Chapter 12
* * *
Day 7 of being stranded, 11:00
""One, two!!""
Everyone pushed the raft into the sea in time with the signal.
"We'll definitely bring the rescue team back!"
Seoyoon and I waved as we said goodbye to everyone.
"Please make sure to tell Yulha and Jain!! Tell them their mom is doing okay!"
The manager spoke in a tearful voice.
"Oppa~! Can't I come with you, too?"
"Luka. You can wait patiently, right?"
"You're really bringing the rescue team back? You're not abandoning Luka, are you?"
"Who said anything about abandoning you? We'll definitely come back with the rescue team."
"Mm-hm!"
The raft we'd built was only big enough for two people, at most.
None of us was an expert at building rafts, so I thought we'd reached a decent compromise.
If we'd tried to make it any bigger, the bindings might have come loose, or it might have sunk at sea.
In fact, once we climbed aboard, it was so shoddily made that it wouldn't have been surprising if it had sunk immediately without the Glyph of Wind.
We'd thrown it together in a single day, so I suppose we did pretty well───
"Mr. Woojin, can you keep us from sinking?"
"Yes. I'm creating an air pocket underneath."
"I'm ready. Let's go."
We set off, leaving behind everyone's hopeful, expectant farewells.
We were setting sail.
Whoooosh.
The raft, propelled by a burst of the Glyph of Wind, cut through the water and sped forward!
The thrust was strong enough to lift the front of the raft a little. I'd better be careful.
"Wow, it's faster than I expected!"
Cheers rang out behind us.
Apparently, we looked pretty impressive as we set off.
"Which way should we go, Assistant Manager?"
"Let's head straight for now. I want to take in the island's shape."
I dipped my hand into the seawater and focused on the flow of mana.
Whoooosh!
As I slowly guided the natural wind in the direction I wanted to go, the makeshift sail billowed taut.
"How is it?"
"The thrust is fine, but steering is harder than I expected."
The raft didn't just move forward; it drifted sideways, too.
The stronger the current got, the more I felt that if I let my guard down, we'd drift somewhere I didn't even know.
Without the makeshift sail to catch the Glyph of Wind, steering might have been a real pain.
Moving the raft myself gave me an instinctive sense of why ships were built in that shape and how important a keel was.
'───But wishing for something we don't have won't do us any good.'
We had to do it without one.
If we wanted to go home, if we wanted to live.
Whap!!
The sail snapped taut with the wind I'd summoned, and the raft began to ride the waves.
"You're doing great, Mr. Woojin!"
Once I'd gotten us pointed in roughly the right direction, I looked back and saw the island rapidly shrinking.
At first, I could make out the people left on the beach. Someone waving, debris piled on the sand, trees swaying in the wind.
But as the distance grew, everything blurred together.
The beach became a thin white line, and behind it, the dense jungle formed a dark blue-green wall. The island was bigger than I'd thought.
I knew that, but it wasn't just some sandbar with a few trees on it.
An unfamiliar mountain ridge rose in the middle, with layers of dense forest stretching down its slopes.
A little farther from the main island, another small island clung to it like a shadow.
"The island's much bigger than I expected."
"I had an idea, but still."
Once I got used to maintaining the Glyph of Wind steadily, I moved to the center of the raft to see what Seoyoon was doing.
She was looking at her smartphone.
"I was checking whether we had a signal."
"Any luck?"
"Not yet…"
My phone was out of range, too.
Seoyoon suddenly opened her smartphone gallery.
"Look at this."
The photos weren't anything special.
Coffee on the office desk, a neatly organized workspace.
Until just over a week ago, these were ordinary sights in our everyday lives.
"This one, too… And this one…"
A photo of the monitor she'd snapped carelessly while working late.
A photo from a company dinner.
A shot in front of the airport duty-free shops to prove she'd gone on a business trip.
They went by one after another. One after another…
"I want to go back to the world in these photos."
"It can't be much longer. At this speed, we'll definitely find something."
We weren't casually rowing along on a raft.
We were moving forward on a magical wind.
So we'd surely run into something.
Whether it was good or bad.
Seoyoon wiped the corner of her eye with her arm.
"I guess so?"
"What would you want to eat first when we get back?"
"I'd like a strawberry latte."
"Haha."
"What about you, Mr. Woojin?"
"Cola and hamburgers."
"Ah… Those sound good, too."
Seoyoon kept flipping through the photos, and I looked through her album with her.
The most ordinary photos somehow tugged at my heartstrings.
They probably did the same for Seoyoon.
And as she kept flipping…
"Oh."
When the first selfie came up, she quickly swiped past it.
She hadn't seemed to expect a picture of her own body to appear.
From Kang Seoyoon's perspective, that was the wrong move.
The next one showed even more skin, with her pinching her belly and fretting over her body fat.
Seoyoon flipped to the next photo without even taking a breath.
Then, this time, selfies showing off her backside popped up one after another.
After eight or nine of them flashed by, Kang Seoyoon closed the phone.
"……Ahem."
"Did you dream of becoming a model?"
"You saw that belly fat and still have the nerve to say that?"
"I liked it."
Kang Seoyoon stared at me, her face red.
I meant it…
"Don't tease me. My belly fat… It's not this bad now. I've lost some since we got stranded on the island."
"A little belly fat is attractive."
"Tch…"
"What's wrong with that? I'm looking at something way more stimulating than those photos right now."
Seoyoon covered her nipples with her arm and grumbled shyly.
"Just because I'm not wearing a bra… doesn't mean you can show those pictures around."
"Is that so?"
"You must have at least one picture you wouldn't want other people to see, Mr. Kim Woojin."
"Nope."
Seoyoon sneakily took my phone.
"Let's see about that."
I opened my gallery to show her, but honestly, I couldn't even remember what was in there.
There was just one photo.
"What is this?"
A picture of a squashed hamburger.
I'd taken it because I was amazed by the ugliest bulgogi burger I'd ever seen.
"Oh, this? It's a bulgogi burger."
"I was asking you to explain why this is in your album."
"Believe it or not, that's exactly how it looked when they handed it to me."
"No, I mean…"
Maybe she'd realized the conversation was going nowhere, because Seoyoon grabbed me and spoke slowly and clearly.
"Explain what it is and why you took a picture. Step by step."
"It's a squashed hamburger, and I thought it was funny, so I took a picture."
"What?? I really… really don't understand."
If anything, I couldn't understand why Seoyoon took pictures of her own body, either……
"Sigh… I feel like I'm the only one who lost out by having this conversation with you."
"I'll remember your butt and breasts for the rest of my life, Assistant Manager."
For a moment, Seoyoon let out a bemused laugh, half exasperated and half incredulous.
"Why does something like that make me laugh? I feel like I've lost."
"You have a pretty unusual sense of humor."
"That's because you keep doing ridiculous things that go beyond my expectations."
Hmm, was I that bad?
Seoyoon stood up as if to say we should get back to what we had to do, and held the reflector up.
"I'll keep sending the signal."
"Sounds good."
────An endless expanse of ocean.
There wasn't much to do, so I got bored quickly.
Seoyoon kept angling the reflector this way and that, diligently sending distress signals, but nothing came of it.
Most of our time was probably going to be like this.
"By the way, will Manager Han Jia and Luka be okay on their own?"
"Well, the island's rich in natural resources… They'll manage for a few days without us."
We'd made some water in advance, but…
Even if the rescue team found us, how long would it take them to find the island?
"Can we accurately give them the island's location based only on our navigation records with the compass?"
"I'm not sure. There are currents, and we aren't navigating by GPS, so it'll be hard to pinpoint it."
Everything was so vague.
It felt like nothing was certain.
"If we worry about every little thing, we'll never launch the raft."
Seoyoon said firmly.
"We're doing what matters most, Mr. Woojin."
"And what is that?"
"Finding people and bringing back a rescue team."
──Right. Let's put aside useless thoughts.
I focused on the Glyph of Wind.
About an hour passed after that.
The sunlight grew hotter.
Seoyoon was visibly soaked with sweat, too.
Without any shade, it felt like we were being heated like squid on a metal plate until we curled up.
I was using the Glyph of Wind to steer the raft right now…
If I cut back on it to cool us down, the current might carry the raft somewhere else.
"Mr. Woojin. Here's some water we brought. Want some?"
"Yes."
I drank half the bottle, then, out of habit, tried to refill it with water creation magic…
It wouldn't fill.
'What?'
Was it just my imagination? It felt like the mana was thinning out.
───And still, we hadn't found anything.
It was almost as if we were the only ones on this vast ocean.
The island we'd left had shrunk to a speck, and there was nothing in sight.
Was the ocean really this absurdly vast?
I was starting to regret the slightly overconfident attitude of 'we'll find out when we try.'
"Let's keep going, Mr. Woojin. We knew from the start it wouldn't be easy."
Seoyoon said.
Right, that just meant the ocean was that vast.
I handed her some of the fruit we'd brought, and she chewed it enthusiastically.
"We'll find something if we keep going! I'm sure of it!"
"Yeah. At least the weather's nice."
If it rained and the waves picked up, steering the raft would've been a real pain…
"That's true."
Hmm?
Suddenly, I spotted a dark mass below the surface.
"Mr. Woojin, do you see that?"
Seoyoon had noticed it, too, and pointed.
"It looks like a school of fish."
"That's amazing."
A school of tiny fish had gathered into a ball.
Why were they displaying such strange schooling behavior?
I felt like I'd seen something about it in a documentary…
"Oh, it's called a bait ball."
"Wow. What kind of phenomenon is that? Can you explain it?"
"No. I just heard the term somewhere."
I couldn't remember why the little fish were frantically bunching up like that.
"If we could catch that school in a net, we'd hit the jackpot, right?"
"Should I try some magic?"
"We can't even make a fire out here, so let's not…"
That's when it happened.
As I controlled the raft, I felt a strange current.
I turned on detection magic, and something was slowly approaching us.
Creepy───
'It's huge.'
What the hell was that? A whale?
It was smaller than a whale but far bigger than a shark. One by one, they appeared on my radar as indistinct signals.
"Assistant Manager."
"Yes?"
I called to the assistant manager, who'd been watching the school of fish.
"We're moving, so hold on tight."
"What?! Aah!!"
Whoooosh!
I set the raft moving immediately.
I put my hand in the seawater and made the Glyph of Wind explode, giving us a sudden burst of thrust.
I figured we could use that boost to put some distance between us.
But───
'It's closing in on us!'
What the hell was chasing us?
It was difficult to make out whatever was underwater with the naked eye.
If it surfaced, I might at least be able to see its shape───
I tried to figure out what it was using detection magic.
A black mass, impossible to tell whether it was a head or a body.
At its center floated something like a human eyeball.
And things far too long to be called arms or legs slowly spread out underwater.
As if it were swimming.
Fuck.
We're so fucking screwed.
As I kept increasing our speed, Seoyoon, unable to take it, cried out.
"Aah! What's going on?!"
"Don't look back!"
What the hell was that?!
I could tell it wasn't a marine animal, at least.
And I knew we'd be fucked if it caught us.
To make matters worse, our thrust was gradually weakening.
'Why?'
I was using the Glyph of Wind as much as I could…
My mana and our thrust were both dwindling!
"I think we need to go back to the island, Assistant Manager!"
"Why? No! We've come this far—we have to find a rescue team together!"
"This isn't the time to be stubborn! My mana's running out!"
"Ugh!! The island… Can you not use magic outside the island?"
I told you!!
I immediately turned the raft around.
"Hold on tight!"
"Ah!"
Just as I expected, my mana gradually started to fill back up. The farther we went out to sea, the thinner it got.
"What's going on? Explain it clearly!"
"You were right, Assistant Manager. I can't use magic out here. This escape plan has failed!"
"No way──! You're not lying, are you?"
No, this woman!
I was about to say something, but swallowed my words when I saw Seoyoon pleading with a face on the verge of tears.
"We have to get out of here. We have to go home. Please, tell me we can still go back!"
"Right now…!"
I didn't have time to calm her down!
First, we had to escape.
I didn't know what the hell that thing was, but something fucking terrifying was chasing us.
I pushed the thrust higher.
"For now, I'm going to shake that thing off!"
"Why? What's going on? What's behind us───?"
"Don't look!"
Kang Seoyoon suddenly sucked in a breath and fainted on the spot.
Shit. She'd seen it.
I drew up every last bit of mana in my body.
What if they followed us all the way back to the island?
All I could think about was surviving.
Whoooosh!!
Thankfully, the island came back into view. Then I saw that they──eight to ten of them, according to my detection magic──were milling around, unable to approach the island.
Thank God. They couldn't come onto the island!
I drove the raft back to shore as fast as I could, like someone fleeing for his life.
I rammed the raft straight into the beach with all the momentum it had.
Haaah.
I feel like I'm going to throw up……
If it hadn't been for the Glyph of Wind, they would've caught us for sure….
"Assistant Manager, wake up."
I carried the unconscious Seoyoon as I walked out.
The manager and Luka spotted us and ran over.
"Oppa?"
"Assistant Manager Kang?! Mr. Woojin, what happened──why are you so pale?"
Haa──.
I swallowed my words, trying to hold back the motion sickness.
I couldn't bring myself to tell them exactly what I'd seen, and I didn't want to.
I simply summed up the situation in a matter-of-fact tone.
"We can't leave by raft."
The raft won't work.