Chapter 9
“Gueeegh, keh-keh.”
The red liquid dribbling from my mouth plopped onto the ground.
The woman who'd handed me the drink cried out in alarm.
“A-are you okay?!”
“What on earth… what, what is this made of…?”
“Candy bug extract….”
“Why would you make juice out of something only used to treat hypoglycemic shock in the field…?”
“Why? They say drinking it before fighting anomalies helps preserve your mental fortitude.”
Ugh, fucking pseudoscience.
Ever since the Anomaly Flood, pseudoscience about food has really reached new heights.
All thanks to the extreme placebo effect born from the instinct to survive.
People spout all kinds of nonsense: that eating a beast will make anomalies sense it as one of their own and leave you alone, or that Koreans are more immune to anomalies because they eat so much garlic.
It's all hearsay.
‘Biological anomalies are often trapped by spatial anomalies and torn limb from limb, so how does eating a beast make you safe from anomalies…?’
I didn't want to get into an unnecessary argument with the woman, so I wished her luck and made a tactical retreat.
You shouldn't try to convince people about this stuff.
You'll just stress each other out for no reason.
“Ugh, I was just going to wait while having something cold….”
The bitter taste wouldn't leave my mouth, so I hurriedly looked for an open café, but I guess everyone had evacuated because of the situation.
Not a single café was open!
“Uuugh… the sunlight's hooot….”
I gazed at the enormous dome, shimmering translucently, with my shoulders drooping.
It was a translucent barrier derived from Sephira, surrounding Window Da-112 and the central area of today's operation.
I heard the Management Bureau's Measurement and Analysis Division had made it.
When I tentatively touched it, the translucent wall buzzed and violently bounced my right hand away, just like before.
Because I'm an anomaly.
I thought about breaking through, but decided against it because I might be misunderstood.
I should avoid making trouble and bothering Woo Cheonyeop from the Exorcism Bureau. Yeah.
“…Is it about to start?”
At the center of the dome, a middle-aged woman holding a long staff topped with a skull was giving an enthusiastic speech.
She was Kim Rok-hee, the representative of Loki Office, which worshiped fantasy and magic.
[Anomaly Living Its Best Life : By the way, is Auntie Rok-hee trustworthy?]
[GOD : You can't even compare her to Cheong Jinsu]
[GOD : If you had to name the most humane fixer, it'd be Kim Rok-hee]
[Anomaly Living Its Best Life : Oh]
[Anomaly Living Its Best Life : That's a relief]
[GOD : But she has one chronic problem]
[Anomaly Living Its Best Life : She's humane, that's nice]
[GOD : She lets her guard down]
[GOD : She's addicted to saying, “Did we get them?”]
[Anomaly Living Its Best Life : That's a little too humane]
[Anomaly Living Its Best Life : What?]
[Anomaly Living Its Best Life : Isn't she the kind of person who'd die first in a horror movie? How is she still alive?]
[GOD : She's simply very skilled]
[GOD : I think people call her Zombie or Auntie more often than by her name]
[GOD : There's a video about her life on the office's official site. Check it out sometime]
I replayed my conversation with Gode in my head and started walking in a wide circle along the edge of the dome.
“Tsk.”
Based on what Gode had told me and the posts on the gallery, Kim Rok-hee was bound to make a mistake.
But apparently, that mistake always created a dramatic moment, and she was popular thanks to those dramatic moments.
The thing to focus on here was that she ‘made mistakes.’
“The mistake I'm worried about would be bugs getting out… but the dome's sealed off the entire area perfectly.”
There were two possibilities.
One was that the bugs would tear through the dome and get outside.
The other was that Kim Rok-hee, the owner of the Sephira maintaining the dome, would get taken out.
“But you said she'd never been taken out. She only ever gets into trouble.”
Then of course the former was far more likely.
After all, an anomaly is an anomaly because it's not something humans can easily define just by witnessing it.
‘What if these bugs are highly intelligent?’
They looked like some giant creature made by combining locusts and cockroaches.
But that could just be a feint, playing on humans' tendency to think insects are insignificant.
They might use a diversionary tactic or concentrate their forces to break through at one point.
“I guess I need to get to the top of the dome to see everything, right?”
To survey the entire area, which was about half the size of a soccer field, I needed to get to the center of the dome's ceiling.
For some reason, I felt like I'd be spotted if I flew up, so I asked the gallery first.
[Dropping the head mod's personal info]
Obviously bait.
What do you think you'd do if you saw someone hovering in the sky during an anomaly-clearing operation?
ㄴ Called it
ㄴ I can see it already lol
ㄴ You'd think it was an anomaly, right?
ㄴ I'd shoot first and ask questions later
ㄴ What if it turned out to be a person?
ㄴ If they're a fixer, they'll know how to react~
ㄴ 1 This guy seems more dangerous than an anomaly lol
ㄴ Sawayo) I fly around just fine on my sword, Sawayo
ㄴ Sawayo) If anyone shoots me while I'm flying, I'll land and beat the shit out of them, Sawayo
ㄴ Sao Pai Pai ㄷㄷ
ㄴ Oh, so Sawayo was the one who beat the shit out of me last time
ㄴ One-Punch Man🔸) …
ㄴ Dome and run
ㄴ Eek, it's the Ban Anomaly
So it came to this after all.
I guess people aren't all that different from one another…
‘Maybe I should've just taken Cheonyeop-hyung up on his offer… Even if I used a Sephira to fly, a fixer flying around would draw less suspicion than an anomaly flying by itself.’
But just think about the complicated and ridiculously difficult process of registering an anomaly as a fixer.
They'd just forget all that and make me a fixer or an office representative?
Woo Cheonyeop would crow about it nonstop.
Didn't he say the paperwork alone would take a month?
I think Poppy's owner, who made a real anomaly his representative, said he'd nearly had to shut down his business because of it.
“Ugh……”
Damn it.
The sunlight's making it even harder to think.
For now, I'll run around the dome in a wide circle at ground level.
“Ueegh.”
I picked a direction based on which way a drop of spit left the bigger mark on the ground.
Counterclockwise, then.
“…Once you've decided, don't hesitate!”
I pushed off the ground with gusto.
* * *
The problem arose just as I'd expected.
I think I'd made it about halfway around the dome.
Boom—!
It wasn't long after a swarm of black bugs filled the upper part of the dome like smoke from a fire that big-headed bugs began flying in one after another to ram the translucent wall.
Thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, thud…
The fixers were rushing to beat the bugs back, and the dome was easily repelling their headbutts, so there didn't seem to be much damage…
But every now and then, I spotted some suspicious ones.
They were spraying red secretions mixed with little lumps.
“Sniff, sniff.”
Before long, the smell coming from those secretions reached my nose.
My body twitched in response.
The smell of blood. Human blood, at that.
Why could I smell it?
The barrier didn't just block anomaly wavelengths; it served as a physical wall, too.
I shouldn't have been able to smell anything at all.
A hole had been made.
“…No way. Really?”
The Management Bureau's barrier at the isolation facility only lets ‘humans’ pass through.
But ‘what used to be human’ or ‘part of a human’ also counts as human.
Otherwise, there'd be a problem transporting the injured or dead.
In other words, the things making holes in the barrier weren't the bugs' secretions, but humans.
They were using the corpses of fixers they'd killed inside the dome to force their way through in disguise.
It seemed they were using human corpses to make holes in the barrier, then physically forcing their bodies into the gaps to keep them from closing and make room to get through.
“These things were seriously dangerous.”
You crazy Cheong Clan Alliance bastards.
Why did you take on a Window mission if you couldn't even close the Window?
You raised a whole damn swarm of bugs!
They were already starting to poke through the barrier, so there was no time to hesitate.
I threw a blood droplet at a bug struggling to get past the hole.
And then—crunch!
I instantly expanded the bug's bodily fluids and made it burst.
Fragments of chitin scattered in every direction.
The problem was, there wasn't just one or two of them.
The holes marked with red secretion were gradually multiplying all over the dome.
Had the fixers not noticed?
Ah, they were all too busy fighting the bugs to notice.
…But shouldn't they have noticed by now?
A swarm of cockroach-locusts spreading through Seoul?
“Shit. If it weren't for the restaurants…!”
I gathered up the blood of the human that had made a hole in the barrier and hurled it back through the wall.
The head of a bug that had been charging to keep the gap open went CRACK! and burst apart.
I immediately ran toward the next hole.
I burst the bug trying to crawl through.
I removed the human blood from the wall to seal the hole.
Seal, seal, and seal again.
After sealing about five holes like that, I was sure of it.
“…Trying to plug these one by one is absolutely fucked.”
For every five holes I sealed, ten more appeared.
They were multiplying at an impossible rate.
“Shit, should I release a seal?”
If I pulled out the silver crosses embedded in my body, the amount of power I'd sealed away would be released depending on how many I removed.
With that power, dealing with this situation probably wouldn't be difficult.
But Woo Cheonyeop would be watching me,
and the ability I was about to use would look incredibly threatening to human eyes.
If I messed up, I might be classified as a dangerous Clipa and become a target for disposal.
‘But if I don't unseal myself, my restaurants…!’
Should I or shouldn't I? What do I do?
The dilemma kept going as I ran, burst bugs, and sealed holes, but it came to a surprisingly futile end.
“…What?”
One person was suspended in the air, impaled by a bug's sharp foreleg.
That was a perfectly plausible situation during an anomaly-clearing operation.
But it was a problem because it was Cheong Harin.
No, why was my meal buddy over there?
Dark-red blood spilling from her mouth.
Her body convulsing.
Her eyes beginning to roll back.
She wasn't dead, but her body was on the verge of death.
I felt no emotional turmoil, but immediately afterward, I was probably more nimble than I'd been at any point since my isolation began.
I threw a blood droplet at the bug making a hole beside Cheong Harin.
As it burst, I sent another droplet flying and burst the arm joint of the bug that had attacked her.
The force sent Cheong Harin's body through the barrier and into my arms.
The enraged bugs charged toward me, but—thud, thud.
They only smashed their heads against the barrier, which had already closed.
“I mean, why didn't you answer me…? If you had, this wouldn't have happened.”
Right after pulling the bug's leg out of her abdomen, I sealed the severed blood vessels with coagulated blood so none could leak from the puncture wound.
As soon as I stopped the bleeding, I returned all the blood she'd spilled to her body.
The blood she'd lost inside the barrier had come out with her when I pulled her through, so her actual blood loss probably wasn't that great.
The problem was the organs she'd lost.
If I carefully adjusted the flow and direction of her blood to keep any tissue from bursting or dying off because of the severed blood vessels, that would be the extent of the first aid I could give her, but…
“This won't do.”
Things were a complete mess inside the dome, too, so I couldn't just leave her with someone else.
But if I took her to the hospital, the number of holes the bugs were making kept increasing.
The blood scent, which let me tell how many holes there were in the wall, had already revealed more than fifty.
It was too dangerous to leave the area, so to save Miss Cheong Harin, I'd have to wrap up this mess after all.
I was a mosquito once, too.
…At least I never hurt humans, you guys.
Blame the Cheong Clan Alliance for raising you into this.
“And I can't forgive anyone trying to wreck my beloved ramen shop, burger joint, spicy pork place, snack bar, and all the rest!”
I reached inside my body and pulled out one of the silver crosses embedded there.
Then I shook the blood from my dark-red right hand and held the cross I'd pulled out.
The synesthesia that had been limited to my immediate surroundings expanded far and wide.
I could sense the locations of living creatures in real time.
Every last one of them, including the bugs inside the barrier.
I threw a blood droplet at the bug making another hole.
I made it burst.
I split the droplet into hundreds and scattered them in every direction.
I avoided the fixers and planted droplets in every bug I came across.
Burst, spread, farther, more.
‘There sure are a hell of a lot of them.’
About ten thousand in total.
If I unsealed more crosses, I could probably do this without an incantation.
But there were too many risks in unsealing more.
For now, I'll deal with it using an incantation.
I took a deep breath.
“Expand (膨).”
Burst!
