Surprisingly, the period when Gong Gyeong-min and I teamed up wasn’t that long.

Even so, he felt more intimate than Kim Daram because we think alike.

Of course, our personalities are different.

I was the one called taciturn, cold, and—at a high frequency—mechanical and inhuman, while Gong was the loud, popular mood-maker with lots of friends; our characters sat pretty far apart.

But in the one thing that mattered—our approach to the unprecedented phenomenon called the Crack—we were like twins.

Like me, Gong was an uncommon Hunter who tried to approach the Crack academically.

We shared a similar viewpoint but had different approaches, which was part of what made ➤ NоvеⅠight ➤ (Read more on our source) us find each other interesting.

If I tried to systematize the Crack in the so-called inductive, that is, empirical way, then Gong searched deductively for an absolute order hidden within the chaos.

The one recognized publicly was me.

Accumulated data is intuitively easy for anyone to understand, and it can serve as evidence in and of itself.

My materials and hypotheses earned recognition beyond Korea, worldwide, and bestowed on me the honor called the Golden Fleece.

Gong, on the other hand, received no return for his academic attempts.

From the outset, he was speaking deductively about a universal order applied to monsters for which “proof” is impossible, and therefore it couldn’t translate into a track record.

If Gong had cared about honor or a résumé, he might not have endured.

Fortunately, he had no complaints about his claims being ignored and unrecognized.

Being a math-minded thinker himself, he considered it only natural that claims which cannot be proven would not be acknowledged.

Later, Gong received his own kind of compensation by other means, but that’s another story.

Working with Gong, who sought to define the Crack by a method different from mine, was still enjoyable despite our long estrangement.

Our purpose in setting up a new camp in the military bunker is the removal of Kang Han-min, but we still haven’t found common ground on the method.

What we have to handle right now is the large-scale monster offensive Woo Min-hee reported.

Sightings confirmed numerous monsters approaching the outskirts of Seoul.

Even without listening to broadcasts, if twelve Kraken-types were shaking the ground as they moved, you could feel them from several kilometers away, and later, the aerial photos Hong Da-jeong sent confirmed it as fact.

Twelve Kraken-types alone.

The monsters below that class were beyond counting.

That terrifying number surpasses by far the era when the Republic of Korea was in its prime with about sixty million people—fifty million South Koreans plus roughly ten million North Korean refugees.

This is a wholesale denial of the theory that the Crack’s intensity is proportional to population.

And yet, as Gong pointed out, the thing called the Crack has its own internal consistency.

It can’t be captured, and when it’s done functioning it dissolves into particles of light, leaving no corpses at all; human traditional analysis—dissection or reverse engineering—is impossible, but from experience we also know the Crack operates according to its own independent logical system.

As mentioned, Gong had a special knack in that field and personally liked to systematize.

“There’s something. There has to be something. Otherwise that many monsters can’t spawn. Cases of more than ten super-large classes popping out at once were observed in Mumbai, Shanghai—Cracks crammed with refugees with nowhere to go; you don’t see those numbers in a country with a normal population.”

The signs had been sprouting for a while, but Gong was firmly convinced this mass monster emergence wasn’t just the Crack “deciding” to do it.

Even if the Crack had such a humanlike will, just as a person needs to stick a finger down the throat to vomit on purpose, Gong’s hypothesis was that the Crack performed some special act to inflate those numbers.

The problem is proof.

Gong has offered many bold hypotheses with solid foundations, but they weren’t acknowledged because they can’t be proven.

This time is not much different.

For Gong’s hypothesis to be substantiated, we’d have to find the variable that increased the monster count, and neither of us knows what that is.

In other words, the hypothesis turns into a bounced check.

Thump! Thump!

While the distant herd of Kraken-types moved, all we could do was hunker down.

If the Kraken-types detected us and attacked, our lives—grand plans notwithstanding—would vanish like flies; but with monsters everywhere on all sides, there wasn’t much we could do.

The one consolation was that mass monster emergence doesn’t necessarily lead to a full-scale offensive the way we talk about it.

Unless there’s a command-type monster like the Nemesis-type I took down, monster groups just wander—or freeze motionless.

That overwhelming army that appeared soon scattered in all directions from the Paju area and from their point of origin, and those that stepped onto un-eroded zones slowly disappeared under Earth’s hatred like other monsters.

It won’t be many that reach Sejong, the only real human bastion left on the peninsula.

After the ruckus, I brought the Buggy-Car to life.

The Buggy-Car, my secret weapon and one of my most expensive movables, always ran into the practical wall called fuel, but Gong’s bunker had a good stock of quality synthetic oil.

For all the talk, this place had been home to nearly ten people who’d received fairly high treatment from the government, so there was a lot of usable material.

I decided to pop over to my bunker.

I planned to bring back food and a few pieces of my personal gear.

“I’ll take the Min-hee clone. She’s a bit of a burden, but still.”

I asked Mark Two what he thought as well.

“It’s fine. She seems like a good person.”

I nodded and moved the vehicle.

Though the monster army had left this land, there were still plenty that had halted their march and settled in like territorial birds, shamelessly filling regions.

The landscape of Seoul, at least eighty percent eroded, hollowed me out just to look at, but that didn’t mean I let my guard down against humans.

Driving through the city, I spotted smoke that looked human-made.

Even though it’s an eroded zone, people still live inside. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

And there are quite a lot of them.

If you judged by the internet alone, you’d think everyone would abandon their homes and flee in a crisis, but leaving your home isn’t as easy as saying it.

Some had poor health and stayed; others were exhausted or lacked the will or confidence to adapt elsewhere and remained in a dying home.

The countless civilians we’d encountered in the war zone were proof.

We were exiting Seoul along a ruined, shattered road.

A monster was planted dead ahead on the road.

A medium-class Trooper-type.

One I’d rather avoid.

Judging by its state, it wasn’t fully stationary; it was moving very slowly, and detouring around it would mean going a considerable distance.

There was no guarantee there wouldn’t be monsters on the detour.

We had no choice but to park the car in a nearby ruin and wait for the monster to leave.

Spring had come, but mornings and evenings were chilly, and after sunset the cold could easily kill a person.

The Buggy-Car has great mobility but is the worst for keeping warm.

The frame is full of holes with no partitions.

Even on the way here, Mark Two whined several times that he was cold.

Seoul is, by international standards, quite a cold place.

And by the same standards, a very hot one too.

At minimum, it’s better to hide where there’s a wall to block the wind.

We went into a building that was relatively intact.

And being relatively intact, it had signs of life.

Not recent ones.

At a generous estimate, traces from half a year ago.

Still, no reason to relax our guard.

Clack!

A pistol in one hand, an axe in the other, I carefully entered the building.

No living people.

The dead, maybe.

Sharing a room with a skeletonized corpse isn’t exactly a pleasant experience, but there was no alternative.

The monster outside wasn’t thinking of leaving anytime soon, so we could only wait.

At least we’d catch less wind and less cold, and the stench of corpses didn’t weigh on me much after I’d gotten used to it in Gong’s bunker.

Checking on the monster from time to time came with the territory.

It looked broken—shuffling slowly back and forth on the road.

Still, since it was inching west, it seemed like it would soon move off the road.

There was no need to rush and invite danger, so I sat back and ordered my thoughts.

Gong’s hypothesis is quite interesting.

Regarding the phenomenon of monster numbers increasing even as humanity’s numbers fall, the idea that the Crack installed some kind of device is persuasive enough in light of the enemies we’ve faced.

Uncovering that is another matter, but on a personal level I find unraveling the Crack’s mysteries interesting.

For now, I see the increased monster numbers as Kang Han-min’s influence.

That madman’s idea of rolling humanity back to the days of Eden agitated the Crack’s deeper layers and led to mass spawning.

But more monsters doesn’t automatically mean a threat to humanity.

Barring special types like the Nemesis-type, monsters are just grayish machines that wander without thought.

Small infiltrator classes have a clear objective—establishing footholds—but mid-class and higher, the ones categorized as combat types, are literally dead lumps that do nothing unless they encounter humans.

If the number of monsters grows, of course the probability of meeting the remaining humans rises—but the Earth is broader than we imagine.

If the aim was to exterminate the few remaining humans by increasing monster numbers, the Crack might have to pour itself into production until it’s winded.

Even for a Crack with the attribute of infinity, that wouldn’t be easy.

Of course there’s a chance another Nemesis-type will appear.

I think, with high probability, that Nemesis-type will be Kang Han-min.

All signs point to him.

He’ll come to finish off Sejong, the last refuge left to us.

Maybe Jeon Si-hoon, who’s stuck in the Tower, could take that role—but compared to Kang, Jeon lacks the motive to exterminate humanity.

Even if Jeon transforms into a Nemesis-type, he won’t actively hunt humans.

If anything, he’s more likely to walk a path similar to Jeong Dae-kyung.

“...”

I stared absently at the skeletonized corpse.

A man’s body.

Maybe he died last winter; he wore a thick padded jacket and pants lined with cotton.

With no family, he’d died alone.

It looked like suicide.

There was nothing in his hands, but the unnaturally bent arm as if he’d been gripping something silently testified that he’d shot his vitals with a rifle, and after a long time a scavenger had taken the gun.

They’d already grabbed everything worth taking, but they hadn’t taken the clothes—probably because the stench wouldn’t come out even if you washed them.

Thud—

I don’t know what I was thinking—maybe it was just inertia.

I dragged the corpse down and tossed it into a dug-out pit.

I couldn’t give him a careful burial with a shovel, but I could pile a few stones to cover the dead man’s body.

Thud—

Something fell from the corpse.

Looked like a note with a will on it.

I didn’t read it.

It was too fouled with slime to read.

I doubted I could even unfold the folded paper.

I buried the body and kept waiting in the empty room for the monster to leave.

It had nearly cleared out.

Give it thirty more minutes and we could move the vehicle.

While resting, I measured the Necropolis transmission as a way to pass the time.

Good signal.

Quite an impressive figure.

We’d moved to Gong’s hideout unintentionally, but if that helps open Skeleton-Net, that’s plenty of profit.

Once the monster left, we hurried back on the road.

Maybe because a monster horde had swept through, there wasn’t an ant to be found at the garrison where I remembered the Sejong soldiers.

Quiet and peaceful—and when I reached my domain, I even received an escort from a drone piloted by Hong Da-jeong as I arrived at the bunker.

I packed food, ammo, and the stockpiled Hunter weapons.

I loaded drones and clothes, and the few belongings Mark Two had brought.

“Skeleton. You’re moving to Seoul, right?”

Defender hailed me over the comms.

“Yeah. Ran into an old classmate. Gonna try something there first.”

“Jeon Si-hoon?”

“He was there, yeah. But this won’t end with just him.”

We chatted for the first time in a while and caught our breath.

As I grabbed my laptop last, I measured the Necropolis transmission.

Low signal.

Unusable level.

Clearly, the closer you get to the Tower, the stronger the Necropolis signal gets.

Which means something’s going on at the Tower.

“Ah.”

A thought flashed through my head like lightning.

“...”

The strength of the Necropolis transmission.

What if that’s the Crack’s pure will—its total energy?

It’s plausible.

Deadman_working, founder of Necropolis, said the Necropolis wave is something more than a wave that carries its own energy in a way different from the radio waves we use.

Maybe that wave itself is the energy source that drives the biomechanical machines called monsters.

But the place where that energy is detected the strongest is Jeon Si-hoon’s Tower.

We already knew that.

But if we plug that known fact into Gong’s hypothesis?

That is—if Jeon Si-hoon, or more precisely the Tower where he’s staying, is a device that makes the Crack miscount the population?

That’s entirely plausible.