By Zephyria The trees in the forest rustled busily.
Even a relatively quiet Taser was within the safe range, but that damned thing used gunpowder rounds, and it had to come to this.
Hawkins clicked his tongue briefly and rummaged through his pockets. A small spray bottle, which he carried whenever he visited places like this, appeared in his gloved hand.
It was a tracking scent made by their group. It was an odor that humans didn’t particularly notice, but creatures affected by Blue Energy, such as Beasts and Aberrants, found particularly interesting.
As he sprayed it on the fallen man’s body, the red-eyed man twitched his nose, tilted his head, and then cocked it again.
Hawkins left the bait and ran behind a rock. He boarded a pre-prepared aircraft and slowly began to gain altitude.
Soon, Aberrants would flock to it. There was no better place to watch their party from a moderately high place…
Screech- Screech!
“Smells.”
Joo-oh muttered. He could smell the Aberrants from afar. One. Two. Three. Four. Four of them were loitering around, and now they were running this way after hearing the commotion.
But the stronger smell was coming from Jin Mu-hae, who was now unconscious. It was the smell of a weak, frightened prey struggling. There would be few smells more stimulating to a bored Aberrant.
“Jin Mu-hae.”
He called out in a low voice, but the fallen man did not respond.
It was a good thing, in a way. He had no choice but to clean up the variables caused by his intervention.
Joo-oh slowly bent his legs and sat next to Mu-hae. He put his nose to his body and sniffed, then tore off the cardigan from which the strange smell was rising.
The torn piece of cloth was rolled into a ball and thrown far away. Still, he felt bad that there seemed to be a lingering smell.
Jin Mu-hae’s smell was different from this. He had a tenacious, unwavering scent that was ready to pounce at any moment, even in times of crisis.
Joo-oh sniffed around his neck a few more times, then licked the tip of his chin for a long time.
His red tongue brushed against his cheek, neck, and earlobe. He even nibbled a little on his ear, as Jin Mu-hae sometimes did.
He nonchalantly committed an act that would have made the fallen man furious if he had woken up and seen it, and then met the eyes of the Aberrants, who were beginning to appear.
Screech!
All of them were 〈Grade 1〉 Aberrants. It was not common for these things to live together like this.
Certainly, Bay City, which was close to the sea, was a dangerous place that they wouldn’t even approach, even though it was suffering from a chronic energy shortage.
Whoosh-.
Joo-oh glared at the aircraft hovering low in the sky, monitoring them, then tilted his head to one side and smacked his lips.
Thwack! Thwack! The sound of sand kicking up grew closer, and the Aberrant that had been barely visible at the end of the beach instantly approached.
He didn’t remember much because he was always out of his mind when he was a monster.
Joo-oh knew what those things were. He knew how to chase and catch them, and even what they tasted like.
Aberrants came in various forms. The tastes were just as different, with some making his mouth feel completely acrid, while others had a surprisingly decent rough taste.
These were the latter. The chewy texture made his teeth itch. Saliva began to pool in his mouth, and he felt like something black would slowly seep out of his eyes, nose, and mouth again.
“Kireung…”
Still, he had some reason left, and the sound was close to human. A chilling aura flowed through his wide-eyed pupils.
Screech-.
Surprisingly, the rushing Aberrants all stopped. Their glistening eyeballs slowly scanned the vulnerable human and the unknown being sitting in front of him.
Joo-oh listlessly raised his hand, licked it again to get the scent on it, and strode towards them.
Kireureung…
The more intelligent the Aberrant, the quicker it was to discern between targets that could be easily attacked and those that could not.
Even a strong aggressive instinct could be completely abandoned in the face of survival. Whether these were individuals with better cognitive abilities than the ‘Stonemason’, the Grade 1 Aberrant subtly pulled its juicy foreleg back.
Joo-oh clenched his fist and took a deep breath. He pushed the lump down inside and suppressed the urge to have a meat feast at any moment.
The candy someone had given him in Jaegang District. Boots made of the same material as Jin Mu-hae’s red jacket. Jin Mu-hae, who hadn’t abandoned him and had come to pick him up from the hospital. The noodles he had eaten with him. The large hand that stroked his head.
Thinking of happy and joyful things calmed his fluctuating inner self. He was satisfied just thinking about it and didn’t want to lose it forever.
To do that, Joo-oh had to be human. A monster howling in the wilderness could not stay by Jin Mu-hae’s side.
“Jin Mu-hae. Jin Mu-hae. Jin Mu-hae.”
My protagonist. The object of longing he had waited 15 years for.
To protect him, Joo-oh didn’t even take out a single tail. Just as he could endure hunger with happy memories, he could also endure anger by thinking of Jin Mu-hae.
It had taken him months to get here. Food was still the simplest and fastest way to suppress his instincts, but he now had human memories to replace it, even if only for a moment.
Kireureu-!
At the low growl, the Aberrants slowly retreated. They lowered their bodies for survival and backed away as if crawling.
As a ghastly gaze swept over them, their grotesque heads lowered further as if they were being slammed into the ground.
They were probably hiding their heads so they wouldn’t be noticed… but at first glance, it looked like they were prostrating themselves in worship of an unapproachable ruler.
“Jin Mu-haeee.”
Joo-oh rubbed his cheek against his shirt. He was more than happy with the body, from which the strange smell had disappeared, leaving only his natural scent and his own.
When the predator’s gaze disappeared, the Aberrants turned their bodies and began to run. They were faster and quieter than when they had been running to find prey to play with.
Only then did Joo-oh get up again. He walked towards the rock where the Small aircraft had been.
Thwack! The impact, which was so strong that it was hard to believe it came from an ordinary body, shattered the rock.
The beach was a mess as if it had been bombed. In the middle of it, a white hand without a single scratch picked up a large shard and threw it into the sky.
Whoosh!
Screech-!
A sharp piece scratched the aircraft. A series of stones that flew through the wind also narrowly missed the engine.
If it didn’t gain altitude and run away immediately, it might crash. Nevertheless, for some reason, the Small aircraft began to land slowly.
Screeching- Psh!
The door opened, and a man with a bizarre expression staggered out. Hawkins, looking dazed, was trembling at his fingertips.
His eyes were eerie, like a madman. He was still wearing a suit, but somehow he looked like the junkies he had seen in Sakdal’s underground arena.
“…Blue.”
Hawkins, who had been fine until just now, approached, muttering incomprehensible words. Even as he stumbled over a rock, his gaze was fixed on only one place.
“The ultimate… Blue. Incarnation…”
The hesitant voice was soon tinged with superiority. The more he muttered as if possessed, the more his gray eyes filled with joy.
He looked as if he had seen a fantasy from beyond the world. He dropped the cylinder containing the crystal shards on the ground and reached out to his flawless face.
At the same time, Crunch!
“Kuaaaaack!”
The area below his elbow was torn off like a robot. His writhing arm was thrown in front of his crouching eyes.
“Hawkins is disgusting.”
“Aaaaaah!”
“He was going to give Jin Mu-hae as meat.”
“Aaaaack!”
The man, who had been screaming in pain, saw the fallen Jin Mu-hae. Then, surprisingly, the screams gradually subsided, and his spaced-out gaze swept back and forth between the two.
As if realizing something, a strange light shone in Hawkins’ eyes. With a face contorted with pain and pleasure, he fell onto the sand and groped for the blood-stained ground.
He found the object he had dropped earlier and grabbed it, then opened the tightly closed top.
The brightly shining crystal shards flowed down his throat along with the sticky liquid.
“Keueup, ugh…!”
Hawkins flailed his dangling arm and gagged.
Joo-oh, who had been watching the scene with indifferent eyes, grabbed the madman’s head.
He didn’t shake it off or avoid it. He just stared intently at the man with his back to the sun, making a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a moan.
“…It really existed.”
Along with the pie-in-the-sky sound, Crack.
His fragile head turned to one side, and the light went out in his madness-filled eyes.
It was an incomprehensible death for the perpetrator.
When Jin Mu-hae quietly woke up from his sleep, he was lying on a soft seat.
As he felt a throbbing pain in his side, the events that had occurred just before he had collapsed flashed through his mind like a panorama.
“……!”
As he hurriedly got up, something that had been pressing down on his upper body fell to the floor below the seat with a thud.
Judging from the whimpering sound, it was Joo-oh. He got up with a delighted expression and hugged Mu-hae tightly.
“What happened?”
“Hawkins tried to kill Jin Mu-hae.”
“……And?”
“Hmm. Aberrants came out of the forest. I just picked up Jin Mu-hae and came here.”
He was so confident and dignified that he didn’t seem to be lying. Even though he had given a simple explanation, his clothes were stained with blood.
Whether he had tried to wash it with seawater, salt remained on the spread stains. Jin Mu-hae grabbed his chin and turned it this way and that to check if he was hurt.
He had thought it was over when he had passed out, leaving this guy behind. He didn’t know what had happened, but he was unharmed, without even a scratch.
Only then did he slowly look around. Seats that looked like sofas. A mini-bar and a small window on the wall.
Mu-hae was on a Small aircraft. Seeing that the door was intact, it wasn’t the aircraft he had broken and escaped from earlier.
It seemed that Joo-oh had put him on Hawkins’ plane. He hurriedly went to the window, but the sun had set, and all he could see was the faint waves on the pitch-black beach.
“Good job.”
He didn’t know what had happened, but it seemed that he had been safe so far thanks to Joo-oh.
Mu-hae roughly stroked his hair, which was also covered in salt, and looked for the monitor to control the Small aircraft.
The first thing to do was to get out of here. The NPS’s pursuit was secondary, but Aberrants had appeared.
He could hear the details after taking off. Once the aircraft was in the air, even if five crazy Stonemasons ran out and threw stones, he could escape without getting a scratch.
“Jin Mu-hae. Hug me.”
As the Small aircraft was about to take off, Joo-oh came to Mu-hae’s front without even fastening his seatbelt.
He had a very anxious look in his eyes. It was Joo-oh, who had been left alone in a place like this and had waited for him, unconscious, for hours.
Mu-hae’s heart ached again as he remembered the way he had hurriedly run away, thinking he was abandoning him.
“Come here.”
A body reeking of the sea sat on his lap. As his back touched him, he heard a rustling sound from his chest.
His shirt pocket was full of candy wrappers. It was as if someone had been diligently unwrapping snacks while snuggled in his arms while he was asleep and had pushed the trash in there.
It was absurd, but he didn’t have the energy to say anything. Mu-hae closed his eyes, feeling the throbbing pain.
What he had experienced in Bay City felt like a dream. The luxurious accommodations and the well-maintained streets. The poisoned blade hidden beneath the hospitality.
Since Dmitri’s death was related to the NPS, his solo play was over for the time being. If there were any gaps in his data, he could only find it through West Wind now.
The most direct route was Gu-reum, who had been a member of the same Return flight. If Director Gil and Teacher Jung didn’t tell him, he would have to ask her and go from there.
When he arrived in Goryeo City, he would have to contact Gu-reum, even if it was late.
“I’m hungry.”
Of course, he had to feed this guy first. Mu-hae rubbed his head back and forth without replying.