By Zephyria Only then, startled, Joo Ho-young took his eyes off Seo Yakrin and looked at Yohan. His brow furrowed, and he scanned his surroundings sharply.
“But even up until today’s reconnaissance, it had been fine.”
As fast as he truly was, Joo Ho-young’s reconnaissance range was very wide. It was so wide that even considering the Flood’s top speed, he could complete reconnaissance of distances that would take several days to be fully engulfed. However, instead of assuring them the Flood wasn’t coming, he hesitated and stood up.
“Here, get on my back.”
“Huh?”
As Yohan looked up, bewildered by the sudden remark, Joo Ho-young nodded.
“If you’re uneasy, you should go check. It’s fine without the two of us in that fight anyway. And you shouldn’t ignore that kind of intuition.”
“Uh, then it’ll be tough, so leave me here and go quickly…”
As if saying it was absurd, Joo Ho-young immediately stood Yohan up. Then, with just a few swift movements, Yohan was instantly on Joo Ho-young’s back. Before the flustered Yohan could say anything, Joo Ho-young dashed forward.
“…!”
Yohan clung to Joo Ho-young for dear life, unable to utter a single word. He had been carried on Lee Hyun-muk’s back before, but this was an incomparably faster speed. The strong wind pressure made it impossible to open his eyes properly. Peeking through narrowed eyes, he saw something resembling reeds flashing past fiercely in all directions. In just a few minutes, Joo Ho-young had scouted a radius of several tens of kilometers and returned to his original spot. Seo Yakrin had… shrunk in ‘volume’.
“Thankfully, I don’t see any Flood!”
While Yohan was stunned by the brutal sight, Joo Ho-young said cheerfully and patted Yohan’s floating hair, laying it back down. Then, he quickly erected an ice wall again. Seo Yakrin, cornered, had begun to lash out, scattering Psychokinesis everywhere.
Aaaargh- Aak! Burn it all! Burn everything down!
Each time Seo Yakrin flapped its tattered wings, which had suffered particularly severe attacks, droplets of blood rained down. Now that it could no longer fly, Lee Hyun-muk and Yoon Seung-ryong had a bit more breathing room. It was a surprisingly easy conquest.
However, Yohan couldn’t stay still and fidgeted nervously, constantly looking around. His chest churned with a nameless anxiety. Joo Ho-young, glancing at him, pulled his bowstring taut.
“You know… I’m not feeling too good either…”
He muttered, starting to look around like Yohan. A moment later, he was biting his lip. Words spilled rapidly from between his lips, which had split and were bleeding.
“Why? Why? Why? There was nothing, but there was? I checked earlier, I did? I checked.”
“Ho-young?”
Yohan called out worriedly and purified Joo Ho-young. When they used their abilities, the three of them often succumbed to Madness, so Yohan thought this might be another such instance. It was then.
A bird fell from the sky.
Everyone’s gaze, even Seo Yakrin, Yoon Seung-ryong, and Lee Hyun-muk who were fighting fiercely, instinctively turned to the bird that had crashed to the ground. The bird on the ground convulsed and swelled. Then, it twisted its body and vomited something like murky water from its mouth.
It was the Flood.
“What the hell!”
As Yoon Seung-ryong cursed, Lee Hyun-muk raised his head and looked up at the sky. From far away, birds, each swollen, were flying towards them at high speed. The birds that had been flying around Seo Yakrin, attacking Lee Hyun-muk and Yoon Seung-ryong, quickly flew away. Even though they were of the same kind, they instinctively felt a sense of dread. Yohan’s face turned pale.
“The Flood, from the sky…”
Before his words were even finished, the birds carrying the Flood, no, the things that had been birds, began to fall from the sky. Thump, thud. Pitter-patter. Drops and clumps of black rain, carrying horrific chaos, covered the ground. The three beings fighting stopped dead in their tracks. Seo Yakrin, in particular, was engulfed by the Flood faster than anyone else due to its massive size.
Geeeek… Geeeeeek…!
Seo Yakrin’s voice, which had been speaking human words just moments before, turned grotesque. It sounded like the cry of a strangled heron. It shook its head up and down as if trying to vomit something, then collapsed forward. The rain of the Flood pattered down onto its widely spread wings. Seo Yakrin’s transformation intensified, and its entire body twisted with ominous cracking sounds.
And black raindrops scattered over Lee Hyun-muk’s and Yoon Seung-ryong’s heads. Dead birds fell around them. The most horrific rain in the world was falling.
As Yohan screamed and tried to rush forward, Joo Ho-young grabbed him with a rough hand. Then, turning his back to the spot where the rain of the Flood began to fall, he started to run away. The silhouette of Lee Hyun-muk standing tall among the long reeds remained as an afterimage in Yohan’s eyes. When he came to his senses, Yohan was hitting Joo Ho-young repeatedly, pleading.
“Stop! Ho-young, please! We have to go back right now…!”
“No!”
Joo Ho-young, who had stopped dead, put down the Yohan he was holding and shouted. His eyes were glazed over, already half out of his mind.
“You, you know, the Flood, do you know how terrifying the Flood is? It’s horrific! Once you fall in and come out, you can’t go back to how you were! And I can never face those Hyungs! I can’t even face one of them.”
Joo Ho-young tore at his hair. A nervous laugh flickered across his face, a mixture of despair and frustration, before his eyes turned dark and lifeless. It was the face of someone who had just grasped hope only to lose it again.
“You change forever! They won’t be people I know… No, they won’t be people anymore! Monsters, ugh. In the first place, in the first place, we shouldn’t have entered this place. Hooo, but how do you avoid the flying Flood? The Flood is flying? The Flood, the Flood… It’s a disaster, we have to escape quickly. We have to go as far as possible…”
Joo Ho-young, dazed, began to mumble at an increasingly incomprehensible speed. He was shaking so violently that his body’s surface seemed to crackle. Shocked and scared, Yohan gasped for breath, then reached out with both hands. Slap! A sharp sound echoed.
“You’re human!”
Joo Ho-young, slapped on both cheeks with a glowing white palm, looked stunned. Yohan grabbed Joo Ho-young’s face tightly, shaking him, and shouted.
“You’re human! You’re human…! Why do you keep saying you’re not human!”
“Heehee, Yohan…”
So lost in his own world, Joo Ho-young forgot to call him Hyung and muttered with a silly grin. It was a laugh that was amusing but deeply pathetic.
“If you see it in person, you… won’t be able to call it human either…”
Yohan’s gaze involuntarily drifted towards a place he could no longer see. A commotion was occurring where the Flood’s raindrops were falling. Flocks of birds flew up and fell, flew up and fell again, or soared higher into the sky in twisted forms… The Reed Sea churned as if facing a storm. Ominous things surged forth.
“Human or not, that’s not what’s important right now. Let’s go… run further away. You must always run from the Flood.”
Joo Ho-young, having barely regained his senses thanks to Yohan’s purification, clasped the hands that were covering his cheeks. Yohan called his name in a trembling voice.
“Ho-young.”
“That’s why the Team Leader assigned me to you. If necessary, to carry you and run…”
That was an undeniable fact. Before fighting Seo Yakrin, Lee Hyun-muk had given Yohan only one instruction: Defend as best as possible, and if necessary, run without fail. Yohan’s role was one that could only be performed after the battle had ended.
“If we run? If we run like this, what will we do afterward?”
Yohan asked, listening to the sound of the ominous rain. His voice, losing its composure, began to tremble. Swoosh… The Reed Sea swayed with a chilling quietness. Above the swaying Reed Sea in the distance, the tip of something with an ominous shape flickered. They had desperately fled from the Flood so many times before, but this time they couldn’t. That fact made Yohan terribly afraid. Joo Ho-young stammered.
“As long as we’re alive, someday, we’ll go back and purify it.”
“Here! In this vast place, how will we find it! Even if we find it, what will the two of us do! And what if someone dies like that!”
Joo Ho-young hesitated at those words. Lee Hyun-muk, Yoon Seung-ryong, and Seo Yakrin were all Dealers whose attack power was fatally dangerous. As Yohan said, it wouldn’t be strange if one of them lost their life. Moreover, the Reed Sea was a place where it was harder to find someone than in any other area.
“We have to go back now! If we don’t go back, we’ll… be in danger too.”
“What are you talking about? For now, we’re safe if we get away from there…”
Yohan, his face turning pale and then breaking out in a cold sweat, cut off Joo Ho-young’s words and shouted.
“The Flood, it feels like the Flood deliberately didn’t attack the two of us, like it let us go…!”
Even though they had moved so far from the Flood, the eerie feeling hadn’t stopped since earlier. A warning bell of intuition, that something sinister and terrifying was circling above them, targeting them, hadn’t ceased. Wiping away the tears that flowed, Yohan said to Joo Ho-young.
“That’s why we can’t go any further from here. And, and… I have a plan.”