person...... is an awakened in the mid-30s.’
A fairly high level.
To begin with.
This bunker would have had monsters summoned to guard a military base.
Just the fact that four people broke through those monsters and settled here told me enough.
Jang Youngwoong must have been a formidable fighter to begin with.
Surviving Seoul’s brutal conditions must have forged him into that.
“We still don’t know in detail what kind of situation this world is in.”
We’d gained quite a lot of information ourselves by surviving up to now.
So.
“If there’s anything you learned, I want you to share that information.”
There would be information he’d obtained by surviving up to this level.
Especially.......
“You’re an information-type awakened, aren’t you.”
“.......”
An ‘agent’ specialized in gathering information.
He’d failed in the end and ended up like this.
But surely.
He knew a lot.
